Our society is better when the things that are available are available to everyone, not just the privileged. I don't see why accommodations for the disabled are considered some unnecessary burden; they should be considered a cost of doing business, for everyone who does business.
This wasn't business. There were no profits to divert into making better subtitles.
And the ratio of effort between making a recording versus making a recording and then manually subtitling it is completely out of whack compared to the ratio you have in full produced works. There's a reasonable level of accommodation, and the reasonable level is below a doubling in costs.
I'm someone that would significantly raise the subtitling requirements on youtube if I could. But in this case I just don't feel it.
I shouldn't have used the term "business," because that made people think that I was referring more to economics instead of "doing the right thing even when the right thing is slightly more expensive." Look, UC Berkeley is a public university and they have to adhere to certain rules around disabilities and accommodations. It's well established law at this point; the ADA is 35 years old. They should know this, and they should be able to comply. To take down the videos suggests laziness and ignorance on Berkeley's part.
> doing the right thing even when the right thing is slightly more expensive
And that's why I made the argument that it wasn't slightly more expensive. It's possible it would have cost more to add subtitles than the entire rest of the project combined.
I think it's fair to mandate subtitles when there's a certain level of budget. I don't think it's a good idea to unconditionally mandate subtitles.
> UC Berkeley is a public university and they have to adhere to certain rules
In their normal course of action. I don't think this side project was plugged in to the core tasks of the university.
Shutting it down counts as lazy but what do you want a project with minimal budget to do?
We're not shaming other universities for not putting courses online. We're only shaming one that did it "badly" and then gave up. That's unfair. Every other university that doesn't fund similar subtitles and uploads should get the same reaction.
And by "badly" I mean it still had okay subtitles, just not particularly good ones.
Yeah, and without subtitles, the course content is not accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing... which the law says it has to be. UC Berkeley decided not to make their content accessible, and when someone complained, they took it all apart rather than making a reasonable (and legally required) accommodation. I guess I don't see why I'd blame the person filing the lawsuit here. UC Berkeley could have just... put up subtitles.
It had subtitles. The demand was better subtitles, and the project had barely any budget.
While I think fixing it or even having a fundraiser would have been a much better response, I do put a good share of blame on the person that filed the lawsuit against a free side project.
The person could have volunteered to write the subtitles themselves or, if they were deaf, to hire someone or even ask someone to volunteer to write subtitles. Or any other number of solutions.
To jump immediately to litigation is aggressive and shows that their true motive was not to actually enable the production of courses with good subtitles.
Why is the onus on the person with the disability to fix the lack of accommodation for the disability? A lawsuit is their remedy. Berkeley chose the laziest form of compliance rather than attempting to do the right thing.
I'm also a Miele canister vacuum owner, and everywhere in my house where I vacuum is within range of a wall outlet. When I'm done, the cord retracts into the vacuum so I don't need to wind it or stow it myself. I guess, for me, that takes care of the issue to a great enough extent that I just never saw an advantage that justified the expense?
If you are ok with it, I think that's fine. Cordless to me is a huge productivity boost since I can just pick it up and vacuum whenever. I think most people see it as a huge win, but I haven't conducted a formal poll or anything.
Having a robot do everything is just another step in the convenience direction. It is great if you have expensive floors that you want to maintain on a daily or bi-daily basis.
Well I don't think most people choose who they work with. Even if you like your team a lot, you might have a discussion with someone from another team or division, and that's where it's useful to have a good chat history haha.
Speculation masked as "econ 101"-level fact as a way to preemptively dismiss counter arguments is also pretty indicative of bad-faith participation, it just looks more polite in a comment section.
The econ 101 observation feels like it falls apart under light scrutiny. The market sets a rate, but which rate is more "natural?" When individuals negotiate directly with employers, they tend to be at a disadvantage. An individual has less knowledge and bargaining power than an employer in almost all cases; so can we call the rate set by these negotiations to be the "natural" rate? Conversely, when bargaining collectively, employees are able to pool knowledge and resources to bargain more effectively, and they have more leverage as a group which allows them to negotiate on a more even field to the employer. I would consider this outcome to be more "natural," and would argue that it is not that collective bargaining results in higher wages than the market would set but that individual bargaining results in wages that are artificially lower than those of the market clearing rate.
And to your first point, the "good army" did become the "bad army" by the time of the sequel, Zeta Gundam. Once they're no longer on the back footing, the "good army" becomes a ruthless occupying force, operating almost entirely without oversight and under the direction of officers who are all too willing to cover up war crimes. But it still makes sense because you can see over the course of the show how such shift could happen in the inter-war period between the One Year War and the Gryps Conflict.
One of the keys being, of course, that the Chinese government doesn't care. Yeah it might require mules bringing the GPUs into China but once they're in China, no one is breaking any laws. Of course DeepSeek is using these GPUs! It's not illegal for them to do so!
That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:
> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
We have someone in the comments section talking about how they encountered a bunch of suspicious bidders on their GPU auction. That's not what happens when people care about being potentially investigated for breaking export rules.
I always think that I would hate to work into my old age, but it's different for some. I can't speak to what Anna's financial situation is like, but the way she talks about her work as part of the community and a way to stay active and independent makes me think that she's content, and that's great. She certainly seems like she's doing well for 101!
I have an uncle that is extremely old and until a year and a half ago he was still working. But he needed a car for his job and he decided that he's going to get rid of the car before he ends someone else's life and so he had to give up his job too. He's a super nice character, has a great sense of humor and in general is probably one of the most fun and optimistic people that I know. He'd be working still if not for the car and I know that the loss of the job and a chunk of his independence is hard for him. But he does not let it get him down for long, just finds new things to do (he's currently studying bridge like his life depends on it).
It's the same reason you see barbers working well into their 70s.
After a lifetime offering a service to your neighbourhood, cutting hair and having a chat, why would you even retire? Just to stare at a wall, useless and lonely?
There was a barber down the street from my former work place, and I had no idea what his hours were. He seemed to just show up and work when he felt like it. Clearly was semi-retired.
Was a great story teller and joke teller. That was worth the price of a haircut by itself.
I can’t imagine I’d ever stop programming as long as I’m mentally and physically capable of it. That doesn’t mean I’d work until I drop, because I can always do hobby projects for myself instead. Being a hobby barista probably doesn’t work quite the same way.
For most people, it proves very disorienting to not be doing something constructive for others, and in a capitalist world, where everything easily becomes transactional and people get a little isolated from deeper community and family, it's kind of organic for that drive to be fulfilled by continuing to work in old age. Lots of people do it by choice.
If you feel like you might be on that road, the smart trick is to start thinking early about what kind of work you might want to take up during that stage and plant the seeds for it early.
Some people don't have a lot of choice to prepare, and just end up falling into being barista because the job is there and they find they enjoy it. But the other barista at that same cafe might be the owner who bought it as their own "retirement", filling shifts when they want to, while giving the neighborhood a place to gather.
Not every culture or community is built so centrally around atomization and transactionality as the prevailing one is. But those things represent the essence of what capitalism is, and are central to what it aspires to acheive. It works its magic when people can negotiate their relationships through currency and through accounts measured against it, and so a society that means to participate in it is one that tends to engender payment, quantified barter, and unburdened individuality over alternatives like filial concern or community enrichment.
It's not really a controversial thing to suggest, and wasn't there to be accusatory or something. It's the world we live in.
Not only is not controversial but one of the bases of Marxist critique of capitalism is the concept of alienation, which not even the staunchest defenders of capitalism deny.
If the pensions in Italy are anything like in Spain, she’s making more money off it than young people are making working. Plus she’s probably defrauding the pension system by both collecting her pension and working.
A defined benefit pension (or any other retiree benefit such as healthcare) is a claim on future productivity.
“Contributing” cash to it may not be enough, if the cash didn’t convert into sufficient automation to offset declines in humans due to declining birthrates.
So the question gets more interesting if it’s “Was contributing whatever amount calculated (using tenuous assumptions) many decades ago enough, especially if you chose not to have well raised kids who in turn could provide society with the retiree benefits?”
And then that opens up a can of worms about who was and was not expected to have well raised kids, and it gets messy very quickly, yet at the same time, we see a clear macro problem of taking more and more from a smaller young population and giving it to a bigger and bigger old population.
You are saying that very matter-of-factly, while that is not how it works here in the Netherlands, and probably also in other places in Europe. The reasoning being, the pension isn't an unemployment benefit, pension is a fund you spent your career investing into.
