What source do you have the Gemini is profitable? Are you referring only to the chat app, or to Google'a AI Ventures division? Or including Google Cloud AI related revenue?
Not agreeing with the parent, but that hardly matters. Google has a real business, advertising, that brings in $400 billion a year and income around $150B. They can afford to throw away tens of billions every year while still remaining immensely profitable and quite solid as a business. OpenAI has no such income to spend so it's as the above comments reflect, entirely unsustainable while Google's spending on AI is a drop in the bucket for them.
The US Postal Service seems to derive upwards of 90% of their revenue (Or at least of the mail I receive) from similar scams. Are they going to have the same fines applied to them?
And you can't escape. Facebook is less of a concern because you can just not go to the website and you're good. The US Postal Service is the basis of an entire huge industry devoted to finding you at your physical location to try to scam you.
You have a very different profile of junk mail than I do. While the services may be overpriced or of dubious quality, they are rarely outright scams the way FB marketplace frequently is.
The US Postal Service doesn't serve the American people, by its own admission. I can find the quote from the Postmaster General if you like, but the gist of it was "the 400 direct mailers are our customers". They are a spam company that has outlived its usefulness, if ever it had any. Don't fine them, dissolve them.
How would you find a government entity? This is just moving money from one government budget to another.
The USPS is like this because of the persistent belief that it's not enough for government entities (think USPS, Amtrak, etc) to provide a good service for the citizens - they must also (try to) turn a profit.
If we as a society considered it acceptable for the USPS to spend money to ensure everyone in the US had mail access without selling out to corporations to turn a profit, they wouldn't need to have products like EDDM blasting spam to entire zip codes.
The whole governmental agencies should be profit seeking businesses needs to died ignobly in a ditch. The reason we pay taxes is so that we don't have to handle the logistics of running the thing we pay for.
I don't even star the vast majority of packages I use... I usually only star repos I don't use but find interesting and may want to refer back to in the future.
And completely excludes projects not hosted on Microsoft's GitHub or NPM (Though they do say you can contact them if you don't meet their insane criteria).
Graphene doesn't really try to stop you. They just don't spend their own efforts on making it possible. It is OSS so, your free to spend your efforts where you want to.
It would require a significant commitment of limited resources to broadly support insecure devices with very little upside, and to do so would constitute gross mismanagement of the project.
Meanwhile, others are completely free to fork numerous GrapheneOS improvements or benefit from their upstream improvements (as some have, including Google).
I never mentioned any commitment except accepting pull requests, did I? Qubes can do that and doesn't require a fork. Are you saying they have much more resources?
Graphene is OSS, so if you want to create a fork that supports other phones, you are free to do so. The maintainers have limited amount of resources, why wouldn't they focus those resources on the most secure hardware if that is what aligns with their goals? If you have different goals, create or fund a fork to support more hardware.
From the sources I have seen, that 10% was a projection for 2024, with goals to significantly reduce it in 2025 and 2026 onward. It also includes "banned" goods, which are not necessarily fraudulent nor illegal. I have not seen any data on whether or not Meta has achieved their goals of reducing fraud and banned goods advertising.
A grant can be for a lot more than $5,000. It can be for as much as the grant-making org has and wants to spend. Grants can be given on an ongoing basis as well.
Just like in the US, there are a ton of homes in Ireland just sitting vacant. Supply isn't nearly as large a problem as affordability. Ireland introduced a vacant homes tax to try to help, but it seems they haven't gone far enough.
That's because, in the places where housing is expensive, it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there. It's a pipe dream that you can out build demand in these places. Reducing prices of housing in nice places to live (by any means, including building) will only result in more demand up until that insatiable demand is satisfied.
Nice places to live can't support all the people that want to live there.
Because demand is, for all intents and purposes, insatiable, the dollar value of housing/property isn't based on supply and demand because supply can't practically be increased to affect demand. Instead, the price is related to what a prospective buyer can afford to pay _every month_ and, thus, is related to interest rates. Interest rates go down, prices go up to the point where a prospective buyer's mortgage payment would be the same.
People who bring up the (un)affordability of housing are never talking about Oklahoma, they're talking about the Bay Area, Southern California, New York City, Seattle, Portland, etc. All places that are so desirable, they can't practically support everyone that wants to live there.
> it's expensive because a _LOT_ of people want to live there.
I can't figure out how to make the math make sense even if I were to build a house in the middle of nowhere. Time and materials is the real killer.
Some day, when AI eliminates software development as a career, maybe you will be able to hire those people to build you houses for next to nothing, but right now I don't think it matters where or how many you build. The only way the average Joe is going to be able to afford one — at least until population decline fixes the problem naturally — is for someone else to take a huge loss on construction. And, well, who is going to line up to do that?
"Built in 1954" doesn't sound like new construction. Of course you can buy used houses at a fraction of the cost. That's nothing new. Maybe you missed it, but the discussion here about building new to make homes more affordable.
It is not like I'm homeless. I would be the one upgrading. Except I don't see how the numbers make sense.
You're right: The cost of new construction anchors the used market. Used housing is so expensive because new housing is even more expensive. If new houses were cheaper I, like many others, would have already have built one and my current home would be up for grabs at a lower price than I'd expect in the current reality. However, that's repeating what was already said.
If one was freely able to move about the entire world you may have a point. Especially given current events, I am not sure the country in which that house is located would take kindly to many of us moving there. In a more practical reality you're not going to find anything for anywhere close to that price even in the middle of nowhere, never mind somewhere where everyone wants to live. That is where earlier comments suggest building more housing would help.
Except it is not clear who can afford new construction either. It is even more expensive.
> That is where earlier comments suggest building more housing would help.
I explained earlier why I don't think it would. The places with a housing "shortages" are the places where everyone wants to live. Those places would have to build an impossible number of houses to affect demand.
You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."
> Those places would have to build an impossible number of houses to affect demand.
If houses were able to be built freely then everyone would be able to build a house... Except, if you can't afford a used house, you most definitely cannot afford a new one. As before, time and materials are the real killer. The used housing market is merely a reflection of the cost to build new. Same reason used cars have risen so high in price in recent years: Because new cars have even higher prices.
> You have people saying they can't afford housing and then, when you show them they can, they say, "not there..."
The trouble is that you confuse affordability with sticker price. I technically could live in that house for six months before I have to return back to my home country, but I could not legally work during that time. It is far more affordable to pay significantly higher prices in my country for a house and work all year long. The price of that house is low, but the cost is very high.
The places everyone wants to live are the places everyone wants to live because they are the most affordable places to live. If it were cheaper to move somewhere else, the people would have moved there already. Humans love to chase a good deal and carve out an advantage for themselves. However, a low price doesn't mean cheaper.
Land is more or less worth the same whether it has a used house on it or if you build a new house on it. The trouble remains that the high cost of new construction anchors the cost of used houses.
Construction costs should really have been driven down by the march of technology, but that really hadn't been the case. It's mostly stagnant IIRC. But construction costs doesn't really explain the housing crisis well.
> What part of your idea was supposed to stop that happening
The part where people see their money burning away paying maintenance and tax on deteriorating assets.
Why are people holding assets unused?
Because they don't believe that the city will allow sufficient development to allow them to purchase like-assets in the future if they chose to reinvest and the carrying cost is minimal because council taxes are trivial relative to the value of the asset. If my research is correct, Kensington council taxes are under 10k USD per year.
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