I work in academia. There is no way anything is so organized and directed as that. That would require laughable levels of efficiency and planning across multiple organizational layers. Do you know how long it takes to make literally any decision? Who would even be directing such a scheme? Are the president and this PhD student in cahoots on this insider trading scheme you are envisioning?
judging potential is an easy thing to do. anyone who works with a trainee for a month can be a fantastic judge of their potential. the problem is, as you allude to, a lack of funding and of jobs
It involves a month commitment of (trivially, overall) the temp's salary, and a month partial commitment of someone senior enough to make hiring decisions (even as a primary advisor).
I absolutely agree what you describe is both viable and useful, but it's easier to hire good-looking resumes and hope for the best.
It is challenging and expensive to get a driver's license in Germany, and the repercussions for screwing up are high. Also driving isn't as necessary--the excellent public transit means there are alternate means of traveling, so not having one is less of a detriment. So while the Autobahn might be considered the Platonic ideal of high-speed driving, it isn't always feasible or likely and I don't think it should be considered as such. As much as I wish we could have that in the US!
Local transit?.. Sure the S and U bahns are (rather) fine, but the alternative are regular roads at regular speed - the highways in such areas are speed limited (e.g. Cologne / Dusseldorf etc.). The real Autobahn is only far outside the urban area where there is no local transit whatsoever
It’s the dumbest argument ever. Find a perpetual software license or 12 month subscription that allows for cancellation for convenience.
I get why some folks are angry, it was easier to pirate Adobe back in the day. If people don’t want to pay, there’s all sorts of competition in different segments of the market as well as open source.
The problem is that the 12 month contract is (a) pulled out of their ass and not reflective of the real costs for either party, and (b) until very recently not even disclosed (even in recent months, there are plenty of reports of cancellation fees from people with screenshots of having correctly chosen the monthly version). The very highest cancellation fee that makes sense is the delta between the monthly rate and what the annual rate projected on to the number of months of payment would be. If an annual subscription is cheaper because of risk or the time value of money, even that delta is a vast overestimate of Adobe's damages, and the fact that they're asking for 10x-20x is a blatant abuse of power.
> Find a perpetual software license or 12 month subscription that allows for cancellation for convenience.
All of them with Canadian customers, for example. It's a product with incremental costs and incremental value, so cancelling it (neither paying incremental costs nor forcing the service provider to do the same) makes perfect sense.
> It was easier to pirate back in the day
That's not the problem at all. Gimp is way better than the piratable photoshop ever was. It's not useful to ad hominem people who don't want to be abused.
I don't know about Canada, but here in France many things come as a long-term contract with monthly payments and cancelation fees. Most common which come to mind are mobile phone plans and ISP subscriptions.
Many companies still have 12 or 24 months plans, and you're on the hook for some form of penalty if you cancel before the term. And no, I'm not talking about buying a plan-subsidized phone, even "naked" plans have this.
Since some years ago, companies have started offering monthly-only plans, so you can cancel anytime. But, for some reason, there still are cancelation fees, which are fixed. What's funny, is that they also usually offer rebates if you switch providers, which usually cover those fees.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but, at least where I live, the Adobe scheme is fairly common.
No way. I have no problem paying. I don't even mind the price. When I signed up last time I chose the monthly option because thats what I was used to for nearly every subscription. I didn't do the math to notice it matched the price of the annual subscription and not once was the cancellation fee mentioned. I was totally caught off guard by the fee and was lucky it was close
to the end of the contract.
It's the same shit internet providers used to do in the US that thankfully they can no longer do. I cannot understand anyone defending Adobe on this if they actually used that plan the way they explained it. Maybe it's better now,
but it absolutely was shady as hell a few years ago.
It isn't a monthly subscription. Its an annual subscription broken up into 12 payments.
I understand that there was a lawsuit and all that, I read through part of the Adobe thread from the other day. I am not defending Adobe in that regard.
If you only want the software for 2-3 months, the month-to-month agreement is available, but if you have a longer-term need for the software you get a discount for committing to a year's worth. If you take the discount, pay the cheaper monthly cost and then cancel before the end of the commitment, a penalty seems fair.
Again I am not defending whatever obfuscation of terms that led to the oft-mentioned lawsuit, just that there seems to be some confusion about monthly and annual commitments.
I had no idea a monthly subscription was even available. You have to ask the website in my region for “more details and more plans” to even see the monthly subscription.
Also because they offer “a discount” on the first year here, it’s 38€ month/yearly plan or 104€ a month/monthly.
I don’t know. If you’re going to allow Adobe to buy its competitors and monopolise entire regions of our economy, this seems a bit shit.
Yes, it is really up to Adobe's marketing team to make sure that customers are not misunderstanding the plan. If the misunderstanding continues, then the government might end up stepping in.
>Paying money to make the problem go away instead of learning how to fix it yourself means that, at scale, you lose the ability to fix it yourself.
This is very insightful and, in my mind, a good preview of what is happening with AI right now. We will forget how to use the skills that built these systems in the first place.
There was a South Park special about this. I think it was Into the Panderverse as a 2nd plot line.
The handy men of the future were like today’s tech bros. They were loaded, because people couldn’t perform basic tasks around the house. When a father was looking to teach his son how to fix the oven, he showed him how to call the handy man.
I understand your question, and it is hard to describe. Our brains are pattern generators, and it "feels good" to resonate with patterns we've already experienced. Neural circuits create patterns by strengthening connections upon our experience. This is particularly true as we get older and our brains become less plastic. Lesser used patterns become harder to access as they are no longer reinforced as frequently. However, this feels less good for our brains, and we value novelty.
So in the same way that riding a bike after a long time is much harder than it is to ride one when you use it every day, you can generalize this to something like emotions. It is bad to only experience one type of feeling all the time, and variety is good. Having a controlled, relatable medium lead you to experience a less commonly-felt emotion feels good. I don't know if I can explain why--maybe we have mechanisms in our brain for encouraging this novelty--but this is likely why we seek out these emotional experiences.
You know what's so interesting? If I had known he was going to threaten tariffs, I might have considered shorting a lot of stocks. And well, if I knew he was going to then quickly walk them back the next day, I probably would have bought those same stocks. If only I had known he was going to do this!
Now that I think about it, if he had told me about these things in advance, I could probably make a LOT of money. I mean sure, it's illegal, but we could always gut the SEC[1]!
You can bet your right ass cheek there are all kinds of shenanigans going on right now. The president himself has broad immunity and is a known grifter, and for his lackeys of course there’s the pardon power.
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