Right. But a ticketing system doesn't solve this problem either.
A pre-paid ticketing system could make this problem worse because there is no "cue" as it were. At least a bill being placed on the table, paid, and then picked up later by the server. Having the bill picked up by the server is, ostensibly, the last interaction aside from refilling the water.
Of course, tickets could get handled in some special way like being redeemed at the end of the meal, or the ticket pays for the core meal, and a separate bill is given for drinks and extras not handled by the ticket.
At Alinea, it works just like you suggest - the ticket price is just covers the core meal, with the drinks being extra and settled at the end of the meal. Interestingly enough, though, the sister restaurant Next does require you to purchase your drinks option as part of the ticket. But I doubt there is much problem, as they provide a highly-coordinated service that already requires a constant awareness of where you are in the meal at all times.
For the non-high-end, non-pre-fixe market, the ticket is normally a deposit on the meal price, so you'd still have to settle the remainder of the bill when you're finished.
I think that in most of the cases, there is still a bill presented at the end. The article itself points this out:'
> The system also allows for different kinds of tickets, allowing for variable pricing. (Most restaurants are not prix fixe and will sell tickets as down payments on a meal as opposed to a full prepay.)
I don't think length of table use is generally a problem. Most restaurants have it figured out. Shit happens and you move people around. I don't think there is any solution for this beyond proper table management.
You can't paint all lobbying with the same brush. There are beneficial lobbying groups out there helping to bring a voice to issues in an arena where they would otherwise normally be drowned out. We just focus on the bad ones because they tend to have greater influence. Absolutist positions such as this are rarely true and sensible.
If the question was whether or not to ban lobbying, how do the benefits of lobbying stack up against the damage? That whole cost-benefit analysis thing...
Solution: Only a candidate can pay for ads, campaigning, and the like. There is a campaign contribution cap reasonably low as your average citizen could reach it. None of these BS PACs, none of this "I'll make a large donation if you 'listen' to what I want".
What happens in the rich candidate vs poorer candidate elections then? The richer one would get a lot more viewership and exposure, increasing his chances to win.
The problem, of course, is that the courts have struck down similar (actually, less restrictive) laws. So it doesn't seem as though there is any path that would lead us to that from where we currently stand.
I am not a lobbyist, but I am aware of the fact that contacting your representative to do something you want him/her to do is, in fact lobbying them. It's literally the dictionary definition:
"seek to influence (a politician or public official) on an issue."
My personal opinion is that an individual calling their representative is not the same as tons of money being poured into campaigns, but the fact remains that it is, by definition, lobbying.
Therefore, doing away with ....all.... lobbying, as the original post suggested we do, removes our voices from the system as well.
Is there a name for the argumentative tactic of speaking for a fictitious group of people so one can say, "I believe the thing you're saying is wrong, therefore everyone believes the thing you're saying is wrong"?
What is your point, then, exactly? First of all, it's clear the original post wasn't talking about "lobbying" as you've quoted its definition but not its actual usage. So why bring it up at all, if not to discourage those who support campaign reform simply by browbeating them into submission?
Seriously, why discuss trivial definitional disagreement when it only serves to muddy the waters and decrease the SNR of the conversation?
Because when it comes to campaign reform, there is only one way to accomplish it; legislation. Word choice and accurate usage are the most important things when it comes to legislation. You've never experienced tedious noise until you've been involved in the process of drafting federal legislation.
It's not implied purpose that matters. If you leave ambiguity, someone will read ambiguity. That's why there are entire panels and institutions dedicated to interpreting the meaning of the law.
So, I brought it up, because if you say 'we should do away with all lobbying', that does, by definition, include contacts by citizens to representatives. The original question was whether the benefits from good lobbying outweighed the drain of bad lobbying. I put my two cents in because I felt it necessary to define lobbying to render the question null through poor word choice.
The real question is whether or not substantive campaign finance reform needs to occur. Businesses and citizens both should have access to their representatives. It's whether or not a business or wealthy enough citizen should be able to effectively buy an elected official.
The question is whether or not to ban lobbying is not a reasonable one, if only because lobbying would not be able to be banned just on a principle of free speech alone. People have a voice—good, bad, whatever—and lobbying provides an efficient means of communicating that voice. The question is rather how to reduce, if not obviate, the damage caused by the role of money in lobbying without violating free speech rights.
It doesn't matter how different it is: If money is not speech, why couldn't Congress prevent the Times from spending money to write and print articles about candidates?
Have a guess. I have one: the consumer pays up nicely in the end. Lobbying is done (most of the time) for the benefit of coorporations who wan't to expand their business volume.
There are beneficial lobbying groups out there helping to
bring a voice to issues in an arena where they would
otherwise normally be drowned out.
Lobbying is like advertising[1] in that it's a vicious cycle. If company A spends $100 on advertising, then they capture the market, and push out company B. In retaliation, company B spends $150, and company A spends $200...
In 2010, Coca-cola spent $2.9 billion on advertising. They only did that because Pepsi spent about the same amount.
"Good" lobbyists only exist because bad lobbyists exist. If you could cut the budget of every lobbying firm by 50% then nothing would change. The only thing that affects outcomes i proportional spend.
1: In fact it is advertising, to an audience segment of one.
Companies like coca cola and mcdonalds have to advertise that much because they offer poor quality products that would otherwise be irrelevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8344345
You know what's also a good way to bring issues into 'the arena'? People's initiatives. Democracy is only really a stable system that can protect civil rights if you go all the way with it. There shouldn't be a law that the people as a whole cannot throw out. Otherwise a political system is not worth being called 'democracy' (= reign of the people). The government is supposed to be serving the people as a whole, not just a few financially strong and powerful groups.
With all the communications and monitoring technology, I am surprised we still have the antiquated representative system. This system came about in an era where the travel time of a message was in days not milliseconds.
Lobbying in the form of "We think this is a good idea, and here's why you should vote for it" is fine, regardless of the issue. Lobbying in the form of "We think this is a good idea, and a million dollars says you should vote for it" is bad, regardless of the issue, even if the position they advocate is a good one.
So, essentially, this is a rewrite for TeX. But the reality is that creating complex layouts really, truly requires GUI layout tools. No matter how good the output is for this application, it's entering into an firmly-established market with a few, large, expensive players, and not a lot of action.
Publishing automation tools are nothing new, but one has to give up a certain amount (usually a lot) of control to create a document on the cheap. Even for those workflows that are intensely reliant on templates, designers are still working in InDesign for the initial design, which is then handed off to a person, or more frequently a system, to translate into something to be automated.
Even as a long-time TeX user, I'm not sure what the appeal would be here, but I could have been in publishing too long to see this for what it really is.
I foresee mashing a robust typesetting application and a robust word processing application as being an extremely difficult thing to do well. Both are very different use cases and resulting environments.
A detailed understanding of this difficulty is what I am seeking. Can you explain more about why such a combined thing would be difficult and/or would be unable to satisfy both use cases? Thanks.
Each use case—typesetting and word-processing—have enough standardized tools to fill an entire application's interface. I think making the compromises needed to do be able to do both adequately would be too much to make either task worthwhile. Maybe that wouldn't necessarily be true for digital, like ePub, but I think that would quickly become true for print.
I don't feel a typesetting interface/context is amenable to writing long-form documents. When I take into consideration multi-column layouts, running headers and footers, art wrapping, page flow across multiple pages, there are what appears to be a lot of potential distractors from the writing process. Word processing documents, when I hide as much of the interface as I can, allow for the tight focus needed for long-form writing. Someone else in this thread suggested having writing and editing happen in another window, but that's still creating an abstraction from the layout, and not really having edits happen "in real time" if only because then editing is not happening actually within the layout.
Finally, I think there would be a significant barrier to training for many authors trying to work in layouts. There are applications, like QuarkXpress, that enable word-processing-like tools in the layout. But I couldn't imagine asking an author to learn enough about the above to ask them to write a long-form paper, much less an entire book, in that environment. Fonts are handled differently, styles are handled differently, etc.
You can type directly into layouts in InDesign and see your line and page breaks in realtime. I think where the problem lies in InDesign is that it is, at its core, a typesetting and layout application and not a word processing application. There is a lot of work to do to get to the point of being able to write in your layout, and pages don't get added dynamically when adding new content as easily as they do in a typesetting application.
> pages don't get added dynamically when adding new content as easily as they do in a typesetting application.
InDesign will actually do this. I think it's called "Dynamic Flow" or something? It can automatically append new pages to fit the content.
In general, it's not very eager to do this because when you consider spreads (distinct left-hand and right-hand pages), inserting a new page will affect the layout of all subsequent pages. You could insert a new spread, but that may not be what the user wants.
In other words, if the user is laying out pages, actual pages matter. They aren't just an implementation detail derived from the length of the text.
You wouldn't necessarily be "writing in your layout". You could do something where you have a separate preview pane that updates in real time. Similar to what Apple showed earlier this year with their Swift playground IDE, only for typesetting.
Apple has its issues with scripting in its apps but other companies like Microsoft and Adobe have robust scripting support in their applications. Developers like me have created significant workflows using scripting that save my company money, time, and errors. Apps like iPhoto and iTunes are really small potatoes by comparison. Having Javascript with Cocoa for scripting is truly powerful stuff.
Adobe's scripting APIs are usually 2 versions behind in functuality and very buggy. Anyone with significant workflows that script Adobe apps got there through lots of pain and suffering.
Yes, I know because I script for them all the time, but at least Adobe's API's try to be more robust than Apple's. My point was really more towards there being more to scripting than just Apple's own apps.
my experience as well; i doubt any app has such extensive scripting support as Microsoft Excel; OmniGroup's apps omnioutliner and omnigrafle also had excellent scripting support--demonstrable just by opening up an app's 'dictionary' using applescript editor (and comparing those dictionaries w/ the dictionary iphoto, itunes, etc.)
True unless someone has made years of investments in iTunes-sourced content, then moving over to a cheaper phone with the same feature set is no longer an apples-to-apples comparison. I have a collection that goes back to iTunes' and the iPod's very first days. I'm not terribly keen going through any conversion/repurchasing process.
If you bought your music after Apple finally ditched DRM, you can upload your AAC files to Google Music for free and sync/stream them to all your Android devices as well as your laptops/desktops.
If you "bought" your music with Apple DRM, you can pay another fee to actually own it and be able to play it on a non-Apple devices.
If you "bought" your videos with Apple DRM, consider it a lesson learned.
Taking the entire migration process you describe changes the "price" to be paid for similar phone, so my claim of false equivalence still stands.
There's no "lesson" when I have made the conscious decision to stick with Apple all these years. I may have paid a premium paying for iPods and iPhones, but I feel my time is valuable enough to not have to mess around with my media files in any way you describe. Nor do I feel the urge to spend money on music I have already purchased, but I don't see that as being a mistake from which to learn a lesson. Nothing has happened to me with Apple or its products so egregious to feel compelled to take on anything like you describe.
The 'mess around' process would just mean loading your existing music into Google Music one time. Heck, on a Mac, it may just ask by default if you want to sync your iTunes library. Then they're available everywhere you run Google Music... which means not being artificially locked to a single company's hardware.
Most people make the mistake to think they 'bought' a movie or DRMed music file when they really just rent/lease it long term.. And then they realize they're screwed when they want to the freedom to buy whatever device they want and have 'their' music they 'bought' on it. After all, most people didn't grow up buying a CD from Best Buy and having it work on their Best Buy CD player but not on their Sony CD player.
You may have realized what you bought into and consciously made the decision that you accepted the limitation in rights/etc in exchange for convenience/etc, but most average consumers do not.
Remember that music on on iTunes isn't DRMed anymore.
With movies you're SOL, but Google Play literally let me just upload my iTunes music folder, and aside from a couple of metadata glitches, it just worked.
How can anyone argue they don't have biases? From a 2013 article they ran explaining their politics:
"We like free enterprise and tend to favour deregulation and privatisation. But we also like gay marriage, want to legalise drugs and disapprove of monarchy. So is the newspaper right-wing or left-wing? Neither, is the answer. . . it opposes all undue curtailment of an individual’s economic or personal freedom. But like its founders, it is not dogmatic. Where there is a liberal case for government to do something, The Economist will air it. Early in its life, its writers were keen supporters of the income tax, for example. Since then it has backed causes like universal health care and gun control. But its starting point is that government should only remove power and wealth from individuals when it has an excellent reason to do so."
How would you define deliberate practice, then? I would agree that deliberate practice may be hard to define across all skills, but it could be defined for a specific skill.
For example in programing, I would consider problem sets and side projects with functions and goals that are aligned but still outside of one's normal scope of work to be deliberate practice. Working on Project Euler problem sets could be considered deliberate practice. They are problems that can be done in most any programming language, are known to be great for learning a new one, but generally fall outside the usual work of handling data, transforming content, etc.
I would consider Project Euler to be akin to practicing scales on a musical instrument: playing scales is not necessarily music in a "having popular appeal" sense, but it does enable new skills and depth of knowledge of the instrument.
Taking the Project Euler example, consistently doing the exercises, if they go in difficulty for each done, is deliberate practise in (probably) algorithm design, but does nothing for architecture. But redoing the same exercises over and over, always improving the design of it in each iteration (examples: reduce number of lines, apply DDD or hexagonal, etc, though the solutions in Project Euler probably not the best for this kind of practise) improves architecture skills.
The idea of deliberate practise is to always be improving in the tasks you are doing, usually by taking more and more difficult tasks in progression, but also analysing the past actions to identify where to improve. For example, I always liked to play tennis (and have many years of competitive table tennis behind me). Before I started working with a coach, my practises were mostly playing the game, maybe having a few swings against a wall when I didn't have a partner. When I started working with a coach, we practises my service over and over and over again, changing targets in the field, the kind of spin, and analysing most of the services to see what went right and wrong with my service. I can only say my skills improved at more than 10x the speed than when I was just having matches with other people.
A pre-paid ticketing system could make this problem worse because there is no "cue" as it were. At least a bill being placed on the table, paid, and then picked up later by the server. Having the bill picked up by the server is, ostensibly, the last interaction aside from refilling the water.
Of course, tickets could get handled in some special way like being redeemed at the end of the meal, or the ticket pays for the core meal, and a separate bill is given for drinks and extras not handled by the ticket.