The Brick is a large Canadian store, mostly for furniture, mattresses, and appliances. The submitter may not even be aware that it's only Canadian. They are infamous for advertising that you can purchase their shit for a very long deferred payment (as they put it, for $0 down, $0 payments, 0% interest for 2 years, back when interest rates were high). These adds have gone on for over 20 years, perhaps much longer.
They got dinged recently for actually requiring down payments despite their advertising, because you pay tax up front, and "administrative fees", and delivery, etc. etc., so they kind of have a reputation for welching on their advertised prices already.
I'm not saying I love region locking, but counterintuitively, it's overly hasty to say there's no benefit to consumers in terms of price.
Things that are region-locked tend to be things with high fixed one-time costs and very low replication costs. That means to be profitable, you must earn an essentially-fixed amount of money.
So imagine a $1 million one-time cost item with $0 replication cost, for the sake of argument. If you could region-lock, you may be able to sell 900K of them at $1 apiece in PovertyLand, and 15K of them at $10 apiece in RichWorld, thus making a profit of $50000. If you can't region-lock in any way (including non-technical methods such as mild shipping inconveniences), then they have to be the same price everywhere. If you still want to sell for $1 apiece, you need to sell 85K more of them in RichWorld, but dropping the price 90% only gets you 10K more buyers because there are a lot more poor people than rich people, so now it's not a profitable venture, so it won't happen in the first place.
But maybe you sell at $2 apiece. Now you can only sell to 490K people in PovertyLand, at 20K people in RichWorld. You're back to making a profit of $20000. However, that's less profit than before, and look at who loses:
490K people in PovertyLand paid double 410K people in PovertyLand don't get your product at all 5K more people in RichWorld get your product 15K people in RichWorld get 80% off.
In total, over 98% of consumers are worse off without region locking, and even a large portion of rich people (25%) are worse off. The corporation doesn't profit either, in fact they look worse and do worse. Only about 1.6% of people benefit, by shaving off dollars that they could have afforded anyway.
This is of course a contrived scenario, and any given actual scenario will be so complicated it's likely impossible to make a simple call. The point is it's *not* obvious who does and does not benefit in nontrivial scenarios.
Of course, this makes me consider whether capitalism is really the best model for things where initial investment is the dominant cost and ongoing capital is trivial, but that's an entirely different question which is a powderkeg on slashdot and other places.
- Yes, value is not a single attribute but a collection of attributes - But there is still clearly such a thing as a D player who is just bad at all things relevant to an organization, and players that are actually useful to an organization, and you can sort of summarize this by talking about A players in the abstract. - There is also such a thing as a person who is significantly more productive in their job capacity as most of their peers. It just happens. Doesn't really matter whether you excuse it by saying they have no social life and their hygiene means they'll never have a family.
It's kind of like how you can have an A student even though academically they'll get marks in many different subjects and they may get a C in gym or English or math, and you can have a C student even though they absolutely nail art class.
And if everybody takes shop in high school they are all carpenters, and if everybody takes home ec in high school they are all chefs, and if everybody takes music they all play in the orchestra, etc., etc..
I very strongly suspect that if people make noise about coding on Windows 8 or iOS as a course every year, Microsoft / Apple would respectively "donate" dev licenses to the students, because it would be pretty stupid of them to let the other guy outbid them on this.
It's a lot easier to enforce "no dogs" than "no dog shit". You have to see dogshit as it happens with nobody picking it up. And dogs stop barking after your emergency 911 call to the police for "my neighbours dog is barking! Ticket him $50 on the double!". Dog existence? Not so much.
There are exceptions of course, like seeing-eye dogs or police dogs or other working animals.
You evidently don't understand the definition of regressive tax. It's perfectly possible to give a wealth tax that is inherently progressive, by definition. We don't tend to do that (wealth taxes discourage reasonable savings and planning).
If you want to punish the successful, reward failure [...]
You just finished saying that it was impossible to have a progressive tax, so this is a non-issue.
Regardless, how do people think that progressive taxes (or, if you must, "less regressive" taxes) punish the successful and reward failure? Punishing the successful and rewarding failure means that the failures get more than the successful. But that's not true. Somebody in a hypothetical country who makes 200K per year and pays 80K in taxes has 120K net dollars per year, while the guy in the same country who makes 20K per year and pays no taxes has 20K net dollars at the end of the year. The guy who was more successful was "rewarded" 6 times as much as the guy who failed. To put it another way, taking a voluntary 50% paycut in order to dodge taxes is basically never a good move (leaving aside from BS with capital gains taxes).
And since you are a liberal, I doubt you'll ever understand this simple little truth.
And since you're a jerk, you just can't resist.
You want successful tax policy, tax things society doesn't want [...]. But what you'll find is eventually those taxes diminishing as people quit the activities you're taxing.
Good, that sounds wonderful. Two birds with one stone. If we need more revenue later, we can tax something else.
I'm not familiar with the backstory, but my intuition tells me, and this article agrees (http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/january/new0122d.htm), that once the payout happened it replaced the royalty deal. That settlement was January 1997, long predating any serious integration of IE with Windows (IE4 was the first with shell integration in October 1997).
If that's not a perfect cancer cure, I don't know what is.
Oh! I know a better one! A perfect cancer cure is:
A truly permanent cure that works in all cases with no risk of death, other adverse side effects, or recurrence.
And then there's something even better than a cure: a guaranteed prevention mechanism that is inherited, so you don't even have to do things to new humans.
Homeopathy is, unfortunately, more of a left-wing delusion than right-wing. Young earth creationism and global warming denial tend to be right wing delusions. Other left wing problems include irrational beliefs about power generation (to some extent this happens on the other side, but even most hard right wingers admit fossil fuels aren't an ideal long-term solution...), and mysticism about quantum mechanics, "organic foods", and GMOs. There are healthcare mysticisms on both sides too. The "religious right" is ironically particularly resistant to certain alternative medicines that come packaged with incompatible religious messages, like weird aura/crystal healing bullshit.
The problem is that you have this idea that the left is the "right about everything" party and the right is the "wrong about everything" party. The only thing you can be sure a left-winger is right about is politics:), not science. In fact, your own post is an ad hominem fallacy: the right are more likely to be wrong about evolution, THEREFORE they must be more likely to be wrong about vaccines. It's a very irrational way to view the world and that's exactly how we get the problem of these ridiculous beliefs in the first place.
Remember, just because a person is too ignorant or even too stupid to understand the right answer doesn't mean they'll believe the wrong answer. Especially in cases where you narrow to two choices (left and right wing) where they'll pick the right answer half the time even for completely wrong reasons. They'll still pick the wrong answer on a bunch of other things.
No, it's entirely true. Just look up the definition of relativity -- even just the word itself, not the physics term. It literally means the absence of absolutes -- in this case, space and time.
A consequence of relativity is that Alice and Bob can disagree on which came first: event C or event D, and both can be correct and both correctly think the other guy is incorrect, because each exists in a realm where their event actually did come first. Despite inhabiting the same universe.
This said, we think that C cannot cause D, nor D cause C, if there's any disagreement between Alice and Bob about which one came first. Only when one event precedes the other for all observers can the one possibly be the cause of the other.
Some of this gets trickier still when you look at some variations of the double slit experiment, eg. the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, where an effect appears to precede a cause (alas, not in a way that lets us send a message to the past).
Not necessarily, it's just relativistic. It's hard to break out of an absolutist mindset, but there isn't really a sensible way to say that the black hole is there at all without invoking a set of physics that outright demands you think relatively. Remember, we're actually observing phenomena which is consistent with a physics model that is rooted in relativity, not downloading absolute knowledge of the existence of black holes at this location in spacetime.
The entire population of earth is essentially in the same observation "moment" in time relative to this black hole, though.
Lots of people have factored in pollution at the generating site.
It depends on what the generating site is, but its uniformly better than a car. You have large plants and many employees dedicated to efficiently producing electricity, it will do it with much higher efficiency than an engine constrained to run in a relatively-small mobile plastic box with almost no serious maintenance.
That part is super easy. The battery manufacturing and disposal processes (which you referred to) are the places you can make a serious argument about electric car pollution. The actual power generation is wildly in favour of electric cars, even if you have to add ~15% to compensate for inductive charging inefficiencies. The pollution types generated are also quite difference: more diffuse from cars and concentrated from electric. This has the same situation of nuclear power vs. fossil power (regardless of your position on nuclear power; just comparing those two in isolation since we don't have significant solar-powered cars:)), where there's significantly less pollution impact from nuclear but since it's concentrated it can look pretty bad at a glance compared to coal.
It's not often explained why "porn laying about in the open and hedonism on open display" is bad. I'd be uncomfortable with that too, but the only strong reason I can give is that I come from a culture where that was thought to be bad.
a) Speed limit laws designed for human drivers will never change when driverless cars are common. --- to some extent in residential areas they still need a lower limit to account for children running out into the street, but anywhere you can go kind of fast now, the roads could be built for driverless cars to go much faster. b) Driverless cars will not have an emergency mode.
Emergency situations are always a priority as transportation and communications infrastructure becomes commonplace -- think of 911 and then E911 etc.. The greater the percent of cars on the road that are driverless, the more you can just punch a "911" button and get to the nearest hospital quick with every other car automatically dodging out of your way, clearing a single lane of a multilane street just-in-time. Resisting driverless cars is tantamount to insisting that when you drive your wife to the hospital, you want to deal with random jackasses and you also do not want the police to know why you are driving like an idiot.
This stuff can happen today, eg. brake failure, so it's not unprecedented. In the case of brake failure, the liability is typically in the hands of the manufacturer and/or the dealership. Only extremely rarely is that a jailable offense (in the sense that vaccination injuries would only very rarely be a jailable offense).
This isn't a new kind of liability problem, it's just a different scope.
Baked in that argument is the assumption that the consequences of educating a society = the consequences of educating a single individual * the number of individuals. But there's reason to suspect that education carries a network effect on society.
The GP is talking about a transition from 40 years ago to now in public schooling. Odds are if you're working in Singapore, your colleagues came out ~20 years ago. The education system changing does not have immediate effect on the people educated under a worse system. Nor is it reasonable to compare a single individual against any aggregate group in a statistical study.
Note that I can't speak to the accuracy of the GP at all and don't claim to.
Do we have any evidence that ChromeOS is any better on this front?
And unlike Microsoft, Google might actually make this work securely.
That's a bizarre assumption. The proper assumption is that nobody can make this work securely (regardless of the company, closed/open source policy, etc.), and it's on them to prove you wrong 99% of the time (knowing that there *will* be cracks in any nontrivial system).
Now, on the flip side -- HTML & javascript applications are essentially ephemeral apps, and that's literally what browsers are designed to run. So are Flash apps, essentially, especially since Chrome and IE (the two dominant desktop web browsers) have Flash bundled right into the browser install, essentially making it a part of the browser. And we get along with that right now.
Of course, some slashdotters go hardcore with noscript and flashblock etc., but most people don't (I'd venture that even most slashdotters don't, it's just that slashdotters *consciously* don't). Then there's the fact that Flash is infamous for its vulnerabilities...
Slashdot Mirror
I also read a fictional book that predicted an alien invasion in 2015, so we better start getting prepared.
Read all about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/maher_arar
Yes, it's a wikipedia cite, but that article itself has 118 citations for whatever particular aspect you need.
I think it's only fair that they don't get full frequent flyer credit on those flights, really.
Are you suggesting that Delta would not have charged those customers all of those things if they didn't get a sweet deal on their tickets?
The Brick is a large Canadian store, mostly for furniture, mattresses, and appliances. The submitter may not even be aware that it's only Canadian. They are infamous for advertising that you can purchase their shit for a very long deferred payment (as they put it, for $0 down, $0 payments, 0% interest for 2 years, back when interest rates were high). These adds have gone on for over 20 years, perhaps much longer.
They got dinged recently for actually requiring down payments despite their advertising, because you pay tax up front, and "administrative fees", and delivery, etc. etc., so they kind of have a reputation for welching on their advertised prices already.
I'm not saying I love region locking, but counterintuitively, it's overly hasty to say there's no benefit to consumers in terms of price.
Things that are region-locked tend to be things with high fixed one-time costs and very low replication costs. That means to be profitable, you must earn an essentially-fixed amount of money.
So imagine a $1 million one-time cost item with $0 replication cost, for the sake of argument. If you could region-lock, you may be able to sell 900K of them at $1 apiece in PovertyLand, and 15K of them at $10 apiece in RichWorld, thus making a profit of $50000. If you can't region-lock in any way (including non-technical methods such as mild shipping inconveniences), then they have to be the same price everywhere. If you still want to sell for $1 apiece, you need to sell 85K more of them in RichWorld, but dropping the price 90% only gets you 10K more buyers because there are a lot more poor people than rich people, so now it's not a profitable venture, so it won't happen in the first place.
But maybe you sell at $2 apiece. Now you can only sell to 490K people in PovertyLand, at 20K people in RichWorld. You're back to making a profit of $20000. However, that's less profit than before, and look at who loses:
490K people in PovertyLand paid double
410K people in PovertyLand don't get your product at all
5K more people in RichWorld get your product
15K people in RichWorld get 80% off.
In total, over 98% of consumers are worse off without region locking, and even a large portion of rich people (25%) are worse off. The corporation doesn't profit either, in fact they look worse and do worse. Only about 1.6% of people benefit, by shaving off dollars that they could have afforded anyway.
This is of course a contrived scenario, and any given actual scenario will be so complicated it's likely impossible to make a simple call. The point is it's *not* obvious who does and does not benefit in nontrivial scenarios.
Of course, this makes me consider whether capitalism is really the best model for things where initial investment is the dominant cost and ongoing capital is trivial, but that's an entirely different question which is a powderkeg on slashdot and other places.
The fact is:
- Yes, value is not a single attribute but a collection of attributes
- But there is still clearly such a thing as a D player who is just bad at all things relevant to an organization, and players that are actually useful to an organization, and you can sort of summarize this by talking about A players in the abstract.
- There is also such a thing as a person who is significantly more productive in their job capacity as most of their peers. It just happens. Doesn't really matter whether you excuse it by saying they have no social life and their hygiene means they'll never have a family.
It's kind of like how you can have an A student even though academically they'll get marks in many different subjects and they may get a C in gym or English or math, and you can have a C student even though they absolutely nail art class.
And if everybody takes shop in high school they are all carpenters, and if everybody takes home ec in high school they are all chefs, and if everybody takes music they all play in the orchestra, etc., etc..
I very strongly suspect that if people make noise about coding on Windows 8 or iOS as a course every year, Microsoft / Apple would respectively "donate" dev licenses to the students, because it would be pretty stupid of them to let the other guy outbid them on this.
It's a lot easier to enforce "no dogs" than "no dog shit". You have to see dogshit as it happens with nobody picking it up. And dogs stop barking after your emergency 911 call to the police for "my neighbours dog is barking! Ticket him $50 on the double!". Dog existence? Not so much.
There are exceptions of course, like seeing-eye dogs or police dogs or other working animals.
Nobody buying at McDonald's is paying for quality.
All Taxes are regressive. ALWAYS.
You evidently don't understand the definition of regressive tax. It's perfectly possible to give a wealth tax that is inherently progressive, by definition. We don't tend to do that (wealth taxes discourage reasonable savings and planning).
If you want to punish the successful, reward failure [...]
You just finished saying that it was impossible to have a progressive tax, so this is a non-issue.
Regardless, how do people think that progressive taxes (or, if you must, "less regressive" taxes) punish the successful and reward failure? Punishing the successful and rewarding failure means that the failures get more than the successful. But that's not true. Somebody in a hypothetical country who makes 200K per year and pays 80K in taxes has 120K net dollars per year, while the guy in the same country who makes 20K per year and pays no taxes has 20K net dollars at the end of the year. The guy who was more successful was "rewarded" 6 times as much as the guy who failed. To put it another way, taking a voluntary 50% paycut in order to dodge taxes is basically never a good move (leaving aside from BS with capital gains taxes).
And since you are a liberal, I doubt you'll ever understand this simple little truth.
And since you're a jerk, you just can't resist.
You want successful tax policy, tax things society doesn't want [...]. But what you'll find is eventually those taxes diminishing as people quit the activities you're taxing.
Good, that sounds wonderful. Two birds with one stone. If we need more revenue later, we can tax something else.
I'm not familiar with the backstory, but my intuition tells me, and this article agrees (http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/january/new0122d.htm), that once the payout happened it replaced the royalty deal. That settlement was January 1997, long predating any serious integration of IE with Windows (IE4 was the first with shell integration in October 1997).
If that's not a perfect cancer cure, I don't know what is.
Oh! I know a better one! A perfect cancer cure is:
A truly permanent cure that works in all cases with no risk of death, other adverse side effects, or recurrence.
And then there's something even better than a cure: a guaranteed prevention mechanism that is inherited, so you don't even have to do things to new humans.
Homeopathy is, unfortunately, more of a left-wing delusion than right-wing. Young earth creationism and global warming denial tend to be right wing delusions. Other left wing problems include irrational beliefs about power generation (to some extent this happens on the other side, but even most hard right wingers admit fossil fuels aren't an ideal long-term solution...), and mysticism about quantum mechanics, "organic foods", and GMOs. There are healthcare mysticisms on both sides too. The "religious right" is ironically particularly resistant to certain alternative medicines that come packaged with incompatible religious messages, like weird aura/crystal healing bullshit.
The problem is that you have this idea that the left is the "right about everything" party and the right is the "wrong about everything" party. The only thing you can be sure a left-winger is right about is politics :), not science. In fact, your own post is an ad hominem fallacy: the right are more likely to be wrong about evolution, THEREFORE they must be more likely to be wrong about vaccines. It's a very irrational way to view the world and that's exactly how we get the problem of these ridiculous beliefs in the first place.
Remember, just because a person is too ignorant or even too stupid to understand the right answer doesn't mean they'll believe the wrong answer. Especially in cases where you narrow to two choices (left and right wing) where they'll pick the right answer half the time even for completely wrong reasons. They'll still pick the wrong answer on a bunch of other things.
As for who is more anti-vax? Well, according to this: http://today.yougov.com/news/2012/12/05/public-support-vaccination-remains-strong/, it's true: in the US, the right wing is more anti-vax than the left wing, although not by a wide margin. You appear to be correct about vaccination, for completely the wrong reasons.
No, it's entirely true. Just look up the definition of relativity -- even just the word itself, not the physics term. It literally means the absence of absolutes -- in this case, space and time.
A consequence of relativity is that Alice and Bob can disagree on which came first: event C or event D, and both can be correct and both correctly think the other guy is incorrect, because each exists in a realm where their event actually did come first. Despite inhabiting the same universe.
This said, we think that C cannot cause D, nor D cause C, if there's any disagreement between Alice and Bob about which one came first. Only when one event precedes the other for all observers can the one possibly be the cause of the other.
Some of this gets trickier still when you look at some variations of the double slit experiment, eg. the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, where an effect appears to precede a cause (alas, not in a way that lets us send a message to the past).
Not necessarily, it's just relativistic. It's hard to break out of an absolutist mindset, but there isn't really a sensible way to say that the black hole is there at all without invoking a set of physics that outright demands you think relatively. Remember, we're actually observing phenomena which is consistent with a physics model that is rooted in relativity, not downloading absolute knowledge of the existence of black holes at this location in spacetime.
The entire population of earth is essentially in the same observation "moment" in time relative to this black hole, though.
Lots of people have factored in pollution at the generating site.
It depends on what the generating site is, but its uniformly better than a car. You have large plants and many employees dedicated to efficiently producing electricity, it will do it with much higher efficiency than an engine constrained to run in a relatively-small mobile plastic box with almost no serious maintenance.
That part is super easy. The battery manufacturing and disposal processes (which you referred to) are the places you can make a serious argument about electric car pollution. The actual power generation is wildly in favour of electric cars, even if you have to add ~15% to compensate for inductive charging inefficiencies. The pollution types generated are also quite difference: more diffuse from cars and concentrated from electric. This has the same situation of nuclear power vs. fossil power (regardless of your position on nuclear power; just comparing those two in isolation since we don't have significant solar-powered cars :)), where there's significantly less pollution impact from nuclear but since it's concentrated it can look pretty bad at a glance compared to coal.
No, it also makes sense if you think that a person who does it is uniquely ruthless.
Or else you're assuming you are the only morally-aware engineer in the universe. Which is just as arrogant as thinking you are uniquely clever.
It's not often explained why "porn laying about in the open and hedonism on open display" is bad. I'd be uncomfortable with that too, but the only strong reason I can give is that I come from a culture where that was thought to be bad.
I also do not understand why people think:
a) Speed limit laws designed for human drivers will never change when driverless cars are common.
--- to some extent in residential areas they still need a lower limit to account for children running out into the street, but anywhere you can go kind of fast now, the roads could be built for driverless cars to go much faster.
b) Driverless cars will not have an emergency mode.
Emergency situations are always a priority as transportation and communications infrastructure becomes commonplace -- think of 911 and then E911 etc.. The greater the percent of cars on the road that are driverless, the more you can just punch a "911" button and get to the nearest hospital quick with every other car automatically dodging out of your way, clearing a single lane of a multilane street just-in-time. Resisting driverless cars is tantamount to insisting that when you drive your wife to the hospital, you want to deal with random jackasses and you also do not want the police to know why you are driving like an idiot.
This stuff can happen today, eg. brake failure, so it's not unprecedented. In the case of brake failure, the liability is typically in the hands of the manufacturer and/or the dealership. Only extremely rarely is that a jailable offense (in the sense that vaccination injuries would only very rarely be a jailable offense).
This isn't a new kind of liability problem, it's just a different scope.
Baked in that argument is the assumption that the consequences of educating a society = the consequences of educating a single individual * the number of individuals. But there's reason to suspect that education carries a network effect on society.
When were your peers trained?
The GP is talking about a transition from 40 years ago to now in public schooling. Odds are if you're working in Singapore, your colleagues came out ~20 years ago. The education system changing does not have immediate effect on the people educated under a worse system. Nor is it reasonable to compare a single individual against any aggregate group in a statistical study.
Note that I can't speak to the accuracy of the GP at all and don't claim to.
Do we have any evidence that ChromeOS is any better on this front?
And unlike Microsoft, Google might actually make this work securely.
That's a bizarre assumption. The proper assumption is that nobody can make this work securely (regardless of the company, closed/open source policy, etc.), and it's on them to prove you wrong 99% of the time (knowing that there *will* be cracks in any nontrivial system).
Now, on the flip side -- HTML & javascript applications are essentially ephemeral apps, and that's literally what browsers are designed to run. So are Flash apps, essentially, especially since Chrome and IE (the two dominant desktop web browsers) have Flash bundled right into the browser install, essentially making it a part of the browser. And we get along with that right now.
Of course, some slashdotters go hardcore with noscript and flashblock etc., but most people don't (I'd venture that even most slashdotters don't, it's just that slashdotters *consciously* don't). Then there's the fact that Flash is infamous for its vulnerabilities...
Dude, they stopped selling XP years ago, yet support doesn't end until April 8, 2014.
Julie Larson Green talking about rebranding Windows RT does not mean you are losing support effective immediately.
He's comparing a TV to a computer monitor, not to another smaller TV. The use cases generally differ.