Well the FAA discovered the pilot lied and now the pilot is in serious ** with his career and reputation destroyed: I'm assuming he is looking at possible jail time (not a lawyer).
I'd say this is a serious deterrent to pilots contemplating similar action in the future but I don't think the problem was with the FAA or this pilot. The real problem was the senior management at Boeing who made the conscious decision to put profits ahead of safety. Thus they were directly responsible for creating a culture of short cuts and cheating which lead to the ending of several hundred lives.
You (probably purposefully) make no distinction between the long term / residential rental market and the short-term / holiday let one. That is what Airbnb trades on (and the point of the article): they muscle in on the role traditionally filled by hotels and guesthouses except that they do not face the same regulations and costs. You have to apply and be regulated (you know, to stop guests being burned to death in unsafe properties) to be an actual B & B; to open a house as a... B&B on Airbnb you simply have to list the property. And you can do the same thing over and over again.
Anyway now the people that actually live in these locations can no longer afford to rent, let alone buy (again, the point of the article). If you don't see the problems with that (starting with airy concepts of 'community' and ending with your anger that there are no longer any nurses or teachers in your town) then you are even more of a wilfully ignorant passive-aggressive libertarian dork than the hacker news average (a bar which is set extremely high).
If that is a problem in your community then have you considered running for office? Ralph Nader's Raiders is a historical example of what could happen if people stood for candidacy, regardless of the party in power. AOC showed that it can be done if one is willing to try.
Let me play devil's advocate here. Because I worry a lot about this.
In as much as it affects the outcome of climate change you're wrong: not eating meat, driving and flying less, etc. will not, in any meaningful way, save us from what are increasingly alarming predictions regarding climate change. What you're talking about are straw men.
In fact I worry that the effect is negative because everyone pats themselves on the back for these kinds of activities and thinks they've done everything they can when, as I say, the impact of what they've done is essentially negligible and draws attention from what really is driving climate change (and noone seems to talk about).
And what really is driving climate change (and numerous other environmental issues - see massive over-fishing, environmental destruction by dredging for sand / mining for minerals, etc.) is the massive shift out of poverty of billions in people in China and India and their demands for housing, cars, travel, construction, etc. The US and Europe have had (fairly dramatically) decreasing carbon emissions for some time now, but all of those decreases (and then some) are erased by the increases in India and China. Particularly China which built 184 new coal plants in 2020 and increased its own CO2 emissions by 4% in the second half of 2020 alone: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-coal-idUSKBN2A308U .
Hopefully it does not need to be said that you cannot fault these countries for massively improving the welfare of their citizens or say that this is a bad thing. To be fair to both India and China: both are aware of (do not deny) the problem and are devoting large amounts of resources to finding solutions.
But those are the facts. You can virtue signal all you like about being vegan but really you are doing nothing to address the actual problem (and may actually diverting attention away from it).
Yes, the things you described also have a profound effect on our carbon emissions. Agriculture also accounts for a large portion (those people leaving poverty gotta eat! And they wanna eat meat), and a large portion of agriculture is animal agriculture. So if eliminate or drastically reduce our reliance on animal agriculture, it stands to reason that we'd have an effect on overall carbon emissions.
Are there other things that can be done alongside reducing our demand for harmful products? Totally, and a lot of those things will involve regulation of industry, not individual changes in habits.
But the good thing is that we don't need to do one or the other, we can do both. I invite you to start doing what you can.
> and may actually diverting attention away from it
I find it hard to believe that trying to get people to change their consumptions habits in order to reduce our reliance on CO2 and Methane heavy industries is going to result in more carbon and methane. Do you have anything that actually says that folks who are motivated to make changes like this are somehow _less_ motivated to address climate change after?
It seems more likely that folks who want to virtue signal ("Climate change is awful, but _I_ won't do anything to help") are those who already weren't gonna do shit, so no loss there, really.
Here's the only solution that's going to solve the climate crises: every person of the world is going to have to realize they they are responsible for their own CO2 output. The goods you buy, the transportation you use, how you heat and cool your home - these are all your choices and all impact your C02 output. Americans on average produce double the amount of CO2 than the Chinese do on average. Americans produce more C02 than Europeans, who in turn also produce more CO2 than the Chinese.
Once you realize your CO2 output is your personal responsibility then you can take care of your own business and strive to make changes to reduce your output. You can create demand for green power (not demand, create demand - actually buy green energy), you can make choices as to your thermostat settings, you have choices in what you eat, you have choices in what your purchase - all of these are within your control. Small changes made by hundreds of millions of people can have dramatic impact - in fact that's how we got into this mess in the first place.
What doesn't look good is Americans, who produce more C02 than anybody else in the world - by far - throwing up their hands and saying it's hopeless because of India and China, who's citizens are producing far less CO2. It's time for us to clean up our act and lead by example.
>If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you.
I once went out with a nurse in the UK who worked in palliative (end of life) care. On a daily basis she was responsible for life-changing decisions concerning medications; she had to comfort the dying and tell bereaved people that their relatives had died (frequently ending up in tears herself); she had to give bed baths and clean up human waste daily. She had to undertake continuous training and assessment with her career at risk if she failed; she did not know more than a week in advance what shifts she would be working which on any given day could start at 6am or 9pm (and go through to 4am the next day).
For all of this she was paid £25,000 (USD 35,000) / year.
The injustice is that software engineers and the tech sector in general are being so insanely rewarded as most of the rest of society stagnates and living standards fall (I say this as an insanely rewarded software engineer).
Software engineers are rewarded what the market demands, not some prize because they're seen as better for humanity than nurses. Some would argue the field of nursing has a lower bar to entry than software development.
Creating a UK corporation takes ten minutes online and costs you USD $20 (and anyone can do it).
But the compliance / Know Your Customer rules are very strict in the UK: it's almost impossible to get a bank account there unless you are legally resident there.
Not trying to be aggressive but I'm guessing that you use an adblocker to browse the internet?
I'm guessing that you believe content on the internet should be universally free (and contributors unpaid). Quick aside: even if you don't believe creators should be paid for their work, how do you propose that server / infrastructure costs are covered?
It's a philosophy I (sort of) understand but surely it's up to the creator if they want to be compensated for their work or not?
If that's the case then the current options are:
1. Advertising, marketing and user tracking / profiling which I'm sure you're a big fan of.
2. Some sort of subscription service
Or 3: contributors are compensated with micro-payments / tokens - e.g. what these guys are doing.
How has Facebook become one of the biggest (and malignant) companies in the world without paying a cent for the content that we (and content creators) supply (content without which Facebook would be nothing)? How is that right? What if there were a (let's call it "decentralised") system where all of us were rewarded for the content we produce and not just the mega corporations? It could be a system... sort of like this :-O.
People will create content for free. Places like wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo Answers, whatever prove that. Some people like to get upvotes or likes, others just like to take a topic and expound on it a bit and see how people react. Some people probably have other motivations.
Adding money to it commercializes things. Changes incentive. People start working to earn money rather than for the joy of contributing. Partly this is good - some of my favorite YouTubers work full time at creating the content I like. Partly this is not good - lots of content on YouTube for example is kind of cookie cutter attention getting spam type stuff.
Google itself is another example. Before, and in the early days of Google ads Google results were amazing. Nowadays Google seems to mostly return ads, top X lists, spam, and such.
Imagine reddit where the goal was to earn upvotes. That would look a lot like spamming low effort memes. Maximum possible return for effort. If your upvotes are money, I think that's what you'll tend to get.
Adding tokens isn't just about money -- it provides a lot of features that simple money doesn't.
For example, each token may have voting power, allowing users (and more so power users) to have a say in the decision making of the product. Holding tokens (versus selling them) could also come with extra VIP privileges (similar to a rewards system). The point is to reward users for providing content, not just in money but also a say in the platform.
I agree with you that people will create content for free. But I think there is still a massive audience that could provide great content thats left out on the sidelines because there is no other motivation.
Why is youtube so much bigger than reddit? Youtube is literally an ecosystem -- where successful youtuber's have set up great partnerships outside of youtube due to their content. Individuals have built a career on youtube, something not possible on a free model like reddit.
"Partly this is not good - lots of content on YouTube for example is kind of cookie cutter attention getting spam type stuff. --> there may be ways to combat this, if the algo deciding how to distribute MU tokens is efficient. But if not, and this is the trade-off in building a massive community like Youtube that provides insane amount of knowledge to the world, then is worth it (imo).
>Imagine reddit where the goal was to earn upvotes. That would look a lot like spamming low effort memes. Maximum possible return for effort. If your upvotes are money, I think that's what you'll tend to get.
You basically described reddit as it is today.
On hypothetical crypto-reddit, on the other hand, spamming low-effort memes to farm hypothetical karma-coins would cause inflation; and if hypothetical crypto-reddit failed to combat spam, that would debase its currency in comparison with competing platforms, causing people to preferably post elsewhere.
Oh, and admins tampering with posts wouldn't be a thing, because they wouldn't own the only copy of the database.
The story is that - certainly in the early days - you could be fired from Amazon as a manager if your section made a profit.
The argument is that your entire focus as a software / service business is growth (aimed at profitability for some undetermined future date). If your section or company is making a profit this represents a failure to utilise all of your resources for the purpose of growth.
As a multi-national there are various tax shenanigans you can play - that is up to governments to decide how to crack down on those. The unfortunate fact is that you need countries like Ireland on board who have benefited greatly from being very corporation tax friendly.
I've often thought that coding - for me - is more visual / graphical than anything else. If you could find a way to quantify + test people's ability to do that, you could throw rubbish coding challenges out the window and, given the state of tech hiring, be an instant millionaire.
Having said that, for me it's impossible to describe. There is a part of my brain that is putting things together (graphically, sort of) but simultaneously thinking dependencies, potential problems, optimisation, etc.. Then there's a part that is doing things based on experience and repetition - to be fair the second and third parts are more based on experience than anything else.
I'd say this is a serious deterrent to pilots contemplating similar action in the future but I don't think the problem was with the FAA or this pilot. The real problem was the senior management at Boeing who made the conscious decision to put profits ahead of safety. Thus they were directly responsible for creating a culture of short cuts and cheating which lead to the ending of several hundred lives.