> And this is where we wait together, regardless of our age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.
Yeah... I went to an ivy league school and I've never felt remotely that way, nor did any of my friends.
Sure, some of my classmates were snobs, and there was probably a higher concentration of them (snobs are drawn to prestige-granting institutions, after all), but I wouldn't blame the education for that.
You find the same kind of attitude with any exclusive groups, from employees of fancy tech companies to country clubs to religious & political organizations.
The efficacy of US democracy has eroded over time, and it's clear we're going to need reforms to preserve democratic governance for future generations.
Every branch of the federal government has experienced a decline in democratic accountability.
The House is so gerrymandered that only 10% of seats are remotely competitive each year, and it hasn't kept up with population growth.
The Senate is permanently gerrymandered, with state population differences that are far more disproportionate than what was originally designed for and intended when the Constitution was written.
This combined with hyper-partisanship prevents the US from accepting new states like Washington DC (population 700,000+) and Puerto Rico (population 3.2 million), depriving millions of US citizens from Congressional representation (no, non-voting representatives don't count).
The Supreme Court has become hyperpartisan, and appointments are a high stake circus that rely on arbitrary retirements and deaths. They need to be elected at this point to preserve democratic legitimacy.
As for the Presidency... the Electoral College has resulted in the election of the loser of a popular vote twice in 25 years.
I don't know how reform will happen, or if we'll ever see it in my lifetime but we desperately need it. The US government needs to be accountable to the people again.
Democracy is precious, and it's so tragic to see how much it's declined.
In 2011 Netflix announced it would split its DVD-by-mail and streaming businesses. The DVD business would be called "Qwikster", which was mocked. Eventually they reversed the decision.
Besides the goofy name, people thought the move was premature. Netflix wanted to go all-in on streaming. The catalogue was a lot more limited back then, though, and the DVDs helped bridge the gap since a lot of movies and TV shows that were unavailable for streaming were available by DVD instead.
Some additional details: The proposal was submitted by an individual shareholder.
She requests that the Board "commission a report assessing the implications of siting Microsoft cloud datacenters in countries of significant human rights concern, and the Company’s strategies for mitigating these impacts."
She specifically cites the 2024 completion of a Microsoft datacenter in Saudi Arabia, citing a "State Department report [that] details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity."
The Board opposes the proposal because it believes Microsoft already discloses extensive disclosures on key human rights risks, and has an independent assessment each year of how they manage risks and its commitment to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy. They also re-iterate the need to comply with local laws and legally binding requests for customer data.
The proposal is non-binding, so the Board doesn't have to act on it even in the unlikely event it gets majority support (ESG proposals rarely do, especially in this environment). In practice many Boards do choose to act on majority-supported non-binding shareholder proposals, though, because many shareholders will vote against directors the following year if they don't.
I had trouble getting one. I thought I was prepared. I brought in my passport, my social security card, my paystubs, and stacks of utility bills to prove my residence.
They told me bills needed to be physically postmarked, not printed, so what I brought didn't count. The problem was I had gone digital/paperless, so I hardly ever received physical bills in the mail.
I eventually had to switch two of them to paper billing, wait a month or two, get the bill, and then use that before switching back, then go back to the DMV. It was really annoying.
The Senate is in a permanent state of gerrymandering.
There were only 13 states when the Constitution was ratified. It was never envisioned to be as disproportionate as it is today, with California's two Senators representing 40 million people vs. Wyoming's 0.6 million.
I wonder if it slowly progresses over time, or if it develops opportunistically once some other bodily system that keeps it in check breaks down with age.
WhatsApp has really taken on this role for me, now that mention it.
I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.
When I was a kid, I used to imagine if that society ever developed AI, there would be widespread pushback to the idea that computers could ever develop consciousness.
I imagined the Catholic Church, for example, would be publishing missives reminding everyone that only humans can have souls, and biologists would be fighting an quixotic battle to claim that consciousness can arise from physical structures and forces.
I'm still surprised at how credulous and accepting societies have been of AI developments over the last few years.
Under the 3-factor economic growth model, there's three ways to increase economic growth:
1) Increase productivity (produce more from the same inputs)
2) Increase labor (more people working or more hours worked)
3) Increase capital (builds more equipment/infrastructure)
Early AI gains will likely be from greater productivity (1), but as time goes on if AI is able to approximate the output of a worker, that could dramatically increase the labor supply (2).
Imagine what the US economy would look like with 10x or 100x workers.
I don't believe it yet, but that's the sense I'm getting from discussions from senior folks in the field.
It's amazing how ephemeral these incredibly complex manufacturing networks are.