Unlike the U.S., the island states of Japan and Great Britain have had centuries of unilateral culturalism
Britain does not have a unilateral culture. "London, England, United Kingdom is one of the most ethnically diverse cities on earth. As of 2007, there are over 300 languages spoken in it and more than 50 non-indigenous communities with a population of more than 10,000." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
What you suggest has not been the case for a long time: "Magna Carta (1215ad) was the first document imposed upon a King of England by a group of his subjects." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
In many countries, employers are obliged to keep paying an employee full salary while they do jury duty, to prevent exactly the situation you describe. Sacking an employee on jury duty is a criminal offence.
The ancient Greeks used to treat jury duty like casual work - if you're free, turn up at the court in the morning, get selected randomly, and get paid. Apparently you could actually earn a reasonable wage through this. The advantage is that well-employed people don't have to waste their time (and money) doing jury duty, and the people who turn up have some motivation to do it, and probably prior court experience. The disadvantage is that whole "good cross section of the population" thing.
In the video game world, the term "grey market" has been used to represent non-authorized international sales channels for at least two decades. And I'm pretty sure the term was used before that for VHS video tape imports.
I'm concerned about it becoming a mainstream practice, not that it happens in niche markets.
It already is mainstream - the international import and export of clothing is restricted. In the UK, Tesco famously lost the court case over grey importing of Levi jeans, which they were selling at half the retail price of the officially imported jeans. And so now the only jeans you will in the UK (and the rest of the EU) are officially imported ones. The same thing happens with clothing, motor vehicles, basically everything where there are official distribution channels.
Allowing grey importing would ultimately lead to convergence on a single global price for everything. I think that would be interesting, but let's play devil's advocate - some publisher release a movie. Americans and Europeans are willing to pay perhaps $10 to download. Indians and Chinese are willing to pay perhaps $0.50 to download. But in a single, free market, there can be only one fixed price - so what should it be? If you price it closer to the Western price, then the product is inaccessible to Chinese and Indian people. But if you price it closer to the lower salaries, then your profit margins will be much lower, so you aren't going to do that. You can't please everyone when there is such huge wage disparity in the world. So, you conclude that the practical pricing model is the one that restricts distribution to only Westerners and wealthy people from elsewhere. So there is a counter-argument that dividing the world up and practising price discrimination actually helps the consumer, by enabling them to access the product they want at a price that they are able to pay. Now, I'm not saying that I agree with that point of view, but that's the counter-argument. Price discrimination is an important concept in business; having a range of similar items at varying price points allows your customer to pay a price point that they are comfortable with, rather than forcing them to choose between simply buying or not buying. See, for example, Starbucks coffee.
Nobody in their right mind is buying a new $3000 laptop every three years.
What? The average refresh rate is 2-3 years, above that TCO rises. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=using+tco+to+determine+refresh From the Intel study: "For PCs that are older than three years, the cost of maintenance and issue resolution increases such that it is cheaper to purchase a new system." Something like 2/3rds of the desktops and laptops in industry were purchased in the last 2 years. e.g. Google's head of systems gave a talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (video) where he stated that they upgrade all hardware every 12 months - and they insist on it even if your system is working fine - because not doing so costs them more than dealing with failures over time.
I have a 2005 Thinkpad. Bit by bit, things stopped working - but the difference here is that I replaced the keyboard, case hinge, and battery with cheap parts from ebay, and to this day the laptop is still functioning and useful. I have upgraded the OS to the latest Xubuntu and it is fast and runs all of the latest software without any issues. I didn't pay anything for the software upgrades. Every so often I am tempted to buy a new laptop, but then I realise my Thinkpad runs as well as it did in 2005, and still does exactly the same things it did then, so I really have no reason to replace it.
you would be okay with a law requiring companies to say whether or not any black people touched the food.. And before you go on with some bullshit about there's no reason that would matter, there's equally no reason why a food being a GM crop would matter.
Isn't it possible that a person might be allergic to proteins expressed by a particular gene, or particular configurations of proteins combined into larger molecules, and hence a person could be allergic to GM wheat with jelly fish genes or whatever, but not allergic to normal wheat? Whereas it isn't possible for a person to be allergic to food touched by a black person.
Some sort of religious crusade, then? You hate GMO so lets single out GMO?
You mischaracterise. I don't hate GM foods; I think the concept is actually quite interesting and promising, though needs some consideration - humans have, more or less, been eating the same kinds of foods for tens of thousands of years, and we should be somewhat cautious before radically altering that on a large scale (like, hundreds of millions of people...). There are reasons why vegetables did not naturally evolve animal genes, and shifting genes from, say, jelly fish to cows or carrots, may have unanticipated side-effects. I am a scientist, so I am obviously not "anti-science", but scientists have been wrong before, particularly when millions were at stake from selling a "wonder drug", or, when we thought it was safe to feed cows ingredients derived from animals. Money can be a corrupting influence in science, but it is not the whole story: we as a society have to accept the blame when we assume that something is safe over the long-term, but we have not actually done any long-term studies.
If you want to know what's in GMO food, it's perfectly fair to require labelling of all natural food contents as well. Cyanide in apples, radioactive potassium in bananas, radioactive carbon in most plants, neurotoxin in pufferfish, etc.
"If you want to know what's in food, it's perfectly fair to require labelling of all natural food contents as well. Cyanide in apples, radioactive potassium in bananas, radioactive carbon in most plants, neurotoxin in pufferfish, etc."
People like you said the same thing when mandatory labelling of ingredients was introduced, and yet somehow we now have ingredients labels and still no "cyanide labels on apples" or any of that nonsense. The reality is that, in a functioning democratic society, if people want to know what ingredients are in the food that they buy, and the manufacturers refuse to comply, then the government will eventually pass a law that forces manufacturers to comply.
The information is freely available to anyone willing to research it.
How? If the manufacturer doesn't put it on the label, then how is a purchaser supposed to find out that the ingredients have been genetically modified?
This is about forcing information beyond a rational minimum of information (like nutritional content, ingredients, and allergies) to be displayed, but not all the information, only the information that fits political agendas.
Nutritional content and ingredients are also "information that fits political agendas", and food manufacturers were opposed to labelling them for the same reasons. How is GM different? There is no real reason why nutritional content should be labelled other than politics (aka "people want to know", which also applies to GM).
Singapore is routinely ranked as having one of the best healthcare system in the world (WHO 2000 study Singapore ranked 6th, U.S. was ranked 37th). It's universal healthcare that people pay for out of their own pocket. The cost of providing world best medical care for everyone in Singapore, costs per person what Americans spend on administration alone - not doctors, drugs, surgeries or real health care - just what Americans spend on managers and secretaries. And yet, for this price, they get one of the best healthcare systems in the world in return. Amazing. Economists love it, here's some excerpts from The Undercover Economist - Lemons, health care, and the United States
The United States relies upon private health insurance to provide much of the financing for medical costs. This is unusual: in Britain, Canada, and Spain, for example, health-care costs are largely paid for by the government. In Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, medical costs are paid for by a system of "social insurance": it is compulsory for most people to buy insurance, but insurance premiums are tied by law to income rather than to the risk of a claim.
The United States system makes it voluntary to buy insurance, and premiums are linked to risk, not to income. But these market-based premiums, beloved of many Americans, do not seem to be delivering health care that makes them happy. A recent survey revealed that only 17 percent of respondents in the United States were content with the health-care system and thought no substantial reforms were necessary. Why the discontent?
The superficial reasons are simple enough to describe: the system is hugely expensive, very
bureaucratic, and extremely patchy. The expense first: US health cares costs a third more, per person,
than that of the closest rival, super-rich Switzerland, and twice what many European countries spend.
The United States government alone spends more per person than the combination of public and private
expenditure in Britain, despite the fact that the British government provides free health care for all
residents, while the American government spending program covers only the elderly (Medicare) and
some of the marginalized (Medicaid). Most Americans worry about health-care costs and would be
stunned to discovered that the British government spends less per person than the American
government but still manages to provide free health care for everyone. In fact, if you figure in the costs of
providing health insurance to government employees and providing tax breaks to encourage private
health care, the US government spending on health care, per person, is the highest in the world.
Bureaucracy next. Researchers at the Harvard Medical School found that the administrative costs of the
US system, public and private, exceed $1,000 per persons. In other words, when you count all the taxes,
premiums, and out-of-pocket expenses, the typical American spends as much on doctor's receptionists
and the like as citizens of Singapore and the Czech Republic spend on their entire medical care. Both
places are countries with health outcomes very similar to those in the United States: life expectancy and
“healthy life” expectancy (a statistic that distinguishes a long healthy life and a long life plagued by years
of severe disability) are a shade lower in the Czech Republic than in the United States; and in Singapore
they are a little higher than in the United States. The costs of US bureaucracy is also more than three
times the $307 cost per person for the administration of the Canadian health system, whic
this guy Horowitz comes across as the biggest asshole not featured on a.cx TLD.
Not exactly uncommon; see, for example, this article which encourages CEOs to fire people: Three Types of People to Fire Immediately: "I wanted a happy culture. So I fired all the unhappy people." - A very successful CEO.
(Spoiler - it's people who complain, are overworked, are realistic about project prospects, or are already knowledgeable; "The best innovators are learners, not knowers.")
That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation. In 1848, the English parliament passed the ten-hours law and total output per-worker, per-day increased. In the 1890s employers experimented widely with the eight hour day and repeatedly found that total output per-worker increased. In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the originator of “scientific management” prescribed reduced work times and attained remarkable increases in per-worker output.
By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers’ Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. “Throughout the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,” writes Robinson; “and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.”
What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day. Likewise, the overall output for the work week will be exactly the same at the end of six days as it would be after five days. So paying hourly workers to stick around once they’ve put in their weekly 40 is basically nothing more than a stupid and abusive way to burn up profits. Let ‘em go home, rest up and come back on Monday. It’s better for everybody.
BayStar Capital and Royal Bank of Canada invested US$50 million in The SCO Group to support the legal cost of SCO's Linux campaign. Later it was shown that BayStar was referred to SCO by Microsoft On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means.[60] Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real.[61] BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft
It's been pretty clear that Microsoft was involved in providing indirect financing for SCO - surely there are some investors who lost money and would want to expose these shady deals, and sue Microsoft for subverting SCO and turning it into a litigation vehicle, rather than the independent enterprise that the board claimed it to be?
Yes, this is likely related to the economy and changing attitudes about education.
I'd argue there is an even simpler explanation - popular culture has shifted. Reality TV and the "media studies" degrees it fuelled are no longer cool. Instead, the people who appear on reality TV shows are increasingly seen as losers; the new cool is startups and app stores, the young crowd hear stories of the people who became app store millionaires in 6 months, and dream of being the next Zuckerberg. I predict that this new wave of enthusiasm for computing won't last; we saw this cycle before with the.com millionaires, everyone wanted to be in the industry, but at some point the river of money begins to dry up and something else becomes the new cool.
We don't need thousands of Media Studies graduates with huge debt, we need Scientists, Entrepreneurs and many other roles that are currently being filled by imported labour.
The problem is that 17 year olds generally have no idea what skills are in demand in the workplace. Perhaps every university should be required to write a letter to each prospective student, informing them of the ratio of graduates from that university with that particular degree in the last 5 years who are employed/unemployed, and the median salary. The letter could also point out similar degrees with better prospects. That way student choice would be retained, but it would be more informed. Alternatively, we could go the China route, and only fund the top % of students to study in-demand degrees, and consign everyone else to a lifetime of manual labour (gaokao: for poor households, the 30 percent of China’s population living on less than $2 a day, the gaokao is like a lottery ticket — but one whose rewards come not by chance, but through blood, sweat, tears and toil. For them, gaokao doesn’t translate as “high exam,” it translates as “test you must ace so your life won’t suck.").
I think there seem to be better opportunities elsewhere in the EEA, but people seem unwilling to move.
Lack of personal mobility has been cited as one of, if not the most important, factor in regional and youth unemployment. I have a number of old friends and acquaintances who relocated to find work - usually to a large city within the same country, but sometimes further afield, to other continents, EU to/from US, to places like Dubai, Sri Lanka, Amsterdam, Germany etc. There are immigrants to the U.S. and U.K. who have left their friends and families, travelled hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles, in search of work. Once they arrive, they compete in a jobs market where they are at a distinct disadvantage as they are not native speakers of the host nation's language - and yet, they find work.
On the other hand, I know people who moan that there are no jobs in their tiny village in the middle of nowhere, but are at the same time refuse to even consider relocating, because that would mean changing their lifestyle. Instead, these people continue to receive money from the tax payer to live in their location of choice, despite the probability of finding a job there being low. The government should, as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits, require people located in areas of high unemployment to relocate if there are appropriate jobs elsewhere.
If it is, I'm certain the Chinese will be happy to know. Especially the next time we shelter one of their dissidents at our embassy.
U.S. embassies do not offer asylum, according this dissidents have to actually get into the U.S. before asylum can be applied:
The United States does not grant asylum in its diplomatic premises abroad. Under U.S. law, the United States grants asylum only to aliens who are physically present in the United States.
The GPU for sure and likely other components on the SOCs Moto use utilize closed hardware that only Moto can provide drivers for.
It's not true that only Motorola can provide drivers - it is just *hard* for others to do so. Nouveau showed it was possible to reverse engineer a GPU driver; in the ARM a world open source Mali GPU driver and Adreno GPU driveris being worked on, which will hopefully cover a large proportion of the mobile devices out there.
I notice one of them actually works, the other is a piece of plastic with a print of a newspaper stuck to it.
Tablet Newspaper (1994). Note that the depicted design includes tablet with full-color reactive touchscreen (CRT, not LCD), it is not just "a piece of plastic with a print of a newspaper stuck to it". Also note that this case is about design patents, not functionality, and therefore the fact that Fidler didn't have a fully functional iPad in 1994 is irrelevant.
Great Britain and Germany, two Christian nations*, went to war twice in the last century, ultimately resulting in over 90 million people being killed. If you think that the people of any one religion have a monopoly on violence then you are a fool.
* (The official state religion of Britain was, and still is, Christianity. Surveys from that era show 95%+ population of both Germany and Britain reporting as Christian. Heck, some of the troops in World War I stopped fighting on Christmas Day and left the trenches to fraternise with the enemy. That's how Christian they were: they would kill each other on any other day of the year, but not Christmas day.)
allowing a suspect to undermine judicial authority like that (essentially, thumbing his nose at the Swedish legal system and saying "fuck off") can have other long-range implications that Sweden may not be willing to bear the cost of.
Like Warren Anderson, who was charged with the culpable homicide of 8,000 people, left India and refused to come back until they said they wouldn't charge him, and who then jumped bail and left India after he was charged? Did the U.S. government respect the judicial authority of the Indian courts? No - it refused to extradite Anderson because they said there "wasn't enough evidence". And yet when the United States wanted to extradite bin Laden, and the government of Afghanistan requested evidence of his crimes, the U.S. government refused to provide it. When it comes to international politics and law, the U.S. is not afraid to apply double standards.
Assange would be considered a spy so they'd probably hang him, like they did the Rosenbergs.
According to an article in the New York Times (which I can't find right now, otherwise I'd link to it), nobody outside of the U.S. government/military has ever been prosecuted for publishing information leaked from the U.S. government/military. The prosecution have always backed down because they know they would have to argue that the First Amendment right to publish information that you have obtained about the government does not apply to whoever they're prosecuting, and that a jury may well decide that the First Amendment actually does matter after all. Numerous newpapers have published leaked information, and the New York Times and others actually conspired with Assange to publish the diplomatic cables etc. However, in Assange's case, it's possible that they just plan to put him in front of a military court with a predetermined judge and outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike the U.S., the island states of Japan and Great Britain have had centuries of unilateral culturalism
Britain does not have a unilateral culture. "London, England, United Kingdom is one of the most ethnically diverse cities on earth. As of 2007, there are over 300 languages spoken in it and more than 50 non-indigenous communities with a population of more than 10,000." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
What you suggest has not been the case for a long time: "Magna Carta (1215ad) was the first document imposed upon a King of England by a group of his subjects." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
In many countries, employers are obliged to keep paying an employee full salary while they do jury duty, to prevent exactly the situation you describe. Sacking an employee on jury duty is a criminal offence.
The ancient Greeks used to treat jury duty like casual work - if you're free, turn up at the court in the morning, get selected randomly, and get paid. Apparently you could actually earn a reasonable wage through this. The advantage is that well-employed people don't have to waste their time (and money) doing jury duty, and the people who turn up have some motivation to do it, and probably prior court experience. The disadvantage is that whole "good cross section of the population" thing.
In the video game world, the term "grey market" has been used to represent non-authorized international sales channels for at least two decades. And I'm pretty sure the term was used before that for VHS video tape imports.
I'm concerned about it becoming a mainstream practice, not that it happens in niche markets.
It already is mainstream - the international import and export of clothing is restricted. In the UK, Tesco famously lost the court case over grey importing of Levi jeans, which they were selling at half the retail price of the officially imported jeans. And so now the only jeans you will in the UK (and the rest of the EU) are officially imported ones. The same thing happens with clothing, motor vehicles, basically everything where there are official distribution channels.
Allowing grey importing would ultimately lead to convergence on a single global price for everything. I think that would be interesting, but let's play devil's advocate - some publisher release a movie. Americans and Europeans are willing to pay perhaps $10 to download. Indians and Chinese are willing to pay perhaps $0.50 to download. But in a single, free market, there can be only one fixed price - so what should it be? If you price it closer to the Western price, then the product is inaccessible to Chinese and Indian people. But if you price it closer to the lower salaries, then your profit margins will be much lower, so you aren't going to do that. You can't please everyone when there is such huge wage disparity in the world. So, you conclude that the practical pricing model is the one that restricts distribution to only Westerners and wealthy people from elsewhere. So there is a counter-argument that dividing the world up and practising price discrimination actually helps the consumer, by enabling them to access the product they want at a price that they are able to pay. Now, I'm not saying that I agree with that point of view, but that's the counter-argument. Price discrimination is an important concept in business; having a range of similar items at varying price points allows your customer to pay a price point that they are comfortable with, rather than forcing them to choose between simply buying or not buying. See, for example, Starbucks coffee.
Nobody in their right mind is buying a new $3000 laptop every three years.
What? The average refresh rate is 2-3 years, above that TCO rises. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=using+tco+to+determine+refresh From the Intel study: "For PCs that are older than three years, the cost of maintenance and issue resolution increases such that it is cheaper to purchase a new system." Something like 2/3rds of the desktops and laptops in industry were purchased in the last 2 years. e.g. Google's head of systems gave a talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (video) where he stated that they upgrade all hardware every 12 months - and they insist on it even if your system is working fine - because not doing so costs them more than dealing with failures over time.
I have a 2005 Thinkpad. Bit by bit, things stopped working - but the difference here is that I replaced the keyboard, case hinge, and battery with cheap parts from ebay, and to this day the laptop is still functioning and useful. I have upgraded the OS to the latest Xubuntu and it is fast and runs all of the latest software without any issues. I didn't pay anything for the software upgrades. Every so often I am tempted to buy a new laptop, but then I realise my Thinkpad runs as well as it did in 2005, and still does exactly the same things it did then, so I really have no reason to replace it.
you would be okay with a law requiring companies to say whether or not any black people touched the food.. And before you go on with some bullshit about there's no reason that would matter, there's equally no reason why a food being a GM crop would matter.
Isn't it possible that a person might be allergic to proteins expressed by a particular gene, or particular configurations of proteins combined into larger molecules, and hence a person could be allergic to GM wheat with jelly fish genes or whatever, but not allergic to normal wheat? Whereas it isn't possible for a person to be allergic to food touched by a black person.
Some sort of religious crusade, then? You hate GMO so lets single out GMO?
You mischaracterise. I don't hate GM foods; I think the concept is actually quite interesting and promising, though needs some consideration - humans have, more or less, been eating the same kinds of foods for tens of thousands of years, and we should be somewhat cautious before radically altering that on a large scale (like, hundreds of millions of people...). There are reasons why vegetables did not naturally evolve animal genes, and shifting genes from, say, jelly fish to cows or carrots, may have unanticipated side-effects. I am a scientist, so I am obviously not "anti-science", but scientists have been wrong before, particularly when millions were at stake from selling a "wonder drug", or, when we thought it was safe to feed cows ingredients derived from animals. Money can be a corrupting influence in science, but it is not the whole story: we as a society have to accept the blame when we assume that something is safe over the long-term, but we have not actually done any long-term studies.
If you want to know what's in GMO food, it's perfectly fair to require labelling of all natural food contents as well. Cyanide in apples, radioactive potassium in bananas, radioactive carbon in most plants, neurotoxin in pufferfish, etc.
"If you want to know what's in food, it's perfectly fair to require labelling of all natural food contents as well. Cyanide in apples, radioactive potassium in bananas, radioactive carbon in most plants, neurotoxin in pufferfish, etc."
People like you said the same thing when mandatory labelling of ingredients was introduced, and yet somehow we now have ingredients labels and still no "cyanide labels on apples" or any of that nonsense. The reality is that, in a functioning democratic society, if people want to know what ingredients are in the food that they buy, and the manufacturers refuse to comply, then the government will eventually pass a law that forces manufacturers to comply.
The information is freely available to anyone willing to research it.
How? If the manufacturer doesn't put it on the label, then how is a purchaser supposed to find out that the ingredients have been genetically modified?
This is about forcing information beyond a rational minimum of information (like nutritional content, ingredients, and allergies) to be displayed, but not all the information, only the information that fits political agendas.
Nutritional content and ingredients are also "information that fits political agendas", and food manufacturers were opposed to labelling them for the same reasons. How is GM different? There is no real reason why nutritional content should be labelled other than politics (aka "people want to know", which also applies to GM).
The United States relies upon private health insurance to provide much of the financing for medical costs. This is unusual: in Britain, Canada, and Spain, for example, health-care costs are largely paid for by the government. In Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, medical costs are paid for by a system of "social insurance": it is compulsory for most people to buy insurance, but insurance premiums are tied by law to income rather than to the risk of a claim.
The United States system makes it voluntary to buy insurance, and premiums are linked to risk, not to income. But these market-based premiums, beloved of many Americans, do not seem to be delivering health care that makes them happy. A recent survey revealed that only 17 percent of respondents in the United States were content with the health-care system and thought no substantial reforms were necessary. Why the discontent?
The superficial reasons are simple enough to describe: the system is hugely expensive, very bureaucratic, and extremely patchy. The expense first: US health cares costs a third more, per person, than that of the closest rival, super-rich Switzerland, and twice what many European countries spend. The United States government alone spends more per person than the combination of public and private expenditure in Britain, despite the fact that the British government provides free health care for all residents, while the American government spending program covers only the elderly (Medicare) and some of the marginalized (Medicaid). Most Americans worry about health-care costs and would be stunned to discovered that the British government spends less per person than the American government but still manages to provide free health care for everyone. In fact, if you figure in the costs of providing health insurance to government employees and providing tax breaks to encourage private health care, the US government spending on health care, per person, is the highest in the world.
Bureaucracy next. Researchers at the Harvard Medical School found that the administrative costs of the US system, public and private, exceed $1,000 per persons. In other words, when you count all the taxes, premiums, and out-of-pocket expenses, the typical American spends as much on doctor's receptionists and the like as citizens of Singapore and the Czech Republic spend on their entire medical care. Both places are countries with health outcomes very similar to those in the United States: life expectancy and “healthy life” expectancy (a statistic that distinguishes a long healthy life and a long life plagued by years of severe disability) are a shade lower in the Czech Republic than in the United States; and in Singapore they are a little higher than in the United States. The costs of US bureaucracy is also more than three times the $307 cost per person for the administration of the Canadian health system, whic
this guy Horowitz comes across as the biggest asshole not featured on a .cx TLD.
Not exactly uncommon; see, for example, this article which encourages CEOs to fire people: Three Types of People to Fire Immediately: "I wanted a happy culture. So I fired all the unhappy people." - A very successful CEO.
(Spoiler - it's people who complain, are overworked, are realistic about project prospects, or are already knowledgeable; "The best innovators are learners, not knowers.")
That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation. In 1848, the English parliament passed the ten-hours law and total output per-worker, per-day increased. In the 1890s employers experimented widely with the eight hour day and repeatedly found that total output per-worker increased. In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the originator of “scientific management” prescribed reduced work times and attained remarkable increases in per-worker output.
By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers’ Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. “Throughout the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,” writes Robinson; “and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.”
What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day. Likewise, the overall output for the work week will be exactly the same at the end of six days as it would be after five days. So paying hourly workers to stick around once they’ve put in their weekly 40 is basically nothing more than a stupid and abusive way to burn up profits. Let ‘em go home, rest up and come back on Monday. It’s better for everybody.
I don't understand how someone can be such a jerk and we can say "oh, yeah, well, they had to do it because of the shareholders."
I still don't understand why the shareholders haven't called for an explanation of the mysterious investments that bankrolled this whole thing:
BayStar Capital and Royal Bank of Canada invested US$50 million in The SCO Group to support the legal cost of SCO's Linux campaign. Later it was shown that BayStar was referred to SCO by Microsoft
On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means.[60] Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real.[61] BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft
It's been pretty clear that Microsoft was involved in providing indirect financing for SCO - surely there are some investors who lost money and would want to expose these shady deals, and sue Microsoft for subverting SCO and turning it into a litigation vehicle, rather than the independent enterprise that the board claimed it to be?
Yes, this is likely related to the economy and changing attitudes about education.
I'd argue there is an even simpler explanation - popular culture has shifted. Reality TV and the "media studies" degrees it fuelled are no longer cool. Instead, the people who appear on reality TV shows are increasingly seen as losers; the new cool is startups and app stores, the young crowd hear stories of the people who became app store millionaires in 6 months, and dream of being the next Zuckerberg. I predict that this new wave of enthusiasm for computing won't last; we saw this cycle before with the .com millionaires, everyone wanted to be in the industry, but at some point the river of money begins to dry up and something else becomes the new cool.
We don't need thousands of Media Studies graduates with huge debt, we need Scientists, Entrepreneurs and many other roles that are currently being filled by imported labour.
The problem is that 17 year olds generally have no idea what skills are in demand in the workplace. Perhaps every university should be required to write a letter to each prospective student, informing them of the ratio of graduates from that university with that particular degree in the last 5 years who are employed/unemployed, and the median salary. The letter could also point out similar degrees with better prospects. That way student choice would be retained, but it would be more informed. Alternatively, we could go the China route, and only fund the top % of students to study in-demand degrees, and consign everyone else to a lifetime of manual labour (gaokao: for poor households, the 30 percent of China’s population living on less than $2 a day, the gaokao is like a lottery ticket — but one whose rewards come not by chance, but through blood, sweat, tears and toil. For them, gaokao doesn’t translate as “high exam,” it translates as “test you must ace so your life won’t suck.").
I think there seem to be better opportunities elsewhere in the EEA, but people seem unwilling to move.
Lack of personal mobility has been cited as one of, if not the most important, factor in regional and youth unemployment. I have a number of old friends and acquaintances who relocated to find work - usually to a large city within the same country, but sometimes further afield, to other continents, EU to/from US, to places like Dubai, Sri Lanka, Amsterdam, Germany etc. There are immigrants to the U.S. and U.K. who have left their friends and families, travelled hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles, in search of work. Once they arrive, they compete in a jobs market where they are at a distinct disadvantage as they are not native speakers of the host nation's language - and yet, they find work.
On the other hand, I know people who moan that there are no jobs in their tiny village in the middle of nowhere, but are at the same time refuse to even consider relocating, because that would mean changing their lifestyle. Instead, these people continue to receive money from the tax payer to live in their location of choice, despite the probability of finding a job there being low. The government should, as a condition of receiving unemployment benefits, require people located in areas of high unemployment to relocate if there are appropriate jobs elsewhere.
If it is, I'm certain the Chinese will be happy to know. Especially the next time we shelter one of their dissidents at our embassy.
U.S. embassies do not offer asylum, according this dissidents have to actually get into the U.S. before asylum can be applied:
The United States does not grant asylum in its diplomatic premises abroad. Under U.S. law, the United States grants asylum only to aliens who are physically present in the United States.
The GPU for sure and likely other components on the SOCs Moto use utilize closed hardware that only Moto can provide drivers for.
It's not true that only Motorola can provide drivers - it is just *hard* for others to do so. Nouveau showed it was possible to reverse engineer a GPU driver; in the ARM a world open source Mali GPU driver and Adreno GPU driveris being worked on, which will hopefully cover a large proportion of the mobile devices out there.
I notice one of them actually works, the other is a piece of plastic with a print of a newspaper stuck to it.
Tablet Newspaper (1994). Note that the depicted design includes tablet with full-color reactive touchscreen (CRT, not LCD), it is not just "a piece of plastic with a print of a newspaper stuck to it". Also note that this case is about design patents, not functionality, and therefore the fact that Fidler didn't have a fully functional iPad in 1994 is irrelevant.
Great Britain and Germany, two Christian nations*, went to war twice in the last century, ultimately resulting in over 90 million people being killed. If you think that the people of any one religion have a monopoly on violence then you are a fool.
* (The official state religion of Britain was, and still is, Christianity. Surveys from that era show 95%+ population of both Germany and Britain reporting as Christian. Heck, some of the troops in World War I stopped fighting on Christmas Day and left the trenches to fraternise with the enemy. That's how Christian they were: they would kill each other on any other day of the year, but not Christmas day.)
allowing a suspect to undermine judicial authority like that (essentially, thumbing his nose at the Swedish legal system and saying "fuck off") can have other long-range implications that Sweden may not be willing to bear the cost of.
Like Warren Anderson, who was charged with the culpable homicide of 8,000 people, left India and refused to come back until they said they wouldn't charge him, and who then jumped bail and left India after he was charged? Did the U.S. government respect the judicial authority of the Indian courts? No - it refused to extradite Anderson because they said there "wasn't enough evidence". And yet when the United States wanted to extradite bin Laden, and the government of Afghanistan requested evidence of his crimes, the U.S. government refused to provide it. When it comes to international politics and law, the U.S. is not afraid to apply double standards.
Assange would be considered a spy so they'd probably hang him, like they did the Rosenbergs.
According to an article in the New York Times (which I can't find right now, otherwise I'd link to it), nobody outside of the U.S. government/military has ever been prosecuted for publishing information leaked from the U.S. government/military. The prosecution have always backed down because they know they would have to argue that the First Amendment right to publish information that you have obtained about the government does not apply to whoever they're prosecuting, and that a jury may well decide that the First Amendment actually does matter after all. Numerous newpapers have published leaked information, and the New York Times and others actually conspired with Assange to publish the diplomatic cables etc. However, in Assange's case, it's possible that they just plan to put him in front of a military court with a predetermined judge and outcome.
Oh, here's a reference: "No journalist has been prosecuted for publishing leaked information under the Espionage Act." Though it seems a new game is afoot: "Why the WikiLeaks Grand Jury is So Dangerous: Members of Congress Now Want to Prosecute New York Times Journalists Too"