An alert is not necessary for amazon prime.
If you cancel now, you still get to keep your benefits until they expire.
Also, Amazon is one of the few companies that actually gives you the option to get a prorated refund if you cancel.
Agreed. Not to mention, you are going to be competing with millions of Chinese that know better Mandarin, the Chinese culture better, and good enough English.
A company is going to want their external communication to be native so a native chinese speaker with passable english is a better candidate for most chinese speaking jobs than a native english speaker with passable chinese.
The only real exception is CIA and other national security type jobs and even then most positions, a native chinese speaker might be preferred.
I used to pick up bags of National Geographic magazines at my local library at the dollar bag sales.
My local library was rather large and still didn't keep all the old issues.
They were also the most popular magazines in my grade school to cut up for art collages.
I still have a box of maps from my childhood that I saved from them in a box in my house.
Wonderful magazine. Would make a great addition to any doctor or dentist office if everyone wasn't just using their phones instead.
Sad to see them go but likely not viable in their current form anymore than the sears catalog is.
Not negligible but not our current biggest problem.
Our energy growth will eventually cause problems in the next few hundred years regardless of how we generate it though.
Clippy was not a big success for Microsoft but good old Bob was an even bigger failure. Bob had a little more personality than Clippy, though.
Microsoft Bob was not a failure for Bill Gates. It got him laid.
It if wasn't for Microsoft Bob, Bill Gates would have likely never got married.
His future wife was in charge of that project.
If you're Bill Gates, you can afford to burn a few million to keep your girlfriend happy.
Ok, what about black and white photos? Those aren't exactly portraying reality either. How about grainy color photos from the 70's? How about instant developed Poloroid photos of the 80's that are all washed out? I mean, really, has there ever been a photograph that truly represented reality? You are flattening a 3D world into a 2D format, there is always going to be information loss.
There is a huge difference between a less than perfect capturing of reality and a complete fabrication.
A map is not a perfect representation of earth but if you start adding roads and cities that aren't there, it's not reality anymore.
We've been editing out exes in photos for probably as long as there have been photos.
This is a slight distortion of reality in that we want to pretend that that person wasn't present at the event we still want to remember
and better that the alternative which is what happened at my wedding where the photographer wanted to take a bunch of pictures
with various inlaws removed "just in case"
But that is different than complete fabrication where you are changing the sky, the outfit, the location, adding a velociraptor, etc..
How do you think companies get "high level" tech support?
Hint: it isn't by hiring people off the street, generally. The better support people are usually good to begin with, yes - but they're promoted from L1 or L2 to L3 or similar internally, because you need to know the product to get good.
Button pushers will never get good.
Yes, but you don't need 10,000 L1 -> L2 -> L3.
You could easily do it with 100 L1 -> L2 -> L3 and the other 9900 button pushers.
Basically, you might still need a few skilled people to really understand the business and go thru each level of training
but only a select few. You would only need a handful of people to make it to level 3 and that would be enough to train the AI.
And that training requires the highly skilled people to learn how to do it.
You can't get highly skilled people doing something if you're only hiring minimum wage button pushers.
your pipeline for skilled and capable workers will disappear.
This isn't an issue at all. We already basically have this which is why tech support has different levels and you have to escalate to the top for real problems.
If you need 1000 employees, you have 900 button pushers, and then a few dozen humans in the rotation to continue to advance from low to medium to high skilled and train the AI.
If you think of something like an AI surgeon then you could have 1 medical school and 1 real hospital where humans learned and then replicated that knowledge to the AI.
The stargate episode Learning Curve (s3e5) basically deals with this with humans instead of AI. They have a single person learn all the necessary knowledge and then transfer that to the whole population.
Still got some shelf space to fill next to my collection of vinyl records I can't play.
It's interesting that you have the whole downsizing and tiny house groups while at the same time you have another group that is buying useless stuff with no practical value to them.
If the computer has a keylogger (software or hardware) then it's going to be next to impossible to do something like
type in a credit card without it being logged even if you install a virtual machine.
If you are talking browsing the web, then it doesn't really matter.
If you are worried about your local network then isolate it and you are basically back to coffee shop style of network.
If you are logging into a banking portal and you have 2FA, then they will have your password but won't be able to do much with it.
The issue with an "unsafe" computer is that it Is has known security bugs and someone uses that to compromise the
system and install a keylogger then your only recourse is likely to hope to prevent it from "phoning home" with your information
but not knowing exactly how it phones home, it will likely be hard to stop as it could easily disguise as something else.
example: streaming services.
Yes, streaming services have started the race to the bottom but they at least still have the advantage of some exclusive content.
Without exclusive content, no one would have more than one streaming service.
If your business plan doesn't provide for a living wage for your workers, it's a shitty plan, and you're a shitty planner.
Although I don't completely disagree with you, if you were an executive at Mcdonalds or Burger King, what would you do differently?
If you raised menu prices enough to pay everyone a living wage, everyone would go to one of your competitors across the street instead.
Yes, these companies do make profit and pay executives well but not near enough extra to pay everyone a living wage without pricing
themselves out of the market.
Their solution to stay competitive is to use robots and automation to reduce the number of employees needed. Raising wages is not an option.
Even at $30k per robot, you could afford to keep an extra new one in the box. at 5% interest, that is only $150/year to keep a
spare employee in the closet.
Chances are, the repairs even at $100/hour would only be a couple times a year so maybe an extra $1000 on top of the $30k.
No missed shifts, no downtime, no calling in sick, etc...
It's a complete win for a hotel. It makes no sense for a hotel to hire a human to vacuum empty hallways unless the employee
is already on the payroll for something else and just has extra time.
Cleaning rooms are different story but I've always thought daily cleaning is silly. I always put the do not disturb on my door
and wait until checkout to have them clean my room. This seems like the easiest way to save money. Only clean rooms
once a week or on checkout.
Then your business model SUCKS and you shouldnt try to foster that off on the WORKER.
How would you suggest he change it? If he raises prices by 5%, no one buys anything and his business goes out of business.
His margins are so low because he is in a cut throat industry with presumably no competitive edge and everyone is competing to be the cheapest.
The reason tech can command high margins is because of 3 unique factors:
1) They can leverage a few employees to serve millions
2) They have a near monopoly. There aren't 100 googles or 100 facebooks.
3) The rate they charge advertisers is set by the advertiser's competitors so they are basically in a bidding war and google/facebook profit from it.
If there were 100 googles or 100 facebooks and people could easily switch between them and they paid a small fee for them instead of ads
then google and facebook would also become a commodity industry that would have to compete by who could provide the cheapest service
and their profit margins would completely disappear.
Prison is supposed to serve TWO purposes - protect society, and rehabilitate offenders.
This right here is the problem. It barely does either. All is does is contain prisoners for a small amount of time and
the only thing most prisoners learn is usually more bad habits.
I have a friend who went to prison for 7 years as a sexual offender (for being 23 and dating a 17 year old coworker who already had a child).
In order to get out, he had to take a sexual offender's class. He gave some money to another inmate so his punishment was
to be banned from taking his class so he was not eligible for parole and served his entire 7 years.
At the end of the 7 years, he was released without even having taken the mandatory class.
So the little bit of rehabilitation that was supposed to have happened was taken away as a punishment.
Our prisons are containment. Actually, it's worse that that. It's almost gladiator training.
Take the worst of society, put them all in a giant room and have them fight for a few years and let them go.
They come out meaner, more calloused, with no money and no job prospects and a record so its hard to even get a job.
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener
