What I want is a set of receipts for all of my iTunes Stores purchases, so I have proof that I purchased them if iTunes Store is discontinued and I have to rely on my local backups.
I've actually stopped buying from them based on this.
If we were actually interested in getting things done, we'd get them done, right? It seems like the core of the problem is people having priorities imposed on them that don't match their own, actual priorities. When people aren't getting things done, they're usually doing other things, their actual priorities, not staring idly into space. (Usually. And maybe staring into space is fine too).
If your well-being or the well-being of others is at stake, then you got to do what you got to do, and "get things done". But a lot of this sounds like people feeling guilty about not going the extra mile on things they don't actually care about.
EDIT: Wow I guess this struck a nerve.
EDIT 2: And I think "people having priorities imposed on them" would also include people imposing priorities on themselves without sufficient self-reflection.
Yes! I used to be obsessive about TODOs but never found a solution that worked for more than a year. After the novelty wore off, my lists would grow longer and the satisfaction of clearing them would wane. Then I just stopped.
And my productivity grew anyway! If I value the task, it gets done because it stays on my mind. Reminders help because there’s no giant list to maintain or to make me feel guilty or defeated. Without the TODOs, I have been more spontaneous and naturally more selective about where I focus my attention.
It would probably be easier for Facebook or Google to just reboot their headquarters, in multiple offices, wherever their labor pool migrates when their homes get flooded. For the most part it's just people at desks in buildings, which can be set up anywhere there is electricity.
These companies would take a freebie if municipalities decided to mitigate flooding on their behalf, but it wouldn't end up being an existential issue for them to just move elsewhere if things became untenable.
Just as plausible they would seek to protect their existing investments, which could become increasingly valuable due to increasingly limited shoreline protected from weather volatility, while also helping surrounding communities. Win/win.
You can't have a fraction of a person. The probability of having .65 out of 100 people working for Amazon is zero, no matter which 100 people you select. 1 out of 153 can at least happen.
We should start using the birthday paradox number (BPN) to express these things. That is, the smallest group of people such that the probability that at least one of them will exhibit the criteria is greater than 50%.
In this case, the BPN for working at Amazon is 107 (assuming everyone in the group is a worker).
If more than 51% of BTC mining eventually takes place on machines rented from AWS, could Bezos flip a switch and take control of the blockchain (e.g. by shutting down the miners running on the AWS hardware, and rebooting it all with miners he controls?)
51% miners have limited control over blockchain. They can censor blockchain by not allowing some transactions (and forking whenever other miner tries to add those transactons). They can undo some transactions by making a fork before that transaction has happened and eventually forcing the world to switch to their chain.
All those cases are highly visible. I don't know what will happen if someone will attempt to force-fork blockchain. But I highly doubt that 51% miners could monetize that power.
Another point: bitcoin miners are using ASICs, not GPU or CPU. Those ASICs are useless bricks outside of bitcoin mining. If bitcoin miners will collapse bitcoin, they'll lose their ASICs investments. AWS can sell their CPUs to anyone, but mining bitcoin on their CPUs is pointless. To mine bitcoin, you need to buy or build ASICs. And you need bitcoin to stay afloat to return investments from those ASICs.
The only danger is if some actor have lot of money (e.g. US government) and want to kill bitcoin. They can rent some fabs, build lots of ASICs and wreak havoc. They'll spend a lot of money, but probably they'll achieve that goal.
Nobody is legally mining on AWS - the margins would put you behind everyone with dedicated hardware, not to mention the lack of ASICs.
That said, if that happened, think about what would happen next: there’d be a mass exodus of customers and breach of contract lawsuits, governments would bring charges under anti-hacking laws, and the rest of the community would agree to rewrite history back to the point before that happened. He’d lose orders of magnitude more money than he could possibly gain, especially given Bitcoin’s limited liquidity.
That last part is key: we have no reason to think Bezos is a crook, or willing to break his customer’s trust, but say he has been completely compromised by Dr. Evil. This still makes no sense because nobody _wants_ a bunch of random hashes — they want to buy things. Even if he could commit the theft of the century, there wouldn’t be any place to spend it with enough volume to make it worth as much as Bezos makes every second.
You don’t think there’d be a trust issue from showing a willingness to make unauthorized changes to your servers? From breaking their public promises about security, many of which are written into contracts?
Now think carefully about the implications of doing that to steal money. It’s not like they’re hypothetically doing that to hot fix a critical security issue - it’d literally be to profit from betraying their customers’ trust!
AWS does not rent out bitcoin mining rigs and really has no incentive to. To mine at a profit requires expensive, extremely specialized single-purpose hardware that can only be used for bitcoin mining and can't be re-used for anything else.
Just because it doesn't serve a clear purpose doesn't mean it should be banned.
If governments simply allowed cryptocurrencies to exist outside of any regulation except the obligation to pay taxes on transactions and gains, eventually participation would decline as users of the currencies lost their money to scams or mismanagement, in the absence of a state interest in
protecting participants.
If the system is designed to resist state intervention, maybe letting it run as designed, and suffer the consequences, is the best approach. There's no need to regulate it out of existence just because it serves no apparent purpose. This is one case where the market will sort that out if we let it.
Thanks for clarifying. I don't think I've ever actually clicked one of those "social networking" icons so didn't realize that's where it was going. (I had grepped the text for the name instead).
It seems like a statement in today's announcement...
> Personal results in Search include... Personal answers based on info in your Google Account, like “my flights” from Gmail
...makes some aggressively ambiguous wording in a previous announcement [0] apparent...
> Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.
So I guess anyone who assumed that "Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization" meant that your Gmail was not being scanned at all was mistaken, since today's setting implies that it was still being scanned for Search personalization?
There is a search bar in Gmail that can be used to search the content of your emails. I think most technical people who have used Gmail realize that it wouldn't be possible for that feature to work without something, somewhere reading your emails to index them.
The chart does indicate 9% of fully vaccinated people believe that the vaccine microchips the population, with another 9% not sure.
I wish they'd done a follow-up question where they asked that 9% "do you think your vaccine contained microchips" to see if the answers were logically consistent.
I've actually stopped buying from them based on this.