This article alone is grounds for me to never, ever use Apple gift cards -- just by virtue of all the personal photos, etc that I've entrusted to iCloud.
The real wisdom to take away from this is that you need to keep copies of everything you've ever entrusted to iCloud because iCloud cannot be trusted. This was one instance where a giftcard seems to have caused someone to lose access to their stuff, but there's nothing stopping some other random thing fully outside of your control from causing Apple to kick you out of the things you've given them to keep for you.
Everything in the cloud is at risk of being taken from you.
Companies like Apple are not your friend. They explicitly make no promises and insist that they are not accountable/liable. Stop trusting them.
I agree with this but I am not sure the personal risk of loss is very high with Apple. It is real but is it even on the same order of magnitude of losing your family photos in a house fire 30yrs ago? I used to keep a disk in a safe deposit box with my pics but got lazy. Is that good practice or paranoia?
Seems like good practice to me to keep digital backups in your safe deposit box. Probably a good idea to check/refresh them every couple years too. When it comes to things like house fires and getting screwed by cloud providers everybody thinks that it can never happen to them even when examples of it happening to others exist. The important thing to make sure that you're covered in the event that the rare but catastrophic event does occur. Especially when the cost of doing so is so low. For back ups it amounts to little more than a thumb drive and a visit to your bank every couple years.
Honestly you'll be safer if you don't use any major cloud provider for anything valuable. They've proven over and over again that they are very unreliable.
You'll hear tons of similar stories with GCP/Google accounts.
This is the same reason I dont use GCP -- ever -- for business. If there is ever an unintentional linkage in GCP of your personal gmail account, and you have an issue on GCP, your personal account can get locked out.
agreed. was it AI ?! not that i care - ive been doing a lot of tailwind apps in ai with great success. AI is great for the web, takes all the tedium out of it
Brought back memories! This was so frustrating, felt like a huge amount of randomness added to the controls. And each time you failed, you had to re-do the whole level. The other frustrating part of the game was mid-air refueling.
I'm not arguing for taxing AI (or tractors) -- but...if we made the wrong decision 100yrs ago, should we make the wrong decision again? It is worth debating.
The wrong decision wasn't using productivity enhancers - it was building a society around the idea that everyone MUST have a job, even in the presence of substantial productivity enhancers which massively decrease the number of jobs. We've scraped by so far... so far.
The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are.
The alternative is like feeding an animal instead of letting it live the lifestyle it's adapted for. That helps it in the moment but over time its capacities atrophy and it ends up weakened, twisted and harmed with nothing to spend its natural instincts on.
> The problem is that for the vast majority of people to be psychologically healthy they must have a job. This isn't a societal decision, it's a reality about how humans are.
The "job" can be things like volunteering, artwork, finding a cause, inventing, raising children, teaching...
Work can be subsidized and based around personal interest and achieve the "psychologically healthy" aspect that you describe.
> If we get working AI, humans will be unemployable at inventing useful things.
The point you're responding to is that humans would be able to do it for personal fulfillment and thus preserve their mental health, not to be useful to someone else.
When they used to say that you'd make more money going to university, that is what they were talking about. The idea was that if you went into the research labs you'd develop capital to multiply human output, which is how you make more money. Most ended up confusing the messaging with "go to university to get a job — the same job you would have done anyway..." and incomes have held stagnant as a result. It was an interesting dream, though.
But not really what everyday normal people want. They like to have somewhere they can show up to and be told what to do, so to speak.
They must have something interesting to do. It doesn't have to be a job.
The ideal society is one where humans only do things that they actually enjoy doing, whatever that is, and automation does the rest. Any human being forced to perform labor not because they want to, but because they need to do so to survive, should be considered a blight on the honor of our species.
I would wager that more jobs accelerate psychological and physiological issues than, say, volunteering or unemployment with active community engagement do. At the very least, the psychological benefits of unemployment are objectively an incidental side-effect of its actual purpose, which is labor for a profitable enterprise. That is to say that employment is still "functional" if it generates that labor even while destroying someone's psychological health. If that health is paramount, the structure of employment probably needs to change in order to privilege health over productivity, even to productivity's detriment. Otherwise, the vast majority of people would be better off with some other institution.
>>> I want a separation between the streaming platform companies and the content making companies, so that the streaming companies can compete on making a better platform/service and the content companies compete on making better content.
>>> I don't want one company that owns everything, I want several companies that are able to license whatever content they want. And ideally the customer can choose between a subscription that includes everything, and paying for content a la carte, or maybe subscriptions that focus on specific kinds of content (scifi/fantasy, stuff for kids, old movies, international, sports, etc.) regardless of what company made it.
This sounds fine in theory, but how would it work if the content were continuously changing? For example, the final straw that made my cut the cord of cable-tv was getting locked into a 3yr plan for cable TV only to get the Disney channel for the kids -- only to learn that Verizon/Disney had a fight and I lost the channel. https://deadline.com/2018/12/disney-warns-verizon-fios-custo...
Now, i'm still locked into the 3yr plan with Verizon but dont have the content I wanted. I know people complain about paying $10 or $15 for a streaming service, but imagine paying $100 for cable TV and being locked into a 3yr contract. I'd much, much rather have a la carte services I can pick and choose and cancel as desired.
However, if you're talking about the Amazon Prime TV model, then I'd totally agree with you. I think that is the ideal model -- Prime is a nominal cost (for now) and you can add/remove channels as you wish.
I had neither healthcare coverage in high school nor expensive college consultants. When I got to college (Cornell) all my friends told me they had plenty of extra time on the standardized exam (the SAT) by virtue of doctors letters declaring conditions requiring accommodations. I'm sure some of these were legitimate. But practically everyone I spoke to supposedly had ADHD and resulting accommodations on the SAT. I'm not a MPH or Epidemiologist, but does 80% or 90% of the student population truly have a condition requiring accommodations?
Once 10 or 20% of students are doing this, it isnt unexpected for everyone to start doing it just to get on an even playing field. As usual, the poor students lose out because they cannot afford the doctors or expediters who can facilitate all these things.
>> You've made a much larger claim (80-90%) than the article. That is interesting. And anedata, unless you have solid evidence of your opinion.
Firstly No evidence provided and none needed as an unscientific anecdata supporting my personal shock.
- Many of these accomodations for SATs are done in high school and then it isnt required anymore, so naturally people dont ask once they have already gotten into college. The SAT used to be a singular choke point for top schools, and becomes irrelevant immediately after.
- I was speaking about SAT and the article was talking about accomodations needed for college housing and other things
1. I provided an anecdote based on friends' personal statements, not statistics based on school, you should trust the school's stats, but i'd really like to see the stats from The College Board on SAT scores, with a WHERE clause on only scores/accomodations for students going to top schools
2. I provided an anecdote that may well be wildly inaccurate being n=1
3. I entered to college in 1996, we're 29yrs off from my experience and the article
4. As I said above, accomodations in college != accomodations for SAT
Central to the challenge of UBI and housing costs is the law of rent. UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners. There are ways to make that possible.
Rent controlled apartments being held by tenants no longer using them as primary residences is pretty common. A famous case of this was Cleve Jones in San Francisco who tried to make it a huge political deal when his landlord raised his rent to market because he was 1. living in Guerneville full time and 2. subletting the apartment. The media environment is one where it's ok for a master tenant to be a de facto landlord and make money on real estate, as long as it's not the landowner themselves!
>> UBI could work if all its redistribution was not immediately captured by landowners.
Doesnt this happen now because we're all so tethered to HCOL cities? With UBI presumably people would be geographically free, and there is a lot of inexpensive land and housing around the country. Doesnt the capture problem only happen due to scarcity in HCOL cities and thus not an issue?
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