It only needs to be paired to an iOS device for initial setup and configuration. A watch with cellular can operate independently of the iOS device after setup and configuration.
It's been a year or so, but some carriers refused to sell me a watch only plan, it had to be a new cell plan for a phone too. (And pairing with an existing phone meant it had that cell's number, not a watch only one.)
I'm very curious where your data comes from to back up this statement. "The current level of pedestrian fatalities from motor vehicle collisions is the right level" just seems wrong to me.
The obviously-too-low speed limits cause all speed limits to be called into question. Thus, Americans drive about 10 mph over the limit on suburban roads, where lots of fatalities occur, and the opinion that speed limits are too low is very common. Also, significant data exists that shows that the vast majority of fatalities involve a driver that is speeding.
How would it cost extra lifetimes to people sitting in traffic? If there's sufficient traffic to slow traffic meaningfully from 30mph, a 20mph limit isn't going to make a difference?
If we cultivate trees, then remove them from the earth and atomize them into the air, then plant more trees, they're a renewable resource but it's still causing climate change.
The effects of climate change are not instantly reversible. Imagine shifting weather patterns dry up a wetlands. Removing carbon from the atmosphere does not recreate that biome
CO2 doesn’t disappear from the atmosphere the moment you plant trees. In fact, burning wood is worse than burning coal here, because, for the same amount of energy provided, burning wood is going to emit more CO2 than burning coal.
> Energy output is directly related to carbon content. More energy density from coal mean more co2.
No. It means you need to burn a larger volume of wood to get the same amount of energy. And when you increase the volume, you increase the emissions. The first sentence of this quote may be true, if we are talking about absolute amounts, but then in the second sentence density is a ratio (energy to volume), which is why it’s not true.
I don’t know all that much about relative PM2.5 emissions, but a brief search shows a paper, which argues that PM2.5 emissions depend more on combustion conditions than fuel type[1].
> A ton of coal will create much more co2 than ton of wood, isn't it?
Yes. But that hardly matters.
> For the same amount of energy the result should be similar amount of co2.
No. Apparently, wood is estimated to emit 30% more CO2 than coal for the same amount of energy[1].
> Coal is worse for people because burning it creates many unhealthy chemical components. Sulfur, heavy metals, etc
Is it more than when you burn wood though? I’m not knowleadgable enough to answer this question. I found one link about it[2], but currently I don’t have time to read it. In any case, the fact that it produces more CO2 than coal is a good argument against wood in my eyes. My argument is against wood, not in favour of coal. Coal is just a benchmark to measure against.
Not from a carbon perspective. Forestry isn't cutting down ancient forests and then randomly thinking it would be nice to plant some new ones. Trees are a crop. They are planted, left to grow, and then harvested, in a cycle.
It’s going to take time for a new tree to consume the CO2 produced by burning a tree. If instead you leave a tree standing and burn coal, you will produce less CO2, so it’s going to take less time to consume it (and the older tree is going to do it faster than a young one).
Moreover, it’s not only a question of net emissions. It’s also a question of location. People burn wood and coal in their homes and that affects the air most near them the most. It is the worst near cities, where you can’t plant a new forest. Instead just think about how the local air is going to be affected if people burn there 1MWh of wood vs coal. Because trees are not going to help here, if they're planted far away.
And, when trees die naturally, they don’t emit CO2 at the speed that they do when they’re burnt. It happens much slower, so it’s not that much of a problem.
Mind you I’m not advocating for burning coal. I’m advocating against burning wood.
Ok, there are many rural properties in the world populated with trees. These trees naturally fall and contribute brush. Firefighters and forest management will tell you to clean up the brush by burning, otherwise it will decompose (still co2) and eventually lead to a natural wildfire (same effect). Better to burn it for heat than outside for nothing. What would you do instead?
In this instance I’ll say burn it if you want. Although it leading to a natural wildfire is highly dependent on local climate. Where I live, for most of the year it’s too cold and humid for anything like this to happen, except during maybe 2 months a year. But I appreciate that in places like California or Australia it may be different.
Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies?
*If* this lets chrome remove third-party cookies, doesn't it effectively increase your privacy by putting that tracking data on the user's machine instead of having random third-parties involved in every page load to harvest that tracking info?
I understand that you can currently turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that. If chrome is able to turn off third-party cookies for a large swathe of people, I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies.
I don't know a huge amount about it, but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.
> I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.
That’s a bit like saying you’d rather have cameras inside your house streaming your every move than have paparazzi at your door.
In the current model, the third parties have to fight and spend resources to get an imperfect profile of you, while you can make their life harder every step of the way. But your browser has access to information those third-parties could never have; it can make a profile from real data without you having the chance to block it.
Both are bad for privacy, but the new method is way worse and has the potential to become even more invasive. What if Chrome decides to share your bookmarks? Or settings from your extensions? Or specific pages you visit, including private GitHub repositories for your company? Or full URLs with sensitive keys in them?
I don't think it's fair to compare what might happen in the future.
In my mind the metaphor is more like "instead of having paparazzi at your door following around, you show everyone a card saying that you like dogs and video games and the steelers, and you tend to shop at big box stores out of town".
I'd rather know exactly what I'm presenting, which is possible in this model, than have the paparazzi all over me figuring most of it out imperfectly anyway.
> Can anyone explain to me why this is worse than third-party cookies?
How about thinking the other way around:
Can you, or anyone else for that matter, explain to me why this is better than commercial interests not following us around at all?
> turn off third-party cookies, but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that
Most of what breaks is just tracking for ad serving purposes. I'm fine with that breaking.
Some authentication services have trouble, but there are other ways of implementing that, so they could be fixed without needing to keep 3rd party cookies enabled.
> I expect that most sites will be forced to make themselves work without third-party cookies
As they should, if competently designed.
> … but naively I'd rather …
Call me dogmatic, but I'd rather not be followed around at all, even as a group. I don't trust that the data cannot be de-anonymised in any way, and I don't trust a company that would gain from that to do its best to make sure it can't happen.
I totally appreciate the desire not to want an advertising profile build for you at all! I think that in practice, interest-based-advertising is going to happen, and I think if chrome can provide a way for it to be done without involving so many sketchy third-parties then I'm for that.
I don't know a huge amount about the wider ecosystem here, but I can imagine that if chrome were to disable third-party cookies without providing an alternative, then advertisers will go to fairly great lengths to fingerprint you to build a profile.
Right now my guess is that Firefox users benefit from the fact that it's probably not worth investing all that much in alternative tracking techniques since you capture the vast majority of people with techniques which work in chromium browsers.
Again, I really don't know that much about all this, but my feeling is that this is moving in the right direction, even if it's not the solution I'd ultimately prefer as an individual user.
I think a big flaw of interest based ads is that my interests rarely line up with what I am in the market for. Say I am interested in some hobby. I probably have all my gear already, and if I buy new gear it means doing enough research to breach through the fog of marketing to see it for what it is. I might spend all my days reading about hobby x online, when I really ought to be advertised the differences of some other products y and z that I actually will buy, which I only see when I visit a physical store and see them together on a shelf.
What is lost in this discussion is that now my browser, software on my machine, using my resources is the agent that is acting against my own interests.
Never said they were, only that they both using your browser & resources "against your own interests", and this is not a good argument against tracking.
When just displaying a static banner add, your browser is a lot more passive than implied by "agent that is acting" in the GPP. Simply displaying an image (with a little HTML for the link) and perhaps caching it in local storage is quite different from collecting & collating logs about you and distributing that back out to the where internet.
You are right about the bit of the post you noticed though, both do use at least some resources. This system more, but the simple banner still some.
> Can you, or anyone else for that matter, explain to me why this is better than commercial interests not following us around at all?
Because people prefer free, ad supported content on the internet.
Once you accept that premise, then it's a matter of balancing privacy, volume of ads, and payments to creators (ad tech companies are going to get theirs). Do you think the majority of people would prefer fewer, better targeted / higher yielding ads as long as it is tracking them anonymously? Or more ads, with worse targeting? Or neither and less payments to creators?
I can see both sides of this. There's the side of me that looks at advertising and sees it as a necessary annoyance. It's the primary funding source for the open web today, and thus far that model has been very successful. Advertising has enabled the development of well polished, incredibly useful software like YouTube, Google Maps, search engines, etc without requiring users to directly pay a single cent for those services.
Then there's the Stallmanesqe, crypto-anarchist side of me that says it's my machine and it shouldn't do anything that doesn't directly benefit me. Tracking and ads don't directly benefit me, so my machine shouldn't cooperate in running them and if your business can't survive under those conditions then it doesn't deserve to.
I'm not 100% on how to resolve that tension, but I can't really fault Google for the way they're handling it. (As an optional, yet on-by-default feature that cooperates in serving relevant ads in a way that's more private than cookies but less private than just blocking everything.)
There is no paid-internet without ads -- so it's not that people prefer free we don't really have a group to test against. Maybe it's like the choice between water and no-water -- results show that humans like water.
But choices like: free water with punch-in-the-face VS paid water without punching would be better indicators of choice.
When there are few/no options then choice is an illusion.
> Because people prefer free, ad supported content on the internet.
I have no objection to adverts based on what I am looking at at the time, or more random blanket advertising⁰, as long as they are not too obtrusive or intrusive: flashing ads, auto-playing audio, and so forth, are out.
Unfortunately modern ad tech is apparently inseparable from following us around our online existence logging everything we do, which is on the list of things I consider to be too intrusive.
> as long as it is tracking them anonymously
Yes. But call me a cynic if you will: I don't trust that the proposed system is as guaranteed to be anonymous as is claimed (or at least implied).
> payments to creators?
Remuneration for creators is why I don't use sponsorblock and such. Sponsor segments aid the creators without having to track me wherever I go online.
--
[0] though I am getting tired of seeing adverts for Temu everywhere, anything broadcast en-mass to the point of annoyance¹ well never result in me buying a product or using a service
[1] I could name several others, Temu is just the most recent example
If there was only a single choice for advertisers to place a completely static banner on the page, they would still be happy. As long as no other advertiser had more capabilities.
Restrict them all and the money would still flow as the ads would increase sales just as much.
It boils down to greed. Targeted ads are proven to have larger profits, which increases the more precise the targeting is.
No advertiser wants to go back to dumb ad campaigns like they used to run on traditional media, simply because they're far less profitable.
Which is why they're concerned about the restricted and more general profiles the Topics API will give them. They want even more granular topics[1], and Google can do this at any point once the controversy has died down, and this feature gains traction.
Make no mistake that if this turns out to be less profitable, many advertisers will still resort to cookie tracking, fingerprinting, and any other shady mechanism, as long as the browser and lack of regulation allow them to do so.
> Some authentication services have trouble, but there are other ways of implementing that, so they could be fixed without needing to keep 3rd party cookies enabled.
not to mention that if the goal is to remove 3PC, this new ad tracking doesn't solve the auth problem at all.
Other browsers have shown this is a false dichotomy. You can disable third party cookies + surveillance AND not have this data still harvested by your browser.
Is this better than third-party cookies? Yes, probably. Does Firefox and Safari go better without surveilling your browsing history to serve you ads? Also yes!
This means that your browser starts spying on you, whereas currently, ‘only’ sites do.
If you use Chrome, it will use information about all pages you visit, even ones without tracking cookies to categorize you for advertisers.
Google says that will happen locally, but even if you trust them, I don’t think that makes much of a difference. You could even see it as “now I pay the bill for getting myself categorized for Google’s ad business”.
Soon, Chrome also will start blocking third-party cookies to protect you from evil Meta and its ilk (all because Google wants to protect you from them, not because Meta competes with Google in the advertising space, of course)
So, as before, Google won’t be able to see what users do inside Meta’s apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc.), but now Meta won’t be able to see what Chrome users do outside them.
> but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data
It won’t all stay on your machine; a summary of it will be sent to Google so that they can sell targeted ads to advertisers.
I expect they’ll have quite a few different tags, including age, gender, and location, and shopping preferences.
And third-party tracking websites would load their websites up with a bunch of hidden anchors and then through JS read the visited state of these websites to get an accurate fix on a person's identity, or at least of their (relevant) browser history?
And how this modifier was removed ASAP once people realised its abuse potential?
Basically Google thought this was a good idea after all, and is bringing a "coarse-grained" version of it back.
>but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that.
not really, no. From my experience most stuff works fine (the thing that breaks websites the most is webgl and even then, only the few websites that really need it use it)
You would be surprised at what breaks. It also prevents local storage (not just cookies) from working at all when inside an iframe. That took me a long time at work to debug.
More importantly, instead of silently failing like localStorage should, the attribute on the window object is missing, causing page scripts that don't catch the exception (ie all of them) to crash and usually break the page.
I'm pretty sure Google is making disabling cookies as painful and breakage-inducing as possible to make sure
people don't flip the switch.
It's MUCH worse, because if this catches on in any significant way, it makes Google the main (eventually only?) provider of demographic data for audiences/tracking. Google already owns the browser market and almost owns the advertising market, but if you want to try to play outside with your own SEO/direct marketing strategy you may be able to make it work. But in a world where cookies/independent tracking is dead and the only provider is Google? you'll have to go through AdSense.
Google needs to be broken up and ground to dust --well, judiciously regulated by a democratically-elected legislature, but in the absence of that, I would take anything. I can't believe this is the "Don't do evil" company.
But the only provider isn't "Google". The browser will provide this data equally to any site asking for it, i.e. all the ad networks that the site is using. Not just to Google.
If anything, it is leveling the playing field. All ad networks will get the same interest data, rather than the ones with a higher reach 3rd party cookie having more information.
Wow, you are spinning this as a universal good? "Leveling the playing field." Ridiculous. Nothing to see here folks, move on, Google is protecting you.
> but a bunch of the internet breaks if you do that.
I hadn't noticed, although I've heard this many times. I mean, I notice some broken pages, but nothing so important that I'd bother working out what's wrong with them.
If it's really that the site is checking that the 3d-party cookie they set really got set, and failing to load otherwise, that's an abusive site that I don't want to use anyway.
There are a few (not that many) things that break on the internet if you turn off third-party cookies, but "I'm no longer being tracked without consent" is not one of them. It's one of the big reasons to get rid of third-party cookies, not an unfortunate side-effect.
The third party tracking was dependent on someone else's processing power and system, this is sinisterly making the user's own software work against his best interest and instead work for a morbid advertiser's interest. Since it is all done in the browser and locally using much more of my data, that data being even more 'relevant' to advertisers, with its results presented as an API to every bloody page I visit, this will only make the tracking problem worse.
A related reason is my bookmarks are very much a private affair and this method feels much more intrusive. I dread to think of the security implications.
The only upside is that third party cookies will be less of a problem in other browsers, if this new API kills them.
> I don't know a huge amount about it, but naively I'd rather have my machine present this kind of data than have a network of unknown third-parties collaborate by sharing bits about me to build a profile.
They go up if you build more densely and then hop in your car and drive an entire block to your destination, which some Americans insist on.
But if you walk, bike, take transit, it gets better.
People don't automatically adapt just because you build it differently and people typically have trouble imagining genuinely living differently without actually experiencing it.
I don't disagree entirely but if you genuinely build a low-car dependent neighborhood it will be too inconvenient to use your car for a short hop.
Speeds are way lower in dense neighborhoods, and no on street parking, so the noise is lower and it's a pain to pull your car in and out. Most noise is tire noise not exhaust (except your odd racer boy and their fart cannon exhaust)
I see you never lived anywhere with decent public transportation. Better public transportation infrastructure + increased density + parking is expensive + increased traffic = reduction in car usage over time.
It's America's problem of its own making, you need to find a solution, just shoving more lanes for cars, more suburbs with single detached homes, is not solving absolutely anything. No, not every rural small town will have Dutch-levels of access to trains but you can definitely improve the situation on the densely populated areas of the East and West coast, just have to get rid of this obnoxious and gauche car-addiction.
The longer you take to transition out of car-dependence, the more painful it will be.
Good luck on solving it, doesn't seem like American society put much value in it, you seem to like to suffer in traffic.
I have lived in a city with what in the USA passes for "decent" public transportation: Chicago. And I used it. But a "city" like L.A. will never have sufficient trains, because it's a giant county masquerading as a city. It's unlikely that a citizen works close enough to home to do anything except drive there.
That's why the endless proselytizing about "Let's be Amsterdam!" is soooo tiresome. We're not fucking Amsterdam and never will be. I love Amsterdam, but it's just not applicable.
Also the vilification of houses is obnoxious and dumb. The USA is not "full." Some people actually want to DO things, like garden or have a workshop or a swing set or a kiln. That means they want a HOUSE, and guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than covering up every square foot of ground with concrete for high-density apartment blocks, preventing water from percolating into aquifers and intensifying the permanent drought that reigns over much of the west.
Not to mention the "heat islands" that endless densification creates, and the trees destroyed for it.
The endless bellyaching by fake liberals about "zoning" serves as a smokescreen for corruption: a handout to developers and a license to destroy already-residential areas, while giant dead malls with boarded up Macy's stores and vast concrete parking lots sit growing weeds. THOSE have already imposed costs on the environment and are already "high-density," so until every one of those is redeveloped (along with every defunct commercial or manufacturing zone) we should never be targeting neighborhoods with actual HOUSES.
Zoning is USEFUL. It allows people to choose the kind of neighborhood they want to live in. People who want density and walkability have downtown. People who want a house can choose neighborhoods zoned for houses. And some neighborhoods blend the two pretty effectively. But pretending that zoning is always a racist, elitist conspiracy is infantile at best and more often an excuse to destroy neighborhoods for someone else's profit.
SFH are unsustainable, they don't generate enough tax income to maintain the infrastructure they require, they are subsidised by the denser parts of a settlement. Why should society subsidise the lifestyle of a richer caste who can afford SFH close to cities?
> Also the vilification of houses is obnoxious and dumb. The USA is not "full." Some people actually want to DO things, like garden or have a workshop or a swing set or a kiln. That means they want a HOUSE, and guess what? It's a hell of a lot better than covering up every square foot of ground with concrete for high-density apartment blocks, preventing water from percolating into aquifers and intensifying the permanent drought that reigns over much of the west.
It's not about being "full", it's about creating an urban environment that can enable humans to live without a car. The Netherlands has many suburbs with mixed SFH, some duplex buildings, rowhouses and so on. It creates denser packs of urbanisation that allow even small towns/settlements to share a downtown feeling with shops and local commerce while still providing housing for people who prefer to live in a SFH.
The issue with American suburbia is very similar to a monoculture plantation: instead of creating suburbs with a variety of different houses to accommodate differing levels of needs and incomes, which can sustain some kind of a local life (with local bars, restaurants, grocery stores) the US has zoned out most of that to only allow detached houses, creating pockets devoid of life except for individuals in their houses (like a monoculture, devoid of an ecosystem).
You don't need to get rid of SFH, you just need more mixed usage of the land, keep the SFH suburbs around a small center with denser housing which can support local shops on their ground level, like you said the US is not full, there's space to do it this way, it's just a matter of policy, not a law of Nature.
No citation. No evidence. No thought process. No credibility.
Where do you think dead malls are, exactly? I live in an SFH neighborhood that's threatened by developer giveaways, and there is a boarded-up Macy's and defunct Fry's growing weeds within two miles. And, to the west, there are stretches of decrepit small-commercial/industrial tracts awaiting rejuvenation. But NOPE! Let's let developers replace one house with 10 FUCKING UNITS, with no permits or review.
J&J is liable for the full liabilities of the new child company.
The child exists to make sure a pool of at least its current assets exists to split between all claimants. If they’re found to be liable for more than that, then J&J will be liable for it and, if they can’t service that liability, they will have to declare bankruptancy.
Sometimes funding is necessary to grow income enough to sustain the business or hire more engineers or whatever you want to do.
If it costs $40 to acquire a new customer, and you expect a customer to stick around for long enough to spend $90 then it's totally worth doing that, but you need $40 now to make 90$ over some period of time.
There is an entirely possible and alternative funding model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D. It's trivial to imagine how a responsible incremental funding approach could create a better, more transparent, more estimable, more reportable, more mappable, more rigorously trackable innovation process.
Raising massive lump sums of money is about VALUATION. You have been led to believe this is the only way to go about building a software business like this.
It's all a major silkscreen for the colder simpler goal of generating a lot of eventual wealth for a specific cast of people.
Again, no shame or emotion here. It's just how business is done in this world.
> There is an entirely possible and alternative funding model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D.
This works for some but not all business ventures.
There's a reason corporations were invented in the Age of Sail. If you build 5% of a ship, you can't sail to the New World and bring back 5% of the resources. You just sink in the harbor.
(The moral implications of relating modern VC-invested corporations to rapacious European conquests of the already-inhabited-thank-you-very-much New World is not lost on me.)
I believe there are healthy ways to start up a business that has startup costs too large to bootstrap. I agree with you that VCs are often not it.
Or maybe 20 customers who believe that having a shared ship might form a join stock company to take care of their respective 5%... and when the venture proves itself, they might convert it to a publicly traded company and let it scale up with demand.
And by the time you've done that 97.3% of all shipping from the new world is being handled by a small handful of companies with gigantic cargo ships.
But congratulations, you've successfully created a small "local" business with a decent number of customers who are reasonably loyal. You should be happy with what you have and possibly invest in future generations who want to colonize the moon or something (assuming you want to expand your wealth)
Real world example: was DropBox a better or worse product when they were a simple syncing app before they started “innovating”.
The only consumer company that I can think of that went from “initial value proposition” to “not sucking after it went public” is BackBlaze. None of their new offerings has taken away from their initial “unlimited cheap backup” offering.
I'm curious have you ever tried to raise money for a tech business before?
There's a big reason VC and angels were and largely continue to be only game in town. No one understands or would risk loaning millions of dollars on a high risk business aiming for marginal incremental growth.
That alternative only works in the absence of competitors who raise capital to pursue more rapid growth. It is an arms race to an extent, but if you don't play the game then you may get locked out.
Particularly when that rapid growth involves price dumping. I've bootstrapped businesses before. It's really difficult to compete with free offerings when you have to pay the bills. Your competitors can burn a pile of cash to flush out the competition. They don't even need a better product... people love getting stuff for free. Invariably, those services either go bust or don't remain free since it's often unsustainable. But, it means in the short-term you often need to raise money if you're competing with a VC-backed business.
> There is an entirely possible and alternative funding model that perpetually allocates a responsible amount of incremental funds for the purposes of novel R&D.
You are completely missing the point of venture capital here.
Of course, bootstrapping exists, but I can't point to any similar companies to Fly which have achieved standout success in an area like this with a model like that.
> Raising massive lump sums of money is about VALUATION.
Valuation is merely a side effect in pursuit of market dominance or hopefully establishing a niche monopoly.
That’s what's so great about five year projections! Somehow it’s always worth it until reality comes knocking after the money’s been raised. Then it’s a mad scramble for ROI that debases everything that built the business.
Stop inviting so many cars to everything - less pedestrian deaths.
So much USA urban and suburban land use is dedicated to cars. Massive wide stroads, enormous car parks etc.
It makes it so difficult to get anywhere without a motor vehicle, and it means there's way more cars on the road than there needs to be because lots of people just can't realistically do basic tasks without driving.
