A superficial web search reveals a handful of options; I'm sure if you spent a little time, like 10-15 minutes, you'd find dozens. If you only look at what's on offer in stores, and aren't in a place with a lot of variety, then you're not going to have many options.
Shipping something that weighs only a few pounds and can be shipped along with tens of thousands of shipping containers (i.e., is not needed at the destination in a day or two) costs almost no CO2 emissions.
It costs as much as shipping just one container. Just because you can distribute the emissions over more people doesn’t make it less bad for the environment. Not ordering something from overseas is the only solution.
Arbitrary markup based on whatever they can maximally extract from their consumers is the name of the game. Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose.
> Product segmentation is just one of a variety of tools used to that purpose.
I think people here forget that Apple is targeting a certain profit margin. Currently, their gross profit margin is about 45%.
If you're rolling this out on the Mac line, it's okay to have a profit margin closer to 35% on the base model; but maybe with 55%-65% margins on the higher-tier professional equipment, to "balance" it out. It also turns out, professionals have money, and will pay despite the grumbling. The RAM prices are basically a progressive tax.
The nearly unlimited acquisition of private data should be tightly regulated, ephemeral by default, require total transparency in disclosure to any party for any use. Any time any ad or government agency or private individual obtains your data, you should be notified at the expense of the entity obtaining the data. Everything should be proactive and favor the rights of individuals. Not following regulations should be lethal to corporations, disincentivizing the mindless global surveillance apparatus we have now.
Bas relief and the play of light and shadow have been used since humans have tried their hand at carving. Seeing the impression a wet face left on dry cloth would be sufficient to tickle artistic inspiration, but actual artists, who spend their time thinking about how things appear and how to capture them in their respective media would have all sorts of opportunities for capturing the negative of an image, even if they wouldn't have thought of it in those terms.
There are plenty of examples of engravings, carvings, intaglia, and so on that used what we consider to be a "negative." There's nothing particularly special about flipping an image, transposing light and dark, inverting the 3d characteristics, or otherwise reversing different aspects.
Specifically, the inverse image might be carved for a wax seal ring or imprint, or it might be carved for a decoration stamp used in cement, or a mold for jewelry or ceramics. There are plenty of examples of things all throughout history that provide opportunity to inspire an inverted or "negative" image; it's simply our context of photography that is novel.
What accolades? The Hollywood self-congratulatory conspicuous consumption festivals they use to show how good they are at producing "art" every year? The film festivals where billions of dollars are spent on clothing and jewelry to show off the "class" of everyone attending, which people like Weinstein used to pick victims, and everyone else uses as conspicuous consumption and "marketing" media?
Pinnacle is not the word I'd use. Race to the bottom, least possible effort, plausibly deniable quality, gross exploitation, capitalist bottom line - those are all things I'd use to describe current "art" awards like Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc.
The media industry is run by exploiting artists for licensing rights. The middle men and publishers add absolutely nothing to the mix. Google or Spotify or platforms arguably add value by surfacing, searching, categorizing, and so on, but not anywhere near the level of revenue capture they rationalize as their due.
When anyone and everyone can produce a film series or set of stories or song or artistic image that matches their inner artistic vision, and they're given the tools to do so without restriction or being beholden to anyone, then we're going to see high quality art and media that couldn't possibly be made in the grotesquely commercial environment we have now. These tools are as raw and rough and bad performing as they ever will be, and are only going to get better.
Shared universes of prompts and storylines and media styles and things that bring generative art and storytelling together to allow coherent social sharing and interactive media will be a thing. Kids in 10 years will be able to click and create their own cartoons and stories. Parents will be able to engage by establishing cultural parameters and maybe sneak in educational, ethical, and moral content designed around what they think is important. Artists are going to be able to produce every form of digital media and tune and tweak their vision using sophisticated tools and processes, and they're not going to be limited by budgets, politics, studio constraints, State Department limitations, wink/nod geopolitical agreements with nation states, and so on.
Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh on impossible. People will create a lot of garbage, a lot of spam, low effort gifs and video memes, but more artists will be empowered than ever before, and I'm here for it.
Any accolades, be that professional groups, people's awards, rotten tomatoes or IMDB ratings.
> Race to the bottom, least possible effort, plausibly deniable quality, gross exploitation, capitalist bottom line - those are all things I'd use to describe current "art" awards like Grammy, Oscars, Cannes, etc.
I find them ridiculous in many ways, but no, one thing they're definitely not is a race to the bottom.
If you want to see what a race to the bottom looks like, The Room has a reputation for being generally terrible, "bad movie nights" are a thing, and Mystery Science Theater 3000's schtick is to poke fun at bad movies.
> The media industry is run by exploiting artists for licensing rights.
Yes
> The middle men and publishers add absolutely nothing to the mix. Google or Spotify or platforms arguably add value by surfacing, searching, categorizing, and so on, but not anywhere near the level of revenue capture they rationalize as their due.
I disagree. I think that every tech since a medium became subject to mass reproduction (different for video and audio, as early films were famously silent) has pushed things from a position close to egalitarianism towards a winner-takes-all. This includes Google: already-popular things become more popular, because Google knows you're more likely to engage with the more popular thing than the less popular thing. This dynamic also means that while anyone will be free to make their own personal vision (although most of us will have all the artistic talent of an inexperienced Tommy Wiseau), almost everyone will still only watch a handful of them.
> Art's going to get weird, and censorship will be nigh on impossible.
Bad news there, I'm afraid. AI you can run on your personal device, is quite capable of being used by the state to drive censorship at the level of your screen or your headphones.
Yes. Do stuff that other people have been successful doing. Monkey see, monkey do - it's not a tech people thing, it's a human thing.
Tech just happens to be most on display at the moment - because tech people are building the tools and the parameters and the infrastructure handling all our interactions.
What do you think globalizing means?
Ships are too expensive to be built to a given level of quality in the US. This means we outsource the expertise, and in this case, even the expertise necessary to tell what a good deal is.
They've created a market in which a US based company cannot compete economically, because the cost of production elsewhere will be less. There is no margin by which any competition can take place, whether or not the government throws a ton of money and stopgap incentives into the mix.
You can't manufacture chips, small household goods, general purpose clothing, electronics, or a whole slew of other things in the US because our legal regime fundamentally disallows any American participation in those markets through economic disincentivization. If you can't make any profit because you have to pay higher wages or taxes if you manufacture in the US, then you're not going to manufacture in the US, even if you're a patriot.
The US doesn't have a rational system designed to maximize value to citizens, it's a hodgepodge of conflicting regulatory grifts designed to maximally benefit the corporations who paid for the lobby.
> they're crap compared to ships from other countries.
That's exactly what "globalizing" is. You literally cannot, under the current regulatory regime, create a ship building company that can compete with other established interests and competition from other countries. You'd have to relax the arbitrary labor and wage constraints, fix taxes and tariffs for sufficiently long term outlooks that anyone would bother investing. To achieve that, you'd need good faith operators throughout the government willing to rock the boat, and if you think that will ever happen, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn for ya - I'll sell it cheap.
Other industries seem to be fine competing with other countries. Would there be some greater investment in manufacturing in the US if there were no labor (or environmental) constraints? Sure, but the fact that other industries compete just fine makes me believe it's simply not an economically efficient allocation of resources for labor heavy manufacturing to be done in the US.
China is winning because they are intentionally and directly investing in tech regardless of the financial circumstances. They don’t care about the profits, they are focused on the outcomes. They are doing what developed countries should be doing.
Winning is winning. History is written by the victors. Important to know who you’re playing against, and whether you’re playing by the same rules, and if the rules matter. It’s not great, but it is what it is. We must operate in a way based upon how the world is, not the way that we wish it was.
At this point, China is outdoing the West in so many ways, and rapidly catching up in the areas where it still lags. I’m not one to eagerly praise the CCP, but it’s hard to not see how China is progressing while the West lags more and more.
The West plays nice as much as possible. China is playing to win.
>China is outdoing the West in so many ways, and rapidly catching up in the areas where it still lags.
I'm not seeing it. Chinese economic power and tech capacity might exceed US capacity in time, but I give it only p = .25 or so. China's descending into some sort of political chaos seems more likely.
> Our research reveals that China has built the foundations to position itself as the world’s leading science and technology superpower, by establishing a sometimes stunning lead in high-impact research across the majority of critical and emerging technology domains.
> China’s global lead extends to 37 out of 44 technologies that ASPI is now tracking, covering a range of crucial technology fields spanning defence, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials and key quantum technology areas. The Critical Technology Tracker shows that, for some technologies, all of the world’s top 10 leading research institutions are based in China and are collectively generating nine times more high-impact research papers than the second-ranked country (most often the US). Notably, the Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks highly (and often first or second) across many of the 44 technologies included in the Critical Technology Tracker. We also see China’s efforts being bolstered through talent and knowledge import: one-fifth of its high-impact papers are being authored by researchers with postgraduate training in a Five-Eyes country. China’s lead is the product of deliberate design and long-term policy planning, as repeatedly outlined by Xi Jinping and his predecessors.
> China's descending into some sort of political chaos seems more likely, like it has done over and over thru history.
And the West isn’t? I honestly am not sure whether I prefer Xi Jinping over one of the candidates in the upcoming US elections.
There are still thankfully some checks and balances in place, but if the loudest elements of one of the two major US parties has everything their way, I’d honestly prefer to live in the PRC.
> China is winning because they are intensely, directly investing in tech regardless of the financial circumstances.
Investment can (and often is) different from protectionism. Typically, investment provides time-limited grants or other forms of support. If a company misuses them, a global (or local) competitor will outpace it.
Protectionism ensures that companies are indefinitely protected from global competition, so they don't feel as pressed to improve.
The developed world is unable to compete on a level playing field against other countries when taking into consideration potentially enormous subsidies or developing world labor costs. Protectionism, when implemented strategically, can reduce these counterparty advantages. Investment is also a component, but they both work in concert to arrive at a desired outcome. And I think that’s really where this problem lies, that we’re arguing about protectionism versus investment, when we should be identifying what the desired outcome is and then, based on an inventory of all of the policy and capital allocation tools that we have available to us, implement what is needed to arrive at the desired outcome. We don’t want to sacrifice innovation (which calls for mechanisms to prevent companies from leaning too far towards entrenched interests vs innovators), but we also don’t want to run a race we cannot win because we unnecessarily handicap ourselves in an inherently unfair and unequal global market.
I am not a terribly smart person, and I don’t have all the answers, but I would argue it’s clear what we’ve done so far isn’t working, based on all available evidence.
> The developed world is unable to compete on a level playing field against other countries when taking into consideration potentially enormous subsidies or developing world labor costs.
Cheap labor cost typically is only a fraction of a high-tech product. If anything, China was not the world's biggest factory, but the world's biggest assembler. It's changing right now, and China is producing more of its own high-tech components.
So a small amount of protectionism (like a 10-15% tariff) might be OK, and it will compensate for this labor cost discrepancy. But not tariffs that simply make the local industry complacent.
Music? I don't think anyone listens to American music these days outside of America (and maybe Canada). America used to produce great music, back in the 60s-80s, that people around the world wanted to listen to, but that went away after the 2000s.
American movies, however, are still quite popular abroad. Offhand, I'd say it's one of America's biggest exports. "Microcode" is the other one, if you mean things like CPU design: all the biggest CPU makers are in America: Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. (Many of the CPUs are manufactured elsewhere, usually by TSMC, but all the design work is done in the US.)
According to this article (https://www.billboard.com/business/touring/taylor-swift-eras...), it looks like it's mainly American tourists going to Europe to see Swift's shows because the ticket prices are 1/10 as much as in America. Apparently, it costs about $5000 for a couple to see a Swift show in the US now, so it's actually a lot cheaper to just fly to Europe to see her show.
> $5000 for a couple to see a Swift show in the US now...
That's just not true. As long as you are able to get an original ticket and not a resold one. But ticketmaster and live nation should be regulated because they're a middleman monopoly in all of it.
It is literally false. The original tickets are nowhere close to that expensive and they do a lottery system with more verification now so that more fans get the tickets. I'm not defending Ticketmaster (they are awful and should be regulated), but original tickets just don't cost that much. Have you ever purchased Taylor Swift tickets? I have twice. Both times at original ticket prices.
I'm not talking about original ticket prices, but rather the prices that normal people actually pay. According to the article, it's huge because of scalpers. Maybe that isn't true in your experience, but it seems to be true for enough people that they're writing articles complaining about this.
Which are non critical and can be shed without much harm. Critical industries are, by definition, critical and require sacrificing efficiency to preserve.
If you want to be able to build and retain the capability, you have to protect the machine that does the building: people, institutional knowledge and domain expertise, equipment, etc. Otherwise, you forget how to build, the machine evaporates. And here we are.
Do you mean in the GitHub repo? Happy to add more images/gifs to the repo! It's a fairly recent addition and the website does a much better job of showcasing the product!
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