Barry Zuckerkorn @ BarryZuckerkorn @beehaw.org

He's very good.

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The SAG-AFTRA strike doesn't cover on-camera work for variety shows, game shows, or talk shows, which are governed by SAG-AFTRA's Network Television Code, a separate contract that remains in effect between SAG-AFTRA and the studios/networks.

Key points from the article that I think are worth specifically mentioning:

• The college wage premium still remains high. College educated people earn a lot more money than those who don't have degrees, on a per hour and per year basis.
• The college wealth premium has shrunk significantly, in that paying tuition and delaying entrance into the workforce is a huge up-front cost that requires much more time in the workforce to recoup, compared to previous generations.
• The variance in outcomes means that even if college is a good financial decision for a majority of students, doesn't mean that there aren't an increasing number of graduates for whom going to college sets them back financially. Key factors include school, major, actual out-of-pocket cost of attendance, and, well, parental wealth and socioeconomic status.

Still, college is still worth it if you can attend for cheap (lower-cost schools, financial aid, scholarships, outside tuition assistance, education funds that are tax advantaged if used for education, etc.), if you choose a high earning major, or have the socioeconomic background to take advantage of the additional credential. It's a tougher bet if you choose a less lucrative major, attend a more expensive school, or might not finish on time. And, unfortunately, it's a lower-odds bet if you're not white or rich or both.

The other social and political issues are interesting, but I think it's still worth maintaining an eye on the return on investment, and making sure that's clear to everyone making the choice of whether to go to college or not (or whether to encourage kids to go or not).

I was envisioning something more like an alternative version of the sport that turns into its own thing for amateurs, rather than as a direct replacement for the top professional tiers.

Formula 1 exists, sure, but so does all sorts of other kinds of motorsport, with all sorts of different kinds of vehicles and budgets. Rather than migrate Formula 1 over to electric vehicles, for example, the FIA just created a separate Formula E series that doesn't replace F1. Similarly, there are lots of non-FIA racing sports that have much, much smaller budgets, to make the sport more accessible to people, from go-karts to street legal cars to motorcycles to all sorts of other vehicles.

After all, a lot of us like to play sports recreationally with modified rules than what the very, very top tier professionals play. A 3-on-3 half court basketball game is still basketball, and basketball courts can be built that accommodate that without necessarily accommodating the full court necessary for the official professional rules.

Bundling things together is good when it reduces friction for the consumer, but bad when it reduces choice for the consumer. Every decision about bundling needs to be understood from that perspective, and evaluated on a case by case basis against that tradeoff.

That loss of choice is especially anti-consumer when a provider leverages a dominant market position in one product to push their own inferior version of a totally different product. For example, right now there's a competition for consumer cloud storage. But none of the providers are actually competing on cloud storage features or pricing. All of them are competing based on bundling with the other totally unrelated products provided by that competitor:

• Apple pushes iCloud by giving it first party advantage on all Apple devices, with system and OS integration that the other cloud providers aren't allowed to match.
• Google pushes Google Drive by using that storage space as part of the quota for Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Workspace.
• Microsoft pushes OneDrive as an add-on to its dominant position in Microsoft Office and Exchange, and gives it first party integration into Windows.
• Adobe pushes Adobe Cloud as an add-on to its dominant position in its suite of apps
• Amazon gives cloud storage to people who subscribe to, like, 2-day shipping and a TV streaming service and discounts at Whole Foods, in what is probably the most absurd bundle of them all.

And you see it everywhere. YouTube tries to protect its inferior Music service by bundling it with ad-free videos, Samsung put the inferior Bixby assistant on its phones, Google uses its dominance in browser, search, and maps to protect its advertising business, Apple gives its credit card preferential treatment in its payment app, etc.

So when a service protects its own affiliated service through unfair/preferential treatment, it harms the consumer by making the entire bundle less useful than a bunch of independent services, each competing to be the best at that one specific thing.

Maintaining that much turf probably isn't very environmentally friendly, either.

Maybe the better way forward is for other versions of the game to increase in popularity. Obviously there's mini golf/putt putt, but there's also stuff like Top Golf (digitized driving range with almost a bowling-like game options using those sensors), all sorts of indoor golf simulators. If VR/AR gets better, we might see some of these other types of games become more practical replacements or spinoffs from the traditional outdoor game.

There’s plenty of space available outside cities

My city has a few old golf courses, but they were literally built before the surrounding areas eventually got developed. I suspect a lot of the golf courses you're talking about originally were on the outskirts of populated areas, until population expanded past them. At that point, they might not want to move.

a specific amount of energy (watts?)

Energy is measured in joules. Watts are joules per second, and a measure of how quickly the energy is being used.

And from there to absolute zero (0K) would be “available energy” in my perception.

No, it's not available. The only way to use heat energy is to find something that's colder, to be able to transfer that heat to, and use that heat transfer to drive some other process that puts the energy in another form: in a chemical bond, in an electrical charge, in a moving object, into moving something heavy higher, etc.

Once everything in the universe completely evens out in heat, where none of the heat can go into anywhere else (because everything else is just as hot), that's known as the heat death of the universe.

So if you're starting with stuff that's all the same temperature, and you want to make one part of that system colder by pumping heat out from the place to be cooled and dumping that heat into an already hot place, it'll always cost more energy than you can capture again when you try to use that heat for other stuff. That's because if you want to use that heat energy, the only way to do it would be to take advantage of the heat differential between the hot zone and the cold zone, by equalizing the temperature between two zones. Well, if you're going to do that, then why did you spend energy cooling the cold zone in the first place? It'll cost more energy to capture the heat as it returns to the cold zone than it cost to make the cold zone in the first place, so it would've been more efficient to just let the two zones remain equal temperature.

I'm pretty protective of my online privacy so I have a tendency to make alts rather than allow disparate interests to be correlated to the same user (I'd rather have 3 accounts than a single account that show that I'm a person with my hobby with my career living in my city), so I've scattered my lemmy alts all across the lemmyverse (less beholden to instance downtime or an admin trying to correlate users).

There’s a complete dearth of content for niche communities like individual games or special interest hobbies, because the userbase is simply too small to support a healthy special interest community.

At this point, lemmy doesn't even have much in the way of communities on some mainstream topics: sports, lifestyle/advice, food, cars, fashion, television, film, music, local issues in major population centers, etc. I mean, back in the 2000's, these were topics that were mainstream enough that they were able to publish printed magazines or even newspapers for newsstands, but we can't even get a critical mass of commenters for many of these topics on lemmy.

Yes, linux/FOSS and video games and tech are relatively niche interests that do have robust discussion here on lemmy, but that's mainly a function of who tended to adopt use of the platform. Is lemmy going to be like Hacker News or Slashdot in that it never makes the jump to the mainstream?

I feel like a bid/ask function wouldn't be that technically difficult to implement.

A driver can punch in minimums: Maybe there's a driver who is only willing to drive for $10 per ride, $0.50 per minute, and $0.25 per mile at a particular moment in time, and maybe a multiplier or premium for certain routes that involve tolls or larger passenger groups, etc., or a discount for pre-booking at least certain number of hours or days in advance. Maybe the pricing could take into consideration more variables (idle time versus driving time, pickup distance, minimum rider rating, etc.). Potential riders punch in their desired routes and they get real-time pricing information on the available drivers and the quoted price according to each driver's formula.

The formulas shouldn't be that hard for the driver or the passenger, from their interface, as long as the service has access to go route data.

Because some more microseconds later, it’s the difference between being able to serve 1k requests per second and dropping connections, vs. 100k requests per second and working smoothly.

Doesn't this assume that the bottleneck is that particular function? If the service as a whole chokes on something else at 500 requests per second, then making that particular function capable of handling 100k requests isn't going to make a difference. For web apps, the bottleneck is often some kind of storage I/O or the limits of the network infrastructure.

If you’ve bought a small starter house 10 years ago then you have lots of options when you want to upgrade. Your starter house should have appreciated and a good chunk of your mortgage payments have gone to increasing your own equity.

Do the math. The S&P 500 would've outperformed the equity in the starter house over most 10-year periods of time. The renter is in a superior position when bidding on homes, compared to the owner who wants to put in a contingency on the sale of their current home.

Plus look at what people are actually experiencing today: they're ready to upgrade in their home, but are finding that the equity they've built (from high housing prices) isn't actually enough to significantly upgrade (because of high housing prices). So they feel stuck in their old house that no longer suits their needs.

After all, if the starter home appreciates from $250k to $500k, that means other $500k homes out on the market are generally similar, and your equity can't actually buy as much as you imagined 10 years earlier.

And more to my point, is living in the same house for 10 years a mistake? For most 20 somethings, yes. That "starter home" is a compromise in lifestyle: extra bedrooms they don't need yet, commuting distance to work or to family, shitty neighborhood for dating, school district they don't need, etc. Actively planning to live somewhere for less than 5 years makes buying a mistake, but actively planning to live somewhere for more than 10 years requires a lot of contingency planning and anticipating changing needs (and sometimes living with those incorrect choices).

Google has run a fiber ISP for a little over 10 years now. It was one of the first U.S. ISPs to offer gigabit speeds to residential customers, and has provided steady competitive pressure to other providers to provide faster speeds in those markets, as well.

Google also operates a mobile service called Google Fi as an MVNO. They handle the billing, but lease the capacity the way other MVNOs do.

In the U.S., buying is a mistake if you don't think you're going to stay for more than 5 years. The up-front transaction costs of a purchase, and then a sale when you move, needs to be amortized over a long enough time period to be worth it.

A typical $500,000 home is going to see something like $520,000 paid by the buyer for $480,000 in the seller's pocket. That $40,000 is an expense that can only be justified if you're staying there for more than 5 years ($8,000 per year). Maintenance, taxes, and insurance on that $500k home will also be continuous, and will vary heavily based on age/condition of the property and the jurisdiction/location. On the upside, maybe the property will appreciate, but historically that has basically only happened about as fast as inflation for specific properties.

Renting is generally better if you want the flexibility. If you're single and childless, but anticipate maybe getting married and having children later, do you buy the place that works for a single person today, or do you buy the place that might work for raising kids 10 years in the future? Contrary to this piece's argument, it's precisely the young people who are least equipped to predict the medium term future, and renting can buy time so that when they do buy, they buy the right place for them at that future stage of life, with full knowledge of their household income, expenses, and household size. Plus city, neighborhood, etc. Nobody wants to commute an hour per day because of a decision they made 10 years ago.

Renting is almost always better for people under the age of 30, and the financial calculators basically prove it.

Physical equipment is depreciated at a specific schedule based on that asset's useful life. If you have a widget machine that costs $10,100 and is expected to last 10 years before being scrapped for $100, you can use a straight line depreciation of $1,000 per year.

But 5 years in, if the widget machine is destroyed, and the remaining scraps are only worth $100, then you can write down the $5,000 loss against your income, taking that tax benefit now instead of over the next 5 years.

If it’s the $10,000, can that expense not be deducted at purchase, and they have to wait until the actual object is disposed of?

No, they can't deduct the purchase price because it's not actually a loss of income. If they bought something that doesn't lose value over time (a chunk of gold, a famous painting, some foreign currency, or a parcel of land), the amount they paid isn't a "loss," because they have a valuable asset after the purchase, so they're not any poorer after the transaction.

A ledger would prevent that change from happening, or at least leave a permanent record of the change

Yes. That's why most western land ownership systems moved to written ledgers in continuous, sequential books since, like, the slow collapse of feudalism 400-600 years ago. Let anyone add to the record but store those records in a way that they can't be tampered with or removed after the fact, and let basically the entirety of the county's land ownership records be tied up in one ledger that all land owners have an interest in properly preserving integrity.

Basically, blockchain doesn't actually help any more than simple/regular digitization does. Which already happened in most places 25-50 years ago.

The current residual formulas are based on subscriber counts for the whole service (which all the streamers publish to shareholders and the public), not the number of viewers or hours viewed or any statistics that have anything to do with the specific show/movie itself (which the streamers refuse to release even to content creators and producers).

The strike negotiations want bonuses based on actual streaming performance, but the streamers are resisting anything that might require them to actually disclose numbers.

You absolutely could build this with a “traditional” centralized service that eg. the GOBERMENT (or whoever trusted stakeholder) runs and operates, but then you have a single bottleneck that’s entirely dependent on a single stakeholder, and you still need to implement eg. audit trails for state mutations, access control, etc. etc.

So before anyone comes forward and claims that their innovative solution will improve on the status quo, I generally expect them to be able to describe the status quo. And here, you haven't done so.

In the U.S., county recorders allow for anyone to record to the centralized ledger (and this is literally paper technology that long predates computers), and the transactions themselves are validated when necessary to resolve a dispute: one can only sell what they already own, and if they sell something they no longer own it. The law allows for certain types of involuntary transactions: foreclosures, execution, inheritance (where the owner can voluntarily prescribe some rules but doesn't get to control the timing of when those rules get executed, and the failure to affirmatively write stuff into a will means that the inheritance falls back to defaults), divorce, partition, adverse possession, reverter, and then a bunch of special rules that apply to governments like tax foreclosures or eminent domain. And no matter what the actual papers say, ownership of land still must be enforced by a sheriff.

Which portions of this status quo should be decentralized? Or centralized? What would the benefit be?

In my opinion, real estate is the worst candidate for decentralizing the ledger.

In some countries it’s fairly common for someone to lose their home because someone bribed the official to change the title records.

If the state, with its monopoly on force, says that you don't own land, what difference does it make if it's a piece of paper, a record in a traditional relational database, or a transaction on the blockchain?

Title ownership of a piece of land is only as good as the enforcement mechanism of that title mechanism. Changing from recorded paper deeds to PDFs in a centralized database made sense (and was backwards compatible). Changing from PDFs in a centralized database to a blockchain doesn't actually change the enforcement mechanism, and makes it less efficient. So what's the point?

I disagree here. with p2p/federated you have to worry about if your microprovider goes out.

This Quarks protocol still seems to require reliance on "nodes," which is the same thing as a federated service, with extra steps. It's more overhead without any of the portability you want.

This is a huge point of contention in the current strike negotiations in Hollywood. Take, for example, this article:

SAG-AFTRA has proposed a bonus on top of the standard residual for the most-watched shows. But the AMPTP has refused to go along with that.

One of the challenges is getting a common metric that would work across all the streaming platforms. Each platform measures views differently, and they also consider that data top-secret.

. . .

Under the current formulas, streaming residual payments for all three guilds are based on a pre-determined compensation formula that declines over time as the TV show or movie ages. Platforms are sorted into subscriber-based tiers, with the higher tiers paying a higher residual. But the payments are the same regardless of the popularity of a show.