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I don't get the last statement. My plan is a tax-driven plan which transitions from current public-aid welfare to a universal social security. The USS returns most of the taxes taken to the people paying them, and pays out on a monthly-or-better (e.g. twice per month?) schedule, thus doesn't interfere with cash flow (you don't get a lump sum back at the end of the year or something crazy; the government isn't holding your money for months). It has nothing to do with bond returns or stocks.

Further, those individual investment options are means to transfer money. Money doesn't grow; someone must lose for someone to gain. While that's true of a tax-driven system, investments are haphazard and tax-benefits systems are controlled.

The only investment consideration I make is in diverting the benefit to retirement savings, as compared to current old-age pensions (Social Security retirement benefits). I compare that to guaranteed-income funds as a baseline, because Vanguard bonds can win 14% in a year, but they can also lose 16% in a year; I can only make definitive statements about 1.2% or 1.7% growth in a guaranteed-income, non-losing option like a savings account or CD.

I did a cost rundown, as well as considerations on long-term retirement impacts. (Note: the married-filing-jointly table on my cost rundown is wrong; I'll have to fix that. The actual computations are correct.)

SS and Medic* combined are over $1.9 T - there's just no way to replace them with basic income and still pay everyone else too.

Uh, actually, I worked out how to do just that in particular. I use a 20-year amortization because the Social Security Administration won't give you full benefits unless you retire after age 67, and projects an average life expectancy of 87.

You should note the numbers I use are conservative--i.e. faulty. I control the impact of Universal Social Security for all retirees who enter retirement age in the first 15 years of the program, grandfathering these until they die. The actual buying power of the USS benefit *increases* over time--for example, the benefit has a purchasing power 0.7% higher in 2014 than in 2013--because it doesn't factor out productivity gains. If productivity is 10% higher, then the gross distribution has 10% more buying power. Productivity gains are called "technical progress" by economists, and essentially are just new technology which produces more with less labor--the same hours worked spits out more stuff, thus the total pile of money buys more stuff--and so are a constant until such time as a fatal economic collapse ends our ability to function as a country anyway.

That means the actual USS benefit is ~11% higher 15 years in. 50 years in (retirement age for someone who turns 18 at inception), it's 41% higher--that's more than someone who worked full-time minimum wage for their whole life would receive today from OASDI. People making more than minimum wage have a capacity to save their own money to supplement this.

In 15 years, you're looking at the equivalent of $645/month today, plus up to 15 years of savings--over $1,100/month on a 20-year amortization if you *only* put the USS benefit away as savings with NO GROWTH (not even 1% fixed-income growth). If you weren't able to save, you'd be receiving less in Social Security old-age pensions anyway.

Again: that still covers 100% of current OASDI benefits for 100% of all current retirees and retirees who reach retirement age within the next 15 years, grandfathering them until they die.

I've run the numbers, including impacts on HUD-qualified households, on low-income households, on high-income households, on families, on single individuals, on single parents, and even on retirement. I even included a public aid system targeting children and naturalized Americans in low-income households, avoiding the known-unknown risk of handing out straight cash for welfare babies and gold-digging immigrants.

It's a trillion dollars cheaper than our current model, and completely remediates all defects in our current public aid system. It eliminates the HUD lottery; it gets food to the 50 million Americans who don't get to eat every day; it pushes everyone down to the bottom 5% above the Federal poverty line, and it creates stability in the lowest-possible-income individuals so as to support market solutions supplying food, shelter, and other basic needs.

There is no American who ends up worse off under this Universal Social Security plan. Not one. By extension, there is not one human being in the *world* who ends up worse off.

I've run the numbers, including impacts on HUD-qualified households, on low-income households, on high-income households, on families, on single individuals, on single parents, and even on retirement. I even included a public aid system targeting children and naturalized Americans in low-income households, avoiding the known-unknown risk of handing out straight cash for welfare babies and gold-digging immigrants.

It's a trillion dollars cheaper than our current model, and completely remediates all defects in our current public aid system. It eliminates the HUD lottery; it gets food to the 50 million Americans who don't get to eat every day; it pushes everyone down to the bottom 5% above the Federal poverty line, and it creates stability in the lowest-possible-income individuals so as to support market solutions supplying food, shelter, and other basic needs.

There is no American who ends up worse off under this Universal Social Security plan. Not one. By extension, there is not one human being in the *world* who ends up worse off.

It's one trillion dollars cheaper.

The total tax burden on the American tax payer, in a 2013 model, is $1,023 lower than the current public aid system, excluding displaced income (i.e. money taken from you and given to someone else is counted as tax burden).

Snopes declaration doesn't carry much weight. Take for example their analysis of the death of Mary Mahoney. She was an intern at the white house. It was announced by Mike Isikoff that a former intern was coming forward to testify about being sexually harassed by Bill Clinton. Three days later, Mary Mahoney and two coworkers were gunned down at the Starbucks where they worked. The police investigation determined that it was a "botched robbery". However, Mary was shot 5 times, including 1 shot to the back of the head. Nothing was actually taken from the Starbucks. Yet snopes declares this murder to be "false". Why? The person ultimately arrested claimed that Mary tried wrestling the gun from him. Here's more details about it.

Other than being black, how else did he match the description?

Same long hair, same thin build, same scraggly chin beard.

Photo of Castile (warning, graphic).

Because you can't really go around just murdering people who vaguely resemble some description of a suspect. You can't go around just murdering all the black men in a neighborhood because one black man robbed a store.

Of course not. But you also don't get to fill the airwaves with false narratives that racist cops are gunning down black people for no other reason than they're black. When you do this it inflames racial tensions, causes riots, and this case was among those cited by the Dallas shooter as prompting his rampage.

Was the officer right to shoot Castile? I don't know, we need to see the results of the investigation, hear the officer's side of the story, see the dashcams. We still may never know. But we do know the officer's wary or hostile attitude towards Castile was because of suspicion of armed robbery, not because of his race. Kind of changes the narrative, doesn't it?

Ultimately though my point was to show snopes' bias and/or uselessness. Regarding this case, there are two narratives:

1. Castile was pulled over for a broken taillight and shot because the racist officer was scared of black people. This is widely reported narrative in the mainstream media, and the vast majority of people who have passing familiarity with the case will tell you this is what happened. This is also false.

2. Castile was pulled over because the matched the description of an armed robbery suspect. This is true.

Why doesn't snopes choose to debunk narrative 1 there, the widely reported, absolutely false narrative? No, instead they choose to play semantic games with the #2 narrative, stating it as "Castile was wanted for armed robbery," which no one ever said and then labeling that "mostly false?"

Why didn't snopes write an article about the media claim that Castile was pulled over for a broken tail light, label that false, and give us the correct story, that Castile was pulled over because he matched the description of an armed robber?

Other than being black, how else did he match the description?

Same long hair, same thin build, same scraggly chin beard.

Photo of Castile (warning, graphic).

Because you can't really go around just murdering people who vaguely resemble some description of a suspect. You can't go around just murdering all the black men in a neighborhood because one black man robbed a store.

Of course not. But you also don't get to fill the airwaves with false narratives that racist cops are gunning down black people for no other reason than they're black. When you do this it inflames racial tensions, causes riots, and this case was among those cited by the Dallas shooter as prompting his rampage.

Was the officer right to shoot Castile? I don't know, we need to see the results of the investigation, hear the officer's side of the story, see the dashcams. We still may never know. But we do know the officer's wary or hostile attitude towards Castile was because of suspicion of armed robbery, not because of his race. Kind of changes the narrative, doesn't it?

Ultimately though my point was to show snopes' bias and/or uselessness. Regarding this case, there are two narratives:

1. Castile was pulled over for a broken taillight and shot because the racist officer was scared of black people. This is widely reported narrative in the mainstream media, and the vast majority of people who have passing familiarity with the case will tell you this is what happened. This is also false.

2. Castile was pulled over because the matched the description of an armed robbery suspect. This is true.

Why doesn't snopes choose to debunk narrative 1 there, the widely reported, absolutely false narrative? No, instead they choose to play semantic games with the #2 narrative, stating it as "Castile was wanted for armed robbery," which no one ever said and then labeling that "mostly false?"

Why didn't snopes write an article about the media claim that Castile was pulled over for a broken tail light, label that false, and give us the correct story, that Castile was pulled over because he matched the description of an armed robber?

Lol you know when you are in the middle of nowhere when you pass a sign that says in huge red letters "No Fuel for 500km" and then gives you 228km to the next intersection.

https://brianpas.wordpress.com...

Computers are complex, that is true. But firstly, quite a lot of this complexity is superfluous, the result of crappy engineering, feature creep and backwards compatibility to standards that should have been laid to rest decades ago. And secondly, yes, we are perfectly capable of building machines with several million parts of which a sizable portion moves which are highly intolerant of errors and still bringing down the defect rate to a manageable level. The IT world is the shanty town of the industrial sector, with few exceptions. Even the lucky players with more or less closed ecosystems like Apple make headlines every other week with blunders that in other industries would get people burnt at the stake. Yes, we make a conscious trade-off between crappiness and costs. But I am not in the least convinced we are drawing the line in the best place.

It is true that CO2 stimulates plant growth, if you isolate other factors. The problem is that we are deforesting our planet, so the net change in plant biomass is negative. Furthermore, the excess CO2 in the atmosphere is about 37% of the existing 3E12 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, or 1.13E12 tons of excess CO2 from human activities. A single km^2 of rainforest contains about 356 tons of biomass (wikipedia), so assuming it's all carbon (it's not) we'd need another 3.2E9 km^2 of rainforest to consume all of the excess CO2 in the air. The earth's surface area (including oceans) is only 5E8 km^2. So we'd need 6.2 earth surface areas of Amazon rainforest to sequester all of the extra CO2 in the air. You see, the carbon stores were saved up from fossilization over millions and millions of years and we've attempted to release all of them into the atmosphere in about 100 years. The earth cannot "bounce back" from such a rapid change, it will take millions and millions of years for geological processes to bring carbon back into the Earth's crust. Hope that you see now this is a major problem that won't be solved by sitting back and watching. My sources are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://micpohling.wordpress.c... feel free to check my math.

He isn't just controversial, he does things like post fake tweets purporting to be from his victims and uses them to encourage others to harass them. You can tell it's fake, by the way, because he forgot to edit out the delete button.

This is the specific fake tweet, since deleted. Unfortunately I don't have an archive link, but it's been widely verified including by Twitter themselves.

It's pretty amateurish, he even forgot to edit out the delete button.

"WebExtensions" are just glorified Greasemonkey scripts -- with a much larger API than GM scripts have available, but you're still playing around in a sandbox. These are mostly interesting for extending how a given website works, hence my comparison to GM.

With WebExtensions, you're not playing in a sandbox, you're playing with abstractions. Exposing internal XPCOM objects to extensions offered no abstraction - extensions were messing directly with browser internals, which was severely hampering our ability to improve fundamentals of the Gecko engine. We want to be able to make significant changes to Gecko without constantly worrying about breaking extensions. An abstraction layer is the way to do that.

"Extensions" have access to the browser chrome, and can thus add or change any functionality in the browser. This is the bit that is euphemistically (and wrongly) described as "deprecation of XUL and XPCOM" (even though XUL and XPCOM aren't actually a requirement for this type of extension...).

You're right, XUL and XPCOM are not required for that type of extension. WebExtension APIs are going to allow for modification of browser chrome. Mozilla is working with extension developers to make sure that the functionality that they require will be exposed to them in a way that is future-proof. We fully intend to allow for extensions such as tree-style tabs and Vimperator.

If you have useful ideas for new extension APIs, I encourage you to offer suggestions instead of FUD.

WebExtensions overview
WebExtensions roadmap
WebExtensions experiments

I find this version preferable.

wget -O NYPost20160731_front9.jpg https://thenypost.files.wordpr...

I believe the problem has been solved

Check out the new Speedos

Did you see the picture of the guy (Alé de Basseville) taking the photos? Seriously, I think he might be a vampire.

So you are saying that he infected Meiania and via Melania Trump also became a vampire? That is about the best explanation so far.

Especially since 2008 appears to have been one of the cooler years.

Did you see the picture of the guy (Alé de Basseville) taking the photos? Seriously, I think he might be a vampire.

NOBODY has the full political spectrum...in power. Among those out of power the US has everything from Anarchists to Totalitarians, and from Religio-Communists to monopolists. Come up with another axis and we probably have those, too.

Among those in power I believe that the EU has those further to the "left" (to use a term from the French Revolution) and the US has those further to the "right", with a nearly bell curve spread within the extremes.

Left and right are, of course, stupid linearizations of the actual political stances, but they are the idiocy on which most political thinking seems to be done. The stupidity is on a par with thinking that Trump represents the "little people", but it makes for quick sound bites and easy snap judgments.

OK captain bollocks.. Europe has a FULLER political spectrum .. does that satisfy your pedantic wee heart.... WE do have a far fuller spectrum and pretty much all of them represented in power in one country or another over.. America.. you have no real centre or left parties.. it's kinda like a national hangover/hang up since the McCarthy era.
While you might have piddly tiny token elements of other parties.. here we have them in plentiful supply of all flavours.. not just right and not just a token amount of others.
I'm Scottish.. WE FUCKING HATE TRUMP.. because he tried his anus tactics here... EPIC FAIL... LOL
here's a list of shite that has made him universally hated in Scotland https://secretscotland.wordpre...
He claims he's "not part of the system" but he's VERY MUCH part of the globalist ,capitalist system and would not benefit from what most would take as a shake up of that system unless it was to his business benefit. wankers like him never do anything unless it benefits them. putting a fox in charge of the chicken hut.. and he's a blatant fucking retard to boot.

nearly 1,600 square miles of land around Chernobyl has radiation levels too high for human health

The irreparable damage is already done, but the other three reactors at the station are in perfectly fine order. In fact, they continued to operate for 14 years — and were shut down for reasons political rather than technical.

Instead of sending thousands of people to install solar panels in the vast dangerously polluted lands, it would be far more sensible — and cheaper too — to reactivate the reactors already there.

In 2014, corporations paid income tax accounting for under 10% of all taxes and 20% of all income taxes (Excluding OASDI). If you include OASDI payroll and wage taxes, corporations paid 23% of all taxes and 38% of all income+OASDI taxes.

Sales taxes, payroll taxes, and wages are paid by the consumer. These through some manner increase the cost of products directly. Income taxes skim the top: a business barely-getting-by doesn't pay income taxes. That is to say: If I pay $250,000 to employee wages, have $50,000 of other expenses, and have $310,000 of revenue, I pay income taxes on $10,000; if my operations grow 10x in size, I have $3,100,000 and pay taxes on $100,000. If I'm paying 10% on payroll, I've suddenly got to pay taxes on $250,000--and $25,000 of taxes! To compensate, I'll need more revenue; and to make more of whatever I'm supplying, I'll need more employee work time, meaning more wages, and more taxes on those wages. Basically, it means my prices have to go up by $15,000 for me to break even.

That doesn't mean a 40% business income tax is desirable. Business income taxes were $274 billion in 2013, SOMEHOW. Taxable business income was $2,090 billion, and wages were $7,633 billion. Wages would have about $1,700 billion of standard deductions, and total is $12,427 billion, so businesses would have under $1,100 billion in deductions in total.

Because it's so little, I typically ignore it as an accounting smudge. Business tax reform patently doesn't matter, and I am more interested in knocking down payroll taxes to produce the effect of lowering wages without lowering the amount of money that people actually take home. Sales taxes (and any form of VAT) also need to go away.

Are you telling me Trump was correct when he said H1B's were not good for America?

The TPP isn't going to fix this? really? I mean Nafta was fantastic, look at the manufacturing in this country, its so much better!!

/sarc
Seriously, if you can't figure out how to make sure those black box voting machines, that are so wonderful you do not need to see the code or how they work, are safe, this is game over. Hillary and the DNC will steal this election with the help of a few of the RNC folks. Epstein and Clinton thought all this through when they were on his sex slave island and plane. Where are those movies of those powerful DC men again? Oh yea nobody talks about it.

Where are the slashdot stories about the voting machine fraud 2016 again? Voting Machine Fraud

Did anybody wonder if there is something funny with Shari Steele? - her husband is working with the NSA. and probably works/worked for the NSA: https://bvass.wordpress.com/ta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

A more robust analysis shows it's over a trillion dollars cheaper than America's current system, but Slashdot doesn't support a basic income and will mark that kind of thinking as spam less than 2 minutes after it's submitted.

Of course they are! Even servants have servants these days!

People keep telling me folks should all just get better jobs instead of being burger flippers. This comes up a *lot* because I talk a lot about alternatives to minimum wage, because minimum wage increases concentrate wealth at the expense of jobs (no, your hamburger won't be $15; your $8 value meal will cost 13 cents more, multiplied by 31 billion sales per year, which takes enough of the *same* *total* *income* to make wage for 281,000 minimum-wage jobs--that's the maximum number of jobs that go away). One of the common answers is just "they should get better jobs instead." The other is some magical handwaving about money falling out of the sky (some people don't realize that the wages come out of the consumer's spending, and think that raising wage means more money magically appears in the paycheck, and so it can be spent and create even more jobs--a concept that would indicate infinite money and infinite jobs at all wage levels).

My more recent response has been pointing out that these people can bother feeding themselves, since those wage workers are your grocery baggers and burger flippers. People expect a register operator, stocked store shelves, bagged groceries, and a hot meal ready for them for two dollars; then they complain that somebody actually did all the work involved, and demand that guy stop mooching and go get a real job. It's ludicrous.

Really, I shouldn't talk about this on Slashdot. Bashing concepts like Basic Income is front-page material, but supporting positions are spam.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba596

https://riffenberg.wordpress.c...

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/20...

http://talkbusiness.net/2009/0...

It's great until your bed suffocates you or your fridge freezes you almost to death.

As a side note, it never ceases to amaze me how stupid ads look (maybe I don't watch enough of them to stop noticing such things). The girl wakes up in her bed with full make up, her hair is done, fake eyelashes, etc. Everything is sterile and perfectly clean and wrinkle free. Who lives like that?

It's great until your bed suffocates you or your fridge freezes you almost to death.

As a side note, it never ceases to amaze me how stupid ads look (maybe I don't watch enough of them to stop noticing such things). The girl wakes up in her bed with full make up, her hair is done, fake eyelashes, etc. Everything is sterile and perfectly clean and wrinkle free. Who lives like that?

Please stop with this meme. When we talk about CGI we are talking about complete computer remakes of entire scenes for no reason, often even rendering the main cast themselves.

So they drove through a giant fire tornado?
http://animation-boss.com/imag...
There is a large formation of rocks with a giant waterfall spout built into it?
http://animation-boss.com/imag...
http://oneperfectshotdb.com/wp...
The main character's robotic arm was a real prosthetic?
https://hardinthecity.files.wo...
The cars weren't composited in for safety?
http://www.gizmodo.jp/images/2...
http://i2.wp.com/www.cgmeetup....
http://i2.wp.com/www.cgmeetup....

Entire canyon environments weren't created in CG?
http://www.konbini.com/en/wp-c...
The wheels weren't entirely replaced and the entire ground moving under the vehicles wasn't added in post to make shots of parked vehicles look like they were driving fast?
http://oneperfectshotdb.com/wp...

It's not a meme that a substantial portion of Mad Max Fury Road was shot on greenscreen. As much as any other big blockbuster like The Avengers. The only difference is that many Mad Max Fury Road (which I loved) are in plain denial about the extent of the CG in the film. There is a reason it was nominated for VFX.

https://vimeo.com/132806170

It's got historical value, one of the first major computer installations. TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) was developed by IBM and this location at 4000 N Mingo was one of the first deployed installations of it. It's two stories underground, behind a huge blast door. Unfortunately, it's off-limits to the public (and most employees that work there too). There might be a couple of dozen people who have access to it. I had to beg for two years just to go down; even then I didn't get to see all of it. Conspiracy theory says it's connected to the "underground UFO transport system" lol. Some claim that there has been UFO sightings / storage there, but it IS on Tulsa International Airport grounds and there are many drunk Okies around hahaha.

It would make a great place to hole up in case of some apocalypse. If you shut down all the computers, you could have enough on-site generated electricity to last a few years. Plus your behind several tall fences with barbed-wire, and isn't located inside Tulsa proper. Even better, Lake Yahola and it's water processing systems is less than two miles away, and just north is Mohawk Park that has wild game running around.

Look, first up, this isn't personal. There's this dumbass thing common in the UK and US that fat == morally bad. It isn't. It's more often than not bad for one's health, but even then that's not guaranteed.

Look at my picture. I'm not a butterball.

Uh... I mean sure you have muscle mass. But your neck is wider than your head in that photo and it's a big fat roll. And there are at rolls of fat at your elbows and wrists. Also with your arms out, your chest is out past your arms: muscle doesn't do that, fat does. You do seem to have a quite unusual distribution of fat though. Anyway here's what some very strong men look like:

Hulk Hogan (very little fat, 303 lb)
https://wrestlingrecaps.files....

Geoff Capes (fatter, 360lb, hard not to find pictures completely obscured by a beard)
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-i...

If you want more examples, people in the worlds strongest man contest are usually good choices because they are enormous, incredibly strong men with huge amounts of muscle, but are generally non pro, not ripped either and have a bit of far too making them somewhat normal in that regard.

Fine Newt. So what is the penalty for THIS?

There is a litany of other countries with massive problems with human rights

Yep, and they should all have more of a say in how the Internet is run. Just as soon as the US surrenders control. The more progressive companies are already there — actively policing "hate speech" on their own.

And that last link takes us right back to the religion of peace... Quite unintentionally...

You mean pictures like this one? That's the best one I could find.

The average single-family house in 1950 was 983sqft, and the average household spent 28% of their income on it; in 2003, it was 2,300sqft, and the average household spent 33% of their income on it. Roughly half of that expense is the actual rent or mortgage.

Housing prices do not equate to housing cost. The same $120,000 house in a 14% interest rate market is a $350,000 house in a 4.25% market. That is to say: it's a $1,085/month 30-year mortgage. I'm working off what people actually spent per square foot of living space.

Even so, house prices did increase marginally in the past decade and a half. Falling interest rates don't just adjust the price of housing; people were conned into this idea that low interest rates mean a buyer's market, and the willingness to spend a greater proportion of the household income on the same amount of housing increased.

In case you're wondering, here is a chart for the United States median household spending shares. These represent the proportion of income spent on each good, with housing and utilities represented per 1,000 square feet of living space.

Rent-seeking behavior in an area doesn't reflect the national trend, and also isn't sustainable. We also have concepts such as gentrification (we throw all the poor people over there, and bring all the rich people over here, and then jack up all our prices for the same shit).

You're forgetting that it's the cost of running hot and cold lines to the washing machine, and the cost of running 220 and an exhaust vent to the dryer.

Uh, no I'm not. You think these are major, multi-thousand-dollar expenses? It costs about $50.

And now your 224 square foot apartment has appliances taking up almost 10% of the space - more than 10% if you include room to open the doors - which isn't optional

I hate to break it to you, but making this a few machines bigger is going to raise the cost of electrical run by ~$50, raise the cost of plumbing by ~$30, and add another $250 per machine. Yes, I said $250; typically a 12-apartment-block will have 3 of each washer and dryer, so $125 per apartment per ~10 years. I also included the $1.25 landlords charge to use those machines in the personal care budget, which, for weekly use by 12 apartments doing 2 loads per week, is $31,200 over 10 years, or $260 per apartment per year (two machines used per load, since there's a washer and a dryer).

And let's not forget a toilet and bathtub, and the bathroom sink so you can brush your teeth, shave, whatever, and enough room to get around in the bathroom so you can actually sit to do your business in private. And the hot water tank. That's another 50 square feet.

In my 244sqft, I included a 6x9 bedroom, a 10x9 main room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. The bathroom design I used includes a shower stall with a corner-mounted sink, as well as a toilet (outside the shower stall). That actually fits in a 6x6 area, meaning the wall between the bedroom and shower can be 6 inches thick. This leaves a 6x10 kitchen--my first apartment had a kitchen that size. The entire length of counter space will be between the kitchen and the main room, acting as a dining surface as well. I've planned several such spaces, and such microunits are actually in use today, albeit more targeted at luxury tenants (the 245sqft apartment model typically targets tenants who want to live in the same building as a shopping mall, and has a market place on the lower floors so you can go shopping without leaving your building; it oddly enough targets people who aren't home a hell of a lot, yet don't want to go out shopping a hell of a lot).

And the hot water tank. That's another 50 square feet

I can't help feeling you're trying to describe a house. My apartment had neither a hot water tank nor a furnace, yet it had hot water and a thermostat to control forced-air heating. We had building hot water with meters on each feed line to each apartment, and were charged for our individual gas and electric use. The building utility space was in an unfinished basement area not suitable for human habitation as a living space.

Lets not forget the space to open the front door - another 6 square feet.

There won't be furniture in front of the door. This isn't hard.

And the second door as a fire escape.

Every apartment I lived in used a window as the egress to a fire escape. Regardless, such a door would open outward.

And there are some people who, by law, you cannot exclude from having a dog. Where's the guide dog going to go? His food and water bowls? Say goodbye to more free space.

What HOMELESS PERSON WITH NO JOB AND NO INCOME can afford to keep and feed a guide dog?

Taking an existing building and fixing it up runs into problems with what's allowed to be modified on existing buildings. One stupid ass renovated more than 50% of the property without checking, and was forced to tear his house down to the ground, as anything over 50% had to both get a permit to build a new home, and to conform to the latest building codes.

Plus either way y

If you are implying that 2/3 of the middle 1/3 of society is experiencing an increase in disposable income, sadly that is not the case.

It's slowed down since 1980, and still marches forward.

The upcoming automation thing will either occur over a stretched time span (humans stay competitive with machines) and create a technical renaissance (1950-1980 on that chart), or they'll occur compacted (rapid wage increases, increases in payroll taxes, sales and middle-class income tax increases, etc.) and cause a technical revolution (Industrial Revolution: 80% unemployment for 100 years, massive economic destruction).

A lot of people want a sort of Universal Basic Income in the mistaken belief that it will allow an 80%-unemployed society to continue functioning; that won't happen, because the sharp loss of employment stems in large part from a compounding loss of jobs (loss of jobs leads to loss of consumer demand, which leads to further loss of jobs), which means lost production and, ultimately, a loss of a tax base from which to direct production toward welfare.

A viable UBI can preempt a Technical Revolution by supplying a sort of Universal Social Security, migrating payroll taxes to income taxes, and providing a basic standard benefit by a non-wage income rather than minimum wage increases. This decreases the cost (thus risk) for businesses to wait for even-cheaper machines, ultimately staggering the replacement of workers over a wider span of time, giving the market time to adjust to the lowered production costs and the consumer time to use the increased buying power to buy more goods and create replacement jobs.

That process of production costs filtering to the consumer is guaranteed for mathematical reasons (goods can't universally keep even with inflation), and is demonstrated continuously--not just leading up to the 1980s, but even so much as in food falling from 13% of the middle-class income in 2000 to 11% today, and by computers and cell phones becoming ever-less-expensive, while jobs continue to normalize to the 4%-8% band and consumers spend larger and larger fractions of their income on an increase in luxury goods and healthcare. Jobs are lost by progress, and *eventually* replaced by the same number of jobs (proportional to the population) making more things in total.

That "eventually" is important: if jobs are lost in too-rapid succession, the unemployment rate piles up, and the consumer base shrinks. Recovery from this takes a lot longer, and a lot of people become very poor.

So, provided we can avoid the economic collapse of a technical revolution, we should see something similar to the sharp increase in purchasing power of the middle- and lower-classes over the long years of conversion onto a more automated service base. If we *don't* avoid that kind of economic collapse, we'll see severe damage that doesn't care about uneven income distribution among workers because the collapse came when most of the jobs went away.

Notice this isn't an argument to sit back and see who's right: I've described factors which influence whether we move into an era of great wealth or a failed state. As you must readily understand, we *need* to minimize the risk of an economic collapse in a period of accelerated technical progress.

The consumer pays wages. If it takes 100 hours at $10/hr to make a product and that product has a 10% profit margin, then you pay $1,100 for that product; if it takes 50 hours at $10/hr and that product makes a 20% profit margin, then you pay $600. What do you do with the extra $500?

With prices coming down like that, you don't *need* as much income to live at the same standard-of-living. Part of this difference goes upwards, creating the growing income gap; the other part stays with the consumer. This is why we $4,000 cell phones in 1983 (over $9,000 in today's dollars) with $250/month service to make 2 hours of phone calls each week (over $550 today) have given way to $350 smart phones with $60/month service providing unlimited voice and text plus a few gigabytes of high-speed data. It's why food, housing, and clothing got cheaper in the past few decades--and continue to get cheaper, aside from a localized fluctuation in house prices due to falling mortgage rates and bad lending practices.

Everything (nonetheless nothing and something) is fully logically cleared up in the nascent Reality Waveform Theory, which you can conveniently freely read at: https://spiritwave.wordpress.com/reality-waveform-theory

RWT even justifies Einstein's instincts against quantum physics, while fully preserving the tried-and-true results of that well-established area of physics.

Never to yank my own chain that I don't own (or such), but no science-minded person should avoid understanding RWT.

Here's the police scanner audio of the incident.

Excerpt:

“I’m going to stop a car,” the officer says on the recording. “I’m going to check IDs. I have reason to pull it over.”
“The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery,” the officer says. “The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just ‘cause of the wide set nose,” the officer continues.

Here's a photo of the gun in the video.

How many parts of the "story" have to be lies before you stop believing the person telling it and trying to make money off of it?

UDF is ultimately just a filesystem. It's tailored to optical media, yes, and it's suboptimal for other formats, but it can be formatted and used that way; and when you need large files or Unicode names on portable media, and want it to be usable across platforms out of the box, it's pretty much the only choice right now. Conveniently, both Windows and OS X will mount such media just fine with no additional actions requires, although formatting in UDF is another matter. So this has been a little-known trick that has been in use for a while now.

https://j0nam1el.wordpress.com...

The only catch is that existing flash media is usually explicitly optimized for FAT. Formatting them to something else can result in lower speed, and faster wear.

The Fifth Element

Many of the best IR lens materials can't stand humidity

Again, it depends on what you mean by "IR", which is a very broad spectrum range. Cameras often have to add a special IR filter to block near-IR because the lens doesn't block it on its own. You can see here the transmission spectrums of different types of glasses and plastics. You can see that as a general rule they're good at blocking UV but not IR, at least near-IR (750-1400nm). They tend to block more IR the closer you get to the far-IR spectrum, however.

This was a software issue. The camera 'saw' the truck, but the edges didn't have high enough contrast.

Images being overexposed will do that to you. And the overexposure of an image isn't a fundamental aspect of CCD hardware, it's a processing artifact.

Example: take this image. Note how the boundary between the car and the sky in this picture is completely lost. It's not like the CCD is receiving the exact same amount of photons from the car and the sky - they're actually going to be very different. But they're both truncated off at maximum brightness when saved into an "image" - and that image is then provided to the autopilot. In severe cases, the autopilot is highly disadvantaged, if not inherently doomed, no matter how good its software is. Human eyes don't have that limitation - we can see bright and dark areas simultaneously and make out details in both.

The CCD is getting the data that's needed. But the autopilot isn't.

Actually, it probably depends upon where you actually live. The USoA is a very large country size wise. If you put Seattle lined up with London, Florida would cover Israel. So, saying Europe is better would include everywhere in between.

https://stevenglassman.files.w...

Yeah, comparing Europe to America is complete apples to apples for all cases. /sarcasm

If you really cared so much about vulnerable people, you would be doing social work or something along those lines.

I'd like to be a house representative. On the subject of vulnerable people, we can discuss new taxation plans which only marginally raise taxes on the rich (0.69% less income to the top 0.1%; 2% less income to someone with $10M annual salary) and the effects on the poor in a failing welfare system, as well as the stabilizing effect on all low-income families. In the long run, I want to target a maximum tax bracket of 1/3 above marginal (a United States flat income tax would be 29.97%; the top tax bracket I specify is 41%, and I want that to be no higher than 40%), rather than attempting to use the rich as some idealized Robin Hood funding source.

Is that along those lines?

BASIC seemed to work just fine when I was 6 years old, I didn't need it dumbed down.

I used a book called "Usborne Guide to Computer Games" to get going, got it from the library: https://2warpstoneptune.files....

Sweden’s affairs in Cuba: a U.S. proxy and Julian Assange

Assange Case: Evidence Destroyed Over and Over Again

Assange Case: Ny Knows the Girls Made it Up but Doesn't Care

This is a common misconception, but the first Chromebooks were released in 2011, whereas Peppermint released in 2010 and was in development before that .. so if anyone copied anyone.....

Interesting! Thanks for the correction. Yeah, reading about it now, it appears that Peppermint was originally inspired by a desire to integrate social media and various cloud elements directly into the desktop. You're right that it predated Chromebooks... I didn't remember the timeline correctly.