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Comment Google is a monopolist in ads (Score 1) 41

Because the market will drift towards one standard market which google controls. Google is the exchange where buyers and sellers come together. No one else can compete. No new market place can arise, to sell ad space you need websites to sign up for your market but no one will because there are no buyers. Once Google became dominant the other markets collapsed. Ads are the castle where google makes 90% of their money. Everything else, gmail, search, android, is just a mote to protect the castle.

This is a bad monopoly. Google can distort the market. They control any innovation. They can literally decide what startups can advertise and which can't. In the past market places where at least a little public or where they were private competing market places could be built. This is not true for website ads.

Comment A great step in the right direction (Score 4, Insightful) 111

Now if we could just remove the farm and construction safety exemption for SUVs that will never be used for construction or farming we could save even more lives. For example a car or a mini van must hit the average person, cyclist or child low enough to have them fall on the hood and not take excessive damage to the vital organs. Most SUVs have hoods above my waist and I'm 5'11".

Comment Swapping good pay for bad? (Score 1) 159

The USA currently has lots of really good paying jobs in services. I'm not sure why voters in the USA want to have more jobs sewing shirts or assembling electronics. US unemployment is 4%. I'm not sure where the USA will get lots of people to work for $10 a day especially if they are deporting all the Mexicans.

The US trade deficit is caused by Americans collectively consuming more than the produce. If Trump wants the USA to have a trade surplus then he can just cut the US consumption. The US has a 1.13T capital account deficit. The US defense budget is 824B. So maybe cut that and change the law on taxing interest on mortgages and American consumption would easily fall by 1.2T.

Comment The guardian - the bastion for the entitled (Score 1, Interesting) 211

The insurance companies didn't say it will destroy capitalism. Places with increased risk due to climate change won't be suitable for investing in. If you can't get insurance at a reasonable rate then what you are doing is to risky. You aren't entitled to cheap insurance especially if you are doing something risky. You aren't entitled to a mortgage or any other secured borrowing especially if the lenders think your collateral could be destroyed.

Comment I've been using AI to code (Score 1) 121

I've inheritted the worst project I have ever seen. Maybe not the worst code but the worst run project. Not a single comment in the code, argument and variable names that are sometimes close but not quite right. Function pointers and other indirection for no good reason. Duplicate variables for the same data just in different units. (temperature is stored 10 f$#king different ways). 100,000 line header files with only 3 relevant defines. The AI hasn't been useless. It might have given me some insight but after two months I am now faster using the old algorithmic tools, paper and a bit of crying. Honestly no risk to my job. The rest of the people on this project could be replaced with rocks. They do negative work. In that respect, there are lots of "developers" that could be replaced.

Comment Math (Score 1) 45

The earth has a mass of 6x10^24 kg. A sphere built at Mercury's orbit would be 5x10^22m^2. So you would have 100kg of matter to make each square meter of sphere. I suspect that is 10,000x more than you would need.

Also most of the earth is iron and nickel so 100kg of steel. And before you say it. The only tensile stress on the sphere is it's own mass. The point of the shell is only to capture energy so thin is better. A really thin sphere could be made with existing steel.

Comment Escalating never gets you in trouble (Score 2) 100

We see this all the time in law enforcement all over the world and I think it is getting worse. No one ever gets in trouble for escalating a situation. This could have been a minor suspicion that someone could have quietly checked and decide there is nothing here but instead they escalate it a little and someone else sees it and it escalates a bit more and pretty soon a joke on a private chat results in fighters escorting a plane back. https://www.news.com.au/travel...

Comment The Theatre is an in person experience (Score 1) 192

You go out with friends, you eat dinner, you might shop or do some other activity. The restaurant and bar experience has gotten worse and significantly more expensive. In Canada, bars and restaurants have gone to all hard surfaces with no sound absorption. They are now so loud that you can't have a conversation, only eat, drink and leave. So the over all experience of going out with my friends to see a movie has become less appealing. I don't think it is about the quality of the movies. Maybe the 15 minutes of car and cellular ads. I think it is just a cumulative decline in the over all experience of the entire evening.

Also the younger generation is a lost cause for theatres. It is now too expensive for me to take my 5 kids out for a meal before the movie and the movie experience isn't anymore appeal to them than watching on a 75" TV at home. They will never feel that nostalgia of sticky floors, the smell of popcorn and the excitement of the crowd.

Comment women in trades? (Score 1) 289

Half the population won't do trades and if we somehow changed our attituteds to not look down on them there would be an outrage that men are over represented in these good jobs. People in the trades would be labelled sexist and firms would have quotas and be shamed if they didn't meet them.

Comment fan stupidity created ticketmaster (Score 5, Interesting) 22

There are a limited number of tickets to an event and finding the market price is difficult. Fans somehow think market price for tickets is what they want to pay. Sorry, if someone is willing to pay $5000 so their daughter can have front row for Tailor Swift, then that is the market price. The proper way to have sold concert tickets would have been a revers dutch aution. This would have maximized the profit of the venue and act, ensured those willing to pay the most would get their seats and eliminated the profit of scalpers. It would also mean tickets would more easily be transferable. Instead we got a disfunctional market and TicketMaster took advantage of it. My Uncle is a band manager for some big 80s/90s acts and he saw this coming. He's been fight ticketmaster and when possible books venues that aren't tied to ticketmaster even if he loses money. Every year it gets harder and harder though.

Comment Mass (Score 1) 45

The point of a Dyson sphere is to harness a non-trivial fraction of a stars energy output. If you can harness even a few percent of a stars output you can disassemble entire plants. The binding energy of the Earth, the amount of energy to break the earth down into individual atoms and push them apart so that they won't reform is 2.5x10^32 J or about a week of energy from our sun.

Comment US consumer banks are incompetent (Score 1) 114

I've lived and worked in the USA many times over the last 30 years. I've written software for credit bureaus, bank security and the SWIFT network. The USA has the most incompetent banking system in the world. They aren't corrupt but they are mind bogglingly dumb and they honestly are getting worse. Opening accounts, getting approved for credit and moving money now takes longer than it did 25 years ago. Transactions that are instant in third world countries still take multiple days in the US. Documentation or even source code for many systems doesn't exist. I've parsed records that have had fields that are fixed width, delimited, {type, length, value}, ASCII, EBCDIC and binary packed decimal all in the same record.

I understand the USA had a system that worked in the 60s but things do improve over 60 years.

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