I mean, if you'd asked law makers in 1850 if we needed speed limits on the roads between towns, you'd be laughed out of the room. Does that mean we shouldn't have speed limits? Or does that mean that nobody in power dreamed that it would be a serious or wide-spread enough problem that just suing each individual for damages was insufficient? Sometimes, we even have to invent new ways to express the damages so that suit can even be brought.
As I recall, the main issue with that was that because it used facial recognition, the labor burden of enforcing that was significantly lower. If its just human beings looking at every visitor and trying to decide if they match a description, the venue has to decide "has this person done anything so egregious that all this extra effort is worth it?" which makes the tactic self-limiting.
With facial recognition, enforcing a trespass order becomes nearly zero cost, so it can be applied for basically any reason. I can sort of get to understanding the tactic for "this lawyer is actively suing us", but if its "this person said something mean about us online, and we can get a facial recognition match from their profile picture", it seems like a wild abuse.
Which is why that whole Radio City Music Hall situation was such a good illustration of the actual harm of facial recognition systems. If a potentially bad action is only kept "good" because the high cost (in labor or lucre) causes discernment in its application, then removing the cost will necessarily remove the discernment, almost guaranteeing bad actions.
Business owners should have the right to bar someone from the premises, and legal recourses to enforce that right. But enforcing that right should be sufficiently cost prohibitive that enforcing that right does not grant the business outsized power to limit the public's rights to e.g. express negative opinions of that business.
> With facial recognition, enforcing a trespass order becomes nearly zero cost, so it can be applied for basically any reason. I can sort of get to understanding the tactic for "this lawyer is actively suing us", but if its "this person said something mean about us online, and we can get a facial recognition match from their profile picture", it seems like a wild abuse.
Also the ban was not communicated. So probably counts as theft as well.
Almost as if there's a limit to how many demands strangers can reasonably place on a person before we as a society agree that the person should put up boundaries (like, say, putting on headphones and outright ignoring the demands) and even go out of our way to encourage strangers to respect those boundaries.
I'm not calling you out, IncandescentGas, you're right and you're doing a good thing. I'm just saying its ironic that you jump to the defense of somebody who has made it clear that they don't believe others deserve the same courtesy you are providing them.
No defence needed in my case. I made a mistake and paid my price. I feel bad for people who are so bored and miserable in their own lives that they feel the need to elevate themselves by trying to diminish me.
It's too bad that they don't live more fulfilling lives that don't require them to feel the need to attempt to insult people.
First, increased demand drives increased prices. This is the least controversial axiom of modern economic theory. So if you add a huge power consumer to a market, all consumers in that market will have to pay more. You can mitigate that some if that new, big consumer builds their own power facility, but the fact still remains that the local price in fuel (oil, coal, etc) or materials for renewable generators (turbins, solar panels, etc) will increase. Again, because demand increased.
Second, its one thing for things to cost more in a market that has a booming economy and plenty of high paying jobs. Home prices in the Bay Area are horrifying, but the poverty line for a family of 4 is $80k, which sort of grounds things. If energy costs go up by $100/year in the Bay Area, nobody notices. But if energy costs suddenly skyrocket in Great Falls, Montana (poverty line for 4: $33k) or similar that lacks a vibrant economy, the residents don't have much choice but to tighten their belts over the suddenly larger electric bill that has done basically nothing to actually revitalize their economy.
We all see the incipient decoupling of labor from capital, while still having bills to pay. We are at the stage where we need to trial solutions, like a Pigouvian tax.
I had a similar experience playing, of all things Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. You play as a variety of US Marines helping Russia defend some island from a Chinese invasion so as to control some recently discovered oil deposits.
And at one point while playing this already somewhat implausible situation, I thought "that random PLA soldier I just mowed down would not have, in reality, signed up to be the invading force in a petro-conflict". It kind of killed first-person shooters for me for a while, because I accidentally humanized a poorly-programmed bot in a ridiculous, made-up scenario into making me feel bad for them.
Questions like "how would you search for a substring?" are so incredibly dependent on what you're doing on a day-to-day basis, and what you're doing with the data once you've split it. Just because .split(...) is in all the tutorials doesn't mean the codebase you've worked on for the last 5 years actually uses that specific call with any regularity, and it may well be the case that your codebase does use regexs more often (maybe for query-portability purposes).
I write bare metal firmware, primarily in C, and I've had to make it a point to explain, in most every interview I do, that I've only ever used malloc(...) in tutorials. "In my world, malloc is a 4-letter word". So while I know what it does, and how it works, I actually have to google its usage, and I'm not as keyed into its pitfalls, because every system I've ever worked on could not afford the risks associated with dynamic memory allocation.
All of this to say, bad interviewers go looking for a specific answer, good interviewers go looking for good process. All of the jobs I've held are ones that accepted that I was rusty on this or that specific call, but could think about the system holistically.
I'd go further and say that modern suburbs are designed to completely isolate commerce from residence, in a way that doesn't just necessitate driving, it necessitates driving long distances to centralized commercial centers. So you can't just walk around the corner to a shop and get what you need, you have to drive, sometimes for miles, to get to a big-box grocery store. And because people didn't want to drive all that way for one set of things, just to drive another long distance for another set of things, you ended up with clusters of shops (or more frequently, clusters of big box stores), all in these centralized locations.
You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.
You often can "go down the block" for some value of "block" (often within walking distance, if not perfect walking conditions; definitely within bike range) but the store you find is likely expensive, small, and limited. The same time expenditure gets you to Walmart (or Target, if you're upmarket) and things are more plentiful and cheaper.
The funny thing about the big box stores is that they can apply so much pressure to their suppliers (and their landlords) that the price difference outstrips differences in quality and convenience.
Once upon a time I lived within easy walking distance of my job, a big box retail store in one of these clusters. Elsewhere in the same cluster was a Market of Choice, which is basically a Whole Foods but for Oregon residents who are too cool for such a mainstream store. Despite the higher costs, I vastly preferred shopping at Market of Choice because I could easily walk there and the food was generally higher quality. Generically, I would consistently shop at stores I could bike or walk to, outside of that shopping center, and frequent restaurants I could get to.
Meanwhile, where I live now, there's a Haggen (an Albertson's branded Whole Foods competitor) across the street from a Safeway (which is the brand Albertson's uses in this particular market for their standard store). They carry identical store-brand items, but the premium store charges 5-10%, because they know that people will pay more just for a better shopping experience.
Obviously I don't speak for everybody, but I think a lot more people would accept paying a little bit more in exchange for not driving so much, but part of the problem is that, thanks to market effects and economies of scale and so on and so forth, they have to pay a lot more, for the same products.
My point is that American suburbs are so aggressively designed for cars that even considerable cost and inconvenience (driving 30-40 minutes) is acceptable in the face of much MUCH lower prices (even if the prices are so low because the quality is commensurately lower as in e.g. Levi jeans since they started selling in Walmart). If we hadn't let our communities be planned around driving to begin with, then building a big box would be less effective.
People are so habituated to driving, and the walking/biking experience outside of inner cities so unpleasant, that the corner stores simply cannot compete. Of course a big box store is going to have better prices, they win on economies of scale. But we've allowed our cities to be designed around the total separation of residence and commerce, so that you have to drive an interminable distance on unpleasant, congested roads just to get to an ersatz corner store. May as well drive to Walmart.
Just to buttress and embroider around your point that a fab is not a small business:
If there was a realistic way even to go from bare wafers to non-trivial custom chips in a small-batch fashion, you can bet there would be a cottage industry around it. I would love to live in a world where I could manufacture custom silicon as easily as I can manufacture a custom PCB or custom mechanical part.
But as it stands, quick-turn, rapid-proto "micro" fabs are obscenely expensive, to the extent that if you aren't absolutely certain you need the performance gains from custom silicon, justified by years of R&D that confirms the inadequacy of a multi-chip solution, then the idea is killed before any layout engineer is contacted.
Microfabs are either operated by research institutes, or they're booked solid for years, and basically printing money.
IMEC is a lab, not a fab. They have partnerships with all major fabs for driving research forwards and making prototypes and concepts, but they don't manufacture anything there, it's still up to Samsung, Intel or TSMC to try out whatever IMEC comes up with.
They may have lasers, electron microscopes, probes, etc on-site for testing what Intel or TSMC ship them and verify research results, but that's pretty far away from a "cottage industry".
Intel and Samsung are the true "cottage industries" as they do full vertical integration of IP, R&D and manufacturing under the same roof.
IMEC is more like the UN of semi companies, a place for them to come together, talk, share knowledge and results and decide industry standardisation based on that.
... which sort of assumes that the global downturn and the local downturn are completely unrelated.
Like, if a rent hike pushes out the tenant who has been there the longest, who has the most consistent revenue stream, in other words is the surest bet, then that, all by its lonesome, should be a pretty clear risk indicator to the bank.
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