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axeil posted:I don't see the issue here. No one is using a fitbit for truly medically accurate info. If my heart rate is at 140 or 160 it's not a massive difference, it's just to get a ballpark estimate. Yeah, if a fitbit is off by that much then it's completely useless because it isn't providing you with any information that you aren't already provided with by virtue of being alive. quote:Moreover, this analysis disregards the thousands of discrete data points in which the Fitbit devices recorded literally no heart beat at all. As the authors note, incorporating those null data points increased the average discrepancy at moderate to high intensities to approximately 25 beats per minute, an even worse result. In addition, the study also reported a “startling inconsistency” between Fitbit devices simultaneously recording the same user’s heart rate on different wrists. If they're off by that much, then the only question it's answering is whether or not you feel like you're exerting yourself, and you should know the answer to that without any kind of monitoring device. All of the (already questionable) reasons why anyone other than a professional athlete might want to know their heartrate while exercising go right out the window if you can't get a more accurate and consistent reading than that.
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May 27, 2016 23:21
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Here, have a story about two of this thread's favorite things: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/driverless-car-startup-zoox-valued-at-1-billion-after-new-funding-round-2016-05-30 quote:The backer of a Silicon Valley autonomous car developer called Zoox said the secretive startup raised a fresh round of capital valuing it at more than $1 billion, roughly equal to a similar company General Motors Co. acquired earlier this month. Cruise Automation is the startup GM acquired: http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-startup-for-more-than-1-billion/ quote:General Motors this morning announced that it will acquire Cruise Automation, a San Francisco-based developer of autonomous vehicle technology. No financial terms were disclosed, but Fortune has learned from a source close to the situation that the deal is valued at “north of $1 billion,” in a combination of cash and stock.
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May 30, 2016 22:08
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Baby Babbeh posted:I still think Pokemon Go is a big success, but I worry that the markets are getting a little tulip crazy when they put Niantic at a $3 billion valuation. I doubt it's representative or anything, but it feels like it's died down quite a bit already in my general area. Probably about half of the people I know who were seriously playing have stopped, either because they got sick of the grind or just got bored. I don't see the crowds that I was seeing practically every night either, but then again there was a minor kerfuffle from a bunch of local business owners here about crowds of people blocking up foot traffic and making it difficult for actual customers to come and go.
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Jul 27, 2016 03:01
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Working for Uber to offset a car payment for a car that you actually want seems really counterproductive. That's a ton of wear and tear and depreciation (especially since you're talking about city driving) that you'd need to offset in addition to gas and the car payment itself.
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Jul 30, 2016 22:17
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Panfilo posted:That's why its only worth it if you're buying a hybrid. How many miles would you really need to put on it to net $350 a month to cover the payments? I don't really know anything about Uber's payments to their drivers and finding unbiased information online is hard, so I really have no idea. You'd have to look at earnings per mile, though, because the easiest way to devastate a new car's resale value is to put noticeably more than the average number of miles per year on it. That's before accounting for actual maintenance costs due to wear and tear.
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Jul 30, 2016 22:29
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e_angst posted:You know, you'd think it would, but they've done studies now that proves Uber doesn't reduce drunk driving. This seems pretty logical since taxis are a thing. Most people have always had alternatives to driving drunk, they just choose not to use them.
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Jul 31, 2016 09:27
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Arsenic Lupin posted:The most obvious issue is that you think you aren't all that drunk; another is that if you leave your car at the restaurant/bar, you're going to have to take a cab back the next morning to retrieve it, screwing up your commute/carpool/whatever. I don't think the suicide analogy really works anyway. Suicide is an impulsive decision and prevention methods like suicide barriers work by making it harder to commit suicide. Uber doesn't actually make it any harder to just get in your car and drive home, and doing that is still cheaper and more convenient than hailing a cab or using Uber.
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Aug 1, 2016 20:38
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Lots of people have had really bad experiences with car salespeople, dude. I basically don't ever want to deal with them or dealerships in general again after my last experience car shopping. edit- Lady Naga posted:Used car dealers are the common goto metaphor for people who are duplicitous, manipulative and smarmy but sure it's incredibly goony to not want to deal with them. I've honestly had worse experiences when looking at new cars.
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Aug 3, 2016 16:07
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Lady Naga posted:I mean for sure some element of the metaphor does arise from classism ("those dirty used car salesmen only deal with poors, unlike those noble few who hock Cherokees for 30k!") but there are elements of truth there. I think a lot of it just comes down to what it is they're trying to sell you. New car salespeople are really only going to push you on price and financing, used cars salespeople are potentially lying to you about the actual condition of the vehicle.
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Aug 3, 2016 16:49
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Popular Thug Drink posted:thats not irony? they were just a giagantic general retailer who thrived on mail order. only recently has amazon started reselling various home goods, for the longest time amazon was just a bookseller This is just me doing stupid nitpicking, but Amazon started moving away from books as early as the late 90s. They've definitely operated as a general online retailer for a longer period of time than they operated as just an online bookstore.
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Aug 16, 2016 01:12
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Arsenic Lupin posted:"Make eye contact with a road guy and see that he's waving you on" is a LOT harder problem than "navigate roads using known landmarks and known automobile actions". If automated vehicles ever become even remotely commonplace it's hard for me to imagine that we wouldn't end up with some kind of signaling technology that flaggers can use to instruct a self driving car to wait. You'd obviously still need the car to have some ability to fall back and make a decision based on its own sensor data, but a little handheld device that signals "wait" or "all clear" doesn't seem too extreme.
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Aug 19, 2016 22:15
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It isn't free market competition when whoever has the biggest bag of money can just operate at a loss until everybody else dies. The mistake is in assuming that "free market competition" is a thing that has ever, does, or even can exist. The free market is one of those conservative myths that falls apart under even light scrutiny since markets in the modern, capitalist sense literally cannot exist without governments to support them. Complaints about regulations always boil down to "I don't like this specific form of regulation because it benefits someone else."
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Aug 26, 2016 18:07
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Absurd Alhazred posted:To anonymously show a person that there's one more person who thinks their video was worthwhile? Yeah, this doesn't seem weird at all. I mean, I knew about youtube's default for liking videos and it doesn't bother me, but the idea that upvoting something is meant to be a public show of support is kind of odd to me. I tend to think about buttons like that as more of an anonymous positive or negative vote, even when I know that's not how it's being used.
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Aug 28, 2016 05:35
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Don't Uber drivers generally either circle areas or idle at central locations when waiting for fares? That kind of behavior is what I'd consider to be on the clock if we're calling Uber drivers misclassified employees. Like, I'm a contractor. A decent portion of my time is spent writing proposals, networking, or doing general administrative tasks and none of that is billable to anyone, but I'm also able to account for that time in the rates I charge. There's a problem if Uber drivers aren't able to even hit minimum wage once you factor in time that isn't billable.
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Sep 5, 2016 19:03
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nm posted:The interesting issue with uber while waiting for a fare is that 99% of drivers now also have lyft running at the same time. The answer to all of your questions is "it depends" since the actual definition of an independent contractor is murky. If Uber is misclassifying drivers, then most of your questions resolve themselves since the real issue is that drivers are being treated unfairly and are forced to use both services to turn a profit. If they aren't, then the questions aren't relevant anyway. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Sep 6, 2016 |
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Sep 6, 2016 05:44
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BarbarianElephant posted:Bollocks is it. I cook more than anyone else I know and I've never caramelized onions. Anything that needs to cook for an hour, attended, isn't simple. I could do it, but it'd be a fancy meal to impress people. Wait, how are caramelized onions a fancy thing you do to impress people? You literally just throw onions into a pan with some oil and butter and stir them every few minutes.
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Oct 20, 2016 22:03
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I don't actually have a ton to add to this derail, other than to say that I think it's pretty reasonable to see smartphones as a transformational technology for the developing world while still just being largely a convenience for rich, developed nations. If you're wealthy enough to worry about things like ordering out without ever talking to a human being or finding good restaurants in a new city then, no, I really don't think having a smartphone has meaningfully changed your life. Having constant access to the internet (and a variety of services that take advantage of everyone having constant access to the internet) has mostly just allowed us to more conveniently do things that were already pretty easy and convenient. None of this means that I think smartphones are bad or whatever, but I do think people tend to drastically overstate their importance just because they really, really like them.
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Nov 1, 2016 04:38
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Speaking as somebody who cannot remember driving paths even after she has driven them more than a year, yes, a smartphone changed my life a lot. But GPS! you cry. Yes, and I had one on my car that didn't do me a drat bit of good walking down the street. And all the people, as I say for the fifteenth time, who have recorded police brutality have changed the American conversation about race and policing quite a lot. That affects all of us, wealthy or not. For what it's worth, I was trying to specifically use "wealthy" in a way that basically encompassed all Americans. As far as getting around goes, I guess I'll admit that this is just a blindspot for me. I used to drive or ride into New York and Boston kind of regularly around 2002-2004 to meet with friends, and it was never inconvenient or time consuming finding my way to somewhere that I'd never been before. Having my phone or car do it for me now saves me maybe five minutes in prep time if I'm being generous. That said, I feel like everyone having a phone on them at all times and everyone having a camera on them at all times are really separate developments from smartphones, which is why I didn't bring those things up. The same goes with texting taking over as a preferred form of communication. I remember getting annoyed as poo poo back in the early- to mid-2000s because pretty much everyone that I knew had started preferring text over calls and forcing someone to text on a feature phone should probably be classified as a war crime. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 05:14 on Nov 1, 2016 |
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Nov 1, 2016 05:04
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FilthyImp posted:People honestly want to contact the Internet Team/Sales, do the back and forth during a lunch break (I saw X price can you do Y? Ok Z sounds good see you in a few hours), and basically be sent papers to e-sign, look over, make sure the math is right, then walk into the dealer and walk out in 30 minutes. Like, the ease with which we make purchases like computers, phones and TVs is the standard. Car purchases are hardly ever that easy. My last car purchase involved mass emailing a bunch of dealers with my best offer and going to the first one that said "yes" without trying to get me to come down to talk in person and/or on the phone first. It was pretty great, and my only real complaint is that I had to fight off salespeople when I was going around doing comparison test drives a few week earlier. The car buying process is in general pretty unfriendly to consumers and doubly so if you're trying to make an informed purchase. Legitimate comparison shopping is a huge hassle because there's a ton of (understandable) pressure to actually sell you a car if you're test driving multiple models. Edit- Basically, the whole model for buying a car is broken and doesn't seem to actually be what anyone wants. If you're an engaged, informed consumer then you probably just want to drive whatever your top few choices are and come to a decision on your own. If you just need a car and aren't willing to do much research then the process borders on predatory. There's no one that wouldn't be better served by cutting out the actual car buying sales process. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 09:15 on Nov 8, 2016 |
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Nov 8, 2016 09:09
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computer parts posted:Again, what makes you think this latter group will be better served? You seem to be under the impression that people will just sack up and do all the research since there's no one there to (even nominally) give them advice. They'd be better served by a process that was less time consuming and stressful, even if they weren't necessarily making better purchasing decisions. The point is that there's no real benefit to the consumer that comes from how car buying works right now.
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Nov 8, 2016 16:53
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:This is a problem I've had in both Massachusetts and New York. Even when it was possible to purchase individual plans, the premiums started at $800/month. Obamacare was a major factor in me being able to start my own business, and if it goes away before I can expand enough to enroll in a group plan, I'm not sure what the future looks like. Same. I've been self-employed for most of my adult life and I just never had health coverage pre-ACA, despite making fairly good money at times. That's probably what I have to look forward to if I lose access to my coverage.
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Nov 18, 2016 23:05
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MiddleOne posted:As someone who grew up and learnt to drive on the Swedish countryside, cars as a concept are not suited for heavy snowfall. Hell, Stockholms traffic stopped for almost 9 hours last month due to snowfall. Not that it has anything to do with self-driving cars since it's not like we'll ever stop forcing people to drive in snow, but this is totally true. Driving in snowy conditions is one of those incredibly bad and dangerous things that we just kind of accept as a society even though we really, really shouldn't.
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Dec 7, 2016 18:31
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Baby Babbeh posted:People work for reasons other than money. Shocking, I know. The concept of work is really fundamentally different when you aren't doing it to survive, though. Someone with enough wealth to retire at will is effectively living in a Star Trek work-for-personal-betterment utopian bubble.
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Dec 24, 2016 08:35
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boner confessor posted:where did they buy this house? a lot of our parents wanted to live out in the burbs in a new tract house, a lot of us want to pile in to the cities. i often frame my choice as struggling to get a house where i would like to live, or giving up and moving out into the woods where i could easily afford a house The house my parents bought in the suburbs in the 70s is absurdly valuable (in inflation adjusted terms) compared to the price they paid for it. House values and weak inflation are part of the reason that mortgages are nowhere near as useful for building wealth as they once were.
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Dec 25, 2016 22:35
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LanceHunter posted:Now, if we end up reaching human population equilibrium (or if there is a massive population crash), there will be a whole other level of weirdness going on economically that will probably make the inefficiency of home buying as a store of wealth not our biggest problem. There's more to it than just rising home values, however. There was really a perfect storm of rising home values, general inflation, and a guaranteed increase of household income over the long term that made debt (and mortgages in particular) incredibly useful for the middle class. Debt is still fine if you can afford it, but it doesn't have the kind of universal advantages that it did when a lot of people who are now in their 50s and 60s bought their first homes.
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Dec 26, 2016 16:01
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Platystemon posted:Simpson’s Paradox This isn't much of an argument since: 1) Simpson's Paradox doesn't actually suggest that local data should always be ignored in favor of aggregate data when making decisions and 2) Policy decisions are made on local and national scales, not global ones. You can argue that the second point leads to bad policy, but it's the way things are. People aren't going to support policies to put the welfare of people elsewhere in the world over their own.
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Feb 13, 2017 00:43
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pangstrom posted:To basically agree with everyone in a way that will be read as disagreeing with everyone: It was a big advantage but 99% of failsons with that advantage don't change lanes as successfully as he did. I'm being very agnostic about the merit/skill/luck side of things because I don't "get" him as somebody worth watching but whatever tastes differ. I don't think anyone is saying that he doesn't "deserve" his success, but the ability to fail repeatedly is actually a huge advantage. This Salon article from last year is kind of tangentially related: http://www.salon.com/2015/01/25/sponsored_by_my_husband_why_its_a_problem_that_writers_never_talk_about_where_their_money_comes_from/ quote:In my opinion, we do an enormous “let them eat cake” disservice to our community when we obfuscate the circumstances that help us write, publish and in some way succeed. I can’t claim the wealth of the first author (not even close); nor do I have the connections of the second. I don’t have their fame either. But I do have a huge advantage over the writer who is living paycheck to paycheck, or lonely and isolated, or dealing with a medical condition, or working a full-time job. The problem is that "being good at youtubing" is a (relatively) low bar when you have a support structure that allows you to fail repeatedly while you get better at whatever it is that you're trying to do. It's like people who insist that software development is a hugely meritocratic industry because a self taught programmer with a good portfolio can probably find someone who will hire them. That's absolutely true, but it also requires that person to support themselves for a year or more while learning and essentially working an unpaid full time job. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Feb 15, 2017 |
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Feb 15, 2017 05:03
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Eh, coffee is fine unless you're dumping sugar and cream into it or you've got some health condition that makes caffeine a no-go. You're probably drinking stuff that's a whole lot worse than black coffee unless you're living exclusively off of plain water. It's not even in the same ballpark as juices.
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May 23, 2017 05:50
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Tiny Brontosaurus posted:Why is that so common Only around 75% of the US population showers once per day, so it doesn't seem too unlikely that some of that other 25% happen to be tech CEOs. It's probably more unusual to actually admit that you don't shower daily than it is to not do it, but I don't think it has anything to do with nerds or CEOs or whatever.
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Jun 29, 2017 22:03
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enraged_camel posted:That's not the disagreement at all, you should pay more attention: It turns out most people don't actually find professional accomplishments all that impressive if it turns out the person behind them is a total dick, especially when we're really just talking about business accomplishments and not, like, curing cancer.
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Jul 2, 2017 20:20
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hobbesmaster posted:I don't know how chemical has been doing since the price of oil crashed. I'm a ChemE who works as a developer, but I keep in touch with a few people from my school who actually went to work in the field and my impression from them is that things are basically fine. Still, I'm willing to bet that recruiters aren't falling over themselves to offer $70-80k/year positions to new grads like they were when I graduated.
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Jan 25, 2018 04:36
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Rhesus Pieces posted:Supposedly sharing your exercise progress helps keep people focused and accountable but I've been doing just fine keeping all my exercise info strictly to myself. I'm really curious to see whether this kind of thing is going to ultimately end up doing more harm than good. It's basically taking the worst psychological aspects of long term goal setting and social media and shoving them together.
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Jan 29, 2018 02:13
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cowofwar posted:Uber has invented trains. I mean, I get what you're saying, but also not really. quote:How it works is that Uber will load up the freight on a conventional, human driven truck who collects the load from the shipper and then does a short haul run to a transfer hub. The short haul truck then loads its cargo onto a long-haul freight transport, which is autonomous for the purposes of these trips. That self-driving test truck handles the highway driving for the longer portion of the trip, handing it off once again to a human-driven trip for the short haul cap to the overall journey. It's not a train just because you have something like drayage going on. You've still got individual trucks transporting goods over regular highways. It's not like regular shipping always involves a single, human driven truck going from origin to final destination. Edit- Coincidentally, long haul trucking is actually a job we should want to see automated. It sucks and no one really wants to do it. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Mar 7, 2018 |
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Mar 7, 2018 02:26
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Condiv posted:there's a huge amount more time to lay on the brakes for an autonomous vehicle than a human controlled one. it's hard to imagine any scenario where she could step in front of one, it detect her, and fail to brake in time, barring her suicidally stepping right into it as it passes. The last thing in the world that I want to do is defend Uber, but this kind of poo poo actually does happen and it's not always because the person in question is suicidal. Sometimes pedestrians don't see cars and step into the road at a point where it's outside of the physical ability of the car to stop, even with perfect reaction time. I know someone who killed a teenager about fifteen years ago this way. She was never even charged with anything since several witnesses made it clear that there was absolutely no way she could have stopped the car in time. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but even 100% perfect autonomous cars are going to sometimes run people over because a car can only stop so fast and sensors can't magically see through solid objects.
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Mar 19, 2018 20:34
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Condiv posted:your friend doesn't have anywhere close to perfect reaction time so i'm not sure why you think the anecdote is particularly applicable. It's applicable because you didn't understand my anecdote. With perfect reaction time she still would have hit that girl. In that particular case there was a large bush that made it both impossible for the pedestrian to see that a car was coming and for the driver to see that a pedestrian was about to step out into the street. She stepped into the road maybe 20 feet in front of a car moving over 40mph. It had nothing to do with reaction time. Cars don't magically stop. Cars with perfect reaction times are going to hit pedestrians occasionally.
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Mar 19, 2018 20:39
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Condiv posted:they don't have to magically stop to avoid killing someone, they just have to decelerate enough to avoid doing so. Cars can't magically do this either.
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Mar 19, 2018 20:43
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Condiv posted:there really isn't. I checked the speedlimit of that street and it's 40mph. that's less than 4 seconds to reach full stop. and the car doesn't have to reach full stop for the accident to not be lethal It's a probability distribution that any given collision with a pedestrian will result in a fatality. It's less likely that you're going to be killed in a low speed accident, but it happens all the time. The only way to prevent all fatal pedestrian/vehicle collisions is to build magical cars that defy the laws of physics and stop instantly (presumably killing their occupants). Seriously, you're making such a ridiculous claim that you've got a thread full of people who generally hate Uber actually defending them. Without details it's impossible to know what actually happened, but it's also not at all outside of the realm of possibility that a pedestrian stepped into the road in such a way that the car physically could not stop in time.
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Mar 19, 2018 21:50
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Condiv posted:no, not really. why do you think it's appropriate for an AV to speed? there's literally no reason it should've been programmed to exceed the speed limit, especially since it would've had 10% more time to react had it been going the speed limit. This is, like, the one reasonable thing you've said in this thread. I'd still be willing to bet that the car traveling slightly above the speed limit did not contribute to this accident, though. Edit- Are self driving cars designed to travel slightly above the speed limit to better keep up with the flow of traffic? It's not as much of an issue on surface streets, but I can think of stretches of highway where obstinately driving at the speed limit is horrifically dangerous in certain traffic conditions. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 03:49 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 03:42
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Absurd Alhazred posted:No, that's nuclear warheads. Reactors aren't meant to kill the people operating and maintaining them, and yet they did. Yeah, but outside of a handful of incidents early on none of those fatalities have anything to do with nuclear power. This is every accident with fatalities after 1964:
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Mar 26, 2018 03:48
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I'm pretty sure any self-driving car safe enough to operate on public streets (ie, not Uber's apparently) is capable of distinguishing between places to drive and places not to drive regardless of what a map might say. Self-driving cars don't just blindly follow GPS. I'm also willing to bet that this guy wasn't blindly following the GPS either and is just using that as an excuse for not realizing that a wide stairway wasn't an exit. Either way it's hilarious that Uber is being blamed.
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Mar 28, 2018 02:58
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