If Spectrum spent half the money they spend on leaflets and promotional offers (that aren't really promotions and invariably force one to purchase Spectrum TV) on actually growing and upgrading their fiber network, my internet at home wouldn't be so absolutely awful.
Naturally you just can't expect a comprehensive fiber network in the largest metropolitan area in the Western world, though.
One can only hope that those software devs who create applications for both ecosystems don't leave for greener pastures, taking their software with them...
There are far, far, too many ads. But the ads are at least more tasteful than on most platforms. If you keep your list of follows < 100 or so (and take care to cull any accounts that get too spammy -- limiting yourself to people you know personally is a good strategy for this), Instagram is a pretty pleasant platform to check once a day, especially if your friends use Stories.
That being said, it suffers from Facebook syndrome to the extent that you literally have to fight the platform to make it usable. I'm holding out for some kind of federated hybrid of instagram/facebook in the near future with a chronological timeline and a reasonable volume of ads (to keep the lights on)/subscription option.
While I'm sure FB's algos are somewhat to blame for this, it's hard to estimate just how much content has been driven away by the site since the halcyon days of 2007-2012. Most of the reason I left was because none of my friends posted photos or thoughts any more -- folks just started sharing links and regurgitating talking points without generating any original content, so I left because I have HN/Reddit for that (with better curation tools, at that). Facebook was a good place when all of my friends used it for messaging and sharing their lives, but at some point everyone I knew started to use instagram and snapchat for those things.
Snapchat has mostly been killed by monetization, but instagram is still on life support for now. Losing the chronological timeline was quite the blow, though. Is it really that hard to balance "pleasant place to share my life" and "shove ads into my face"?
Don't worry: they've been slowly hobbling the mobile site to make the application more and more attractive. iirc you can't even message on the normal (non-basic) mobile site any more: it just shows a splash screen requesting that you download messenger. And of course their site uses screen dimensions and user agents to decide to force you onto mobile even if you request desktop.
It's worse than that. Even if you check the "Desktop site" box on Chrome for Android, every time you type a word in the messenger box and press space, it's deleted.
You have to go a long way to make anything that bad, it can't be accidental.
You can still get to it via normal means. You don't have to use the desktop site. What you do is go to facebook.com, check the "desktop site" option in the browser... page refreshes, you're in "mobile view" still (m.facebook.com), click messages icon.... now you're able to message people just fine. Works fine for me. I use Brave (which is not much different than Chrome on Android).
Absolutely agreed. However, I don't think spending 15 years in China is a particularly rare trait in tech work -- a very good chunk of the people I work with in tech on a day-to-day basis were born and raised in a foreign country (typically China, India, or Russia, though there's a very long tail there). In fact, my own background (that of a very, very, small rural US town) who went to a liberal arts college is extremely rare in my own experience in tech. Of course, I'm a white heterosexual so I'm considered a member of "the majority"...
Diversity metrics based on the color of your skin or the country where you were born are an awful way to assess actual diversity of thought. It's much more about your own personal experiences regardless of your environment. It's a shame that's hard to quantify so everyone ignores it.
Lexington, Kentucky is the 60th-largest city in the United States. That is not the "small town Kentucky" that the grandparent is talking about. (S)he is talking about small businesses (or business franchises, like Dollar General) that are barely scraping by in small towns -- a gas station, a diner, a dollar store -- typically with a only 1-3 employees working at a time. A place like that would take a substantial hit from a doubling of the minimum wage.
Don't get me wrong -- workers are grossly underpaid in most of the US, and wage gains are good. But those wage gains do have to be relative. In NYC/SF, a $15 minimum wage is just enough to scrape by with a couple of 20-30 hour a week jobs. In a poorer part of the US, a $10 min wage is plenty... but anything more might be enough to kill what few businesses currently survive there.
The small mom and pop stores have been closing at record paces due to things like Walmart and Amazon. A higher minimum wage might speed that up, but it just moves things faster in the direction they've been moving for decades already.
The thing that blows my mind is what the federal government (by the definition of the IRS) considers the poverty level is based on the cost of food plus inflation, while entirely negating the cost of living. Minimum wage is made based on the poverty level, but the poverty level is wildly inaccurate due to not taking into account housing.
Couldn't agree more. It's also silly that there's a federal poverty level at all -- I see a poverty level as only useful on a scale as granular as county/parish, even state level is probably too large to give any useful data (for reference, I grew up in Northern New York State and now live in NYC, and any New York State poverty level is meaningless in both of those places because they're so disparate).
It's a shame that the GOP, which is supposedly anti-federal power consolidation, no longer embraces that ideal. We would likely be better served here in the US by something more akin to a confederacy.
On the subject of Dollar General: I imagine the corporation as a whole is profitable, but I'm curious about their franchisees. If it's something like the McDonald's setup, then I imagine that their franchisees could be seriously hurting while the name Dollar General remains lucrative. Unfortunately I don't know much about their structure -- maybe they don't have franchises?
A federal minimum wage as a "line that you have to meet or beat" seems sensible enough to me for states that want to screw people. That said, it should definitely be per state and even per-city, as you've mentioned. I was just pointing out the severe problem with the current system and how it is really doing a disservice to those underprivileged citizens.
Actually, Toys R Us went bankrupt through a buyout:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-27/toys-r-us...
Basically, they were forced to take on a lot of debt to go private at a critical inflection point where competition was starting to undercut their pricing. Then they couldn't invest in anything else to fight their competition because they already had far, far, too much debt.
So I'd be skeptical to say there's something inherently wrong with non-tech stocks. You may have just lucked out and invested in tech stocks during one of the worlds largest bubbles (or just bull runs? Hard to say!)
Naturally you just can't expect a comprehensive fiber network in the largest metropolitan area in the Western world, though.