That doesn't really take away from his success though.

How many 'upper class' kids of well to do parents are there? Plenty. How many of them become nothing more than perhaps inheriting their father's law/medical practice? How any become nothing more than bums leaching off their parents wealth? How many just become average upper middle-class people?

I don't take anything away from people like Bill Gates. If he started with much less like say Jack Ma, the AliBaba guy, then we might have even more respect for him. But Bill Gates still accomplished much much more than all of his peers who had equally well to do parents with connections.

I generally agree with you.
I should point out that much of this is the case in some areas. I'm in Ontario, Canada and boy was I relieved that the default custody was 50/50. I also purposefully chose a working woman as a wife. Not because I wanted her money. It was more so that in the case of divorce (which happened), there isn't a huge financial hit.

About the only addition I would make is that when couples separate the children must stay in the area of the marital home. That wasn't a problem in my case. However, as I was going through the divorce proceedings, I heard a number of cases where one spouse ran away with the kids and that kind of screws up the 50/50 arrangement.

I think fully legally binding prenups are the way to go. If you want a stay-at-home-wife, then she can do her prenup properly with some kind of annual payment or some exit clause.

Other people can do their own kinds of prenups. We just need full confidence the courts will hold these up. Assuming no one is rushed and both sides have proper representation, there is no reason these should not be accepted.

Realistically, I don't think each person need customize their own. We'd probably end up with just a couple generic prenups for the average couple. Like if you belong to a religious community, your church/mosque/temple could have their religious marriage contract that says whatever it says. As long as it's not illegal, it's fine.

Just to give an example. I come from a Muslim background and so roughly speaking, a prenup that would be valid would be something like this.

Husband pays wife upfront (mahr). In case of divorce, that is her own money to help her out. Typically speaking, richer women demand higher mahr.

Husband is responsible for all household finances.
If the wife works, her money is her money.
Wife is responsible for all household duties

What 'data' they use is very complicated. Let me give an example.

I'm in Ontario, Canada where insurance companies used to use your credit score as part of the calculation. Personally I think it is reasonable if that's what their actuaries figure out. It's not unusual to think people with bad credit are more irresponsible and so might be at higher risk when driving. Not all the time, but along the same risk pool as say age, gender, or location...

That metric was challenged by anti-poverty groups saying it unfairly punished the poor. On some level, that is true. On another level, it actually hurts the poor. I was part of the 'responsible poor' growing up. Never went into debt, was careful with money and I was working since I was like 12 years old. I did however live in a 'high-risk location' So how would the insurance company differentiate me from someone else when I am doing my most to be responsible and I think I should be a lower-rate?

It's just complicated is what it is and nothing is easy.

Personally, I think the more 'detailed' the risk being calculated, the more it should be a discount as opposed to being used to raise rates. Just for example, when I do my insurance, I get a discount if I state I use winter tires. Similarly, tracked driver behavior should be used as a discount. Ideally and I think by law in my view, it should be an explicit app by the insurance company. I know a few companies in Ontario, Canada that say they do this. They offer discounts if you install their app and drive well. Now I don't trust this is all they are doing, even if maybe I can, so I haven't installed the apps. But that is certainly a better way to do it.

The last part of insurance being risk-sharing from extraordinary events is also a big thing. However, we again get a catch-22 situation. That's the kind of insurance I want, but due to regulations, that's actually impossible where I live. The government mandates certain minimum benefits. Lobbyists like rehab facilities and what not pressure the government to keep those in place so they have a constant stream of money. There were even scandals with coordination between criminals purposefully causing accidents, then funnelling money to rehab facilities, tow-trucks, and repair shops... then milking the insurance companies.

It's a vicious game. Insurance is simply not just risk sharing against extraordinary events in life. Government rules typically move against that for better of for worse. When people get insurance they think it covers everything. Just think about health insurance. How often do people complain their claim is rejected unfairly when maybe according to their policy, it should actually be rejected? So government typically steps in and starts saying you have to cover this and that, and it stops being about risk sharing against extraordinary events.

Cheating has always been a big thing with assignments and essays. Students can cheat off each other. They can find assignments from previous years...

What is new is 'newer' teaching methods want to de-emphasize exams. There are reasons for this in that some students may not show their best during exams. In reality though, a proctored exam is simply unmatched in terms of grading a student.

Even things like essays can be done in proctored exams. I remember taking philosophy and history elective when I went to university, and during the exam, we had to write an essay on various topics. That's a perfectly fine way to grade a student.

Is it possible that unfairly grades a student who knows the content, can put together an essay, but just performs poorly within the constraints of an exam? Probably. But it's a much smaller problem than dealing with the cheating that can result in projects/assignments/essays done outside of a proctored exam.

Proctored exams are simply a very good final check on a student's learning and there just isn't a good substitute.

Honestly, have we become so disconnected from basic human behavior that people expect different?

Are people so engrossed in theory that they think we can give people free money and they're just going to keep working? Heck, I'm a professional and if there was a UBI, I might very well stop working once I had have enough in terms of a house and some savings. Not just that, imagine how much of a pain you would be at work if you didn't actually fear being laid off because you'd still have UBI. Our efficiency would drop to nothing as we'd all become entitled jerks demanding our employers make our work life amazing.

Yes, some people might truly pursue creative tasks or be truly dedicated to helping people in life, but that's not the vast majority of people. I know we spend a lot of time investigating UBI for the poor, but we should also look at it for professionals/working people. A doctor might still be a doctor for example, but would they want to work the 3 am night shift in a UBI world?

All this is not to say we shouldn't do a UBI. Maybe it will be a way to organize society, but people have to stop idealizing it and idealizing people.

You joke, but that's actually kind of surprising it is so low.

From my driving experience, far more important that just 'speed' are things like following too closely, weaving in and out, not paying attention...

I can personally recall one time I was driving back from university late at night. It was like 3 hour trip. There was a point, my eyes must have shut... and it scared the living crap out of me.

I actually don't mind many of the things that cars have today that warn drivers. My car has blind spot monitoring with a little light and that thing that beeps when backing up. It's great.

I'd love to have more beeps like following too close might start beeping if too close and going a certain speed.

Similarly, something to check if your eyes are on the road.

Beeps are the way to go.

'Speeding' is pretty far down the list because it's 'generally' intentional. I think if they want to do speeding, it should be limited to things like school zones where they can clearly mark it and the system clearly knows that it is in one.

Absolutely... and actually reading the article, the proposal the judge is thinking about is actually rather sane in my view.

"Instead, heâ(TM)ll order Epic and Google to create a âoetechnical compliance and monitoring committee,â with one representative from Epic, one from Google, and a third they both agree on, to arbitrate the technical details and report back to the court every 90 days or so. "

It's just plain understandable that Google would not want any and everything on the AppStore. Just to tie it into another Slashdot article today...

https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
This one where the courts puhsed microsoft to provide equal access to kernel level modules for things like virus scanning... that led to the crowdstrike issue.

Just blindly opening up things is probably not the best solution. While Epic is probably a 'safeish' partner to include in the app store, they can't just blindly open it. I hope this comittee comes up with some process of vetting apps within those app stores and some way of managing it all in terms of security.

On that contrary, I think selective enforcement is really good and needed.

Speeding is a regulation. It is one that is needed to ensure the safety of our roads. However, there is no victim in speeding. There is only a victim if/when there is an accident.

Like many regulations,you don't actually want them enforced 100%. You just want to keep things relatively controlled. Selective enforcement does that and I think does it well. I don't really want people driving exactly 60 instead of 65. But I want people aware enough that they might get caught and so keep their speed and driving behavior in check.

The example I'd give are things restaurant food inspections. Do you really want food inspectors 100% enforcing food standards at every restaurant? I know some people would say yes, but for me, the answer is no. To properly monitor every restaurant would be far too infringing on people's lives and require too much monitoring. Life happens and people need to run their restaurant. It's never going to be perfect, but you just want food inspections done to keep people on their toes and to have a process where complaints can be filed so inspectors can be sent in.

The main point I want to convey is that with 'regulation' selective enforcement is actually good. It gives people enough freedom to live their life without excessive monitoring or hassle by the state. But it keeps people on their toes to not grossly violate the regulation and also allows complaints to put pressure on people.

This is changing across the board. I work for a pretty boring company that followed this practice. Our biggest problem before was being stuck with old software. We still have it today.

However some pieces of software are being allowed to just update automatically. For example a lot of the Microsoft ecosystem is just being allowed to self-update. Teams just updates on it's own for example.

I don't know the solution, but it has to be more than just our EULA means we're not responsible for anything. My personal preference is more standards in software. For example, the US has the SBOM initiative (software bill of materials). At least for 'corporate' software, something like that should be standardized for easy identification of things like Log4j issue or whatever.

Similarly patch/updates at least for 'corporate' software should provide the option to have a patch approved by the user/corporation. A certain test report showing host systems, upgrade versions, and a proper change log (from the repository).

There's no way to guarantee this never happens, but I prefer standardization over dealing with it post-factor with lawsuits and playing the blame game.

I'm in Canada and we've had a very gradual digitization of taxes. It's not as complete as some other countries, but I was really impressed at how it progressed.

It started many years ago where your work would 'upload' your tax slips to the government website. It was very basic. But functional.

Then tax software, like TurboTax gained the ability to connect to the government website and download all your tax forms. More and more stuff started to be upload to the government site. Today, even my stock trades are uploaded to the government as I use a major brokerage.

Today my taxes are literally sign in to turbo tax, authorize so it can download the tax info from the government website, and I basically submit. Only thing I need to do is add donations and other stuff. There are 'free options' to file.

It's not a huge deal for the IRS to have built it's own software. I personally don't think that's a good model and prefer the model Canada did. The government defined the protocol to file taxes and receive tax slips. Then the actual programs to do taxes is left to the market. Most of the market players offer a free filing option for low-income people anyways.

You joke, but it's true. I was a teacher for a few years and Canada and went though all the teacher education and training. There's a lot of theory out there, but in practice, I genuinely don't think there is any better than exams.

A lot of people will say things like exams are too much pressure. Some learners don't perform well on exams...

Exams do one thing really well. They give you a closed environment on the course material. Sure, you can cheat on any assignment or essay during the regular school year. Yet, come exam time where all you have on your desk is a pencil and a piece of paper, you had better be able to perform.

Then if you get a student who wrote amazing essays during school projects, but could barely come up with a sentence during the exam, you would know something is up.

Catching cheaters should not be the biggest deal for regular school work and assignments. Just catch the big and obvious cheaters. For everyone else, leave it to the exam and weight it highly.

I think this is it right here.The strength of the chat bot lies in it's language processing.

However, the actions/results the chat bot actually takes are going to generally be limited by existing systems. If all the chatbot is doing is parsing your query then doing a 'google' or 'bing' or 'site search', then you might as well just do the search on your own. The technical competence of people to 'search' is also pretty ingrained in the culture that it is no big deal.

Similarly if the chatbot is accessing some feature of your website/app, a well designed app/website is going to make that functionality relatively easy for you to find and use. So again, you're likely to just go straight to that functionality. Alternatively, if it is hard to find that function, the chatbot might act as a glorified application/website search.

Laws that are vague and highly punishable are always dangerous.

It's more the stifling effect you have on the average person. As a kind of general rule, I do not believe such laws can exist in any area. Unfortunately this does mean that some 'small harms' might continue to exist. But I do think it is a worthy trade off for people to learn how to deal with small harms themselves, to preserve the rest of society.

We can and should count on 'social' rules to deal with the 'small harms'

Whether it is a small fist fight, small parental spanking, small sexual assault (not rape, but say verbal or vague touching...), small hate speech... the risk of criminalizing it is too great.

You risk stifling people's regular behavior. Young people may not be as willing to risk courting each other knowing it could actually land them in trouble. People may not be as willing to engage is civic discourse.

You risk exploitation by manipulative people. For example, I work in a corporate environment where people are always fighting each other for top position. Do you think someone might accuse someone else of some small hate speech to take their position, even if they weren't really offended?

As a kind of general rule, I am very wary of any law that is 'vague' and highly punishable. It doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you are in, they're just dangerous laws.

It's not pointless. Generally speaking flatpak or SNAPs are great for applications; especially those that update frequently.

I don't know why any vendor would release a binary outside of these formats or doing it straight into the distro. Yes, things that might be more system level could have issues, but for applcations, I don't know why Microsoft wouldn't just pick flatpak or SNAP and release it like that.

There's a lot to it, but yes in North America far far far too much is placed on enforcement. I'm in Canada and here, people are blind to anything except more enforcement.

I'd say Number 1 is actually road design. Just a quick example, I really dislike busy road that allow left turns into plazas outside of signals. Ban those and you get rid of a lot of potential points of conflict. Let people turn at a light or a round-about or whatever. You can do so much in terms of just designing the street better, so points of conflict are less.

Other examples I've seen anecdotally in Canada is really bad interchange design. We have 'collector' and 'express' highway lanes in a few of our highways. Express having less stops, so theoretically better. Ideally, you get on the highway via the collector, then go to the express. There are some really bad interchanges were people get straight onto the highway then try and cross 4 lanes to get to the express on-ramp. Just don't allow that.

Then of course you have driver education, which is a big thing.

Then you have street racing, which is a really big thing too. On this, I really believe we need to provide legal avenues. Have a local racetrack that people can race on. Some countries have done this as well. Government isn't too keen to do it here, probably due to fear of endorsing it or legal issues. But they really should. You want to have a car meet and race around, do it HERE... away from regular streets. Charge/toll entrance to it and away you go.