I have hosting that regularly shut down my servers based on legal demands from jurisdictions that should have no reach my service whatsoever, or on total bogus claim.
If I refuse to act, they shut me down. If I'm late in acting, they shut me down.
Zero check on the legitimacy on the claim, zero trust in my debunking the claim.
The reality is, it's not economically viable to do so. I'm not giving them enough money to be worth it. So as long as I'm a small actor, anything that looks remotely legit is just processed as-is with no recourse.
The entire world can basically impose its view on me as long as they find a convincing way to tell my hosting "you are at risk".
And it's not one single provider either. Most of them do that: domain name, vps hosts, proxies, caches, etc.
Agreed, but then said optical markers regularly positioned in tunnels and a map of the tube is enough to position yourself already. That's likely how it works right now, and it's fine.
The article says they just use wheel sensors. Most of them time they don't need to be very accurate so that is more than good enough, but in stations much higher accuracy should be needed and so they need an additional correction there. (note that I said should: I'm a strong believer in automated edge of platform doors which require stopping so the train doors align. Few systems in the world have this though)
A number of parts of the underground already have platform edge doors, and train stopping locations are tightly controlled regardless of the presence of platform edge doors.
You should read one of his many biographies. Every one of them has him drinking like 6 cherry cokes a day, and eating ham sandwiches, mcdonalds, and steak nonstop.
You don't have to believe anything, but the many people who spent the most time with him have reported on this extensively.
> There needs to be an initial chapter for teaching Python in case the reader doesn't have the background.
I can't stand books that start with a half-baked Python tutorial. It's not only wasting the time of people who know, but worse, it's wasting the time of people who don't.
Because a one-chapter explanation on the topic is always going to be so superficial that the people who actually need it will never have the details they actually require to get up to speed. You will give them the illusion of understanding, only to let them hit a wall the first time they try any.
Before uv, install python package was a topic that required a lot more than a quick intro, explaining virtualenv, branching depending on OSes, even backtracking how to source the Python installer.
Better to just say "mastering this is a requirement prior reading the book" and be done with it.
There are full books on the topic that can actually help.
Replace this useless chapter with more content to which the book is actually dedicated.
My experience with the people around me who are in this situation is rather either:
- They just don't care. Society and others are not on their radar.
- They don't think it's that bad.
- They think it's not great, but the benefit is too good so they ignore the voice at the back of their head. Or they have a lifestyle and that takes priority.
- They think it's bad, but the friction to live according to their own moral view of the world is higher than their desire to adhere to such a moral view.
When I was 20, I declined interview offers from Facebook and Google. Huge opportunity cost. My friends looked at me like I was dumb.
I have friends regularly coming to me with ideas that are about spamming, selling personal data or basically fraud. They don't see a problem with it.
When you talk to people and say "advertising is basically normalized lying at the scale of the entire society", people just give you a blank stare.
There is no need to look for coercion every time you see something bad to explain it. The human population is diverse and they all draw the line of what's acceptable in different places.
This is not like IT where the Americans are completely dominant and clearly superior.
The European pharma companies are doing more than fine, despite their main market being heavily regulated and price-controlled.
The less charitable explanation is that US companies want to charge outrageous prices, and the American system let them to, so they do it.
That's what the USA are: a machine to prioritize profits over people. Sometimes it turns out fine, like for the startup scene. Sometimes it's terrible, like when lives at stake.
There are a lot of bad health outcomes built into our society, yes, but by the time people are confronted with the health impacts of cars, agriculture subsidies, for-profit healthcare, etc. it is likely that drugs will be necessary to treat the very real, immediate problems which any given patient has. Reversing the subsidies for things like car-dependency would positively benefit millions of people but it’s a generational change, not something most individuals can do.
I agree about the significance of those large-scale changes; still ...
> Reversing the subsidies for things like car-dependency would positively benefit millions of people but it’s a generational change, not something most individuals can do.
Individuals frequently can chose to not use a car, of course. Still, it's not realistic for everyone or all the time, especially in a society built for automobile use.
> by the time people are confronted with the health impacts of cars, agriculture subsidies, for-profit healthcare, etc. it is likely that drugs will be necessary
My point is that there are other treatments for illness. I doubt it's a coincidence that this patentable technology is so relied on in a hyper-capitalist society; other countries with better health outcomes use far fewer pills, iirc. Who will fund the large-scale study that says a valuable pill is unnecessary?
> Individuals frequently can chose to not use a car, of course
To some extent, yes, but my point was that it’s not realistic for many people because we treat walkable neighborhoods like luxuries. If you wake up in your 40s with a bad back and cardio problems because you live in a suburb and drive everywhere, you can’t roll back the clock and build sidewalks, legalize density, or run decent transit and on average don’t have the money to move somewhere dramatically better.
I think a growing number of people, especially younger ones, realize this is unsustainable but it took generations to get here and it’ll take a while to change trajectories, too. If gas prices had stayed high in the seventies that might have gone differently but a huge percentage of American neighborhoods are designed to minimize physical activity and that’s often enforced by law.
That's what I meant by, it's not realistic for everyone and everywhere.
> I think a growing number of people, especially younger ones, realize this is unsustainable but it took generations to get here and it’ll take a while to change trajectories, too.
Urbanist movements, including walkable communities, are much older than this younger generation. I think within a certain segment - well-educated upper middle class, maybe - it's long had influence.
I think they need to bring those ideas to other segments of society, which they have a hard time doing.
I definitely don’t think that it’s new to the current young generation but I am optimistic that they might have enough political clout to actually make progress. My neighborhood narrowly avoided becoming a highway in the 60s so we have some older folks who have been fighting car culture since before I was born, but there were a lot of people who didn’t really care because it was more affordable in the past, but their kids are a lot more motivated because it’s so financially non-viable now.
In the United States, the other big factor was recognizing how much it wasn’t just car culture but racism driving things. Despite the current moment, I get the impression that a lot of people are more aware of how much avoiding sidewalks and transit was driven by racism and just hurt everyone.
>Maybe drugs, or these drugs, aren't the most efficient solutions. Shouldn't we direct resources toward more efficient ones?
Turns out all the low hanging fruit have already been picked, so the only "more efficient ones" left are stuff like gene therapy, which are absurdly expensive, but still theoretically cheaper than a lifetime of care. Unsurprisingly the high sticker price draws much backlash from the public and politicians.
> all the low hanging fruit have already been picked
What is that based on?
Also, I'm not talking about 'low hanging fruit' necessarily; only solutons that become cost effective for vendors if drug prices aren't so extreme.
There's reason to think there is low-hanging fruit: Research is incentivized for the most profitable solutions for the vendors, not the most cost-effective solutions for patients.
>Also, I'm not talking about 'low hanging fruit' necessarily; only solutons that become cost effective for vendors if drug prices aren't so extreme.
>There's reason to think there is low-hanging fruit: Research is incentivized for the most profitable solutions for the vendors, not the most cost-effective solutions for patients.
High drug prices also mean you can charge more for one-off cures. See, the gene therapy example above.
I have hosting that regularly shut down my servers based on legal demands from jurisdictions that should have no reach my service whatsoever, or on total bogus claim.
If I refuse to act, they shut me down. If I'm late in acting, they shut me down.
Zero check on the legitimacy on the claim, zero trust in my debunking the claim.
The reality is, it's not economically viable to do so. I'm not giving them enough money to be worth it. So as long as I'm a small actor, anything that looks remotely legit is just processed as-is with no recourse.
The entire world can basically impose its view on me as long as they find a convincing way to tell my hosting "you are at risk".
And it's not one single provider either. Most of them do that: domain name, vps hosts, proxies, caches, etc.
The system is broken.