+1 on this, folks with just enough experience to have strong, yet naive, opinions is the bane of my existence. It is almost akin to a religious discussion, whereas folks will back up their suppositions with blind faith and defend those views to the death. Sorry if this is not adding a lot to the conversation, you just really struck a nerve!
I have realized that a really good open world video game with lots of replay value has an amazing value. $60 at 200 hours of gameplay works out to $0.30/hour, which I am struggling to find anything else I am interested in that has a similar fun-to-cost ratio.
On the flip side, if the game sucks, the average goes way down. Fortunately I'm a sucker for decent open world games so there's a relatively low chance for me.
People complain about the prices of games but they are cheap when you weigh inflation and the amount of time you play. You could generalize it to any AAA studio video game at $60-70.
Counter intuitive thought is to buy physical and then do a trade-in/sell on a marketplace if you don't like it. If you buy digital you are stuck with it, like it or not.
I always do some quick "pub math": How many hours of entertainment do i get out of this? How much would that time cost me in a bar / pub? that normally makes it a lot of easier to justify a 50 / 60 price.
So this is total anecdata but I have never been assaulted by someone that was stoned, and never seen someone become sexually aggressive or belligerent when stoned. I'm sure they exist, however those type of folks seem to be much less frequent that people who exhibit this behavior when drunk on alcohol.
I think it really comes down to the fact that weed was originally made illegal through disinformation and policies motivated by racial discrimination, when in reality it is at absolute worst, just as bad as alcohol. We need to stop policing people from themselves, especially when it is so hypocritical because of the massive alcohol and tobacco industries. Why do we need to keep wasting money on this?
I think your response is based
on assuming what I would advocate for regarding moderation
Just like with alcohol its not a role of the government to say “thats too much, get help”. We can absolutely shame people into moderation, just like we shame people into limiting drinking till after 5pm, with limited discretionary exceptions. People are worried about breaking those social conventions at work functions, they’re worried breaking them socially, they’re worried about doing it by themselves knowing the cautionary tales of those who normalize the behavior.
We can maintain that peer based moderation with regard to weed consumption, and right now we don't have those conventions at all. Its all or nothing at the moment, where most people can read the room and use discretion, other people are getting high the same as people would take multiple daily coffee breaks, alongside coffee in the morning, and other intervals. A mental security blanket they think helps them with X, Y, Z while the rest of us see a degraded stupid human that is missing stimuli for a good chunk of time, and then making silly decisions after.
This is the real reason, why worry about people/orgs that don't have money? Plus, can you imagine blast radius of a bug in the system that could get a bad signal and shutdown your entire infrastructure? As a rule, I always try to avoid any pattern where touching/changing one thing will cause everything to fail. There is currently a mechanism in AWS to shutdown/delete resources for non-paying customers (disclaimer: used to work there), however it has an enormous amount of checks and balances, as well as a significant time lag before actually removing everything, in order to cut down on false positives.
Having said all this, I would love it if this was actually a feature. I watch my personal AWS account I use for toy projects with great anxiety that one day I will get a luxury new car sized bill.
The real reason is us-east-1 was the first and by far the biggest region, the same reason that new services always launch there but other regions are are not necessarily required (some services have to launch in every region).
The us-east-1 region is consistently pushing the limits of scale for the AWS services, thus is has way more problems than other regions.
I agree with your sentiment but some of the quotes in the article from internal Google memos look pretty damning. One of interest says their "Jedi" advertising program, which was meant to subvert legitimate ad competition from other exchanges, 'generates suboptimal yields for publishers and serious risks of negative media coverage if exposed externally.'
I also would like to see some changes but this seems like a case of Google actively trying to be evil. They architected their systems to choose their exchange, even if another exchange had a higher bid, and then lied to ad publishers about the practice, along with fully acknowledging it in writing! How much more self-aware could you be? How could people, in good conscience, work for a place like that?
It wasn't just evil, it was a calculated power move. They understood the fact it was wrong, calculated the risks involved and even the damage it would cause if they got caught.
The only effective punishment for those is to calculate how much they gained from it, calculate all profits that resulted from those gains, subtract all that from them, and then apply some huge fines as well in order to leave them in an even worse position than they started. Basically reset the company to the position it was in before this move, and then make that position worse. Like rewinding a chess game but they also lose a rook or something as punishment for their audacity.
The people that facilitated this behavior and got wealthy from it, the C-suite people, should be out in prison for this as well, as well as be forced to pay a huge fine.
This should serve as an example for other companies not to behave in the same way.
Agreed. This is straightforward fraud: they promised to find the lowest possible prices, and instead deliberately overcharged people in order to line their own pockets. In a properly regulated industry, this would be a violation of their fiduciary duty, which is punished extremely severely.
> The only effective punishment for those is to calculate how much they gained from it, calculate all profits that resulted from those gains, subtract all that from them, and then apply some huge fines as well in order to leave them in an even worse position than they started.
From a practical (and economic/game-theoretic) perspective, you need to insert a risk adjustment (by which I mean, if their odds of being caught were 50%, you need to divide the fine by 0.5) and a net-present-value adjustment (if an additional dollar earned at the time of the violation is worth 80 cents at the future time of the judgment, divide the amount by 0.8) prior to the calculation of profits and the addition of punitive fines to be truly effective.
1. True justice would have been 100% chance of them getting caught. Since it was not 100%, it means they took advantage of some inefficiency in the system in order to get away with it. They should be punished for this disrespect through bigger fines. The less risk there was to them, the bigger the fine.
2. They earned dollars years ago. Today's dollars are worth far less. Therefore the fine, calculated based on that year's profits, must be adjusted upwards to compensate. Just like their profits must be adjusted upwards for inflation in order to make sense of their value in terms of today's dollars.
You're right about the inflation adjustment (which is separate from a net-present-value adjustment). I guess I was assuming constant-dollars.
To be clear, net-present-value is the bird-in-the-hand principle. A dollar now is worth more to you than a future dollar, EVEN IF YOU ASSUME NO INFLATION.
Oh yes, Google are definitely being evil in this situation, but the point I'm trying to make is that the battle-field they're all fighting over has no good guys. Everyone fighting on this field wants the same outcome.
I'm not trying to be universally damning, and I respect Apple's actions in relation to this, but it doesn't change the fact that this is a battle between powers that don't have our individual interests in mind. This is a battle of mind-share.
