Blyton and Dahl used to sell about equally well a few decades ago, but Blyton's books fell off a cliff as the racism, anti-gypsy, etc parts of the books meant parents weren't buying them for their kids anymore. Which isn't surprising, considering the many tens of thousands of great books, the vast majority of which don't have these issues, that they could buy for their kids, no decent parent would want to subject their children to these retrogressive ideas presented as absolutely normal.
Avoiding this fate is why the Dahl estate made the decision to edit their books.
Of course, if the people who really think that these capitalistic decisions are a threat to literature and human culture and history, they would challenge the root of the problem, which is copyright protections preventing humanity from enjoying these apparent building blocks of our culture, decades after the authors have passed away and have no say on how they should be treated.
It's also much harder to make millions from the lottery than it is to get a degree from an Ivy. There might be a few hundred winning the lottery every year.
So I'm not really sure what information the statistic that there are about 140 Poker millionaires in a year vs 75k Ivy grads conveys.
If you have an open mind, I encourage you to look in to poker theory. It's far deeper than you appear to think, requiring a competent understanding of statistics, good mental maths, and an ability to perform under pressure. There's a reason many consistently successful modern poker players have some math pedigree. Many pro players go on to work at trading firms, Jesse Martin and Vanessa Selbst come to mind.
If you do truly think it's no different to the lottery, I'm interested in your explanation as to why these people (a) come from the background they do (a high schooler with decent maths can tell you why the lottery is -EV) and (b) go on to the careers they go on to.
> So I'm not really sure what information the statistic that there are about 140 Poker millionaires in a year vs 75k Ivy grads conveys.
Poker is played competitively both online and in the casinos of every country all over the world 24/7. There are a phenomenal number of players compared to Ivy league students.
Unlike the lottery, it is also largely considered to be a game of skill based on a combination of statistics and social manipulation.
GP is generally implying that because the ratio of players to successful players is so small for a game so widespread that is is very difficult and requires a huge amount of skill to make a significant amount of money playing poker.
Not really. It's not just 1 billionaire replacing another billionaire.
Twitter was public and is now private. That's a huge difference.
It's not just any billionaire. It's literally the richest person in the world. That also makes a difference.
The idea that the only reason this is in front page news is changes in censorship policy does not seem to follow considering nearly every other major purchase makes it to the front news. Michael Dell taking Dell private was heavily in the front page news. There were no censorship policy concerns there.
Even completely setting aside the political aspects, how does TikTok have less of a moral downside as a product?
At least Facebook and Instagram can genuinely claim to be built on the idea of helping people build relationships.
As far as I understand it, TikTok completely eliminates the friend and family network. It's simply providing mind numbing bite size entertainment. It's genius is removing everything that might distract someone from scrolling mindlessly.
Well, iphones have also only existed since little before Uber came around.
The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.
Maybe what you should be demanding is that cab services provide apps so you don't have to hail/call, etc. There are several companies that can provide this for your cab jurisdiction area as a third party service and they won't price gouge the cab drivers and/or the customers, and they won't use illegal threats and bribes to change laws to suit their needs.
The reason that was the only way cabs were available because those were the only communication technologies available.
Nah, it was would because taxi company owners are lazy morons. Well, to put a better face on it, a given one-city taxi company would have at a most a few hundred drivers and maybe ten actually back-office/real-employees. That level of small business isn't going to create a web interface to their operations in the early 2000s. Sure, third parties were offering some high priced web-based hailing service but of course that kind of thing would have to be higher priced than the already high-priced (and crappy) "interface" that calling the dispatcher for a ride involved. Why didn't taxis create their own phone/internet hailing service? The same reason Al Gore's "information superhighway" was dead in the water. That is, the average abusive monopolist - like a local taxi company - could only look at the Internet and say "sounds all-right but I'm not lowering my price for that, I'm raising them web-design costs money".
I’ve used non-Uber taxi apps in cities like Austin and they failed to show up multiple times and about 50% of the time the “finding driver” part takes about 15-20 minutes before I gave up and just used Uber (one time my phone died during this process and I was left with no taxi). It’s obviously treated like a 3rd tier part of their companies.
People want tech companies providing taxi services, they don’t just want the old local taxi service with a half-assed app bolted on + the usual dirty city taxi cars w/ no review process.
In Sweden, I have had the opposite experience. The Uber app is never used, due to how low paid the drivers are. The taxi apps are actually decently good and pretty reliable. They are not as feature rich as the Uber app, and more expensive, but when you need a ride at three in the morning, don't expect the Uber app to get you one.
I don't know why the app would need anything more than "I want to be picked up here". Dispatching worked fine when you had to call a phone number. The app could literally be an interface to texting.
Because no one wants to sit and wait around wondering if a car will show up?
> Dispatching worked fine when you had to call a phone number.
Dispatching absolutely did not work fine when you had to call a number. You were often left twiddling your thumbs wondering if a car will actually show up.
> The app could literally be an interface to texting.
Why not start your own competitor then? I'm sure it will be easy to create such a simple app. Better include some load-balancing, because I'm sure everyone will rush to use your featureless app instead of these other apps with nice interfaces, that show you exactly where the car is, with accurate ETAs, integrated payment, safety features, etc.
> You were often left twiddling your thumbs wondering if a car will actually show up.
They always showed up for me. And I have no idea what city/country you think it didn't. I feel like this is just Uber PR.
> Why not start your own competitor then?
Because the network effects of drivers and network effects of riders. It would cost a lot of money to compete with that. Also, to deal with a lot of other backend issues that have nothing to do with the app itself - like making sure the driver's cars are in good repair, commercial insurance, etc.
The actual app itself is much easier compared to the business side of things. If someone wants to do the business side, I'll spearhead the app development.
> Have you ever even used the Uber app?
Yes. Also, I never said it was trivial to create a clone of the Uber app. I said things worked fine before there was a complex app and would work okay with a simpler app. Because the complaint I was responding to wasn't feature parity, it was bugginess. But lets go through your points.
>that show you exactly where the car is
Uber actually has admitted that the majority of the cars you see on your screen are simulated to give you a feeling for how many cars are in the area.
Or do you mean once a driver is assigned, in which case I don't know the point of it. I can just look at the ETA.
> with accurate ETAs
Now who never used the Uber app. Their ETAs are wildly inaccurate.
> integrated payment
That you have to check and dispute in case the bill you for drivers cancelling on you, and a variety of other things hooked directly to your card. I'd much rather pay people what I owe them in a one-off transaction.
> safety features
I've never seen them in action, but I'm glad they're building them.
Can we collectively agree that the reason why people are reporting very different experiences with cabs before uber, is because cab-rides in different locations were very different experiences?
In London, the chance that calling a cab (or even the less regulated minicab services) would result in a no-show seemed remote. In San Francisco, it was a regular occurrence. In the rural UK, calling a cab would have been a rare, expensive event, and would require finding an unoccupied local driver among a very small subset.
I'm sure there is even a wider variety of taxi implementations worldwide.
Uber fails to show up for me about half the time. It just goes through driver after driver, moving to another when the previous one doesn’t come well past the estimated time. Has happened in three different cities in the past three months.
and i’ve used uber in austin and had some of the worst experiences i’ve ever had. personal anecdotes dont really matter— uber is a shitty company and so are taxis, two wrongs dont make a right.
In 2007 I had to drop my car off to get some work done. The plan was to take a taxi ~3 miles down a major road to my office, then taxi back up there at the end of the day.
Well it took three calls and about 90 minutes, but eventually someone showed up to drive me six minutes down the street in blistering 98F. It was more like 2 hours of standing outside baking in the sun to get someone to drive me to the shop at the end of the day. Turns out in my city (Dallas) taxis really only exist to drive to and from the airport. Worst case with ride-share companies, you're looking at ~30 min wait for an uber to arrive, with real-time updates if the driver feels like canceling, and auto-orders you another one.
Taxis work nothing like uber. If you are not traveling to/from a major sporting event, convention center or airport, the taxi does not want your business and will actively avoid/ignore you. For small, one-off trips like a coffee date, going to a concert, dropping your car off for service etc uber is great. Taxis absolutely do not want to be in that business. What this fight is about, is who is allowed to pick up/drop off at places like the airport, metallica concerts, apple wwdc etc.
You're extremely lucky. Or maybe you change your laptops before Apple acknowledges the very real problems they have.
So many of their laptops have had issues necessitating recalls, but because they were able to delay those recalls until 5+ years after those devices were released (even if complaints started way earlier), they get away with it.
I've already had 2 Apple laptops where I took in a 4-5 year old device, and basically had them replace/refresh it for free. One was the gen 1 or gen 2 Macbook which had a ridiculous discoloration issue on the case palm rests, combined with the case peeling apart, and the other a Macbook Pro (2011?2012?) that had a graphics card issue.
Ironically, you can buy the 14-inch M1 MBP with no touchbar... and you can buy the M1 Air with no touchbar... it's only the 13-inch MBP with that god awful invention. I'm sticking with the M1 Air for now specifically for that reason.
I think there was also a period post 2015 MBP up until the new M1s now that the laptops were pretty bad and had a lot of points of failure. The current ones seem like a return to a more robust workhorse to me. I was lucky and and had a 2013 model that lasted me up until I replaced with an M1 recently.
On the personal front my 2012 MBP still works. An old 2004 PPC MacMini is still going strong though it runs OpenBSD rather than the last version of Mac OS X it supported.
My experience with Macs as work and personal laptops has been very good.
CPI is a completely different measure that includes a lot more than currency value vs other currencies (usually the dollar).
I'm curious why you wouldn't compare it to the direct measure, which is the value of the Argentine Peso.
Because if El Salvador had bought Argentine Peso instead and let's assume they bought them in September, when they first started buying Bitcoin (if I assume they bought the Peso gradually over the past 4 months like they did Bitcoin the Peso would look better since its value has only dropped over that period), they would have bought $88mm USD of Peso on September 1 at a price of 97.71 Peso per dollar, giving them a 8.598 billion Peso holding.
At today's price of 104.50 Peso per USD, that holding would now be worth $82.28mm USD.
Compare that to their BTC holdings of $60mm spending the same amount of USD to buy Bitcoin. Clearly $82.28 > ~$60mm, so they would have done a lot better with the Argentine Peso instead.
Of course, BTC is highly volatile and for all you know it may rise by 50% making their holdings more valuable than the Peso. However, what it does show is that BTC appears to be a poor currency, that specifically does not protect from inflation or currency risks.
It might be a great investment, as a lot of people appear to be treating it, but that in fact makes it a poor currency. An investment should appreciate over time. Whereas a good currency should depreciate over time (although slowly) because if it appreciates over time then that greatly reduces the incentive to spend/invest the resources that currency represents in actual productive endeavors, which damages the real economy, and means a country does not build as much infrastructure, grow as much food, or employ as many people, as it would with a slowly but consistently depreciating currency.
The Argentine peso is at 220~. Without snark, I think talking about argentinian peso is reserved only for argentinians. It is just impossible for non-argentinians to understand a multi-currency multi-denomination monetary economy.
Venezuela also has currency controls, but Argentina is still different, because we have had more monetary systems and we also have a non-repressed black market economy+currency economy.
Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard.
Leopard: Quick Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional perspective, but wow it looked amazing.
Snow Leopard: They just cleaned up everything.
Early versions of Snow Leopard did have a bug that could delete all the data on your hard drive. :)
10.6.8 was pretty good, but I've had similar stability on Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9). I think Snow Leopard has developed a legacy partly because Lion (10.7) was pretty bad, and partly because Snow Leopard was the last release to support Rosetta.
Then again, Yosemite (10.10) was also really bad, and I seem to be the only one who thinks Mavericks was the actual pinnacle. *Shrug*
Snow Leopard was great to work on. When we were told the next release of OSX would focus on stability and performance, morale went way up. Having a massive backlog of bugs felt like an unseen energy vampire, sucking away the will to live. You just knew some user out there is hating life because you don't have time to address their issue. The Radar issue count for Finder was in the tens of thousands alone and it could be argued each bug was worthy of being fixed.
Avoiding this fate is why the Dahl estate made the decision to edit their books.
Of course, if the people who really think that these capitalistic decisions are a threat to literature and human culture and history, they would challenge the root of the problem, which is copyright protections preventing humanity from enjoying these apparent building blocks of our culture, decades after the authors have passed away and have no say on how they should be treated.