willbes

The thing is, it always was. It is more about compliance with procedures than any real security.

So I've started carrying cash because in NYC, most places now have 3-5% "Cash Discount which is already applied to the price" which means a 5% fee for using your card.

Dividend paying stocks will be pulling from the value of the stock. The 4% you get will immediately drop the value of the stock by 4%ish.

Dividend paying stocks may not be a great option for most US people (and maybe others) unless they are in tax-advantaged accounts. You will be taxed on that as income and not capital gains, which would have occurred if you had a stock that held value and then sold it when you needed to.

Their user hostile approach to Better Call Saul just shows why they just don't get streaming. I cancelled them almost immediately when I realized I couldn't watch Better Call Saul episodes that had already aired earlier in the season.

Yeah, Last.fm is really good for playing a playlist from a single scene. It's not necessarily a single genre, just bands who tour together, or guest on each other's tracks.

They used to go pretty deep too, like bringing in bands from 20 years before that influenced the current one.

It's not necessarily the greatest for bands that are selling out stadiums as there's too much interference from Clear Channel, but it's great for small to midsize scenes which tend to have shows from 100-1000, since those tend to be more defined.

It depends on the intent of the rules being enforced.

An example given was a state wanted to spend less on low income benefits. They setup an overly complex computer system that decides eligibility and requires participants in the program to fill out multi page forms 100% accurately on a regular basis or their benefits are suspended immediately. There was no way to appeal this decision, only to re-apply.

Employees of the state agency no longer had any insight into why a form was rejected, and could not speed up the process to resubmit it because the participant had long term medical issues and needed potentially lifesaving prescriptions filled. As a result, many people who would otherwise be eligible for benefits had them denied.

This lead to a marked decrease in spending on social services and was considered a win by the state.

One could contend that perhaps the greater social problem solved by Zoom and the Internet was "How do we allow people to have more lucrative jobs without them paying xx% of their salary to live within a commutable area of an in-demand city"?

On the one hand, this causes a deeply ingrained negative reaction in me.

On the other, people have been paying hundreds (thousands?) of dollars for digital tunes to reflash their ECU to add more horsepower/torque for years now.

That is a one time fee as opposed to a subscription, so maybe therein lies the problem.

You are 100% right. The book just laid out exactly what you are saying.

Computers just made the enforcement easier and with less opportunities to break out of it - for example, a sympathetic public servant no longer has the power to make exceptions since "the computer won't allow it."

A book called Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks touches on how for many years now, we've hid unfair policies behind computer complexity. It was really eye opening to me how what seems to be a poorly implemented system is actually working as intended in order to make life difficult for certain people.