14,269 karma · joined September 24, 2010
Non-consumers' preferences don't count.
>let's not pretend that America being incredibly obese has nothing to do with it.
America's preference for larger vehicles long predates the rise of obesity.
As an aside, you're really not doing much for the "self-righteous cyclist" stereotype.
Things like the Yaris, Polo, Fit, 1-series, etc are all subcompacts.
North American cities are largely planned around cars as opposed to having bricks thrown down wherever horses used to walk, gas isn't nearly as heavily taxed, and historically steel was never anywhere near as expensive as it was in post-war Europe. So there's no need for small cars like there is in Europe, and people like the comfort and practicality of larger vehicles.
I...wait, what? Did Windows actually used to be that bad?
There seems to be a real desire in the US, on both sides of the political divide, to offload policy making to the courts (when it works in your favour, and despise it when it goes against you). Fetishization of a centuries-old document, that has long been surpassed by others in its ability to deliver effective government, is not how healthy societies should meet and face the challenges of their day.
The government shouldn't compel Apple to do this because it's wrong and it hurts America, not because it violates Apple's supposed constitutional rights.
I'm not Google or Facebook. My team at work is me and two co-ops. I'm not going to triple our development time just so I can get some Internet back pats from purists.
>Your content can't be archived properly by the Internet Archive.
IA doesn't factor into 99.999% of what I build.
>Your content can't be accessed by anything user-agent less sophisticated than a full-blown browser.
I build things for browsers.
>Your content can't be indexed by a search engine that doesn't have the resources to crawl using full headless browsers.
I can barely be arsed to submit sitemaps to Bing.
>Your content won't work with tools that attempt to scrape and expand content
When supporting those things becomes a priority, I'll do so.
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RMS looks at a microwave and writes an essay about whether or not the software that drives it needs to be FOSS.
I make my food hot.
- Knuth got his for TAOCP in 1976, 8 years after first publication.
- Thompson and Ritchie got theirs for UNIX in 1983, 10 or so years after its introduction.
- Englebart got his for his HCI work in 1997, 30 or so years after the fundamental work was done (but just after its universal adoption)
- Alan Kay got his for OOP & Smalltalk in 2003, 20+ years after the first stable release.
- Cert & Kahn got theirs for TCP/IP in 2005, 20+ years on.
And so forth.
It means you need to align incentives. Those can be positive (tax breaks for hiring veterans) or negative (penalties for violating antitrust laws), but they are incentives nonetheless.
>So they should already have an incentive to do good to those societies- they will personally benefit from that good-doing.
Do you, individually, benefit more from living in a society where mining companies don't dump toxic chemicals in rivers in third world countries, or from making your quarterly bonuses? This is a classic tragedy of the commons.
>Why do they need me, or anyone else, to provide that incentive?
Because companies are amoral profit-maximization constructs.
>"Companies" are not "amoral entities", neither are nations.
There are many corporations and politicians who are more than happy to indulge that fantasy in exchange for your money or vote.
You can rant and rave about evil corporations till you're blue in the face, and you won't change a damned thing. Corporations respond to incentives, not moral pleas. Change the incentives if you want to change the behaviour.
Corporations are, like Westphalian nation-states, explicitly amoral entities. The extent to which they behave morally is due to market and/or political pressure, not any inherent moral judgement.
Apple makes consumer devices. That's their business. They have a responsibility to make the greatest possible profit selling those devices. That's where their responsibility begins and ends.
Now, there are all sorts of moral dimensions that can affect their decisions. If their phones were made with slave labour, people might not buy them and talent might not want to work for them. But the reason Apple doesn't employ slave labour isn't because it is a moral entity; it isn't. Apple doesn't employ slave labour because doing so would hurt its bottom line.
If you want companies to behave in an ethical fashion, you need to align legal, social, market, tax, and other incentives in order to push them in that direction. Expecting them to do so out of the goodness of their hearts is quixotic: they have no hearts with which to be good.
There's a pretty major leap in logic, there. What does diversity have to do with talented, passionate engineering teams? Companies like Honda and Toyota have some of the least diverse engineering teams on the planet, and yet they have a well-earned reputation for engineering excellence.
You may want a company to take diversity seriously, and there are many others who feel the same way. But it doesn't follow that maximizing diversity is therefor an imperative for companies that want to have world-class teams. In fact diversity seems to be orthogonal to competence.
The only way a company should be responsible for hiring underrepresented minorities is if there was a market inefficiency to be exploited. And even then, that's a responsibility to their shareholders, not to society. And "we hire black people because we don't have to pay them as much" probably wouldn't go over too well, anyway.
As long as the US continues to gain more from its alliance with Israel than it loses, the alliance will endure. No matter how much individual leaders may loathe each other.
It reads like it was written by a crisis management team, and it probably was. Apologies are most effective when they both are and are perceived as being sincere. It's fine to say pmarca stuck his foot in his mouth, it's fine to say that his expressed views are not those of facebook, and it's fine to say that facebook sincerely believes that offering a limited version of the Internet to poor people, for free, will be a great emancipator. But I think it would be a more effective apology if it came across as heartfelt, and that means leaving out what really sounds like self-serving praise for India.
I think what really bugged me is that it came across as something a politician would say. It was insincere and designed to offend as few people as possible. Which I find offensive, because it's not how real people talk. It's like the audience is being talked down to.
And it's hard to say what class the Model S fits in. I don't think 7 or S is right, despite the price point. Those are both full-size luxury sedans, and while the Model S may be a full-size sedan, it's hardly luxury. Its interior is closer to a 3-series or E-class than the top-of-the range luxobarges. That's not a knock on build quality, just the reality of battery power currently being much more expensive than ICE. You've got to shave cost somewhere, and Tesla shaved it off luxury.