I really love all of the things that I can do with my smartphone these days that I'd never have been able to do with an older device (trying to even browse the Internet on a phone that I owned as recently as five years ago was painful), but I do miss a certain amount of reliability and hardiness of the older devices. Maybe nostalgia plays in a bit here, but I think that the move away from embedded device to general-purpose computer brought with it a lot of the downsides of the latter, along with the upsides.
As nice as it is to be able to watch an HD video stream on my pocket-sized computer on a stretch of rural highway halfway from nowhere, I don't always trust my phone to be able to, like, dial 911 when it really counts, and that's a little scary.
>> ...they even went so far as to say it didn’t even matter what you studied!...
> ...They weren't wrong. The sheer number of people who have had their resumes ignored simply because they don't have a degree of some sort attests to that.
This doesn't imply that having any degree would have gotten their resumes looked at, or secured them an interview.
Looking over other people's shoulders while they job search I've seen plenty of openings that require a bachelor's but don't require it be in any particular field.
These may or may not be the best jobs but it's not an uncommon requirement and they are typically better in some dimension than openings that require a HS diploma only (at least within the same organization).
But ~$89,000 isn't six figures, so...? Also, I suppose it depends on the source and relevant area covered by the statistic. I've heard other (lower) figures elsewhere.
>> Veterinarian programs specific limit how many students they accept, because if they didn't, their graduates wouldn't be able to afford a living wage.
> Are you sure that's the only reason?
I'd be surprised. I'm sure that, as always, budgets and class sizes are concerns as well. There are also other ethical concerns to be considered (e.g. lots of students implies lots of animal cadavers implies...?).
Limiting class sizes to keep wages inflated sounds a little conspiratorial to me, but I won't deny that it could be a factor.
Personally, I'd really not like to see a precedent set for a company entering a market, doing very well, and then being legally compelled to provide their product as some sort of legal right to an entire population. It might be a different story if said company is employing anti-competitive practices, but telling somebody that they're now legally obligated to serve a community because they're just too good at what they do, or so popular that nobody else can best them, seems a little too authoritarian for my taste.
Oh, they're allowed to withdraw from the market, or decouple the privacy-invasive bits and find a way to make that work financially when users don't opt in to those. Nobody's forcing them to serve Europe if they insist on being this awful regarding mandatory tracking. They're free to allow space for a competitor to grow with a different attitude toward privacy.
Right, I'm not talking about withdrawing from the market, I'm talking about remaining in the market and being allowed, as a private company providing a private service, to freely associate.
I have no qualms with a competitor starting up to serve those denied by Facebook, but let's not muddy the water by equivocating a monopoly as a result of anti-competitive practices with one that forms simply because nobody wants to use anything else.
Restrictions on how private parties can provide a private service are ubiquitous in every market. In the US, home-cooked meal startups get shut down because their uninspected kitchen doesn't meet commercial standards. In Ethiopia, you need a local entity with an IT license (seriously) to import a Dell server that you've already purchased. In Canada, you can't agree to an employment contract that allows for zero-notice zero-compensation firing when you didn't do something extreme like steal. Etc.
I don't think most of the people who find Facebook convenient for coordinating groups actually choose the tracking knowingly and willingly (at best begrudgingly), nor do they choose to exclude the people who object more proactively to those things even when that's the effect.
Society's legislative and regulatory choices have a valid role to fix negative externalities of what economic actors would otherwise naturally do. Natural monopolies/oligopolies like electric companies, highway operators, and Facebook are all worth regulating for roughly the same reasons - even according to Orthodox free-market undergraduate microeconomics 101.
> Restrictions on how private parties can provide a private service are ubiquitous in every market...
I'm speaking more about "ought" than "is" here. I don't see any reason why Facebook should have to choose between serving everybody, regardless of the regulatory burden that it places on them, and taking a hike from the global market entirely. I'm not saying that they won't be forced to do so anyway.
> ...I don't think most of the people who find Facebook convenient for coordinating groups actually choose the tracking knowingly and willingly (at best begrudgingly)...
And yet, they've probably chosen it all the same. In the hypothetical scenario where somebody has a metaphorical (or literal) gun to somebody's head, forcing them to use Facebook, I don't see how Facebook themselves can be blamed for this, and simply chalking this sort of thing up as a "negative externality" and saddling Facebook with the burden seems to be weaselly way of making Facebook to the will of somebody who just can't bear to give it up.
You can't always get what you want. Some of us would do well to internalize this a bit.
I find this distinction increasingly odd as time goes on. Or, at the very least, the use of the phrase "real life", as if interactions over the Internet are somehow cleanly separated from the rest of one's interactions.
According to the Wiki, some people in the past also objected and preferred the term AFK, but nowadays with smartphones and tablets, that seems increasingly obsolete as well :)
It's analogous to asking if jQuery provides comparable functionality to JavaScript ES5 enumerables. It does, it's just a strange comparison given that the former is a library built on top of the latter language, using a different API due to the former predating the spec
The ubiquity of the "funny == upvote" mentality is rather depressing, and I'm glad that HN (generally) tries to avoid that. It makes the comments section a much more interesting place to be (to me, at least).
As nice as it is to be able to watch an HD video stream on my pocket-sized computer on a stretch of rural highway halfway from nowhere, I don't always trust my phone to be able to, like, dial 911 when it really counts, and that's a little scary.