Personally I stopped using Facebook because even in the before-AI days it started becoming a glamour photo book of everyone you ever knew (and probably lots of people you only kind of sorta know), and while people certainly deserve to do and see great things, seeing it all shoved in your face every day becomes exhausting in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses kind of way.
I totally get that not everybody is like that, but I am, and so I stopped going to Facebook.
These days I'm in private Whatsapp groups for my direct family and so I learn about what they do, and not the random stuff that my neighbors and 20-years-past classmates did.
My wife is still active on Facebook and I actually do still visit occasionally to boost her posts but that's about it.
I agree with this a lot. In the late 2000s, which for me was when I was about 20, posts were very throwaway and low effort -- in a good way! You never really knew what you'd see when you logged in. Photos of stupid things or silly status updates, etc.
Over the next five years though, content gradually shifted to mainly image crafting. Over-processed photos, highlight reel curated trip photos, major life updates, etc. It felt like the bar was higher on what people would share, but unfortunately that removed a lot of the things that made FB fun in the first place.
I don't know whether it was a more universal shift or whether it had more to do with the age of my peers.
Correct. Of course, that wasn't the case in 1750 or 1900. It wouldn't have been possible then.
Hence why prior technological changes that increased productivity didn't result in living lives of extended leisure, despite some predictions to that effect. Instead people kept working to raise the overall standard of living to what could be achieved when using the new tools to their fullest extent. Doing more, not doing the same with less effort. As you say, we're not animals. We can strive for better.
The glass of the window does not have a frame. You want the glass to go into a rubber seal to really prevent air from getting in and whistling at high speeds. If there's a frame around it, then no problem, the seals move with the glass when you open the door. But if you don't have a frame then opening the door without retracting the glass will cause it to pull at the rubber seals. At best it'll wear the rubber faster, but eventually it'll pull the rubber seal out.
This is very common on cars where the windows don't have a frame. Before I had a Tesla I had a convertible Mustang. Because it was a soft top it didn't have the same kinds of seals. Instead it used lateral pressure to hold the window against some rubber. At freeway speeds the window would flex and let air in. Eventually the soft top started blocking the passenger side window from meeting the rubber, and there was always a 1/4" gap unless I rolled the window down a bit and then back up.
That paper is about mandatory masking and social distancing at the population level. It does not speak to the question of whether it's "worth it" to wear a mask on the train if you're the only one who is doing it.
A 3-year maternity/paternity leave guaranteed by law sounds so completely crazy and unworkable to me that I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean. Before I start pelting you with objections that might be based on a misunderstanding, do you want to fill in a bit more detail on how you envision such a policy working in practice?
I've tried to research this, because I am honestly trying to understand it. It has been surprisingly difficult to verify what the current parental rights are for Canada Post. The most recent info on the union website is dated 2004, but I think the same basic agreement is still in force? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Also, it's worth noting that the Canada Post leave policy it's obviously the result of a union negotiation, not a blanket government policy that applies to all jobs. The post office is the epitome of a stable job that doesn't change much, so is probably optimally able to offer longer parental benefits.
Anyway, it says:
> All pregnant employees are entitled to 17 weeks of unpaid maternity leave.... If you have worked for the post office for six months of continuous service, and if you are eligible for the Employment Insurance (EI) maternity leave benefits, you are eligible to receive paid maternity leave.... EI [government program] pays a basic rate of 55% of your average earnings, up to a maximum of $413 per week.... This amount is topped up with the SUB [Supplementary Unemployment Benefit from the union contract] to 93% of your weekly wage.
> If your spouse is giving birth, you are entitled to one day of leave with pay.
> Parental leave [without pay)] can be split between two parents, but the total number of weeks must not be more than 37. The total number of weeks or paternity and maternity leave must not be more than 52 weeks.
That's a far, far cry from 3 years of leave, much less 5. Like I said, it may be outdated, but I can't find any indication that it has changed, and I don't want to spend my whole day on this.
Where are you getting this 5 year number? 5 years sounds truly insane and I have real trouble believing it. Even assuming that's split between the two parents, can a family have 6 children 2.5 years apart and spend a continuous 15 years of their careers on leave?
I don't know about Canada Post, but Wikipedia has a handy table listing the duration of parental leave. 3 years is a common option across various European countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Europe_and_Cent... Yes, parents with a lot of children could potentially spend a very long time out of work while still keeping their jobs, but it's rather rare to have so many children that it would become an issue.
Or maybe this wasn't a surprise to anyone and was already priced in, and then the final numbers were slightly better than the general consensus expectation? Could be that too.
But you're right, everyone who owns stock in Tesla is probably the member of a cult, no need to think any harder about it.
Yes but are those the marginal buyers and sellers that drive price movements? Most people in index funds are probably not flitting in and out of index positions at anything approaching even medium frequency.
The result was not, and could never have been, known a priori. All sorts of random things could have gone wrong with the operation causing the raid to fail and Maduro to remain in power. Trump could have just randomly changed his mind, or postponed the raid to beyond the end of January (the cutoff for the betting market). The person placing the bet was still taking a chance, but it was an informed chance that shifted the market probability more in line with reality.
If it helps, you can think of the money made as the payment to a confidential informant for information that contributed to a more complete picture of the world. It just happens via a distributed algorithm, using market forces, rather than at the discretion of some intelligence officer or whoever. The more important the information you have to share, the more it moves the market and the bigger your "fee". It's not being a "grifter" to provide true information that moves the market correctly. In fact, this mechanism filters out the actual grifters - you can't make money (in expectation) by providing false information, like traditional informants sometimes can.
This "intelligence gathering" function is the primary goal of a prediction market. It's the only reason it makes sense to even have them. If you turn it into some parlor game where everybody who participates has access to all the same information, then what are we even doing here?
> This "intelligence gathering" function is the primary goal of a prediction market. It's the only reason it makes sense to even have them. If you turn it into some parlor game where everybody who participates has access to all the same information, then what are we even doing here?
If everyone has the same information, then whoever does better analysis wins. That's far from a parlor game.
Ideally people with good info and people with good analysis can both make money. (And ideally nobody takes real-world actions to make their bet come true.)
> The result was not, and could never have been, known a priori.
This is a level of solipsism not worth discussing.
Yes, Superman could be a real person and we all had our minds altered to think he’s a superhero.
Yes, when someone pulls the trigger of a gun pointed at someone’s head, it could misfire and explode in their hand.
The point is that someone influencing prediction markets can push this probability to very, very near zero. So much so, as to make the outcome effectively certain for all intents and purposes.
Literally everyone can burn their neighbor's house down! Everyone has access to "valuable predictive information" when that information is being created by the person making the bet.
Get the last word in if you must. We're going in circles.
OK, I see now that you're specifically referring to the case where someone places a bet and then actively goes out and causes the event to happen themselves. I was specifically replying to the people who were saying it was unfair for insiders to profit on the information they already possess.
I agree, I can see how that's a potential edge case, though I don't think it's as likely to happen in practice as you do. Certainly, anybody who commits a crime to cause a payout should be barred from receiving that payout, though you can tell a plausible story where someone manages to conceal it. I also really really doubt that that's what happened in this particular case.
I mean, yes, unironically. If the goal of a prediction market is to find out the truth about the world, that's what will get you there faster.
Google might feel differently about whether it's OK in that case, but that's their prerogative.
Ask yourself: If the CIA really needed to know in advance what the top search result was going to be with as much accuracy as possible (for some weird reason, doesn't matter why), how would they go about doing it? Would they spend a bunch of time evaluating all of the public information, or would they just bribe (or otherwise convince) an insider at Google to tell them?
It's interesting how the article is written in the past tense, and the Society (presumably) no longer exists, but there's nothing in the article about the decline and fall. The history just basically ends in the 1950s, at the height (?) of the society's cultural relevance. Most articles that are this well sourced and detailed include at least a bit of "late history", but not here. I guess people just stopped writing about it so there are no sources that chronicle how it petered out?
I honestly can't tell whether I'm supposed to interpret this as "The dads lost interest in Facebook before anyone else", or "Everybody got divorced."
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