you literally said "cheap" and the comment said "cheap-er not cheap". I think the comment is correct and you are wrong. China is building the same design again and again and again. And it's still not cheap.
Doesn't really work that way. If you want to sue Abbot, then you have to reveal yourself. At which point, it will be clear that you were in fact using the product and did in fact agree to the ToS. If you never sue Abbot, then sure. But then it doesn't matter.
Gosh, they have statistics! By a man. A man from Goldman!
"I was quoted by a man from Goldman's in the mansion house, that in Hong Kong it cost them $70 to onboard a client. In the UK, it now costs them $10,000 to onboard a client just because of the regulation."
In the US about twenty years ago, there was a minor movement for a flat sales tax that would replace all other taxes. I lived in Georgia at the time, which was the epicenter of support for the idea. Proponents got themselves stuck in a metaphoric tarpit when they wouldn't accept that most people's way of calculating sales tax was different than what they promoted. At least in the US, if there's a 7% sales tax, it means if you buy something for a dollar, you pay seven cents in tax. Their flat sales tax would have been 30% using this method, but they wanted to promote it as being only 23% since $0.30 is 23% of $1.30.
I'm sure there were other reasons why it failed, but for the people I knew who supported it, claiming it to be a 23% sales tax instead of a 30% sales tax was a hill they were willing to let the whole thing die on (and it did die). Lots of people who casually supported it at first when they heard 23%, lost interest when it was clarified what that really meant. The difference between 23% and 30% isn't all that great but if you're going to overhaul the tax system, trust in those who are doing it is needed.
Laughing aloud at the thought of the average paycheck to paycheck consumerist blowing a gasket when they see a $24k tax bill for their $80k pickup truck.
Every time someone shares something it has to be new, otherwise it's not worthy of your attention? Couldn't you at least provide some constructive criticism why the argument falls short in your mind, instead of the sharing the first knee-jerky reaction that popped up in your head that just touches the surface?
> Couldn't you at least provide some constructive criticism why the argument falls short in your mind […]
For the flat tax, which is tax cut for the rich:
> This paper uses data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and unemployment. First, we use a new encompassing measure of taxes on the rich to identify instances of major reduction in tax progressivity. Then, we look at the causal effect of these episodes on economic outcomes by applying a nonparametric generalization of the difference-in-differences indicator that implements Mahalanobis matching in panel data analysis. We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.
The quality of discourse on HN has been nearing the bottom of the barrel (read: mostly indistinguishable from Reddit) since the pandemic. It’s very rare these days to see citations or even arguments that explain personal reasoning. Just like Reddit and Facebook, commenters mostly write what they think or feel as if it were unyielding fact, and the most common denominator (read: boring, derivative, often oversimplified assumptions) rise to the top via the voting system.
> The quality of discourse on HN has been nearing the bottom of the barrel (read: mostly indistinguishable from Reddit) since the pandemic
That's very much not true, and it's also a tale as old as HN at this point. Since I started commenting on HN in 2010 sometime, the quality had stayed more or less the same, and hasn't drastically dropped in quality like Reddit has done as it grew. Also, the amount of comments that complain that HN is turning into Reddit seems to have stayed at the same level of frequency too, fwiw.
The constructive criticism is that this has been the economic policy of the US for the last 40 years.
It's been a disaster that's lead to wealth consolidation not seen since the gilded age while bringing back old terrible concepts (such as company towns [1]). It's wrecked the middle class.
The fact is, tax isn't what gets in the way of company growth and innovation. It shockingly is actually the opposite. When you have buybacks, low taxes, and easy mergers and acquisitions, it encourages companies to behave in manners not good for the company but good for the owners of the company. That means sending money to stock buybacks, buying out competition, suppressing wages, and cutting corners which overall kill quality. That's because the name of the game is capturing as much money as possible.
High tax and strong corporate regulations like we had in the 50s, 60s, and 70s changes the perspective of companies. If you give a company owner the choice to spend a dollar in taxes or spend it on employee benefits, they'll spend it on employee benefits. But leave a loophole for how they can circuitously capture that dollar for themselves and they'll do that every time.
The tax cut and deregulation era of Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden has been a trainwreck that has lead us right up to the problems we have today. Nothing is affordable and the unrestrained capitalism has made it more expensive than ever just to live with everything getting worse year over year.
This guy pretends like the economic policy he's proposing isn't what we've been running and that's why it's so laughable dumb.
I have overseen over 20 phase III clinical trials. Many of those clinical trials have failed to show statistical efficacy. In every single one of those trials there are patients who see dramatic and undeniable benefits. In the oncology field, we continue to treat such patients even when the statistics say, no benefit. And, sometimes those patients just stay better. My point is, when the trial shows "no better than placebo", it doesn't mean the treatment doesn't work. It might be that. But more likely it means we don't know how to define the population of folks for whom the treatment does work. Maybe it's a particular genetic background, maybe it's age, gender, serum CPR or Tau level. Maybe it's something else. This stuff is complicated and interesting. And we are still figuring it out.
Very strange article. The author is very upset that an "intimacy tracker" might receive an 18+ rating on the app store. I mean yes, younger folks do it, but the vast majority of potential customers are 18+. Why is this an problem?
Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:
> The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.
I don't mind the 18+ label, even though it's up to the users what they use the app for, whether it's tracking sex, a partner's health, or personal wellbeing.
But I do find the history of age ratings and categories in the App Store and the limits they have to be quite hilarious, and figured I might as well write them down.
Hi OP! I’ll share what I mentioned below in hopes of a response from you directly, because I’m genuinely curious to hear what you think:
Seems like people should be of whatever age we consider mature before they start capturing intimate data about themselves on random platforms. If we don’t think you’re able to understand the risks of pursuing your reproductive impulses, do we think you can measure the risks of sharing data about those impulses on a platform you don’t control?
Local data or not, if I were the steward of a marketplace I’d use that position to create this kind of teaching moment for pre-developed consumers. If young people had been warned since the mid 2000s of how much of their intimacy they were handing over to Meta, ByteDance, etc. before they started, the world would certainly be better off.
Hey! I don’t disagree that people of any age should think twice before putting personal data (intimate or not) into any platform.
My point wasn’t about lowering the age rating. The issue is that Apple doesn’t have a real category for this kind of wellbeing at all. The age gate itself is sensible, but what’s funny is why it exists. It’s not "because we carefully considered how to protect teens’ data", it’s "because in 2009 the Store was drowning in farting apps, and we’ve been patching around that ever since."
Urm, did you read a different article then the one linked?
Because there's isn't really an argument innit - at least none that I took notice of. Isn't it just exploring the reasons why it is like it is today? They even made it abundantly clear in the beginning (and in the comments here) that the rating is fine for the app
And for what conceivable reason would this need to have sure underage people aren't using it?
A period tracker has relevance in the context of a sexual relationship, but there is really nothing about it that needs to be censored from underage people. It is not explicit content. It's a specialized journal, that's it
I bet that the ratings are dictated not by usability but by liability.
Yes, people younger than 18 engage in sex, but this has different legal consequences than for people past 18, and Apple has no interest to wade through that legal quagmire.
> Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:
I would imagine that the confusion arose because they read past that sentence. You wrote that you don’t mind that the app you specifically made for adults to use got the rating that it did and then sort of talk about how you don’t find the rating system to be rational.
I couldn’t tell if the subject of this article is “I think my intimacy tracking app shouldn’t have an adult rating because a user could use it for general wellbeing” or “I don’t like Fortnite”
That’s fair feedback, thank you. The point I was trying to make wasn’t "my app deserves a lower rating", it was "I built something for adults and realised there isn’t actually a correct category for it at all."
Once I noticed that gap, I went digging into the history to understand why the App Store age ratings and categories are the way they are, hence this archeological detour of a post.
all the machinery used to obtain and maintain an economically viable fusion reaction. Having worked with particle accelerators and synchrotron rings, I'll tell you that stuff breaks down all the time.
Something similar happened to a friend of mine. In San Francisco. I just sort of assumed it was just bad luck. Bad things happen occasionally even in good systems. But maybe that assumption is wrong? Is this a thing? Are ambulances just unreliable?
It Depends. It's going to depend on your location, how your health system works, and a bunch of luck.
Even in the most well-resourced system if your high-priority call comes in just after a bunch of other high-priority calls you may not get an ambulance in time as everyone's already helping someone else. Also in our current economic system there's a whole bunch of pressures that mean we can't base our medical care availability on the worst case, so sometimes people don't get the care they need due to lack of staff.
However I do think in a good system dispatchers would have visibility to know if an ambulance can be dispatched or retasked and how long it will take to get there. You can't make good recommendations without the information to do so.
FWIW, I also live in Toronto and been in an ambulance a fair few times (generally for false alarms that were still worth checking out); I can't recall it ever taking that long for an ambulance to arrive, even reporting less severe symptoms.
Very unlikely that would happen. The way similar issues have been dealt with in the past is that settlement is negotiated to something "reasonable" (at least arguably so) and administrable. Probably the settlement amount would just go to a fund that the state would then distribute according to its priorities.
Ehh. I've done mushrooms, lsd, etc. about once to three times a year pretty much my whole adult life (decades). I find it fun. I have a relaxed good time with like minded friends and that's it. I think the whole "mind awakening" nonsense is just as much nonsense as the PTSD or worse folks. Perhaps someone with underlying severe mental health issues might experience things differently. But for folks in a pretty healthy headspace, it's just a recreational drug with extremely low addiction potential and zero hang over. What's not to like?
I think the numbers of those early leafs (a lot were sold), their horribly degraded batteries, and their consequently low sales price make the numbers appear a bit more dire for resale EVs as a whole than they are in reality (breakdown loss of resale value by model and other EVs are doing much better). However, I think it is also true that EV resale values are lower than they perhaps should be due to used battery fears.
There are a bunch of California-only compliance cars that were essentially given away that would depress the values in the sector. I considered picking up a used Fiat 500e, but even though it was electric, FCA still managed to mess it up and a common recommendation was to keep a few specific tools in the back that enabled quickly disconnecting and reconnecting the battery.
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