The rumor is that they intend to scale up a silicon photonic chip fab, which is very ambitious, and expensive. It will either be a spectacular failure, or a bold step into the future.
If we all lived in huts, subsisted on rice and beans, and travelled by bicycle, humanity wouldn't be threatening the stability of the biosphere; but of course, we're wired to crave richer experiences, we hoard, and we seek to acquire status which is demonstrated by how much excess cargo we have to waste.
The more aspects of the human experience we can ephemeralize, the less we need to go out and muck up the physical world to get what we want.
A just released Pew research study has shown that 1 in 5 are online almost constantly. Which is to say, their experience of the world is already largely virtual, and the role that their physical presence plays is, by extension, diminished.
I'm in Canada and a friend of mine was working in a government call centre; her job description could be summarized as 'deny people benefits in 9 minutes or less'. Her role as enforcer of state brutality eventually led to clinical depression and she quit. She couldn't handle turning down people who were more often than not in dire straights.
Thanks for filling in the other side of the picture. I'd never considered that bad guidance wasn't the result of incompetence or malice on their part, but that the phone workers might actually be incentivized, even required, to lie.
Surfing is plenty exclusionary. whether or not this is a bad thing, there are a finite number of decent breaks in the world. You can go to the ends of the earth, paddle out an hour before the sun is up, and there are already 20 guys in the water trying to catch the same wave.
If you're a kook with a $100 soft top the others will work together to keep you at the back of the lineup. Whether it's a matter of safety or subculture is besides the point, dedicated surfers don't want you around.
Surfers have no inclination to promote surfing unless they have some kind of sponsorship. Promotion is a corporate venture that has nothing to do with surfing and everything to do with making money. Mo money, mo problems.
The whole "safety" issue is a bit of red herring, used to just keep surfing exclusionary and to accuse others of malfeasance if they get in someone's way.
The serious risks in surfing are relatively low provided you're at a sandy bottom beach break with waves under 5ft. No one is taking these soft-top boards to the Pipeline and endangering lives, they're mostly just showing up at mellow low-risk breaks.
Yeah it's annoying when someone bumps into you, and yeah you might get a bruise in the worst case scenario, but no one is dying or drowning in 3ft waves because of too many surfers.
Back in the 90s when the print industry was still a thing my canned statement for whenever I passed a magazine rack was that Playboy should really start covering up the nipples so it can sit on the front of the magazine rack and compete with Frat-boy mags like Maxim, Loaded, and FHM. Playboy had great content and a great culture built up of esteemed contributors, it's a shame legacy pride kept them from making it to the next generation. I'm skeptical there's much left to salvage at this stage.
Less Space taken up by parked cars may mean more space for people to live. Though SF real estate will likely be insane for the foreseeable future any way you look at it.
Mobility should be a right, driving shouldn't be a right. If someone is too old, too young, too poor, disabled, or otherwise unable to drive, and unfortunate enough to live in a car dependent area (as most inhabited areas are) then their rights are being infringed upon by your driving and others. For most of those who are victims of vehicle accidents- which number in the millions annually- what about their rights? Most of them did not cause the accident- they were passengers, other drivers, cyclists, pedestrians etc.
While the regulations were at one time created to keep shady players out of the industry, Taxi services nowdays are most certainly regulated for the sake of limiting competition. Consider that in Manhattan in the 1950s there were roughly 13,000 taxi medallions. Today there are still only 13,000 medallions available- they sell at auction for a million dollars a piece.
The Taxi companies that own these medallions have gone to court many times to enforce the artificial scarcity that drives up the value of their golden geese.
A taxi driver in NYC has to pay $80,000 a year over and above his insurance and operating costs just for the right to operate a cab: that money goes straight into the pockets of medallion owners who don't much of anything except own medallions- until a threat like Uber comes along, wherein it's time to deliver brown paper bags filled with bundles of unmarked bills until the problem is solved. Both the drivers and the consumers are getting shafted.
NY is an extreme example, but the taxi industry works more or less same way in pretty much every city in the western world. It's not uncommon for incumbent businesses to hijack goodwill regulations as a way to stifle legitimate competition.
Now Uber and app-based livery services do need to be regulated- but their service is a whole different paradigm from the traditional taxi industry. In California progressive legislation has been passed that places these services in a completely different category than tradition taxi companies, much to the dismay of those taxi companies.
Uber is also expanding aggressively- their revenue has grown 20% per month over the past couple years, they started with 15 cars in 2009 and they are now valued at nearly 4 billion dollars, and operate in 60 countries. Every city they go into, they go into expecting a fight. They win some and they lose some. They were shut down in both Toronto and Vancouver. Uber is a fascinating company to watch- it's trench warfare everywhere they go- and they have mountains of venture capital backing them.
New York medallion owners are definitely milking the value of their monopoly, but it's really hard to make the consumers are getting shafted argument when Uber is much more expensive than traditional cabs.
The solution for Uber and the like isn't progressive regulation that puts them in a different category. Uber walks like a cab service and quacks like one, the only difference is a more modern method of hailing. Cities should deregulate their cab systems to increase supply, but categorize services like Uber within the same cab regime.
Also: the population of Manhattan is 25% smaller today than it was in 1950, so that means more medallions per person. Also, it has probably a lot more private cars.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/538146/magic-leap-needs...