I worked for the major streaming company when the service was launched in Japan. Sony (among others) said that streaming would never take off in Japan because Japanese consumers are too tied to physical media. This was probably 2014. It's probably been the slowest place in the world to change, but it has changed. Sony understands the consumer preference for digital media as well as anyone. They just know that resistance and opposition will fade over time.
They are a fairly adaptable company (as Japanese tech companies go), and if they get it wrong, they will pivot, but there is nothing pro-consumer about the company. They didn't put Blu-ray players in PS3s because it was good for consumers, they did it because it was good for Sony's entertainment business. And people often forget that part of the Blu-ray spec was mandatory internet connectivity so that the content licensor could revoke content licenses. We haven't "owned" physical media since DVDs.
This is the company that brought you Memory Stick after all. They've been anti-consumer ever since the Walkman was a huge success. It benefits Sony by making people buy more copies of the same thing. You might not buy any, but if the optimization is right, enough people will.
Proper estate planning (Trust, will, healthcare directive, etc.) are all important, but even with a good plan in place, there are a few not obvious things that were a surprise to me:
Banks will disable online access the moment they get a death certificate, and from there, the process is entirely opaque. If you have passwords and access, knowing account numbers and balances before you notify the bank of the death can be a big help.
Email accounts like gmail are often the center of people's business life, and having access to them can be a massive help. But Google will not help you get access to a decedent's accounts if you didn't set it up in advance. Even if you know the person's password or access codes, Google makes it very hard to access a person't account without their phone. They offer inactive account access to automatically grant access after a period of time. It's not great, but might still help.
There's a high probability they have accounts, insurance policies, benefits and liabilities you don't know about. This can be a chore to figure out in retrospect.
I don't think there's a perfect solution, but after going through this with my parents (who did have a trust, will, advanced directives, etc.), I decided to make a "What do do if die" document for my kids. It's a few pages long, details accounts, what stuff I own, what I still owe, and tells them how to get and use passwords and 2FA seeds. Maybe most important, it tells them who they can call for help for certain things. We also did a trial run. Made me realize that so much of life is tied to my phone for shitty 2FA and identity tracking. Once I realized the instructions were "If my phone dies with me, you can't do any of this" it made me try to find solutions that were secure, but not in the hands of big tech and telco companies.
Do you take care of them physically as well? I mean giving them showers, cleaning them, cleaning the house, feeding them, organizing their medicines
If it gets to the point where they can't manage their own eating and hygiene, don't do it for them (and don't hire someone to do it); let nature take its course. I know it sounds harsh, but once that sort of decline begins, it's game over anyway, and the constant medical intervention usually just extends the misery.
He didn't repeal the law. He repealed an administative rule/regulation (that was never really implemented in the first place).
The law was the NDAA (part of which was the Corporate Transparency Act). Those laws still exist. Ordinarily when a "law" is passed by congress it's too goddamn vague to implement. So federal agencies start the administrative rulemaking process (which usually takes years to decades) and eventually the appropriate federal agency implements some set of regulations that are the agency's best effort to implement what they think congress kinda meant with the original law.
In this case, when Biden was president, a rule was passed to implement part of the Corporate Transparency Act that required corporations to report "beneficial owners" to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen). The presumption of this rule was that if you are a beneficial owner of a corporation (but not a big one), you are a criminal or will be, and FinCen needed to know who you are to come bust your ass in the future. The rule was created and implemented fairly quickly in federal rulemaking terms, and like most contentious regs, it was immediately challenged in court, and there were injunctions and reinstatements. and and FinCen was on-again and off-again in telling people to report or not report. It was a shitshow, but moreover, it had a very short compliance deadline, and real teeth in terms of fines, and even by FinCen's own estimates most "beneficial owners" of corporations had no idea the rule even existed. It was the sort of thing that wouldn't be hard for the well heeled people to work around, but a pain in the ass for ordinary small corporations. It was feel-good legislation that wouldn't have done much to stop crime (because we kinda know who the big financial criminals are anyway).
This "headline" misses the mark. Nothing has changed; the rule that was "ended" here never fully went into effect in the first place.
There was a brief period where FinCen was accepting BOI reports, but most people weren't doing them because it was ping-ponged in the courts a lot, and the reasonably intelligent among us could see that this was the corporate version of "protect the children." It created a "pre-crime" reporting burden that we actually didn't need because we've know who the fucking criminals are.
Not paywalled for me, so I'll share the relevant part:
Gravity is the weakest of our four fundamental forces—the other three being electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Gravity is unusual among forces, not only because of its weakness, but also because it’s always attractive between all objects. In other words it acts as a universal glue. That’s exactly what keeps us stuck to Earth, keeps Earth in orbit around the sun, and keeps the sun in its own orbit around the center of our Galaxy, and so on. But gravity’s quantum nature could actually be used to make gravity repulsive. This is my latest work with Marletto and another colleague, Pablo Saldanha, in which we designed an antigravity machine.
The machine works similarly to the BMV experiment. Imagine that one of the two gravitating masses (the “source”)—or a beach ball, in terms of our layman’s experiment—is in a superposition of states, while the other (the “probe”) is localized in one place. In the part of the superposition where the source is closer to the probe, the gravitational attraction is stronger. Meanwhile, in the other part where the source is farther away from the probe, the gravitational attraction is weaker. In both branches, the force of gravity is still attractive, so how do we make this into repulsion?
For starters, every quantum experiment has three parts:
Prepare a superposition.
Let it evolve in time.
Finally, measure in another superposition.
It’s this last part that gives us the repulsion, but it only does so for one of the outcomes of the final measurement. So what matters is the post-selection; we have anti-gravity only if the right outcome is observed. On average, if both outcomes are included, gravity is always attractive, just as it is in the classical world. So, we need to discard one of the outcomes of the final measurement, which is what gives us repulsion.
While some might argue that anything can happen if we post-select—or observe the most favorable outcome—that isn’t necessarily the case. Indeed, discarding “bad” outcomes (such as those where the particles attract) leads us to observe what we want (in this case, repulsion). However, classically, this isn’t possible, no matter how much we post-select. If our experiment is confirmed, it would therefore show that gravity can act from two different points on the source at the same time. In other words, only if gravity is quantum could we have an antigravity machine.
How realistic are the BMV and antigravity experiments to perform? Pretty difficult. Luckily, a number of world-leading quantum groups are racing to implement these experiments, and I’m optimistic that we will have conclusive results in the early 2030s. Even more excitingly, I am collaborating with Marletto and my Italian colleagues Marco Genovese, Fabrizio Piacentini, and Ettore Bernardi, who are wizards in the lab, to try to get there first. We are on the cusp of solving one of the biggest mysteries of physics, and, as a bonus, might be able to develop technology that even renowned science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke couldn’t have imagined.```
I was shocked when I learned what the monthly cut for referral services like "A Place for Mom" is. After going through this with a parent, my #1 advice is to avoid every single place they recommend. Their "recommendation" is entirely based on how much money they get from the facility. And these kinds of referral "services" are increasingly being offered as a workplace benefit for a lot of people. It's not the scummiest part of that economic sector, but it is straight up payola masquerading as healthcare advice, and should be illegal.
We used a recommended provider for a few months and it was a nightmare. We eventually moved to a facility A Place for Mom "couldn't recommend" but was recommended by a hospice nurse. It was about half the price and 100x better.
His state of the union was more intelligible and inspiring.
Americans get nothing. The president gets another distraction from whatever batch of crimes he's committing today.
I worked for the major streaming company when the service was launched in Japan. Sony (among others) said that streaming would never take off in Japan because Japanese consumers are too tied to physical media. This was probably 2014. It's probably been the slowest place in the world to change, but it has changed. Sony understands the consumer preference for digital media as well as anyone. They just know that resistance and opposition will fade over time.
They are a fairly adaptable company (as Japanese tech companies go), and if they get it wrong, they will pivot, but there is nothing pro-consumer about the company. They didn't put Blu-ray players in PS3s because it was good for consumers, they did it because it was good for Sony's entertainment business. And people often forget that part of the Blu-ray spec was mandatory internet connectivity so that the content licensor could revoke content licenses. We haven't "owned" physical media since DVDs.
This is the company that brought you Memory Stick after all. They've been anti-consumer ever since the Walkman was a huge success. It benefits Sony by making people buy more copies of the same thing. You might not buy any, but if the optimization is right, enough people will.
Proper estate planning (Trust, will, healthcare directive, etc.) are all important, but even with a good plan in place, there are a few not obvious things that were a surprise to me:
I don't think there's a perfect solution, but after going through this with my parents (who did have a trust, will, advanced directives, etc.), I decided to make a "What do do if die" document for my kids. It's a few pages long, details accounts, what stuff I own, what I still owe, and tells them how to get and use passwords and 2FA seeds. Maybe most important, it tells them who they can call for help for certain things. We also did a trial run. Made me realize that so much of life is tied to my phone for shitty 2FA and identity tracking. Once I realized the instructions were "If my phone dies with me, you can't do any of this" it made me try to find solutions that were secure, but not in the hands of big tech and telco companies.
If it gets to the point where they can't manage their own eating and hygiene, don't do it for them (and don't hire someone to do it); let nature take its course. I know it sounds harsh, but once that sort of decline begins, it's game over anyway, and the constant medical intervention usually just extends the misery.
He's a huge crybaby removed. Been that way for a long time, and pretty typical of California Sherriffs too.
"Us" is the pedophiles running things, and "keeping us safe" means attacking their critics.
They still know who most users are even without a google login; they can monetize just fine.
Betteridge's law of headlines... no, of course they aren't.
Rightly.
He didn't repeal the law. He repealed an administative rule/regulation (that was never really implemented in the first place).
The law was the NDAA (part of which was the Corporate Transparency Act). Those laws still exist. Ordinarily when a "law" is passed by congress it's too goddamn vague to implement. So federal agencies start the administrative rulemaking process (which usually takes years to decades) and eventually the appropriate federal agency implements some set of regulations that are the agency's best effort to implement what they think congress kinda meant with the original law.
In this case, when Biden was president, a rule was passed to implement part of the Corporate Transparency Act that required corporations to report "beneficial owners" to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen). The presumption of this rule was that if you are a beneficial owner of a corporation (but not a big one), you are a criminal or will be, and FinCen needed to know who you are to come bust your ass in the future. The rule was created and implemented fairly quickly in federal rulemaking terms, and like most contentious regs, it was immediately challenged in court, and there were injunctions and reinstatements. and and FinCen was on-again and off-again in telling people to report or not report. It was a shitshow, but moreover, it had a very short compliance deadline, and real teeth in terms of fines, and even by FinCen's own estimates most "beneficial owners" of corporations had no idea the rule even existed. It was the sort of thing that wouldn't be hard for the well heeled people to work around, but a pain in the ass for ordinary small corporations. It was feel-good legislation that wouldn't have done much to stop crime (because we kinda know who the big financial criminals are anyway).
This "headline" misses the mark. Nothing has changed; the rule that was "ended" here never fully went into effect in the first place.
There was a brief period where FinCen was accepting BOI reports, but most people weren't doing them because it was ping-ponged in the courts a lot, and the reasonably intelligent among us could see that this was the corporate version of "protect the children." It created a "pre-crime" reporting burden that we actually didn't need because we've know who the fucking criminals are.
Lacking the decency to be honest is literally what got her the job.
I wonder how many of the major car manufacturers are already surreptitiously participating.
Sounds like every other religion. If AI is mimicking human behavior, creating mystic nonsense isn't a stretch.
There was a time when this would have been obvious satire, but these days you just don't know.
Not paywalled for me, so I'll share the relevant part:
I was shocked when I learned what the monthly cut for referral services like "A Place for Mom" is. After going through this with a parent, my #1 advice is to avoid every single place they recommend. Their "recommendation" is entirely based on how much money they get from the facility. And these kinds of referral "services" are increasingly being offered as a workplace benefit for a lot of people. It's not the scummiest part of that economic sector, but it is straight up payola masquerading as healthcare advice, and should be illegal.
We used a recommended provider for a few months and it was a nightmare. We eventually moved to a facility A Place for Mom "couldn't recommend" but was recommended by a hospice nurse. It was about half the price and 100x better.
When traffic is bad, you can drive for an hour in LA and still be in the same neighborhood.
Worked there for 16 years. Not 16 years old.