>Perhaps the government should open companies that are meant to lose money and are tax supported (for-loss conpanies) that compete with the industry with solutions that are good for the people but bad for business?
Many government owned companies actually make a profit until private industry lobbies them into ineffectiveness. The US Post Office was profitable until a change lobbied by Fed-Ex and UPS forced them to keep 100% of their pensions available at all times.
Various crown corp electric companies were profitable in Canada and SaskTel, a crown corp telecommunications company is the last bastion of non-insane cell phone plans though I'm sure Rogers and Bell are working on it.
People just hate seeing the government make money. They see that things are good, say "hey, why should the government get this money" and then shut down the system that's working and complain when everything costs more because private industry is trying to squeeze every last cent out of them.
This is one of my favourite things. It's an incredibly old, historically important text in a dead language and it's just a customer complaint.
>"You have put ingots which were not good before my messenger and said, 'If you want to take them, take them. If you do not want to take them, go away'.
3750 years ago some dude was still showing up and trying to rip people off and pull the "cash in hand" choosing beggar play.
It should literally remind you of the east coast cod fishery in Canada which was once the most productive fishery in the world and is now basically nothing.
It got wrecked by giant all in one factory trawlers out competing local boats, causing a feedback effect where to complete you needed trawlers as well helped along by a corrupt government that was willfully ignorant of the situation until (almost literally) one day there just weren't any fish left.
That destroyed an entire region's economy (a region I happen to be from), and has led to generational depression, joblessness and frankly hopelessness.
>- A friend of mine, when showing him the statement 'x = x + 1' was confused; surely, x cannot also equal x+1.
I think the best thing that my CS 101 prof did was always refer to the assignment operator as "gets" so you'd say "eks gets eks plus one" out loud. It really helped divorce assignment and equality in my mind.
I dreamed myself a sci-fi miniseries and it was extremely weird so it's not just you. I work in games/entertainment so I assume it's just how my brain organizes stuff.
>Seems like you need some kind of divine recognition, as otherwise you're just a dictator.
I'd argue you have it backwards there. You start as a dictator (you and a bunch of people who agree with you take over some part of land, congrats you're the King) then the legitimacy comes from you and your family holding on to it till everyone's used to it.
>There is an (appointed) upper house in Canada and the UK at least, that in theory can act as a check on parliament.
If anything needs reform it's the fucking Senate. Basically the same problems as the US Supreme Court has where whoever's in charge when people die get to pack the upper house of government. I'd happily take at least term limits but I feel like it should either be elected or produced somehow via vote share during the parlimentary election.
I still think it was a bad call allowing Harper to get away with prorouging parliament twice and giving the cons time to paint a coalition government as somehow "unconstitutional" and "undemocratic".
Well the main source of turmoil would be in replacing the office since theoretically all the powers in the country devolve from the head of state.
I gotta say that I find the rabid anti-monarchal take a lot of americans have online kinda weird. I wouldn't say I feel "ruled" in any real sense by the British crown even though it is technically true. The Prime Minister and the House of Commons are where the actual legislative power rests and as much as the Governor-General is technically the commander in chief I highly doubt if she called for a revolution against the civilian government that would get any traction.
Furthermore I gotta say that given a lot of the other options I LIKE the hoky kind of odd but deeply rooted ceremony that surrounds our governmental proceedings.
Is it silly that the prime minister has to be presented to the Governor-General to get invested and leads a Privy Council (and for that matter is called a Prime Minister)? Yeah, but it's been WORKING that way for a long time and that inertia is important, especially I think nowadays with a lot of uncertainty from the largest democracy in the world.
Interesting my CS degree had a required introductory Computer Engineering course which itself had a pre-req first year course where we learned digital logic (among other stuff).
We didn't go quite as far as this book seems to but definitly got a decent grounding in how computers actually do their thing before it was back to theory.
>Can journalist check Gamasutra nad gdc vault before writing blog post on genre
No because if they take time to do research they'll miss the views they could have gotten if they just slam out a piece and (basically) nobody is going to pay extra for a journalist who's also an expert on board game design.
>These days that dispute is ridiculous - obviously prejudice and bias can be built into technological artifacts. It's one "if statement" away.
And with machine learning we're building our biases into the algorithms explicitly; see all those "resume parsers are racist" articles.
This is clearly an issue that needs to be dealth with but the problem is that it's not a problem we can engineer our way of, we need to confront the biases that we have and try and build ways to expose biases we don't even realize we have.
This is obviously quite hard and if I had a solution to it I'd probably be implementing it instead of waxing poetic on HN.
I mean 5 hours is pretty much a days work realistically so if you look at it that way it seems pretty reasonable to me. Project 1 is basically a "you'll take a day to do this" project 3 is basically a week's work, etc.
If it comes with some instructions and hints it would line up with my estimates pretty closely, that said I've done a bit of this sort of work before so I might have less unknown unknowns in my estimate.
Many government owned companies actually make a profit until private industry lobbies them into ineffectiveness. The US Post Office was profitable until a change lobbied by Fed-Ex and UPS forced them to keep 100% of their pensions available at all times.
Various crown corp electric companies were profitable in Canada and SaskTel, a crown corp telecommunications company is the last bastion of non-insane cell phone plans though I'm sure Rogers and Bell are working on it.
People just hate seeing the government make money. They see that things are good, say "hey, why should the government get this money" and then shut down the system that's working and complain when everything costs more because private industry is trying to squeeze every last cent out of them.