I do half of that crap on personal calls too. Interestingly enough, I don't get those issues on phone calls! Or most audio only calls over the internet.
The underlying issue is the technical failures of video calling, not the social environment it's used in.
Make $100-$200k/yr from your equity compensation, have that same equity comp go up 2x (amazon) and you get 800k-1.6m for 4 years of work pre-tax. Add a few more years on top of that.
Cells are getting so cheap that almost all adults in the world have one. Something around the number of 5 billion, and 4 billion of those are smartphones.
Fairly soon everyone will have a smartphone and you can get service for one hour of work a month.
France is ahead in fashion and few other art forms. America is ahead in popular art because LA is the silicon valley of culture and has the population of Europe.
After a certain point it's a language and population thing, and France has a language barrier compared to english.
I've never really understood fashion, so I can't comment on that (Whoever makes the models wear the most ridiculous outfit wins?). However, why isn't France going to Mars? Where is France (or Germany, or Sweden etc for that matter) creating the Internet, or GPS, or Hip-Hop, or Jazz, or doing cutting edge medical research? It's not that they don't do that at all - it just, that, if the safety net was such a strong driving force, we'd be light years ahead of the US. And we're really not.
Regarding culture superiority, I feel like it's just that the big and wealthy countries manage to spread their culture the most, and that's what catches on in the world. If jazz and hip-hop were invented in the Czech Republic instead of the US, there would be much larger chance of it staying just a local phenomenon, and the world would be taken over by some other cultural trend instead.
Possibly, but I'm not convinced. France and Germany spend lots of money to subsidize their artists, the French have gone so far to order radio stations to play a quota of French music - yet despite their wealth and their size (on the European level at least), they don't dominate culturally.
That's not to say that it couldn't be random that a lot of the recent advancements happened in the US, I just don't find it likely.
The problem with subsidised art (or subsidised anything really) is that the money in large part goes to the people who are well connected and great at weaseling their way into funding. So, there's a constant stream of always-mediocre French, German etc. (state-funded) movies in local artsy cinemas in Poland, which no one wants to watch, because they're mediocre.
In other words, the film makers are not subject to the market forces, they don't need to make something that the audience actually wants. The official stats of the PISF (polish state institute which funds movies) say that only 4 out of hundreds funded movies have recouped the state investment via tickets and other sales. The rests are flops, which is not a problem for anyone involved. That's how you get bad art.
Yeah, I've been having similar feelings. The state acts like a monopoly on culture and so the focus isn't on the audience but on the grant administrators. At least we're creating a proxy indicator for studying the tastes and likes of the officials that decide what gets subsidized ;)
I think you should vary your news sources, or pay more attention to the names. A large amount of cutting-edge research comes from EU universities and companies, especially Germany, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, UK. Related business ventures will always pop up in the US first though, due to the vast investment capital.
> A large amount of cutting-edge research comes from EU universities and companies
I'm not attacking European universities and companies, I'm not arguing that there isn't any great research, I'm saying it's not a multiple of the US, which it really should be if "have a strong social safety net and the possibilities are endless" was true.
While I hear your point that the explosion of cultural proceedings is below the utopia mentioned here, it may be worth noting that the WWW was invented by a guy born in London working partly for the French government. That was Tim Berners-Lee ;)
Yeah, I'm not arguing that nothing happens in Europe, just that it's not overwhelming - which it would have to be if the social safety nets were a deciding factor.
I don't that social safety nets play a large role - for most academics, researchers, engineers, artists, there's a de facto social safety net (via tenure, high income, patents, equity, stock options, grants, strong job security etc), so a general safety net doesn't improve their situation and output. And having a general safety net also doesn't by itself increase the amount of people of exceptional skill and/or ability.
I'm not against safety nets (though I do believe that we've gone too far and have created strong negative incentives), but I do believe that "our society will be like Star Trek" doesn't hold water. We have them, and our societies aren't like Star Trek.
Yes, it is correct. Vending machines are generally 20% more expensive than conbini. A bottle of water is 98¥ to 120¥ at conbini while 120¥ to 140¥ in vending machines.
You also get EM radiation from the electric wiring in your house, lightbulbs, the sun and so on. It's also about the strength of that EM radiation that determines is if it's harmful.
To compare, your wifi router does a max of 4000mW transmission, which is 4W
Where are you getting that information from ?
My outdoor Wifi CPE has maximum Tx Power of 23dBm which is about 200mW, which gives me signal strenght of -65dBm and my internet tower is approx 6Km far.
I think you have typo on the decimal points on the watts.
2.4 ghz tends to be 200mW, and 5ghz max tends to be 4000mW. I wanted to be as pessimistic as possible to still make my point.
Although with stuff like 4x4 MU-MIMO routers or dual network routers with one for 2.4ghz and for 5ghz, you could say it's 4 radios at once = 16W max. Radiation per inch of 4x4W power sources is different than one 16W source, so it's not 1:1.
The 50/60hz wiring radiation is a mild annoyance compared to 2.4 and 5Ghz wifi (I prefer 5Ghz because it seems to transfer less heat to my tissues); I sporadically use 4G on my phone so I don't need a permanent wifi installation in my room. Contrarily, I've found that staring into the sun, early in the morning for seconds up to a few minutes, is quite pleasant.
If 5G is much worse than 4G I'm literally getting lead-lined underwear. It's already a bother to keep my phone sufficiently far from my brain and balls while typing this comment.
Then again, my sensitivity is way too high. I can also feel whether my microwave is turned on through the wall!
No it isn’t. The antenna is basically just a flashing light bulb for 5 GHz. 5 GHz transfers way less energy into your body than visible or infrared light because it’s not absorbed as readily and each photon has less energy. It’s like the difference between a blue lightbulb and a red lightbulb.
It's good for my mood and concentration, and it supports my sleep rhythm. I shouldn't focus on seeing into the sun itself, though I have seen it look 3D now, super cool! That hurt my eyes for a day or so, they felt mildly bruised. It wasn't so bad, as I've hurt my eyes quite a lot before, playing around with a green laser with diffractor. That felt like "100+ small cuts in my retina" that lasted for over a week.
It works best to aim for an "HDR" effect (as a baseline, or when it's at all uncomfortable), so look around the sun and only for a small part of the time directly into the sun, aiming to make the sun more defined (vs. "overexposed white area").
For safe fun, use a candle instead. A real burning one, LEDs are Not Nice for staring at.
I actually like the design of the homepod, it's quite clever.
The apple watch being held together by glue vs interlocking plate or screws although is something I don't like. It makes the water resistance fail when you are in a hot situation, like a hot sunny day, a warm shower or a hot tub.
For many years, I remember needed a piece of photo id with my ticket to get through TSA security checkpoints. What were you able to do instead? Just give a ticket?
You didn't even need that, you just walked through some metal detectors and you could hang out near the gate and greet your loved ones coming off the plane. You didn't need a ticket. You didn't need ID. You didn't even need an intent to fly.
Yes, this is also the case in Europe (EU passports go through automated gates very similar to the Australia/NZ ones). Your passport contains biometric information about your facial structure, and the facial recognition is used to verify it.
Given the somewhat-recent studies[1] which show that the vast majority of border guards (unless they happen to be "super-matchers") have a 1/7-or-worse failure rate when trying to check a person's passport photo, I think it's quite understandable to do the facial recognition electronically.
But such a system should only be used for immigration purposes (where identity verification is very important to get right), not for getting onto a plane or just coming into the waiting areas of domestic airports.
It is worth noting that while it's totally possible to fly domestically in Australia without having your ID checked, you're still required to have one.
I'm actually quite happy with the facial recognition cameras at the Australian border - they make things a lot faster than they used to be from my experience.
Haha, oddly enough there was a period where there were almost daily hijackings of aircraft! The most common period for plane hijackings was 1961-1972. It was just a thing that happened sometimes and people totally just rolled with it. Sometimes your plane was hijacked and you landed in Cuba. Whatev, if happens: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/29/11326472/hijacking-airplanes-e...
That's why we added the metal detectors. Reinforcing the cockpit doors may have been an okay response to the events of 9/11 and potentially would have been sufficient to prevent most major terrorist attacks that seek to use the plane itself as a weapon rather than merely destroying it. (Also people will generally gang up to attack hijackers now rather than just remaining calm and letting them fly the plane elsewhere. Which sufficiently changes the dynamic.)
The TSA has only been around since November 2001. Before that, there were no TSA security checkpoints to get through. There was a security line, but no one cared who you were when you went through it.
Sometimes you could get on the plane and buy the ticket aboard.
I remember the first time I encountered a metal detector at an airport (my parents were concerned that it would terrorize us kids but I just thought it was interesting). Before then we just walked onto the plane, like boarding a train.
In Europe I routinely fly without being ID'd. I just present my mobile boarding pass to the scanner, and go through security. Anyone with my phone would be able to get on board.
It's not 100% ID-free though: AFAIK they are permitted to check ID, and they do it randomly.
I am assuming you're flying within the schengen zone.
Can I ask what countries you fly in? I fly frequently within the European Union and I am a EU citizen. However, even for flights between the Netherlands and Germany I have to enter my ID details during check-in and it's checked multiple times throughout the trip.
It's not just random checks, but it seems mandatory. When you drop off the luggage they ask for your ticket + ID. When you board the plane, they again ask for your boarding pass + ID. The exception is large, modern airports such as Munich where you simply scan your boarding pass when boarding the plane.
Maybe this is not general: I am mostly speaking about commuter flights within Germany. Typically I am flying without checked bags and I go straight to security.
I have definitely also flown from Germany to Italy and back without ever showing ID. I can also recall flying from Germany to Shiphol without ID, but I can't recall whether I was controlled on the return flight.
The underlying issue is the technical failures of video calling, not the social environment it's used in.