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Comment It may not be necessary but it sure is helpful. (Score 2) 189

I learned to touch type in high school--at a time where I had to fight the administration to allow me to take a class "for girls" to learn a "secretarial" skill. (Early 80's, but the teachers there were still stuck in the early 1960's, apparently.)

I find it incredibly useful to be able to express my thoughts and ideas without having to think about the keys or to look at where the keys are. Just sit my hands until my index fingers feel the little bumps, and away I go. And as a software developer it helps to be able to express complex code without thinking about where the keys are; in fact, I got rid of a keyboard because while I loved how it felt and how it looked, the back-tick button was moved down and to the left, and the escape key was placed to the left of the 1. And I found typing code escapes in Markdown and bitwise negation in C a pain in the ass; every time I'd think 'code' my finger would press the escape key where the backtick should have been.

Comment Welp, AI has jumped the shark. (Score 1) 39

Sorry, but having known some VCs in my own life, this feels like a significant disaster in the making as VCs who bought into the hype of AI dump a bunch of money on existing companies, fail to upgrade them, then dismantle those companies: old school 1980's corporate raider asset-stripping.

There are places where AI can definitely help--but I sincerely don't trust VCs to know where that is. I mean the whole 'vibe coding' thing came from the VC world--and in a sense, VCs don't give a shit if it works or not, so long as it maintains a high volume of churn.

Comment Re:Trade deficits measure the wrong thing. (Score 1) 262

If it were that simple and that impactful, economists would surely have adjusted the metric.

As to why we still use them: because they're easy to capture, they're easy to understand, they've been standardized over the decades, and they're politically useful. And no economist in their right mind uses the number in isolation; it's usually used along with a broader notion of the balance of payments. And when comparing trade deficits year over year across different economic sectors, it does give insight into how the economy is evolving.

But for the purposes the Trump Administration (and prior administrations; notice trade deficits has been on the political radar for decades now), the way the metric is being used is--to put it politely--faulty.

Comment Re:Trade deficits measure the wrong thing. (Score 1) 262

No... none of the money Apple pays to China for the manufacturing of the device goes into Apple's pockets.

What I mean by this is that suppose you order an iPhone from Apple for $1,000. It gets drop shipped from China to your home.

The imported item, the $1,000 iPhone, is counted in our trade deficit as the full $1,000 going to China. That is, we calculate the trade deficit by looking at the declared value of the imported item as it crosses the border from China to the United States, and in the case of your iPhone, we presume we just lost $1,000 to China, never to be seen again.

But here's the thing: Foxconn, the company who assembled the iPhone and who drop shipped it to you, only gets $50 to assemble and ship the phone. Yes, that's $50 that Apple doesn't get--Apple pays $50 to Foxconn. And note that there are other costs that go to other companies: Apple pays money to TSMC to manufacture the processor, they pay to Samsung for the display, they pay to other companies around the world for the other components--including money to other Chinese manufacturers.

But at the end of the day, even though we count the full $1,000 value of the iPhone as a trade imbalance with China, the reality is companies all around the world got a small piece of that $1,000 total cost.

That is, a Taiwan company got money for the SoC, a Japanese company got some money for the camera module, a European company got money for the gyroscope technology, a South Korea company got money for the display, etc., etc., etc.

And Apple makes almost $500 in profit.

In other words, and this is my point: while we credit the full $1,000 as a trade imbalance to China--half that money actually winds up in Cupertino.

But wait! Our trade imbalance numbers are even worse than that! Many of the items that are in your $1,000 iPhone are technologies manufactured by, or designed by, other American companies who get a substantial profit from those compnents. Qualcomm (in California) licenses the modem, Corning (out of New York) provides the glass, Micron (out of Idaho) provides the DRAM/NAND memory core, etc., etc.

So while our trade imbalance credits the full value of the $1,000 phone that was just drop shipped to you from China after you ordered it from Apple, it's quite likely somewhere around 35% of the actual build cost (the $500 used to make the phone) flows back to America. Meaning that while our statistics suggest we just had a $1,000 trade imbalance with China, the reality is perhaps $700 of that stays in or flows back to America.

This means the trade imbalance statistics are **WOEFULLY** inaccurate in representing the real world.

Comment Trade deficits measure the wrong thing. (Score 5, Interesting) 262

The problem I see is that the way we measure trade deficits don't account for the flow of wealth due to the value of American intellectual property.

Consider, for example, that in the trade deficit metrics, China gets full credit for the $500-ish import cost of an Apple iPhone. That, despite the fact that most of that $500 winds up in the pockets of a California company rather than in China itself.

When you take into account the value of intellectual property around the world, it explains why some of the most valuable corporations to be created in the past 50 years are American, despite supposedly persistent trade deficits for the entire period of time. Because we're surprisingly good at creating new intellectual property--thanks to a legal and cultural environment which encourages greater levels of risk-taking than does Europe or Asia.

So all this finger pointing over trade deficits, all the actions taken by the Trump Administration, all the hand-wringing over how the US is somehow being 'bled dry'--is all based on a faulty metric

And so long as we keep measuring the wrong thing, and talking about the wrong thing, we'll keep doing the wrong thing to fix the wrong problem.

Comment Re:This is nonsensical. (Score 1) 178

When a government--any government--announces they are doing something for a stated reason, I tend not to believe the stated reason. In this case, if what they wanted was to guarantee a steady flow of electricity by creating a supply of 'on-demand' energy sources that can ramp up when there are disruptions in the grid due to weather, they'd be looking at things like natural gas turbines (basically jet engines attached to power generators which can spin up and down at a moment's notice).

Not nuclear.

So I'd be looking for an underlying explanation that makes more sense than "we need an on-demand source of power, so we're going with the one energy source that does the shittiest job with on-demand energy supply."

Unless there has been a breakthrough in on-demand nuclear that I haven't seen...

Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)

RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.

Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.

This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)

The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.

This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")

Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.

As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Submission + - Surado, formerly Slashdot Japan, is closing at the end of the month. (srad.jp) 1

AmiMoJo writes: Slashdot Japan was launched on May 28, 2001. On 2025/03/31, it will finally close. Since starting the site separated from the main Slashdot one, and eventually rebranded as "Surado", which was it's Japanese nickname.

Last year the site stopped posting new stories, and was subsequently unable to find a buyer. In a final story announcing the end, many users expressed their sadness and gratitude for all the years of service.

Comment Re:Cannot wait... (Score 3, Informative) 159

I used to screen scrape jail registry records for county jails in my home area. Though the IDs weren't exactly sequential, doing groups of 50 would get hits for two of the local counties.

What I found was that, while the website UI wouldn't show juvenile records, you could access them directly w/the ID. Surfacing it to the county took a day or so to find the right person but they quickly closed that hole, but who knows how many records were handed out to malicious actors over the years before I found it.

Comment Thank goodness. (Score 4, Informative) 128

My wife and I rented a car recently in Australia which had a touch screen and a row of useless buttons below it. To change the temperature in the car if you were displaying a map using Apple Carplay was (a) hit the home button (to close Apple Carplay), (b) swipe left (to bring up the secondary row of navigation items; the primary row was radio, carplay, and something else I don't remember), (c) tap on the "Environment" button, then (d) adjust the slider on the touch screen (whose touch point required you to actually touch the slider, not just tap the bar for 'up' or 'down'.)

All operations (except the first) were done through the touch screen. Often while traveling down a bumpy windy road at 80km/h. All without any sort of tactile or auditory feedback.

And notice to switch back to Apple Maps (so we didn't get lost), you'd have to press the home screen, then press the "Apple Carplay" button.

Thank God car makers are either coming to their senses, or are being dragged kicking and screaming back to their senses.

Comment Re:UK Online Safety Act (Score 2) 142

That's what I was thinking too.

It doesn't help that ToS documents are written in 'legalese' which means they always use awkward and annoying language. Hopefully someone will learn from the uproar and use plain language instead. Like:

When you enter or upload information in Firefox, the browser only uses it to help you browse the web, like finding and showing websites based on what you do in Firefox. This does not grant us any ownership or broader rights over your information.

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