I use the term "programmable people" for people like this, in that they believe what the screen tells them to believe and they do what the screen tells them to do. It bothers me that it won't be long before these programmable people represent the overwhelming majority of voters. Not sure what happens then but history tells me it won't be good.
This is like maximum 80's cringe... I say that as a child of the 80's... I'm half tempted to cut this up and try and build some sort of vaporwave track. Seems tailor made for vaporwave.
Oh wow. This is exactly why people were trying to require a license to use a synthesizer. Maybe it gets better ?? [1] It could probably be clipped into something good though, yeah.
OTOH, when the piano hits, Ripples feels so much like I'd Do Anything for Love for a bit, but predates it by six years.
[1] 3 minutes in, I'm pretty sure the answer is no. EDIT: after the whole thing, yeah, it doesn't really get better... but I kind of like the APPLE spelling thing towards the end of the cassette. Ending on some laser shooting sound effects is a good note though.
Watching it from time to time over the years I've noticed all the little 2001 A Space Odyssey references. The Dark Star universe is some sort of "low budget" version of the 2001 universe. By low budget I mean janky. Many things in Dark Star are janky versions of what you see 2001.
For example, the Dark Star central computer is really just a janky version of HAL. In 2001 HAL wishes happy birthday to a sunbathing Frank Pool. In Dark Star, you have Pinback on a lawnchair using a jerry-rigged sunbathing lamp, later complaining that no one remembered it was his birthday. Both have scenes that feature explosive bolts. Also both have scenes with the astronauts getting sandwiches (chicken or ham?). Both have a mission control guy, with the one in Dark Star being completely useless. There are probably more references but these come to mind.
> I dont know why people would want to be in a community where they arent wanted.
This is standard predatory behavior. Child abusers hanging out with kids, weirdos hanging out near the women's clothing department, etc.
It's usually a clear indication of the sort of people you don't want to associate with in your online community. They bring a net negative to the table.
What is "it"? Putting the two halves together, the sort of people who want to be in a community where they aren't wanted are the sort of people you don't want in that community. I guess I can't argue with that.
They are talking about social norms. Inversely, "creepers".
Most adults understand why men should not, generally, be hanging out in the women's clothing department. When accidental violations of those norms are pointed out, they apologize and correct. Creepers, OTOH, gonna creep.
For their own well-being, online communities should police repeated violation of social norms. Otherwise the normals leave and creepers take over.
I spose. But labelling deviants (from the norm) and chasing them away is hazardous, because if you overdo it you end up with an echo chamber. How dare you talk to the people who others don't talk to, you traitor! Now you have to be ostracized too ... is how it might go.
(I can't help thinking of the Father Ted Christmas special, where a group of priests have to organize a quasi-military operation in order to escape from Ireland's largest lingerie department without a scandal.)
From my point of view I don't see anything wrong with knowing a little bit more about the person behind the app I'm trusting to do my personal compute on my personal device. Personally I always think twice when I download apps from company's whose names I don't recognize. Same with PCs... do you really want to run that *.exe you downloaded from that cool site you found?
Changes like this will help keep developers honest and accountable. Yeah yeah bad apples will still find ways to screw us.
If you want to publish an app to a global scale ecosystem, is it really too much to ask to give some ID?
This isn't the issue that's at stake here though: The question is:
> Who is making the decision which code is allowed to run on my device?
The status quo is already that can make this decision yourself. There are other people who make different decisions from you.
The proposed change is trying to take this decision away from you and making google the arbiter of which code is allowed to run.
The core of this issue is the opposite of "publishing an app to a global scale ecosystem" - I want to publish an app that is useful for me and a very small circle of people, that is what's being taken away.
> Same with PCs... do you really want to run that *.exe you downloaded from that cool site you found?
Yes, I am fully capable of making decisions about what software to run on my personal hardware on my own, thanks. I don't need Apple or Google or Microsoft to make this decision for me.
They're trying to fix social engineering. It's simply not possible.
Sex is a protected class under Title VII of the civil rights act. And the supreme court recently said that even majority classes (men) are protected by this. Since Uber involved in the decision to send more business to female drivers than male drivers, this would seem to me to run afoul of employment discrimination (sorry we don't need as many men workers today, too many of you competing so market forces mean we're going to pay you less, etc).
Can someone explain to me how this is (or isn't) legal under Title VII?
It seems if this is fully legal because it's the customer making the decision, then pretty much any form of "in app" discrimination is legal as long as it's the customer doing the discrimination. How long till "I don't want a black/white/gay/etc driver" options show up?
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." — George Orwell, Animal Farm
Is it illegal to set a filter for a female gynecologist over a male one? Or a male gym trainer over a female one? Or a massage service, hostel, sports team? Is it illegal to set a gender preference on a dating app? Is it illegal to issue a casting call for a female actor or model?
This kind of "discrimination" is a part of society, and has been tested in courts plenty of times.
I don't think you need scare quotes, this is discrimination. Discrimination isn't always bad. IANAL but it seems like these are cases where we just kinda ignore some laws, and society usually goes okay despite and in spite of it. Just my uneducated impression.
Could you link to some cases where this kind of thing has been tested? I have an amateur interest in law and this issue is puzzling to me. It's not at all clear to me why it's okay to discriminate against Uber drivers based on the genitals they are born with, but not e.g. their skin color or religion.
Interesting, the Wikipedia article has this to say
Mere customer satisfaction, or lack thereof, is not enough to justify a BFOQ defense, as noted in the cases Diaz v. Pan Am. World Airways, Inc. and Wilson v. Southwest Airlines Co. Therefore, customer preference for females does not make femininity a BFOQ for the occupation of flight attendant. However, there may be cases in which customer preference is a BFOQ – for example, femininity is reasonably necessary for Playboy Bunnies. Several breastaurants like Hooters have also used such requirements of femininity and female sex appeal under a BFOQ defense. Customer preference can "'be taken into account only when it is based on the company's inability to perform the primary function or service it offers,' that is, where sex or sex appeal is itself the dominant service provided."
So basically the question to ask it "Is it a bona fide occupational qualification that the driver be female?" Seems like a high standard to reach. Arguments based on "feels" as in "I don't feel safe around this kind of person/employee" seem like the very kind of discrimination that the law has tried hard to eliminate. It's pre-judging someone based on sex, and deciding that they aren't safe even though they haven't done anything. I understand that women are often harassed, but the law already has a process for dealing with harassment.
I predict this kind of thing (apps that allow customers to discriminate on the basis of protected class) will spread and eventually be challenged in court. Curious how this will all play out and become settled law.
> I understand that women are often harassed, but the law already has a process for dealing with harassment.
And that would be a good argument if we could see that the process really is used and trusted. Do we? What I see is the opposite; the ubers and bolts of this world only care as much they have to. So what is probably happening is that uber calculates this will be cheaper than dealing with the consequences of women losing trust and stopping using their services. If this is banned by the courts, they will move on to the next cheapest solution and so on.
What would interest me is, what would be a proper solution to this issue? Apart from Waymo, probably a surveillance/recording of all the interactions between the customer and the driver?
It's not illegal to do business with whom you want to (freedom of association etc)... but if my business provides you with tools to systematically avoid a protected class (say, black businesses) then my business might not be legal.
Isn't there a way for Uber to do this in a way that doesn't give preferential treatment to female drivers, even if higher demand/supply? One of:
1. Force the same market rate for female-only vs regular mode. This means a shortage of female drivers and higher wait times for users in that mode, but anyone who really wants it can use it.
2. Charge more for female-only mode to account for the lower supply, but pay the driver the same rate either way.
I am not sure about the legal implications. But, I do see the concern.
Someone else mentioned the analogy of patients preferring physicians of a given sex.
I would not be surprised if they find a way around this by just having riders 'select which driver you want'. Effectively putting the onus on the customer to do the discrimination.
> How long till "I don't want a black/white/gay/etc driver" options show up?
Slippery slope fallacy.
> "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." — George Orwell, Animal Farm
Women being harassed by Uber drivers isn't a necessary part of life, and wanting to address this issue isn't equivalent to literal Soviet communism. This quote is waaay out of place.
Playing devil's advocate, but can you justify discriminating against an entire class of people, because of the actions of a subset? Part of the reason for protected classes is not to be reduced as an individual to the perception of the group.
> I've always been fascinated by nostalgia. It is such universal source of both positive and negative feelings for people.
I read somewhere that nostalgia is just bitterness towards the present. It's an emotional trap and best not to linger in nostalgia too long. Change is inevitable, we can't go backwards.
My understanding is that for extremely large black holes the tidal forces are negligible near the event horizon. So things should function pretty much the same other than you can't move in reverse and get out.
If two rockets fall past the horizon at the same time, one accelerating forward towards the singularity, and the other accelerating backwards away from the singularity, then shouldn't the distance between the rockets increase, even though they are both moving inexorably forward?
If the tidal forces are low, I'd assume that my muscles are still strong enough to "slow down my hand enough" to move it above my head.
The relevant quantities are the curvature scalars near the horizon, and for a sizable black hole they are small there. As an example, consider the Kretschmann scalar (KS). The KS is the sum of the squares of all components of a tensor. In Schwarzschild spacetime KS looks like R_{\mu\nu\lambda\rho}R^{\mu\nu\lambda\rho} = (48 G^2M^2)/(c^4r^6), where R is the Riemann curvature tensor, and we can safely set G=1 and c=1 so (48 M^2)/r^6. In this setting, KS is proportional to the spacetime curvature. At r = 2M, the Schwarzschild radius, the number becomes very small as we increase M, the black hole's mass. However, for any M at r = 0, the Kretschmann scalar diverges.
For a large-M black hole, there is "no drama" for a free-faller crossing the event horizon, as the KS gradient is tiny.
Since the crosser is in "no drama" free-fall he can raise his hands, toss a ball between his hands, throw things upwards above his head, and so forth. The important thing though is that all these motions are most easily thought of in his own local self-centred freely-falling frame of reference, and not against the global Schwarzschild coordinates. His local frame of coordinates is inexorably falling inwards. Objects moving outwards in his local frame are still moving inwards against the Schwarzschild coordinates.
You might compare with a non-freely-falling frame of reference. Your local East-North-Up (ENU) coordinates let you throw things upwards or eastwards, but in less-local coordinates your ENU frame of reference is on a spinning planet in free-fall through the solar system (and the solar system is in free-fall through the Milky Way, and the galaxy is in free-fall through the local group). That your local ENU is not a freely-falling set of coordinates does not change that the planet is in free-fall, and your local patch of coordinates is along for the ride.
A comparison here would be a long-running rocket engine imparting a ~ 10 m s^-1 acceleration to a plate you stand on. In space far from the black hole, you and the rocket engine would tend to move away from the black hole, but you'd be able to do things like juggle or jump up and down, and it'd feel like doing it on Earth's surface. This is a manifestation of the equivalence principle. Inside the horizon the rocket would still be accelerating the plate and you at ~ 10 m s^-1, but you, the plate, and the rocket would all be falling inwards.
Tidal forces are not the constraining factor - the transformation of space into a timeline property is. There is no out, no away direction. All paths lead to singularity. No particle can travel away from singularity .
Two rockets can diverge in distance, because one is slowing itself along the timeline space dimension toward singularity. If you are moving 1 m/s toward singularity, the fastest your hand can raise above your head is 1 m/s with infinite energy expenditure. The same goes for blood pumping to your head, electrical impulses to your brain, etc.
You can move away from a singularity once you are inside the event horizon. You just can’t achieve escape velocity anymore once you’re inside the event horizon.
After you pass the event horizon, all your possible paths become elliptical. That doesn’t mean all possible paths instantly point directly at the center.
This is not true. There are some special exceptions (rotating kerr ring singularities) but in general there is no 'upward' direction away from the singularity. Space becomes timelike. There is only forward, toward the singularity. You can expend energy and accelerate toward the singularity slower, but every particle within the event horizon can move only closer to the singularity. There is absolutely no moving away from the singularity. Full stop. If you think there is, you are misunderstanding something fundamental about the model.
> Space becomes timelike. There is only forward ...
No. It's a fanciful analogy on a particular family of coordinate charts, particuarly systems of coordinates which do not smoothly/regularly cross the horizon. The black hole interior is still part of a Lorentzian manifold, there is no change of the SO+(1,3) proper orthochronous Lorentz group symmetry at every point (other than spacetime points on the singularity). One can certainly draw worldlines on a variety of coordinate charts and add light-cones to them, and observe that the cones interior to the horizon all have their null surfaces intercept the singularity. However, there's lots of volume inside the interior light cones (and on the null surfaces) and nothing really constrains an arbitrary infaller's worldline, especially a timelike infaller, to a Schwarzschild-chart radial line (just as nothing requires arbitrary infallers to be confined to geodesic motion).
The interior segment of a Schwarzschild worldline in general can't backtrack in the r direction, but there are of course an infinity of elliptical trajectories which don't. (That is to say that all orbits across the horizon are plunging orbits; but one can also say that of large families of orbits that cross ISCO, which is outside the horizon).
A black hole with horizon angular momentum and general charges offer up different possibilities, as does the presence of any matter near (including interior to) the horizon (all of these also split the ISCO radius, move the apparent horizon, and may split the apparent and event horizons). The Schwarzschild solution of course is a non-spinning, chargeless, vacuum solution everywhere, and is maximally symmetrical, and is usually probed with a test particle. An astrophysical system like a magnetic black hole formed that passes through a jet from a companion pulsar, for example, does not neatly admit the Schwarzschild chart (and has no known exact analytical solution to the field equations). At least one such astrophysical binary is known (in NGC 1851 from TRAPUM/MeerKAT) (and if you don't immediately run away from A. Loeb papers like you should, he added his name to one that argues there are thousands of such systems in the galaxy centre near Sgr A*, which itself is now known to have strong magnetic fields (thanks to EHT's study of the polarized ring)).
No, not really. To boil it down to thinner text, and to focus on your "Space becomes timelike", I think you are stuck on (a) a particular system of coordinates that (b) are not regular across the horizon and (c) thinking that either of these does anything physical to free-falling infalling test particle.
The huge flashing red warning sign on (a) & (c) is that you drop in the words "'upward' direction", "{toward, closer to, away from} the singularity" and most especially "slower": you are clearly implicitly slicing spacetime into space and time.
From a product standpoint, we're beginning to look at lot more like Europe did to us in the last few decades. The EU couldn't manufacture a cheap consumer item no matter how hard it tried and no matter how much the EU subsidized things. Just too much government/societal bloat. Seems to be the direction we're heading unless we can recapture the "get it done" spirit of old. I don't think we can do that while we're continually focusing on making sure everything is always fair to everyone all the time.
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