One of the cornerstones of neoliberalism as practiced in the US in the Clinton-era and beyond has been predatory lending disguised in a facade of laissez-faire feel-good marketing. Drawing a line between Jack Ma’s new lending scheme and that is a pretty specific criticism, even if you don’t agree with it.
Agreed! If Apple caves in to Chinese pressure on this, what else will they do? Does Xi Jinping's brutal authoritarian regime now effectively make decisions for Apple abroad, since they can always threaten to cut Apple out of the lucrative mainland market?
I've never heard "microkitchen". Where I work, it's just a kitchen. A pretty big kitchen, actually, so prepending "micro" would feel strange. Are Google's microkitchens small?
It's unfortunate that this post links a bad CNBC summary, rather than the actual Amazon press release. There's a lot more to Amazon's announcement than just buying electric trucks:
> ...getting exactly what the market could afford.
"afford" is an odd word choice. As if to suggest that employers simply don't have any money by which they could have increased worker salaries.
In this same period, average CEO compensation increased 25-50%, depending on how you measure it. So, apparently, there's lots of money, but its distribution is skewing increasingly to the very top.
Part of the study claimed that in a month of diving exercises you can replicate this clarity of vision underwater in European (and presumably any) children. That should be easy to reproduce. The part about a speculated adaptation to better tolerate salt water in the eyes, less so.
Memories of a talk in grad school where we had a guest from Google (also an alum of the school) presenting. He had been with Google from early days and had a hand in their biggest products, including Gmail. It was a very good talk, and I don't mean to disparage it, but someone from the audience asked him a question about user privacy and he answered it by describing how good Google's security is. Like, he didn't quite see the difference between privacy and security. It was illuminating.
Beijing, Xi'an, Chengdu, and a handful of villages nearby them. Also some roadside farmer stalls in between. I'm sure the quality and variety vary, but the sample I saw was impressive.
One thing that's not mentioned is that the freshness and variety of produce available in China is fantastic. There's much less refrigeration and transportation, so there's a good chance the produce you buy at the local street market came from nearby fields very recently. Seeing this as a visitor from the US is quite a revelation.
You don't see visible homelessness nearly as much as in US big cities. Chinese friends I've discussed this with attribute it to familial piety acting as a much stronger safety net; people will make big sacrifices to save their relatives from total failure. It's expected, and a stark contrast to the American notion of extreme individualism. There's also no opiod epidemic.
(I was once talking to a friend over beers, ranting about some politics I was unhappy about. And he asked me: So what are you doing about it? Of course, I wasn't doing anything besides complaining, and this made something click in my head. All of my self-important opinions were worth nothing if I couldn't be bothered to do anything about them. I think about this a lot and it has changed the way I see the world.)
It's not just you. Gmail has become so slow to load for me that I wonder if they've deliberately sabotaged it on Firefox. Amazing how it's 2019 and web apps somehow seem to be less usable than they were ten years ago. I miss fast desktop apps.
We've been hearing this "both sides are equally bad" argument from Republican apologists for years, but by now there's a mountain of evidence that it's simply not true. Republican efforts to gut and silence science within the government have done profound damage.
Not one word in that press release about privacy safeguards.
The benefits are real, but without safeguards it will be abused: police officers and, in this case, also power utility workers likely have full, unaudited access to this data. That means they'll use it to stalk and harass people, e.g. ex-girlfriends, in addition to legit uses.
If Peter Thiel is so concerned about scientific progress, maybe he shouldn't spend so much time and money supporting a regime that's openly hostile to science. Just a thought.
Strongly disagree. Effective technical leadership is a rarer skill than pure technical chops, especially as one becomes more senior in an organization. And it’s much more than “PowerPoint skills”——it’s driving consensus and making good decisions in highly ambiguous situations.
That said, I agree that it’s not something CS majors should worry about much in school. It’s something you learn as your career progresses.
These private equity scams seem to revolve around borrowing money, transferring the debt to a separate legal entity that then declares bankruptcy, and pocketing the money. If that’s true, then it would seem that creditors (and AL taxpayers in this case) end up holding the bag. How are savvy lenders falling for this?
Wow! Yesterday we learned about what happens when dead alligators are dropped to the sea floor of the abyssal plane (a giant isopod smorgasbord), and today we learn about cheese exposed to hip hop. The 2019 IgNobel competition is really heating up.
They’re very publicly pivoting to /claiming/ to take privacy seriously. I don’t know why anyone would believe them, given their track record, continued willful ignorance about the actual definition of privacy, and vested interest in mining every detail about their users to achieve better ad targeting.
Platforms can censor content however they like. Amazon isn’t a government entity and has no responsibility to provide a platform for free speech. Why would they?
I used to work in the aerospace industry. The engineers had spreadsheets that consisted of three visual elements: Cells for the input and output filenames, and a "Run" button.
It had once been company policy that engineers didn't have compilers or other programming tools on their computers (because "we have programmers for that"). But engineers are a resourceful lot, and they did have Excel with VBA.