I think you're confusing your kiloseconds with megaseconds.
* 60 seconds per minute
* 60 minutes per hour: 3600 seconds per hour
* 1 kilosecond = 16 minutes and 40 seconds
* 24 hours per day: 86,400 +/- 1 seconds per day
* 1,000,000 / 86,400 ~= 11.57
I love giving metric-using friends a hard time whenever they criticize imperial units of measure. I always tell them that I will happily embrace metric when they give up their irrational attachment to an archaic system of time-telling.
Under that interpretation of accountability, you could easily hold a machine accountable for decisions; if it loses enough "reputation points" such that people no longer trust it to make the right decision, the machine could be replaced.
I was working on a mobile team, the order came down from on-high that google recaptcha was no longer cutting it for verification during user signup and we were switching to Arkose for our captchas, for some reason, no one could tell me why other than "my boss's boss says so".
The Google and Arkose SDKs were fairly different in their implementation and the Arkose SDK needed a lot more tweaks to get working in our code. The entire company spent around a month migrating web, iOS, and Android and then coordinating a simultaneous release. All went well, congratulations all around.
Fast forward to a year later, new order from on-high: we're switching from Arkose to Google Recaptcha because Arkose was too expensive! Rumors were circulating around then that the only reason we had switched to Arkose was that some VC had a buddy on the Arkose board and pushed really hard to get our company signed on, and then immediately left.
I left the company not too long after the migration back to google Recaptcha, but was waiting with baited breath for another order to be given to switch back to Arkose.
That is sad news. I used to listen to a CD of one of their acts on most road trips with my parents. They were so funny, even though the political references were all well before my time. I had no idea they were so well known; since I never heard of them outside my family, I had always just assumed they were some random little show my parents had found the CD for at a goodwill.
A truly legendary comedy duo.
I had the same experience, with a CD on long road trips. I still try to make references to talking to trees, vats full of chocolate, crevasses filled with pumas, boiling that cabbage down, boy, and baby John Henry wetting his dad's leg. Alas, only my own brother ever gets them
I dont think it's demeaning. Uber (and others) are not very upfront about the longterm costs and risks, causing (often) desparate people to make serious decisions without critical information. This mostly affects people who drive for these companies as their full time job.
They make it seem like it's a job you can do at your own convenience, but you can't actually do it like that and expect to make consistent money. All of them start penalizing you (by giving you fewer jobs in the future) if you turn down jobs for any reason, driving down their profitibility. It also looks like youre making more money than you are because you have to do all your own taxes (which is mostly just a hassle, but did blindside my poor friend who didnt know anything about taxes and had to go into debt to pay his taxes since he was living paycheck to paycheck).
And its very easy to not make the connection that driving all day for Uber et al increases chances of getting in a car accident, which will increase monthly insurance costs, not to mention car repairs and car maintainance from driving 8-12 hours a day most days of the week. And if your car ever needs to go into the mechanic for repairs (a famously slow process often times) thats lost wages every day youre without your car. It's like being a truck driver; Uber et al just move all the costs of fleet maintainance to the drivers, which really eats into what looks like a decent wage on the surface level.
Of course, there are going to be some people who do all the research and are ok with these risks, or game the system someone. But most people who do these driving jobs full time do it because they dont have a lot of other options, and dont bother to do all the in-depth research because "it looks easy" and they didnt have another readily available choice anyway. This isnt Uber's fault per se, but they benefit from it and do nothing to inform drivers of these risks.
(cite: have a friend who worked for all the delivery and ride share apps before losing his car and being too poor to buy a new one.)
I think youre right. Unfortunately, once the issue of, particularly homeless, severely mentally ill people is out of sight (i.e. no longer on the streets), it will be very easy for the issue to be forgotten by the masses.
And it would be a huge cost center, since many of the patients would likely not have large quantities of savings, so no good material incentives to do it well either.
It would be dangerously easy to fall right back into the terrible asylums of the past.
You're falling prey to the fallacy that just because 1 person's actions can't make a world of difference on their own, those actions aren't worth taking. By your logic, you may as well not vote either, because everyone else is voting.
Every little bit DOES count, because the more people believe they can make a difference, the more of a difference they will make collectively.
You have to lead by example. Rolling over and dying because you dont think you can make a difference makes you part of the problem.
New tech certainly would help, and it isnt/shouldnt be on the shoulders of just individuals to make all the change. But Im not going to use that as an excuse not to change my own behavior for the better.
> By your logic, you may as well not vote either, because everyone else is voting.
Correct. Voting is the worst possible example, because while e.g. individual recycling has a negligible but technically non-zero impact, voting is overwhelmingly* likely to have exactly zero impact.
* unless the voting base is either extremely small, or extremely close. Your vote only matters as much as the likelihood that at least one result is decided by exactly one vote, which is only realistic in something like a local town election. Which are the only elections most people should actually pay attention to.
> Every little bit DOES count, because the more people believe they can make a difference, the more of a difference they will make collectively.
That's pure wishful thinking.
What actually happens is that people believe they are making a difference, even when they actually aren't, but since they feel personally good about having put in an effort, they stop worrying about the actual problem, and stop even thinking (let alone acting) towards solutions that might actually work.
Why do you think the "carbon footprint" idea was actively pushed by BP and other super-polluters? Out of the goodness of their great? Or because it drew attention away from other, less corporate-friendly CO2 reduction measures?
> Your vote only matters as much as the likelihood that at least one result is decided by exactly one vote
This is entirely wrong. The value of your vote is the relative ratio of the fraction of alternate universes in which you vote in the election and your side wins, over the fraction of alternate universes in which you don't vote in the election and your side wins.
The value of your vote, as a result, is emphatically and enormously greater than the likelihood of the election being decided by a single vote. That's because there is an enormous amount of correlation between you not voting and people in the same voting demographic as you not voting. The question of whether you will vote should be seen as largely a consequence of the turnout characteristics of your voting block, not a free choice of the "uncaused cause" variety.
In fact, the real danger of the your argument is that by taking it seriously, you greatly reduce your voting power by making your demographic that of the tiny group of people who decide whether to vote based on meta-arguments about the value of their single vote. And this particular demographic basically never swings elections, so by putting yourself in that demographic, you effectively make the value of your vote zero.
You're basically describing superrationality, which is a model I don't buy.
Defecting still wins the one-shot PD, which in this case maps to "not wasting dozens of hours researching political candidates" and everyone who votes like you is a prisoner.
If you want to be safe against network effects, just lie and tell everyone that you voted when asked.
I mean you’ve got to appreciate the scale of the problem here and be pragmatic. The danger of recycling is it gives the illusion of progress, but I’m not against it otherwise. Philosophically you might be correct but voting blue in a non swing red state is completely meaningless
kilosecond: 11.57 days
and fun to say, but never useful:
gigasecond: 31.68 years