I'm betting this is going to appear the same way as it does on Waze, which shows fast food logos along your route, as well as popup ads whenever you're stopped. Annoying, but not intrusive enough to be considered a driving distraction, IMO.
I'm talking about the report from a few weeks ago banning top level government officials from using Huawei devices for personal use. At the time, they were considering banning them for all military members as well... But there was no mention of any other Chinese manufacturers. The only other one that's been in the news lately is ZTE.
I'm so torn with how to see Huawei. The dealings with Iran seem pretty cut and dry, and the laws in China are impossible for Huawei to ignore. On the other hand, their consumer products are very different from the commercial routing and telecommunication branches. Yet, the high level US government folks are being forced not to use the consumer products. Why aren't they being prohibited from using other Chinese consumer electronics, like Lenovo, Xiaomi, etc?
> But gender isn't inherently binary, even if many but not all cultures have tended to ascribe gender from a binary pallette.
You say that, but based on what? It's not a construct that makes any sense, except with regard to mental disorders (gender dysphoria). The mental disorder context is particularly relevant when you look at the wildly abnormal rates of suicide attempts among gender dysphoria sufferers.
For my Google Assistant, I've made it a point to select a male voice, and I always refer to it as the Google Assistant or just Assistant. The choice in voice gender was so that my wife could keep the default female voice, and we would know it's responding under her account when she talks to a Home in our house vs defaulting to my account like it does for me or guests.
Having said that, I've never heard a genderless voice (although there have been times when I'm on the phone and cannot make out the other person's sex from just their voice). I think this idea that everyone should stop considering gender as binary simply due to the apparently increase in gender dysphoria is a bit ridiculous. Creating the voice for a digital Assistant is a perfect example of this, since the big companies involved have probably done a lot of research to try to determine the best way to make one that doesn't lend itself to a particular gender but always seem to default to a female voice / character (excluding this "Leon").
I think it'd be cheaper and less effective. The benefit for advertisers on Facebook is that the rate of click throughs is significantly higher than the more shotgun-style advertising that was in use before Facebook and Google started managing so many ads across the web.
Plus, this idea that 70% off the top 1% is still nowhere near enough to pay for any of this. The numbers I've read suggest that taxing 70% of the $10mil+ earners would amount to around $80bil in revenue, assuming no changes to those earners' incomes as a result of the increased taxes... That's nearly nothing compared to this GND proposal.
Or better yet, a service existed that paid per view. Microtransactions, for example, could pay per article read in a similar way to Medium's system (although it would be better if there was just a wallet that it paid from, without a minimum monthly charge). I know Brave is working toward that goal, and I like what they're doing, but I'd prefer if their system was universal (I refuse to use their browser).
With Android Pie, users can just set the DNS to dns.adguard.com and be done with it at the DNS level. Works great on my Pixel so far (past couple months).
I rarely like or dislike anything, unless there's some significant reason to do either. The best example I can think of for when I've happily disliked something was the 2018 YouTube Rewind, which was absolutely atrocious a Google needs to understand that their creators are getting more and more reason to find an alternative to their ridiculously poor management relating to monetization and the algorithms.
Spotify is the company best positioned to fix this, although I'm not sure they'll be able to.
The real issue is that podcasts run on old backends like RSS, and there's no reason for creators to change that without a functional platform to offer a financial alternative. With the current format, creators embed the ads and all's well. Even if a lot of users skip the ads, some still here them, and some go to the affiliate link.
With an alternative system, like Spotify, there's the possibility of a better system. Spotify could host a network that allows creators to separate their content from the ads, and then Spotify can distribute the podcasts via their app, with an ad-free version going to paying customers. Furthermore, if Spotify manages the ads that get embedded, they could insert ads that are more tailored to the listener. The added benefit (for creators and advertisers) is that Spotify could use the app to ensure that listeners can't skip the ads when they're listening with an ad-supported account.
I've been a proponent for a refresh of the podcast platforms for a while now, and even pitched this idea of a more subscription oriented model to friends who have the ability to build an app or service capable of this, but the reality is that it requires buy-in from multiple creators for it to be viable. As I see it, Stitcher and Spotify are the only two businesses positioned to make it happen, and Spotify (with its recent purchase of Anchor and Gimlet) is probably the only one with any legitimate interest in going this route.