bleepblorp

For the company that's operating the call center, that's a feature rather than a bug. Anything they can do to just make you go away, including making you wait for two hours in the first place, saves the company money.

"I didn't die in a car crash today, therefore I don't need this stupid seat belt."

Yes, and?

Where I live, well over 50% of all new community cases have been associated with bars and restaurants. The bars have been ordered closed until there's an effective vaccine. The restaurants are open, but patronage is far below pre-pandemic levels because, even without a government order, most people don't want to risk dying for a restaurant meal.

The reality is that bars and restaurants aren't safe to operate as long as SARS-CoV-2 is spreading in the population. This is a catastrophe for their owners and employees, but it is the epidemiological reality.

Most countries don't allow businesses to stockpile explosives in residential areas because the risks of an unintended mass casualty event is too high. During this pandemic, operating a bar or restaurant is similarly unacceptably dangerous and cannot be permitted any more than residential storage of explosives can be permitted.

No amount of bleating about 'muh rent payments' or 'muh rights' will change this, or make patrons decide to risk their own lives for the benefit of the industry.

What's the social utility of hedge funds?

Their business model is to draw in investors who are willing to pay extremely high fees in exchange for the hope of beating the market. In practice, hedge funds underperform the market, so their investors are paying fees for nothing. The only winners are the hedge fund managers. Enriching people for providing negative value to their customers isn't socially useful.

Along similar lines, the crowning achievement of the synthetic asset quants was the creation of a mountain of toxic three-card-monte mortgage debt that exploded in 2008, bringing down the global financial system, crashing the world economy, impoverishing hundreds of millions of people, and creating the political environment that lead to both Trump and Brexit. Blowing up the world certainly isn't socially useful.

I don't see any downside to reducing the FIRE sector's share of GDP back to what it was in 1960. The economy worked for the median person then; it doesn't work for the median person now, and the amount of wealth the FIRE sector sucks out of the economy to pay for these kinds of games has a great deal to do with that.

It was not my intention to malign the huge numbers of rank-and-file FIRE-sector people, like customer service agents across the entire sector, who are just working to put food on their own tables.

I'm thinking more of things like hedge funds, HFT outfits, and the groups that devised synthetic mortgage-backed securities, that put ivy league-level talent towards socially useless and/or economically dangerous activities.

We'd all be better off if the people with the quantitative and social skills to be effective in these spaces put their talents towards things like carbon capture or battery R&D rather than e.g. finding ways to con people into pouring money into hedge funds that under-perform the markets.

The sick thing about these kind of scams is how much top-tier human talent has been sucked up by the financial sector, essentially to find ways to scam people legally (or at least without getting caught).

It doesn't say much for society's conception of value that there's more money to be made through finding ways to squeeze more revenue out of socially useless financial transactions rather than by solving real problems.

This will vary between jurisdictions but my understanding is that, yes, you can be sued for making a false promise to buy from a specific seller even if you don't get to the stage of a formal contract.

Putting out a press release, or RFP, saying 'we want to buy X quantity of Y' without the intent to follow up isn't illegal. However, getting to the point of a handshake agreement with a specific vendor but then backing out means that you will be expected to pay compensation even though no formal contract was signed.

A large form factor monitor hooked up to a PC.

Commercial TVs aimed at the digital signage market are an alternative option to a large monitor, especially at larger sizes. They're less likely to spew advertising than consumer Smart TVs, but are probably less likely to stay clean than a monitor with no Internet connectivity.

I use a Linux PC as a media decode device. It works, but I have no interest in 4K (hardware video decode is sketchy on Linux, which makes 4K difficult) or paid streaming services (if I wanted to watch sewage I'd take up urban exploration into wastewater facilities).

It's just a matter of time until Smart TVs deactivate themselves if they can't connect to their telemetry and ad servers -- or the manufacturers enter into agreements with streaming services to proxy ads through the same IPs used to stream video.

This would not be without precedent. Some Samsung TVs already refuse to exit setup mode if they can't connect to the Internet after initial power-on to geo-lookup their IP to make sure that they're being used in the country they're sold for.

The best solution for streaming is a low-end PC with hardware video decoding and the ability to run Ublock Origin.

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Edit: I see from other comments that Samsung TVs already go into degraded functionality mode if they can't connect to their ad servers, and already serve some ads from endpoints used for necessary functionality.

The entire point of this post is that consumer SSDs provide no data loss protection in the event of an unexpected hard reset or power loss. Data security is only available in far more costly enterprise SSDs.

Just as the 's' in 'IoT' stands for 'security', the 'f' in 'IoT' stands for 'fairness to users.'

Never buy a consumer product that expects an Internet connection.

'Consumer product' is a synonym for 'cheaply built crap sold at premium prices' these days.

Much as how the introduction of SMR allowed for the prices of real hard drives to increase by 25% or more, the development of new data-destroying technologies for consumer SSDs has pushed the effective price for non-garbage SSD storage up to the $0.75-$1 USD per GB level of enterprise SSDs.

Nitpick: I don't think it's completely accurate to imply that Chinese elites are exclusively interested in economic self-enrichment.

Societies where the elites are only interested in stealing everything they can take look like Nigeria (or Mississippi): a tiny sliver of people living in luxury while the rest of the population lives in permanent, abject, squalor.

In contrast, median living standards in China have improved dramatically in living memory. In many cases, the transformation has literally been from mud huts to skyscrapers. The kind of wealth distribution that supported this transformation would not have been possible if China's elites were only interested in self enrichment; if they were, they would have taken the wealth for themselves.

Obviously, China's human rights policies have no redeeming qualities, but its economic policies have benefited the average Chinese citizen. Credit where it's due.

There's an unconfirmed rumor that this outage has taken out 911 services in multiple parts of the US.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/nationwide-reports-of-...

Fear of abuse is just the excuse entities use to avoid providing services they have other reasons to oppose. Heavily abused services continue to exist if they're profitable enough or sufficiently socially useful.

All adtech and most social media is both abusive and socially destructive, but it's profitable enough for the Right people that there's no serious prospect of it being shut down.

The road network sees a lot of abuse (e.g. transportation of illegal property, impaired driving, simply allowing criminals to move freely) but it's too socially useful to shut down.

Fear of abuse is just a cover for withdrawing, or failing to provide, services for other, unstated, reasons.

There's a running joke on /r/sysadmin that Office 365 should be called Office 360.

I'm not sure if even that number is low enough.

It does, but seemingly not as frequently. The community version seems to phone home every few months.

Now, the pirated version never phones home and always works even when MS decides to steal your products back.

No one knows.

One school of thought is that extraterrestrial pathogens could pose limited risk. Earthbound pathogens have co-evolved with humanity in order to harm us better, but xenobiological pathogens would not have this advantage and might not pose much of a threat.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible that the random chances of evolution could create a xenovirus that's airborne in humans and bootstraps a fatal prion disease in everyone it infects.

Sadly, I think a lot of the reason for this is that a lot of people, in much of the English-speaking world, haven't heard of a successful government program in their lifetimes.

Much of this is media bias (Murdoch-style media will only report on sensationalist failures) but the past decades of withering of state capacity and the growth of elite self-dealing means that successful government interventions are increasingly rare.

The idea that government can actually help people seems to be a dead letter in the United States (less so in other English-speaking countries) and this is killing people now we are faced with a pandemic that can only be mitigated through collective (governmental) action.

There's a reason governments give out bizarre capital gains incentives: rich people bribe ('lobby') politicians for them.

The truly rich receive most of their income through capital gains rather than wage labor, so when the rich lobby for tax cuts for themselves, they lobby for reductions in capital gains taxes.

I wonder if an acceptable level of safety could be achieved, at greater cost but without compromising weight or size, through advanced materials, active safety systems, and better driver training.

Vehicles like these would be much safer in countries with high driver training standards and a low rate of fatalities per distance driven (e.g. New Zealand[0]) as compared to e.g. Mexico[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Only 20% of the US population lives in rural areas[0]. Pre-pandemic, the national average one-way commute time was half an hour[1]. Given typical (pre-pandemic) traffic in most cities, much of that commute time will be spent in traffic congestion and very little will be spent at high speeds.

Rural areas, and locations with severe winter weather, have special needs for which higher speeds and more robust vehicles are appropriate, but smaller, lighter, and slower vehicles are a viable option for most Americans.

It's laughably out of touch to believe the US is even half rural. That ship sailed a very long time ago.

[0] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-210... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/study-states-with-the-longes...

When that happens, the US will just ban Chinese aircraft from US airspace and impose economic sanctions on the Chinese aircraft industry under the pretext of IP theft and/or National Security<tm>.

That is the Washington solution for Huawei, TikTok, and Tecent after all.

Most programs don't have internal settings for this, but Firefox does things its own way--and tends to break regularly because of it.

Also try reducing mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount if changing the other setting doesn't help. Try a value of 16.

Firefox' scroll behavior seems to be non-deterministic on Linux, so there doesn't appear to be a universal answer.

The default is 100, which seems to work fine most of the time, but for the OP's issue, reducing it by a factor of ten might be a good starting point.

Most foreign students aren't white. Letting them stay in America doesn't play well in states that have a deficit of educated people and a surplus of electoral college votes.

Cutting the numbers of foreign PhD students is very likely the point.

There is a widespread view inside Washington that allowing foreign advanced degree students hurts US competitiveness because they "steal" US knowledge to take back to their home countries.

I think there's a three-pronged cause for reduced trust in public institutions in the US.

The first problem is that US governing elites have proven themselves to be corrupt and untrustworthy.

People in the tech sector have not been greatly exposed to this, but wages for the median person have remained stagnant for the past four decades. The elite response has been either to deny the problem or make it worse. People do notice when it gets harder to make ends meet, and the failure to address this problem has undermined faith in the elected arms of government.

Other issues such as the bipartisan consensus to invade Iraq on the basis of fabricated evidence and the fact that Trump has told 20,000 lies about objective matters since assuming office have exacerbated the problem.

The second problem is that conservatives--including conservative media--massively overstate the scope of governance problems in the unelected civil service as an electoral strategy. These viewpoints are amplified by Facebook and other social media in search of engagement.

The third problem is low quality education among the bulk of the population. Critical thinking skills are not effectively taught, much less internalized, by the average person. Most people are not able to effectively evaluate information they are given, which leaves them vulnerable to whatever propaganda Facebook et el shovels into their feed.

Try severely reducing the value of mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y in your Firefox about:config.

That's an arguable point; indeed it has been argued since at least Plato. No hard hat required as far as I'm concerned.

Excessive public representation can cause poor outcomes, (hard hat on) such as the governance problems in California caused by ballot initiatives. Letting the public write policy does not seem to lead to good outcomes in most circumstances.

However, representative democracy which combines the requirement that leaders secure consent of the governed with with normalized protections for individual rights seems to be the best system of governance humanity can come up with. Leaders, like employees, tend to do a better job if they can be fired for doing a bad job, and that is what the need for majority democratic consent provides. Protections for individual rights reduces the risk of individuals being harmed by mob rule, such as would be the case in the dress code problem in your post.

Indeed, most of the democratic world combines these principles to good effect. The US is an outlier among nominally democratic countries as it is governed without the consent of the majority.

Political systems that allow for governance without the consent of the majority allow rulers to act with impunity towards the majority and, as such have a very long history of abusing the majority. The kind of people who rise to the top of such systems tend not to be the kind of altruistic people who will govern in the interests of the public, and without any requirement for democratic consent they absolutely will not govern in the interests of the public. Indifference to majority needs, persecution, or even genocide, often follows.

Quite frankly, this is the situation the US has blundered into. Over the past few decades the US has gradually shifted from a polity where broad consent of the governed was essential into a situation where the constitutionally empowered minority (represented by the Republican party) has become increasingly abusive towards majority interests. Under Trump, the minority is now pursuing a platform specifically designed to antagonize--or even persecute--the majority. Fights over USSC nominations are just a part of this.

This isn't a good place for a country to be, especially as a large portion of the American ruling minority population is very pleased by the prospect of persecuting the majority.