throwaway2245

There's no objective measure of value and the amount the workers are paid is more a function of their (very little) power: if those types of workers vanished, Amazon would not have any value.

> The government subsidizing their pay is a good thing

The government is really subsidising the money into Jeff Bezos's accounts.

The skills aren't considered worth $25/h because they are not paid according to the value they are providing, which is evident by the grotesque profits that Amazon is making.

Amazon arguably has monopoly power over this type of job, which means there isn't competition for the workers, and they aren't paid correctly.

That should be corrected, rather than subsidised.

Or you could add a 'salt' to the location, before adding randomness, so there is an unknown offset.

It's worse even than that.

As long as one company controls the One Rendering Engine, all websites are tested against that One Rendering Engine (i.e. not the truth of the spec).

It becomes impossible to create a new rendering engine without actively copying the quirks behaviours.

I think our perspectives are different because I'm thinking about what the board of Wikimedia might look like later: when it controls a bunch of money but is essentially dying as a service.

I imagine a political mess, of people trying to extract personal benefit from the remaining endowment.

So, your suggested alternative to avoid data monopolization is to use a FAANG (with a worse product)? I accept that those are alternatives, but no thanks.

Pandora has been geo-blocked and IIRC only serves the USA since 2007, and SoundCloud appears to me to be offering a different service.

If Wikipedia becomes unfashionable to the extent it is highly dependent on its savings, it will no be longer valued for being Wikipedia (by definition).

It might be valued as an institution with modest economic power, which doesn't seem to me to add anything to the world that isn't already there.

2 years of all current spending as a cushion seems like plenty to me (for Wikipedia, which has not faced any unexpected financial shocks, even in 2020). If you can't navigate shocks and downward trends with that cushion, then you probably ought not to exist.

Why should Wikimedia need a significant nest egg?

What do you do with the money, when people have stopped valuing Wikimedia enough that they are no longer paying for it to exist?

As best as I can tell, the timeline of these data is lagging and inconsistent...

I believe it's (now) listing UK up to 2020 Week 51, and Bulgaria to 2021 Week 3.

That's a 5 week difference in which Bulgaria was hit pretty hard. We don't see the effect in this data set of the British variant yet.

Humans are systemically dependent on nitrogen in the air, in that it is required for nitrogen fixation.

In my opinion, the second is just not true.

If a reliable feature is evolutionary advantageous, then new systems will come about to take advantage of that (and may out-compete old systems, indeed, to the point of extinction), I agree.

But, if a reliable feature isn't evolutionary advantageous, it can be ignored or even removed.

Negative features may need to be managed, rather than taken advantage of. Examples: ionizing radiation, landfill.

It also means that the business model is still an advertising-funded model - just indirectly advertising-funded, via Google.

All the pressure to protect the advertising industry and disseminate advertising will still be present.

Nobody is asking for 10000 Mozillas?

Doing the work researching a cure for cancer is much more practical with 1 Mozilla.

> The knowledge base should be primarily in your head.

Making it easier to store and recall useful information, without using your brain, is a good thing that has fuelled progress in recent decades.

The impermanence of the internet requires you to store useful information in your brain (you can't guarantee that it will be stored for when you need it), when really it would be better stored externally.

The fact that the internet is impermanent encourages you to treat it as something you need to siphon information from (jam all the data into your head), rather than a safe store that you can depend on.

> Having only the content I want to see only be shown when I want to see it

I would rather not do my own content discovery and content curation: I see those as literal chores that have to be done before I can consume content.

Like all chores, I'm not keen to do them. Despite years of practice, I'm still not confident I am great at them on my own, and I have the option to employ someone more skilled.

Twitter has done a good job of these chores, making discovery and curation easier (like the parent article, I feel frustrated that Twitter is now broken from this point of view); TikTok does a great job, surely better than I could do myself.

"Le bon ton" likely had a very direct hand in shaping colonialism, given that they were aristocrats and landed gentry, and given the "season" spent in London was shaped around political networking.

However, I also meant that it was a sort of cultural neo-colonialism: that the British are allowed to present the history of this period as a romantic drama.

I was surprised this article didn't mention British colonialism at all.

Also uncontrolled spread allowing the opportunity for significant mutations to evolve.

It's hard to understand how you can mess up worse than that.

> You need BSL3 facilities if you want to have a hundred people have it. But the alternative is 27 million people getting it in planes, boats, and buses - none of which are BSL3.

Those things are not true alternatives.

I said "it's not going to get your vaccine approved any quicker" in the hope that you would understand: vaccines have reached the point of global distribution without doing the additional deliberate harm of intentionally infecting people.

> This is quite simply nowhere near as hard as you're making it out to be.

I'm going to quote a (sarcastic) reply to another of your comments:

"This is easy. Just find a job that pays you $350,000 a year."

If you have plenty of wealth and income, then it's easy.

But then, if you have plenty of wealth and income, it doesn't really matter what you do.

A randomly controlled challenge trial would involve deliberately infecting scores of unvaccinated people, putting them at risk, along with anyone involved in the procedure and anyone they come into contact.

It would mean handling live virus, which requires a Biosafety Level 3 facilities.

And, it's not going to get your vaccine approved any quicker.

"Better" is doing a lot of work here.

The UK (in particular, England) is currently reporting the second highest new death rate per capita in the world, still higher than it was at any point in 2020. It continues to report 1000+ unnecessary deaths per day.

And, is it still the case that the UK has 50% more excess deaths than it is reporting in the daily coronavirus figures? A mystery...

> The only reason that it isn't apparent to you

It is apparent to me that no other species (ever) has been implicated in a mass extinction event.

I notice both commenters referenced cats - a domesticated and invasive species.

> Humans are simply better at resource extraction than other animals.

Claiming that humans are 'better' ignores my point that bacteria will happily exhaust whatever resources are given to them.

> Also, "if it would save just one life" is where you're going with the last sentence.

Please read again. If a virus is transmitted even once via a surface, it is then free to transmit onwards by whatever method is most efficient. This is likely to cause an outbreak whenever R>1.

Preventing an additional outbreak is more relevant in NZ than in the US, perhaps.

This quote might be stale, e.g. New Zealand suggests that it has identified cases of infection via lift button and bin: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/427446/rubbish-bin-the-l...

Obviously this is disputed, because it's impossible to tell - saying "not been documented" is quite a neutral statement.

Even if surface transmission is unlikely, a single case could be enough to trigger a wider outbreak. So, if you are doing what you can to prevent aerosol transmission, then it also makes sense to minimise surface transmission.

My impression is that other animal species generally are in harmony with nature:

Non-human animals seem not to be inclined not to, in general, exhaust existing resources. They seem to have no interest in this, even where it would give them a monopolistic economic advantage over their competitors. You don't see animals hunting for sport.

On the other hand, bacteria and viruses will exhaust the resources given to them, and thus end up limiting their own growth. Humans are not so exceptional in this regard.

Is it not right that 2019 was the highest spend ever for TV advertising?

And a 5% drop would be less than the drop in broader TV production, via coronavirus?

Major events that are associated with large advertising budgets haven't happened: the Olympics didn't happen. The Eurovision Song Contest didn't happen.

> It turns out most non-targeted ads aren't actually that effective

Non-personalised television advertising is still doing great.

You are quite literally the consumer - you consume the service.

You're just not the one paying for what the service is.

This helps, but not that much. (Assuming your risk assessment is correct)

Suppose a shock happened right before I planned to shift into a safer portfolio. What do I do then?

The only really correct answer is: "well, I didn't need that money anyway."