supernova87a

Let's however not get too caught up in feel-goodism that somehow breaking up Ticketmaster is ridding the live entertainment industry of some external leech that everyone hated.

You should realize that venues and artists are equally beneficiaries of what Ticketmaster enables. In a sense they enjoy having Ticketmaster be the hated scapegoat for high prices that they then also enjoy the benefits of.

Without Ticketmaster who knows how much less tickets would sell for. And venues get paid a cut by Ticketmaster. Artists get paid a cut by Ticketmaster. Sometimes those parties are glad for that value extraction from the concertgoer to be done on their behalf, and to be blamed on an entity that diverts attention from the fact that they want more $ too.

Ticketmaster did not just emerge to prey on an unwilling helpless industry. They occupy a niche that is part of a semi willing ecosystem.

Could the loss function be any better??

State insurance regulators do have a legitimate purpose -- to prevent totally free-market (read, "lawless") behavior by insurance sales companies which happens when people can promise something in the future, take money for it now, but not deliver (ala the golden age of past American business hucksterism). Insurance as a product (or snake oil) is highly prone to this malfeasance when unregulated. Just like lotteries.

But on the other hand, because state regulators are slow to react or adapt to changing circumstances, they essentially freeze the market and the parameters allowed for sales of insurance in the past, for circumstances that may no longer exist.

So, new risks and willingness to insure are not accounted for, and companies no longer find it profitable to do business with rules of the past, in the present.

It will be interesting some day if the line becomes blurred between "what you know" and "what you are" and you could be compelled to turn over something against your will. Because that boundary is if anything getting less clear over time?

For example, if your voiceprint were required to unlock your phone, but not a particular passphrase. Could you be compelled to speak (or just recorded speaking) general statements in order to unlock?

If they really did save lives, you would think the highway patrol officers who rely on their bikes for their safety and entire professional existence would be equipped with them. No, this is just obnoxious leisure bikers wanting to justify their unnecessary noise they inflict on the rest of us.

I know people here will always say "you have no idea the amount of work that goes into <xyz>" straightforward seeming function. But I still have to ask it:

The Reddit UI/app/experience hasn't changed in years, right? What do they need $450M/year of R&D costs [1] for? For serving advertisers? For infra ops? Seems bloated to me.

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1713445/000162828024...

But that's just the $ value. Has the incidence of innocent people been growing with that number?

Just to provide a contrary (or tempering?) opinion about the broader context --

Civil asset forfeiture seems to be loved so much on Reddit as some kind of evil boogeyman that's coming for each of us, by corrupt police forces stopping you just when you happen to carry cash around from selling your car, or things like that. It's talked about as if people were getting struck by lighting or bitten by sharks every minute in the US.

But the actual cases of this tool/legal mechanism being used are incredibly rare. The paper linked doesn't even go into any stats on how often this happens. It talks about this in isolation as a legal oddity to be fixed. And, sure, it may be worthy of fixing.

But in the popular understanding (admittedly, a specialized, weird-threats-in-our-country understanding) this remains a topic that, like many other things, has harsh and extreme or unfair sounding impacts on people but is actually extremely rare. But it grabs headlines among a certain class of internet news readers. You're statistically not going to face this in reality in your lifetime.

Maybe I missed a point in the article, but I feel a broader shift that produced this situation is simply that the US is no longer building huge numbers of new factories and industrial processes that need lots of new machine tools.

We have left that phase of our country's development behind. We have relatively piecemeal demand for such tools, aside from the random new Tesla factory. And that kind of growth is what spurs development and maintenance of these kinds of supporting industries.

As a country, you fall out of the practice of building stuff, and the talent or ecosystem of it migrates away.

Look at railroad building. In China, they have entire industries of people building the tools for building railroads. They can call up 100 experts on design just for EV battery building machine tools and factory processes. Here you're lucky if you can find that many experts on any machine tool topic across all the contractor companies that have had to consolidate to make keeping this kind of talent sustainable. We just don't have this deep practiced industry knowledge in general across many businesses any more. And aside from some specialized centers (NASA, NIST, national labs) that doesn't exist much in the government either. We've outsourced it.

Maybe it's a natural evolution of a country. Maybe the tide can be turned with strategic investment, I don't know.

"...Flight 1182 was en route to Toyama airport but headed back to the Sapporo-New Chitose airport after the crack was found on the outermost of four layers of windows surrounding the cockpit, the spokesperson said..."

Hopefully people can tell routine maintenance issues from newsworthy improper design and implementation / manufacturing problems.

It really took me a surprising amount of time to notice the difference between his channel (and similar other actual content creators like Veritasium) and the many many other channels where some guy pretty much regurgitates information he did with only desk research, showing about 200 short stock footage clips while voicing over from some bedroom.

I suppose it just goes to show how easily you can be on autopilot and not appreciating or being able to tell actual journalism or original content from junk.

I dare say / guess that 2 combined factors will have helped the successful evacuation effort (especially given that these aircraft for Japan internal flights are some of the densest passenger configurations):

1. Domestic flight, with people less likely to be hauling around lots of belongings, although in Japan people already bring much less onto flights with them.

2. The well-known social expectation/procedure-abiding inclination of everyday Japanese people kicking in to enforce an orderly (and no bag-carrying) exit.

Others may have observed similarly when flying in Japan. They can regularly board a widebody plane in 15 minutes, whereas 30-40+ minutes for the US still produces departure delays. I am guessing this efficiency factors into the evacuation as well.

Versus other evacuation videos I have seen where people are actually exiting with their rollaboards. Really shocking.

I remember asking at some point what seemed to make Tom Scott so successful compared to the thousands of others who have probably tried to make it big on Youtube/social media. Was it the format/length/style, the topics, the camera work, the commentary/research, etc?

I think the consensus was that he came out with generally interesting content, but most of all, predictably and sustained, which generated viewership. Interesting how that can be the main factor -- maybe both in keeping people's interest, but also developing the skills to create content that was improving each time and becoming more engaging. And I guess he points to that explicitly in this last video, where he says he challenged himself to make it his real job. For 10 years.

Please tell that to Github, where I first created my most simple/straightforward named account (very similar to my real name) using my company's email address. Company folded. Now I can never get my simple named Github name back.

If there's one thing that quantum made me understand (and this was after 3 tries, which seems to be how many times it takes me for some things to become intuitive), it was continuous probability distributions (applicable to other parts of engineering/statistics) and how to understand the purpose of all those integral expressions without getting lost in all the symbols (learning to simplify understanding before getting wrapped up in details).

I propose that the fines be per piece of information leaked, and combinations of information:

$1 for name

$2 for address

$3 for email

$4 for phone number

$5 for social security number

--------

and multiply for combinations thereof.

> " The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish ..."

If there was a good argument against the arrogance of billionaires who think they should have technology that lets them live forever, here it is.

To entertain an actual technical discussion for a moment on this (and assuming air security is a legitimate goal), I wonder what kind of pen testing certain people might try on this, given that now there is not someone so actively watching if you display suspicious behavior. As in, at least with traditional checkpoints, an agent watching your moves could easily see if you were fiddling with something to try to evade detection. And that would deter people from trying anything.

But with an automated portal, who knows what someone might try and test the tolerances of, to understand how it works and the limits.

Although, perhaps if it is operated like some automated immigration checkpoints abroad, a dedicated officer still does oversee several booths and will probably notice lingering behavior where someone is acting suspiciously.

Imagine it's like if you knew that after 3 tries, your login attempt gets reported to root, versus if you know that never happens.

What would the system be as an alternative? You are born stateless and have the ability to declare (or in harsher terms, need to audition for) citizenship to a country of your choosing? At what age?

The notion of having no state is kind of an impracticality, do we accept that as a given?

People who jump ship don't get severance.

Possibly. But personally, I don't think the generosity of any severance package is a deal-breaking factor in most people's decisions to work for a company or not. Or for most people getting a job offer, that the company has reneged on some recent offers -- there are far more fundamental questions than those specific actions.

What's the logic, that if a company has cash available then it should just go to the employees?

If the money is all borrowed and meant to keep the company running, why would employees get more than is a reasonable severance package? And by the way, 9 weeks of severance on pretty good tech job salaries is far more than many are lucky enough to get, lest you live in too much of a bubble to realize.

It seems to me that people will believe the US is good for its debts until we behave like it isn't. Japan, of course you know, has debt like 300% of GDP so clearly some kinds of countries are able to manage even ridiculous amounts.

The problem though, is that the US seems to be behaving like it may not be good for its debts lately. Not that it can't outgrow them, but just that things are getting more worrisome payment-wise.

You remember we used to have budget crises and shutdowns every once in a while (every few years), decades ago. But now it happens like every 2 years, and it seems like it's getting worse. And you never think that disaster will strike until it does. One of these days we're going to miss a bond payment, because some leader will want to "show everyone", and people will be shook, I think, when everyone realizes that the US is not some special country that can never default on its debt. That will be a sad day.

And it's all the more likely when everything is 50:50 paralyzed -- very easy for one bad step to take us over the brink while everyone is unable to do anything. I'm no fan of the ridiculous right wing "republicans" who are playing games in Congress, but they do (by accident) have one thing right. We are really far from balancing the budget[0], and both the spending and the debt are getting worse over time with demographic pressure. Not that "balancing the budget" is a requirement in the simplistic household way that they or the public generally think. Incurring debt has its purposes for a growing sovereign nation. But the way we're doing it / reasons we're doing it for is sleepwalking our way into a big hole.

Unless we're willing to behave as a country like it's not a problem, it is a problem, and growing.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/06/upshot/balanc...

Maybe I missed it, but is there maybe a side-by-side comparison of the footage that usually comes out of an iPhone camera versus how it can look (with light, simple controls) out of this Blackmagic app?

And question for others, while I'm at it. What was it about Blackmagic cameras or software (or company) that "broke the curve of what you could get for the same $" versus like RED or whoever expensive studio cameras? Did they do something clever with the hardware and controls to get much more out of consumer grade sensors? Or did they make tradeoffs that you eventually hit against when you try to use their cameras for real professional high-duty purposes?

Why is the article's title phrased with the word "problematic" rather than "duplicated" or outright "fraudulent"? Are we trying not to offend someone's sensibilities, or not leap to conclusions (when in fact, journals have been far too reluctant to do what they should have been doing about this kind of academic dishonesty)?

I think the analogy here is that after graduation, the kids are going to be asked to play a song from sheet music, but the school doesn't want them to be forced to (or feel bad if they have trouble to) learn the terribly constraining rigors of musical notation. Or worse, the teachers don't really understand how to teach the notation themselves.

Instead, we want them to invent how to write music "using the innate and self-discovered techniques for music notation that make sense to them as whole individuals".

What's interesting to me is that one particular station came in clearly, given how the difference in broadcast FM allocated frequencies translates into millimeters of antenna length. (e.g. 98.3 vs 98.7 MHz = 3051mm vs. 3039mm)

Just some flexing / coiling of the cord could mean you would favor a different station or get tons of mixing in of other stations.

Maybe the key is that the author / friend was very close to a broadcasting antenna and that overwhelmed any other station that would equally have been received on the headphone cord otherwise?

The problem isn't so much that Google has a hard time old phones on their OS maintenance team books, and even just phoning in the effort to keep them working (hah). It's that they actively don't want to do any work that isn't sexy and supporting new products. I don't think their teams are incentivized to do so.

Let me play it out with an example.

At Apple, a team/individual might be actively told to have to use an iPhone 8 for their daily use, so they get to experience what it's like for a user with an older phone. They solve the users' pain by solving their own pain, and commit to making the experience actually better with future iOS releases. Not just keeping it working but actually making it better if possible.

Google has shown time and time again that they're not thinking like that. Or at least not setting up the company to be rewarded like that.

I will also posit that the single-handed ownership of the iOS app store makes deficiencies fall squarely on Apple, so they are more directly blamed/responsible when phone performance gets worse. With Android, and so many reasons a team could claim that other factors are causing negative trends in performance, who cares to keep making an old phone better?

Ah, thanks that explains it -- (follow the link also for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Emergency_Alerts )

I wonder how this works technically? and to what extent it taxes the bandwidth of the system / backhaul / towers / channels?

Is it:

Cell tower: "Every phone currently connected to this tower -- display this message now <emergency alert xyz123...>"

or

Cell tower: "subscriber 202-555-1212 known to be connected to this tower, display this message now <emergency alert xyz123...>" , "subscriber 202-555-1213 known to be connected to this tower, display this message now <emergency alert xyz123...>", etc...

or

AT&T central: "deliver to AT&T subscriber 202-555-1212 special text message <emergency alert xyz123...>", "deliver to AT&T subscriber 202-555-1213 special text message <emergency alert xyz123...>", etc...

or

FEMA central: "deliver to mobile subscriber 202-555-1212 special text message <emergency alert xyz123...>", "deliver to mobile subscriber 202-555-1213 special text message <emergency alert xyz123...>", etc...

Is it like a loudspeaker or a high priority special messaging channel?

I have no idea but I would guess there were choices about whether to optimize for speed of delivery versus guaranteeing that every single phone would get the message. And does the alert get stored for phones that weren't on? Or you only get it if your phone happened to be on and connected at the time of the alert or within 1 minute of it? How do they tell whether a phone received the command, or should try again?