The difference is being seen in public is ephemeral and being recorded in public is eternal. In the former, your actions exist in fallible human memories for a short while at most; in the latter there is a permanent digital record of you, geotagged and time stamped and available for perfect recall forever.
Regardless, it's not what humans are used to, culturally, or in our recent human evolution. Lol maybe I don't disagree that it's a lizard thing. But then why would you force a thing on lizards that they don't like?
Even if you're right, and we all just should be comfortable with being seen by the internet when we're in any semi-public space, you can't expect human brains and culture to change on a dime, and you should expect weird effects.
Side note, this is a spectrum, not like a black and white thing. Semi-public is a thing, why not let it still be a thing
And a long one at that. I’m sure I could do well as an electrician eventually, but there’s no way I could make it through 4+ years as an apprentice making $21/hr, and then another three as a journeyman (even if it pays double). Maybe when my house is paid off (but who’s going to hire a 50yr old apprentice?).
The biggest problem with an apprenticeship model is that it creates a bottleneck to getting people into the trades. You need competent journeymen (and knowing the trade isn’t enough, they need to be able to teach) who ideally can take on more than one apprentice at a time. But no matter how much everyone “wants young people in the trades” and no matter how much of a “shortage of tradespeople” there is, the bigger shortage is apprentice positions. Every kid in the world could suddenly decide they want to be electricians and plumbers, and it would still take two generations to fill the ranks.
Note that I’m mostly focusing on trades that require state licensing. Laborers, carpenters, painters, plasterers, welders, etc. don’t suffer this problem as much, because there is no set amount of time for someone to be an apprentice. If you’re good and reliable you’re getting promoted fast. I’m not against licensing per se, but I am strongly against legislated work requirements for a job.
I know I could study for a week and pass the master electrician exam on Monday.
This is largely why I (almost 50, and who likes doing casual electrical work and has tools and knows some things) don't try to get into that trade.
If I have to start making money again, I might go into something like low-voltage install where there's not any licensing and my network admin and electronics skills might help.
I enjoy electrical install work- I put a solar power system up in the off grid cabins where I live- not big (4kw panels, 6kw inverter, 15kwh battery), but it has been fun wiring in a panel and placing outlets in the shacks.
What doesn't sound fun is 4 years of $20/hr work working for who the hell knows.
There's quite a few places in the US where no electrician license is required to be an electrician.
Alternatively where I live (Arizona) a license is required to offer services but as long as the contractor is licensed the guy doing the actual work doesn't have to be, so in practice there are ways to minimize the licensing problem by having a license holder just be a shell company holder of your electrical service
This one[1] has a meeting space that can be closed off from the rest of the store, with a TV or projector, and I’m pretty sure they’ve got a copier or at least an all-in-one printer.
If I had to guess, I'd guess Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook. It was published in 1972, and it seems plausibly the sort of book someone like Susan Kate might have had to hand in the early '80s. https://www.societyofsigns.com/projects/symbol-sourcebook
Symbol Sourcebook would’ve been my first guess, too, but I just glanced through my copy (7th printing, 1977) and didn’t see the ⌘ symbol. The closest thing in the Graphic Form Section is a symbol for “Atomic d orbital,” but it’s clearly not the same one that inspired Susan Kare.
Interesting. The left side of the slide at 15:43 in the video is definitely from page 27 of Symbol Sourcebook, but the detail of the ⌘ symbol doesn’t seem to be: not only could I not find the symbol, but also its caption (“FEATURE”) is set in Helvetica rather than Univers as used in the book.
I have a suspicion that she may no longer possess or even remember the book in question. Heaven knows I wouldn’t were I her, but my memory is atrocious.
> This opens up another very fasciniting [sic] possibility. A cell with two adjustable aluminum plates (a variable capacitor) might very well be useable as an efficient light dimmer.
I wish Kaleidescape[1] was more affordable. It's a download rather than streaming service, with a comprehensive movie library (12,000+ titles) and you buy movies individually rather than a monthly subscription. But then you can watch the movies as many times as you want and they don't disappear from your library if Kaleidescape stops carrying them. I don't know if they include the extra content typically available on discs or not.
You have to buy their player ($4,000) and their media server ($5,000 for 8TB up to $27,000 for 96TB). Then buy movies (about $9 - $30 depending on how new they are).
If you have the money, you can buy a pre-loaded system for $98,000 which includes their entire 4k library (only about 2000 movies), two 96TB storage arrays and a 4k player.
If the player was around $2,000 and I could use my own storage, I'd have bought one already and ditched all the streaming platforms.
Edit: looking through their library, some titles do include extra content (special features, deleted scenes, music videos, etc).
That's really cool that it exists / is possible. Maybe someone will create a similar service that undercuts them - but I would imagine the licensing agreements somewhat require them to do drm with the player / media server. 9k entry cost is going to keep essentially everyone out of the market - and much of that sounds like total bs costs, in no way related to the cost of the components.
Don't you get the majority of that with buying movies from Apple? You can get 4K and Dolby Atmos. If there's DRM anyway, it seems like the difference isn't worth it.
Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
The most upsetting version of this is when you actually have to remove hardware. “Upgrading” the machine entailed removing a certain screw from under the hood to double the performance.
For instance, I believe every car is actually running full self drive software in simuation mode. But if you pay $8k it can actually control pedals/steering.
Charging for software features is fine. Tesla is spending a lot of money to develop their self driving software and its perfectly reasonable for them to expect to be paid for that.
Charging to stop blocking the use of hardware features that are already present on a product you own however (like seat heaters or battery capacity), is unacceptable in my opinion.
Software Freedom would solve all these problems by making it trivial for users to buy a software patch from a third party vendor for cheap that unlocks the seat heaters, thus destroying the incentive for manufactures to do stupid stuff like that in the first place.
Indeed, driving a Tesla is collecting training data for the company whether you benefit from it or not. (The idea you can own a Tesla is laughable, you might have the title but Elon can brick it and refuse to activate it.)
They're also well-known for artificially capping battery capacity unless you buy an unlock. There have been a few stories before about them unlocking the expanded capacity for free during emergencies.
When you pay for goods or services, you should expect to receive something. If you pay extra for leather seats, you’re getting leather seats. If you pay for DLC as part of a game, you’re subsidising the cost of the developer adding more stuff to the game. The pricing of digital products and add-ons may not always be fair but you should be getting access to something valuable that you didn’t already have, i.e. something that costs money to develop and/or host.
In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.
If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…
You may be right, I’ve no idea. For me it’s the principle more than the specific amount. I can’t understand why a manufacturer is entitled to charge you to use something that you supposedly own. Car manufacturers charging to unlock seat heating is a good example.
The VIN requirement may be due to part (version) differences between vintages. Most automakers make few changes during production of (one year’s) model, whereas Tesla seems to make changes all the time.
Legacy car industry has a life cycle for a model of about 6-8 years with a "refresh" in the center, so usually you can get by with model variant code(s) and construction mm/yy to find a specific spare part. Designs are locked in-between and you can't just go and swap suppliers or whatnot, which is what almost broke the neck of the entire industry back in the heyday era of covid - there was no flexibility, even if there were alternative suppliers for missing parts. Everything is solidly locked with multi-year long contracts on both sides.
Tesla however, they change stuff alllll the damn time because they make so much of their stuff in-house, the vertical integration eliminates the need for rigid contracts. You absolutely need the VIN because for some differences even knowing the week of the production doesn't give sufficient resolution.
By the way, legacy car makers are also shifting to that model, BMW for example doesn't deliver paper-printed sheets for which fuse in the fuse box does what for a few years now, you have to use an online service. The logistics for printing the sheets for all the variants became too complex.
> Tesla however, they change stuff alllll the damn time because they make so much of their stuff in-house, the vertical integration eliminates the need for rigid contracts. You absolutely need the VIN because for some differences even knowing the week of the production doesn't give sufficient resolution.
Sounds like a maintenance nightmare. Who decides when parts go EOL?
This is absolutely not true, other manufacturers refresh their models all the time. They just use a simple approach - part numbers to track what goes where. Funny how you call THEM "legacy", not a company that can't do that.
All of that fuckery is not going to help you or the technician when your car breaks.
I guess this suggests what kind of people should be buying Teslas (buying new cars every 1-3 years) and what their resale value should quickly become (disposable cars).
Interestingly in an 80's Toyota I worked on there were some minor revisions part way through a given model year. Most of the vehicle stayed the same, but I recall in some cases you needed to know year and month rather than just year in order to find the correct part or wiring diagram. I'd have to answer the question: Do I have the early version or the late version in this case?
>Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
Won't happen. Feds find the status quo too useful to let every tom dick and harry start wrenching on these things
I'm pretty familiar with what's going on at CAT. A large part of the way all the emissions stuff that everyone (I'm talking about the customers, dealers, OEMs, the people who actually pay for things, not the online peanut gallery) hates gets enforced is that the OEM threatens the dealers that they'll cut them off from the software if they don't run a tight ship and their techs are too frequently caught doing things like plugging into vehicles outside the scope of their job, working on deleted equipment and whatnot. The dealers roll this downhill to their employees. I assume Deere is similar.
Basically removing the dealers and therefore the OEM's stranglehold on software would take the teeth out of emissions enforcement.
In a world where rolling coal[1] is a thing that people do voluntarily, I submit that emissions enforcement (as it stands) is a failed experiment. It's time to rethink it from first principles.
Even low-tech anti-features are insidious. They make the windows in a 3D "bubble" type shape so when you break one, they can charge you more, or use it as leverage to scare you into paying for a support plan that "covers" broken windows. If they were made out of flat panels, 3rd parties could make them, farmers could make their own, and they would be cheaper.
I don't think it's going to happen. Too many shares of automotive companies locked up in influential institutions. The same reason Microsoft is untouchable.
How would you implement that though? As soon as you push a law in a single state, the company will move states, over a single country and the company will move countries, and you’re not gonna get this law passed somewhere like China
Yes, but we should also be honest about the fact that this protectionism will have a cost. In the case of farm equipment, it means that everyone who buys food will be paying more to subsidize the protected industry.
I'm not making a judgment on whether it's worth it or not, I think that depends on a lot of details, but when people throw out tariffs they are rarely honest about the fact that it's a tax that flows downstream to the end user. In some cases multiple ways, like farmers who pay higher cost for equipment due to tariffs, so production of their soybeans (or whatever) are higher, so then they needs USDA subsidies to make them price competitive for export, so there's multiple layers of taxation there to make it work.
