The phrase "good enough for government work" was actually not originally meant ironically. It was for Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration and it was an optimistic statement on the quality of the work.
Wouldn't the darkening be temporary? After the bloom, the plankton are either consumed by ocean life, or die off and sink to the bottom (sequestering carbon in either case)
Uber was far more incremental than most people remember now. It started as a luxury black-car reservation service, something better than calling a specific transportation company, and something analogous to other application / marketplace plays. Uber gain experience there to later disrupt a whole industry.
And taxis were already a very regulated industry, that isn't actually that old. Not only was there on-going change, side-stepping regulations was one of the biggest advantages. It's not the same as claiming to be able leapfrog many hundreds of years of development on greenhouse farming.
There has been massive innovation in the area in the last forty years or so. This isn't leapfrogging but attempting to scale up what is known to already work.
Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries. No-one thought this was possible, I assume there was someone somewhere who said that all the innovation was done, no leapfrogging, etc. (unsurprisingly, the only positive quote in the article is from an academic who works in the area and is aware the model has been proven). Indeed, you do actually see this today where people argue that it is pointless to try to produce food anymore, just ship it on polluting cargo ships...that will save the environment.
And, to be clear, the main issue with this is that it is politically disruptive. NL are tearing this industry apart. They have a gusher of cash, and are trying to shut it down. The article isn't about a man spending $500m on technological innovation...if he succeeded with this model, was making billions like NL, there would still be an article attempting to shut it down (and, if NL is anything to go by, succeeding).
Economic growth and innovation are very unpopular. Never forget this.
> Netherlands invested heavily in agricultural technology in the 70/80s, they are now one of the biggest food exporters in the world despite being one of the world's smallest countries
The Dutch built their agriculture industry on the back of the environment - they have massive problems keeping nitrogen runoff under control enough to pass EU-wide legal limits, and the question on how to transform the ag economy has crashed two governments by now. Continuing as-is is blatant cheating against other EU countries that do keep their nitrogen emissions under control, but any kind of reform will threaten people with very deep pockets.
No, they didn't. They had an industry before there were EU-wide limits. The stuff about nitrogen emissions ignores the fact that no other country outside the EU has done what they did.
This cultish "EU is the world" mentality is tiresome.
And the other thing, Uber became super popular because it was subsidized by VC money and fares were cheap.
Now that it's established... it isn't generally cheaper than taxis, it just has a slightly better app, though in many places that's not true anymore.
Oh, and to add insult to injury, you know how the taxi groups lobbied against public transportation, for example to airports? AWESOME, now there aren't just a bunch of local SMBs doing that, now there is an international mega corp doing that too.
Yeah, uBer was better and cheaper. Because it was subsidized from every angle. Cheap fares for riders, higher pay to drivers. Now it's either worse or about the same as Taxi's used to be. There's definitely some benefits to Uber especially when travelling. For local rides though, for me, at least, it's no longer better than taxis used to be, but the problem is now all the taxis are gone. It used to be that calling a taxi was unreliable, but they were generally available just by going outside and standing around for a few minutes.
Ah, I forgot to mention something. The enshittification has begun. Uber needs ever growing profits every year. Those will come from... lower pay for its drivers. Higher fares. Other various microagressions (ads in cars, ads everywhere).
In a sense the invention of farming itself was a bunch of neolithic hackers fooling around with nature, which they knew almost nothing about, until they got it right.
I don't agree that Uber was a better solution than taxis.
They drove their competition out by offering rides far below the cost to provide them.
Now they're more expensive than what they replaced, and with far worse service.
Take pre-booking a car for an early flight for example. Taxi companies would ensure they had someone on shift ahead of time and refuse the booking if they couldn't accommodate you. Uber will accept your booking but leave you to hope that, around the time of your booking, someone decides to open the app and accept it.
It doesnt sound like it's obvious to the driver that it's a pre-booking either. So you'll often see drivers show up 15-20 minutes early, irate that you're not ready to leave.
The worst thing about Uber is that their price distortion seriously damaged their competition, who could not afford to burn tens billions of dollars on the service the business is meant to be making money from.
Feels like you didn't book a taxi before Uber. Going up to them (no apps back then) and maybe they were or weren't legit, they were expensive, and they would sometimes tell you a price and then charge your differently at the end of the journey, getting annoyed if you challenged it, and you had to pay cash, and you couldn't easily speak to your driver or see where they were on the route to you...so much worse.
The last time I caught an Uber dude intentionally ignored my directions and missed a turn, then just kept cooking off into the countryside with me in the back seat. At 20 over the posted speed limit. At 3am. I spent an unbelievably tense 5 minutes seriously wondering if I was being abducted. I got home but seriously what the fuck.
I literally described my experience of booking a taxi before Uber. Many of the local services also had apps that showed the location of the car and a fixed price before Uber was available here.
Booking a courtesy car is different to most instances of getting a taxi, though. Getting a taxi is far more often things like "going to the line of taxis outside the club and negotiating prices with them" or "I landed in a foreign country on a business trip or family visit and I need a taxi to my hotel, and I don't have a local credit card". Before Uber, these things were far, far worse on average than they are now.
It worked out for Uber because the taxi industry was, in most parts of the world, a monopoly, inefficient and often riddled with corruption and criminal acts.
You try this with something like agriculture, which has increasingly become efficient and arguably made vast improvements over the last hundred years, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Remember than Larry Ellison is in it completely for himself and is willing to do anything I increase his bottom line. You cannot entrust something as important as agriculture to the likes of Ellison. In short: don’t trust Larry Ellison.
I've tried but I honestly start getting a headache after an hour, more from the weight of the device on my head than eye strain. And that's with the dual loop band
We finished the first big hangar and my said how cool it was and that we’d seen it and ut was time to go.
Then I told her about the other 2 (3?) hangars.
We got our 10k steps in before lunch, but it was amazing, and I’d go back any day.
Putting the kids in the flight sim was cool. I told them it wasn’t that bad then my daughter promptly flew it fully upside down and we heard the screams from inside. Mostly fun screams. They begged to ride it again. We did it a bunch. My daughter got competitive so we had to fly together to get the days high score.
Absurd headline. Gizmodo's anti-tech bias is showing pretty clearly here. This makes total sense as a product strategy. Not sure what's so controversial about giving more reach to Threads posts as this already works pretty well for Instagram stories
I can't imagine being so far gone that you have no shred of the end user perspective left in your consciousness, and no concept of how getting your feed rammed full of a failed social media platform's posts might be annoying.
That said. Facebook and instagram are both already a lost cause in this regard.
A Thread carousel within the Facebook app will drive a ton of passive views, which in turn will drive "creators" to the Threads app.
Perhaps what the article meant by the carousel has lead to an "insufferable experience" - is that its annoyingly addictive. In my experience as a passive consumer - I do find I pop open the FB app and then somehow get sucked into the reels... which as a user is annoying but probably highly lucrative for Meta.
My take is that this is the secret sauce of Meta - whereas any new social app needs to grow views organically - Meta uniquely can jumpstart a new social app through its ability to drive view counts through carousels on its existing properties.
Are big-iron investments like this even useful for an outright shooting war with another major power? It feels like our defense budget could be better spent on more cost-effective, unmanned tech
The Ukraine war may not have a ton of lessons for a conflict involving great powers. So far Russia has held back from using its arsenal to its fullest (no nukes, not exactly firebombing Kiev to oblivion). Maybe a preview of a war in Taiwan, though I think that kind of conflict would be quite different
Reminds me of the Swiss brand H Moser that makes a mechanical wristwatch which looks like an Apple watch
That said, it's a custom case & their movement wouldn't slot into an actual Apple watch without a lot of machining. But it would be a cool way to immortalize one of these Series 1 watches https://www.h-moser.com/product/swiss-alp-watch-5324-1205/
As we say in my family: "close enough for government work!"