It would also be damning of recruitment patterns across American institutions. Getting ahold of prestigious or lucrative opportunities often requires pressing unfair advantages that other applicants don't even know exist, by design. My personal anecdote: my SAT score was higher than yours (statistically-speaking, this statement is correct 9 times out of 10, maybe slightly less considering the audience); my alma mater's ranking is lower than yours. I was not privy to he means required to capitalize on my performance. No one bats an eye at this; if the guidance of the adults in my life and my own ambition didn't drive me to a better school, that's tough luck. Never mind that the incidence of this sort of situation has a likewise racially-biased bent.
Perhaps if these sorts of tactics, or even just circumstances, weren't so prevalent, then they wouldn't seem like such a good idea to purposely replicate.
No one is gullible enough to believe that, if the alleged is true, it would be the first time that unscrupulous methods were used to advantage a particular group in recruitment for jobs or education, right? Or that, when it has happened, it has been primarily used to advantage black applicants?
I'll do you one better: in this specific situation, the antisocial buck stops at the friend group who doesn't all chip in and buy their Android friend a "keep in touch" iPhone.
But the point remains that a cynical UX/technical/business decision that does not need to be so is rending real relationships between actual people. If Tim Cook had the power to render anyone who didn't pay him $400+ mute to their friends and family through some sort of black magic, we'd call him a comic book supervillain.
I bought an Android specifically so I don't have to use an iPhone, speaking as a former iPhone user. "Friends" chipping in to buy me an iPhone isn't something I'd actually want.
Honestly, if your "friend" group is willing to exclude you because you're not using a particular brand of cell phone, then I have some bad news for you: They might not really be great friends.
Every company in the space realizes that it's the next computer pillar, after desktop PCs and smartphones. Even more so: these devices see everything their users see (and more), hear everything they hear (and more), and can provide significant insight into their mental and emotional states. The prospect of controlling the platform all of this takes place on? No one - especially incumbents that know their history - wants to get left behind. Everyone knows Apple's modus operandi: wait for others to experiment, then define the standard and run away with the market. So, Facebook bought Oculus (and slow-walked its R&D), Google shelved Project Tango, and everyone resolved to wait for Apple to make their move. Apple knew this, and kept pushing back their own reveal. The arrival and demise of upstart Magic Leap (and smaller failures from Vuzix and Snap, among others) confirmed to everyone that there was no point in trying anything until Apple had shown their hand.
So, we've been in a stalemate for more than 10 years. The AVP finally had to come out - antsy investors - and turned out to be the overengineered product of Apple trying to outmaneuver everyone else's outmaneuver, with the entire field understanding that whoever wins this owns the next 20 years.
However, it's a bit of a Chinese finger trap. Consumers and users want actual value out of this technology, and developers want to provide fantastically innovative uses, and both are at odds with the platform owners' lust for unilateral control. The platform that wins will be more like a PC than a Silicon Graphics workstation (which is what Apple et al seem hellbent on forcing down people's throats). Get something with basic functionality that just works out of the box, and that is open and ready for experimentation, into as many hands as possible. It will bulldoze the field. (This is why the Quest line has gotten so close. Shame about the owner.)
I agree with your sentiments on an open platform ultimately prevailing. The hardware is still not there yet for good AR glasses (IMO). The processing power, connectivity, power, displays, etc.... just can't be crammed into an almost invisible pair of glasses. You basically need to squeeze the equivalent of the latest apple watch into a form factor about the size of a stick of gum (cut in half length wise)....
It's not just the cost of building the house. Utilities and infrastructure (and the taxes to pay for it all) add up. Now, if you were to build smaller, densely, and close enough to amenities that residents could walk or bike to their daily activities, or to public transit that can take you farther away, you save a significant amount on initial AND recurring costs. And what's better, people WANT that! Or, a least, they're willing to eat the downsides in order to benefit from the upsides, including lower costs. But there lies the rub: when these types of places get built, they get offered at market pricing, not in a way that reflects their lower costs. So people say, "Why spend the same for less?" and move to a traditional suburb (or, more likely, put off home-buying altogether).
The problem with housing in America always comes down to the way it was financialized and securitized: too much relies on "line go up, forever". There's no room for new blood/capacity (read:competition), there's no room for "investments" to lose value.
One of the problems is that the people who need housing aren't buying new houses.
Nobody is going to spend $x on a brand new house without having some say in it, and so those houses tend more and more toward "high end/luxury". After all, why go through the hassle of all the paperwork and building and NOT sell for the highest price you can get?
Same thing happens with cars; the market for car buyers is much larger than the market for new car buyers, but only new cars ever get made. Nobody is making used cars, or even the absolutely cheapest possible, which affects the whole supply.
Most new houses are only slightly custom. You generally start with a floor plan from the builder, and then choose the color of the walls or other minor details. Sometimes a new house is cheaper than a used one because you can move into a used house much quicker, while a with new house you have to wait for them to finish. Usually a new house is more expensive than a comparable used house, but not by much. Even a fully custom home is generally not much more expensive because your builder will tell you what costs a lot of money (if you ask for 8.5 foot ceilings the builder will talk you into 9 foot because those are much cheaper since precut parts are available), and what is insignificant. Generally walls can go anywhere and are cheap to move around.
Charitably, that's a very flawed blog post. Studies of housing affordability in Finland should not be used to make points about America. Finland has a number of legal protections that shield its citizens from the rampant price-fixing, collusion, investor-oriented building, and other predations of the American market.
That's not to say housing construction regulation isn't a problem. It is, but two things can be problems at the same time.
Without reading your link: this is a problem across new and existing builds, so it can't be an issue wih permitting. Housing cost growth has outpaced wage growth for decades. We are reaching an inflection point of unaffordability (unequally distributed geographically, of course). The problem is that market rates must support a number of (often unnecessary or inflated) concerns, including but not limited to permitting and litigation. Profit for a rotating cast of securitized mortgage holders is another major one. Insolvent municipalities that can't see property taxes fall is another.
That's a lot of talking around the actual question
>that has kept his Tradition alive through the centuries and alive fundamentally unchanged
the answer to which is an emphatic, "No." Which is why Protestantism exists in the first place.
The fundamental conundrum is whether or not you believe god is operating through people who are clearly behaving in self-serving ways, as many Catholic officials have in the past. There's nothing empirical about such a question and no use becoming indignant over some taking the perfectly sentimental (if not also reasonable, though that's beside the point) stance that they simply don't trust those dudes. The appeal to being the Church which is Jesus who is God, and therefore you can't question anything a church official says, is, like... the whole point of tension.
> the answer to which is an emphatic, "No." Which is why Protestantism exists in the first place.
Early Church scholarship makes it impossible to maintain the Protestant contention that the teachings have changed in their essence, obviously vocabulary has changed. Some recommended reading on the topic that is a mix of popular and scholarly works:
* The Fathers Know Best by Jimmy Akin
* Upon This Rock by Steve Ray
* Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett
* The Faith of the Early Fathers Volumes 1 to 3 by William Jurgens
* The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451 by Adrian Fortescue
The medium is the message, as it were. Changing vocabulary changes the essence, since the minds and souls that would provide consistency across shifting intonation aren't still here to speak/bare them, respectively.
I think you overestimate my interest in soil-testing when I'm removed enough from the scene to see the mountain for myself. I suppose it could be a mirage; that's the best you can hope for.
Is it a no? Many archeological finds since the reformation have shown that the early church was indeed very much alike to what the Catholic Church later claimed.
What differences in doctrine or practice do you know of?
In terms of "x for gamedev", what I would love to see is a fork of Brilliant that covers common topics from the basics up, using pseudocode only. I've always liked Cat-Like Coding's approach to tutorials, but I've never been able to "acquire" that knowledge (and an intuitive feel for it) in a permanent way like I have with Brilliant's method. I know that they have a CS module, but one specific to gamedev topics would be amazing.
In 2016, I wrote a short essay about my epiphany, as a Millennial, concerning the attitudes towards technology of people living in the 80s - the sense of suspicion and paranoia, living under the glow of green CRTs and the threat of nuclear annihilation - and how it was likely that our relationship to that technology had transitioned to one that was more trusting not because we'd become acclimated to its alien character, but because that tech had morphed to become more (superficially) friendly.
I went to revisit it a few months later, and found that an OpenOffice/LibreOffice bug had blanked the entire document.
(The essay was inspired by watching an Otaking animation of two anime characters dancing in an arcade to the RoboCop 3 main theme, on repeat. (Said animation has also been erased from existence.) Sent me down an empathetic rabbit hole of trying to understand what it felt like to live during that period.)
I always forget if it was Candeland or the other guy who was prominent in early Gorillaz productions, but suffice it to say, those videos spawned quite the rad pedigree.
EDIT: Forgot to add that, since this is a Gorillaz-related comment section, I'm obligated to state my personal esoteric theory that DD/PB/HZ constitute Albarn's attempt to reboot Dante's Divine Comedy. (Among all the other fantastic things those albums are.) (Think about it.)
Perhaps if these sorts of tactics, or even just circumstances, weren't so prevalent, then they wouldn't seem like such a good idea to purposely replicate.
No one is gullible enough to believe that, if the alleged is true, it would be the first time that unscrupulous methods were used to advantage a particular group in recruitment for jobs or education, right? Or that, when it has happened, it has been primarily used to advantage black applicants?