Stuff that matters?

When is Xbox going to be forced to let the PlayStation store be available on their console?

How is this any different?

This, like other distractors which affect small numbers of individuals but are blown out of massive proportion through social media engineering, probably has its roots in Russian/Iranian/Chinese psyops.

Slow and insidious gradual change in culture. All these young fools believe a 4 day work week is now the way to go. What will that result in? Gradual decline in year to year output to the tune of around 20%. Sure, initially there may be little decline as those individuals who are for such a change set out to demonstrate they were right about maintaining productivity, but humans being humans, daily productivity will settle into the same amount as with a 5 day work week. Overall total output will be at a loss of that 5th day.

And like most things, the same people that push for stuff like this don't take the next step in critical thinking and analyze what that will mean. Economic contraction. Increase in prices. Decrease in buying power. Less goods, less income, less supply, stable demand.

But hey, 3 day weekend!

BTW such a ridiculous plan is not being discussed in any of the above mentioned countries for a reason...

The whole appeal of iPhones is that they're incredibly secure, walled-garden, and have an app store that is well-vetted. Just wait until grandma gets the text telling her to side-load whatever nonsense crypto/spyware/notification blaster on her phone and then promptly drain her accounts while texting all her contacts further download links.

This ONLY benefits large corporations by letting them side-step Apple's surcharge. An unintended consequence of this will be scammers running wild on tech-illiterates, which at this point is nearly everyone. It absolutely does not help ANYONE ELSE.

Absolutely they can. A private road or a private parking lot can make up whatever rules it wants."For paying customers only" "For Ferrari's Only" "No tresspassing".

You can do whatever you want. It isn't private property.

Looks like Mr. Genius Grant should have taken a basic (and I mean basic) philosophy course in undergrad. His conclusion illustrates his ignorance about the philosophical implications over lack of free-will.

Essentially the argument about punishment/reward for a universe without free-will is moot for two reasons. First, those punishing/rewarding other have no free-will themselves. Second, the purpose of punishment/reward is not to punish and reward the INDIVIDUAL. Rather their purpose is to function as a positive inducer or negative deterrent to SOCIETAL behavior.

The actions of an individual are not determined by free-will, they are determined by the environment and history that lead to the current state of the individual's brain. Society's only recourse is to try to shape this environment, to induce the brain towards actions we deem acceptable. So our reward/punishment systems serve to steer free-will-less individuals towards morality/ethics in their future free-will-less choices, not as retroactive reward/punishment.

So why does all this matter? Its all just philosophy because as you notice, the systems we set up to achieve our societal goals are the same whether there is free-will or not. Rewards and punishments continue, its just their justification and the philosophical implications are different. Social systems set up to be proactive and shape future free-will-less choices or they are they set up to retroactively reward/punish free-will choices. Those systems are indistinguishable aside from the philosophical debate.

I'm all about sustainability and communities like this are obviously not it. However, importing water is not a novel or unique thing - even Los Angeles does this and they're huge, next to the ocean, and have a mediterranean climate - not desert.

Hell, even the photos in the article were carefully chosen for the given narrative. Muted, washed out colors. You'd think they were taken in the 1970s. Showing only the most depressing sights for the town.

Articles like this undercut their message with their obvious slanting. Why not just state the facts: desert community has no sustainable water plan outside of importing and is overly ambitious / about to suffer massive hubris. By tainting it with this baked in bias it makes me not want to believe the article or agree with its conclusion.

Let the facts speak for themselves "journalist."

Amazing how quickly morons adopt the terminology propagandized by their party's political officers. "Insurrectionists" indeed.

Though I did enjoy your Beautiful Mind-level tapestry of innuendo, projection, and theorizing utilized to support it.

My experience was that the amount of students going to college far exceeded the amount of actual academics that should have been going to college. Many were "forced" by social pressure or family, while having no desire or motivation for academia.

Maybe people are finally waking up the fact that earning worthless degrees (you know which ones) that land you a job as a barista after 4 years and 50k of debt aren't worth it?

Hopefully we see a resurgence of trade schools and increase in trade workers. They make a great living and incur little debt. Win-win.

I'm no fan of corporate welfare, but $50B is cheap.

Half of the federal budget is actual welfare, about $2T, which doesn't exactly go into the pockets of Americans either. It's a big trough where lots of other corporations feed, and millions of middlemen wet their beak.

Returning the silicon to Silicon Valley (or, more likely, Texas) is a good thing all around for America and Americans. If we can keep our chips from even having a whiff of NSA fingers, that's a competitive advantage to the rest of the world. And it makes a home for the technically inclined so they have a career path that doesn't end in yak shaving in the bowels of some high-frequency trading company to gain an extra nanosecond. Offshoring our manufacturing is 100% the worst thing our leaders, both corporate and government, has done to the country.

What is the endgame of these transparently partisan articles? Do they really think that people are so gullible they'll read the headline and say, "I guess Trump is the worst thing in the entire world. Literally Hitler."?

It's all so tiresome.

That's daft. Entering into the search market when Google did is a completely different animal than entering into the search market now. Google's one good idea--PageRank--was so much better than the other methods that it quickly dominated. From that it built a market valuation with very few rivals. During that time, the Internet grew exponentially, and the technology required to keep up has grown commensurately. Google may have started as a box under Sergei's desk, but you can't do that now. There's simply too much.

Even if you have a killer idea to revitalize Internet searching, good luck getting the kind of funding you would require. Your best bet is to bootstrap it, hope Google doesn't patent-troll you to death, and have getting bought out by Bing (or Google) as your exit strategy.

In any event, the quality of Google's primary product (that isn't slurping your personal data) isn't what it used to be. Trying to find something using Google is no longer the go-to. You have to use Google, Bing, DDG, whatever else you can find in order to get what you're looking for. Google's taken their dominant platform, and using political correctness as cover, to mold reality. Search terms for things Google doesn't like aren't suggested. Sites that Google determines are "untrustworthy" are deranked. And Google likes it that way.

If your instinctive reaction to anything Google touches isn't "how is this bad for my personal data and good for Google," you have to turn in your nerd card. Google is worse than '90s Microsoft on every metric, with the added insult that they think they're still an upstart with noble goals.

You know this is true from the fact were now in day 1 billion of open rioting in the streets by mobs of conservatives smashing windows, attacking people, and looting stores.

If Trump, or conservatives, or anybody else you hate who's to the right of Che were half as bad as your fevered dreams imagined them to be, you'd be in a gulag. You're not. Major, multi-national corporations, the entire Democrat party, half the Republican party, and the entire media apparatus of this country all bend over backward to accommodate your hurt fee-fees, and yet you still think you're oppressed. It's so astonishing it can only be explained by some kind of mental illness.

It's almost like allowing Google to become a single point-of-failure for the Internet is a bad idea.

Citation needed.

Machine learning is largely being used to acquire data to serve advertising. Server automation is being used to aggregate hardware under the control of a handful of huge corporations. VR technology is used for porn and games.

To be fair, the most productive and forward looking uses for these technologies would be in medicine, which is hampered by our byzantine patient privacy regulations. And even so, progress is being made, i.e. automatic scanning of xrays and remote surgery. But short of a radical new paradigm that doesn't involve hoovering up data so Granny will get ads for blood pressure meds instead of Viagra, technology has stalled.