How well does gait analysis work against gait-disguise techniques like putting a pebble in your show as described in this video?
151 karma · joined October 17, 2018
That's an entirely different issue from what I was commenting on.
> And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government.
You're forgetting that ISPs are natural monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly:
>> "A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity.[1] Natural monopolies were discussed as a potential source of market failure by John Stuart Mill, who advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good."
> Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s
You're right, it does sound great; especially when you remove the blinders of misunderstanding. Admittedly, it's not entirely without it's own problems, but those problems are best solved without re-introducing the problems that regulation successfully mitigates.
This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even less accountable to the average person than the government, and they have obvious interests in tilting every table to advantage themselves.
Dealing with a corporate bureaucracy is dealing with a regulatory body that's been totally captured by that corporation.
I think it's twofold:
1. There are some hyperlocal elections, such as for school districts. Only your local polling station will have the correct ballots for those elections, and if you vote at the wrong polling location you could vote in an election you shouldn't.
2. Minimization of voter fraud using analog technology: if you're assigned a particular polling station, that station and no other will be given your name on a list to check off. You can't go to two polling locations and vote twice, because no other station will have your name. Human error makes it impractical to give each station a complete list and then cross-check to find people who voted twice: too many false positives.
> but over here we tend prefer for the government not to swing its weight around until there is clear evidence of a problem.
There is clear evidence of a problem: SF banned scooters to give itself time to figure out how to regulate them: http://www.sfexaminer.com/companies-pull-scooters-off-sf-str.... There is no reason to think SF is particularly unique and that other municipalities won't have similar experience.
And even before SF banned scooters, there was clear evidence of problems with dockless rentals in China: sidewalks became bike parking lots with little room left for actual walking.
This idea that governments should only regulate if there's a manifested problem in their particular jurisdiction is pretty stupid, frankly. It's like saying you shouldn't make up your mind about crack cocaine before you've actually tried it and experience the problems it causes.
That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It means your regulators are paying attention to events elsewhere and are trying to proactively prepare for them, rather than flailing about in reaction to complaints and problems. When the scooters come, your jurisdiction will be ready for them, rather than having to ban them just so they can catch up.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/companies-pull-scooters-off-sf-str...
Or, more likely, the people providing those services will not actually be paid enough to live in the community, but instead forced endure grueling commutes and other practices that lower their quality of life if they want to remain employed.
https://www.sfgate.com/traffic/article/Bay-Area-commute-San-...
https://www.curbed.com/2018/3/8/17097154/affordable-housing-...
I think the idea with funding education more equitably is to remove existing barriers that are created by policy, not about creating totally equal outcomes.
And the rationale isn't too different from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONKkoiszVSs&t=409
1. Have less annoying ads that respect the user.
2. Charge money.
3. Some novel funding model that's unexplored because obnoxious ads dominate everything and suck all the air out of the room.
I think that's the trap: you can't work yourself to the bone then have energy to work more to be active in your community, volunteer, run for office, pester politicians with letters, etc. Those are the kind of activities that I think could avoid the decay and perhaps even lead to some improvement.
I think it's a mistake to view "donating money" as meaningful response to many current social problems. Many of them are caused or propped up by people with more money than you could ever dream of having. Thinking that mere donations can win is like thinking a group insurgents could win in a stand-up direct fight against the US Army. The insurgents have different advantages than the US Army, and if they're smart, they'll use them rather than futilely attempting to reach parity with the US Army's strengths.
There's definitely some minimum amount of donations that will be required to really change things, but at a certain point I think the returns diminish.
I disagree. That only makes sense if you assume you (and everyone like you) are politically powerless and the rot and decay are inevitable.
There's also another option: redirect that excess effort you're expediting to hoard for the failure into fixing the system before it fails. Your personal efforts to fix it might fail, but some other group that heeded the same call might succeed, and that's all it takes.
Hoarding wealth might seem like a safer bet, but it's just as prone to failure. The kind of wealth you could accumulate through hard work might not be enough to give you the security you want, and to get more you have to take big risks anyway.
> Then think of how much scientific inquiry has been discouraged because people don't want to work under those conditions.
That's an entirely different issue. What we're talking about here is work that exists, but is not cited due to it's authorship. If Adolf Hitler himself had correctly proven Goldbach's Conjecture, is the proof itself so inseparable from his other actions that it should be rejected with them?
Even if these tools worked, they wouldn't be able to detect truth, only belief.
There's a lot of space between companies with 10 million dollars in revenue and ones with 10-100 billion where lots of R&D can happen.
Smaller companies can be very good at new product development, and are probably better at supporting those products once they catch on and become established. The really far-out R&D is probably better handled by university research labs than by big-company monopolies and semi-monopolies, which then will spin off small product development companies.
> How many startups comes up with new medicines, for example?
Seems like quite a lot, actually:
https://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180509/BLOGS11/180...
http://fortune.com/2016/05/13/big-pharma-biotech-startups/:
> A crucial part of the allure: Pint-size ventures are driving pharma innovation. The majority of drugs approved in recent years originated at smaller outfits—64% of them last year, according to HBM Partners, a health care investing firm.
Really? What if you want to copy a group of images? If what you describe is correct, when you drag and drop a group of images, wouldn't you get copies of the thumbnails.
I'm pretty sure my GF did this. I asked her for full res copies of some images of us, and got resized low-res versions. She uses iPhoto said she just dragged them out of the app. I had to fuss around with it and finally got what I wanted by using an export feature.
Dragging and dropping each full-resolution images one by one sounds like a nightmare.
> That's pretty much how I would expect an app like this to work on a Mac!
If this is what's now expected from Macs, oh how Apple has fallen. I can think of zero use cases where you'd actually want to drag and drop the thumbnail out, but not the full resolution image.
Not necessarily: Some of the letters could have been intercepted in China. Others could have made it to people who cared but were less successful in getting media attention. Still more could have been destroyed, unread, with unsold inventory.
CCP spies? Chinese Communist spies? Personally, I've been trying to correct my use of China/Chinese to "Communist Party" when talking about PRC government topics. I think that's more accurate since the PRC government dominates the Chinese people more than it represents them.
It doesn't even look like you need the right resources, just the motivation and willingness to exploit it.
Also, it's pretty depressing to hear the response to deskilling be more deskilling.
Was that a reaction to the problem described in the GP? Especially in the 80s/90s, defensiveness like that was probably to solve an existing problem.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/faceb...
Not quite "listening to calls," but not too different either. It shows you where their heart is.
They were slurping up text massages and collecting call logs, IIRC. So the rumor isn't too far from the truth.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/03/faceb...
Pretty sure it's not in the US, or at least can be halted by the disapproval of antitrust regulators.
For example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/staples-office-depot-merge...
So, Elon Musk is the tech-Jesus? He died on the SEC to take us to Mars?
Not really. It's sort of like RMS with open-source hardware: yes there are a handful of modern computers that can be made to work without binary blobs, but it's a lot of trouble and only a few people will actually do that out of principle. It's practically requred to run proprietary binary blobs. Similarly, Bing, Duckduckgo, and OpenStreetMap exist, but Google services are practically required for modern daily life.
For an illustration: a typical local shop is going put the effort into making sure its information is correct on Google Maps and that their website is indexed on Google; but it's going to put zero effort into updating its info on OpenStreetMap or making sure it's indexed by Bing. If you want info about that shop, you're probably going to have to use Google.