The lesson from 1918 for public health is that if you lie to or mislead the public once, even if by accident, you have reduced credibility in the future and are less likely to have the public listen to you. The authorities didn't learn this lesson and instead misled the public for 2 months, then did a 180 and expected people to blindly listen to them again.
As a citizen, would you trust the government if they did yet another 180, after demonstrating to you 2x that they didn't actually know what they were talking about?
> As a citizen, would you trust the government if they did yet another 180, after demonstrating to you 2x that they didn't actually know what they were talking about?
One of the many things that I've learned from this pandemic is that for better or worse, the answer to this question is emphatically yes for a significant percentage of the population. Many folks will indeed blindly trust whatever they are currently being told by people they believe are authorities or experts. At times this may be a good thing, but I personally lean toward thinking it's not good overall. And as you correctly point out, another big chunk of people will understandably lose faith in institutions and authorities that either were wrong or simply lied, which I'd argue likely causes significant long term damage to the healthy functioning of a society.
you guys want to talk about frustration and pain from hangouts? pffff, try this:
an important new client calls you on your google voice number, which routs to hangouts. You don't yet have their number as it isn't in your Google Contacts or your Phone Contacts.
You answer, but are busy, or need to look up something for them, and you tell them you'll call them right back.
You get the info you need and you look to your recent calls for the call THAT JUST CAME IN LITERALLY A MINUTE AGO. It's not there. Hangouts does not save incoming calls. (or at least it didn't a year ago)
As a 3rd party observer with no stake in either the US or China, I wonder how the USA would react if China was the #1 in the world economically, and exporting Facebook, Boeing, etc. I imagine we'd see some American protectionism.
The WTO was created to prevent these shenanigans. Europe and US play ball, mostly. EU/NAFTA/CETA/TTIP all part of that leveling of the playing field.
China does not play ball, at all. Literally don't give a shit about the Wests opinions or approaches to deals. Perceived in the West as cheating, but that is just a cultural viewpoint.
China is #1 in the world economically, and exports Baidu [1], WeChat [2], etc. Baidu has had a Silicon Valley presence for years, and Tencent, WeChat's parent, opened one last week.
WeChat could be a real threat to Google and Facebook. It's comprehensive; you can do messaging, banking, shopping, and taxi calling from inside WeChat. It has sub-applications for other services. It's a post-desktop world. Google and Facebook came from desktops and crammed down to phones; WeChat was born mobile.
I think it's possible that the culture barrier during the initial days of social networks might have been the cause here. Cultures/aesthetics/languages are different and so platforms that serve as "one size fits all" (not localizing their layout and options) might not be able to compete with more local options at this scale.
Euhm. Not to blow your bubble, but the US is extremely flexible and open economically. Far more so than any other country on the planet.
Europe is pretty inflexible, compared to the US. E.g. there is no free market for most agricultural products in the EU. And before you say it, no this is not due to US meats having hormones in them. Firstly, those taxes and rules apply to everything, whether or not produced with EU rule compliance, and secondly, there isn't even a free market within the EU for many products (e.g. wine in France. Olive oil (or other oils) in Southern Europe, ...). And of course, the EU is certainly not neutral when it comes to other products as well, e.g. Boeing vs Airbus.
China is extremely INflexible and hostile to free trade, even today. VERY few commodities trade freely with China, even just taking the published import tariffs and conditions.
Add to that that the Chinese state famously owns pretty much every large Chinese corporation (state owned enterprises) and it's influence and restrictions over what products are welcome in China goes above and beyond the officially published rules.
So I believe a fair assumption would be that no, the US would not object too much to large Chinese companies being successful in the US. In fact, I do believe there's large scale examples of that if you search just a little bit.
For a practical example of the US allowing large non-US businesses to operate freely in the US, even where it hurts local industry, you only need to look at the steel industry.
To me, that fact used to seem simply protectionism, but honestly it's very reasonable.
Google and Facebook in particular are a security agencies dream - people volunteering to share messages, location, what they're reading, who they're friends with, etc - that a rational country would be afraid of from even friendly nations.
oh please, google did their own study. They want to hire more females than any company but the conclusion was that there aren't enough women in the engineering pipeline.
So yea, the more likely reason is
C) Women don't want to become engineers as much as men do, for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason
Given a multitude of other results showing that equalizing for pipeline problems shows women competing equally with men, the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving.
Oh and your claim that they're being filtered out by sexism doesn't qualify as handwaving?
Look, if women are being unfairly excluded from the pipeline then fight THAT. Don't blame Google or Facebook or X company for hiring the best they can. They have "diversity consultants" on their payroll for christs sake. This isn't an issue that is gonna magically be solved in a few years. Making the "pipeline" more diverse takes years of investment and education and encouragement. What I take an issue is with people blaming these companies when they're actually doing a reasonable job of trying to become more diverse. As if these companies are the ones really holding people back. and if only they could overcome their biases they'd have a perfect diversity ratio overnight.
We have voluminous statistical evidence that women are judged more harshly than men in all phases of hiring when the only differentiator is being perceived as a woman. That's not handwaving, that's decades of study. Handwaving is "for whatever (social/biological/cultural) reason".
We know there's a pipeline problem, and we are fighting that. We don't think it's going to be solved overnight either, and critically, not just by addressing the pipeline because, as numerous stories from the tech industry have made clear recently, even when qualified women make it through that anemic pipeline, they still face individual and institutional sexism. Or have you forgotten that one of Uber's recent departures left Google after an internal sexual harassment scandal that was quietly handled?
" the more likely reason is that women are being filtered out of the pipeline by sexism, not some mysterious "maybe they just don't want to" handwaving."
So you're alleging that Google is judging women more harshly than men, "at all phases of hiring".
And they hate being doctors too. Except they don't. And deconstruction of what was a frankly pervasive culture of sexism in medicine and law has resulted in much higher participation of the second sex in these fields.
Is your claim that the pipeline is not completely fugged? Because there are very clear numbers indicating that it is, starting very early, at the K-12 level.
Or is it merely that the pipeline being fugged doesn't mean that everything else is fine and dandy? I'd agree with that, hell yeah, and that claim matches the actual content of those links quite well. But I don't think it in any way suggests that the problem is a myth.
I also don't think the pipeline is unfixable, but that's both my day job and another rant for another day.
Sorry, in retrospect that was very unclear. I agree with your second statement. There are definitely fewer women and people of color even applying for STEM jobs, although there are so many other factors such as quality of education, harassment, visibility of role models, etc that I think calling it "the pipeline problem" is an oversimplification.
What I think the original comment I replied to was saying though (and what most people in the industry with hiring power that I've talked to about this have said) is that "the pipeline problem" is the main thing preventing them from hiring a diverse team. That's bullshit though; there have been a million and one studies showing implicit biases in the hiring process, for one. We definitely need to improve the pipeline — the "pipeline problem myth" I'm referring to is that that's the extent of the problem.
Other people are subsidizing you. Basically, sick people get a better deal. Healthier people pay more to cover sick people. I'm sure you are happy but let's not pretend other ppl aren't covering your ass.
First of all leave your judgment elsewhere. Else there's no point in discussion because to you it's "Gross" to even have a different opinion.
It really depends on the people you have in your society and what the sick people are contributing.
Getting sick needs to have some kind of downside to it. Else people have no incentive to stay healthy. They can take as many risks as they want to their personal health because it's going to be paid for by other healthy people.
America in particular has a large obese population which is addicted to popping pills and overmedicating in general. If you give people free license to eat whatever they want or take as many drugs as they want without consequence our healthcare costs are going to be unaffordable very soon (they nearly already are)
Once you are in a system where everyone is forced to contribute, one person's actions affect others. If you don't take care of yourself and get sick, others are forced to pay for you. If you have too many people who don't take care of themselves, the healthy people are the ones who get screwed because it's effectively a wealth transfer: They're paying for sick people to have the license to do whatever they want.
The reality is that sick people are a drain on society's resources. Obviously we need a humane solution to treat them but the answer shouldn't just be a blank check. There are sick people who require hundreds of thousands of care YEARLY. They are not temporarily sick, they are permanently sick. I dont' think it's fair that they pay the same rate as healthy people. If you are permanently sick, that sucks but you should pay more of the burden.
>Getting sick needs to have some kind of downside to it.
Yeah it would suck if illness affected your ability to be physically active, gain and keep employment, be part of a happy relationship, enjoy hobbies, etc.
It's great that you've found a way to punish people financially so those ill freeriders don't get off Scott free.
If you get in a car accident, you pay more in increased premiums. That gives people incentive to drive safe and punishes people who get into more accidents.
If you remove any sense of personal responsibility from people's health, they will have no incentive to take care of of themselves. Everything they suffer will be covered by insurance (ie. other healthy people). That's how it is right now. Healthy people are not signing up for these shitty health insurance plans because they are being forced to pay for sick people who eat up 80% ( or some ridiculous number, i don't know what it is) of the actual costs.
It's not about "punishment". it's about people paying their own way. If other people were paying for your car insurance they why not speed, drive drunk, drive recklessly, etc. You are not personally liable for any of your driving consequences.
The reality is that people who are sick are a drain on resources. We have to decide , rationally, how much other people should be forced to pay for these sick people. If you are fine joining a health insurance plan with these people and paying more then fine, all the power to you. So are you doing that?
I bought a new chromebook a few months ago. One of the nicer ones, not the super cheap one.
I'm just as disappointed as I was when I first used a chromebook 4 years ago. It's slow, already crashed once - requiring a full re-install, the touchpad barely registers my finger, and it loses battery in a few days. Seriously if I leave it alone for a few days it drops from 100% battery to like 5%.
For $449 I'd rather buy a 5 year old macbook air than use another chromebook. I'm selling mine.
It sounds like you got a defective unit. I've used half a dozen Chromebooks across the price spectrum, and none have had any of those problems (even the lowly Acer C720 from years ago). In particular, battery life and touchpad are usually excellent on most Chromebooks. Usually it's the screen that's the weak link, which is one of the reasons that makes these new Samsung models interesting (along with Android apps and possibly the pen).
The C720 was/is an awesome chromebook! Mine is still going strong and is perfect for 99% of my use. Is the screen as nice as a MBP - nope, but I think it was under $200 vs $2,000+. Not all chromebooks are created equally but some of them are excellent value for the money.
I had one of the original beta Chromebooks and I loved it to death (literally) - so much so that I am occasionally tempted to get one on eBay even though it would run at a crawl now. Disappointing that it doesn't seem to deliver.
I think yours was broken. I have had 3 chromebooks and all of them worked well. I have never had to reinstall. These things can break as they were made by humans,but I think yours is defective. What brand was it?
Well, my 2013 MBP does that, to the point that if I leave it for 6hrs it's out of battery such that I cannot even turn it on. Real shitty. Don't know if I'm just bad at this stuff or if most computers do that.
Your battery might be shot or it might not be really sleeping. Either way you can try changing it to hibernate instead of sleep using a command line utility (pmset I think). Not nearly as convenient but if your battery is dying that quickly convenience is probably secondary.
You've probably already looked but console might actually tell you exactly what the culprit is. This has happened to me in the past a couple of times. Once with an app running in the background that I can't remember the name of that wouldn't even let the screensaver start, much less sleep. The other time was because of a kernel extension shitting the bed on a regular basis. If you're curious what non-Apple kexts you have installed you can see them like so:
kextstat | grep -v com.apple
They're at /Library/Extensions/ and you can disable them like this:
Even if it's not a kext it's good to keep tabs on kernel extensions you have installed. I hope that helps and apologies if you're already aware of all that.
Keeping batteries fully charged all the time makes a HUGE difference in their lifespan and ability to hold a charge. If you regularly let a battery run down under 25% you're directly contributing to the "won't hold a charge" problem.
I can't speak as well to the bottom end, but if your hardware provides the option (ThinkPads generally do, at least with Windows), cap the charge at somewhere between 80 and 90% to maximize battery lifespan, and set it to not start charging unless it's at least 10-15% below that maximum charge level.
At the fully-charged end of things, think of the batteries like latex balloons - if you repeatedly fully inflate them they're going to have problems sooner than if you just mostly-inflate them every time.
As a citizen, would you trust the government if they did yet another 180, after demonstrating to you 2x that they didn't actually know what they were talking about?