But why does Uber need to spend 3.4B on injecting a useless blob of text between me and an overpriced burger delivered by a struggling illegal immigrant in a smoke-belching jalopy?
I know the counter-argument. "This will increase sales". You know what else would increase sales? Spending the 3.4B to replace the above with a uniformed delivery service similar to UPS. That job could pay benefits.
My last job did something similar. An AI blurb feature was researched and built and costs a good chunk of resources to run for no reason other than being able to tell investors AI was being used.
I proposed a solution using simple heuristics that would have accomplished the same output, would have been cheaper to build and cost next to nothing to run, but being economical, efficient and boring doesn't make exciting PowerPoint slides.
In most large tech companies the senior leaders want to run some vanity projects so having a research arm makes that possible. They can screw around without impacting product teams.
For the same reason the shoe industry spends billions sponsoring athletes and sports teams to hawk their gear. It's to build layer upon layer of abstractions to move the conversation away from how the sausage is made, and towards something that could justify their own bloated salaries, like promoting "sporting excellence" or "tech innovation".
> Only one amateur in my portfolio need "catch" the incumbent "out".
The rest can live out the rest of their short degenerate lives as the failed experiments that they are. This does however have the side effect of turning the entire town into a society of failed degenerates...
Larger cities have private schools. There are also embassy-affiliated schools (yes, even today).
In public schools there's this unofficial "letter grade system". Unlike the US, where kids homerooms are mixed around each year on purpose, in Russia a homeroom group sticks together through the entirety of their school career, grades 5-12. Of course some kids will move away, and new kids will join, but the core group remains. Many lifelong friendships are formed this way.
Now - and this part doesn't officially exist, but it certainly does in practice - these groups are not created equal. Let's say there are 3 teachers who are picking up a grade 5 homeroom. They will stick with these kids until they graduate. So, the teacher with the most seniority has their pick of the "best" graduating elementary students. These will be well-behaved and academically strong kids. Their new homeroom will be called 5A. Then the second most senior teacher has their pick. This homeroom will become 5B. And 5C onwards are the "leftovers". And these groups will stick together until they are 12A, B, and C.
If you want a good school experience for a nerdy shy kid - they have to be in "A". Of course, as a newbie who is unfamiliar with the system... your kid will likely be put in "C" ("ve"). And you probably know enough about how Russia works by now to understand how to go about changing that ;)
North Korea likely is extremely safe when things like street violence and bullying are concerned. It's only unsafe for dissidents.
And you know, you can also ask people. In software there is a large population that grew up in the ex-USSR. Many of us still regularly visit the old country and talk to friends and family that live there. And we aren't all bots, despite what many seem to believe.
But if far right parties are gaining votes - then some voting population is giving votes to them. Or are you saying that far right parties are not Nazis?
Which votes are those again? In the USA, which we're talking about here.
If refusing to patronize 1 nazi means the far right gets more voters, we would expect to see that in USA election results over the last year or so.
Fortunately, this hypothesis is not borne out in the data. In fact, I'd say your purported correlation is inverted, but I suspect there is a deeper, correlated variable: "doesn't like nazis" -> ( "doesn't vote for nazis", "doesn't patronize nazis" ).
We must be looking at different data. Most of Europe has seen a significant increase in far right support. Italy, France, Germany. And in the US, like it or not, there are people who feel represented by the MAGA movement. And last I checked - they managed to elect a president who invented this acronym.
Pretending these people don't exist might feel nice but ignore them at your peril. If this is what "Nazis don't vote" looks like - what would it look like when they start?
Approximately the same things were said about Dubya Jr's war with invisible WMDs. If you've forgotten - listen to some songs that came out at the time. It's not about a particular president, it's that the US seems to have a systemic dependency on starting these wars.
Information, both good and bad, is a lot more accessible this time around. It has been a dramatic accelerator to worldly views of America in the wake of their recent actions.
There are political similarities between the two aforementioned wars, but the social and technological backdrops are quite different, and they're working against US public perception. Furthermore, decorum is entirely gone this time around, which isn't helping.
Whole world would weep with joy if somebody like Bush jr would come into power now. Even when talking about that cocaine nepo kid of his cia chief father. I recall those times and emotions well from european perspective, not everybody here is 20-something.
These 2 are incomparable on any level. If you want to say it can always get worse that I can agree with.
and we're still experiencing damage from that war, and it's getting worse because of some things that it changed (patriot act, creation of homeland security, etc)
we've faced two major recessions since then and may very well be entering our third
at this point it seems we're just trying to find out where the breaking point is
The only "stability" gold has is an emergent property of an interconnected system of hairless apes somehow making each other believe they need it. Same with fiat, bitcoin, or whatever we come up with tomorrow. None of these things have any real utility outside of an expectation that the peer ape also finds them valuable.
Nah, this problem is systemic, and much older than the current administration. Or has everyone forgotten the "anthrax" in a test tube? The invisible WMDs? The fake news about soldiers tossing babies out of incubators? Setting up a web of lies and attacking is a foundational value of the United States.
I know the counter-argument. "This will increase sales". You know what else would increase sales? Spending the 3.4B to replace the above with a uniformed delivery service similar to UPS. That job could pay benefits.
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