There are fascinating chapters about how the combination of railroads, mail-order catalogs, rural-free delivery of USPS, and chain stores like A&P successively wiped out local merchants in small town America in favor of distant economic centers.
The debates they had about those technologies and economic models are almost identical to the debates that have raged about Wal-Mart and later Amazon in my lifetime.
France has a long history of attempting to protect its cultural industries, including film and publishing.
It's not wrong. There are other things that are important aside from customer purchasing power.
Amazon is using its economies of scale to drive out smaller businesses. It is not unique in that. But the industries that Amazon affects may be unique to the nations that wish to preserve them.
Most centralization incrementally kills local industry, including the local culture industry. TV, railroads, chain stores, Wal-mart, you name it -- they are all killing something local.
There are plenty of people piloting drones from trailers in New Mexico. They can take the blame. But they are not exactly pilots in the Chuck Yeager sense.
This makes me think that pilots are going the way of cavalry officers. An exclusive club of people with skills that matter less and less. I wonder which activities, in the future, will require the Right Stuff...
It is often worth it in the short term to trick sources. But it has consequences for the individual doing the tricking, over the long term. And it has negative externalities for reporters as a whole. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it's a decision that comes with a tradeoff.
I used to work as a technical recruiter and made several hires out of coding bootcamps (though never from Lambda, which didn't exist at the time).
One rule of thumb that we drew after many trials was that, if a candidate coming out of a coding bootcamp did not have a math or science background prior to that bootcamp, they probably would not pass our interview process.
That is, people with a certain intellectual foundation and aptitude can acquire useful skills from coding bootcamps. But people without that aptitude will not obtain it simply because they attended a coding bootcamp.
Separately, while I appreciate that Vincent got answers to questions that many people are asking, the fact that he had to hide his intentions to get an interview with Austen is exhibit number 1 why people have grown to mistrust reporters.
And that's interesting, because often you can't have both. That is, either you accept that corporations lie while the press plays by certain rules of honesty, which prevent them from getting past the smokescreen of lies. Or you support the press in its schemes to penetrate the smokescreen by using deception themselves. But if you support them against Lambda, then you should support them, too, in lying to the institutions you may support, which are also hiding something. Muckrakers need to disguise themselves.
DELETED: A sentence claiming that Vincent runs Coder Pad and has a conflict of interest. I apologize for the error. See his comment below.
I clicked expected to see big ML ideas explained, and all I found was Google scrubbing its AI ethics reputation after the debacle last year. I hope they devote their energies to actually explaining some ideas about ML rather than nattering on about fairness.
https://www.amazon.com/Americans-Democratic-Experience-Danie...
There are fascinating chapters about how the combination of railroads, mail-order catalogs, rural-free delivery of USPS, and chain stores like A&P successively wiped out local merchants in small town America in favor of distant economic centers.
The debates they had about those technologies and economic models are almost identical to the debates that have raged about Wal-Mart and later Amazon in my lifetime.