The Visa network is the frontend to a truly staggering number of issuers who also want to maintain a similar level of uptime to support their cardholders wherever they are in the world.
This is, de facto, not really a differentiator any more. Only one of the countries in question asks to see my social media profiles at the border to make sure I'm ideologically appropriate.
I suppose it could have some kind of ARC. In theory some future languages could even have some hybrid approach? A high perf default but you can fallback to a GC allocation for hard things?
I'm pretty sure that there are multiple GC crates for Rust out there. But using them mixed in with non-GC variables presumably makes things more complex.
The market exists, does it make financial sense to fill it? Are there enough johnfns out there willing to buy enough of them at high enough of a price to justify the mind-boggling capital required, not to mention the opportunity cost?
If you make a $10,000 robot that can do all of the dishes every damned household with kids in any semi-rich country will get one. A very good portion of our night is spent cleaning up after supper with just two kids, and that's time we can't spend with them. I'd even pay a subscription on top of that $10,000.
If it does laundry too? We'd easily pay $20,000, and we don't have FAANG type salaries.
Yeah, great. Except we need to unload the dishwasher every day, which takes a lot longer when you have all sorts of kid's cups and bottles. We also need to bring the dishes over, rinse them, put them in, wash the pots & pans by hand along with the high chair's detachable eating area, wash the table, wash the cooking area & counters, and then wash the sink.
A dishwasher saves a lot of time but it certainly doesn't save all of the time.
If the $10k robot only lasted 5 years that's a budget of $2k/yr. They have an expectation of someone cleaning most nights of the week. Cleaning services around me will typically charge ~$50/hr. Having someone come for ~2 hours 5x a week means $500/week. You'll blow your budget in four weeks. There are a lot more than four weeks in a year.
But let's be generous and suggest you'll actually get someone willing to come out for just one hour and work for half the pay of market rate. Sixteen weeks. Still far short of 52 weeks.
I think it is pretty reasonable to say that even for those in the continental US the state of the world in 1942 provided much more cause for concern than anything going on right now. At the very least, for a child born then you would be very unsure what kind of world they would end up growing up in.
True--I don't think things got better in the US until after the Korean War. And even the 60s were marred by Vietnam (far more than the impact of the War on Terror).
My parents were born in Peru in 1941/42. Peru was neutral for much of the war, but in 1942 they began deporting Japanese individuals suspected of Axis sympathies to internment camps in the US. In 1945 Peru entered the war on the Allied side. If the war hadn't ended, I'm pretty sure my dad and his family would have been interned.
And even after the war, the situation was unreal. My dad's uncle didn't believe that Japan had lost the war. He thought it was all just allied propaganda. In 1949 he sold all his possessions and took his family back to Japan--to Okinawa, in fact. When he got there, he saw the truth: the country was smashed to rubble, and he had to beg in the streets for food. My grandfather travelled to Japan, taking my 10 year-old father in tow, to bring the uncle back to Peru.
That's probably one of the tamest, least tragic stories from that time. Even in the US, 400,000 never came home and 600,000 came back wounded. That's a million families affected. Germany, Japan, Russia, France, China, Korea, and even Britain, had far worse stories.
Whatever troubles we have now (and we have plenty), they are not on the same scale as those from that time.
> It's for doing the things where the existing system fails you, not the things where it works. But it can do those things too.
Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter. Trying to resist a government by using a digital currency is putting the cart before the horse. The dollar is an abstraction and an accounting convenience over the genuine temporal powers of the consensus that issues it.
> Only as long as its use for the former doesn't outweigh its use for the latter.
That's just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously the early adopters are going to be the people for whom the existing system fails, but if you use that as an excuse to ban it or otherwise make it an insurmountable inconvenience for ordinary use through regulatory suppression then you're just preventing people from using it to buy lunch, not preventing them from using it to buy drugs. Which is useless and spiteful, especially when you're not going to address any of the problems that caused people to want it to begin with.
Only if they use it purely as a git SaaS which they don't, it's also an issue tracker and discussion forum. Even PRs aren't strictly a git concept. Given they use all those things and given they're against having AI features built into them, it does not seem ironic to me at all.
The US is the largest market for firearms, so the NRA can use the threat of boycotting a manufacturer within the states to prevent the technology gaining traction elsewhere.
To profit, they would first have to sell the goods. Who is actually in the market for a smart gun? Consumers aren't, surely. There is virtually no upside to your gun tracking you, at your own expense of buying a more complex piece of tech to boot. So that leaves something like (apparently) New Jersey where the government would compel purchases of smart guns because they were interested in the tracking. But eg. China simply don't allow citizens to purchase guns period. There may be some application to applying it to state-owned firearms to track military and police usage, but deploying that at Chinese scale would be an extremely expensive endeavour for what appears to be a solution in search of a problem. Not to mention the biometric lock concept, if implemented, is introducing an entire new axis of unreliability to a life-or-death tool.
Gun owners in the US probably wouldn't want their gun to be used against them in a home invasion, or by their child at a school. Seems like that could be a large-ish market. Especially if you can lobby regulators in favor of making it a requirement for all or some people.
You are right that gun owners wouldn't want those things, but they are unlikely to want a smart gun as a solution to those things.
They want the gun to be available to them, and not be under duress to use a fingerprint reader or pin pad or RFID ring to do it.
Responsible gun owners keep guns out of children's hands by locking them up or supervising them, and irresponsible ones aren't going to want to pay extra for smart features.
I think there's a very narrow range of smart features, something like a gun that is unlocked when removed from a holster, but locks up if it is dropped or grabbed, that might be interesting. That makes having the gun taken from an officer less of a threat, which might have an institutional appeal. Give it a 10-hour maintenance mode so that it can be used as a "nightstand gun" while automatically being locked if left idle for longer, and it would basically meet the needs of police both on and off-duty.
In my personal experience gun owners want mechanical foolproofness too. They want something that's not going to lock up or fail or discharge at the wrong time. Smart features just add a layer of complexity with fail possibilities to address a problem that many of them would prefer to be addressed differently anyway.
I think a country like Australia could be a good starting point for smart guns. Yes, not a very big market-around 8% of US population, with significantly lower rates of gun ownership-but culturally more open to gun control, with a much weaker gun rights lobby, and a marked political tendency towards surveillance and “nanny state” regulation
IIRC Australia doesn't have legal frameworks for gun ownership for the purpose of self defense, and there's no great implementation of smart guns in the first place.
A smart gun is like an AWS authenticated motor twisting ballpoint pen. Just no one ever seriously pays for such a thing, and it has not even been seriously made if it ever was actually conceived. Making it a requirement is basically out of question.
> Making it a requirement is basically out of question
Why? If there’s the political will, it is doable. There are Australian gun manufacturers (e.g. Lithgow Arms, owned by Thales)-and if none of them are willing to cooperate, the government can always start their own gun manufacturer. Indeed, Lithgow Arms was founded in 1912 as a government-owned arms manufacturer, and remained in public hands until the Australian federal government sold it to Thales in 2006.
Same reasons as why things like Clipper Chips isn't happening. It completely lacks technical basis, and even political consensus gets sketchy quick.
Post-war Commonwealth nations are generally bad at gun designs as well - UK tried once and produced an infantry rifle that will(not could) seriously injure its user if held and fired in left hand. So even if forced, the approved gun will be more of a theoretical product, and the smart gun mandate will just be a less politically viable alternative to total firearms ban.
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