kepler1

I think your understanding of competition is a little warped or flawed. The mark of competition isn't that a company's price changed. It's that other people/companies were free to enter the market.

You are absolutely free to go and develop your own phone ecosystem and app store, or go provide your app development services elsewhere. That is competition. And that is what the court has found.

Competition is not that I need to give you more shelf space or a better price for selling something on my marketplace.

I guess developing an app on iOS for sale at a healthy profit margin just became a fundamental human right.

What's the principle you're advocating? That the number of 30% is too high, but 20% would be ok? How are we to decide what number is right? Isn't the principle that parties entering into an agreement voluntarily and with competition get to set their own prices?

Do you follow the same rule you're advocating for? When your app some day makes more than 30% margin on customers revenue, you're going to lower your prices, right?

Well... doesn't that circumvent the point of backups? Backups in my mind are supposed to be like read-only, can never be modified so that the system that was corrupted can't do anything harmful to the safe previous checkpoint.

I guess it has to have some method of what you mention then. If someone wants their data deleted, yes, what about the backups?

Thanks, that spurred me to read about it given the link above.

> "This bill would require the agency to establish, by January 1, 2026, an accessible deletion mechanism that, among other things, allows a consumer, through a single verifiable consumer request, to request that every data broker that maintains any personal information delete any personal information related to that consumer held by the data broker or associated service provider or contractor. The bill would specify requirements for this accessible deletion mechanism, and would, beginning August 1, 2026, require a data broker to access the mechanism at least once every 45 days and, among other things, process all deletion requests, except as specified. Beginning July August 1, 2026, after a consumer has submitted a deletion request and a data broker has deleted the consumer’s data pursuant to the bill’s provisions, the bill would require the data broker to delete all personal information of the consumer at least once every 45 days, as specified, and would prohibit the data broker from selling or sharing new personal information of the consumer, as specified....

> "This bill would provide that a data broker that fails to comply with the requirements pertaining to the accessible deletion mechanism described above is liable for civil penalties, administrative fines, fees, and costs, as specified, and would raise the amount of the existing civil penalty provisions described above...."

I guess it all comes down to the implementation level how specific and "actually deleting" they will be. And whether the new agency (ugh) charged with enforcing this will actually have teeth in the details.

And I don't know why such a long 45 day period is required. For reasons we're all too familiar with, people are quite able to gather data within seconds, but somehow need 45 days to delete it?

Are we talking actual data deletion, or just "not serving it up when queried" or attaching a "do not use" flag to the data but keeping it?

Because if there's one thing I've almost never seen, it's data being deleted from a db.

What strikes me about this story (and "reporting" in general) is how eager people writing stories are to stir up the worst kind of racial/gender-based implications without any further responsibility for analyzing or self-doubting the top level findings they're throwing in front of the audience.

You would think that anyone presenting statistics that call into question some kind of differential treatment by race, ethnicity, or gender would take a moment to point out the cautions in the data. Or even express some doubt about writing the story to begin with.

But no, for some reason, we are fascinated by the "0th order analysis" of inequities by race, almost want to see it blown up into incorrect interpretations and incentivize reporters to produce such stories.

I think there should be a code of ethics where reporters should be questioned about what they seek to accomplish with half-assed analyses like this, if they fail to accompany it with huge warnings about what it hasn't taken into account that could explain differences:

-- age

-- experience

-- selection biases in employees tenure (both hiring and departures)

etc.

Without this kind of info, all these stories do is shout an alarmist call that "this isn't fair" and then fail to produce any backup for the claim, but rile everyone up.

Really? What's the principle there? Even though no contractual relationship has been established yet between the employer and employee, the offer creates some entitlement that has been broken and therefore is a cause for action?

I assume then that an employer could hold a potential hire accountable for damages if the candidate backs out of the job offer/commitment after agreeing?

I think out of embarrassment, the student also decided not to showcase his proof that in 1000 years, the mass of human beings will outweigh the Earth.

Eh, who am I to criticize? They say that your early grad school years are a time to publish large amounts of papers that you don't think are likely to stick. This is a little bit out there even by this standard though.

Last I heard, Hollywood actors and writers weren't being abused, deceived, or coerced into working in this industry. They're not working under hazardous conditions or agreeing to false terms of work. It seems that there are people who want to work for the wages that are offered, the group just isn't happy with what they're being paid.

Aside from the consequences of their collective ability to withhold labor and ability to penalize those who don't join their union, can anyone explain why we should support them?

Why should I be glad to see actors strike for more $, any more than I would be happy to see plumbers strike so that they can charge me even more for work?

Maybe we should have as a public policy that when a certain topic is of sufficient public interest, and we observe some amount of $ registered for lobbying, the government should be able to allocate a proportional amount of funds to have policymakers receive competent advice from other sides of the argument. (distributed according to some sound independent judgement)

It seems that we're just leaving a lot of things to who can outgun in $ the other side lately. And sound government will never win in this race.

Like so many idealistic things, this kind of setup works only as long as the people joining or taking responsibility for the thing continue to have and practice the same ideals as what started it.

Start to lose that just a little bit, where responsibility gets diffuse, the original intention gets lost, or you start hiring people who don't have the same understanding, and it all falls apart.

Not every worker wants to have an equal share of the grunt work. Not every worker believes that they contribute equally to the success of the restaurant and are willing to split the proceeds in that way. Not every worker wants to have to live the restaurant as if it's their life.

Worker owned coops have as many failure modes as "evil" corporate ones do. And in some senses are all the more disappointing because of it.

I love how everything has to be "blandified" to make it sound less significant than it is when it comes to diagnosing and characterizing a problem by Apple. And I don't exempt other companies from this dumbing down or "unhysterifying" language as well.

"Exposing your iPhone to high amplitude vibrations within certain frequency ranges, specifically those generated by high-power motorcycle engines, can degrade the performance of the camera system."

No, it doesn't kill your camera, it just "degrades" it to the point of unusability. Your battery didn't explode, it just experienced a "thermal event"! Your screen isn't cracked, it just has "user-induced fragmentation anomalies"!

Is this not the anticipated reason our predecessors built all that infrastructure for channelizing and holding in the water all over LA?

I'm glad you just solved all of our country's problems by declaring that raising workers' wages is the solution to everything. I'm sure that's got no downsides to it, huh? Why didn't we think of that before?

Amazing how little distance it's moved. Maybe it should be obesity-weighted to show it better.

Oh wait, that would not help. Maybe that's why it hasn't moved much...

So because you live on a street not affected by this, it's hyperbole?

And what root causes should they be addressing that they have the means to address?

Agreed.

If a policy requires nearly perfect implementation, and follow through, and good behavior of the people, in order to succeed, and you rarely achieve / sustain the follow through by the community or police, etc. then it is not a good policy. Even though the concept was nice.

A policy is everything, start to finish. You can't just say a policy was good except for the implementation. No matter how good it makes you feel that you got the idea right, it just wasn't carried out the way you thought.

I maintain now (as I did when Measure 110 passed in Oregon, and in the discussions here in HN) that decriminalizing drugs would lead the state, and especially Portland of course, to a terrible and predictable outcome. Many supporters of the measure believed that it was the objectively right choice. Decriminalize, and get people to treatment instead of locking them up.

The sad thing is that you can make all the piecewise-correct A/B choices yet still end up having destroyed your city.

Yes, giving someone a ticket for using drugs and offering them treatment instead of locking them up might be temporarily more productive / more sensible. Yes, maybe it makes sense to put more resources to mental health.

Yet one day, you wake up and your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts.

Somehow, people forgot that once in a while there is a legitimate role for hard authority to punish people for doing things you don't want them to do. Lest your society go down some lawless path which step by step looked like the kind and charitable course to follow.

I maintain now (as I did when Measure 110 passed in Oregon, and in the discussions here in HN) that decriminalizing drugs would lead the state, and especially Portland of course, to a terrible and predictable outcome. Many supporters of the measure believed that it was the objectively right choice. Decriminalize, and get people to treatment instead of locking them up.

The sad thing is that you can make all the piecewise-correct A/B choices yet still end up having destroyed your city.

Yes, giving someone a ticket for using drugs and offering them treatment instead of locking them up might be temporarily more productive / more sensible. Yes, maybe it makes sense to put more resources to mental health.

Yet one day, you wake up and your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts.

Somehow, people forgot that once in a while there is a legitimate role for hard authority to punish people for doing things you don't want them to do. Lest your society go down some lawless path which step by step looked like the kind and charitable course to follow.

Of course they were developed largely by industry in putting designs into execution and production, but decades ago, the in-house knowledge to spec and actively participate in the detailed technical/engineering design stages still existed in large measure within the military.

Think of most aircraft types up to the 70s -- people in the military (engineers, designers) worked side by side with Grumman, Northrop, etc. in the designs and saying what kind of technical envelope was possible. Actually drawing up designs.

In large part (generalization of course, except for some pockets of expertise) the Pentagon is a bunch of project managers. Skilled I'm sure, but the depth of technical knowledge that used to exist has largely moved to the contractors. And this migration/dispersal of responsibility -- which notably caused a loss of single-minded direction in creating aircraft/ships that meet a specific desired need, driven by deep expertise -- has led to the hugely expensive but bland/mediocre/too many chefs in the kitchen projects that you often think of today. Just my opinion of course.

Two observations, one mundane, one serious.

Funny how even in reference textbooks on radio/EM/etc, for some reason people cannot help but use half circles on a plot about a sine function, instead of the proper function shape. Don't know why that is! See Figure 1-2.

And more seriously, I think that all of our useful military education texts date from pre-1990s, when the military was one part an able research and development (and educational) and contracting institution. Now today most all of that capability has been outsourced to the military contractors and anyone who could write such a text (or properly design an aircraft on the military side) has long left.

Too bad we'll fail to give those kids a proper math education well before they reach college.

https://calmatters.org/education/2021/11/california-math/

Another topic for discussion related to this (and I hope we can be detached enough to discuss the intellectual side of this impersonally):

Even if the drug/treatment method were approved, how much would this cost, would the author even be able to pay for / have the insurance company pay for the treatment?

And by the way, what limits are there on the price of a drug that an insurance company or the government will cough up the money to pay, for one person's extension to life for a couple years?

If someone has a very rare or just very advanced cancer, how much should the rest of us (as individuals paying taxes/premiums/etc) be on the hook for paying for last ditch efforts to prolong that person's life?

These are genuine questions I think are legitimate to ask, if not in polite conversation, then at least at the level of policymaking bodies in govt or insurance companies. I'm sure that people in the UK are quite familiar with this concept or debate.

You cannot just say you'll pay whatever it takes to save someone's life no matter what the circumstances.

I think the consideration that an article like this misses is the unintended consequences of speeding a process up / reducing the criteria for review, approval, etc.

I think we can all see incidents of where some oversight process is loosened because of some legitimate desire to help some, but then you learn that the bad / incompetent / exploitative actors come out of the woodwork to test and take advantage of the changing of rules. Not even saying intentionally, but just by sheer numbers, the change you made allowed things that were being held back by (hopefully proper) regulation to now happen.

Anyway, not saying that the FDA and other bodies couldn't move faster -- that is always the case. And there will always be examples of people/cases stuck in the cracks with legitimately sad situations.

But I would hope that people reading such stories think about why there is a process. It's not like the FDA's purpose in life is to stop people from benefitting from new treatments. It's to prevent the flood of bad effects of companies/individuals from being able to say they offer some drug that doesn't work in the way it says it does.

This is an incredibly stupid comment.

As the article says, I agree, let Harvard put its money where its mouth is, if racial and other kinds of diversity are as important as its faculty and admissions officers believe. Let them make the choice about the money or the diversity.

I think you'll find that the factions of people running the university (which by the way is a many, many-headed beast) would rather keep the money than act according to the principles they profess. I think you find that's true for a lot of liberal principles. (and conservative ones equally)

Harvard is free to experiment with social tinkering. Just not with my tax money.

Not wanting to stray into too culturally sensitive topics, but I am glad to see a find like this land in a country like Norway.

Maybe it's something about the cold weather/caution as a people, Protestant/Lutheran/Calvinist cultural restraint, or factors along those lines, but I have relatively more confidence that this country will not squander and flush the money from this resource down the toilet like some other countries. (at least under the country's political leadership that has given an observable track record with the oil resource as an example)

Maybe it's that they can manage the expectations of their people not to suddenly want to get rich and live off of mineral resources and nothing else. Like some other countries have fallen into the trap of.

Is there some reason we cannot put the reason for the removal (misinformation) in the headline of this HN story, and save everyone the guessing/speculation?

Here's a philosophical (?) topic I would love to hear opinions on the occasion of remembering Ellsberg's contributions.

Some would say that the transparency of revealing the Pentagon papers caused us as a people for the first time (debatable of course) to not fundamentally trust that the government usually does the right thing.

(In the general public perception sense. There were and always would be groups discontent or not trusting the state was acting in their interests on specific issues. But this was a large scale violation of people's beliefs, some might say.)

But for the first time (again, debatable), the government was shown to be covering up the national disgrace of the very important and big topic of Vietnam for face saving, and sacrificing lives in the process. And that this was just people at the top muddling through really important topics.

And this was important for a people to know, and understand that they could check government like this.

So... however --

I wonder, is there something such as too much transparency for a country's people, in the face of the reality of who your international competitors are, in a modern information age?

When governments can control information, they are much more able to sweep certain things under the rug, unify a people with partial information, and embark on war, other issues that dismiss or hide the many layers of truth or actions. And every issue is always complicated by who it helps and hurts. In a huge democracy, there will always be someone hurt by some decision.

When you have competitor countries who are not committed to such whistleblowing, sharing of information, freedom of press, and their people are able to be unified towards some goals while smaller issues are swept under the rug. Is our country by comparison paralyzed from doing great things, because any great thing will have endless "complainers" once all the details are known because of our freedom of information and above mistrust of government?

Basically, is there conceivably a bad or unintended consequence of so much freedom of the press to check government? Has too much democracy been a hinderance (or will it be when some important issue presents itself) to the progress of a democracy?