Frqy3

Treat Facebook like both and apply all the telco and content regulations to them.

One of the key principles in telco regulation is ensuring any-to-any connectivity. It is now established in most jurisdictions that telcos have a monopoly over connecting to their end-customers (i.e. the only was to call a T-mobile customer is for T-mobile to accept the call into their network). Hence regulators not only mandate interconnection, but require it to be done on fair terms and conditions, including a fair wholesale price, which is often set by the regulator.

Or like a lot of GPs, she just prescribes whatever medication is top of mind after the last visit from the friendly pharma sales rep.

The author has extrapolated their experience in (at most) a handful of airports to the general case.

One of the first projects I was given as a junior engineer was to measure signal strengths of our and competitor mobile networks at the local airport. This was pre September 11, but I was still amazed at the access we got carrying a signal analyser and just flashing our employee badges got us.

For inbound roaming users, absent particular partner network preferences (which were less common back then), the mobile device would select the local network to use based on relative signal strengths when turned on. Capturing those inbound roaming fees was a high priority for the product managers and hence a lot of effort and infrastructure investment went into this.

I went through this fairly early in my career. I think the career impact is more severe than a mother taking maternity leave (and without the legal protections). Apart from explaining the gap in employment, there is a disruption to the career momentum that is near impossible to regain.

I'll stick with a Torrens Title system over a digitised version of the old chain of title approach.

Joshua Gans (my old economics Prof) did a study of births by day of week, and showed that the fall in weekend births was explainable by the rise in inducement and cesarean section procedures.

https://www.academia.edu/2808187/What_Explains_the_Fall_in_W...

I feel that what is currently brewing is a form of social cults, or if you prefer softer phrasing, cultural tribes. With a very strong feedback control loop deriving from social networking.

Aspects we can see emerging (and mentioned in the article) include: submission to and no questioning of the leadership/apostles; there being only one absolute truth; a persecution complex; control of actions through indoctrination and isolation; group think; and cognitive dissonance.

The telecoms research company I used to work for has decided to get into the business of writing "white papers" for Huawei that are not far removed from this piece of "tech journalism".

Good for short term revenues, but not good for long term reputation. Part of the reason I am no longer working there.

It's a solved issue, in that the cell company "simply" has to spend enough on infrastructure to cover the desired area.

Justifying the business case to cover the low value (i.e. few customers) areas is another story. However, even here, it might be possible to justify it if the rest of the customer base sufficiently values wide coverage to pay a premium. Particularly if the competitors don't have the same level of coverage.

From the article, it sounds like the surgeons are already well aware of the risk from improper cleaning, but don't care enough to push for a systemic solution, instead relying on "workarounds" when it is their own family member under the knife.

> Except when an important person or a doctor’s family member is on the table, that is. “They call and say, ‘Dr. Jones’ wife is having surgery,’”

We are moving towards a state where technology will allow us to punish every infraction every time, automatically and at low marginal processing cost. I expect that rebalancing the punishments to match the new likelihood of getting caught will lag by at least 5-10 years, causing greater social problems in the interim.

This should be solved using public sector housing. Which you can think of as similar to rent control as discussed in the article, except the subsidy is made visible and direct through the tax payer funding, rather than through being obscured.

This also gives better public control of who receives the subsidised housing, usually a combination of needs assessment to qualify and then a queue system.

The important thing we have learned from the 70s/80s (different timing in different countries) is to spread the public housing throughout the community, rather than concentrate it into a single location. That is, rather than have a large apartment building that is purely public housing, have a requirement that a certain percentage of properties of every new development will be made available as government subsidised public housing.

This is exactly the problem.

Imagine if every single law on the books is enforced 100% of the time. No leeway, no margin for discretion.

Being a doctor also carries much greater social respect (partially linked to the pay aspect). I expect this social respect gap has eroded in SV, but is still very significant in the remainder of the world.

I started in medicine when I went to university (parent pressure), but swapped to a computer science/engineering combination from the second year. The impact on my dating prospects at that time was very significant.

Their similarity to Scientology is quite striking. Complete with alien conspiracy theories [0].

[0] http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2053761,00...

Not testing on women, and particularly avoiding pregnant women, is how to end up with another thalidomide case.

Sure, you wouldn't want pregnant women to be amongst your first field test subjects. But you do want them to be included as part of the carefully monitored testing period, rather than wait until the drug goes commercial and there is not the same focus on looking for and collecting data on side effects.

Humanity needs an existential level extraterrestrial threat to unify us.

Would you like to borrow my grandfather's axe?

Nobody escapes death, but the wealthy can still escape an inheritance tax using a trust fund.

Early in my career someone taught me a useful technique for dealing with this situation.

After each "new" idea, spend about half an hour working on the idea. Best to do this on paper and target producing some good looking notes. Then file it away close at hand. If the "idea guy" ever follows up and asks you about their idea, pull out your notes and say "ahh yes, I've been working on that and I have a few things to discuss with you." You now appear as a hard working and enthusiastic underling. For the majority of cases where they never follow up, you have limited your wasted effort.

With the offer of rewards I can see a similar scheme becoming popular in Western countries too. I expect it would have a large overlap in users with Facebook.

It is possible to argue that we already have an informal social enforcement scheme, with people having lost jobs and being doxxed because of saying the wrong thing on social media.

Don't underestimate the cost difference between running a fibre down a street versus running it into every house.

You might be surprised at just how much news is little more than slightly rehashed press releases.

Nokia Networks has some good 5G whitepapers and other learning resources.

https://networks.nokia.com/5g/resources

Reminds me of being a junior engineer doing radio signal measurements before and after a network optimisation.

With slightly worn hi-vis shirts, clipboards and our portable RF spetrum analyser, we got into all sorts of places from airport lounges (pre 9-11), F1 racetrack a few days before the big race to hotel suites and several corporate office buildings. We were always polite and asked permission before entering private property, but not once did anybody check our IDs nor call to confirm our story.

Would you feel comfortable posting your last 100 searches here? What about on a list next to your front door?

Even though you are "not doing anything wrong", perhaps you did a search on that funny looking rash you noticed the other day, or that trivial programming question you needed to look up the answer to.

For me, it is about keeping control of my information. And the best way to control it, is for it not to be collected.

I'm not an expert in media laws, but my understanding from the broadcast days was that TV broadcasters got access to radio spectrum for effectively zero or peppercorn rates and in return were required to broadcast a certain level of local content. Broadcast licences were also limited in number by the available spectrum.

An on-demand catalog is also quite different from broadcast, being measured by content availability rather than transmission time, and a 30% (or higher) local content bar seems to me to be a rather high level for an on-demand service, however, I read elsewhere [0] that Netflix is already close to meeting this, so the restriction is not likely to be too onerous for them at least.

[0] https://venturebeat.com/2018/09/04/eu-will-force-netflix-and...

Not just hostile UX changes, but also less attention to getting things right.

For example, we sometimes watch a show/movie with subtitles. But netflix frequently gets confused about whether subtitles should be on or off and with which language they should be in, even with simply stopping viewing and coming back later. We sometimes use English subtitles, but then they get turned on automatically in various languages for other shows/movies.

I assume product placement in their own produced shows is already occuring. Etheir that, or they are leaving money on the table with what looks to me like unsubtle brand visibility.

As a pedestrian, I am annoyed that after spending a lot of money to create nice fully separated bike paths near where I live, some of the lycra clad cyclists still insist on racing along the footpath.