> You're argument is the same thing that led to "we should get rid of headphone jacks because we have Bluetooth."
I mean... yeah it's the same argument and I agree with both. When we got Bluetooth and decent ear pods... time to get rid of the headphone jack we don't want both, one is redundant. Simpler, cleaner, more uniform is better for these devices in my opinion.
Wireless headphones are an e-waste nightmare (in particular Airpods, designed to never be disassembled). When used with a mobile phone, their convenience is incredibly minor, and for me is more than offset by the need to keep them charged.
I agree with getting rid of dying interfaces, but this is a case where it makes way more sense to keep options available. Almost everyone uses audio, and different people have different priorities. Waterproofing the jack is easy, and phones still have enough space for them. The only way I can interpret their decision to remove that jack was to incentivize wireless headphone sales, and perhaps appeal to the small ultra minimalist crowd.
Does the fact that there's a tiny and cheap dongle not make it all ok? You can keep using whatever devices you want if you've got some special use-case. Just pop the dongle in. For everyone else... we don't have to add it to the devices and we get a better device.
Apple's 3.5mm audio dongles are honestly very well engineered and they're selling them at an uncharacteristically reasonable markup. Great DAC implementation. I use mine all the time.
I just don't believe most people think the device is better without the headphone jack. It's not a "special use-case". Deleting the jack has definitely driven some sales for wireless headphones to people who don't want to use the dongle, rather than a desire to get rid of the wire.
For some reason it's very hard to find a cheap and solid way to charge via Lightning and use wired audio at the same time. My workaround is to charge after I'm done listening. Probably good for reducing phone use, but it can be annoying on occasion.
I'm just one data point but thanks to "courage" I hardly ever use headphones on my iPhone anymore. I never have the lightning earpods with me, and it can't use any of the random headphones I had stashed in various useful locations. Bluetooth headphones don't really fit into my life either. Thanks, Jony.
Can't really connect my phone to venue sound systems by Bluetooth when teaching dance classes. And wouldn't want to have to be forced to choose between a 3.5mm adaptor and a charger...
This is the main reason I'm still on Android, since the last iPhone I would even consider buying was the original SE.
Do you realise that for your (extremely specialised) use-case you can get a dongle that gives you both 3.5mm and power at the same time? They're about $10.
Everyone else who doesn't need this doesn't have to pay for it by excluding it.
> This is the main reason I'm still on Android
For a $10 dongle? That's the critical decision in your mind?
So, the current ‘joke’ is, buy a brand new vehicle, wait a month for its value to appreciate, then sell it back to the dealership.
My guess on the reason for the pricing increases is several factors:
At the beginning of the ‘shutdown’, it affected auto auctions, where dealers obtain a decent amount of their pre-owned inventory, besides trade-ins.
Actual manufacturing shutdowns decreased new car outputs
The rescue package allowed for a substantial jolt for vehicle financing, and it is not uncommon now for people to finance a car for a 6 year term. There are also 7 year terms, now.
David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, a Theory, around page 524 or so.
> The mechanics and tradesmen who became the foot soldiers of the American War of Independence represented themselves as producers of the wealth that they saw the British crown as looting, and after the Revolution, many turned the same language against would-be capitalists.
> When US President Abraham Lincoln delivered his first annual message to Congress in 1861, for instance, he included the following lines, which, radical though they seem to a contemporary ear, where really just a reflection of the common sense of the time:[189] “Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
> In 1880 a Protestant “home missionary” who had spent some years traveling along the Western frontier reported that: “You can hardly find a group of ranchmen or miners from Colorado to the Pacific who will not have on their tongue’s end the labor slang of Denis Kearney, the infidel ribaldry of [atheist pamphleteer] Robert Ingersoll, the Socialistic theories of Karl Marx”
The challenge with unions is that the same/very similar anecdote keeps on coming up.
I am not anti union (wouldn’t want to be part of one, but don’t ideologically oppose them), but this seems to be a consistent failure point for them, in the same way that Scrum often ends up generating hairball codebases.
The concerns people have with unions are not particularly amenable to statistical analysis. However at some point a sufficiently large collection of anecdotes does become data. Pretending people can hear stories of union-related BS so many times or for so many years and not take that into account is silly.
The article describes exactly the challenge with this black-and-white framing: many things are both evidence of war crimes that ought to be available and terrorist propaganda that social media platforms shouldn't spread.
I basically realized this when I was at an internship talking to a buddy about a compilers course I could be taking and his language he was making for fun. He was talking about a couple topics I'd probably go over in the course.
Then a more senior coworker came over to join the convo and mentioned a few similar words that were clearly jargon related to compilers etc. He spoke with such confidence that I didn't want to admit I didn't know about them, but figured I shouldn't be ashamed at not knowing stuff. I asked him what it meant and he said he didn't really know and wasn't entirely sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I once mentioned off-hand that I was a SIGPLAN member so that I could get the proceedings and learn about future tech in compilers and JITs and GC.
One person did a double-take, looked at me, and said, "You can understand those?" I knew exactly what he meant, and consoled him by saying "only about 2/3rds," at which point all of the tension drained out of his shoulders. I had communicated that yes, some of it is just bullshit not fit for consumption, and that he was not an idiot.
As a Feynman dilettante, if you can't have a human conversation about a subject (note: conversation, not 'curing cancer'/winning the Nobel) then you don't really know the subject. Or perhaps more generously: It doesn't matter if you know it because you can't pass that knowledge on. You are dead end as far as human progress is concerned.
I suspect Tech people feel this more than pure researchers, because we know that in a couple years we will be focusing on something else, and 5 years at most we will be gone. If we haven't passed on our knowledge, then there will be consequences that are readily apparent. In academia you get so many opportunities to connect and if you connect with 5 people, you probably feel like your work is done, and you forget about people like me who regret ever encountering certain teachers because they set me back or in one case, put me off a course I believed I would stay to the end.
Me, I have 10-15 people not of my choosing and I have to connect with 2 and 1/2 of them. It's a tempest in a teapot.
I've noticed that "I have no idea" as an answer is one of the boldest statements you can make in the workplace.
Most people are playing fake it till you make it most of the time (until shit hits the fan, then incompetence becomes dangerous and you get to see who's been swimming naked)
You and your senior coworker are allowed to not know things, and furthermore, allowed to talk about things that you don't know much about.
Was your role or the senior person's role related to compilers? You don't have to authoritatively know something to talk about it, and I never assume anyone knows anything authoritatively if they talk about it nonchalantly.
In this case, there is no option. You either work contractor or don't work. This law is in place to establish this option of "better job". You wouldn't have an option without it.
No, that's the thing. It's not turning 300 contractor positions into 300 better jobs. It's turning 300 contractor positions into a very small number of better jobs (not all of which will actually go to those contractors), leaving a lot more people unemployed.
US unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 50 years and wages are starting to rise due to employers desperate for labor. This is the best time for labor policies that cause churn to be established.
...and those unemployed people will find better jobs with other companies, since all California companies are required to comply with the new law, and the collective amount of work performed by California companies (and thus the collective number of workers required to do this work) is not affected by the new law.
Why wouldn't the collective amount of work performed by California companies be affected? It seems very likely that consolidating a lot of contractors into a few employees would reduce the total number of working hours needed.
The collective amount of work performed by California companies is absolutely affected by the new law, because it's not a constant. The amount of work a company has to do is affected by the cost of performance. If costs go up, a lot of work is no longer affordable to complete, so that work doesn't happen.
That depends on how much ads pay, how many users watch ads/use adblock, how much they watch etc. Videos that get few ads or low-priced ads might indeed have the membership be a large portion of the revenue. Generally it's more in the 10-20% range though.
And the best way to fuel that exploitation is to give the existing set of landowners an effective monopoly by disallowing new construction. If we instead encouraged new construction (via less red tape and other means) we should expect rents to go down as the supply expands - or at least for them to rise less.
