It might be difficult to catch depending on the how macro attributions they could make on you, depending on the time scale - say over 20 years, if you cleared the history every year, it might give them insights that might be hard to correlate to earlier history.
If there were strong whistle-blower laws and pre-set rewards however, then might get a whistle-blower who could earn themselves say $1B+ (based on size/revenues of Facebook) for outing the deceit - which then Facebook would be fined for.
Is a scandal a huge issue? Despite the recent #DeleteFacebook and everything, Facebook wasn't really impacted all that much and is still making tons of profit even without the 1% of users who did delete it. A future hypothetical scandal where another 1% deletes it would be worth it considering all the data and revenue they made from abusing people's data before the scandal.
M is dead because it failed to be automated, but the headline extends that to all chatbots. some of the hype around chatbots was their potential for a uniform user interface and less need to download new apps. has there been any evidence that chat as an interface has failed?
I've always been bearish about the appeal of chatbots but I did see how they could seem to be a useful interface for many users, especially on support-type sites. They basically seemed to function as a friendlier-version of site search. Yes, ultimately they are an unnecessary middleman facade -- in the same that writing a Google search as a formal question -- e.g. "Where are the best pizza places near me?" -- is unnecessary when you could simply query "best pizza"
But perhaps the perception that your question was being interpreted in an intelligent human way caused users to think differently and rephrase their questions in a way that made it easier to find the most relevant help/support links? I remember how interesting Ask Jeeves seemed to be -- though to be fair, Google wasn't much of a presence in 1997.
If they get good enough, I can totally imagine them being keyboard-driven too. I'd love to be able to just type a quick "email" saying "order paper towels" when I'm at work and not have to shout into my phone in a quiet office.
(To be sure, the tech for a lot of this already exists they're just not exposing a text-based version.)
I wouldn't want to be quite as verbose for a text-based version, but oftentimes it really is easier to type more versus less if you're confident the recipient will read and parse the intent of the whole phrase.
Chatbots are, at present, fancy command-line interfaces. I believe that they have great potential, but I don't think they will transcend the CLI until they are conversational and able to understand language at the level of IBM's Watson. At present, each chatbot has a list of keywords with aliases that activate commands with parameters, and they are unable to act unless they recognize a keyword. They need to be able to infer beyond keywords, and they need to be able to hold the context of a conversation in memory.
> any evidence that chat as an interface has failed?
I love chat as an interface to deployments! Hubot is a great framework/bot for hooking into your own environment. Typing deploy prod master in a Slack channel is great. Why is that better than ssh'ing into a jump box and typing cap deploy prod? It's multi-user! Everyone else can see what's going on.
Are you referring to the US? Since we don't have a federal cash welfare program[0], what welfare program are you talking about that gives recipients an additional $24/hr ($50,000 a year if working full time)?
It's the proliferation of programs, most of which don't write checks to the individuals but do provide generous coverage & subsidies. EBT (aka "food stamps"), health insurance, "Section 8 housing" ("right" to rent in upscale neighborhoods with capped cost), etc all add up. Details are out there, often reported. https://downtrend.com/robertgehl/welfare-payouts-top-20-per-...http://nypost.com/2013/08/19/when-welfare-pays-better-than-w... The totality of details is too much for a brief casual blog comment, and it may not be exactly so in all cases, but point is there is a substantial drop in welfare benefits above a certain income threshold for given jurisdictions, enough that between about $12-20/hr the decrease in benefits is more than the increase in wages - to wit: the more you earn, the lower your revenue at an economic strata where decreased income is extremely difficult to bridge. ...and that economic barrier to social mobility is an artificial construct instituted by a well-meaning, but deeply misguided, sociopolitical philosophy.
If your problem with welfare is that it should have no drop off points, what makes that the product of a "deeply misguided, sociopolitical philosophy"? It seems to me more like a problem created by the fumblings of a bipartisan beauracracy.
Welfare should absolutely not be structured to cut one's net revenue when one makes the effort to earn more.
Methinks welfare, as currently implemented, serves the "something must be done!" industry. Many would work themselves out of a job if "poverty" were eliminated as their goal states, so they keep redefining "poverty" and solving it in ways that generate more of it. The operative philosophy indicated simultaneously addresses manifestations of poverty (via income supplements, rent controls, food subsidies, free services), and aggravates the causes (prohibition of low income[1], strict zoning laws, costly food regulations with diminishing/marginal benefits, undermining low-cost services).
Admittedly, a bipartisan system which simultaneously treats government as the solution to, and the cause of, poverty is really going to screw things up.
[1] - I find "minimum wage" the modern equivalent of "debtor's prison": if you can't produce enough value, you're prohibited from producing any value at all.
Not OP, but my guess would be that such a number would have come from pricing out equivalent services as those being provided. That is, providing discounted housing is not handing out money. But you could take the average discounted rent, and the average non-discounted rent, and come to an approximate cash-equivalent "value" of that discount.
Also, I find the direction of the article in your link interesting. That is, given this:
> Under TANF, states can spend welfare money on virtually any program aimed at one of four broad purposes: (1) assistance to needy families with children; (2) promoting job preparation and work; (3) preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and (4) encouraging the formation of two-parent families.
I'm a little surprised to see this a couple paragraphs down:
> In 1998, nearly 60 percent of welfare spending was on cash benefits, categorized as “basic assistance.” By 2014, it was only about one-quarter of TANF spending. That shift has happened despite a burgeoning economics literature suggesting that direct cash transfers are in many cases the most efficient tool to fight poverty.
I don't see "fighting poverty" on the list of four things, so I'm not surprised that it got disincentivized.
I'd rather have only the field I selected autofilled and be given a secondary option to have every field (or maybe choose which fields) in a form autofilled. This bothers me in innocent, non-phishing forms too—especially when the designers don't put labels on the fields and only use placeholders, which I can no longer see after autofill.
Safari lets you choose which fields to fill in by clicking a "Customize" option that pops up, but I doubt any normal user will bother looking that far.
I would think some people who got low scores would become disillusioned with the service, blaming the service rather than seeing any fault with themselves. Then being offended, they would be less likely to use the service or harbor negative feelings towards it.
What's actually going to happen is that you're going to get degraded service from Uber without knowing why. You're never going to get a cab in the quoted time, because drivers won't pick you up, and you'll assume it's the same for everyone, tell your friends how slow Uber is ... I would say the disillusionment, blame, offence, etc are going to be aggravated by consistently slow service.
