Those tables seem a bit... odd? Are we led to believe that between January and February, no fast food restaurants closed? Not a single one? And same for July and August?
Also, a gold star for prominently featuring the totals cumulatively, oooo scary number go up! I did the needful:
> Wedekind found that the women overwhelmingly preferred the T-shirt smells of men who had the most dissimilar MHCs to their own.
Is deodorant making people more likely to have kids with closely genetically individuals? It would be funny that being cleaner and polite increased genetic diseases. And I do not mean close relatives, but non relatives that just by chance are genetically similar.
Is there any study about how generic diversity has changed thru the centuries?
> Budget cuts meant that America stopped publishing some national-accounts data last year
Governments need to invest money to properly work. many countries have been following neoliberal policies, not only the USA. Cut everything that the government does to cut taxes for billionaires and to not fix the mega rich getting loans instead of profits to not be taxed, and countries will fall.
A modern country needs investment. Accounting is just one of the many things failing.
That's true. I currently work for a boutique real estate consulting firm. A senior guy, who has been working with Census-sourced data for two decades or more AND has good sources within the Census bureau--of the firm told me that Census department is considering of stopping some survey data (some sections of American Community Survey or some sort is what I recall as an example he used; but please don't quote me on that) due to lack of sufficient budget.
One trivia that I learned: some parts of the Census building permits data is collected in the old fashioned way via mail. The Census bureau has to consolidate these disparate sources of building permits from 3100+ counties and deliver monthly, annual revised monthly, annual summary values. It's kind of labor intensive and error prone (and thus, revised data is released once a year) to collect.
Yes. Social sites had a card blanche to publish anything without consequences because it was user-generated content.
Social sites used that power to publish their own stuff under the same protection.
That has broken the system. Social media sites are 100% responsible for all the misinformation, scams, and hate that they publish or promote. And they should be legally accountable for it.
"We are not accountable because the users are the ones posting the media"... but we post and promote whatever we want is a terrible way for the world to work.
> Sure, a construction worker can't be climbing the rafters at 80 years old, but this idea that we just transition to leisure and getting together with friends at a certain point is both fairly novel and of dubious value.
Peopled died and killed for the right to a pension. And many more are still fighting for it around the world.
To disregard that so costly-gain right so lightly seems quite a privileged position.
A cosy job, stress-free, well paid, creative... may be worth keeping if you do not have hobbies nor family. But that is not the case for most people. Rich people lives longer than the poor, job conditions is one important factor.
> The data collection indicated a worrying series of fatal accidents in Brazil, all concentrated in five months. The recurrence of these accidents in rural regions and the intense sound of the discharge reported by witnesses indicate the proximity and intensity of the lightning during the accidents.
So, rural areas without lightning rods nor any other safety mechanism. Good study that can save lives by taking prevention measures in rural areas in developing countries. But it will probably not affect anybody living in New York.
> But it will probably not affect anybody living in New York.
There are vast swathes of American rural land with too-few and far between lightning rods. Maybe not in NY, I wouldn't know, but near as I can tell no U.S. state requires the installation of lightning rods in rural areas.
> As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp group.
That is by design. To privatize public spaces and control what is said in that spaces to monetize it is the goal. No individual parent can fight the power of the corporations that push us in that direction.
The public discourse of TV and other media is dying, while the private echo chambers owned by corporations are increasing. That is not good either.
What I think the study is missing is the impact of social media on society, and impact on society on individuals wellbeing. I see an increase in paranoia, extremism, pessimism, etc. caused directly by that closed communities that spin out of control and create the perfect dish plate to grow the most paranoid people. For kids and teenagers it will be worse, as they are still growing and learning.
I used to avoid spyware apps. My antivirus would flag them so I could remove them. Until all of them became spyware. Widely used apps by well known corporations do more intrusive and more constant tracking that the apps that my antivirus used to flag.
Avoiding these brands is one step, but it will not last long. Only the law can deal with total corporation surveillance.
It should be forbidden for all device manufacturers to make apps, tracking, registering, etc. mandatory.
Every TV, phone, camera, tablet, fridge, ... is becoming a spying device like in the worst scifi dystopias. And as soon as the company stops supporting them they become trash to pollute the planet so they can sell you the next one.
Regulations should have come a decade a go. We own nothing, we have no privacy, we are sold products 24/7. I will vote for a goverment that protects me of this total corporate surveillance. It is their duty towards citizens to do so.
And it will happen, like feudalism died this techno-feudalism will die too.
My vote could be swayed by a policy platform making it not merely forbidden, but outright criminal, to market software and hardware that cannot function without assignment of a user id. Everything from drones to games.
In many cases this would thoroughly annoy certain authoritarian regimes that are normalised as totalitarian surveillance states. Their exports would be disrupted. What a pity.
Which is a genuine shame, since LG's webos was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise monolothic android market for smart tvs. I have an older one ( never updated, never connected ), but.. it is just one of many devices ( during easter yesterday I watched in weird state of drunken realization that the gizmo under tv is a set of cameras embedded into some external speakers ). I am officially out of touch with the current zeitgeist. Like... I knew I was an outlier before, but I honestly did not think it was this crazy.
I have been using a linux minipc with debian+xfce for more than 15 years and no regrets.
Yes having a keyboard with touchpad looked like a bit cumbersome at first, but then when al tvs went smart using an onscreen keyboard with a rf mouse is a nightmare.
I use a steam controller for controlling my media PC. Easy to type with and way more convenient than using a mouse. The only potential downside is needing steam running for keyboard capabilities but for me atleast that isn't a big deal.
The more you learn about smart TVs the worse they get. They're not cheap because TV technology got cheaper, they give away the TVs because they sell all your data. They even content match external sources over HDMI.
The Sony TV I have a blaring LED when the microphone is active, and you need to pair it independently of the remote itself so these parts function.
Sometimes during software updates, this pairing is broken, and it never tells me that the pairing has been removed, and never forces me to pair the remote.
I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.
If you want to modify GP’s proposal to exclude things that also have a service, how long until DJI adds a service to their drone? (It might even be a negative duration; I don’t own one, but it would shock me if there wasn’t some kind of service associated already, perhaps to prevent flying a drone in unauthorized areas [or justified as such] or allow access to some online component of camera service.)
> I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.
You should be able to use your phone and install software on it without signing up for the sellers services, I think there is no reason to not allow that except evil lockin.
See windows for what happens when you don't legally enforce that, its ridiculous windows forces you to sign up to their services.
Even then, almost all online services are susceptible to re-imagining such that user/session identifiers are self-declared and can be rotated/discarded at any time. To this, some folks would be yelling, "that's not how my/XYZ service works", which is a proxy statement for those unwilling to say, "my/XYZ business model is abusive".
And that of course is also why this only happens via regulation.
You may be aware, but you can acquire and use the World of Warcraft client without signing up for anything with Blizzard. You register and pay to connect to their servers.
First, to download the world of Warcraft client, you need to log into the battlenet client, which requires an account. Second, the world of Warcraft client is completely useless without a server to connect to. Alternative world of Warcraft servers are technically possible but illegal to run.
You have to reverse engineer the protocol encryption, which is illegal in some places. Also, lots of copyrighted material such as NPC names and quest text must be stored in the server and transmitted from the server to the client, which is piracy in plain terms.
We don't need new regulations. This is probably covered by commercial fraud statutes, as they represented the sale of the device as a sale of tangible personal property. There is no condition required to complete that purchase - the offer is of the physical device and the implied ability to use that device for its obvious purpose.
we need new regulations - the solution currently would be following what you say and suing the company in I guess small claims court or a class action suit for lots of people mad about the same thing against a single company that they make drag out for years while making money doing the same scam and then the payout will just be the cost of doing business.
The small claims courts solution of course not everybody has the time or resources to do that, so the company wins that way.
We need new regulations that stops it before it gets to the point where you have to go to small claims court or class action to redress the wrong.
No, you need a government that enforces it’s laws.
When people are speeding, you don’t need individuals to sue them in small claims court to enforce the speed limit. Having that requirement for consumer goods is bizarre.
New regulation i.e. more civil law. Which require you to sue in a small claims court to be enforced. How does this change anything, when as GP said there are already civil laws?
many regulations are enforced by government agencies that prevent the product from being sold if they do not match the regulations, the civil laws the GP pointed to are contract laws which means that the buyer if they feel ripped off has to sue.
Omitting a regulator makes enforcement a civil matter and the entire burden is placed on the consumer, which is to say, the legal scales are tipped throughly in favour of rogue manufacturers. Good luck suing DJI; you’ll obtain neither satisfaction nor restitution, and it’ll take years of being strung along by lawyers to realise it.
The even worse outcome of failing to protect the consumer at the point of sale is you’ve tacitly swallowed the tenets of an authoritarian surveillance state.
We need new regulations and they have to bite so bad the surveillance capitalism companys go bankrupt. If its working , the prices for devices go up because the thirsty road between oasis is priced in. We also would get real innovations as the companies would have to develop real USP again .
When the governments all over the world are making their citizens download mobile apps I doubt whether there will be any regulation prohibiting hardware manufacturers forcing apps on consumers.
I live in Europe and I love this kind of regulation, but I hate other stupid over-regulations we have here. Yes, you can have good regulation and over regulation at the same time.
I would go further, it should not be (just) forbidden, but taboo. Just like it is taboo to install a camera in a bathroom or to listen in to private conversations.
If I have a thing, that thing should obey me. Be it a crowbar, a PC, a smart lamp or whatever. It's a value in and of itself that I can trust in my things. What about criminals? Sure, it is convenient a car can spy on a criminal and tell the police where they are, but we shouldn't allow that. Just like it would be convenient to force priests and lawyers to tell there secrets, but we as a society decided that there is greater value in confidentiality.
I mean especially for a society like the US which is traditionally individualistic and distrustful towards government etc., it should be a matter of principle that "my stuff" doesn't spy on my and serves me and no one else.
> Just like it is taboo to install a camera in a bathroom or to listen in to private conversations.
Give it 5 years. The xiaomi or LG above the bed is likely already watching and listening. Interesting how the taboo shifted from "no camera in the apartment" to "no camera in a bathroom". In many short term rentals you have outright always connected IP camera installed inside apartment because of "break ins", "squatters", etc. The owners don't see a problem, don't accept complains.
Oh, there are already cameras in bathrooms. Everywhere that has an infrared sensor near your buttcheeks that auto-flushes, or on a urinal staring into your crotch, or simply on a soap dispenser, blinking impassively until you lather up.
Those IR sensors are basically cameras; they are wired up for power, they trigger with your image.
So don’t act all surprised when they are hacked and subverted to the visible spectrum and recording capabilities.
IR motion/proximity sensors are not basically cameras. You can't get an actual image from them. They are essentially a single, unfocused pixel tuned to a wide angle with a narrow filter tuned to specific wavelengths. Some of them will have a few extra pixels to try and reject background motion, but still we're talking like 3 or 4 pixels for a whole scene.
Sure, you and I can "know this" intellectually, but the end result is that there are conscious machines lurking in every public restroom, and they await our presence, and upon our arrival they awaken and they spring to life and perform their service for the hu-man whose body temperature is somewhat normal.
So it matters not whether it's one pixel or 50 megapixels doing the work there, what matters is that everyone who attends a baseball game or eats at a restaurant is accustomed to a conscious machine that can "see" their buttcheeks well enough to know exactly when to activate the flusher without any pesky hu-man touching it.
And that there is electrical power and, probably, networking available in the restrooms so that the conscious machines can stay alive and discuss buttcheek sightings with one another and their mothership.
If you'd hide your spy camera in the soap dispenser viewing angle you'd hide your camera anywhere. You could choose to only use manual cisterns and you'd still have to worry about cameras hiding to see your junk. Probably even moreso since you're really got something to hide tbh, Streisand effect and all.
I first encountered this pattern in a rare wearable device, over a decade ago. I bought it from someone and had to contact them to deregister the device.
The foot in the door was theft prevention. Crime rates in the targeted regions of those devices was the original motivation and the enabler. From Chesterton's Fence principle, that has to be solved before the zero consumer ownership problem can be solved.
i paid an extra £50 for a washing machine without WiFi, but I'm not sure they'll be around in ten years. my microwave oven has two knobs: how hot and how long.
I’ve been preaching the Gospel of Knobs for decades. When I was a kid, a microwave had a power knob (already at 100) and a time knob (0-45min, with finer gradations for the first 10-20 minutes). To start heating, just twist the time knob to the time required.
A few years later all microwaves had chiclet keypads with terrible user interfaces. They’ve improved from there over the years but never to the convenience of the original knob layout.
A knob is way more annoying than the single button modes on my GE Profile.
I put whatever leftovers in there. Pasta, chicken and rice, soups, BBQ, doesn't matter. I lightly cover it. Press Reheat. Perfect every time. I don't have to judge how much to turn two knobs.
Same goes for potatoes. Stab it with a fork a few times, butter and salt the outside, toss them in and press "Potato". Perfect baked potato every time.
Same goes for steaming veggies. Frozen or fresh, doesn't matter. Toss them in a bowl, put a bit of water/butter/seasonings in it, lightly cover, press Vegetable, and boom perfectly steamed veggies.
The one-touch sensor modes on my microwave are fantastic. And this is a 20-year-old microwave, so it's not like adding this tech made it less reliable. I'll be sad if I ever need to have a different microwave.
how does it know how much stuff there is, does it weigh?
I've only ever left the how high on high, and the time is 3 minutes for chilled, 10 for frozen. so in a way I agree, two buttons saying chilled and frozen would also work for me.
Maybe it has some kind of scale. But it probably mostly handles it by tracking humidity within the chamber. Some of these modes don't even bother showing a time when they start, they'll cook for a bit and potentially power cycle the magnetron for a bit until it then sets a time and finishes. It complains when you open the door.
I've used a number of microwaves with these modes which asked for a weight. Those were pretty untrustworthy on their results, because moisture content and starting temp can vary greatly.
I stumbled upon them, but I strongly think the mid-2000's era GE Profile are probably some of the best appliances ever made. They were at least the best dishwasher, oven, and microwave I've ever used.
My washing machine is about 20 years old; I changed the carbon brushes for the second time recently (they last about 7 years); everything else seems fine and I hope the machine will last forever. It's just a drum with a big electric motor, a valve for water in, another for water out.
Part of the problem is you can't even count on appliances to last 10 years anymore. These industries can force people to accept new indignities by making sure their old device dies prematurely and the only new ones to buy are shit.
Yeah yeah, survivor bias, rose tinted glasses, conspiracy theories, blah blah. I've heard all the canned refutations. It's true. Appliance manufacturers got better at making things worse.
And even if the device doesn't die early, it will eventually have to be replaced for one reason or another. I got 20 years out of my Honda, which wasn't great but not terrible either, but trying to replace it with something new that had comparable reputation for reliability and also no touch screen computer spyware bullshit was a serious problem. My only choice was Mazda and the although my new car does have the physical buttons and knobs I want, they are easily the worst quality buttons and knobs. All mushy with no satisfying clicks. One company holding out and selling cars or appliances without the new horse shit isn't enough, because without comparable competition they are still free to cut corners and make something worse than could be purchased in the past.
Absolutely. But the technocratic system we are moving into requires "smart" everything and being de-anonymised online, at least for governments and corporations.
It's been awhile since the populist has risen up and demanded the government actually do their jobs rather than get rich and catering to the rich coasting on the destruction of our privacies, rights, institutions, and freedoms.
The fact nearly zero legislation has been introduced to punish companies for violating the protection of our data with the bazillions of data leaks is telling of which master they serve.
We need to make small claims court far more accessible. But outside of the GDPR, there's also just weirdness in terms of what is covered where. I can appreciate that having laws at the county level, the municipal level can be onerous to comply with, so you want things at the national level -- if not international.
But as soon as you do that, some asshat works to reduce regulation because "regulation bad" without any qualifiers. And then as you say, lack of enforcement, is that alternative to this.
Give them their laws, make them feel as if things have been done, but then don't enforce. You're in the same boat, but people "feel" better.
This is a bit of a tangent, but where I live you have to cook a hamburger to safe temperatures. It is illegal to do otherwise, unless it is freshly ground in house, and we have actual, real inspectors that will ensure safe handling practices.
(This isn't me railing about eating raw meat, I eat my steak med-rare. But that's a steak, if you're going to cook a hamburger that way, you need to wash the outside, grind it up, and cook+eat it within hours. Many restaurants are buying mass produced burger paddies and not even cooking them, which is pure insane.)
Yet when I was in California, it's OK to just present a charred outside, a raw inside, along with loads of parasites. The restaurant is covered if they put up a sign saying something about 'raw meat can make you sick' or whatever.
So every restaurant puts up the sign, then just doesn't care about cooking it to safe temps. Yee-haw, FREEDOM!
Point is, people themselves, everywhere ... whether it's a small business or just their customers, don't even know, understand, or really care.
And this is the true problem. People can't even understand the risks of raw meat, something I was taught in public school when, oh I don't know, freakin' 10 years old!
While it doesn't seem that difficult to people on this forum likely, it surely is for the average person. Clearly.
Right? People need to learn to read the small print. “Needs valid subscription for all features to work” no thanks. If something like this isn’t informed before the purchase you have a valid reason for a return/ refund.
I bought an android phone that worked and soon it will reset every 3 days, so Im unreachable unless I enter the PIN. What kills the idea of having a secondary phone just in case.
It will only reset every 3 days if you don't unlock it. I'm pretty sure most people unlock their phones within 3 days. There are some concerns from people using their phones as unattended mobile hotspots; this concern is valid there. However you can just disable the device PIN or turn off the feature in this case.
As far as I know an Android phone isn’t unreachable after reboot, it simply has the same locked screen as always. The only difference is the difficulty to unlock it without the PIN. So in your case it would reboot once (not every 3 days) and then just continue doing nothing.
Well after the reboot Android enters the Before First Unlock state which is significantly more secure. I don't know if that influences the ability to receive regular phone calls, but I'm pretty sure Whatsapp/signal calls won't work.
I own an iPhone (and iPad). It forces me to re-enter my device password, every couple of days. Has done that, for ages.
I think that can be disabled, though. I know of a couple of folks that won’t even enable Face ID. I think that’s insane. The phone has our entire life on it. The thought of having that much information available to any pickpocket is sobering.
I refuse to use custom apps for things like banking and store loyalty, etc. I keep a photo of my store loyalty card’s barcode in my Photos app, because it does get me significant discounts, occasionally, but I won’t install their app.
Most of these custom apps seem to be pretty shoddy quality, in my opinion (I’m a snob, though. Many folks don’t seem to mind). They seem to be written with some kind of hybrid system, and some are little more than webviews.
It was not clear from a recently posted article on the matter that this would be a setting, but from the change log it does appear that it can be switched off.
> Enables a future optional security feature, which will automatically restart your device if locked for 3 consecutive days.
What's disingenuous is the opposite: using the excuse of security to force more and more user hostile spying features on every device. Same with children.
Yeah, everybody here agrees. The main problem is to get this implemented and this will not happen by just venting here. So I'm still waiting for someone with good ideas.
Regulations would absolutely be nice to have, I do like how the EU does actually try to get some good regulations down, my biggest problem with them is though that they don't have any teeth. A lot of the time the cost of the relatively small fines are baked into the cost of doing business if they get caught in breach. It's infuriating. Maybe a fixed percentage of revenue from the services or product that infringes would be more appropriate.
I wonder what the "free-market" types will say to minimize criticisms like those in this thread once everything that can possibly be purchased requires bending over for this sort of abuse.
Is the fantasy that some entrepreneurial savior will come along and voluntarily forgo all the massive spying profits in order to cater to the minute proportion of consumers perceptive enough to realize they're getting molested on the daily?
How about smartphones, for example? "Vote with your wallet," says the smirking corporatocrat, "and just buy a mobile operating system that respects your personal privacy." Alright professor, looks like my choices are iOS or Android, so I'm kind of hosed either way? Unless I want to return to a 2004 feature set, or perhaps a GNU/Linux paperweight with a 20-minute battery life that can't use banking apps or place phone calls?
I exaggerate (but in my opinion only slightly), and sincere apologies for tone--but it's quite frustrating to be met again and again with such a smug dismissal of what to many of us feels like an inescapable horror. This depraved race to the bottom, with every MBA-steered ship vying to see who can violate us the hardest, seems to be standard practice these days, and "purchase different products" puts the onus on consumers to fix what isn't their fault in a way that leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
Wow, this was not a "smug corpo" opinion? I renovated a house recently, and had a plethora of choices for cheap smart options, instead after research I found some expensive options with MQTT support for HomeAssistant, they got my money.
I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.
You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.
Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.
The way I see it, the suggestion that one can simply "vote with their wallet" is absolutely a pro-corporation stance because it pretends that consumers and megacorps have equal footing in the market. This premise is a bit of a spherical cow because it--conveniently for corporations--ignores monopoly, price fixing, anti-consumer corporate fraud at scale and flouting of regulations. Perhaps, in the frictionless vacuum of an Ayn Rand wet dream where every interaction is a transaction between two equals operating perfectly rationally, where there's no governments thus no regulatory capture, no barriers to entry, and so on, this might make sense--but in our world it does not.
You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."
I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.
Hey, you're right. When I said nothing will change them I guess I should have said "nothing will change the goals of a company" apart from your money. The practicalities are hugely affected by law. Maybe I should have originally said "Vote with your money, lobby with your voice"?
Hey, we don't argue like that here. I didn't say that. I said there isn't a business model yet that supports a phone with privacy. There are a few, and they'd force you to be creative on how you interact with certain apps, but you'd have what you wanted at a cost. Hell, I'm sure a Linux Phone with a bunch of crypto apps would work fine, suck for other reasons, but there you go.
Basically impossible, or at best very impractical. Companies change their product after you buy them. This is not a hypothetical - this happens all the time. It happened to you, and to me.
My most recent example: I wanted to calibrate my display using a "calibrite display pro hl" and suddenly got prompted with a software update. After updating, an account is suddenly required. This device is way past its return date. I cannot return it. I'm now stuck with a device that cannot be used with their software without creating an account.
Another example: Philips Hue devices were changed to require an account.
These days I focus on getting commercial variants of devices, since they usually don't have cloud or smart crap in them. For example, there's commercial variants of many TVs. They don't have smart crap in them and are designed for 24/7 usage.
Completely agree that this kind of behaviour should be illegal. My thoughts are products should work from purchase with their offered feature-set (or be forced to recall), have a factory reset mode, and an opt-out of updates.
I always was told that, but I hardly believe that can work. You have to at least also do a viral YT video like the OP too or rather really have competent, independent media with a good reach doing product reviews.
The point of excluding inhabited ice regions is not due to lack of population its due to lack of potential developable land. My point is to put yourself in American shoes when they developed after WW2, there was so much abundance of developable land, resources, and wealth plus this new automobile coming onto the scene, it was natural that it was going to develop the way it did.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands was completely car centric just like the USA until the 1990s, when they decided to start redesigning roads to prioritize walking and cycling. Are you sure these things are really inexorably linked to geography?
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