Our community has to stage mock events to give these folks some practice. We burn funds every once in a while on purpose to maintain readiness as we suppose. If you plan ahead, you can include hotdogs and soda in the budget.
Risky behavior can be something as simple as burning ants with a magnifying glass. It might seem obvious not to allow children to play Cops and Robbers with BB guns, but guess what they can do with a 9V battery.
Our games cover a couple of miles of almost unoccupied property. But teenagers don't always make the best decisions and sometimes treat others' property as their own. It can be super disconcerting to have somebody dressed all in black climb over your back fence, run across your porch and disappear around your garage.
Even when you make a clear rule that you can't go past the power line and into the neighborhood, somebody sometimes does.
Do you really want the police to ignore a distress call of prowlers trampling their tomatoes?
Imagine a scenario where some kid is apprehended by a police officer and brought to face the angry homeowner. Restitution cannot be made by having the child buy a new plant to replace the damaged plant. So the child has to buy two ripe tomatoes a week for four weeks to provide the homeowner with some compensation.
No court hearing. No criminal record. Parents involved, but nobody too worked up. Just a valuable life lesson about respecting others and taking responsibility. The angry homeowner still hires the kid to mow their lawn. No hard feelings.
Do we really want our police to be judge, jury, arbitrator, and parole officer?
Well, in this little sketch of Mayberry, my answer is yes. If only we could always exist in the sunny side of Mayberry. It only takes one person in this story to take us out of Mayberry. Fortunately, there are millions of people who do their part everyday to maintain some sense of Mayberry in their community. Some of them are even police officers.
You may have a bit of a caricature of America - the stories you here are generally exceptions, not rules, if they were mundane everyday American life, they won't be news.
It'd be a bit like me seeing a biography of a French alcoholic and riffing on it with "Tbf if I lived in France and I was out to eat [in their fabulous elaborate traditional gourmand cuisine], I'd buy at least one bottle of wine with a meal.
Not a huge fan of people drinking too much, but needs must when it comes to your country I suppose."
Could you or somebody else explain to the ignorant why that should matter to a corporation? If I want to buy or sale shares of my company once a month or less, why should it matter to me how many millions or billions of ETF flow through any particular index? How does that affect the equity of my company?
I'm willing to expose my complete ignorance by questioning this wisdom.
I get that a startup wants a high stock price so they can raise as much money as possible while giving up as little control as possible. Of course there are other circumstances where corporations' best option for raising cash is to sell shares. So in those circumstances, this reasoning still holds.
But what about when I've gotten past funding shortages and I'm a successful company and I want to invest in myself and take back some ownership? Now I have to pay some premium because of something that has nothing to do with the value of my company?
Or what if I'm ok not taking back ownership. I'm content to just stay with 60% ownership or whatever? Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?
In short, high stock prices only benefit me when I'm selling. So this reasoning baffles me for anybody with an ownership mentality.
I admitted upfront that I was exposing my ignorance. I'm willing to learn from anybody who will show me a bigger picture. But I dread a bigger picture that assumes that future success at any level can only be obtained with leverage.
> Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?
Like it or not, your job as a manager in a company is to run that company for the people that own it, same as if you manage a local grocery store for your neighbour Jeff that owns it. Jeff will be happy if his store appreciates in value the same way the shareholders of the corporation (its owners) will be happy if it goes up in price.
So as an employee of the company (the CEO is one too), you care because your job is to care, and in the case of senior management you also have a legal duty to care and the company can be sued if you don't.
>Now I have to pay some premium because of something that has nothing to do with the value of my company?
The value of your company is decided by the market participants with supply and demand. There's the academic idea that your company can be valued by your profits and losses, but the truth is, those more less to do with with the value of your company than the potentially demand for your shares. In other words being in an ETF may be more relevant to your stock price than the debt on your balance sheet.
>* Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?*
You might not care, but the other 40% might. It's tempting to think the other 40% is just amorphous group of shareholders, but it's likely it includes your business partners, or employees who will want to see the stock rise so they can eventually sell. And those partners and employees, upon learning that you aren't maximizing their shares may choose to leave, ultimately damaging your business.
In other words, once you have multiple owners, as long as the green line goes up, everyone is incentivized to continue doing well.
Wouldn't the share holders care more about the profits of the company which are then being given as dividends instead of the price they can trade the share price at?
Isn't the amount of profit the company is making (and how that will change) what matters and not what its share price is?
Most companies don't pay out dividends. Google paid out its first dividend in 25 years and it's only 20 cents a share. Your wealth increases faster from the share price going up vs a dividend and it's not even close. Couple that with the fact that you don't have to sell - you can just borrow against your shares to get liquidity, most are far more incentivized to care about the stock price.
Put another way: the US investors put a lot of net new capital every month.
Theoretically, more capital means, higher demand for equities and hence better prices for the stock. Of course, this does not apply to all equities equally.
ETF's generally have a buoying effect since the ETF just passively buys shares in your company depending on demand for the ETF, not demand for your company specifically. It also gives a mild proximity effect, where all star companies will attract dollars to ETFs that you are also part of.
Remember the size of the original iPhone? I have long wondered why nobody makes a universal compute brick in such a form factor without a screen. Then sell 5" or 7" or 10" or 27" screens with and without touch that connect to the little brick.
I can buy a 15" screen right now for under $75. It's the ultimate super-thin laptop if you remove the compute and keep the brick in your purse/backpack/holster.
For extra points, connect two compute bricks for more muscle.
I appreciate what you are pointing out here. I agree with you that getting it just right would be a challenge.
Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail?
While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order.
While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.
I already agreed that writing kanji without years of practice would be very hard to make look native. But they said they did it and it worked. Maybe it was obviously not native and it didn't matter. I don't know. But I'm not going to say they lied about making the sign.
Can we agree that it seems improbable that they fooled anybody about who drew the sign and also agree that they got to keep their workshop and their tools and have an amazing (and true) story?
I agree with your general point that it should not be the responsibility of the website to change to make a search engine happy.
I disagree with your specific point that Google should fix anything. Google can choose their own behaviors and motivations. Users can choose to rely on Google or trust them at all, or not.
Remember when Google was a successful business competing against the likes of Yahoo and AltaVista? Back when it was ok to be a successful small business? When you didn't count a millions users as a failure?
Nobody seems to believe anymore that you can operate a successful search company without having a trillion dollar war chest. Few people are willing to give alternative engines a try. They'd rather stick to Google like glue.
I'd like to declare the 28th as "Try something different day." On the 28th of each month people should try a different browser for the entire day. Or a different search engine. Or a different tooth paste. Every month, one day a month, take a different route to work, or maybe even a different mode of transportation. Use a Colemak keyboard. Go to a different church. You don't have to do the same different thing each month. Just start building some experience with shaking up your routine.
When you try something different and it turns out ok, share your positive experience with others.
I have not used Google search or Bing for years and it has worked out pretty well. I started with DDG, but have had good experiences with other search engines, too. Some may argue that DDG is not different enough. So perhaps next month I should try qwant.com for a day.
This, to me, is one of those defining actions that will stand forever as a sign post for what America is at the moment of the event. As such, it is incredibly discouraging to me.
I don't write this in defense of TikTok or China. I'm just sad for the United States.
I imagine a scene where a wagon train of poor pilgrims is surrounded on all sides and all the poor children are crouching behind anything they can find. As the camera angle widens out you see a U.S. Cavalry officer order a rescue team to single out attackers and pull them out of their perches. They go around inspecting attackers one at a time, checking their footwear. Anybody in mocassins is pulled off the line and sent packing. Anybody wearing boots is left in place and encouraged to keep shooting. Especially if they are wearing a cavalry uniform. Just before the scene ends you see somebody in mocassins run back to their horse and pull out a pair of boots, hurrying to get back into the action.
I grew up in a community with things like a volunteer fire department. All the adults around me spent 10-20 hours/week in non-paid positions from coaching soccer to hospice care. A core of some dozens of people carried the community on their backs.
I still see that today. From the volunteers who coordinate 4th of July celebrations to the 4-H mentors to that guy who hauls his own equipment over every month to mow the vacant lot next to the town park, just because somebody needs to do it or it won't get done. Most of these people have day jobs. The folks who rescued people from freeway car crashes back in the day and the ones who still do it today have day jobs. Some are professional paramedics on the clock in the big city who do it for free out in the little village where they live on their days off.
I know the world of open source software is bigger than that. But I still see the world through the lens I acquired in childhood.
Yeah, I think a major factor is our current economic situation. It's no longer possible to support a family of four on a single income with a high school degree. Just look at "grind mindset" and gig work, open source is in crisis because it's harder to put food on the table.
These are pretty strange arguments. Why should an overworked USPTO lead to more patents? That assumes that the default is to grant the patent. If the default is to reject the patent, then an overworked office would not lead to more patents.
An overworked Supreme Court does not lead to more Supreme Court decisions.
> Why should an overworked USPTO lead to more patents? That assumes that the default is to grant the patent. If the default is to reject the patent, then an overworked office would not lead to more patents.
Former USPTO patent examiner here. I'll answer why an overworked USPTO will lead to more patents at present, but I make no claims that it should be this way.
The effective default is to grant patents. Why? Because the examiner has a finite amount of time for each application and has to have some sort of justification for a rejection. Unless there are some formal problems with the patent application, "I couldn't find prior art" means that a patent will be granted. Examiners could try "official notice" to basically say that they don't think it's novel or non-obvious without providing a reference, but that's easily defeated by attorneys. Examiners must provide a clear justification for a rejection.
If the amount of time an examiner has is too low (and it's far too low), that increases the chance that no prior art will be found, and consequently increases the chance that invalid patents will be granted.
Contrast that with the Supreme Court: The Supreme Court can decline to see a case. You can't do that as an examiner. You can try to have an application transferred, but that will just give it to another overworked examiner!
> The effective default is to grant patents. Why? Because the examiner has a finite amount of time for each application and has to have some sort of justification for a rejection.
The path of least resistance makes appearance once again. If we don't understand that this guides the default final state, we would argue about nothing constructive.
There were some enjoyable parts, but I personally thought the job was quite stressful because of the high quota. Psychologically, I found it difficult to reduce my quality of work enough to meet the quota. Many examiners at the USPTO can knowingly reduce their quality to an appropriate level, but I wasn't one of them. (Others don't care about quality or aren't able to discern good quality from bad.)
I stopped for the simple reason that the job was far too difficult, and poorly paid on top of that.
Suppose an institution is overworked, it has two options - long queue or rush the job.
Courts understand their role is important, so you have a long wait, but they d0 the job properly.
Patent office, perhaps, rushes the job. Now whether they issue too many or too few patents is maybe equally bad, in my view, it’s screwed up either way.
The problem is, it is in the interests of the wealthy and powerful that both those things be true—that the USPTO be so overworked they can't adequately review most patents, and that the default be to grant the patent.
And the wealthy and powerful use that wealth and power to influence how government functions.
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