But consider that Sunnyvale, California has the benefit of a very upscale demographic, no gang activity, low organized crime, etc. What works for one place will likely not apply elsewhere (e.g. no one-size-fits-all solution).
Organized crime (especially drug crime) is a quasi-military force. The police are threatening billions of dollars in illicit profit, and that will not go unchallenged easily.
> Organized crime (especially drug crime) is a quasi-military force. The police are threatening billions of dollars in illicit profit, and that will not go unchallenged easily.
Arguably that should be addressed by a different organisation than the folks who enforce traffic laws and investigate petty theft. The state guard, perhaps?
So in Ireland, as mentioned elsewhere, our normal police wear a hi-vis Star Trek uniform, and aren’t generally armed. We also have a few specialised branches for organised crime, terrorism, etc, though; some of those _are_ armed, and have significantly scarier uniforms, and much more extensive training. Same organisation, but totally different role.
We do have an Association for Drug Enforcement, but having one government entity cover every bit of gang activity in the nation seems like a lot of effort.
Police will always need some SWAT and borderline military teams. The question is whether the average street cop needs to be weapon-wielding law enforcement, and I suggest the answer is no.
The danger level goes down when it's known that a cop's power is in their reinforcements. The individual cop would be little danger and doesn't need to be shot.
While using the gasoline engine, the power accessories (power steering, power brake assist, ABS!) are functional, but when the gas engine is powered off, you'll have none of them? That's going to get someone killed. And on top of that, the climate control issues -- A/C won't work, and the heat will only last so long as the gas engine is preheated and then only briefly as the coolant isn't being circulated.
The concept of hybrid is an invisible marriage of gas/electric propulsion brought to us by Toyota who perfected it in the Prius. This is just a hack as far as I am concerned. I would be more impressed if the engine were removed entirely, and this motor were bolted up to the transmission as a replacement flywheel.
OK, but there are a few questions first.
Is this change desirable, or undesirable? What is the correct number of glaciers and are we moving toward that or away from that number? Why?
If we are expecting the world to stay the same and never change (homeostasis), then we expect what has never been before. Planetary history is one of heating-cooling cycles, occurring well before mankind existed.
It is the speed of change that is the problem. Rather than asking what is the correct number, we should ask how fast are we approaching either extreme. Historically these cycles lasted about 100,000 years, so we can safely consider that as the ideal. So if we are at 10% glacial coverage now, we ideally be at 10% in 100 years, too.
it is undesirable, because it is indicative of climate change which will negatively impact humanity
a better number of glaciers is however many would indicate climate change which positively impacts humanity, or a lack of significant climate change
philosophical stoned-speak about nothing staying the same and stuff going in cycles doesn't change the fact that this is an indicator of current and future climate bad for humanity
History repeats itself. I'm old enough to remember when "Cable TV" meant "no advertisements." And then it was just a few between programs. Then during the program, which eventually made it indistinguishable from "over the air" (antenna/aerial) broadcasting. Now Netflix, and Amazon repeat the lesson for another generation of consumer.
> I'm old enough to remember when "Cable TV" meant "no advertisements."
You must be infinitely old then, because "Cable TV" at its inception had ads. Cable TV was originally just bundling all the local stations, and it was like that for thirty years. So the first thirty years of cable had ads. Even most of the first few cable-only TV stations had ads. The second cable-only TV station, WTBS, had ads. Nickelodeon, ESPN, CNN, USA, all had ads from their start and were some of the very first cable-only TV stations.
That's a great idea to make the recruiter actually look at your profile and ensure it indeed matches the offer. Too many lazy recruiters do a simple linked-in search and bulk email everyone who matches.
I had a "great offer - perfect fit for your skillset" notice from a recruiter recently, describing me as a "standout candidate" and urging me to apply. I read the description and replied back "which part of the position makes me the "standout candidate?" is it the complete lack of alignment in skills? (they wanted a javascript dev, I'm a former C/C++/C# dev that transitioned to BA then Product Owner for the past decade.) Maybe it's the "easy commute" of only 9 hours 45 minutes each way? (the job is in northern Ohio, I'm in central North Carolina!)
Sadly this recruiter never responded. Missed opportunity. If they came back with a humorous response (e.g. "oops! That's our mistake, but let us tell you about something else...") I might have continued to work with them. Instead, I just added to my block list.
The worst sort of "elephant in the room" journalism -- everything is to blame, but that obvious thing that everyone took leading to an enormous, never-seen-before statistical anomaly. But it's not that thing. We're sure.
I presume you mean the pandemic? I've had a similar complaint on a lot of analysis lately. People are looking to blame a ton of the previous few years trends in terms of anything but that. It is very weird.
The study in the article tracks young adults from 2000 to 2016 and was published in 2019. It entirely predates the existence of COVID-19 vaccines. Please stick with facts instead of what you 'feel' is true.
Are you attributing the decade-long annual 2% increase in heart attacks among young people to the COVID vaccine?
> A study of more than 2,000 young adults admitted for heart attack between 2000 and 2016 in two U.S. hospitals found that 1 in 5 were 40 years old or younger—and that the proportion of this group has been increasing by 2 percent each year for the last decade.
But anyway, yes COVID itself is also a potential culprit and yeah, the vaccines also should be monitored closely. In fact both are analyzed every day for this type of signal. Please publish a paper if you found some (not gleaned from the vibes around popular news articles).
J.F. Sebastian? He's suffering from a genetic condition that causes him to age prematurely (ironic, since he's a geneticist who designs replicants and simpler creatures). He failed the medical screening required for off-world living, and thus is confined to life on Earth.
I'm afraid I disagree with your claim that J.F. is "suffering serious cognitive decline" due to his life on Earth. To the contrary, his confinement on Earth is not the cause of his psysical decline, his physical condition (genetics) is the cause of his confinement.
I think linsomniac is crossing wires between the film and PKD's original novel: in PKD's novel John Isidore, a radioactively damaged and sub-par IQ human, aids the fugitive androids.
And in PKD's novel, the remaining residents on Earth wore lead codpieces to protect themselves from mutation.
The film differs in that J.F. Sebastian is a creative genius, not sub-par IQ, and yes his genetic condition is the proximate cause of his confinement on Earth: but the film clearly asks: what caused the condition? The film doesn't say but pretty much implies the same as PKD's novel [that one of Sebastian's parents or ancestors was radioactively damaged].
In general the film implies but does not lay out any of the (unnecessary and seriously tiresome) exposition from matchstick characters that PKD's novel did, and that makes it stronger. (Arguably except for Gaff, and especially the unicorn scene in the Director's Cut). Ditto, omitting Mercerism in place of a general existential malaise.
I might have misinterpreted something, but wasn't there an exposition piece from Isidore about how he could heal animals and humans before his abilities were burned out by exposure? It sounded like fantastical ravings of a diminished mind but maybe it was meant to highlight in his fantasy world his desire was to heal.
Excuse me, but what? The Craftsman brand historically was a consumer premium brand, priced midway between tradesmen premium brands like Snap-On and consumer "hardware store cheap tools" -- Craftsman was never a low-price brand. Craftsman used to stand for quality, with a lifetime no-questions-asked guarantee wherein, if the tool fails for any reason, it will be replaced. Period. No questions asked, no receipt required. Quality. And men proudly used their father's or grandfather's tools.
I remember well when Craftsman moved hand tool manufacturing from USA to China. Clearly cost of production was lower, but prices didn't change. The company could pocket the difference... and that's just how it went, at least until the consumer wised up and realized what was happening : a quiet substitution of Chinese-made cheap products but keeping yesterday's premium price. Cheap tool at top-dollar price. Tradesmen are not fools -- they know when their tools are not holding up, and they're being cheated. So the consumer rightly felt cheated and abandoned the brand.
Sears broke the contract, and quickly lost the trust. In just a few years, they destroyed one of the most trusted brands which took 100 years to build. The brand was sold off, and now it's just another meaningless string of letters. Today, Sears is dead and gone, for many reasons just like this. Good riddance.
> Sears broke the contract, and quickly lost the trust. In just a few years, they destroyed one of the most trusted brands which took 100 years to build. The brand was sold off, and now it's just another meaningless string of letters. Today, Sears is dead and gone, for many reasons just like this. Good riddance.
What actually happened: Sears got rolled up with KMart, eventually went out of business. Sears house brands like Craftsman and Kenmore (home appliances) were sold off during the fire sale at the end. Ironically, Sears was the Amazon of the early 1900s but became too invested in big mall stores. When the ecommerce boom hit, Sears had just closed down their catalog division.
What really happened is that Eddie Lampert engineered a financial bust out of both Sears and Kmart. Extracted billions and left the carcass of formerly great companies.
It's accurate that Lampert did engineer a bust, but it happened after Sears had missed the ecommerce boat. I don't think Lampert could have done the deal if Sears hand adopted the internet. The Lampert purchase happened in 2005. Sears shuttered the catalog business in 1993, and Amazon launched in 1994. Amazon started expanding into non-book product in 1998, and it was clear to the Sears universe that they had completely and utterly messed up.
> Lampert is a self-proclaimed supporter of free market economics and is a fan of libertarian writer Ayn Rand.
Big surprise there.
From another article:
> As Sears blew through its dwindling cash reserves, Lampert’s hedge fund made loans to the company money that were backed by the company’s assets, including real estate balances on Sears credit cards. That made him Sears’ largest creditor: Sears owes him at least $1.3 billion.
>Craftsman used to stand for quality, with a lifetime no-questions-asked guarantee wherein, if the tool fails for any reason, it will be replaced. Period. No questions asked, no receipt required. Quality. And men proudly used their father's or grandfather's tools.
This means people bring in 25, or 50 year old worn down tools, and Craftsman replaces them for free. While having to pay modern material and labor costs to replace a tool that was bought 25-50 years before. If that happens too much, it becomes a huge liability on the company. Hopefully the person walking in to replace a damaged or worn hammer or screwdriver decides to buy a set of wrenches while standing there, making it an upsell for Craftsman, but likely it didn't happen enough to keep them viable.
Harbor Freight offers the same warranty now on their hand tools, and Home Depot on Husky's (Home Depot even did a promotion around the time Sears ended their warranty where they'd replace a craftsman tool with a husky for free).
The cost of the replacement is marketing at some point; replacing a obviously abused tool may be a technical loss but you've a customer for life; unless you betray them as Craftsman did (which is why people are still so heated about it twenty years later).
But no one looking to seriously buy tools goes to Harbor Freight, expecting to pass that tool to their child or grandchildren. They go there to buy the crappy chinesium grade tool that gets a job done. If they find that they need the tool often enough, then they buy the heirloom grade one.
I'm impressed that the Craftsman brand, without any manufacturing capability since it was all outsourced, and its reputation falling due to lower quality tools and its association with dying Sears, still sold for nearly a billion dollars.
Even now it's probably one of the more recognizable brand names among "the general public" even if tradesmen and those in the know wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
You can troll bankruptcies to see what the brand goes for sometimes, I know someone bought the ToysRus brand and stuck them inside Macy's for some reason.
My mother was a banker. She asked a hypothetical question of me, 30 years ago, that I've never been able to answer: "Name for me one company that was better, for the customer or the employees, after a merger."
YouTube’s algorithm routinely drives people to more and more extreme content and is designed to be as addictive as possible so that users don’t leave. A lot of this is the result of Google’s acquiring them. I’m curious how you think it’s better.
Let me also be clear that it’s not like it was squeaky clean and friendly prior. But to say it has improved since the acquisition…I’m having a hard time seeing that.
The acquisition by Google happened 18 months into YouTubes existence. It's been 18 years since then. I don't know if you really recall what a site was like 18 years ago.
Besides that, what Google provided was hosting infrastructure and legal protection. Otherwise they would have been sued into nothing and couldn't have afforded to serve video.
It's understandable. It was originally allowed to be its own thing. There were several iterations of it being brought into the Google fold, and it would be easy to mistake any of those for the acquisition event.
The comment I'm responding to asked if either the customer or the company were better after the merger.
Google's (and YouTube's) customers are advertisers. Advertisers are certainly better off with the scale and reach that Google juiced YouTube with, and Google earns about $15B annually in revenue from it.
In no world would Youtube be even remotely profitable without advertising. Google ran it as a $B+/year loss for years before managing to making it profitable.
Tell me now a believable alternative growth story for Youtube where Google didn't buy it and the service isn't "corporatized" and not losing money.
You can't compare an unprofitable small-scale startup product to what the same product needs to be to make it 1) planet-scale and 2) profitable.
Yeah, without an acquisition, YouTube doesn't exist today. And most acquisitions would have turned out far worse than the Google one did. (See Evernote...)
Surely this supports the poster's statement - they went from the Miura and Countach to todays RGB gamer mouse mobile with a Volkswagen drivetrain - a true Shakespearean tragedy
"Why do you think this was a merger or an acquisition?"
The reason I think it was a merger is, that it was a merger.
"The first Mercedes-Benz branded vehicles were produced in 1926, following the merger of Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler's companies into the Daimler-Benz company on 28 June of the same year."
Mercedes was a car name from the Daimlers side of the merger (from a car seller and racing team) - so it was Mercedes-Benz.
Organized crime (especially drug crime) is a quasi-military force. The police are threatening billions of dollars in illicit profit, and that will not go unchallenged easily.