stuart78

Deserts are often teeming with life. The term refers to rainfall, not population. There are plants and animals equally deserving of protection, and it is worth protecting for the same reason any other biome is. If you look for beauty and balance there you might find it.

Covering them with solar panels disrupts the environment and displaces it’s inhabitants.

https://www.worldwildlife.org/habitats/deserts

And somehow the article has numbers to support both interpretations?

Or is it 1 out of 5 fields? Big difference!

Posts like this make me want to remind people that there ARE good places to work. If you’re stuck in this kind of BS, there ARE alternatives. Just like relationships, there are many job fish in the sea, so don’t get discouraged, just find a way out.

From the article: "Forced arbitration ensures workplace disputes are settled behind closed doors and without any right to an appeal. These types of agreements effectively prevent employees from suing companies."

When employment contracts including a binding arbitration clause, the employee is agreeing to resolve conflicts privately with the company rather than through public means, such as a lawsuit. This reduces the public profile and resolution of such an action.

How many times have I listened to that song and never once thought those words meant something... Nice to join the party, even if a bit late.

Isn't the problem here Twitter? These posts were 'public' and BandsEye seems to be simply scraping via the Twitter API. Twitter enables this use case by denying users any control over how their content can be used. There will always be creepy/lame actors trying to exploit things, so if we want real change it might make sense to focus on how the platforms themselves might give users more control.

Perhaps users who wish to should see a list of 3rd party apps and be able to choose which programmatically granted access to their public timeline. Why is there no gradation between private to my select friends and public to the entire world and all of its annoying APIs?

Ask Twitter.

Members of the acquired company had a 7 year run between King and Activision, so not sure it is fair to attribute layoffs to either acquisition.

I understand the reservation about an IPO changing their motivations, but it seems like a pretty predictable path for a company that has raised >$600m.

It does not seem to me obviously better (for developers or their customers) for Unity to stay private or be acquired. Acquisition could threaten the cross-platform appeal and perpetual private state would not deliver a return to investors.

And I don't think there is an inherent threat to either the freemium model or a perversion of the roadmap. There seems to be real competition between game engines and the value the free offering provides is one of the easiest entry points to game development. This delivers a huge number of potential developers, which is the foundation that sustains the paying developers above it.

Somebody there told me once that their mission was to 'have half the world's creative content created in Unity', meaning not only video games, but films and presumably traditional CAD markets such as architecture and product design. If this is true, I think the real threat to developers irrespective of IPO is one of focus. Can Unity evolve the product for their core market, or will they become too horizontally committed and lose focus?

This is a place where the market could 'correct' a land grab strategy by driving the company to focus on the core business.

Library of Congress document search is great, and a good model for how PACER could be done more effectively. No user accounts, no paywalls, no ads. Just free access to documents owned by all of us.

These grand strategy games are always my theoretical favorite genre, but I just don't have the patience and/or time to commit to them (beyond the relatively simple Civ entries). I am equally envious and dismayed by friends who tell me how many hours they've logged not to just the game in total, but a single play in Europa Universalis and its ilk.

Developers are able to distribute their apps outside of the App Store, on Android.

There is a lot about Apple's restrictive approach I don't care for, most notably forcing digital subscriptions to run through App Store billing, but being the single point of entry for apps onto the phone is a feature, not a bug. I trust the content on Apple devices far more than I would those on an Android device.

I think the poster was using deliberately provocative words to call attention to the emotional angle of the debate, not making those judgements themselves.

My uncle used to tell a story about taking a studio tour in the 1960s where part of the tour was being a test audience for Lost in Space (he was a kid at the time). The whole family had a pad with a dial and you could turn it one way to display approval and the other to give a thumbs down.

He hated the show and tried to indicate as much throughout the showing. But when the lights came back on he realized that he'd had the pad backwards the whole time.

He never forgave himself for that one time he "got Lost in Space green-lit".

A big part of it is just how expensive it is to live here. She mentions 3k on rent, for example. Kids are expensive as well, so while salaries can often appear high, the costs often scale to match.

As she also mentions, it sounds like a large part of his total compensation was tied up in bonuses, which can be great when they work out well, but are much more discretionary than salary, as the story indicates.

Just one opinion here, but I've played a /ton/ of Destiny in a fairly casual but consistent way (e.g. no raids or Mic) since launch, and I think it is fairy underrated at this point. There were definitely droughts along the way, but at this point it is a solid game, which when played on Xbox One X is IMHO the finest looking game on consoles. The semi-multiplayer modes are great fun and they've tuned the weekly reset cycle to a point where pretty much every play session is rewarding in some way or another.

I'm glad for their independence and look forward to what the future brings, and I do hope that further investment in Destiny (3 or continuation of 2) is part of that picture.

I'd like to strongly challenge this line from MA: "I just think that’s only true for people who live in a really interesting place in the real world. But only something like .1 percent and 1 percent of people on Earth live in a place where they wake up every morning and think, Wow, there are so many interesting things to see."

I'm not really sure what he means by 'interesting', but I think it captures an arrogance we in the Silicon Valley can have about the rest of the world.

Each town region has varying levels of interestingness depending on ones own depth of engagement with that community. A tourist might be more interested in the history of a place or landmarks (and in my read, this seems to be MA's working meaning of 'interesting'). But a local has many more things to be interested in and ways of participating in the community. Whether the store is open, how to walk to an unfamiliar house, etc.

Whether or not AR is the right technology to help with this I do not know, but people tend to find their local environments more interesting than this gives them credit for.

As a parting thought, I don't read this as a statement MA put a ton of thought into, so I actually chalk it up to imprecision rather than malice. But approaching the world with an assumption that it is not interesting is a great way to force the conclusion (if only for yourself).

They've posted a response, for what it is worth: https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2018/12/14/a-letter-from-our...

Not exactly confidence-inspiring, but we will see.

I agree that there are risks, but at the very least you and your neighbors can a) identify corruption or mismanagement and b) work to vote corrupt leadership out. Much harder to do with Comcast.

(And for the record, I'm all for real competition in these markets. Let Comcast and the municipality battle it out. May the best provider win.)

Cars park in designated spots on streets, they are (generally) not randomly dropped onto sidewalks and parks.

The issue for me is the co-opting of public space for private enterprise in the least considerate way possible. People leave these scooters like litter in parks, sidewalks, and lakes.

You could object that this is an overly precious perspective, but I would counter that similar startups (ZipCar most notably) have solved this by contemplating the logistical implications from the get go.

I personally would not object the assigning some percentage of parking spots in neighborhoods as designated parking for shares, and would hope such a contract will emerge.

I certainly understand the dockless advantage here, but the result for those of us who don't use them is garbage some random company feels entitled to clutter up the sidewalks with.

"Third, people vary, and two groups of scientists might end up with very different results if they do the same experiment on two different groups of volunteers."

This seems to me to be such an important key to understanding this. Considering even myself, I'm not sure I would behave the same way as a subject from one study to the next (pretending there was a way to blind myself). And when you look across regional and global cultural variation, it must have an effect on participants.

The results are less headline-getting if they seem to be overly qualified (e.g. we find that midwestern white women with the middle name Susan have a positive psychological response to salsa dancing) but a deeper appreciation for the complexity and diversity of individual psychology would seem superior to the current state of affairs.

Was coming to say the same thing. This list is absurd. Looking at 'Payments' they mark a branded Chase offering as a distinct business? It is a product offering, and would not be an independently viable business (not saying reselling credit cards in this way might not be). Same in 'Smart Home / Devices'. That group could be more reasonably considered one or two: "Home Automation" +/- Fire Tablet. Each of the rows there is a product.

The ‘US Standard’ for free speech is exactly where it should be, and applies to the government’s role in censoring citizen speech. Joyent, as a business has no obligation to support anything outside of their own policies.

I'd be interested in the next few sentences to go deeper on why. Why should we delegate the prioritization of societal values to the wealthy? what about wealth-accumulation makes them better suited to choosing how we should solve problems for our society. And why are you and I not equally responsible for influencing the direction of things within our means?

In thinking about this last paragraph, I think it may imply I am suggesting that /only/ government can solve these issues. it would more accurately reflect my position to say that a diverse set of players can participate here, Gov't being one important one.

There is something odd about the complacency implied by the line of thinking this game seems to represent. Why is it more Jeff Bezos' problem to solve homelessness than it is each of ours? Does he have a greater moral directive to do so than us because he has accumulated a great fortune? At what point do we as a society hold this theoretical Bezos accountable for the choices he makes?

My point is not that he shouldn't give charitably, but there is something that seems deeply pessimistic to me about turning to the rich to solve our societal ills. If the implication is that we should have a more 'fair' tax system, I can get on board with some version of that straw man, but would rather we as a society fix our own problems rather than hoping for help from the plutocrats.

Why should we assume that Bezos or any other billionaire would solve these problems in a way that is actually in society's best interest? Would we wish that Bezos spend his money differently than the Koch brothers?

We have government to help create solutions for this space, and in my opinion we should reject the passive acceptance of mediocrity there and instead hold them accountable for delivering these things. I may not be holding my breath for this, but that is part of the problem.

Planet Money did a story[0] on this a few years ago, which helps articulate why artists see value in the traditional way of selling tickets.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/epis...

I find it a bit hard to parse the pie menu. My eye has no obvious place to start or end in reading the options, so i try to pick one quickly. Vertical menus have an explicit order (if not alphabetical, an intentional one) which helps I can scan quickly. Also, when I go into a sub-menu, I don't lose the context of the parent (which is also avoidable in pie, but not in the x10 demo shown).

We've been trained from an early age to process lists. Lists are cool.

The in-dash systems these days do a lot more than they used to. Mine (VW Atlas) has 50% of the temperature control, all vehicle settings, etc baked in. All could theoretically be maintained and upgraded, but these are not really separable from the car itself.

I like the idea of them being upgradable, but it would seem to depend on more software and API discipline than I imagine VW or any the other manufacturers being interested in.

Relatedly, the lifecycle of a lease is much closer to a phone, so for owners of the 30%[1] of cars out there that are leased, the upgrade cycle will presumably keep them "up to date". If the car manufacturers are pushing us more towards away from ownership (analogous to phones, software, etc.) then there is little incentive for them to make significant investments in upgrade-ability. And like legacy phone hardware companies, they are too busy preparing new phones to give much love to upgrading older ones.

[1] https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/buying-vs-leasing

In my experience this is the result of some weird contractual framework. Of the show's I've watched, only Marvel's Agents of SHIELD included it and it was almost always 15 second spot. Not really a big deal for me.