> If the biggest flaw of a OS is the border radius of its windows, you've got yourself a pretty decent OS!
There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.
> It's a $3 million verdict in compensatory damages. Even if reduced on appeal, that's a lot of money.
Where are you seeing that?
The article says:
> Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million. That’s less than one-fifth of what prosecutors were seeking.
> Meta is valued at about $1.5 trillion and the company’s stock was up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict, a signal that shareholders were shrugging off the news.
> Juror Linda Payton, 38, said the jury reached a compromise on the estimated number of teenagers affected by Meta’s platforms, while opting for the maximum penalty per violation. With a maximum $5,000 penalty for each violation, she said she thought each child was worth the maximum amount.
> What structural change would permit a worker to take initiative and say "Hey, these working conditions are wrong/inadequate and I will not safely do my job today unless proper changes are made", without risk of getting fired by higher-ups?
Well, what you are describing is a strike, and it is currently illegal for ATC to strike, so in theory one possible structural change would be to make it legal for the workers to do what you're describing.
That website presents an unconvincing argument and uses it to arrive at a conclusion that is at odds with the extensive academic research on this topic.
> Academic research concludes that ranked-choice and vote-for-one both result in a center-squeeze spoiler effect.
No, it's more complicated than that.
All voting systems have the potential for spoiler effects (in the broadest sense of the term). That's a core and long-proven theorem in social choice theory. What's more relevant is how those actually play out under the conditions in which they're used. And it turns out that, while pathological cases are still mathematically possible, in practice, under the conditions that typically apply to our elections, RCV is actually less likely to produce these effects than other systems.
The idea that approval voting, STAR voting, or Condorcet voting is superior to RCV for this reason is a misconception based on decades-old research that is no longer current.
(Also, the website linked above is not a correct demonstration of the effect you linked, although I can see how the confusion happened).
Can you share some actual evidence for your case? I really don't believe it. The anti-RCV story about Alaska 2022 holds that Palin spoiled round 1 of the instant runoff by splitting the vote with Begich, causing Begich to drop out. RCV only beats vote-for-one, unless you can make a convincing case otherwise.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04764v3 (Yes, I agree with the conclusion of this paper, but I argue that we can do better with Approval or STAR.)
Basic modelling on a 2D political compass gives a Yee diagram, demonstrating RCV's counterintuitive results. Yeah, that's theory, but Alaska 2022 demonstrates a real case of it. And the list of center-squeeze cases on the Wikipedia page, too.
> That's a core and long-proven theorem in social choice theory.
Do you mean Arrow's theorem? Doesn't apply to STAR or Approval.
> The idea that approval voting, STAR voting, or Condorcet voting is superior to RCV for this reason is a misconception based on decades-old research that is no longer current.
The First Amendment does not explicitly mention campaign spending (or political campaigns at all), and until 2010, the First Amendment was not considered to apply to monetary spending in political campaigns.
The right to petition the government is explicitly protected, but that doesn't apply in the case of IL-9, which was an open race and therefore none of the candidates were actually elected representatives.
Even still, this is money on how a private entity decides who its going to support for a future election.
None of these people are even running for government yet.
If the democratic party wanted to so something about it, they could, but the freedom of expression and association guarantees that a party that wants to have lots of money spent on ads an such can do it
> It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.
While I wouldn't use the word "degenerate", in terms of gambling, this isn't anywhere close to as bad as it gets.
At least this form is (psuedo)random, and the odds are statistically fair and published (by law).
Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player.
The house always wins, but there is no form of gambling where that is more guaranteed and manipulated than slot machine games (which includes the video arcade-style slot games).
One thing I saw in a study of slot machines is that really addicted slot gamblers eventually become irritated at the jackpot animations, because they break up the "flow" state of pulling the lever or swiping a touch screen continually. They might be the most evil form of gambling we've developed, basically brain jacks for hardcore gambling addicts.
> Contrast to slot machines, which are not random, but are in fact preprogrammed to provide payouts in ways which maximize the earnings for the house and the addictive value for the player.
this isn't correct. slot machines are random. my first job out of school was, in part, making sure slot machines were random.
people think the machines are rigged because they don't understand the rules. the machines are fair, it's the pay tables that are rigged.
Odds of winning are rather meaningless for negative sum games, you’re going to lose anyway. While I find most forms of gambling rather boring, if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
My game of choice is the big state lottery and it’s simply for the fun mental space of the possibility of winning, actually checking your ticket is kind of depressing because the odds are so low. But look at it as paying for the experience of the possibility of a jackpot and realize when you buy one ticket or multiple so just buy one and it becomes a cheap thrill.
I have one friend who likes to gamble. I've tried the old math argument with him and he dismisses it out-of-hand. He says that, yes, he knows it's a negative sum game but sometimes he wins and that makes it worth it. Then he says, "You spend money on a symphony or an art museum or an expensive restaurant, right? Those are guaranteed to leave you a little bit poorer at the end of the night. Same thing as gambling, but with a bigger guarantee."
Hear me out: Whenever people try the "math argument" on a gambler they are basically wrong and are misunderstanding how recreational gamblers actually think, which is not irrational (for the most part) or at least not irrational in the way people think on the surface.
Take the lottery: The classic "math objection" is to explain to the person that the expectation[1] of buying tickets in a lottery is negative so over time they will (on average) lose money.
Most people who gamble know this. The thing is they are not trying to maximise expectation. They are trying to maximise "expected marginal utility"[2]. They know that the dollar they spend on the ticket affects their life far less than the payoff would in the unlikely event they get it. Because the marginal utility of -$1 is basically nothing (it wouldn't change their life much at all to lose a dollar) versus winning say $10mil would completely change the life of most people and therefore the marginal utility of +10mil is much more than 10mil times greater than the marginal utility lost by spending a dollar on the ticket.
It is fundamentally this difference that the gambling companies are arbitraging. And for people who become addicted to gambling it is like any other addiction. The companies are just exploiting people who have a disease and are ruining their lives for profit. There are studies which show that addicted gamblers don't actually get the dopamine hit from winning, they get it from anticipating the win (ie the spin). So actually winning or losing just keeps them wanting to come back for another hit.
[1] Ie the average payoff weighted by probability
[2] Ie the average difference in utility weighted by probability. This could be seen as how much of a difference the payoff would make to their life.
All people who go to casinos are not pathological gamblers.
They have some disposable income, and spend it at the casino for a bit of fun. Sometimes, they come out richer, and they are happy, sometimes, they lose, they come out a bit disappointed, but that's the cost of of entertainment.
Gambling can be entertainment, and as long as it's viewed as consumption it's fine IMO. I enjoy playing craps whenever I'm in a casino, and have great memories with friends playing the ups and downs of the table.
The response is probably that gambling is designed to be as addictive as possible, and while your friend might think they will not get addicted, is it really a good risk to take?
Go to a movie and you are going to be put the ticket prices, it’s a money losing proposition clearly there’s no reason to do so. Obviously, people place value on some experiences so any argument which fails to consider that is flawed.
If you happen to be at a casino, make exactly one bet in your lifetime and there’s a significant chance you’ll end up ahead. On average you’ll be out money but we don’t live out every possibility and average them. It’s just one event and you could easily end up ahead, it’s only as you repeat it with minimal gains and negative returns that things quickly become a near certainty.
With Powerball the odds are low but not astronomical that you buy 1 or 1000 tickets and end up ahead. It’s the most likely outcome by a massive margin but due to non jackpot prizes a long way from zero.
However again the odds of breakeven just reduce the cost of play they aren’t the only thing people get for their money.
If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.
I don’t play the lottery but I’ve never really understood the math against it. It’s a negative expected value, sure, but it also produces a (small) probability of a high return. The math against it seems to hinge on the idea that people should maximize the expected value of their wealth.
But, an alternative goal is to maximize your probability of qualitative changes up, and minimize the probability of qualitative changes down, for your living conditions. If somebody is in a situation where they can spend a qualitatively inconsequential amount of money on lotteries, then playing the lottery is a rational way of maximizing this metric, right?
Of course, it does add the hard-to-quantify risk that they’ll become addicted to gambling and start spending a qualitatively meaningful amount of money gambling!
OTOH if we as a society all started putting a small percentage of our wealth toward the lottery we’re essentially misallocating whatever that percentage was. So it produces a somehow less efficient economy I guess. So maybe there’s a social bias against it.
> if you like the experience it’s little different than spending 50$ at an arcade.
If you spend $50 at the arcade you usually develop a little more skill at the game. Depending on the game and player.
$50 at a slot machine develops no skill. At best you’ve broke even or made a little money. At worst, it just feeds an addiction. But there’s no skill here; the odds of any outcome are fixed regardless of what the player does.
Two or more tickets in the same draw have a lower expected value. Yes it is a very small change to your payout while having an extra chance. In some way you're betting against your self with a second bet in the game relative to the jackpot .
> I've yet to come across anything I want or need outside banking or government use where age verification benefits me, or is so useful/important that I would willingly hand over critical secret documents
So far. As these laws proliferate (and companies continue complying in advance), at this rate, it won't be long before you can't meaningfully do anything on the Internet otherwise.
> I thought HIPPA law had very harsh fines for this
Not at all. The maximum fine a company has to pay is capped at $2 million per calendar year for a violation, and that's assuming it's even eligible for the highest tier of penalty.
> This is not true. I will just give the example of the nighttime illumination of the Eiffel Tower:
That example is not analogous to the topic at hand.
But furthermore, it also is specific to French/European copyright law. In the US, the US Copyright Act would not permit restrictions on photographs of architectural works that are visible from public spaces.
I don't know the details of that specific case so I can't speak to it, but the text of the AWCPA is very clear:
> The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.
This codifies an already-established principle in US law. French law does not have that same principle.
> Meta still tracks analytics which isn't good for privacy, but I'm not aware of any news of them or 3rd parties reading messages without consent of one of the 1st parties? Signal is probably much better though
Correct. WhatsApp uses the Signal protocol, and there is zero evidence of them reading message contents except with the consent of one of the users involved (such as a user reporting a message for moderation purposes).
(And before anyone takes issue with that last qualifier, consent from at least one party is the bar for secure communications on any platform, Signal included. If you don't trust the person you are communicating with, no amount of encryption will protect you).
Discovering a backdoor in WhatsApp for Facebook/Meta to read messages would be a career-defining finding for a security researcher, so it's not like this is some topic nobody has ever thought to investigate.
There are loads of other flaws with the OS. It just so happens that people care a lot about the design of Apple's products, so people talk about these details.
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