The people you visited probably had nothing but the best of intentions. But to expect all those other thousands with similarly elevated privileges to behave similarly as such would be..short sighted indeed.
I agree, it's not easy to get right. But this is a general problem of Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Two things that are protective in the CCTV case are:
- Policy: having police and CCTV operated separately is protective - both have to collude for things to go badly, like any government separation of powers.
- Technology: one example of this is the cameras had preprogrammed "no-dwell" zones - areas the pan/tilt/zoom of the camera is not allowed to stay in (e.g. windows of residential buildings). Although this could be overridden, there was an operational log where such overrides had to be justified, which feed back into oversight policy above. (They demoed this, then had to write into a logbook that they had done so.)
In general, CCTV is a force multiplier, but not excessive - the council could pay people to stand around in the street taking notes for example. The use of unmitigated ANPR with permanent recording – that is something else.
lol you mean he stole a further £300.
Fines are not there to teach a lesson. Poor people can't pay so steal, rich people can afford to pay so do. Who does this arrangement benefit if not the victim?
He was a soldier in the Army, so very likely he got reprimanded rather strongly by his CO. I am not sure where "poor" and "rich" people come into this?
It's a, what, 7th, or 8th generation product?
Let them move on. Of course it's going to settle into a more MacBook style cycle of steady, measured updates (no pun intended).
Going bigger is clearly a 'we've done what we came here to do, now lets mop up what we can from the high end to fund our other projects'. I struggle to knock them for that.
1. They will start saving: No. They won't. They will have what little money they have put into a system outside of their control and systematically syphoned away.
2. The benefits of saving are not something people need to learn; the benefits of saving money are harder to justify to someone who isn't already wholly dependant on it (and maybe even perceives it as a tool used against his people for centuries).
3. True, but I fail to see a major difference between a government and corrupt middle men. Most government people run businesses, is that the same in India? Conflict of interest?
4. The 2000's called...give it a couple years and whatever legislation you think protects the poor will be watered down, eroded away, or completely worked around.
The textbook justifications for predatory capitalism don't work anymore. I'm sorry, but the more involved the poor are in finance, the more they are preyed upon; because there is opportunity and reward. Taking candy from a baby.
I grew up in rural India, where banks were non-existent. People kept the money locked up in houses or worse yet, lent to the local money lender, who may or may not pay on demand. The government in those days introduced postal savings plan, which helped people greatly. That was my introduction to banking as well. Here are some observations:
1. Banks were inaccessible to poor people. Too much paper work. Too far away. Too difficult to conduct business. I hope with new bank accounts all these are changing too.
2. Saving is not new. People save money; even poor people do save. But, then, if the savings are in women's hands, it is spent more wisely. Historically, the only way women could store the money was in gold. Eventually, gold itself because such a coveted possession, it's monetary value was not exploited for capital needs. Bank accounts may not have these problems.
3. Historically, the only reason rural folks went to bank is to take loans, under some government project. And, that had a big potential for corruption. People had to pay money to take the loans. The funny thing was the underlying assumption is that the borrowers need not pay money back, since the government will write it off, for some election purposes.
4. Money transfers for poor is new. I think that would work lot better. And, perhaps giving to women would make it work whole lot better. In my observation, there is lot of social and cultural conditioning in seeing the kids doing better than the parents, the mothers will try to put the money to use. Whether they have the financial education or not, different issue.
5. Any system will be exploited over time. I think it is important to shake them up every few years to disturb the existing power structures, especially in the relationship between the government and the people.
You should understand that most of the banks that opened these accounts are Public sector banks (or Government Banks). And most of these accounts have no minimum balance requirements and not many surprise charges. And deposits in Government banks are guaranteed (insured upto a certain amount). So there is no question of the money getting siphoned off.
Totally agree... also.. government run banks make it difficult to get loans than private banks.. and even to this date older people tend to stay away from private banks because of hidden charges and surprises.
So you are saying the government is going through all these troubles to hand over subsidies and benefits to the poor only to "syphon" it away?
You are forgetting people are being saved from the clutches of money lenders which have enslaved these people for a long time now. Now the poor have the opportunity to get a loan from the bank and a real insurance cover. This change can not be trivialized.
+1 for moving away from the clutches of money lenders.
Though, the situation isn't that simple. Money lenders often accept undeclared assets as collateral. So for some people (the uneducated or the unscrupulous) money lenders are a boon, not a clutch.
20 or more years ago there was a peephole optimizer that looked at generated Turbo Pascal (and other not so advanced (for their time) compilers) and rearranged instructions, removed holes, replaced instructions with better set (turns out some of the "macro"-instructions were not that fast).
Nowadays calling a .so/.dylib/.dll function, or accessing a thread-local variable also generates lots of cruft code that could possibly get optimized once the data is loaded. It won't always work (shared libraries can't be unloaded, but with enough hints, or assumptions that this would never be done, one can gain some benefits). On the negative this may reduce the code-sharing across processes.
I develop for iOS first because I want to. It's the platform I choose to use. I, personally, don't care for Android. The ONLY reason for me to develop for it is money. That's a recipe for shitty work. Does it have to be more complicated than that? If I'm making a mistake, so be it. What do you care?!
Some people would argue that "I" and "What do you care?!" is an example of inward focus, not looking outward towards the user.
Such people would say that ethical and good development should improve the overall human condition and that it should help people somehow. Some others would say at least by doing so it should increase profits for the company than being inward focused.
I think the article is saying that it is irrational not to be developing for Android - even if a developer doesn't like it, they should be making more money...
Depends on what you want out of your career as a developer; again, personally, I try to make things that I want/need myself because I find doing it the other way (looking for a hole on the market and filling it, for example) doesn't give me what I want. The motivation is all wrong and I get no satisfaction from that kind of success.
The difference, to me, is whether you're focussed on the product or the reward.
I try to focus on the product because that's the best long term strategy in my opinion.
"good development should improve the overall human condition"
uh - that's a lot of pressure. I just want to make stuff. Not everything we do has to have a goal, a target. Just build.
