kingsuper20

One thing I tried was a search along the lines of

coronavirus site:wikipedia.com site:cdc.gov

well now, that doesn't work at all. So much for thinking you could send a thousand websites along with the search.

I wonder sometimes, and this would probably only suit me, if I could get a copy of the websites I'm actually interested in and simply have a local copy. Do local organization and search (is that FOSS or buyable?). Maybe with occasional updates.

A person could go a long way with a stack of disk drives holding libgen, sci-hub, gutenberg, magazine archives from archive.org, special interest forums, etc. Plus, it would keep you away from the less useful parts of the internet.

One thing that does make you appreciate Google is how awful Amazon search is.

Too fancy. I want a simple search.

. Only curated websites (period) and databases.

. Only the explicit search terms I give.

. Ability to block certain explicit search terms.

. Perhaps a bit of misspelling support.

Google search's uselessness (is that a word?) increases day by day as it evolves increasingly towards marketing, 'things it thinks I mean', defaulting to wikipedia.

I was just musing about how perfectly constructed this article is to appeal to a tech cubicle employee.

1) Doom porn for those worried about their later years (Hint: it's unlikely that you can pull a full career out of programming, hw engineering, tech marketing).

2) Amazon.

3) Van living.

..a) Sounds good to a single engineer who would rather mountain bike than construct one more product that rhymes with the last 5.

..b) Van design and construction is an interesting problem, especially the unsolved issues of sanitation.

4) Quartzsite, BLM land, other big get-togethers. Burning Man for introverts. Maybe there's room for a new Woody Guthrie.

5) Bob Wells and the whole van living youtube biz. Teaching people how to shit in a bucket can actually pay the bills in our brave new world. Go figure.

6) Often discussed never solved social issues (guaranteed income, public health care). Grave concern can be shown by everyone.

It's got it all.

>There is no way the average well educated American understands what the European or Scandinavian model is.

I would agree. It's similar to the lack of deep knowledge of public health systems in other countries, which are typically understood as slogans.

There's also the unwritten parts of a 'Scandinavian Model' (or whoever). These are monocultures with their own logic and behavior.

>He's saying that a significant part of Americans wants to make that more difficult for you, not easier.

I'd say that a significant part of Americans are simply indifferent. That can be easily confused for ill will.

> Also houses are almost literally untouchable,

Often, (in the US) retirement accounts are also sacrosanct, depending on the claim.

The issue of houses reminds me of how much of the US tax system is regressive. Electric car subsidies, special treatment for capital gains, mortgage deductions.

Social security doesn't seem to work too badly (although the $500 listed in the article implies that the lady featured didn't put together a full career of anything). It's certainly more sustainable than Medicare (US old-age health system for you furriners).

You could argue that a guaranteed income program consists purely of increasing the subsidies for SS and taking money from 'the rich', but that'll require more political will than exists.

An interesting situation that I see a lot of is folks who spent an entire worklife doing largely cash work (construction, waitresses, bartenders, business owners who never took a reported salary) who find themselves getting older with little money on the horizon. This is probably 50% of the people I know.

>hoping that in many years, there will be enough people working to be able to pay my retirement.

No problem. You just import more and more people.

Who supports them? Why...simply import more and more people.

A lot (most?) of the problem is that there are a lot more old people than there used to be and EOL medical problems are more of a thing. Solution? I have no clue.

It just looks like human nature to me.

It's fun (and good for a career) to set up 'cybercommands' and looking-through-keyhole departments with a large logistical tail. Secrety organizations are easier to fund and harder to shutdown.

I'd say that you are simply seeing the natural result of a top-heavy military with less to do than meets the eye. Feature creep is a thing, especially in a growth industry.

Ideally, the various factions that run an increasingly imperial government each have their own intelligence services or even multiple ones that are controlled via competition.

This probably should be rewritten as "Native language speakers are the world's worst communicators".

I got to use an Intel XScale in a product once. I never did see the point of it's choice.

>It wasn’t just all price. It was literally this “develop at home” issue.

Whether you're right or not, I think I agree with the idea.

It also seems to me that, in general, working with a different CPU architecture and instruction set implies that the new & improved stuff has to be significantly better to be worth the cost and risk.

At this point, is one really that much better than another? Are large improvements happening at the margin?

Another camel that'll poke it's head in the tent, in large/expensive embedded (which I realize that the parts in the article aren't aimed at) is whether a CPU and it's battlegroup of other stuff will be supported right off the bat by software infrastructure and later on by actually being available in the long run. You have to wonder how out on a limb anyone who used a Motorola 88k felt.

In an ideal world, it seems to me like everyone needs a different interface with a computer, whether it's a website or an application (remember those?).

Waving a wand, I'd take something like a banking website (let's say Bank of America as an example) and strip out all the cruft. A text-only interface that (maybe) just looks like a simple early-version-of-Windows application. I'll grant that Amazon and eBay require the ability to put up images, Vanguard and Fidelity most certainly do not.

What you could do then is to make them all alike, it's not like these sites are particularly different. Maybe the equivalent of an RSS feed app could run the lot.

The thing is, a deaf or blind person could ask for the same thing just with their own particular abilities in mind.

/oldmanrant

I hear what you are saying, but think a more interesting case can be made for items that are (a) fungible and (b) accepted as a medium of exchange.

Ownership of gold in a vault would be a good one to critique, although I suppose you'd have to find some way to pay for the transactions.

If gold fails this test, then I can't see any point in using a blockchain for any store of value but simply as an in-and-out mechanism for transmitting money.

I think that's a fair observation although peer pressure certainly could act as a form of closed loop control. The near-linear increase in modern obesity seems to kick off in the mid-1970s.

I'd also want to add the lack of physical activity as people move to doing God's Work by sitting still and tapping on a keyboard with occasional visits to the gym, but I haven't found a decent study showing that over time.

The equation seems pretty simple to me.

75+ years of highly designed, increasingly addictive foods + significant work on cost reduction + lack of peer pressure = more obesity

It would be interesting to see the inflation-corrected per-ounce price of Coca Cola over the last 120 years. Usage appears to be dropping so perhaps there's some hope.

>The problem with this approach is that its counterproductive, as many prisons act as graduate schools in crime.

As are the streets.

In this model of 'removal', I'd say that the main point of a prison is to take a more crime prone demographic (by that I mean age, gender, ethnicity, location, wealth...the whole ball of wax) off the street until they are older and less likely to do things that the straights don't like.

In the long run, I would expect for universal surveillance (and the increased ability to parse data we are seeing) to be the main driving force in social control rather than mere warehousing.

I'm in a very small town right now and it's a reasonable driving distance from farms. It looks to me like the average farm stand is simply some clever person buying crates of produce at the wholesaler.

No shortage of healthy food at the local grocery stores of course.

I expect that people who wave their arms about 'food deserts' could probably stand to visit either small towns or urban areas and form an opinion based on actual experience.

>Are they there for punishment or for rehabilitation?

A third possibility is 'removal'. The idea is that a potential criminal is under the control of the state.

Correlation vs. causation and all that, but given the likely lack of results from either punishment or rehabilitation, perhaps that is what happened here.

https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/uploads/content/_1400_700/Cr...

>what incentive does a for profit company have to shift any gains from economies of scale/etc to consumers?

You'd have to have listen in to a Walmart upper management meeting to see why, but my guess is that all commerce is somewhat fungible. There's always a bit more growth to be eked by lowering prices or increasing value of products.

I'm not saying that this always happens, or that it isn't shared with increasing profits. Gigantism in box stores could be used in areas for monopoly pricing where they have wiped out smaller competitors (who themselves wiped out smaller competitors) but there are numerous cases where it hasn't happened. I'd say that fear of anti-trust action is only part of the reason.

Not much of an article, but it seems to me that missing component is that the world, at least the human version, will change to better suit AI/ML/etc. It isn't just synthetic intelligence becoming better at formerly human tasks.

Design for manufacturability is an example of what I mean in terms of the results being changed to suit the process.

There's money to be made and a strong feedback loop in it's making.

or they simply keep it secret.

I've thought exactly this thing for years. I'm afraid that you'd have to build a completely separate organization with a separate management line up to the top of the chart. and even then you'd spend most of your time protecting yourself from the NSA and it's brethren.

Absolutely.

I think that people grossly underestimate the amount of processing that can be done on video. Reasonably sized filters, something like deinterlacing, high quality transforms. Swamping a modern CPU in terms of memory access or processing isn't too hard.

It depends on the type of video processing and whether you can handle adding latency.

You can make the same argument about buying MGM.

Looking at Publishers Weekly, I see this:

"An important driver of print book sales last year was the continuing increase in backlist sales, McLean said. Backlist titles accounted for 67% of all print units purchased in 2020, up from 63% the year before. In 2010, backlist accounted for only 54% of all unit sales. " https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/b...

I think you could make a strong argument for buying a large publisher (or anything really) given a good ROI.

I'm going to show my ignorance here, but how do they handle memory coherence in a CPU like that?

To repeat myself in another post here, copyright is a funny thing in that it proposes a form of monopoly, just on the small scale.

I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that increasingly strong copyright holders (given all of the media mergers) implies increasingly strong copyright law.

Add that to the expanding ability of parsing for copyright violations and I can imagine the Disney Police parachuting in to arrest you for that counterfeit Micky Mouse watch 150 years after Steamboat Willie.

>Vertical mergers can frequently be welfare-improving to consumers.

As can be horizontal mergers given economies of scale and/or network effects.

It's an interesting area of the law (anti-trust) as it strikes me as one of the few really excellent uses for the heavy hand of the government. Lots of cooks in the kitchen of legislation.

It does grate my ears to hear the word 'consumer' rather than 'citizen' but I suppose it's a natural side effect of a country that is made up of decreasingly self-sufficient individuals.

As I understand it, the test for monopoly is detrimental effect for consumers, not control of a market. Making your company more vertically integrated (by buying a back catalog in this case I guess) probably doesn't trip any alarms.

I'm surprised that they don't buy Penguin. Maybe Bertelsmann has no interest in selling.

If you think about it, publishers of print/music/movies are essentially built on monopoly given the single sourcing of a title. It's not as simple as cornering the market on wheat or oil.