I'm going to see the Dodgers next weekend with my family. $700. Yup. This isn't the sort of thing you do every weekend. So, who cares what technology they use to let you in? It's a once in a few years occurrence!

I'm not against this, but the folks I work with where this is already the law, e.g., France, basically carry 2 smart phones with them - one for work use, and one for home. At 17:00, the work phone gets turned off until the next work day. The company (with a large IT team) could not configure current smart phones to split work accounts/apps off from personal ones and be compliant with the law, i.e., never alert for work items after hours, so this was what they ended up with.

Yes, absolutely. For anyone who has worked for a big tech company with Invention Disclosure procedures, you may know that the process is:

1. File an invention disclosure
2. The Patent Review (or IP review) committee will review it and see if it is worth processing further - at this point, you usually receive your disclosure bonus of $100 or whatever.
3. If it is worth proceeding with, then you start the process of filing a patent application and work with the attorney on crafting it, review prior art, etc., etc. then eventually get a patent.
4. If it's not worth filing, or there's some concern that maybe it's already covered by someone, publish it on some benign website and register the prior art like https://priorart.ip.com/index.... or others.

I work with people in France and it's common, but a hassle for them to literally have two phones - one for work and one for personal that they tote around all the time. The work phone gets switched off at the end of the work day. It seems like their company (big multinational) couldn't work out how to comply with the law without just giving them a separate item to turn off. They are very observant of it too!

It's ironic. When I was at college in the 80s we had multiple professors and visiting professors who talked about how if you wanted to see the future you'd find it in Japan.

Remember getting your car radio stolen? In the old days (pre-90's) cars came with radios that were a fairly standard size and would slot into the facia of the car. You would usually buy a car with a crappy stock radio, and then go to an electronics store and buy an upgraded one with better features. When thieves started stealing them, the car stereo (or quadraphonic) manufactures came up with removable faceplates or even ejectable units that you could take with you when you left the car. Finally, the stereo became part of the car - built in - so there was no way, and no incentive to remove it. However, the downside was that you were stuck with what came with the car. For a while, Bluetooth was the saving grace - no matter how useless the audio system, so long as it could hook up to your MP3 player, ahem, smartphone, then you were golden, but now we want maps (mostly) as well as music. Google/Apple Car integration would be good, if there was a standard. We'll have to wait for whatever the screen equivalent of Bluetooth is to eventually emerge and then hopefully we can go back to car infotainment systems being boring and just working.

Even better, pair the bus report with a car remover like this one even so often and they could be free of the blocked cars immediately! https://youtu.be/z3JoCZ6AC48

The US and other western countries have outsourced high-tech manufacturing for decades. If you had a meeting of all the plastic injection molding experts in the US you could probably fit them in a room. Try that in Shenzhen and you'd need a city block or two standing room only. In the UK, back in the 80s when employers still believed that people would work for them for life, there were degree courses sponsored by companies, like British Telecom, that were designed to form a pipeline of engineers for them. If the US were serious about having chip manufacturing (or any manufacturing) it would be wise to develop the pipeline. In this case, TSMC themselves may want to have a 3-year training program where US staff relocate to Taiwan to learn the ropes and then return to the US.

I realized the subtle pro-China propaganda videos popping up in my stream - stay with me! - I'm not a tinfoil hat wearer - but it was incongruent enough to tickle my Spidey-sense. In amongst the dance videos and memes, were videos of normal Chinese people talking about their apartment building, videos by US teenagers living in China raving about how it was more free than the US, and a whole load of what I'd class as "life in the US isn't great" type videos calling out well known US issues like guns, trash, and wage inequality. None of this by itself is wrong but it is definitely pro-Chinese propaganda even if an algorithm picked it. Note that I didn't see any pro-other country propaganda material - just China, which was odd. I am aware that the US has propaganda as well - most of the mass media promotes US values. But it did make me uneasy that the Chinese, who I actually have a lot of respect for, certainly had a hand on the tiller of my video stream and were 100% peppering it with pro-China content. You are what you consume and that goes for that screen you put in front of your face for hours every day. If you don't mind having your thoughts influenced then keep TikTok'ing, but for me, I deleted it.

The VK is used primarily by Blade Runners to determine if a suspect is truly human by measuring the degree of his empathic response through carefully worded questions and statements.

Holden: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of the sudden-
Leon: Is this the test now?
Holden: Yes. You're in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down-
Leon: What one?
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: It doesn't make any difference what desert, it's completely hypothetical.
Leon: But how come I'd be there?
Holden: Maybe you're fed up, maybe you want to be by yourself, who knows? You look down and you see a tortoise, Leon, it's crawling towards you-
Leon: Tortoise, what's that?
Holden: Know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Leon: I've never seen a turtle -- But I understand what you mean.
Holden: You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back Leon.
Leon: Do you make up these questions, Mr. Holden, or do they write them down for you?
Holden: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping.
Leon: What do you mean I'm not helping?
Holden: I mean, you're not helping. Why is that Leon?

I had TikTok for a good while, just to watch, not generate content, but I deleted it because I noticed how every so often, out of the blue, there would be some content that I'd class as Chinese propaganda. It was what all effective propaganda is, subtle, well-produced information that promotes or publicizes a particular political cause or point of view, but in a way that the recipient doesn't really notice. In my case, (and every TikTok stream is customized so you may see different stuff), I'd get charming videos on what it was like to live in China, mixed with "white guy in China" raving about how great it was that he could drink a beer walking down the street, but in the USA with its apparently "land of the free" status you couldn't. Each had a good load of comments - "yeah, that's right", "wonderful", etc. Throw in the "China street fashion" videos and, other "there's no crime here in China" videos, and it was a very nice pro-China marketing campaign mixed in with dance, comedy, etc. I am attuned to this because of my work. They've done a good job there.

I feel your pain. It's a high-cost, high-salary environment. You see plenty of houses with deferred maintenance issues - paint pealing, poor landscaping, yet you know the owners are pulling in $200K plus. Basically, if you didn't get paid a lot, would you still live here?

To answer your question though, it is very logical what Google is doing because they are an established company with a large number of Silicon Valley employees. A simple proof: male employee earns $250K and moves from San Jose to Portland, Oregon. Female employee in Portland is earning $180K doing the same work. Bam! Equal Opportunity lawsuit entails. Only option for Google is either to reduce the salary of the male, or raise the salary of the female, and subsequently everyone else in her office. US law allows for variable pay based on location, but not based on sex (IANAL). Extend the logic, and you can see that a ripple effect would ensue: Google would have to raise the salary of every employee to the highest-common denominator, i.e, everyone in the US would have to be paid Silicon Valley salaries. As that would take time (and undoubtably be very expensive, even for Google), the gamers/arbitragers would take advantage of the system - get the job in San Jose, then move to low-cost city of their choice. This would exacerbate the situation, especially as it'd be pretty obvious to other local employees when the high-roller ex-California couple rolls up in his'n'hers Teslas. Further, there would be a serious disincentive for employees to work in any high-expense city. You might see a hollowing out of the workforce in Silicon Valley, NY City, Seattle, etc., as folks live like kings in Boise, Reno, or Colorado Springs.

Maybe that's what some people believe: Google will shift their centers of operation to these low cost cities, (that you could argue would gentrify due to the high-paid tech workers living there). But logically, if they actually ditched everything they current have in those places, and ignored the inherent attraction of them (Silicon Valley maybe expensive, but it's a really nice place to live, and there's a huge critical mass of smart people here), then logically you'd expect them to adjust salaries downwards because now, there's no need to pay the high Silicon Valley salary anymore. That ain't gonna happen though.

So, it's logical what they're doing, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have ramifications. One of them is that it breaks the implied meritocracy contract of these companies - you thought you were being paid $200K because you bring in $200K+ worth of value for the company. Actually, you're being paid (just) enough to get you to work here, do good work for the company, and not leave. The game theory is sound - it just sucks that we can't take the money and run!

Exactly. I don't have mod points (not sure why they are so few these days), but you're right. This is a silly metric. C and Java comparison makes sense to a certain extend, although you don't get (any?) Java in embedded, but Python is it's own beast.

Like you say DON'T USE PAYPAL. I did what you wrote and what happened was a permaban. Having burner linked accounts is a good idea.

I've been permabanned from PayPal. They gave no explanation and when I called, the rep could only read a stock answer which could be summed up as "we no longer want your business". He did not say anything about me violating any T&C's (I had not) and I could tell from the stress in his voice (he sounded like a really nice older guy) that there was probably something on the screen he wasn't allowed to tell me, or he knew this was happening to others and there was nothing he could do about it. I suspect that every so often there is a sweep of undesirable accounts - those that either don't make them enough money or are linked somehow to something they don't like, maybe purchases or sales through certain websites, chargebacks, etc., and those accounts are frozen and the users banned. Insidiously, they also ban all the associated cards or bank accounts that have been linked with the account so you are well and truly shafted if you ever what to use them again for anything. It completely destroyed my side gig of selling software (that I wrote). All the money in the account was frozen for 6 months and after that time I was able to remove it, which I did. It left a really bad taste in my mouth and I recommend no one use PayPal ever.