From an outside perspective, American system looks more like "right" and "extreme-right", disguised as choice over small-ish policies.
Sadly that's an extreme them-or-us system that's being slowly exported pretty much everywhere else.
Some online banks (don't know how widespread this is) allow you to create "virtual card" that expire either after 1 purchase or at a specific date (and with a set maximum of budget). I use them for every single purchase I make online, it's inconvenient but at least i've never entered my real card info anywhere.
Programming is hard because you need to have a lot of pre-acquired knowledge before you can even start to delve in the only interesting aspect of it, which is the logic solving.
Is like having to learn everything about how a lego brick is built (from the materials used, to the production processes used in the factories, to the composition of the houses where lego bricks are used) before being able to play with them. Everyone (aside from an very motivated subset of people) would find Legos "Hard" in that context.
Having to memorize a myriad of arcane incantations, software setups and a million "standards" will always make programming look "hard" and daunting, even for those who have an interest in logic problems, but not have an interest on babysitting a computer.
I totally agree. But also, critically, an auto-pilot is precisely expected to have "a brain", it's implicit in the name.
Maybe we should just agree that auto-pilot, in its common interpretation, is currently just a sci-fi concept, and communicate more honestly what a computer inside a car can't and can do.
Apparently, dodging weird obstacles is something it struggles with. Which is a problem, since all driving is, essentially, dodging weird obstacles.
I wonder how many flaps you could possibly check on your Tesla during your commute (i'm being sarcastic).
Also, I could imagine that an airplane is, from a totally theoretical and simplicistic point of view, much easier to manage for a computer, even for simply having a lot of space to maneuver, and knowing constantly what other airplanes are doing.
But driving a car? How can a computer possibily handle a scenario where edge-cases make for a good 85% of each travel, unless you drive in the desert?
> In my opinion, this is yet another case of people being lulled into a false sense of security that the car drives itself, when in reality the Tesla's driver should have been attentive and should have reacted.
In every similar story I always fail to imagine how the driver can possibly stay in a state of "active attention" 100% of the time, while also not doing anything active. That's not how much of the human race works.
At this point it's a lot easier to just actively drive, instead of having to make a sudden split-second decision while being dulled by the inaction.
I feel like non full-autonomous driving just doesn't make sense at all.
It's also a matter of perceived consequences. To put it bluntly, most people simply don't have the energy, at the end of the day, to chase "feel good", distant, ethereal causes. Yeah meat consuption leads to pollution, but that's such a stretch of the imagination, and I'm hungry, so please let me see what I need to do to pay this month's rent and taxes instead.
There's an oil spill in the ocean? Man, that sounds bad. But what can you do, it's in the ocean, someone will take care of it eventually.
I know it's a defeatist way of thinking but you can't build a running society (meaning with, literally, people running all the time) and expect to conserve energy for non-primary, non-immediate, non-localized causes.
To put it even more bluntly: I would be very happy to change my whole way of life if I didn't have to run after money. But I have to, and I'm exhausted, and that's the problem.
Not the parent, but i can't recall faces (not even my parents) aside from isolated features, like a mustache.
I've seen absolutely nothing on this flashing screen despite looking at it for around 5 minutes. I don't think everyone else is lying, but i wonder if other people's brains just get "bored" and start imagining things, on a moving visual canvas.
This industry mostly provides very ephemeral services, so it's almost never a matter of life and death (the entire multi-million email marketing sector could implode overnight and life would go on just fine), but you still charge money for those ephemeral services, and the least you could do would be to take your screw-ups a bit seriously.
I repeat, there's a big, big value in being friendly and basically "a human", but the very first starting interaction must be serious, not a joke.
People realize the guy there is not the whole company, but they also realize they are the only way to get communication going, and losing time only to be greeted with an "ooof" can be annoying.
Of course it also depends on the specific case (how big the problem, how angry the customer, how long the "ooof"), but I've been on both sides for a couple of years now and starting in an over-frienly manner sets the mood for an "un-important" context.
And, in particularly bad cases, that could sour the entire conversation.
I've learned that good intentions are filtered differently when the other party is already angry.
If my customer is having a problem, I can try being friendly after the communication is already ongoing, problem has been aknowledged, and it is on his way to be fixed. Ending in a friendly tone is a big plus. Starting with it, not at all.
On the other hand, as a customer, having to deal with you at all is already stressful enough, i'm paying you and still losing time over your screw-ups, and still you start with an "ooof". It would give me a feeling of "not only i'm losing time, i'm also being joked on".
Being professional and gradually friendly is simply the most secure way to operate, because every person that contacts you for a problem, big or small, doesn't want to contact you to begin with. Don't "ooof" me please.
I used to have discipline. Don't know what happened.