No, his comments about race and supporting political groups that advertise oppression and hate have not and will not be simply categorized as a political view. There are universal truths and morals that do not change and simply saying we have different views does not excuse violating those.
I hope this isn't too off topic but one of the key underpinnings of, for lack of a better word, capital-D Democratic / liberal (/ leftist-ish?) ideology in the US is that there is not a universal truth governing reality. Watch any debate where "objective truth" gets brought up and more than half the time the response won't be disagreeing with that truth but that the entire idea of an objective, universal truth is faulty.
I think the issue isn't whether there's an "objective truth", but it's obvious that some things are truer than others. I often find that people who argue against objective truth are actually trying to push a viewpoint that has little to no evidence to support it whilst they also try to deny a different viewpoint which does happen to have some decent evidence.
A little. Broadly, the things that historical people considered "good" and "bad" are still considered "good" and "bad" today – discounting brief thousand-year fads (which largely boil down to how and whether to signal allegiance with particular ways of organising society).
> Do you eat factory farmed animals?
So you, too, understand that factory-farming animals is wrong – and that many people eat factory-farmed animals despite knowing that it's wrong, because very few people are paragons of moral virtue.
> Currently some leftist group is trying to justify Female Genital Mutilation.
You believe that leftist groups in some sense "should" be more moral than… I'm guessing the comparison is "rightist groups", perhaps the various contemporary fascist governments. But you've correctly pointed out that FGM is wrong, and that identifying with a contemporary political label or ideology does not automatically mean you're in the right.
I fail to understand why you think this is a gotcha. Your comment only functions as a gotcha if we all broadly agree on what's right and what's wrong.
What do you mean by "slavery"? The term has been applied to many practices over time. The more egregious forms (e.g. transatlantic slave trade) were justified by "well, they aren't really people, are they?"; tamer forms, like Roman slavery, were justified as institutions, as being a necessary component of the Correct Way to Organise Society. I don't think being enslaved has ever been considered a good thing (except by comparison with alternatives), although I'd be happy to learn of a counterexample. Likewise, being raped is not considered a good thing, except as far as it forms part of an Institution necessary for the Correct Way to Organise Society (e.g. a patriarchy). Each individual instance of rape is regrettable, even in rape culture.
Indeed, you will not even find people defending factory farming, except as far as they defend the institution, which is part of the status quo and therefore necessary for promulgating the status quo. (Usually something about "but farmers will have to change their practices!", as though farmers don't already change their practices so frequently that it's hard to do academic research on farming.) If you want to find something wrong that people will actually defend, in its own capacity, you need to consider examples like bloodsports… but just thinking about what people might say about the topic is no substitute for actually talking to them about it.
This shows where their priorities lie. This is also the same company that got hacked and lost credit card data of customers through their HVAC system. Bet nothing has really changed there as far as cyber security goes.
A lot has changed on the inside at Target since then. They’ve rolled the whole stack in house (even switching to Linux), locked down, and hardened a lot both inside and out.
I was amused finding out that cashiers basically no longer sign onto the registers using the register. They sign onto a myDevice (a Zebra handheld) elsewhere and keep it with them, then use that to scan a rotating PDF417 on screen on the register to complete signon as a 2FA device.
That’s on top of a lot of built in POS restrictions now to limit where certain transactions (like gift card functions) are completable to avoid people trying to swipe devices or signons from outer area unattended registers.
That signin via device is hilarious because it didn't work the last time I was there; the lady had to find someone else who could sign in for her because her device wasn't connecting or something.
I'm sure you meant the code was changing periodically, but now I'm expecting some pseudo-cyberpunk "rapidly spinning barcode" authenticator to show up in a movie...
a) that puts an upper cap on how much it makes sense to spend on theft prevention (notably target does not indicate how much money it spends on such activities)
B) such activities can reduce revenues in the first place. For example I don’t even bother going to retailers because they have so many obstacles with locked cabinets that online shopping is just a smoother experience.
The markup is around 30% or higher on each item (or at least that was the case back when I last studied business)
I get there are overheads but that’s spread across all products and supermarkets have a lot of products.
So you’d still have to have a lot of theft in a supermarket before you get close to a dent in those 2% margins.
Edit: as an aside, this is also why high value items such as alcohol are usually at the back of the store. It’s easier to identify and catch someone stealing if they’ve attempted to conceal a product for the entirely length of the shop.
You understand that that 30% "markup" has to cover literally everything involved in running the store, right? The building, lights, shelves, labor, website, marketing, HVAC, etc etc etc
A 30% markup spread across 1 product or 3000000 products is still a 30% markup.
Yes, and you realize "theft" is a part of everything.
I don't think the comment you responded to was arguing that theft was moral or companies were being greedy. Rather, just that 30% markup is typical and it takes a fair bit of theft before that starts closing the gaps on the margins.
I wasn’t dismissing theft and supermarkets do not have 2% of their stock lost through theft (if 1 in 50 items were already stolen then that supermarket is dysfunctional at preventing theft).
Thus what you’re describing simply has no basis in reality.
Furthermore, you’ve completely misread every single comment in this thread and taken the least charitable conclusion from them.
You seem to believe that when the industry says they suffer a 2% loss due to shrinkage, they mean 2% of their inventory. That 2% figure refers to gross sales, not item inventory losses.
As I’ve already told you, the industry says they lose 1.6% to shrinkage and theft is just a subset of shrinkage.
So your figures are flat out wrong.
And I get it’s a gross figure, I was just putting it into simple terms for you because you’ve managed to misunderstand every other comment thus far. I was hoping turning the figure into a fraction might help you understand the ridiculousness of your comments. It was meant as an illustration rather than a literal scenario.
Anyway, like the other guy, I’m done chatting to you now. I’ve done business studies and worked in retail before moving to IT. Clearly you haven’t. And if you’re going to keep repeating incorrect figures then you’re beyond reason anyway.
The part you missed is that supermarkets sell a significant amount of stock.
If shop lifting is a serious enough problem in a particular store to make it financially unprofitable then there’s more at play than just the theft:
1. The store isn’t following best practices of having electronics tagged, and high value items at the back of the store.
2. The store isn’t making enough legal sales. This could be for a multitude of reasons from the stores location to its cleanliness. Or maybe they’re just stocking stuff people don’t want to buy or at the prices they’re advertised for
3. The overheads are unsustainable regardless of the sales. For example the land rental might be so high that the store wouldn’t turn a profit with the types of products they’re trying to sell.
Shops also factor in loss of stock in their margins. Eg spoiled food, damaged products and theft. This actually comes to less than the cost of personal nor rental costs.
There is still value in anti-theft measures. But that doesn’t mean that the GPs comments were correct when they said:
> it doesn’t take much theft to put the business in the red.
…because if you run a supermarket correctly then it does. Despite what the knee jerk reactions to my initial comment suggest.
Let's assume an average marginal loss of 2% of gross sales to theft at a business with a net margin of 4% (typical of retail). Let's also assume wholesale markup of 50%, just to be conservative.
On two million in gross sales, a 2% loss equates to a $40,000. Assuming a 50% markup, the retailer has lost $20,000 in COGs. We'll ignore the other $20,000 for now.
On two million in gross sales, and a 4% net margin, the retailer can expect to make an annualized profit of $80,000.
We deduct the $20,000 in COGs loss, the retailer is now making only $60,000 a year, that's a loss of 25% in profit.
And that's using 50% markup.
In your stated case, with a 30% markup, the retailer would have lost $28,000 dollars in COGs, meaning the retailer is now making only $52,000, a reduction of 35% in net profits.
There is no universe in which this is a non-meaningful amount or to be dismissed as "well, something else has to be going wrong. Theft just isn't that big a deal."
Those figures aren’t accurate (eg shrinkage is estimated at around 1.6% and theft is just one of many factors that contribute to shrinkage, so the actual percentage for theft is going to be even lower) but I’m done arguing with you because you keep taking my comments in bad faith, eg:
> Theft just isn't that big a deal."
That’s absolutely not what I said and if that’s the message you’re taking then you’re looking for an argument instead of discussing the facts.
It's not OK on HN to use quotation marks to falsely attribute a quote or position to another user. Please don't do this again here, and please make an effort to observe the guidelines, which start with being kind and conversing curiously.
My point is that shop lifting is small scale compared to legal sales. So for a supermarket to make a loss from shoplifting, they’d either have to see a significant jump in items stolen.
This doesn’t mean that I condone theft; it just means I’ve ran the operating costs and margins for running retail stores and thought I’d share that insight.
Businesses price in shrinkage. The more theft occurs, the more employees they hire and the higher they mark up goods.
There's a difference between having a 2% margin and having a 30% markup. Margin includes things like employee salaries, spoilage, theft. That's why buying goods in a remote location will often carry a high price tag. The store selling that produce needs to account for these things in order to stay afloat. So even though they are selling something for $10 that you can get in a city for $5 that doesn't mean they aren't making the same 2% margin.
I'm writing this from a Mac when I ask this. Has Apple actually created anything that could arguably have changed the world? Resistant crops, the Cray, mobile refrigeration all changed the world. My iPhone's nice, but it's not exactly on the same level. Is there anything from Apple that I'm missing?
The iPhone absolutely changed the world. I agree - it is not on the level of the green revolution or refrigeration. It still led to one of the largest paradigm shifts in end user computing, taking it from the desk or table at work or home into the hand, everywhere, for everyone.
The iPhone changed the world through sheer scale. This even trickled back upstream to its components.
For example, VECSEL lasers were added to the iPhone in 2017 to power FaceID. At the time, they were a low volume, high cost component (used primarily in fiber transceivers) with generally poor yields.
Today, thanks in large part to the sheer number demanded by iPhones, they are a cheap, near commodity component with >90% yields.
I'm honestly still trying to wrap my head around in what way exactly the iPhone was innovative. It wasn't the first phone that could run programs, nor the first phone that could use the Internet (the "i" in "iPhone"). Perhaps it was the first phone that did both of those and also had a touchscreen, however that seems like an odd thing that would "take end-user computing from the desk to the hand, everywhere". I would argue the iPhone itself is not the innovation, but rather the ecosystem around it: the app store. I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone else was doing that in 2006.
The major innovation of the original iPhone was its ability to be both $800 (no carrier subsidies) and be an iconic sought after product that didn’t have much function outside of what was already available in the phone market.
I will be the first to say I enjoy working from home. I don't want to go back to the office. What I will also say, that what doubly makes me not go back to the office is the office space itself. It was expensive to put in. Some company paid a lot for it. There are marble tables in the break room, the furniture is obviously not cheap. It is all jarring. It is an assault on the visual and auditory senses. It's bright and loud and overwhelming.
If companies want to try and lure someone back to the office, they should spend some time and money and make it nice. It's not a magic bullet. It won't make people think, "wow I want to spend 30-40 minutes in the car each morning," but it's a start. It's the same thing about catering food into the office, don't buy mediocre food an expect people to hail your praises. If you really cared, you'd actually care about the quality.
When I was in college, I took a number of Econ courses, and I still remember the Macro Econ professor talk about banks failing. This was in the mid 90's. He flat out said that a bank failing is something that just doesn't happen anymore. He pretty much said, you'll never see it happen. This is before they repealed the Glass-Steagall act.
I still remember the mortgage crisis unfold in disbelief that they didn't see it coming. I worked in finance at the time, and I truly realize how fragile businesses (banks, etc.) are, and our trust in a number of things is completely unfounded. We have certain protections now, but I understood at that moment why people my parent's age (born during WWII) and older didn't trust banks, etc.
I had the same feeling. I remember the first time I looked at the accounts of North Rock (covering for a colleague at a small fund manager), the first British bank to fail (and the only one to go under rather than getting a bailout) and being horrified at its reliance on interbank markets.
A lot of British banks needed bailing out, but but building societies (mutuals owned by customers, traditionally mortgage lenders but mostly full service retail banks) were fine, but big banks and at least two former building societies that had demutualised were not.
From that point of view it sounds as though Bank of North Dakota sounds like another example of different ownership structures enabling greater stability than shareholder owned big banks do.
It was the banks holding MBSs that failed. Banks always hold mortgages. With Glass Steagal the investment banks couldn't have jumped in to do the rescues.
We have a family friend who is blind and a programmer. It's interesting to hear his perspective. His hope and expectation are that it will greatly increase usability.
I've been thrown into the usability deep end due to my wife also losing her sight due to an autoimmune disorder, and my dad losing his sight due to Macular Degeneration. Honestly, it sucks, and I mean like rage quitting, phone throwing sucks. (Try it. Turn on voice assist and close your eyes.) If Apple can improve it through AI, where someone can just talk to the phone to do a series of tasks. It will honestly change everything. The number of aging people who are going to lose their vision in the U.S. is set to go up exponentially in the coming years. This could be an unprecedented win for them, if they solve this issue with AI.
A few days ago, OpenAI released live video integration with Advanced Voice mode for ChatGPT—point your phone at something and ask what it sees, and it will tell you pretty accurately. I thought it was just a cool trick until I read the top comment on their YouTube video announcement: “I'm screaming. As a visually impaired person, this is what I was eagerly waiting for. Still screaming! Thank you, Sam, Kev and the entire team over at OpenAI.”
Google released a similar feature with Gemini 2.0 last week. While it doesn’t seem to be integrated with a smartphone app yet (at least on iOS), it can be used through the AI Studio browser interface.
I don't have experience with this kind of problem. But I don't think GenAI is the best tool for this, at least not until it's so rock-solid trustworthy that everyone uses such an interface. Even leaving aside AI questions, if I'm looking for a human personal assistant for someone who's blind, and that person will have unlimited access to their electronic life, I'm going to vet that person very, very carefully.
My point is that the user is adding another layer of abstraction, and that layer of abstraction needs itself to be trusted. When UI elements are really concrete and you can clearly see that you pressed a particular button and the thing you wanted happened, then the UI layer, at least, is a nonissue.
But in retrospect I don't know if my point was that good. The UI problem hasn't actually been solved, and an LLM-based chatbot may actually be more reliable for non-tech users since the user has to do less translation.
Sorry to hear about what is happening in your family.
I think your perspective is spot on. VUI (voice user interfaces) will absolutely change the way we interact with computers. After all, talking comes naturally to humans.
The digit divide (old people, very young people, illiterate) still exists. And will likely get bigger if VUIs don't get wide spread adoption.
> Sorry to hear about what is happening in your family.
Non-sequitur, but I cannot be the only person to find this sort performative empathy odd/out of place in this the context of HID accessiblity discussion.
While I use LLMs I also consider myself an LLM skeptic in terms of its role in upending the world and delivering the value promised by the folks hyping it up most aggressively.
However, using ChatGPT voice mode and considering the impacts on accessibility, especially if that quality of interactive voice functionality is able to be integrated well into the operating systems of devices we use every day, is very exciting.
in order to cure Macular Degeneration we have to develop many different technologies that can be used for power control, it's inevitable as our history shows cyclical nature and behaviors of humans are predefined throughout the history because conceptually the same ideas and thoughts are being encoded and rehashed and decoded by newer generations.
LLM-based AI is not needed, or even useful. We know how to make voice interfaces that work, and work well: have done since the 80s. It's just expensive; and it's an expense that nobody in the industry is willing to pay, therefore nobody needs to do it in order to differentiate their product.
What you're missing is that AI solves the expense problem. As the OS vendor you already have an overview and easy access to all interfaces that you expose and it's straightforward to feed that into an integrated AI agent. Add a bit of glue code here and there and a simple implementation is nearly free. Of course, the real value lies in ironing out all the edge cases, but compared to doing all of that manually, it should still be orders of magnitude cheaper.
It's not, because "ironing out all the edge-cases" is orders of magnitude more expensive than just designing a system without edge-cases in the first place. What's cheap is getting away with not bothering: but then you end up with a tech demo, rather than a usable product.
Anybody who is going to be shocked at what happens as far as aggressive policies aimed at women, minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and the lower income brackets really has no excuse. They haven't been shy in stating their intentions. You can say you made a choice to support it, but don't hide and say you didn't know.
100%. In 2016 it was fair to be shocked that he meant what he said literally rather than figuratively in a crass manner of getting elected. I think everyone expected he would cut to the middle once elected, as he was a New York democrat for his whole life. But in 2024 we now know that when he says something he means it.
I will firmly admit, that in the 2015 primaries I thought he was the lesser of 2 evils between him and Ted Cruz. I will absolutely state that I was foolish and wrong. That's not happening again.
They won't be shocked, it's literally what they wanted and why people voted the way they did. You can't just blame corruption or something anymore. It's what people want.
I think lots of voters want "let's deport all illegal immigrants!"
I think they would be shocked if they understood what kind of operation it would take to deport 15 million and what the side effects would be. For comparison, the entire (huge) prison population is 1.9 million.
I think some terrible things will happen to immigrants (and people suspected of being immigrants), but this scale doesn't seem possible and will be fought against by powerful interests (businesses employing them, etc).
Maybe they should just do what Canada does and have really high civil/criminal penalties for employing illegal immigrants (so no job, they just go back because no work)? The problem is that a lot of farmers, hotel owners, and people who work construction projects vote Republican also, so it seems like that will never happen in the US.
I could image a gradual shift to something like that. But if 15 million workers can't work suddenly, there aren't people to do those jobs. Those people also buy groceries, pay rent, etc.
Ya, but being more honest about immigration is better in the long term. Well, I say that, but that's what Canada did and people (not just conservatives) are still angry. Instead of blaming illegal immigrants, however, they just blame legal ones.
I think Canada had a poorly determined policy which the country couldn't handle the incredible surge of immigrants - especially those who came from south asia through the diploma mill college route and added limited value to the country. Also in Canada the more people come the worse the socialized services if it isn't properly managed (which it hasn't been).
Yes, they definitely over extended on legal immigration, although it should turn into a net positive maybe a decade later assuming they cut back on it now.
