stevenjohns

> The article neglects to mention the huge drop in international visits to the U.S. in recent years. Quoting a USA Today article from last week:

Part of this might be the ever-stronger US dollar. Five years ago, AUD$1 would buy about USD$0.94. Now it buys USD$0.68, making the trip to the US about a third more expensive.

I'm a bit of a "no man", and at a company I worked at in the past my (pseudo-technical) manager told me to spend hours creating some sort of extremely purpose-specific test environment to aid in resolving a ticket that would only take me 30 minutes to resolve directly - so I just resolved the ticket instead and closed it, and got on with the rest of my work.

Eventually I was dismissed from this company a couple of days later and this situation was raised as one of the points. I was told "you can't refuse a mission given to you by your manager, regardless of the circumstances, that's ridiculous" and when I replied "I have different views to you on this" it was considered to be rude. The person who dismissed me is more or less the management boxing bag - a certified "yes man" who nobody respected.

Of course this hasn't changed my attitude, though. Still a proud "no man" and wouldn't go with the flow unless I'm sure everyone completely understands the consequences. At some point people have to realise that their loyalties don't go towards their manager and instead should go towards the shareholders and clients. There is a bit of give on this, of course, but eventually you have to do the right thing by the people that actually stand to gain and lose - not just being another cog in the machine that exists only to support other cogs in that machine.

They are most definitely an ethnic group. That's not under dispute by anyone, so I'm not sure why you're racing it as a concern.

> because of their different culture

Which culture is that exactly?

If you're going to say things like feminist views, or bravery, then I'm afraid that's all racist propaganda.

I'm stressing the racism angle here because this fabricated glorification wasn't even created to prop them up, but rather to bring down the other various ethnic groups around them.

> Like the Kurds they have a bit more get up and go about them.

The idea that "Kurds"[0] are somehow more motivated or more trustworthy is literally just racist State-sponsored propaganda that has been used and abused by all sides, including from other Kurds, for various reasons over the last 150 years.

Rather than picking and choosing arbitrary, loosely aligned militias to control regions, the US needs to take a more holistic view towards the region and stop participating in the Saudi-Iranian proxy war if it wants to resolve the situation.

[0] I'm putting the word in quotation marks because they are a group of 40 million people with differing religions, alliances, identities, political views and geographical locations around the world

It's in your best interests to edit out the last part of your comment.

And yet that remaining 49% are opposed to nuclear and hydroelectric. The "Green's" party found its roots in resisting nuclear and hydro - being behind most of the propaganda and lobbying against it from the beginning and through to today.

> Similarly homo sapiens and neanderthals coexisted for tens of thousands of years. And yet we only have evidence for a handful of successful interbreeding events. That's pretty good evidence that they were separate species.

I don't think it's as simple as what you're saying. We have evidence that 2-4% of the entire modern genome of non-Africans came in from Neanderthals, and an even larger amount of genetics coming in from Denisovans for many in modern Asia and beyond into Australia.

As I understand it, all Neanderthal genetics that modern man has came in through the X chromosome. This could indicate that male offspring of Neanderthals and Homosapiens were infertile, which would be a cut-and-dry indicator that they're two separate species.

You're not wrong about "regime" - it's used to belittle governments that someone doesn't agree with. It doesn't even apply just for dictatorships, i.e the previous Iraqi administration was (and still is by The Economist) referred to as an "authoritarian regime" by some even though it is a multi-party representative democracy with almost full autonomy in the North with peaceful transitions of power across all areas of government.

If someone were to call the current American government a regime then they're likely dog whistling[0] and it reflects the editorial slant of the writer and/or the publication. But it's worth keeping in mind that Gizmodo is just another tech blog and, having worked for one before, I can say that the focus is on churning out more clickbait crap rather than producing anything with substance. The person who wrote it probably has no real understanding of journalism and doesn't understand the implications of the words chosen - they got the job just because they have some half-decent level of grammar. And the editor who approved it probably focused more on the title than the content. So don't think too much about it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

Having "Product Manager" or "Product Designer" from Reddit on your resume would probably a hindrance more than a benefit right now.

Insane how they had managed to mess it up so badly. I can't comprehend how anyone from any part of Reddit, outside of the marketing department, would spend some time on the redesign and say "nice!"

Yep, I feel the same way. The responses went downhill really quickly. I only just jumped back onto the MacOS bandwagon and was looking at resubscribing (I've had an awesome experience with their email customer support reps in the past which brought me back) but if this is how the public facing side of the development team acts... yikes.

I'll be much more open to alternatives now than I would have been yesterday.

> What you propose is a giant subsidy to middle class life at the expense of poor people.

The "poor" people are extremely poor to the point that you cannot comprehend. And they have to stay there and live there for their entire lives because the current system forces them to. It is impossible for them to move out because of how unaffordable the cities are and how heavily the system is rigged against them. They have nothing. These people are already commuting long distances and already live in unregulated, unmarked ghettos. Here[0] is a photo of one of those places I took back in March so you understand the extent of it.

The only people who "lose" here are the current land owners of legal properties. Renters will end up with lower rent because housing will rapidly devalue to a tenth of its original value - every single house will stop being the foreign investment opportunity that it currently is.

> This would take land that currently houses poor people and make that illegal.

Clearly it's not retroactively applied. Town planning and zoning almost never is.

> It also bans building a house with a courtyard on a lot below a certain size.

I mean, I guess? But it also forces properties to have back and front yards, as well as side access, instead of being 100% concrete built wall-to-wall through to the footpath.

> This wouldn’t help poor people. It would just force them to commute to their work from further away.

I'm not sure how it would do anything else other than help poor(er) people and allow them to start living inside expanding cities rather than living on the extreme outskirts.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/b2AKhfJ.jpg

I don't think it's directly a consequence of the local economies, moreso a consequence of bad town planning. Heritage town planning use to allow 3m * 15m houses with no setback. Many better-planned towns eventually introduced more complex legislation to stop this. In lots of parts of Latin America they haven't. Today, in many parts of Colombia, you can take a 150m2 block and build six (!) floors on it provided you have just 10m frontage.

So instead of expanding outwards, the cities just became a lot denser, and economics forced up the price up of the land because the land potential is so high.

What it takes is a gutsy mayor to implement policies such as requiring at least 1m side setback on houses and 3m for apartments, having caps on the floor-space ratio to 50% instead of 98%, not allowing subdivisions on lands that have less than 15m frontage or 600m2 total area etc. This would basically see the housing market crash - lots of people will lose lots of money. But its a necessary evil.

The other angle to this is welfare being given based on the area you live in. Instead of housing support (in the form of tax and utility cost concessions) being distributed based on someone's personal financial situation, the means-test is based on the land classification that the property is built on. The land classification doesn't change whether the house is old or new, or if you build an apartment block on it. Which basically forces higher density in areas with better tax and utility cost concessions - aka poorer areas. In Colombia, this means that buying land in the highest-class areas costs as much - or in many cases less - than middle-class areas. This also introduced an almost caste-like system where people would only hang out from people from their own classification and would look down on people in lower classifications.

I appreciate shared-housing is a thing in Dublin (it is in Sydney too, and I have similar feelings to you about it) but the situation in many parts of Latin America exists for somewhat different reasons.

The title doesn't seem to match the contents. It seems like "Tiny flats might take over Sao Paulo" might be more appropriate.

Personally, as someone who owns a property development company in Latin America, I can't ever see this becoming a major trend. If it is in fact becoming popular and not a one-off architectural/engineering/artistic effort, then it's really just exploitation and profit maximization and not something that is culturally wanted or a consequence of the local economies.

You think having a transactional log to stop people from lying in court is a bad thing and has me doing harm? What unfair, malicious gain do I receive by being able to present evidence that says that someone did in fact read correspondence?

Respectfully, you’re in a very small camp there. You might as well call security footage or fingerprint evidence malicious as well. The same goes for snail mail that has delivery confirmation.

If anything, this thread has just reinforced my belief that I’m doing the right thing.

My point is that this is manufactured outrage from people who don't actually care. They're just caring because it is today's flavor of the day. There are real steps people can take to support user privacy but they don't do them. People happily and voluntarily engage in objectively worse conduct for privacy day-to-day. This includes myself too -- my employer had me add not one but two separate tracking scripts on my company's homepage. I "care" about privacy yet here I am participating in stripping it away from people.

> using the exact same technology as these read receipts

What technology people use doesn't matter, what matters is how they use it. If I were to implement a system that tracked actions users do in a way that was ethical and completely not personally identifiable, then it doesn't matter - there is no problem, regardless of what technology is used to do it.

> Fixing personal email tracking has a pleasant side effect of also fixing the tracking that happens in both phishing and corporate emails as well

I don't think so. At all. This is like banning plastic straws to save the planet.

It is mutating what is basically a porch security camera into a discussion on oppressive government surveillance. The two are not the same. Personal email read receipts have almost no bearing on privacy at all. This is perhaps the point that is being missed by most people.

> But if it's personal, if your next-door neighbor or your weird coworker can suddenly start doing it, then something clicks and people realize, "Oh, this is actually a real problem."

What is "it"? Knowing I read an email they sent me? That's not what criminals and businesses are doing; criminals and businesses build extensive personalised profiles of who you are, what you like, what times you're active, where you go, who your friends, family and coworkers are and what your personal trigger points are all for the goal of exploiting you. They use email tracking as a single metric among dozens of others, and the way they evaluate the metric is completely different to how an individual would evaluate it. That data is usually then sold to other groups that do the same thing.

How is that anywhere even close to an individual with email read receipts?

I don't think anyone would say "this is actually a real problem" besides people manufacturing a problem out of nothing. I'm also willing to bet that 99.9% of the people that are outraged are totally willing to establish, work for, or implement an extensive user tracking system for a company that actually acts on malicious grounds (such as monitoring users or for the objectives of making sales).

This includes you - by the way - a quick look through your resume shows that every single company you've worked for heavily participates in tracking and the first personal website of yours I accessed at reset-hard.com includes Google tracking which is dozens of times worse than a "weird coworker" knowing you read an email they sent. This is literally contributing to a global database of user tracking which we know is used for malicious purposes.

> I understand that sometimes the specific triggers that make people care are stupid, but my response to that is never to ask people to care less. It's already hard enough to make people care about things.

When people care about the wrong things is when we end up with homosexuality being criminalized, prohibition or terrorist groups. So hopefully in this case - just like many others - people would focus their energy into things that actually matter. And personal email tracking is not one of them - and will never be.

I have no idea either. I track every email I send out. The issue with tracking, when done by companies, is what they use that data for. People don't want to have sales profiles built on them or have their literal privacy - in terms of their personal web traffic - being invisibly tracked and potentially exploited by bad actors.

On a personal level, I send emails for a variety of reasons, and I haven't found a good reason why I wouldn't want to know when they were accessed.

1. I've sent legal correspondence and it's important for me to have a record of when and how frequently it was accessed in case it ever reached court.

2. When I send emails to my staff, I'm less interested in whether or not they reply and more interested in whether or not they read the emails at all. If not, then I can use alternative and more immediate forms of communication.

3. Sometimes I'm ignored by people that owe me money for one reason or another (in one particular case, I was almost scammed out of $40,000). Knowing that the correspondence I was sending was being accessed but was being ignored allowed me to take more immediate action.

I'm not building profiles on people, I'm not trying to sell anything. And I'm not going to apologise for it either. My intentions are not malicious, so that's where it starts and stops for me.

Agreed. If that's the case, then this is completely fair.

If Amazon wants to conceal information about the seller, then they have to deal with the things that the seller would usually deal with.

> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://www.reddit.com/r/all/best.json. (Reason: CORS request did not succeed).

> The resource at “https://www.reddit.com/r/all/best.json” was blocked because content blocking is enabled.

When I try to go to that URL in latest Firefox on MacOS.

Beyond that, legally, anything you buy needs to have the seller invoke a concept called an invitation to treat[0] which in modern times is usually established at the point of issuing a receipt or tax invoice.

Even if someone has paid for something, the seller does not have to recognise that a transaction has taken place and would not have to enter or execute the contract. This is especially important in times where there might be a pricing error or something.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat

Pray tell: how did starving Iraqis to the point where 500,000 children under the age of five alone die from malnutrition[0] punish the Iraqi government?

All it did was convert the secular military dictatorship into an extremist religious dictatorship and the effects of this punishment are still being felt today around the entire world[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RM0uvgHKZe8

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_campaign#Consequences

Probably not his call. By "we" he's probably talking about the engineering team, which in many cases is nothing more than a conduit for whims of the marketing and sales teams.

The only time they'd do that is if the marketing team decided that the value-add from taking ads off cancelled out the profit loss from taking the ads off.

I'm not a data scientist, but that downwards slope started twenty years before the 2010 tobacco excise and continuing to fall is a culmination of years upon years of education.

In Australia too - most people I know just buy undeclared cigarettes. Almost all international students that travel into the country bring a bunch of cartons with them and sell them at $10-$15/packet. It's a way for the international students to make a bit more money given how fucked over they are by the lack of working rights they have, coupled with the ridiculously high cost of living and expensive education costs.

All the price raising on tobacco has done is push revenue into the black market, invent crimes from nothing and turn otherwise honest people into criminals.

I imagine there might be more models affected. Some of the names there (such as Doogee) also act as "OEM manufacturers" where they white-label their products and sell them wholesale, internationally, with different branding.

This has less to do with most journalists consciously doing it and more to do with people just riding the wave of their biases and their editor's biases.

The reality is that most journalists are not proficient in the content they try to cover, and for the select "elite" that are proficient and considered to be "experts", they almost always come with some sort of insanely strong bias that made them proficient to start off with. There's almost a revolving door between "expert" journalists and think tanks/pressure groups.

I see this heavily with Middle Eastern coverage. It's basically an all-out shitfight of the most bigoted, racist and sectarian people war mongering through fear, dishonestly and in some cases outright lies. In some cases this has had tragic consequences - things like ISIS' adventure through Iraq could have almost certainly been avoided.

Sometimes the dog whistling moves from just dog whistling and we see writers that have written for publications like The Boston Globe outright tweeting that they wish for the suffering of Syrian children - verbatim - and then deleting the tweets after realising they're on a public platform.

I just moved to a new OS and was somewhat surprised my Firefox configuration didn’t come along with my extensions.

Out of all the data they can collect about me, what I’d be least worried about is how wide I’d like the width of the address bar to be.

Looks like it references the wrong article? This[0] one has the same name as op's

[0] https://habr.com/en/post/456568/

Follow up: I got the 2019 i7.

Thanks for the feedback.

If I get a Dell I'd have to opt for a Hackintosh. There are just too many little things in MacOS that I find are important to me and they're really difficult to replicate across in GNU/nix.