roc

Honestly, that could be it. Signalling isn't always about showing off -- many times it's just about signalling a willingness to belong. Even signalling a willingness to belong to an objectively undesirable group.

So it could be signalling that you're not "puttin on airs" by acting superior to those around you who play. Or it could be signalling that you legitimately like to belong to the group around you who play. Or it could be simply signalling that you don't take yourself (or $2) that seriously.

Social signalling. Like every other human expenditure beyond absolute utility.

It's not about CGI. It's about practical effects; set and setting -- to convey the emotional feel of hope, safety, plenty and beauty.

Utopia requires verdant green lawns, large old trees, calm ponds or slowly flowing water. Big Open spaces. Lots of good light, clean surfaces, rich materials and blue skies.

This adds up to larger sets, more expensive sets (more care needed in their construction and use), lots of expensive lights or desirable locations -- everyone loves a picturesque park, so imagine how much it costs to shut one down for filming. And now imagine what happens if that day is cloudy, or rainy, or a scene just didn't get captured on schedule. (This is also why so very few movies are shot on or around water. And why, when they are, massive water tanks are so often used. Even though they are massively expensive to create, they're far cheaper than trying to film out on open water.)

If you need to build and furnish a "utopian" apartment or a building, it needs to be aesthetically pleasing, with graceful curves and clean surfaces. Drop the fancy chair? You might have to get a new one or at least spend time and effort reconditioning it or setting it so damage isn't visible on camera.

Dystopia, on the other hand, is conveyed with dark, cramped, dirty, broken and grimy sets and setting. These things are easy to find, are not in particularly high demand, can be done trivially on a sound-stage, etc. If you need a building you can literally just screw together shipping pallets and scrap metal. If you need to furnish a room, you take a stroll through a dump or buy some cheap dorm-class furniture and then beat it up a bit. And, importantly, less light. Fewer lights to rent and move and set up and operate (and move and set up and operate and move and set up and operate...). You can shoot into the night, you can shoot facing a decrepit building, you can shoot in the back of a rusted out buick in a garbage dump.

> "how can Google use this data against me"

I look at it the other way: What do I gain from allowing Google to build this profile of me, including information from potentially multiple accounts, devices, location history, search history and communication history.

Because if Google is offering their services for free to all comers, that data must be valuable to them. And if I can't deduce why the value is what it is, that's far more likely a failure of understanding on my part than any indication of fairness or harmlessness in the exchange. [1]

And to me, all I see is a convenience function I can't rely upon. It can identify flight or meeting information. Maybe (who knows what parser errors exist or will exist as things change). And it can only even try some of the time, as google doesn't have access to every channel by which my itinerary is set and changed (emails to non-Google accounts, phone calls, text messages, verbal communication, etc.)

And if I can't rely upon it, I have to double-check that it is operating off the right information. And at that point, I might as well have explicitly handled the bits Google Now might have gotten right as well.

The rest of your examples are replaceable with client-side data-detection features -- that have been identifying likely dates, addresses, flights, etc and offering convenience functions to simplify dealing with them for some time -- and location-snapshot information [2]. Nothing there requires indexing all my communications and locations across history.

Maybe Google Now can become something that's worth the trade-off. Or maybe Google will offer a (for-pay?) version with guarantees about who has control over what is retained and who has access to it. But, to me, it's not a good deal right now.

And besides all that, I'm personally a pretty private person, so I have a particularly good imagination of the downside risks, even beyond weighing my benefits vs google's benefits.

[1] It's that old saw: "There's a sucker at every table..." Applied to internet services it suggests: If you can't tell why a company with a free service has a massive valuation and a willingness to pay through the nose for users, you literally have no idea what you're trading away by using it. So you better be damn sure you're at least getting something worth the per-user valuation in return.

[2] Yes, it requires some degree of trust or self-deception to believe that there's a difference between a company that states it's collecting your location history and one that claims it doesn't -- as providing snapshots implies the ability to log said snapshots. But such is life. At some point you make peace with the level of paranoia you can handle, or you opt out of society altogether.

It gets a little cumbersome to hedge casual conversation the way attorneys do, but sure, it would have been more accurate to have said:

"might not, under the current rules, which are always subject to change"

A notable difference is that a compromise of Cloudflare's key wouldn't [edit: might not] require the bank to notify the Federal Reserve.

It may be pretty cynical to call that situation a "feature". But I'm sure it came up. And I'm sure they noticed.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time "trivial functional difference" translated to "massive legal difference."

There's not much one company can do about the standards. [1] They can only control their own output.

Apple asserts that Facetime and Facetime Audio are end-to-end encrypted. And Google claims Hangouts are encrypted as well.

I don't know whether there are caveats (or how many) to either of those claims. But that's about as much as one could hope for in the current climate. [2]

[1] Particularly upstart computer companies dealing with the telecom oligopoly. Long cozy with governments and law-enforcement, if not an explicit part of government.

[2] It's a serious bummer that FaceTime never developed into the open standard they claimed at introduction. I've been curious about where that fell apart. (Competitor disinterest, patent liability, carrier terms, etc)

Delaying having a child for ten years also implies that the associated costs of having that child will have continued to climb over the intervening ten years.

As many of those costs (healthcare, childcare, education) have been growing at similar (or greater) rates than plausible investment returns, the calculated return of the birth control investment may be overstated a bit.

The UX on the Watch.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297652

I honestly think it was accidental. It looks like a classic case of a simple executive decision that appeared so trivial as to skip a careful consideration of the implementation.

Which isn't to excuse it: it was very un-Apple-like. And it certainly wasn't the only un-Apple-like turn last week.

> "I think that Apple actually took the easy way out here"

They took the "Microsoft" route.

They refused to make hard decisions about what was right for users and use of this unique platform and it's all pointed in a bad direction for that lack of focus, attention to detail and execution.

Smart Watches -- particularly those that require a smart phone -- have about 2 seconds before you hit the "stylus moment". [1] But the watch demo was oddly fixated on long interactions (the most difficult way to text emoji to date) and stupid interactions (browsing pictures on a 1" screen?).

The cases where watch-interaction makes more (or primary) sense [2] were given very little screen time, or mere lip service. And, oddly enough, those cases seem to have been given more thought and have more obvious, natural, direct, and thus better interactions [3].

Enabling those complex interactions, that are going to be inefficient and annoying, is going to lead to an avalanche of apps that similarly invite users to do things fundamentally ill-suited to a watch. Poorly conceived apps, lazily-ported apps -- The ecosystem as a whole is going to suffer for having that around. [4]

And then there's the interaction methods. iOS was a boon for computer use because it's so obvious, direct and natural. Many/most people never really got the hang of click vs double-click vs right-click. Many struggled with the core indirection of pushing the pointer around the screen with their mouse and the whole "scroll down to push the page up" mess (that only makes sense if you grew up on keyboard-only interaction and the also-awkwardly-named "page up"/down keys).

Apple sweated the details, stripped away the distractions and non-essentials, and they nailed it.

But what does the watch bring? Quick-tap vs long-tap vs force-tap? Are they kidding? Undiscoverable hidden interaction zones in corner(s?) or off-screen-swipes to execute features with no articulated conceptual logic as to "what goes where" or how the (in)existence of those features is even conveyed? Those demo controls showed more arcane gestures than a Harry Potter movie.

And the crown? It zooms the screen, except when it doesn't. It scrolls lists, except when it doesn't. It manipulates input controls, except when it doesn't -- and only if you apply the appropriate tap to successfully shift focus to the desired input. This is a mode-switching UX nightmare.

Stated plainly -- that watch, that demo? -- they blew it.

They've got a few months where they could course-correct. They've got a review step where they could filter out "bad" apps to protect the ecosystem from what they accidentally enabled (and encouraged by focusing the demo on it).

But I am not optimistic that a group who could green-light that demo is capable of discerning the difference. I think Apple's fundamental "taste" is in question. [5]

[1] Jobs famously stated "if you see a stylus, they blew it." The key here is that "blew it" doesn't mean "they made a bad tablet". It means "they never understood mobile or touch." They never understood that the use cases and ergonomics require a fundamental re-thinking of interaction. They never understood that you can't just port over things that worked somewhere else and only make sense given prior experience with something else.

[2] e.g. when the phone itself is less accessible (while exercising, while in-bed, while hands are collecting purchased items), thus giving you longer than 2 seconds before the "I might as well have pulled out my phone" moment. e.g. when direct use of the phone would defeat the feature (to use the watch as remote viewfinder/shutter release for the phone's camera).

[3] notification triage; workout/stopwatch/timer start/stop; simple location-based interactions like payments, unlocking a hotel room door, etc. It all looked far more sane/natural/straightforward.

[4] We all just saw what happened with Microsoft's odd mode-shifting app circus on their Surface tablets. If you enable the "conceptually new, thus more difficult, but right" interaction method and "conceptually familiar, thus easier, and wrong" interaction method, how many devs are really going to put in the work to get it right? Recent experience suggests enough devs will take shortcuts that your users will become frustrated and your ecosystem stained.

[5] I don't think Apple's taste is definitely gone. But the notion that Apple might be "coasting on momentum" is no longer something I can laugh off. Not on a core design level.

And an alternative explanation to "they're coasting" on momentum, is that the Watch is pushing iphone/ipad interactions where they don't belong because Apple's captured by their own momentum. And that's far, far worse.

> "It's an entirely different statement."

Which is the point. The character limit creates miscommunication because people wind up submitting something other than what they set out to communicate.

> "Those are side effects of not stopping to think about how to effectively convey a greater-than-140-characters thought in less than 140 characters (without changing its meaning.)"

So you're agreeing that Twitter, as a medium, presents a unique challenge to how most humans communicate in most other media and requires special consideration and effort?

That doesn't actually sound like a disagreement.

The 140 character limit and general focus on brevity encourages people to drop specificity and shift to bold proclamations and absolutes.[1] This is guaranteed to cause miscommunication and hurt feelings. The resulting arguments are impossible to effectively reason out at 140 characters. And even if you do work it out in another medium (email, phone call, etc) - the re-tweeting spreads the old arguments like wildfire.

[1] When the concept "some people in Philadelphia suck" hits a character limit, what gets removed? Exactly. Now someone who's just had a bad experience with a particular person is shouting to the world "people in Philadelphia suck". And having said that, in that way, the larger scope is re-inforced into the writer's brain and tied to their ego and pride. Cue screamfest.

> "why not make an operating system that has only 45 syscalls?"

Because much of Microsoft's licensing revenue is contingent upon continuing to support the edge cases that are inevitably not part of the set of programs that can be dropped into such a sandbox without problems.

Both the possibility that corporations may not come to the US market, or may only come to the US market after having expanded into other, more-profitable markets require an assumption that the US would (substantially) raise taxes above the current level.

We're hypothetically setting out to close a loophole that results in two distinct effective rates, a lower rate A for foreign corporations and a higher rate B for US-based corporations.

So, again, why should we spend any time worrying about what might happen if we were to introduce an even higher rate C? No-one's talking about that. It's not on the table. It's not remotely politically plausible. It's not even a thing anyone's seriously proposed.

Talking about it is either entirely besides the point, or a motivated attempt to conflate closing the loophole with raising rates to C, to scare people away from trying to close the loophole.

> "the flip side the alternative is that they don't sell their goods here"

That's a silly concern. Businesses do not forgo profit simply because they'd prefer if there were more. They always prefer if there were more. And yet they still seek the profit that's available. So long as cost/benefit suggests the US is a profitable market, they will continue to sell their goods here.

The only "risk" of corporations "taking their ball and going home", is if the United States pursued a transparently self-destructive tax rate on foreign-based corporations. Which there is absolutely no reason to expect would even enter rational conversation.

Imagine a husband and wife are talking about what car they should buy next and they disagree on the budget. The analogous case to a tax rate so high corporations leave the US market, is the husband deciding to burn the house down so that there's no garage and no money at all.

While that's certainly a possible alternative to negotiating their differences, discussing that alternative is, at best, silly. And attempting to ascribe serious weight to the possibility is downright intellectually dishonest.

The identity of the poster is recorded as a core conceit of the system. The app/network is explicitly for sharing secrets between friends. It has to record and store who the secrets came from, in order to determine who their friends are and thus which users to show it to.

Before you even sign up it's quite clear that there can't be anything anonymous about this at all. It delivers plausible-deniability at best.

Their claims may be fuzzy. People may not be paying too much attention when they sign-up or use it. But they're quite clearly not trying to make an actually anonymous secret sharing site.

One quibble: Metadata is facts about people. Logging meta-data isn't a slippery-slope toward also catching facts. It's a problem from the jump.

"Joe goes to the gym three times a week" is a fact.

"Joe's network activity originates from a gym on the following schedule" is not only at least an equivalent fact, in practice it's far superior to the simple case. It can give you subtleties [1], it's less susceptible to subterfuge [2], it gives you actionable evidence of specific occurrences, etc.

Consider the CIA doesn't use meta-data to target hellfire missiles because it's less identifying than actual data. They use it because it's far better.

[1] Joe never goes to the gym on Saturday. Joe goes to the gym more during the spring than the winter. Joe almost never misses a day when Sally is at the gym. Joe and Sally nearly always leave at the same time.

[2] It's trivial for someone to say they go to the gym on a schedule they don't. It's not even too difficult to get a second or third party to fudge, embellish or outright lie on their behalf. It's much more difficult to get a second or third party to help you make your device convincingly take the claimed routine, without you creating any conflicting meta-data that gives up the ruse.

It was suggested that dual incomes were a cause of increased inequality, not a symptom. And that's wrong.

The inequality that's an economic problem is not between those earning more than 100k and those earning less [1]. The problematic inequality is the difference between those earning more than 1M and those earning less. [2]

I absolutely agree that dual incomes are an increasing-necessity, but they're a symptom of inequality. They're more-required because the "below 1M" earners have not been seeing their wages rise with their increased productivity. And those "lost wages" are going to the "above 1M" crowd -- not the above 100k crowd.

[1] Two incomes are not making anyone cross that line, save a hypothetical family with two executives at small-to-mid-size firms. And the problem is primarily the rates-of-change of wages between those earning more than 1M and those earning less. That there's a gulf is not, by itself, much of a problem. That it's getting wider, is concerning. That tangible objective increases in worker output and efficiency are not translating into increased worker rewards is the ticking time bomb.

> "I'm not sure why the article is so obsessed with this "six-figure salary" thing"

Because people ascribe meaning to "large numbers" that are unmoored from the actual objective context and meaning of those numbers.

See also: people's penchant for using totals, sometimes even lifetime totals, to argue that certain projects (public or private) are too expensive/boondoggles/etc. They ought to be looking at ROI, rates, per-capita-rates even -- but they don't. Because they know the audience has attached emotional meaning to "millions" and "billions".

> "the growing number of dual-income households has been suggested as an exacerbating factor in the growing income inequality in the U.S."

That's a red herring.

When people talk about inequality as a serious economic problem, they're not talking about any discrepancy between households living off a salary or two. They're not even talking about the discrepancy between the ninety-nine and the one percent -- they're talking about the point-one percent and everyone else.

I'm not sure this isn't satire. It reads like you did a search/replace on a defense of Blockbuster against the upstart Netflix.

To your specific points:

1. Locality is a huge competitive disadvantage. Real-estate, staffing, infrastructure, etc.

2. More-efficiently managing a wide selection and optimizing for product that frequently turns over is a key advantage of warehouse/delivery operations.

3. It makes no sense to compare an interruption of your day with an asynchronous order/delivery method. No-one uses Netflix the way they used Blockbuster. No-one misses Blockbuster.

4. Personally picking fruit directly off plants was more accurate than personally picking fruit in a grocery store. It's also something most people don't miss as a regular chore. Warehouse/delivery has a massive advantage here as well, as they'll be able to better manage inventory flow and don't have to suffer the same exposure to elements/contaminants as a grocery store.

They can even offer "ugly produce" at a discount, bringing the same implicit assumption of responsibility for odds and ends and generating sufficient extra revenue from the particular buyers, to effectively serve them and any returns.

There's no "niche" for this. The niche will be serving the people who enjoy farmer's markets and those who dropped a dozen eggs and will pay a premium for their replacement.

I wonder if "3" isn't an unspoken reliance on self-driving cars for true profitability. If you can be the "Amazon" of delivery the day courier costs drop from $20/hour to $.56/mi, there's an awful lot of up-side. Similarly with Uber.

The irony goes so much deeper.

While "extreme sports" types may not themselves drink Red Bull, the "non-extreme" people who do drink Red Bull are very sensitive to the notion that Red Bull is authentically associated with such sports/attitudes.

That is, they demand their products properly represent feelings, experiences and capabilities that they themselves do not pursue. And you see this in all sorts of markets.

People who will never serious hike demand "authentic" (or authentic-appearing) hiking boots. People who will never push their computers' limits demand high-end parts. People who will only listen to over-compressed audio will demand high-quality stereo components. Etc.

> "and yet we still try to understand them and talk to them"

For certain terrifyingly-narrow definitions of "we".

Compare the number of researchers puzzling over sea mammal communication to the number of fishermen intentionally and unintentionally slaughtering them.

It would be as if aliens arrived and realized that Humans were sentient but hadn't yet puzzled out how to truly communicate with us. So they abduct a few of us and task a handful of them with trying to work it out.

In the meantime, the rest of them discover they have a taste for corn. So they dredge half of Iowa, shrugging their shoulders at the incidental death and destruction of any number of farms, communities and small towns. Then they dump the "by-catch" and leave.

Not to mention the havoc that would wreck on our economy and food supply and how many might starve in addition to those who would die directly. Not to mention the long-term damage their unsustainable harvest methods would wreck and the implications that would have on our own ability to survive. Not to mention any research stations that may or may not be causing massive cases of dementia/die-off of any number of humans.

The next year, when even more alien harvest ships return to do it all again, how much comfort are you going to find in the notion that the handful of them -- however earnestly -- are trying to learn how to communicate with us?

We know dolphins and whales speak and think. We are not "all over it". We could barely agree to a modest effort to reduce incidentally slaughtering some in our quest for other fish. We can not remotely agree to stop* directly slaughtering others.

If an alien race looked at us the way we look at dolphins, whales, or even primates -- we'd be damn lucky if they simply turned around and went home.

*edit: forgot "stop"

Home loans would be a terrible example for your position.

Mortgage interest is paid off disproportionately sooner than the principle and the bank still has a claim on the property until the last penny is (re)paid. So long as they didn't finance a home beyond its value, they're ahead on paper well within the first year. (only needing to recoup the costs and commissions associated with closing the sale before the paper shows profit)

Further, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage didn't really exist until the government got into the business of subsidies and guarantees. Before that, the standard were balloon payment mortgages with larger down payments, far shorter terms and the eponymous balloon payments due at maturity (which greatly favored the bank's end of the deal in practice).

Legislation is not unlike programming. Programs and legislation both have bugs. Many government assistance programs currently have bugs. But bugs can be fixed. And sub-systems can be refactored.

Sure, at some point, a program can become so complex that the desire to do a greenfield rewrite is very strong. But Second System Syndrome is a real thing. And people taking advantage of a rewrite to move goal-posts and shift focus for personal political/pet-goal reasons, to the detriment of the new system to achieve the existing goals, is a real thing.

I would very much like to refactor the every living hell out of government assistance programs. But I'm extremely wary of people who want to do a fundamental rewrite. Particularly when those people have no historical interest in the program's success. Doubly so, when those people demonstrate they have put no priority on representing, understanding or achieving the original system's goals.

This is actually a notable problem with the BIG, as presented.

As it includes Medicaid spending as federal benefit spending (and likely PPACA subsidies -- but I haven't gotten that far in the footnotes) the $10k would seemingly amount to just covering every American household's private-market insurance premiums (with no regard to whether they needed them covered and further handing 'free money' to healthy young childless households whose premiums would be much lower).

And without being structured as Medicaid, it would abandon the other (cost-controlling/bureaucracy-reducing/waste-reducing) financial benefits of a single payer health system -- benefits over the private market that Medicaid actually delivers (according to numerous studies).

So the end result is that poor people would see their net benefits ruthlessly slashed, (good luck buying food and shelter after you use that 10k for market-rate insurance) all so that middle-class people can receive a stipend that they don't need and a decrease in federal-dollar-per-hypothetical-unit-of-healthcare efficiency.

The most-charitable read of this proposal, is that it's the result of a naive person doing "black box math" where they seek some mathematical ideal in the re-arrangement of government payments -- without any regard to the benefits being provided, the cost-effectiveness of those benefits and whether the rearrangement is a practical improvement.

I mean, if we're spending $20k per poor person, and children are still going hungry, under what logic would redistributing it as 10k to every single person see any sort of improvement in the ultimate goals of things like keeping children from going hungry?

To not see the massive benefit cut to these people that we've currently defined as needing help, we'd have to assume that for every dollar in tangible benefits received by the poor, there's a dollar in bureaucratic overhead.

And why on earth would we accept such an implicit assumption, when the ultimate source of all these numbers -- the CBO -- has regularly assessed such administrative costs and never finds such waste? [1]

[1] e.g. SNAP, pointed to regularly in the CATO document source, has administrative overhead of less than 4.5% of total federal cost. So if the average SNAP-receiving household is getting $287/mo, the overhead is $13/mo. Under this proposal, food money going to the currently-snap-receiving household would drop to $143/mo, with $15/mo going to 9 households that don't need SNAP. In the name of "saving" that $13/mo. Most of us would look at the infeasibility of a household feeding itself for $143/mo and see their own $15/mo as a more egregious waste than the original $13. Which, cynically speaking, is likely to be a feature. Following such a programs initiation, it would be trivial to get voters behind the proposal to cut their own taxes by $15/mo, to save them the overhead of having the government take the money only to give it back as a stipend they don't need. The end result would be the massive benefit cut and the reduced taxes.

http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/supplemental-nutrition-assistance...

(EDIT: fleshed out SNAP example)

I guess I didn't recognize your point, because I don't see a huge discrepancy in ability-to-demand overtime, between cleaning people and technology staff.

Tech workers are more-well-paid than the cleaning staff and generally better situated to negotiate for any given job. But I don't see how that necessarily carries over to increased success in negotiating payment schemes that differ from the legal and industry standard for the position.