For me personally, streaming has reduced the times I go to a theater. In my teens I went probably on average a couple times a month. Last year I saw maybe 3 movies in theaters. What's changed? In my opinion the prevalence of streaming has put movie studios in a bind: now that nearly everyone has access to near unlimited amounts of content from their couch, movies have become a much more risk-averse business. Making movies costs a lot and competition is fierce. This has led to studios focusing heavily on franchises and sequels and cinematic universes. There's a reason disney paid a fortune for the Star Wars IP (and already made their investment back): they know SW is a franchise with a huge pre-existing fanbase and they know they can keep pumping these movies out at a rate of about 1 a year and keep raking in the cash. Marvel. DC. Harry Potter franchise being hastily expanded beyond the original series. It's all about risk-management: the studios are asking themselves 'what can we invest XXX million bucks into and be fairly certain that we'll make money?'
This is not to say all that is bad. I enjoy a mindless action-flick or a superhero movie here or there. But this has made it so that the selection of movies available in theaters, at least here in Finland, is pretty narrow. My personal taste in movies is story and character/dialogue driven. If the plot and the writing is good enough, I don't care if the special effects budget has been small. Movies like Coherence and Primer are good examples of how to make thoughtful and entertaining scifi/mystery films with a very limited budget. However these kinds of movies don't make it to the cinemas any more, they're too risky. The movie going public has been conditioned into expecting a 'larger than life' experience on the big screen.
Every once in a while a movie with a wide mass-market appeal hits the theaters that even a cinephile nerd like me can call excellent. Mad Max: Fury Road is a good example of a such a film and in my opinion the best pure action film ever made (because it uses action to actually tell a story beautifully, instead of having tons of crap dialogue that just acts as dressing to get the characters into the next action set-piece, you could cut what little dialogue there is out of the film and it'd still be more world building and immersive than the whole of the Transformers franchise combined), but outside such movies I don't often find myself wanting to go to the theater, because for people like me, the streaming services simply offer a better selection.
So who is "they" in this context? Boeing or Lion Air/Ethiopian Airlines? Who was scrimping and saving? Hint: It wasn't Boeing...
Boeing certainly wasn't scrimping, they were being greedy by selling critical safety features for a few more bucks, and it's now backfired on and cost not only hundreds of lives but hundreds of millions and likely billions in lost sales and upcoming legal costs (Norwegian has already said they're suing for the costs that the grounding will cause them, others will surely follow).
The damage this kind of stuff will do to their brand is massive and it's already affected their sales, Garuda (an Indonesian airline) just cancelled their order of 48 planes. That alone will cost them over half a billion. And it gets worse: Only 381 planes have been delivered so far, less than 10 % of all existing orders. If more airlines start to follow suit as they probably will because the brand of the plane is now seriously damaged and people don't want to fly it (understandably) it might cause the entire plane to be unprofitable for them.
From both a business and product design standpoint they could not have made a more moronic decision, this is a godsend to their competitors, and I can bet you that the sales and marketing department of Airbus are currently ecstatic over this.
Are you under the delusion that European pharmaceutical companies don't make a profit?
No, and he didn't even imply that. The point is however, that the way medicines are bought here means that the prices of drugs are lower. The companies still make a profit off of them, but we spend overall less money on drugs, because of things like collective bargaining.
Take something like insulin. The price of insulin in the US doubled from 2012 to 2016, and it's not because the product itself has change or consumption has skyrocketed. Quoting the article:
“It’s not that individuals are using more insulin or that new products are particularly innovative or provide immense benefits,” Jeannie Fuglesten Biniek, a senior researcher at HCCI and the report’s co-author said in a phone interview.
“Use is pretty flat, and the price changes are occurring in both older and newer products. That surprised me. The exact same products are costing double,” she said.
And one of the 3 main manufacturers of insulin is Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmacompany. So yes, European pharma companies are raking in a lot of money thanks to in no small part the american medical system. Now keep in mind, this is not some new wonder drug, insulin has been around for decades at this point, the manufacturing process has been honed down and is extremely efficient. A study from 2017 estimated the cost of production to be as follows:
After analyzing expenses for ingredients, production, and delivery, among other things, the researchers contend that the price for a year's supply of human insulin could be $48 to $71 a person and between $78 and $133 for analog insulins, which are genetically altered forms that are known as rapid or long-acting treatments. Examples of analog insulins include Humalog, Lantus, and Novolog.
Put another way, the study estimated the cost of production for a vial of human insulin is between $2.28 and $3.42, while the production cost for a vial of most analog insulins is between $3.69 and $6.16, according to the study in BMJ Global Health. Meanwhile, the median prices paid by more than two dozen countries for human insulin were 1.2 to 1.8 times greater than estimated prices. Median prices for other types of insulin were also higher: Lantus, which is sold by Sanofi (SNY), was 5.6 to 7.8 times higher; Humalog, which is sold by Eli Lilly (LLY), were at 2.7 to 3.7 times higher; and Novolog, a Novo Nordisk (NVO) treatment, was 2.6 to 3.5 times greater.
Note: the siggested figures there are not the costs of manufacturing, they're suggested price-points at which the companies would still make a profit on the product. And the actual numbers are global medians. In the US, the average price for a year's supply is now around $5700 dollars a year (from the previous link). Depending on the type of insulin, that's a markup of anywhere from 100 % to around 640 %. On a life-saving chemical that people depend on daily. That's insane. This is only possible because even though there's competition in theory, the highly more privatized nature of the US pharma/medical sector has allowed for all the three major players to raise their costs in tandem, while simultaneously making no significant changes/improvements on the drug itself.
The commercialized nature of the system means it doesn't optimize itself for cost-efficiency or availability, it optimizes for maximal profit. Insulin is cheap to make, so obviously the companies sell it for very cheap in countries with lower incomes or just a better regulated health care system. This
Surely the corporate masters won't allow the patent system to shut down.
On top of this, surely the guys flying their private jets around wouldn't like air-traffic to get grounded or for themselves to get in an accident? Just read today that many air-traffic controllers are now working second jobs out of necessity leading to sleep deprivation which sounds like the perfect combination of factors for some massive fuckups to happen. And that's what they're saying. Trump is playing with lives here.
“We cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break,”
I'm so glad right now that I'm not American because this shit is insane to follow even from the outside. Like, the government is essentially using close to a million people as slave labor right now and putting actual lives at risk because the guy in charge is a dude with the brain of a toddler that wants a massively expensive wall that will do nothing. I mean hell, didn't it just come to light in the el Chapo trial that the cartels are using planes, self-made submarines and tunnels to smuggle stuff in? And isn't it public knowledge at this point that most people who're in the US illegally have entered there legally? How many American lives is this shit worth? Because this keeps going and people will die as a result, that should be clear.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue at all. Like for fuck's sake Republicans: let Trump throw his tantrum about the wall and any other shit as much as you want, but do it without trying to actively ruin the finances and lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Why do they insist on letting him hold the country hostage? I thought there was supposed to be checks and balances. To top of the idiocy the republicans themselves don't want the wall, they could have passed the funding for that prior to the elections but they didn't, so what the fuck is this shit? They're letting a man-baby hold the entire government hostage for what, exactly? Are they this fucking spineless? Because it sure seems that way.
Of all of the outright moronic shit the Solarium Sultan with 'a very good brain' has said and done is this clusterfuck of a presidency, this shit takes the cake. This is beyond idiotic, and I hope you guys now that the longer this goes on, the more you're being laughed at abroad, because at this point it's the only thing left to do. It's absurd, and for the sake of the Americans I know and care about, I really hope you guys get your shit together, because this is some truly dangerous banana republic level bullshit. I expect this from like an African or a south American country, not the fucking US of A.
Guess what, it hasn't had a noticeable effect on unemployment rates, rather it leads to increased wages over time as increased productivity as a result of more capital (automation) being able to be used by people to accomplish more.
This is true for some, but not nearly all, workers. The fields directly related to automation such as programming are in high.demand and have seen wages grow, but this is not the case for jobs requiring less education. As automation becomes more and more commonplace, it means there's fewer and fewer jobs available for those doing manual tasks. In fact, if you look at OECD statistics such as labor compensation per hours worked, you'll note that the rate of increase in wages is in fact dropping. In the case of the US for example, the rate of growth has dropped from 6.53 % annually in 2000 to just 1,32 % in 2016. It's since come up a little bit from there to 2,7 % but when you combine this with inflation and a rising cost of living, real wages are actually falling now in the US (and many other western countries) because the rather modest wage growth is not matching these. The same trend can be observed elsewhere in the developing countries, including the euro area.
This shouldn't be that hard to understand in practice. Take something like invoicing, or any other job that doesn't require a high amount of skill but has been critical in employing many, many people on the office side of things. While I was studying I used to work such a job during the summers especially. Back then the office side team consisted of nearly 30 people as the job involved a lot of manual tasks, including scanning paper invoices, manually entering information about what's being paid so that the books are in order, matching the invoice with its existing purchase order etc... With electronic invoicing increasing at a rapid pace, these tasks are quickly becoming more and more automated as the systems learn to pre-fill this information and you can use less and less people in the process. Now, as this happens and companies cut the number of workers in these tasks, productivity per person indeed goes up. One person can easily do what in the past took 5, as the most time consuming parts of the process have been cut out. But do you think this means the companies end up increasing the wages of the remaining staff? Because that is not happening. There's simply no need to do that. The tasks themselves have in fact gotten easier to do, as now all the guys overseeing electronic invoicing have to do is check that the software hasn't missed anything. Since the goal of implementing these systems is to cut costs by cutting labor costs by reducing staff, it makes no sense for companies to then eat up their savings by bumping the salaries of the remaining workforce. It's not like the requirements of the job have gotten any more difficult. With less and less of such jobs available, the competition for the remaining spots will become fiercer and fiercer as automation proceeds to become more commonplace. With many more people wanting to do these jobs than there are jobs, oversupply means the wages will not grow and may even fall. Why pay more when so many people are willing to do it for slightly less?
No, this time won't be different. The luddite fallacy remains a fallacy.
The end-point of this development is cutting humans off the loop entirely. In 20 years, most data entry jobs will be gone, autonomous vehicles will make a lot of drivers unemployed. Manufacturing and logistics are already being automated at a high pace both in the West and in Asia. And so on. The more advanced automation and AI becomes, the less need there will be for humans across the board. The luddite fallacy rests on the notion that companies will forever pre
Yes clearly but not necessarily for profit reasons: they possibly just deemed that for Windows brand-reasons the OS still needs to ship with an 'MS' browser because that's part of the brand of the OS.
I mean, it's very likely that Edge makes Microsoft next to no money. They could move to Chrome or Firefox and arguably make more money if they made a deal with one of the 2 so they'd get paid some amount for including said browser as the default one, but again: this is likely not about the money for them.
Apple has its own browser. Google has its own browser. MS does not want to be seen as a lesser player for not having one of their 'own', even though their own is a ripoff of one of the existing one's and one that nearly no-one uses.
That, or they're holding off the switch to one of the 2 others while they pit the 2 against each other behind closed doors over who will pay them more.
Freedom of speech has never meant freedom to libel or incite violence towards others for example, nor does it cover things like false advertising.
Freedom of speech also does not mean that governments should be able to freely spread false information to their citizens. In Myanmar, it's gotten to the point that Facebook has been used to facilitate outright genocide by spreading altogether false claims about the local muslim minority, and this has been coming from the highest levels of authorities. Facebook recently banned a general of the army from the platform after it came to light that he had been publishing actual photos of dismembered children, claming them to have been killed by the Rohingya, a claim for which there is no supporting evidence.
Meanwhile, the Myanmar government and military have been among the most adept and sophisticated users of Facebook, using the platform to put out their own narrative of the Rohingya crisis. The office of the Commander-in-Chief in March posted photos of dismembered children and dead babies, claiming they were attacked by Rohingya terrorists, to counter British MPs, who were sharply critical of the country’s handling of the Rohingya crisis.
Keep in mind the international stance is that the Myanmarian army has been actively conducting what's basically ethnic cleansing by killing civilians and driving them into exodus. This is a military regime actively using the social network to spread their own propaganda to facilitate and justify genocide, and up until this point FB has done nothing about it, even though similar activities have been going on for a few years. A UN report found that the Myanmarian military has clear genocidal intent behind their actions and that Facebook and disinformation have been a part of this operation.
So this is case of the state using a popular social media network in the country to push their own genocidal narrative and propaganda. So what Facebook must do, and what it's now slowly starting do do is the opposite of what you're saying: not to allow the state to use its power to feed false propaganda to its citizenry to justify genocide.
Imagine if your own government started to do something similar, demonizing one group of individuals and pushing false information through the platforms to support their narrative: 'Look at what the jews/the muslims/the blacks have done, they must be interned to prevent further crime!" Would you still be screaming 'b.-b-but the state must be free to lie to its own citizenry because of freedom of speech!", because I doubt that. That's not what freedom of speech is about.
What do you mean 'here we come?' These kinds of systems have been in use for a few years already in use in parts of the West, inclunding the UK, parts of Germany and Chicago. There's an alright documentary about ongoing developments and these systems with the name Pre-crime from last year by German directors Matthias Heeder & Monika Hielscher. I can recommend it.
Essentially these systems are divided into 2 categories: ones using open and public data (essentially public crime statistics) that tell the police where crime is conncentrated to help them plan patrol-routes and know where the hotspots are, and the truer pre-crime breed that combines this with personal data by scouring Facebook, twitter, facial recognition, financial and criminal history information, known friends, etc to form a 'threat assessment scoreä via an unknown closed-source algorithm. This is combined with aerial and CCTV footage often to be able to locate/track individuals and cars rapidly. It's essentially exactly what China is doing, except China is slightly ahead because they've got masssive resources put into it and they never claimed to care about individual rights.
The system is Chicago is the latter breed and has a 'heat-list' of around 400 individuals (at the time of the film, probably more now) that regularly pulled aside on the street and interviewed by the cops. Not because they've done anything wrrong, but because the almighty algorithm tells the police officers they might. There's no way for anyone to see what information of theirs is in the system, what their 'threat score is', or what it's based on. There are several commercial operators in this space. My guess is in 10 to 15 years we'll start seeing Chinese 'private' (state-owned western subsidiaries) entering the market in the West. Gotta catch all the terrorists and gang members before anything bad happens, it's for Your Protection(tm), citizen! The gang excuse is the one Chicago seems to be using.
Now is the time to fight the legality of these systems in courts throughout the West as unconstitutional breaches of basic rights. The police will counter with: 'but we're only using it to track Bad People(tm)' which must be countered with 'that's the excuse of all massive surveillance states, stop reading 1984 as a manual you god damn imbeciles." Unless this is done now, unless strong legal precedent against such systems is established in the coming few years they will spread fast, and after that there is no returning, because at that point opposing the systems will be faced with: 'why are you defending criminals?" and the game will be lost. People: do not make this a partisan issue. Regardless of your country and your political leanings everyone knows that China is fucked up. It doesn't matter one bit whether you're a , a libertarian or a neo-Marxist; both sides of the political spectrum can and have in the past become authoritarian. This is not about left vs. right, this is about authoritarian vs. liberal. Unite against this BS now, or stand divided over partisan bullshit and watch these systems take over everywhere.
I'm not a communist by any stretch (I own a third of a corporation), but I am very strongly and openly a leftist individual being from Finland where the political spectrum in general (as in the whole of rest of the West in fact) is more to the left from the US, but I will happily join hands with my libertarian counterparts on the right over this. We can disagree about health care and social security spending all we want when that's the topic, but we're both in agreement that this bullshit must stop.
If you just read the above statement and your first thought is to write some variation of: 'But this is what the left wants! It's your fault!1!11!" then we've already lost the game. That's what they want us to do, so I plead you all not to fall into this bickering, these issues are too important for that..
There is nothing that prevents something to go to $0. Millenials are dumb
Yeah, us dumb millenials. Never before have people erroneously believed that a value of a commodity will not be able to come down, which is why this is the first time in economic history that we have bubbles.
If we only had people other than millenials managing investment banks and hedge fund the '08 crash would have been avoided. Those damn 15 year old CEOs falsely assuming housing prices cannot come down. Same with Maddof for example: had his clients not all been gullible millenial millionaires and billionaires a he'd have never been able to pull his con off. In fact, millenials also caused the stock market crash of 1929. Curse them. When will the older generations come to our rescue with their superior economic insight?
"Help us generation X and baby boomers, you're our only hope!"
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is the 45th and current President of the United States.
Well, fuck. I'll take my request back, you can stop helping now.
What's the big deal? Just think of it like China is adopting a big Code Of Conduct, and people who don't behave accordingly will be blacklisted, but instead of just from open source software development, from life!. Isn't that your tranny SJW end game?
Dude literally stated that he's opposed to all of this as a liberal and you went and argued the exact opposite point because apparently either you cannot read or just enjoy building massive strawmen. How 'fun'. I can do this too, watch me:
"What's the big deal, China's just making sure no-one can openly criticize the Dear Leader or his party, and those who dissent too hard or belong to the wrong religion/ethnicity/political movement will be taken to 're-education camps' where if need be they can be killed and their organs harvested if some Good Loyal Citizens(tm) are in need of them, isn't that your ultra-conservative Trumpian end-game; to have the government be able to operate with impunity, above the rule of law and get rid of the pesky media that Trump calls 'the enemy'?"
See how easy this is? Now Is this productive for the discussion at large in any way? Nope. It's just 'ooh I'm so right they're so wrong aah' -partisan ego jerk off for cunts like you. Grow the fuck up man.
I mean, thing with all large western states is, we don't really now if these kind of systems exist or not. Social media and credit information and so on is all out there, and there be large agencies with significant technical capabilities that we know are capable of tracking mobile phones' location and bank transfers etc. They operate gigantic data centers and apparently (if the Snowden leaks are to be believed) intercept data from ISPs and so on. Hell, Google and other companies already track device locations pretty much all the time for commercial purposes, so copying that data to some server somewhere in case of 'terrorists' is not that far out of the question.
I'm not saying it's happening 'cause again, there's no way to prove this. I'm just saying if some letter combination agency would be doing this, is there any way we'd really be able to know? The official line is that they're only collecting 'metadata' in bulk, but whatever 'metadata' in fact consists of is another matter entirely.
This is not to say that such tracking is identical to the system in China, because it's not used for loan applications and flight ticket purchases and so on like in China. Just pointing out that the collaboration between tech giants and governmental agencies in the West as well is likely more tight than most people assume.
The defense of all monopolies and oligopolies. 'It's not that we really want to charge as much as humanly possible for this thing because we know people want it and have nowhere else to go, it's just that it's really really expensive you see..."
Large parts of the US have no competition on the mobile networking side of things, which basically allows the companies to dictate the price. This is basic economics. It's right there in the summary:
Meanwhile, a monopoly over business data connectivity generally keeps consumer mobile prices high. According to the FCC's own data, 73 percent of the special access market (which feeds everything from ATMs to cellular towers) is controlled by one ISP.
Meanwhile, while we're a relatively small and a sparsely populated country here in Finland, we've got 2 major telecoms that have 4G coverage of most of the country. And whaddayaknow, once some competition appears, suddenly it turns out that data is not so expensive after all. My current plan has unlimited text messages, unlimited domestic call, unlimited (actually unlimited, no datacap) 5G (in theory, in practice the network is still 4G, we're in early phases of 5G infrastructure building) data in the Nordics + 15 gigs of outside the Nordics EU roaming data at at 30 euros a month.
How are we doing on gasoline price, against the same group of countries?
The real question is, how's your infrastructure doing? 'Cause last I checked, according to american engineers, it's pretty dismal. See, the reason gas is expensive here is that we tax the shit out of it (75 % of the price of gas is tax here), which we then use to you know, actually maintain the road and bridge infrastructure. Moreover, gas being more expensive reduces the incentive of people to drive and actually has lead to fast development of public transit. I own a car, but it's actually faster for me to use public transportation to get from my front door to my main office because turns out the subway bypasses traffic jams, and it saves me money; for less than the price of refueling my car full once, I get one months unlimited use of Helsinki's puvlic transit network consisting of buses, a couple metro lines, a tram system, ferries and trains.
In the mid-to-long term, I'm actually all for gradually increasing the gas tax even more to drive people away from using it and to adopt modes of transit less destructive to the planetary ecosystem, because I really like breathing air and would like my potential kids and grandkids to be able to do it as well.
But yay for cheap gas! Never mind tomorrow or actual long-term planning like intelligent tool using apes that have an understanding of their own resource use and its impact on societies and the planet overall. Let the planet burn, as long as there's cheap gas for everyone amirite? Or maybe, just maybe we could for once take a hint from people with a long running relationship with the environment who understand that we're not outside the system but a part of it and we can't just keep exploiting it because we like fast cars and insanely inefficient combustion engines?
Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money.
-Alanis Obomsawin, a member of Abenaki tribe from Canada, talking to author Ted Poole, from the book “Who is the Chairman of This Meeting?” (published in 1972)
But that's the thing, there was no potential threat. They had a phone call that falsely claimed there was a hostage situation going on, and they had a guy ho voluntarily came to open the door who they immediately pointed guns at and then opened fire when he twitched a little bit (unsurprisingly people are kinda nervous when they've done nothing wrong and go to open the door only to be faced with a squad of armed cops pointing guns and yelling orders). They hadn't done any kind of work to verify that the information given to them on the phone was accurate. Hell, even if it was accurate information they had no idea at that point if the guy who came to open the door was the perpetrator, and not a hostage that the perp made to open the door at gunpoint.They lacked any and all information to make the determination that this guy is a legitimate threat and not a civilian, yet they immediately and without any cause assumed him to be both armed and dangerous. That's not how competent police officers respond to a threat situation like this.
I can actually give some contrast, because over a decade ago here in Finland our (extended) family was the target of an attempted swatting by our then mentally unstable (an alcoholic and a schizophrenic off his meds) neighbor who called the cops during a large family party telling them that one of us had pointed a gun at them and threatened to kill them (none of us even owns a firearm). We had maybe 20 people around, including plenty of kids, I was around 17 at the time and was sitting in my room playing on the computer when I saw a couple of armed cops run past my window. I went to the backyard to see what the hell was going on and saw a handful of cops in tactical gear with weapons out but not pointed at anyone talking to my dad who had been barbecuing with our cousins. The female lead-officer told dad about the call, and also told him that they had been monitoring us for the past 30 minutes (I don't know where, but there's a large bridge crossing the railroad tracks a couple hundred meters from the house, I think they had guys up there with binoculars, or maybe just dudes in bushes on the other side of the street, maybe both) and that they'd come to the conclusion that we were not a threat and it was likely a prank call. Dad told them that the neighbor had a mental history and would occasionally yell stuff and insults at us, though he's never been violent, and also said that we don't have guns in the house but that the cops can come inside if they want to look for the gun that they will not find there. The lead officer responded with: 'there's no need sir, you have little kids in the house and there's no need to scare the.' They then checked the IDs of the adults around and left, but not before knocking on the neighbor's door and having a long talk with him about what this will mean for him. He eventually got a hefty fine for causing such a massive police operation (my brothers had went out as the cops were leaving and counted at least 6 cop cars (with 2 officers each) at a nearby parking lot, they'd come in fully prepared for a potential fire fight). I mean look at it from the cops' perspective: they knew none of us had a criminal record and there was no licensed firearm registered to anyone. They look at what's going on and they see a bunch of guys casually sipping on some beers, grilling and listening to music and a few smaller kids playing soccer in the yard. To top it all of, the neighbor who made the call was sitting on his porch (apparently wanting to witness us getting arrested and/or shot). It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this is not the kind of sight you'd expect to see after someone had supposedly been pointing a firearm at someone and angrily shouting death threats.
That's how you're supposed to handle a situation of this magnitude. You don't just go in an point the guns and then open fire at whichever guy you happen to see first because h
Where do you get the false idea that an accountant can magically make taxes just go away? It is complete nonsense. Again: I am a 1%er and pay over 50% of my earnings in taxes. There is no legal way to avoid this
You're seriously claiming that legal tax-evasion via tax-havens is not a thing? Are you living under a rock? Sure, if you make all your income as a salary from a corporation, then reducing taxes on that is difficult, If you however own a corporation tax-evasion becomes easier the larger that corporation is. I mean, what do you think is the reason for basically all major multinational companies owning subsidiaries in the Caymans or other small nations with low taxes? Why do you think it is that basically all megacorps have a lower effective tax-rate on their billions of profit than you do as a employee making a million if creative accounting doesn't exist?
The way the game works when you get to the big-league depends a bit on where you're located and what you're selling but the basic idea is pretty simple and same everywhere: you setup a couple of companies, one in whichever country you're conducting business in (company A), another in a country with suitably lax tax-laws (company B). You then for example make sure that the licensing rights of the software or whatever it is that you're selling are held by the company in the tax-haven. You then do some math and figure out that after operating expenses and salaries and all, the profit of your actual company (company A) is say 100 million. Okay, you don't want to pay taxes on all of that. Well great, you just make a contractual arrangement so that company A has to pay licensing fees to company B to the tune of say, 95 million, and suddenly the profit of company A goes down to 5 million, and the 95 million gets moved to your tax-haven company that pays next to no tax on it.
Variations of this model are so common it's basically a public secret. It's how Apple & al have been dodging billions in taxes for years now. The most common of these arrangements used by US corporations especially to shield around a hundred billion from american taxation a year was known as the Double Irish that used to be combined with what the accountants call a Dutch sandwhich. Basically using Irish and Dutch tax and IP law to move massive amounts of profits from the EU to Bermuda and other tax-havens.
These schemes were forced to be closed by the European Union (American officials and government seemed not to care one bit even though the existence and use of these schemes was known for decades and even though it cost the US a lot in lost tax-revenue.) in 2014. However, Ireland, not wanting to lose all the corporate business especially on the IT-side that this loophole had brought them basically just re-instated the loophole (now known as the 'single malt' arrangement and used by for example Microsoft and probably Facebook) with slightly changed wording and application, but it's essentially still there and still used.
Hell, there's an entire wiki article on Ireland as a tax-haven, which states at the very beginning:
Ireland's base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tools give foreign corporates Effective tax rates of 0% to 3% on global profits re-routed to Ireland via Ireland's tax treaty network.
And Ireland is by far not the only country with such (intentional) loopholes in the laws, it's just the most commonly used. But yeah, clearly because you personally cannot avoid paying taxes on your million or so of (presumably wage) income, that means it must be impossible,
Digital technology allows social pressure to be designed on a hitherto unknown scale. The Stasi was a beta-test. China embraces this with its social credit system. We should not let our culture slide in the same direction.
China is doing this with a clear intent to track its citizens and to silence any possible dissent. In the west the trends are molded by large corporations that are doing this for profit. The more addictive and socially pressuring you make the platforms, the more time on site user spend which then translates to more ad revenue. Also people who're slightly angry tend to be more engaged and hence pay more attention to ads, which is why the way 'filter bubbles' work is by mostly surrounding the user with content they agree with, but occasionally throwing in content they don't agree with, which is likely to provoke the user and make him react in some way (comment, like, dislike, share the post with a friend) which again, increases time on site and ad-revenue.
There's very little regulation of any of this. Western countries have long since recognized that advertising itself needs to be regulated so that people are not deceived by outright false claims and BS, but when it comes to the design of the platforms and their business models, it's a wild west environment. Thing to realize is that the platforms themselves are not going to magically change their behavior. They care about money, and money only. They will keep employing psychologists and other behavioral experts to design maximally addicting Pavlovian interfaces and filter-bubbles as long as it keeps making them more and more money. They do not inherently care whether or not anything people share on the platforms is actually true, what matters is how engaging it is. It's illegal for me or anyone in the west to take up an ad claiming that my new SnakeOil UltraPro homeopathic sugarwater pills will cure cancer at 20 € a month and extend lifespans by 30 years. However, if it so happens that some clueless blogger (that may or may not be connected to the company making the pills) running an 'alternative medicine' blog where they hype this remedy as the greatest thing ever decides to advertise his/her blog post on Facebook for people interested in homeopathy and natural remedies, Facebook will happily take their money and help them spread this disinformation, because the way laws work currently is that so long as what's being advertised is the blogpost (an opinion) and not the product itself, nothing illegal is happening. Convenient, don't ya think?
And in the meanwhile, while many rational people see this as problem, any attempt to solve this via regulations is always met with an uproar of 'look at Facebook/the government trying to censor information/free speech, this is turning into China!" The platforms don't want to interfere with content because they see that as damaging to their bottom-line (hell, the only reason Alex Jones was eventually banned is because of the threats he made and the legal departments of the companies probably decided that the amount of money he's bringing in is not worth the risk of a potential lawsuit), and the governments are unwilling or incapable of deciding what kind of regulation should be put in place to control the behavior of these platforms, because they're both clueless of the way tech works and afraid of the political downfall ('My opponent wants to decide what YOU see on Facebook, whereas I will never touch your social media feed!' etc) so the trends are just allowed to continue and amplify.
Whether we like it or not (and I don't) the fact of the matter is that social media platforms have become the primary channel of information delivery especially for young people and yet they remain massively more unregulated than any traditional media outlets. This is a problem, and one that the companies will not fix on their own because its currently massively beneficial for them. Comedy central did a very good skit about this where they equated
Notice that you didn't dispute anything the articles had to say. Instead, you attacked the messenger.
The article didn't provide any support for the claim made therein. It links to a previous story about a man returning from the middle-east to Canada and then throws out the following claims:
We've learned that 60 battle-hardened terrorists have returned to Canada from Syria and Iraq. - -
Now we know there are 60 such men in Canada.
That’s like 60 Charles Mansons or Paul Bernardos.
Not only is the number itself not sourced anywhere in the article, neither is the claim that these men are all 'battle hardened terrorists'. People travel to conflict areas to for numerous reasons (remember, people do have family and friends still in there) and to work in numerous capacities, including as aid-workers and the people who do end up fighting fight on both sides of the conflict. There are volunteers from the west who've been fighting against the terrorists in Syria for example.
The idiocy then continues:
Despite what we're being told, I don’t believe they’re under surveillance
Well that settles it then doesn't it. If the author of the article doesn't believe it, then clearly it must not be the case right? Utter BS.
The unfounded claims then continue, with the author throwing in this:
The Liberals don’t even know what’s going on with the “legal” 40,000 migrants they brought from Syria. The majority of Muslim migrants who walked across the border illegally have just gone missing, too.
Yet again no factual support for either of the claims made, they're simply thrown in there and the reader is expected to believe that they're true.
How does watching 60 terrorists keep us safe anyway?
Yet another repetition of an unfounded claim.
Why aren’t they prosecuted?
Because in a nation with laws, you need evidence of a crime to prosecute someone. The author seems to be suggesting that simply visiting a conflict area is enough to serve as a basis for prosecution, which it isn't.
Why aren’t they deported?
Because I'm guessing most if not all of them are Canadian citizens and a country cannot deport its own citizens and again even if they're foreign nationals deporting them means there has to be evidence that they're guilty of something other than just travelling to the middle-east and back.
This is not a news article of any sort, it's a blog/opinion piece by an outlet that clearly has an agenda and doesn't provide basic facts about the situation but simply throws out assertions. That's not a 'messenger', that's a propaganda-outlet, and they're quite upfront about it. Similar rhetoric is always used when defending unfounded claims. The net is full of conspiratorial blog-sites masquerading as news outlets posting all kinds of wild unfounded BS and the counter-argument from fans is always 'why are you attacking the source and not the claims' when the real question should be 'why is anyone believing such claims to begin with with little to no evidence?' On top of that, these sites themselves don't dispute claims with facts, but hand-waive them with statements like 'I don't believe this', so they themselves are simply choosing to attack the messenger instead of using facts to even try and support their arguments.
Yeah, it's unbelievable that China still thinks it can go on with the war. It's been what, 17 years in Afghanistan for example and the conflict keeps going despite massive casualties, a bill in the of over 2 trillion that could have been used more productively and no end in sight. It's almost like this is a problem that cannot be solved with military force, but stubborn China and their massive fleet of aircraft carries and overseas bases doesn't seem to care. Gotta kill the terrorists until there are no longer terrorists and finally there will be peace on Earth, right?
The ancient Chinese emperor George Bush once famously said in 2002: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." But what he didn't realize is that terrorism is not an ideology, it's a tactic. You can't have a war on a tactic that's been used by insurgencies through time immemorial and expect it to someday be 'defeated'.
Truly, the Chinese have a lot to learn. But here we stand in the west, powerless to do anything about this wanton madness, watching as the dragonlords, blinded by their ideology of 'Chinese exceptionalism' keep turning large rocks into smaller rocks with precision guided state of the art weaponry, a single unit of which could be used to put many kids through school or provide them with health care like many western countries do. Truly a sad, sad state of affairs.
One day I can only hope the Chinese take a lesson from the great American general Sun Tzu who wrote: 'He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.'. & There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.'
So the EU is now dictating which services it's member governments are allowed to run?
Nope. The EU government is regulating which services its member governments are allowed to run as monopolies (and there are cases where monopolies are allowed. In Finland and Sweden for example all liquor stores are government run which has been allowed because the revenue collected from the sale of liquor are used by the state to provide health care to treat alcohol-related illnesses).
There's nothing about this ruling that prevents the Hungarian government from maintaining a payment service, this ruling just means the state cannot use its power to prevent competition from emerging or entering the market. In the exact same way the Hungarian government can start selling cars for all the Union cares, as long as they don't enact a system whereby all auto-sales have to be conducted through the government.
Free market and freedom of competition is one of the core values of the Union. There are plenty of existing mobile-payment companies in existence in Europe that cannot currently enter the market in Hungary because of the monopoly, and that violates European law.
Brexit was the right move.
Oh yes, finally the British government free from this tyrannical oppression of the free market will be able to implement more state-run monopolies, because who needs competition when the State can simply run all the services, right? Brexit remains of the largest political blunders in modern British history that will do them exactly no good.
Yes, but what I'm saying is that the way it is set up has created a cycle. Because the amount of bitcoins awarded has a half-life, and because the awarded coin always goes to the group who solves the block, this has created a situation where the competition for new coins grows all the time, leading to higher centralization (most mining is now done by commercial operators) and increasing difficulty. If you look at the chart from the wiki you'll not that although there are occasional small drops, the overall trend in difficulty has been trending up since the turn of 09/10. And that's not all, that chart conveniently ends at the end of last year. If you check the current difficulty (for example here), you'll notice it has over tripled since the start of the year.
So yes, you're very much correct that the difficulty can also go down, but what I said still true as well: so far the difficulty is trending up for the past decade and especially fast as of late, which leads to increased mining cost. It's possible that at some point competition in the professional mining industry will decrease, which might decrease the difficulty, but this is not certain, because it's just as possible that the remaining operators will simply increase their capacity to try and get a larger share of the market, which would keep difficulty up or even raise it.
Do they? 'Cause that's news to me. I asked an American living here in Finland that I have befriended about this and he said it's BS. So one of you guys is wrong. I tend to trust my friends more than strangers on the internet but because I wanted to make sure I went to Google and 10 seconds later found this in the wiki
According to a Harvard study, "the expenses for documentation, travel, and waiting time [for obtaining voter identification cards] are significant—especially for minority group and low-income voters—typically ranging from about $75 to $175. When legal fees are added to these numbers, the costs range as high as $1,500."[49][50] So even if the cards themselves may be free, the costs associated with obtaining the card can be expensive.[49] The author of the study notes that the costs associated with obtaining the card far exceeds the $1.50 poll tax outlawed by the 24th amendment in 1964.
So a trusted and informed friend and a dude from Harvard Law against 1 anonymous coward... damn, this is a tough one but I do think you may in fact be full of shit, because I did crunch the numbers and came tot he conclusion that a 'free card' costing anywhere from 75 $ upwards is not in fact free.
This reminds me of that quote from Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
“But the plans were on display” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
suggesting that the virtual work that underpins bitcoin, ethereum and similar projects is more similar to real mining than anyone intended.
Can't speak for ethereum, but in the case of BC this is entirely intentional. Since the computational complexity of the BC transactions grows with time, it's unavoidable that the energy-usage is also going to increase at the same time. This, coupled with a finite cap on the total amount of BC is also what makes BC deflationary by design, which can be a good property for an investment but is overall a terrible property for a currency.
To claim that this is not intentional when it stems from the way the currency & cryptography is set up is just ridiculous.
Or are you opposed to proving identity when voting, like most of the rest of the world requires?
Greetings from the rest of the world. Here in Finland we do in fact have to provide ID upon voting, and we do not have to to register to vote because your ID is checked against a list of eligible voters upon arrival to the voting site. However, social services also funds the cost of the ID for those who cannot afford it (which is why essentially everyone in Finland has an ID). This being the case, the ID requirement does not prevent anyone from voting regardless of income status. This point is often conveniently left out in the american discussions over voter IDs when the 'pretty much everyone else does it' -argument is presented because from what I've seen so far, voter ID proposals in the States don't have provisions for providing an ID for people who can't pay for it, and that's the crux of the problem.
Voting is such a fundamental right that it should never be gated behind a financial barrier of any kind, wouldn't you agree?
stop trying to change Google. Quit google, and go work for some company that is not a monstrous leviathan of cruelty.
So you're advocating for people with moral differences working for megacorporations to just quit and go elsewhere. Okay. How do you think that'll play out in the long term? If the problem is, as you put it, that these corporations are 'big, sociopathic lumbering expressions of greed and brutality', do you think that situation will be made better or worse if people simply stop trying to change them and move elsewhere?
Corporations, by their very nature, are amoral. They're guided first and foremost by profit and profit alone. They will only act morally if they see moral behavior as something that will bring them more cash, or alternatively if they see their immoral behavior as something that hampers their profit. Now, at this point it's clear that these tech megacorporations like Google, Apple, Amazon and others will not be be going bankrupt because of lessening demand. I mean, you damn these corporations as sociopathic, yet it's very likely that within the past 24 hours you have used their products, or someone you've bought stuff from is using their products. I know I have. The demand is there and it's steady.
So the consumers clearly do not care because they really can't. You can't drive a car without supporting gigantic oil companies, and you can't own or use a smartphone without supporting at least one of the tech giants. That being the case the only groups that are left that can affect their behavior are: the shareholders, the advertisers, the employees, or the state via laws and regulations. Now I think everyone agrees the shareholders are not going to do much because they are the company and as such are only interested in the money. Same for the most part goes for the advertisers; they have no interest in biting the hand that feeds them more customers and more money. That leaves us with the employees and the state as the groups that can potentially do something about the behavior. Now, I'm personally of the opinion that megacorporations should be under tighter regulations, because one needs only to look 10 years to the past to see how much damage gigantic corporations can do to the entire global economy (and let's not even go into the environmental side of things) when they're left on their own and can just operate purely on greed.
However I'm well aware that in the american political landscape calling for more regulations is usually met with heavy scorn as it's deemed 'anti-capitalist' (because the ability to make as much profit as possible is a sacred value in most of the West). Hell, we just saw Trump essentially saying that he doesn't give a damn if you guys sell tons of weapons to a regime that murders journalists working for American news outlets. I mean, who cares about freedom of speech, or freedom in general? We've reached peak Ferengi, and war is indeed, good for business. So let the Saudis oppress their own people and keep turning Yemen into an ever growing pile of rubble and human misery, as long as they do it with American high-quality weapons it's all good - think of all the jobs and the money to be made there! Same goes for the environment: the guiding principle of Trump and the republicans as far as I can see from the outside is deregulation, deregulation, and more deregulation. Who cares if the planet burns, the important thing is there's a lot of money to be made in the meanwhile, and something as pesky as morals or the long-term survival of advanced civilizations on the planet must not be let to interfere with business.
With the general attitude towards megacorporations among mainstream American politicians being taken straight from the playbook of Gordon Gekko, and many of these corporations being so universal right now that there's no effective way most consumers can avoid giving them money, the employees are in fact the only group that can effectively pressure many of these corporations because the empl
The saddest part? In theory, an election between a good and bad candidate should be a landslide for the good one. In practice, it too often becomes a worst case election decided by big money and corporate cancers investing in the bad candidate because he's cheap.
Yep. And for those who haven't read their history, this is by no means a new, or a US centered phenomenon. The father of political history Thucydides descried the political situation in island of Corsya after their civil war in 427 BC as all trust in the political system had been destroyed and the island turned to heavy partisanship thusly:
So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.
Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence. And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.
Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out. Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves. In their struggles for ascendancy nothing
Slashdot Mirror
For me personally, streaming has reduced the times I go to a theater. In my teens I went probably on average a couple times a month. Last year I saw maybe 3 movies in theaters. What's changed? In my opinion the prevalence of streaming has put movie studios in a bind: now that nearly everyone has access to near unlimited amounts of content from their couch, movies have become a much more risk-averse business. Making movies costs a lot and competition is fierce. This has led to studios focusing heavily on franchises and sequels and cinematic universes. There's a reason disney paid a fortune for the Star Wars IP (and already made their investment back): they know SW is a franchise with a huge pre-existing fanbase and they know they can keep pumping these movies out at a rate of about 1 a year and keep raking in the cash. Marvel. DC. Harry Potter franchise being hastily expanded beyond the original series. It's all about risk-management: the studios are asking themselves 'what can we invest XXX million bucks into and be fairly certain that we'll make money?'
This is not to say all that is bad. I enjoy a mindless action-flick or a superhero movie here or there. But this has made it so that the selection of movies available in theaters, at least here in Finland, is pretty narrow. My personal taste in movies is story and character/dialogue driven. If the plot and the writing is good enough, I don't care if the special effects budget has been small. Movies like Coherence and Primer are good examples of how to make thoughtful and entertaining scifi/mystery films with a very limited budget. However these kinds of movies don't make it to the cinemas any more, they're too risky. The movie going public has been conditioned into expecting a 'larger than life' experience on the big screen.
Every once in a while a movie with a wide mass-market appeal hits the theaters that even a cinephile nerd like me can call excellent. Mad Max: Fury Road is a good example of a such a film and in my opinion the best pure action film ever made (because it uses action to actually tell a story beautifully, instead of having tons of crap dialogue that just acts as dressing to get the characters into the next action set-piece, you could cut what little dialogue there is out of the film and it'd still be more world building and immersive than the whole of the Transformers franchise combined), but outside such movies I don't often find myself wanting to go to the theater, because for people like me, the streaming services simply offer a better selection.
Boeing certainly wasn't scrimping, they were being greedy by selling critical safety features for a few more bucks, and it's now backfired on and cost not only hundreds of lives but hundreds of millions and likely billions in lost sales and upcoming legal costs (Norwegian has already said they're suing for the costs that the grounding will cause them, others will surely follow).
The damage this kind of stuff will do to their brand is massive and it's already affected their sales, Garuda (an Indonesian airline) just cancelled their order of 48 planes. That alone will cost them over half a billion. And it gets worse: Only 381 planes have been delivered so far, less than 10 % of all existing orders. If more airlines start to follow suit as they probably will because the brand of the plane is now seriously damaged and people don't want to fly it (understandably) it might cause the entire plane to be unprofitable for them.
From both a business and product design standpoint they could not have made a more moronic decision, this is a godsend to their competitors, and I can bet you that the sales and marketing department of Airbus are currently ecstatic over this.
No, and he didn't even imply that. The point is however, that the way medicines are bought here means that the prices of drugs are lower. The companies still make a profit off of them, but we spend overall less money on drugs, because of things like collective bargaining.
Take something like insulin. The price of insulin in the US doubled from 2012 to 2016, and it's not because the product itself has change or consumption has skyrocketed. Quoting the article:
And one of the 3 main manufacturers of insulin is Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmacompany. So yes, European pharma companies are raking in a lot of money thanks to in no small part the american medical system. Now keep in mind, this is not some new wonder drug, insulin has been around for decades at this point, the manufacturing process has been honed down and is extremely efficient. A study from 2017 estimated the cost of production to be as follows:
Note: the siggested figures there are not the costs of manufacturing, they're suggested price-points at which the companies would still make a profit on the product. And the actual numbers are global medians. In the US, the average price for a year's supply is now around $5700 dollars a year (from the previous link). Depending on the type of insulin, that's a markup of anywhere from 100 % to around 640 %. On a life-saving chemical that people depend on daily. That's insane. This is only possible because even though there's competition in theory, the highly more privatized nature of the US pharma/medical sector has allowed for all the three major players to raise their costs in tandem, while simultaneously making no significant changes/improvements on the drug itself.
The commercialized nature of the system means it doesn't optimize itself for cost-efficiency or availability, it optimizes for maximal profit. Insulin is cheap to make, so obviously the companies sell it for very cheap in countries with lower incomes or just a better regulated health care system. This
On top of this, surely the guys flying their private jets around wouldn't like air-traffic to get grounded or for themselves to get in an accident? Just read today that many air-traffic controllers are now working second jobs out of necessity leading to sleep deprivation which sounds like the perfect combination of factors for some massive fuckups to happen. And that's what they're saying. Trump is playing with lives here.
I'm so glad right now that I'm not American because this shit is insane to follow even from the outside. Like, the government is essentially using close to a million people as slave labor right now and putting actual lives at risk because the guy in charge is a dude with the brain of a toddler that wants a massively expensive wall that will do nothing. I mean hell, didn't it just come to light in the el Chapo trial that the cartels are using planes, self-made submarines and tunnels to smuggle stuff in? And isn't it public knowledge at this point that most people who're in the US illegally have entered there legally? How many American lives is this shit worth? Because this keeps going and people will die as a result, that should be clear.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue at all. Like for fuck's sake Republicans: let Trump throw his tantrum about the wall and any other shit as much as you want, but do it without trying to actively ruin the finances and lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Why do they insist on letting him hold the country hostage? I thought there was supposed to be checks and balances. To top of the idiocy the republicans themselves don't want the wall, they could have passed the funding for that prior to the elections but they didn't, so what the fuck is this shit? They're letting a man-baby hold the entire government hostage for what, exactly? Are they this fucking spineless? Because it sure seems that way.
Of all of the outright moronic shit the Solarium Sultan with 'a very good brain' has said and done is this clusterfuck of a presidency, this shit takes the cake. This is beyond idiotic, and I hope you guys now that the longer this goes on, the more you're being laughed at abroad, because at this point it's the only thing left to do. It's absurd, and for the sake of the Americans I know and care about, I really hope you guys get your shit together, because this is some truly dangerous banana republic level bullshit. I expect this from like an African or a south American country, not the fucking US of A.
This is true for some, but not nearly all, workers. The fields directly related to automation such as programming are in high.demand and have seen wages grow, but this is not the case for jobs requiring less education. As automation becomes more and more commonplace, it means there's fewer and fewer jobs available for those doing manual tasks. In fact, if you look at OECD statistics such as labor compensation per hours worked, you'll note that the rate of increase in wages is in fact dropping. In the case of the US for example, the rate of growth has dropped from 6.53 % annually in 2000 to just 1,32 % in 2016. It's since come up a little bit from there to 2,7 % but when you combine this with inflation and a rising cost of living, real wages are actually falling now in the US (and many other western countries) because the rather modest wage growth is not matching these. The same trend can be observed elsewhere in the developing countries, including the euro area.
This shouldn't be that hard to understand in practice. Take something like invoicing, or any other job that doesn't require a high amount of skill but has been critical in employing many, many people on the office side of things. While I was studying I used to work such a job during the summers especially. Back then the office side team consisted of nearly 30 people as the job involved a lot of manual tasks, including scanning paper invoices, manually entering information about what's being paid so that the books are in order, matching the invoice with its existing purchase order etc... With electronic invoicing increasing at a rapid pace, these tasks are quickly becoming more and more automated as the systems learn to pre-fill this information and you can use less and less people in the process. Now, as this happens and companies cut the number of workers in these tasks, productivity per person indeed goes up. One person can easily do what in the past took 5, as the most time consuming parts of the process have been cut out. But do you think this means the companies end up increasing the wages of the remaining staff? Because that is not happening. There's simply no need to do that. The tasks themselves have in fact gotten easier to do, as now all the guys overseeing electronic invoicing have to do is check that the software hasn't missed anything. Since the goal of implementing these systems is to cut costs by cutting labor costs by reducing staff, it makes no sense for companies to then eat up their savings by bumping the salaries of the remaining workforce. It's not like the requirements of the job have gotten any more difficult. With less and less of such jobs available, the competition for the remaining spots will become fiercer and fiercer as automation proceeds to become more commonplace. With many more people wanting to do these jobs than there are jobs, oversupply means the wages will not grow and may even fall. Why pay more when so many people are willing to do it for slightly less?
The end-point of this development is cutting humans off the loop entirely. In 20 years, most data entry jobs will be gone, autonomous vehicles will make a lot of drivers unemployed. Manufacturing and logistics are already being automated at a high pace both in the West and in Asia. And so on. The more advanced automation and AI becomes, the less need there will be for humans across the board. The luddite fallacy rests on the notion that companies will forever pre
Yes clearly but not necessarily for profit reasons: they possibly just deemed that for Windows brand-reasons the OS still needs to ship with an 'MS' browser because that's part of the brand of the OS.
I mean, it's very likely that Edge makes Microsoft next to no money. They could move to Chrome or Firefox and arguably make more money if they made a deal with one of the 2 so they'd get paid some amount for including said browser as the default one, but again: this is likely not about the money for them.
Apple has its own browser. Google has its own browser. MS does not want to be seen as a lesser player for not having one of their 'own', even though their own is a ripoff of one of the existing one's and one that nearly no-one uses.
That, or they're holding off the switch to one of the 2 others while they pit the 2 against each other behind closed doors over who will pay them more.
Freedom of speech has never meant freedom to libel or incite violence towards others for example, nor does it cover things like false advertising.
Freedom of speech also does not mean that governments should be able to freely spread false information to their citizens. In Myanmar, it's gotten to the point that Facebook has been used to facilitate outright genocide by spreading altogether false claims about the local muslim minority, and this has been coming from the highest levels of authorities. Facebook recently banned a general of the army from the platform after it came to light that he had been publishing actual photos of dismembered children, claming them to have been killed by the Rohingya, a claim for which there is no supporting evidence.
Keep in mind the international stance is that the Myanmarian army has been actively conducting what's basically ethnic cleansing by killing civilians and driving them into exodus. This is a military regime actively using the social network to spread their own propaganda to facilitate and justify genocide, and up until this point FB has done nothing about it, even though similar activities have been going on for a few years. A UN report found that the Myanmarian military has clear genocidal intent behind their actions and that Facebook and disinformation have been a part of this operation.
So this is case of the state using a popular social media network in the country to push their own genocidal narrative and propaganda. So what Facebook must do, and what it's now slowly starting do do is the opposite of what you're saying: not to allow the state to use its power to feed false propaganda to its citizenry to justify genocide.
Imagine if your own government started to do something similar, demonizing one group of individuals and pushing false information through the platforms to support their narrative: 'Look at what the jews/the muslims/the blacks have done, they must be interned to prevent further crime!" Would you still be screaming 'b.-b-but the state must be free to lie to its own citizenry because of freedom of speech!", because I doubt that. That's not what freedom of speech is about.
What do you mean 'here we come?' These kinds of systems have been in use for a few years already in use in parts of the West, inclunding the UK, parts of Germany and Chicago. There's an alright documentary about ongoing developments and these systems with the name Pre-crime from last year by German directors Matthias Heeder & Monika Hielscher. I can recommend it.
Essentially these systems are divided into 2 categories: ones using open and public data (essentially public crime statistics) that tell the police where crime is conncentrated to help them plan patrol-routes and know where the hotspots are, and the truer pre-crime breed that combines this with personal data by scouring Facebook, twitter, facial recognition, financial and criminal history information, known friends, etc to form a 'threat assessment scoreä via an unknown closed-source algorithm. This is combined with aerial and CCTV footage often to be able to locate/track individuals and cars rapidly. It's essentially exactly what China is doing, except China is slightly ahead because they've got masssive resources put into it and they never claimed to care about individual rights.
The system is Chicago is the latter breed and has a 'heat-list' of around 400 individuals (at the time of the film, probably more now) that regularly pulled aside on the street and interviewed by the cops. Not because they've done anything wrrong, but because the almighty algorithm tells the police officers they might. There's no way for anyone to see what information of theirs is in the system, what their 'threat score is', or what it's based on. There are several commercial operators in this space. My guess is in 10 to 15 years we'll start seeing Chinese 'private' (state-owned western subsidiaries) entering the market in the West. Gotta catch all the terrorists and gang members before anything bad happens, it's for Your Protection(tm), citizen! The gang excuse is the one Chicago seems to be using.
Now is the time to fight the legality of these systems in courts throughout the West as unconstitutional breaches of basic rights. The police will counter with: 'but we're only using it to track Bad People(tm)' which must be countered with 'that's the excuse of all massive surveillance states, stop reading 1984 as a manual you god damn imbeciles." Unless this is done now, unless strong legal precedent against such systems is established in the coming few years they will spread fast, and after that there is no returning, because at that point opposing the systems will be faced with: 'why are you defending criminals?" and the game will be lost. People: do not make this a partisan issue. Regardless of your country and your political leanings everyone knows that China is fucked up. It doesn't matter one bit whether you're a , a libertarian or a neo-Marxist; both sides of the political spectrum can and have in the past become authoritarian. This is not about left vs. right, this is about authoritarian vs. liberal. Unite against this BS now, or stand divided over partisan bullshit and watch these systems take over everywhere.
I'm not a communist by any stretch (I own a third of a corporation), but I am very strongly and openly a leftist individual being from Finland where the political spectrum in general (as in the whole of rest of the West in fact) is more to the left from the US, but I will happily join hands with my libertarian counterparts on the right over this. We can disagree about health care and social security spending all we want when that's the topic, but we're both in agreement that this bullshit must stop.
If you just read the above statement and your first thought is to write some variation of: 'But this is what the left wants! It's your fault!1!11!" then we've already lost the game. That's what they want us to do, so I plead you all not to fall into this bickering, these issues are too important for that..
Yeah, us dumb millenials. Never before have people erroneously believed that a value of a commodity will not be able to come down, which is why this is the first time in economic history that we have bubbles.
If we only had people other than millenials managing investment banks and hedge fund the '08 crash would have been avoided. Those damn 15 year old CEOs falsely assuming housing prices cannot come down. Same with Maddof for example: had his clients not all been gullible millenial millionaires and billionaires a he'd have never been able to pull his con off. In fact, millenials also caused the stock market crash of 1929. Curse them. When will the older generations come to our rescue with their superior economic insight?
"Help us generation X and baby boomers, you're our only hope!"
Well, fuck. I'll take my request back, you can stop helping now.
Dude literally stated that he's opposed to all of this as a liberal and you went and argued the exact opposite point because apparently either you cannot read or just enjoy building massive strawmen. How 'fun'. I can do this too, watch me:
"What's the big deal, China's just making sure no-one can openly criticize the Dear Leader or his party, and those who dissent too hard or belong to the wrong religion/ethnicity/political movement will be taken to 're-education camps' where if need be they can be killed and their organs harvested if some Good Loyal Citizens(tm) are in need of them, isn't that your ultra-conservative Trumpian end-game; to have the government be able to operate with impunity, above the rule of law and get rid of the pesky media that Trump calls 'the enemy'?"
See how easy this is? Now Is this productive for the discussion at large in any way? Nope. It's just 'ooh I'm so right they're so wrong aah' -partisan ego jerk off for cunts like you. Grow the fuck up man.
I mean, thing with all large western states is, we don't really now if these kind of systems exist or not. Social media and credit information and so on is all out there, and there be large agencies with significant technical capabilities that we know are capable of tracking mobile phones' location and bank transfers etc. They operate gigantic data centers and apparently (if the Snowden leaks are to be believed) intercept data from ISPs and so on. Hell, Google and other companies already track device locations pretty much all the time for commercial purposes, so copying that data to some server somewhere in case of 'terrorists' is not that far out of the question.
I'm not saying it's happening 'cause again, there's no way to prove this. I'm just saying if some letter combination agency would be doing this, is there any way we'd really be able to know? The official line is that they're only collecting 'metadata' in bulk, but whatever 'metadata' in fact consists of is another matter entirely.
This is not to say that such tracking is identical to the system in China, because it's not used for loan applications and flight ticket purchases and so on like in China. Just pointing out that the collaboration between tech giants and governmental agencies in the West as well is likely more tight than most people assume.
The defense of all monopolies and oligopolies. 'It's not that we really want to charge as much as humanly possible for this thing because we know people want it and have nowhere else to go, it's just that it's really really expensive you see..."
Large parts of the US have no competition on the mobile networking side of things, which basically allows the companies to dictate the price. This is basic economics. It's right there in the summary:
Meanwhile, while we're a relatively small and a sparsely populated country here in Finland, we've got 2 major telecoms that have 4G coverage of most of the country. And whaddayaknow, once some competition appears, suddenly it turns out that data is not so expensive after all. My current plan has unlimited text messages, unlimited domestic call, unlimited (actually unlimited, no datacap) 5G (in theory, in practice the network is still 4G, we're in early phases of 5G infrastructure building) data in the Nordics + 15 gigs of outside the Nordics EU roaming data at at 30 euros a month.
The real question is, how's your infrastructure doing? 'Cause last I checked, according to american engineers, it's pretty dismal. See, the reason gas is expensive here is that we tax the shit out of it (75 % of the price of gas is tax here), which we then use to you know, actually maintain the road and bridge infrastructure. Moreover, gas being more expensive reduces the incentive of people to drive and actually has lead to fast development of public transit. I own a car, but it's actually faster for me to use public transportation to get from my front door to my main office because turns out the subway bypasses traffic jams, and it saves me money; for less than the price of refueling my car full once, I get one months unlimited use of Helsinki's puvlic transit network consisting of buses, a couple metro lines, a tram system, ferries and trains.
In the mid-to-long term, I'm actually all for gradually increasing the gas tax even more to drive people away from using it and to adopt modes of transit less destructive to the planetary ecosystem, because I really like breathing air and would like my potential kids and grandkids to be able to do it as well.
But yay for cheap gas! Never mind tomorrow or actual long-term planning like intelligent tool using apes that have an understanding of their own resource use and its impact on societies and the planet overall. Let the planet burn, as long as there's cheap gas for everyone amirite? Or maybe, just maybe we could for once take a hint from people with a long running relationship with the environment who understand that we're not outside the system but a part of it and we can't just keep exploiting it because we like fast cars and insanely inefficient combustion engines?
-Alanis Obomsawin, a member of Abenaki tribe from Canada, talking to author Ted Poole, from the book “Who is the Chairman of This Meeting?” (published in 1972)
But that's the thing, there was no potential threat. They had a phone call that falsely claimed there was a hostage situation going on, and they had a guy ho voluntarily came to open the door who they immediately pointed guns at and then opened fire when he twitched a little bit (unsurprisingly people are kinda nervous when they've done nothing wrong and go to open the door only to be faced with a squad of armed cops pointing guns and yelling orders). They hadn't done any kind of work to verify that the information given to them on the phone was accurate. Hell, even if it was accurate information they had no idea at that point if the guy who came to open the door was the perpetrator, and not a hostage that the perp made to open the door at gunpoint.They lacked any and all information to make the determination that this guy is a legitimate threat and not a civilian, yet they immediately and without any cause assumed him to be both armed and dangerous. That's not how competent police officers respond to a threat situation like this.
I can actually give some contrast, because over a decade ago here in Finland our (extended) family was the target of an attempted swatting by our then mentally unstable (an alcoholic and a schizophrenic off his meds) neighbor who called the cops during a large family party telling them that one of us had pointed a gun at them and threatened to kill them (none of us even owns a firearm). We had maybe 20 people around, including plenty of kids, I was around 17 at the time and was sitting in my room playing on the computer when I saw a couple of armed cops run past my window. I went to the backyard to see what the hell was going on and saw a handful of cops in tactical gear with weapons out but not pointed at anyone talking to my dad who had been barbecuing with our cousins. The female lead-officer told dad about the call, and also told him that they had been monitoring us for the past 30 minutes (I don't know where, but there's a large bridge crossing the railroad tracks a couple hundred meters from the house, I think they had guys up there with binoculars, or maybe just dudes in bushes on the other side of the street, maybe both) and that they'd come to the conclusion that we were not a threat and it was likely a prank call. Dad told them that the neighbor had a mental history and would occasionally yell stuff and insults at us, though he's never been violent, and also said that we don't have guns in the house but that the cops can come inside if they want to look for the gun that they will not find there. The lead officer responded with: 'there's no need sir, you have little kids in the house and there's no need to scare the.' They then checked the IDs of the adults around and left, but not before knocking on the neighbor's door and having a long talk with him about what this will mean for him. He eventually got a hefty fine for causing such a massive police operation (my brothers had went out as the cops were leaving and counted at least 6 cop cars (with 2 officers each) at a nearby parking lot, they'd come in fully prepared for a potential fire fight). I mean look at it from the cops' perspective: they knew none of us had a criminal record and there was no licensed firearm registered to anyone. They look at what's going on and they see a bunch of guys casually sipping on some beers, grilling and listening to music and a few smaller kids playing soccer in the yard. To top it all of, the neighbor who made the call was sitting on his porch (apparently wanting to witness us getting arrested and/or shot). It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this is not the kind of sight you'd expect to see after someone had supposedly been pointing a firearm at someone and angrily shouting death threats.
That's how you're supposed to handle a situation of this magnitude. You don't just go in an point the guns and then open fire at whichever guy you happen to see first because h
You're seriously claiming that legal tax-evasion via tax-havens is not a thing? Are you living under a rock? Sure, if you make all your income as a salary from a corporation, then reducing taxes on that is difficult, If you however own a corporation tax-evasion becomes easier the larger that corporation is. I mean, what do you think is the reason for basically all major multinational companies owning subsidiaries in the Caymans or other small nations with low taxes? Why do you think it is that basically all megacorps have a lower effective tax-rate on their billions of profit than you do as a employee making a million if creative accounting doesn't exist?
The way the game works when you get to the big-league depends a bit on where you're located and what you're selling but the basic idea is pretty simple and same everywhere: you setup a couple of companies, one in whichever country you're conducting business in (company A), another in a country with suitably lax tax-laws (company B). You then for example make sure that the licensing rights of the software or whatever it is that you're selling are held by the company in the tax-haven. You then do some math and figure out that after operating expenses and salaries and all, the profit of your actual company (company A) is say 100 million. Okay, you don't want to pay taxes on all of that. Well great, you just make a contractual arrangement so that company A has to pay licensing fees to company B to the tune of say, 95 million, and suddenly the profit of company A goes down to 5 million, and the 95 million gets moved to your tax-haven company that pays next to no tax on it.
Variations of this model are so common it's basically a public secret. It's how Apple & al have been dodging billions in taxes for years now. The most common of these arrangements used by US corporations especially to shield around a hundred billion from american taxation a year was known as the Double Irish that used to be combined with what the accountants call a Dutch sandwhich. Basically using Irish and Dutch tax and IP law to move massive amounts of profits from the EU to Bermuda and other tax-havens.
These schemes were forced to be closed by the European Union (American officials and government seemed not to care one bit even though the existence and use of these schemes was known for decades and even though it cost the US a lot in lost tax-revenue.) in 2014. However, Ireland, not wanting to lose all the corporate business especially on the IT-side that this loophole had brought them basically just re-instated the loophole (now known as the 'single malt' arrangement and used by for example Microsoft and probably Facebook) with slightly changed wording and application, but it's essentially still there and still used.
Hell, there's an entire wiki article on Ireland as a tax-haven, which states at the very beginning:
And Ireland is by far not the only country with such (intentional) loopholes in the laws, it's just the most commonly used. But yeah, clearly because you personally cannot avoid paying taxes on your million or so of (presumably wage) income, that means it must be impossible,
China is doing this with a clear intent to track its citizens and to silence any possible dissent. In the west the trends are molded by large corporations that are doing this for profit. The more addictive and socially pressuring you make the platforms, the more time on site user spend which then translates to more ad revenue. Also people who're slightly angry tend to be more engaged and hence pay more attention to ads, which is why the way 'filter bubbles' work is by mostly surrounding the user with content they agree with, but occasionally throwing in content they don't agree with, which is likely to provoke the user and make him react in some way (comment, like, dislike, share the post with a friend) which again, increases time on site and ad-revenue.
There's very little regulation of any of this. Western countries have long since recognized that advertising itself needs to be regulated so that people are not deceived by outright false claims and BS, but when it comes to the design of the platforms and their business models, it's a wild west environment. Thing to realize is that the platforms themselves are not going to magically change their behavior. They care about money, and money only. They will keep employing psychologists and other behavioral experts to design maximally addicting Pavlovian interfaces and filter-bubbles as long as it keeps making them more and more money. They do not inherently care whether or not anything people share on the platforms is actually true, what matters is how engaging it is. It's illegal for me or anyone in the west to take up an ad claiming that my new SnakeOil UltraPro homeopathic sugarwater pills will cure cancer at 20 € a month and extend lifespans by 30 years. However, if it so happens that some clueless blogger (that may or may not be connected to the company making the pills) running an 'alternative medicine' blog where they hype this remedy as the greatest thing ever decides to advertise his/her blog post on Facebook for people interested in homeopathy and natural remedies, Facebook will happily take their money and help them spread this disinformation, because the way laws work currently is that so long as what's being advertised is the blogpost (an opinion) and not the product itself, nothing illegal is happening. Convenient, don't ya think?
And in the meanwhile, while many rational people see this as problem, any attempt to solve this via regulations is always met with an uproar of 'look at Facebook/the government trying to censor information/free speech, this is turning into China!" The platforms don't want to interfere with content because they see that as damaging to their bottom-line (hell, the only reason Alex Jones was eventually banned is because of the threats he made and the legal departments of the companies probably decided that the amount of money he's bringing in is not worth the risk of a potential lawsuit), and the governments are unwilling or incapable of deciding what kind of regulation should be put in place to control the behavior of these platforms, because they're both clueless of the way tech works and afraid of the political downfall ('My opponent wants to decide what YOU see on Facebook, whereas I will never touch your social media feed!' etc) so the trends are just allowed to continue and amplify.
Whether we like it or not (and I don't) the fact of the matter is that social media platforms have become the primary channel of information delivery especially for young people and yet they remain massively more unregulated than any traditional media outlets. This is a problem, and one that the companies will not fix on their own because its currently massively beneficial for them. Comedy central did a very good skit about this where they equated
The article didn't provide any support for the claim made therein. It links to a previous story about a man returning from the middle-east to Canada and then throws out the following claims:
Not only is the number itself not sourced anywhere in the article, neither is the claim that these men are all 'battle hardened terrorists'. People travel to conflict areas to for numerous reasons (remember, people do have family and friends still in there) and to work in numerous capacities, including as aid-workers and the people who do end up fighting fight on both sides of the conflict. There are volunteers from the west who've been fighting against the terrorists in Syria for example.
The idiocy then continues:
Well that settles it then doesn't it. If the author of the article doesn't believe it, then clearly it must not be the case right? Utter BS.
The unfounded claims then continue, with the author throwing in this:
Yet again no factual support for either of the claims made, they're simply thrown in there and the reader is expected to believe that they're true.
Yet another repetition of an unfounded claim.
Because in a nation with laws, you need evidence of a crime to prosecute someone. The author seems to be suggesting that simply visiting a conflict area is enough to serve as a basis for prosecution, which it isn't.
Because I'm guessing most if not all of them are Canadian citizens and a country cannot deport its own citizens and again even if they're foreign nationals deporting them means there has to be evidence that they're guilty of something other than just travelling to the middle-east and back.
This is not a news article of any sort, it's a blog/opinion piece by an outlet that clearly has an agenda and doesn't provide basic facts about the situation but simply throws out assertions. That's not a 'messenger', that's a propaganda-outlet, and they're quite upfront about it. Similar rhetoric is always used when defending unfounded claims. The net is full of conspiratorial blog-sites masquerading as news outlets posting all kinds of wild unfounded BS and the counter-argument from fans is always 'why are you attacking the source and not the claims' when the real question should be 'why is anyone believing such claims to begin with with little to no evidence?' On top of that, these sites themselves don't dispute claims with facts, but hand-waive them with statements like 'I don't believe this', so they themselves are simply choosing to attack the messenger instead of using facts to even try and support their arguments.
Yeah, it's unbelievable that China still thinks it can go on with the war. It's been what, 17 years in Afghanistan for example and the conflict keeps going despite massive casualties, a bill in the of over 2 trillion that could have been used more productively and no end in sight. It's almost like this is a problem that cannot be solved with military force, but stubborn China and their massive fleet of aircraft carries and overseas bases doesn't seem to care. Gotta kill the terrorists until there are no longer terrorists and finally there will be peace on Earth, right?
The ancient Chinese emperor George Bush once famously said in 2002: "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." But what he didn't realize is that terrorism is not an ideology, it's a tactic. You can't have a war on a tactic that's been used by insurgencies through time immemorial and expect it to someday be 'defeated'.
Truly, the Chinese have a lot to learn. But here we stand in the west, powerless to do anything about this wanton madness, watching as the dragonlords, blinded by their ideology of 'Chinese exceptionalism' keep turning large rocks into smaller rocks with precision guided state of the art weaponry, a single unit of which could be used to put many kids through school or provide them with health care like many western countries do. Truly a sad, sad state of affairs.
One day I can only hope the Chinese take a lesson from the great American general Sun Tzu who wrote: 'He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot will be victorious.'. & There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.'
Nope. The EU government is regulating which services its member governments are allowed to run as monopolies (and there are cases where monopolies are allowed. In Finland and Sweden for example all liquor stores are government run which has been allowed because the revenue collected from the sale of liquor are used by the state to provide health care to treat alcohol-related illnesses).
There's nothing about this ruling that prevents the Hungarian government from maintaining a payment service, this ruling just means the state cannot use its power to prevent competition from emerging or entering the market. In the exact same way the Hungarian government can start selling cars for all the Union cares, as long as they don't enact a system whereby all auto-sales have to be conducted through the government.
Free market and freedom of competition is one of the core values of the Union. There are plenty of existing mobile-payment companies in existence in Europe that cannot currently enter the market in Hungary because of the monopoly, and that violates European law.
Oh yes, finally the British government free from this tyrannical oppression of the free market will be able to implement more state-run monopolies, because who needs competition when the State can simply run all the services, right? Brexit remains of the largest political blunders in modern British history that will do them exactly no good.
Yes, but what I'm saying is that the way it is set up has created a cycle. Because the amount of bitcoins awarded has a half-life, and because the awarded coin always goes to the group who solves the block, this has created a situation where the competition for new coins grows all the time, leading to higher centralization (most mining is now done by commercial operators) and increasing difficulty. If you look at the chart from the wiki you'll not that although there are occasional small drops, the overall trend in difficulty has been trending up since the turn of 09/10. And that's not all, that chart conveniently ends at the end of last year. If you check the current difficulty (for example here), you'll notice it has over tripled since the start of the year.
So yes, you're very much correct that the difficulty can also go down, but what I said still true as well: so far the difficulty is trending up for the past decade and especially fast as of late, which leads to increased mining cost. It's possible that at some point competition in the professional mining industry will decrease, which might decrease the difficulty, but this is not certain, because it's just as possible that the remaining operators will simply increase their capacity to try and get a larger share of the market, which would keep difficulty up or even raise it.
Damnit, the link to the study is broken, sorry people. Here's a working one.
I clearly need more coffee.
Do they? 'Cause that's news to me. I asked an American living here in Finland that I have befriended about this and he said it's BS. So one of you guys is wrong. I tend to trust my friends more than strangers on the internet but because I wanted to make sure I went to Google and 10 seconds later found this in the wiki
The study in question is a 2014 study from Harvard Law School titled The High Cost of ‘Free’ Photo Voter Identification Cards '
So a trusted and informed friend and a dude from Harvard Law against 1 anonymous coward... damn, this is a tough one but I do think you may in fact be full of shit, because I did crunch the numbers and came tot he conclusion that a 'free card' costing anywhere from 75 $ upwards is not in fact free.
This reminds me of that quote from Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Can't speak for ethereum, but in the case of BC this is entirely intentional. Since the computational complexity of the BC transactions grows with time, it's unavoidable that the energy-usage is also going to increase at the same time. This, coupled with a finite cap on the total amount of BC is also what makes BC deflationary by design, which can be a good property for an investment but is overall a terrible property for a currency.
To claim that this is not intentional when it stems from the way the currency & cryptography is set up is just ridiculous.
Greetings from the rest of the world. Here in Finland we do in fact have to provide ID upon voting, and we do not have to to register to vote because your ID is checked against a list of eligible voters upon arrival to the voting site. However, social services also funds the cost of the ID for those who cannot afford it (which is why essentially everyone in Finland has an ID). This being the case, the ID requirement does not prevent anyone from voting regardless of income status. This point is often conveniently left out in the american discussions over voter IDs when the 'pretty much everyone else does it' -argument is presented because from what I've seen so far, voter ID proposals in the States don't have provisions for providing an ID for people who can't pay for it, and that's the crux of the problem.
Voting is such a fundamental right that it should never be gated behind a financial barrier of any kind, wouldn't you agree?
So you're advocating for people with moral differences working for megacorporations to just quit and go elsewhere. Okay. How do you think that'll play out in the long term? If the problem is, as you put it, that these corporations are 'big, sociopathic lumbering expressions of greed and brutality', do you think that situation will be made better or worse if people simply stop trying to change them and move elsewhere?
Corporations, by their very nature, are amoral. They're guided first and foremost by profit and profit alone. They will only act morally if they see moral behavior as something that will bring them more cash, or alternatively if they see their immoral behavior as something that hampers their profit. Now, at this point it's clear that these tech megacorporations like Google, Apple, Amazon and others will not be be going bankrupt because of lessening demand. I mean, you damn these corporations as sociopathic, yet it's very likely that within the past 24 hours you have used their products, or someone you've bought stuff from is using their products. I know I have. The demand is there and it's steady.
So the consumers clearly do not care because they really can't. You can't drive a car without supporting gigantic oil companies, and you can't own or use a smartphone without supporting at least one of the tech giants. That being the case the only groups that are left that can affect their behavior are: the shareholders, the advertisers, the employees, or the state via laws and regulations. Now I think everyone agrees the shareholders are not going to do much because they are the company and as such are only interested in the money. Same for the most part goes for the advertisers; they have no interest in biting the hand that feeds them more customers and more money. That leaves us with the employees and the state as the groups that can potentially do something about the behavior. Now, I'm personally of the opinion that megacorporations should be under tighter regulations, because one needs only to look 10 years to the past to see how much damage gigantic corporations can do to the entire global economy (and let's not even go into the environmental side of things) when they're left on their own and can just operate purely on greed.
However I'm well aware that in the american political landscape calling for more regulations is usually met with heavy scorn as it's deemed 'anti-capitalist' (because the ability to make as much profit as possible is a sacred value in most of the West). Hell, we just saw Trump essentially saying that he doesn't give a damn if you guys sell tons of weapons to a regime that murders journalists working for American news outlets. I mean, who cares about freedom of speech, or freedom in general? We've reached peak Ferengi, and war is indeed, good for business. So let the Saudis oppress their own people and keep turning Yemen into an ever growing pile of rubble and human misery, as long as they do it with American high-quality weapons it's all good - think of all the jobs and the money to be made there! Same goes for the environment: the guiding principle of Trump and the republicans as far as I can see from the outside is deregulation, deregulation, and more deregulation. Who cares if the planet burns, the important thing is there's a lot of money to be made in the meanwhile, and something as pesky as morals or the long-term survival of advanced civilizations on the planet must not be let to interfere with business.
With the general attitude towards megacorporations among mainstream American politicians being taken straight from the playbook of Gordon Gekko, and many of these corporations being so universal right now that there's no effective way most consumers can avoid giving them money, the employees are in fact the only group that can effectively pressure many of these corporations because the empl
Yep. And for those who haven't read their history, this is by no means a new, or a US centered phenomenon. The father of political history Thucydides descried the political situation in island of Corsya after their civil war in 427 BC as all trust in the political system had been destroyed and the island turned to heavy partisanship thusly: