What's cheaper than and more efficient than fighting wars? To not do it.
That is correct - as long as you can convince the other side to do the same. Such sets of two rational actors don't wage wars; but if any one of them is not rational, or has political goals that are not aligned with "cheap" or "efficient", then you have a problem. The USA went to war against Iraq after 9/11 in an irrational way; to this day there is no reason for doing that, except that Bush wanted a war of his own. It would be cheaper and more efficient to leave Saddam alone, as he did a good job on keeping his country together (by force, and by terror of his sons, but that's up to Iraqis to sort out.)
Highly skilled workers are not immune to layoffs. This is particularly so when H1Bs compete for the same number of high tech jobs with locals. When locals lose, what are they to do? Go to McD to flip burgers for H1Bs?
Minimum wage applies to general competitiveness of the society, assuming open borders for labor and ideas. If nothing stops a business in the USA from hiring a worker from Kazakhstan, and nothing stops the same business from selling the product to Nigeria, what role the business's home country plays in all that? Especially if most of the home population are now jobless and on social assistance? They can't afford your products.
Minimum wage would be effective only if the country's businesses are behind a firewall through which nothing goes through. Then the minimum wage would act as a fudge factor for all prices within the country, or as an inverted value of the local currency.
When the borders are open, the minimum wage only forces businesses to buy their labor abroad, where it is cheaper. In high tech cases they import H1Bs; but as you say they earn enough to not be affected by the law. However there are plenty of simpler jobs that are done abroad through outsourcing - and that is a consequence of the wages laws. Illegal immigrants from Mexico are also taking advantage of this law because they are not a subject to it - they get paid the going price on the labor, regardless of what the law says.
So are US workers incapable of or unwilling to make those same choices?
An excellent question indeed.
Yes, the US workers are capable but unwilling to make those same choices, for several reasons.
First, the H1B worker knows exactly what he is dealing with. Three years working as a slave, and then I'm RICH!1! back in India or wherever. I can live for three, or even six years like that if I know that this is a voluntary and temporary issue. I also know what I'm buying - I'm selling my comfort and buying future comfort in much larger quantity. If I don't want this anymore I can quit at any time, and the DHS will not forbid me to leave the USA.
Second, H1B workers are required to work or to get out of the country. They cannot linger here and live on social assistance. But US citizens *are* eligible for all kinds of social assistance. At some point it is more profitable to collect welfare instead of working. I knew a guy around here who was on welfare. I found a temp job for him, with a good possibility of going full time. He refused! He said that social security money is more dependable.
This means that the very existence of payments (food stamps, money, living, etc.) to able-bodied workers washes them out of the market of jobs that pay less than that entitlement. Actually, the value of the payments is higher than that. You get money for nothing - you don't have to expend your labor; this means that you get the payments + the cost of your labor as you price it internally. The employer has to beat that number!
The employer is also burdened with minimum wages. This measure subverts the free market of labor. I am forbidden by law to sell my labor, whatever cheap it might be in terms of its value, for less than $7.25 per hour. Doesn't matter if I am suffering from some malady or the other and only can work at 20% of efficiency of a healthy worker. Who will hire me? But in a fair labor market I would be hired for the appropriate salary, and it would be fair to everyone involved. Same would happen to a secretary who works from home and answers five calls per day. Are you willing to pay her $1,160 per month for such a hard work? If no, would you pay her $100/mo? It's a good thing to have a human secretary who can deal with callers in a reasonable way, even if your company is very small.
I'm sure there are more reasons to do what people do. I didn't even mention keeping up with the Joneses, but that is an important factor as well.
How dare those American workers think that they deserve a reasonable share of the wealth they create!
At this point in time the US worker is not even invited into the game. He is deemed to be too expensive and too fickle. Why to bother if there are millions of other who will work for less? Obamacare alone forces businesses to drop full time employees and switch them to part-time work, under 20 hours per week, or whatever it is.
You can also understand the position of a business. If you make cheap stuff and sell it cheaply (or else you do not sell it at all!) then you have no money to spend on expensive employees. They aren't worth their feed, so to say. A US business is forced to compete with Chinese basement sweatshops who put together cheap stuff for peanuts. What happened to US assembly people? They are gone. You cannot compete with China on that. A US business can only survive if it is high-tech and has an edge. Solyndra didn't have the edge (no pun intended, but permitted:-)
Note that I do not support the status quo. I only explain it. It is foolish to think that you can change the situation if you do not know what drives it. In this case the problem is driven by the simple fact that an employer can buy labor globally, but an employee cannot sell his labor on the same global market. If this is allowed to continue forever, we will end up with one rich guy on the whole planet, surrounded by millions of robots who cater to his every whim. Everyone else would have been destroyed long ago as useless waste. Dipple, here we come.
The worst of all is that none of the "elected leaders," who ought to be spending sleepless nights thinking about this, play golf and laugh out loudly hearing about your troubles. Why do you insist on keeping those "civil servants" around and pay for their multi-million vacations all over the world?
Doesn't the H1-B guy LIVING IN THE USA have the same cost-of-living handicap? How can he survive with such a smaller salary than the US worker?
He has no peer pressure. He can live in a bad part of town; he can drive a junk car; he does not need to visit bars and strip clubs; he does not need to marry and raise children (with all expenses of that.) All he needs is a few years to park their $behind at, so that he can save as much as possible.
Not every H1B does that, but I know those who do. It's not nice to live like that, as in barracks. However it's OK for a young man who just wants to work for three years, get his money and get out. All the nice houses and expensive wives can be had back at his home country, much cheaper.
Thank you for expanding my terse term "better." This is exactly what it is. "More profit" == "better." There are no substitutes in the world of business. There is no even measure by which to compare substitutes if they were to become available.
Note also that there is a chain of dependencies, up and down from where you stand. Say, out of pure goodness of your heart you hired a "less competent" person and he damaged an expensive machine. The manufacturer of the machine will not repair it at a discount just because the poor disadvantaged person who broke it deserves a discount. You will get no discount on anything; if you hired the guy and he fscked up, you pay for his errors. Same occurs upward: if the same guy had to take a few days off, unannounced, because he had an urgent drug problem to deal with, your customer will not be kind enough to waive the delivery date on the parts that the druggie failed to manufacture. You pay for that.
While U.S. tech workers scream that they're losing out on jobs as H-1B workers are hired, employers are countering that the talent pool is lacking and they need to increase the cap.
US tech workers have to compete with the tech elite of the world. It is then quite obvious that most of US workers are not competitive on their skills alone, not even counting salary and benefits and other expectations (like a somewhat limited work week.)
The US employers at the same time are expecting to hire the best and brightest *of the world* - and I cannot fault them for trying. Naturally, those 85,000 are not all that is available on the world labor market; India and China are large places, and their people are not corrupted yet with ideas that everyone owes them a fine living.
Add to the problem the duality of the salary. A salary that barely feeds a US worker is a windfall in the 3rd world. Work in the USA for up to 6 years, come back, open a business on all that money, and you are set for life. This is how Mexicans operate, for example.
So both sides in this dispute are correct, in their own way. The US tech worker is forced to compete with the best of the best of the whole world, and he cannot win that competition unless he is aided by his own brilliance (it does happen!) or unique skills, or requirements of citizenship (for classified work.) In nearly every other case a foreign coder is a better match for the employer.
People who want to study useless $H!T like art and literature should do so on their own dime and make sure they have a plan to earn a basic income of their own.
Or, instead of regurgitating someone else's books into dissertations, they should make their own art. Interesting but reasonably priced books will be purchased. Books about Joseph K. being {guilty,not_guilty} is not one that would interest the masses. I personally wouldn't want to read one, unless it is really interesting, not a recount of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
The professor may be describing the realities correctly, but this shouldn't be interpreted as complaining. It's more like a warning. The fact of life is that literature studies are in demand only as long as there are students who want them. There are fewer and fewer of those, for obvious reasons - those studies do not give you a job because you do not learn anything useful. They'd benefit a writer, but most of those students are not writers and will never be writers. Today's society needs workers who make things, not poets who sing about someone else's work. (Poets seem to spring up on their own anyway, like mushrooms.)
I've tried and abandoned the use of noscript twice. There's just too much (legitimate) out there that doesn't work with it turned on.
I use NoScript and it works great. However I have Chrome and IE also installed, and I use them when I buy something. The Firefox install is for casual browsing, and it is very safe. But if a reasonably trusted site that I need asks for too many items unblocked, I just use Chrome.
What kind of support you expect to have on an opened and hacked WinRT tablet, with some parts missing and other replaced, and with wires soldered to test points? On a product that is officially discontinued?
Once you start soldering, all support and warranties fly out of the window. You are on your own. Those who are not comfortable with that should buy a finished product, or R-Pi - at least that one is *intended* for hacking. Not that you will get far with support if you burn the I/O with 120V AC.
With regard to quality, where do you think those WinRT tablets are made? In Redmond, perhaps, in MS's own basement?
If you are worried about performance of the CPU, or the amount of memory... MS has no exclusive control over that. If the market wants a tablet with this and that hardware, China will put it together, very quickly. If that's only you who wants 16 GB of DDR3 RAM in a tablet... sorry, you'll have to make your own.
To make it really useful, you'd need to flash a proper bootloader on it and install a proper OS on it. That procedure might or might not involve a soldering iron.
I might be technically capable of this work, but what financial or other reasons would I have to bother? It is not trivial to open a tablet that is glued together and is not designed to be opened. It is not trivial to solder a JTAG connector, or to make a needle probe jig for connecting to onboard test points. It is not trivial to develop the new bootloader. All this effort for what? To reward MS for making a bad product by buying their garbage and then investing my personal time and personal time of hundreds of other developers? Don't we have better things to do with our time and skills? A generic Chinese ARM board for a tablet can be bought, along with a working tablet, in a box, for under $100. I would rather reward the people who didn't go out of their way to screw me with secure boot.
I figure everyone who were talked into buying a Windows CE laptop back in the day is probably a candidate for Windows RT.
Back then they didn't know any better. CE was better than PalmOS. The market is mature now, and it is ruled by iOS and Android. WinCE and WinRT are in the noise, for very good (and different) reasons.
Microsoft is in a bad position. It has to compete with two excellent and zero-cost OSes that are not encumbered with legacy expectations and are designed specifically to do what they do. Microsoft has to charge pretty penny for their product, but it is not even as good as the competition. Microsoft probably feels already that its best days are in the past. There is simply no market that would be interested in buying their new OS. The competition would be still better if you have to pay for it, but you do not. (Perhaps Apple sets aside some revenue to pay iOS coders, but from POV of the customer he buys a complete product.)
I think MS's best bet is to continue the server line of products, and to resurrect usable PC desktop (get rid of Metro on PCs.) This will buy them another decade or two of good revenue. In the end, though, PCs will die out, and MS will have to change. MS refuses to change, and if they are persistent in that then it will do them in.
Generally, only the government cannot refuse to take the official currency as taxes. Everyone else must take it for payment of debts... if there are debts. But there are catches.
First, you cannot force me (or my business) to sell you anything, be it a product or a service. Anti-discrimination laws do limit that freedom somewhat, but as long as the merchant does not deny the purchase on protected grounds he is OK. It doesn't matter how you want to pay if the item is not for sale.
Second, you can avoid creation of debt. For example, you can exchange your house for a sack of tulip bulbs. The buyer cannot give you a bunch of USD instead of tulip bulbs because that's not what the contract says. If you sell a rare stamp the buyer cannot just give you the 5 cents of its face value.
A bitcoin transaction would have to be treated as a barter deal, with the value of it calculated from whatever other information is available. For example, it can be your own prices of the same product in different currencies; or it can be an average exchange rate. This is all difficult to do for merchants because they are not setup to sell for anything but the local currency. This makes them vulnerable because the tax authorities *will* find something wrong, even if the merchant did everything in his power to do it right. Volatility of BC only adds to this problem; not only you have to convert the transaction's value to the local currency at the exact instant of the transaction, you also are vulnerable to fluctuations of the exchange rate. BC is a nice toy currency, but the real world is not interested in toys. The real world is interested in stuff that works - and specifically in stuff that accountants understand. It is tough enough to even deal with USD; adding BC to the mix is guaranteed to trigger an IRS audit. That one audit will cost you all the extra profit that you may have earned over a century of BC sales.
Small transactions will be on the (short term) honour system.
And for a very short period of time. There will be always enough dishonest people who will pretend to pay, but in reality they will send the money to one of their own wallets. Do you think nobody will find it cool to have free coffee and free sandwiches, every day, just because they can? Do you think fast food places will be able to keep a record of patrons? If they want to do that, how would they, and what recourse do they have? The contract law will not be on their side if they deliver a product without ensuring that the payment have arrived. Due diligence is expected. Once the goods change hands, the deal is done. If you were given fake goods... it's a fraud case; but good luck writing a police report for $3.99. The police will file it in their bathroom; the officer will also quietly tell you to be more vigilant next time about your money.
The problem is quite complex also because there are no tags on transactions. You have addresses, but you do not know what address paid for this or that cup of coffee. This means that you cannot associate patrons, visits, purchases, payments and confirmations. You also cannot forbid service to people who you think failed to pay a week ago. What you think is not relevant; the business may have a right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, but by doing so you will throw a lot of babies with the bathwater. You also will not be punishing the freeloaders because they simply go somewhere else. BC merchants will be in a bad spot, compared to their non-BC counterparts who require honest cash up front.
As matter of fact, yes. Perhaps not for everyone; but among my friends everyone is very much aware, and downloads of free music are at zero level now. Or maybe they already have everything that is worth having:-)
I dont know any merchants using bitcoin terminals.
What else are they going to use if BC makes its way into retail? The checkout process must be foolproof just as it is today with existing cash and card registers. Clerks are not rocket scientists, and they aren't going to use a computer to register your payment in bitcoins.
Bitcoin does not have any physical component, so no cash register is required.
Your bank account doesn't have any physical component either. May I have your login and password?
a better solution would to have the bitcoin system built into the food server system so that your receipt would have a QR code printed directly on it. Then you just use your cell phone to pay the bill without contacting the waitstaff
This opens just WONDERFUL possibilities for tax evasion. Cash registers are used to *register* transactions... why would a store want to have a hardcopy record of all sales? Because the taxman says so, not because the store owner is so eager to report his revenue. Paying "under the table" will not be looked at kindly by the said taxman. All sales must be documented, and tax people are familiar with all evasion schemes in retail. "Cash under the table" is one of the oldest schemes. A plumber may be able to hide some of his revenue this way, but a restaurant cannot flaunt it.
When is the last time you saw a credit card or bank card swipe device in a vault like device?
Those card readers that you see at checkout are actually built like a mini-vault.
This is because like credit card, bitcoin is purely a digital component and so the actual funds do not exist at the store or in the customers hands.
The "digital component" qualifier is irrelevant here. What is relevant is somewhat different. The merchant needs to know that your payment went through; for that he must receive several (6) confirmation blocks from the BC network. If that doesn't happen you need to know where your money went. Do you believe that there won't be an error, ever? For example, you are paying $500 for a printer. You scanned a QR code and the money went out. You wait, then wait some more, and nothing happens. What do you do? You double-check, and it appears that someone pulled a practical joke - the QR code that is printed at the cash register is replaced with some other QR code that points to some other, unknown address. (You can't tell the difference by just looking at the QR code.) The transaction is already part of the network. What are your options? With a c/c this won't happen because you do not request payment, the store does. But even if you make a mistake you can revert the c/c payment. Can you take Bitcoins back?
I have never heard of a merchant giving out goods for free based on some defective terminal.
This happens whenever counterfeit payment instruments are presented. Often it's cash, but it can be stolen cards too. Happens all the time, and c/c issuers issue chargebacks. They lose no money, the customer loses no money... but the merchant does; it loses it all. That's how the system works.
When is the last time you handed a merchant cash and he put it in the till and never gave you the goods that you just purchased from him? This never happens, because a business would not last long with a policy like that.
eBay and PayPal are excellent examples. I am glad that you never were their victim.
Because unlike a credit card, you are not handing out a piece of your personal information every time you make a transaction. It is very easy for a deciteful merchant to copy your credit card information or bank card magnetic strip
That payment system needs to be sorted out before BC can become useful. If you execute the transaction then you will NOT be allowed to take the goods and leave before the confirmation blocks arrive. This takes about 10 minutes, an unacceptably long time. If you do not execute the transaction then you in addition
It's trivial to regulate. On the mild end of regulation a BC user probably violates a few IRS and local taxation laws per transaction. On the harsh end of regulation BC transactions may be made illegal.
You can still hold illegal BCs and you can use them - just as you can own a "hot" handgun and carry it illegally. Once you are apprehended this becomes an additional charge. Nobody will to go after you unless you are "a person of interest." Once the authorities want you arrested, an illegal BC "money laundering" operation charge will do the job nicely; tax evasion, through IRS channels, is also a good method to keep you in jail until you break and start talking. You as a person are irrelevant; the authorities are interested in the whole network. A few major convictions will send a loud and clear signal to all BC users that the game is not worth it.
there is now a very real delay in transactions going through: more than enough to scuttle any chance to use bitcoin for anything other than a curiosity and which will only get worse.
Nonatomicity of transactions (caused by delays in processing, for example) will result in you being able to pay for two products with the same bitcoin. Credit card transactions are atomic, and besides c/c does not transfer assets. BC transactions do that.
While an Internet seller may be able to detect the failure in time and refuse to ship, a brick-and-mortar store cannot do the same; so if several people walk in with copies of the same wallet and buy a $1,000 TV at the exact same time their transactions will be registered.
The official solution is to wait for several (six) confirmation blocks. But that can take 10 minutes on average - and more if BC sees more use. Do I want to wait 10 to 30 minutes at the store until my payment goes through? No way. Those [mythical?] BC users who buy coffee with their BCs, do they wait 10 minutes before they are given a cup?
The government can always scale the BC network down by blocking, or damaging, BC connections at the router level. China has the capability, for example, and they are using it for more complex blocking.
At the same time the government can use your tax money to build custom ASIC hardware that sits directly at 100 Gbps links and sends whatever data the NSA wants sent.
Just curious. How long before technology gets to the point you can defeat the encryption of a bitcoin?
It's very simple even today. The criminal hacks the BC terminal at the merchant, and from that point on - until detected - the merchant gives his wares out in exchange for invalid bitcoins (that his terminal sees as always valid.) The card reader at the grocery store is far more secure, and on top of that you have contractual protection. A Bitcoin terminal - not so much.
BC is also nonfunctional if there is no Internet or no power. It's a currency for a stable, well connected society. You cannot depend on your Bitcoins as you travel, for example, because no bank is likely to give you money in exchange for numbers. BC is only good if you use it for occasional, incidental purchases that do not matter - like buying coffee on your way to work. But a bank card works there just as well. It can even work offline, when the Internet is down, at the low cost of a few sheets of carbon copy paper.
The only one obvious advantage of BC is in black market operations and money laundering. Do terrorist groups accept donations in BC already? If not, they will soon. Good company to be in.
My guess is that it would be obvious that your tractor weighs a whole heck of a lot more than the previous tractors.
Not if you detach a part with a similar weight. Besides, this matters only if you ship one modified device among many unmodified ones. This doesn't have to be the case. You are not that supervillain (I hope:-)
But I believe that a fully assembled MIRV warhead weighs about 1000kg
A Caterpillar D9 weighs 49 tons, and D11 weighs 104 tons. Do you think your puny extra ton of something will be noticeable? "Yes, sir, we put a couple of spare tracks into the package." But in reality nobody knows how much a given unique machine is supposed to weigh. All the shipper knows is how much it actually weighs because you pay money for that. Naturally, if you send a container that says "1 ton" and in reality it breaks the deck of the ship then you'll have some explaining to do. But if you ship a machine that weighs 48 tons, or 50 tons, or 46 tons, it's all irrelevant details.
In other words, an attacker with clean papers only needs to buy a Cat in the USA, then sign up for a contract in some 3rd world country. He ships the machine there, does the "work", and then returns it on another vessel. The papers are all in order; why would a customs agent be suspicious?
So what are the gieger counters at US train stations detecting, apart from the gullibility of politicians?
As long as significant kickbacks are detected at the offices of those politicians, nothing else is really required.
However those counters will happily detect short-lived, unstable isotopes that are carried unshielded. In essence, they are protection against idiots who carry radioactive materials on their bodies but cannot afford a cheap, consumer grade Geiger counter. They will also catch mules who carry these materials unknowingly.
As it often happens, none of such protections ever work against professionals. It would be too expensive to equip thousands of entry points, and all back roads across two borders, and all ocean coasts with barriers and detectors that could stop James Bond and his ilk. It just so happens that clean Uranium is pretty stable. Its half-life is 703 million years, so its atoms are not too likely to fission without being seriously prodded by external neutrons (such as in a reactor or in a bomb.) Highly radioactive components are formed as products of those nuclear reactions. The purified metal is bad for you only because it is toxic, as all heavy metals are. Wash your hands and you will be OK.
They test every ship with a geiger counter. The containers with the nuke would be found very quickly.
Uranium-based nukes are not sufficiently radioactive for that. The metal itself is a weak alpha emitter. That alone can be blocked with a mere sheet of paper. But the bomb is enclosed in a metal casing that absorbs pretty much everything. Given the size of the bomb and the size of the available volume for concealment, you could even shield a gamma emitter with enough lead, and nobody would know.
To further complicate your inspection job, container ships are loaded so much that you cannot even access containers inside the stack until the ship is at the pier and cranes are working on it, layer by layer. By then it's kind of too late. You could try inspections at the port of origin, but that is hard - you have no rights there, on the foreign soil, and the locals are in charge. You can approve one container, but a completely different one gets loaded.
Slashdot Mirror
What's cheaper than and more efficient than fighting wars? To not do it.
That is correct - as long as you can convince the other side to do the same. Such sets of two rational actors don't wage wars; but if any one of them is not rational, or has political goals that are not aligned with "cheap" or "efficient", then you have a problem. The USA went to war against Iraq after 9/11 in an irrational way; to this day there is no reason for doing that, except that Bush wanted a war of his own. It would be cheaper and more efficient to leave Saddam alone, as he did a good job on keeping his country together (by force, and by terror of his sons, but that's up to Iraqis to sort out.)
Highly skilled workers are not immune to layoffs. This is particularly so when H1Bs compete for the same number of high tech jobs with locals. When locals lose, what are they to do? Go to McD to flip burgers for H1Bs?
Minimum wage applies to general competitiveness of the society, assuming open borders for labor and ideas. If nothing stops a business in the USA from hiring a worker from Kazakhstan, and nothing stops the same business from selling the product to Nigeria, what role the business's home country plays in all that? Especially if most of the home population are now jobless and on social assistance? They can't afford your products.
Minimum wage would be effective only if the country's businesses are behind a firewall through which nothing goes through. Then the minimum wage would act as a fudge factor for all prices within the country, or as an inverted value of the local currency.
When the borders are open, the minimum wage only forces businesses to buy their labor abroad, where it is cheaper. In high tech cases they import H1Bs; but as you say they earn enough to not be affected by the law. However there are plenty of simpler jobs that are done abroad through outsourcing - and that is a consequence of the wages laws. Illegal immigrants from Mexico are also taking advantage of this law because they are not a subject to it - they get paid the going price on the labor, regardless of what the law says.
So are US workers incapable of or unwilling to make those same choices?
An excellent question indeed.
Yes, the US workers are capable but unwilling to make those same choices, for several reasons.
First, the H1B worker knows exactly what he is dealing with. Three years working as a slave, and then I'm RICH!1! back in India or wherever. I can live for three, or even six years like that if I know that this is a voluntary and temporary issue. I also know what I'm buying - I'm selling my comfort and buying future comfort in much larger quantity. If I don't want this anymore I can quit at any time, and the DHS will not forbid me to leave the USA.
Second, H1B workers are required to work or to get out of the country. They cannot linger here and live on social assistance. But US citizens *are* eligible for all kinds of social assistance. At some point it is more profitable to collect welfare instead of working. I knew a guy around here who was on welfare. I found a temp job for him, with a good possibility of going full time. He refused! He said that social security money is more dependable.
This means that the very existence of payments (food stamps, money, living, etc.) to able-bodied workers washes them out of the market of jobs that pay less than that entitlement. Actually, the value of the payments is higher than that. You get money for nothing - you don't have to expend your labor; this means that you get the payments + the cost of your labor as you price it internally. The employer has to beat that number!
The employer is also burdened with minimum wages. This measure subverts the free market of labor. I am forbidden by law to sell my labor, whatever cheap it might be in terms of its value, for less than $7.25 per hour. Doesn't matter if I am suffering from some malady or the other and only can work at 20% of efficiency of a healthy worker. Who will hire me? But in a fair labor market I would be hired for the appropriate salary, and it would be fair to everyone involved. Same would happen to a secretary who works from home and answers five calls per day. Are you willing to pay her $1,160 per month for such a hard work? If no, would you pay her $100/mo? It's a good thing to have a human secretary who can deal with callers in a reasonable way, even if your company is very small.
I'm sure there are more reasons to do what people do. I didn't even mention keeping up with the Joneses, but that is an important factor as well.
How dare those American workers think that they deserve a reasonable share of the wealth they create!
At this point in time the US worker is not even invited into the game. He is deemed to be too expensive and too fickle. Why to bother if there are millions of other who will work for less? Obamacare alone forces businesses to drop full time employees and switch them to part-time work, under 20 hours per week, or whatever it is.
You can also understand the position of a business. If you make cheap stuff and sell it cheaply (or else you do not sell it at all!) then you have no money to spend on expensive employees. They aren't worth their feed, so to say. A US business is forced to compete with Chinese basement sweatshops who put together cheap stuff for peanuts. What happened to US assembly people? They are gone. You cannot compete with China on that. A US business can only survive if it is high-tech and has an edge. Solyndra didn't have the edge (no pun intended, but permitted :-)
Note that I do not support the status quo. I only explain it. It is foolish to think that you can change the situation if you do not know what drives it. In this case the problem is driven by the simple fact that an employer can buy labor globally, but an employee cannot sell his labor on the same global market. If this is allowed to continue forever, we will end up with one rich guy on the whole planet, surrounded by millions of robots who cater to his every whim. Everyone else would have been destroyed long ago as useless waste. Dipple, here we come.
The worst of all is that none of the "elected leaders," who ought to be spending sleepless nights thinking about this, play golf and laugh out loudly hearing about your troubles. Why do you insist on keeping those "civil servants" around and pay for their multi-million vacations all over the world?
Doesn't the H1-B guy LIVING IN THE USA have the same cost-of-living handicap? How can he survive with such a smaller salary than the US worker?
He has no peer pressure. He can live in a bad part of town; he can drive a junk car; he does not need to visit bars and strip clubs; he does not need to marry and raise children (with all expenses of that.) All he needs is a few years to park their $behind at, so that he can save as much as possible.
Not every H1B does that, but I know those who do. It's not nice to live like that, as in barracks. However it's OK for a young man who just wants to work for three years, get his money and get out. All the nice houses and expensive wives can be had back at his home country, much cheaper.
Thank you for expanding my terse term "better." This is exactly what it is. "More profit" == "better." There are no substitutes in the world of business. There is no even measure by which to compare substitutes if they were to become available.
Note also that there is a chain of dependencies, up and down from where you stand. Say, out of pure goodness of your heart you hired a "less competent" person and he damaged an expensive machine. The manufacturer of the machine will not repair it at a discount just because the poor disadvantaged person who broke it deserves a discount. You will get no discount on anything; if you hired the guy and he fscked up, you pay for his errors. Same occurs upward: if the same guy had to take a few days off, unannounced, because he had an urgent drug problem to deal with, your customer will not be kind enough to waive the delivery date on the parts that the druggie failed to manufacture. You pay for that.
While U.S. tech workers scream that they're losing out on jobs as H-1B workers are hired, employers are countering that the talent pool is lacking and they need to increase the cap.
US tech workers have to compete with the tech elite of the world. It is then quite obvious that most of US workers are not competitive on their skills alone, not even counting salary and benefits and other expectations (like a somewhat limited work week.)
The US employers at the same time are expecting to hire the best and brightest *of the world* - and I cannot fault them for trying. Naturally, those 85,000 are not all that is available on the world labor market; India and China are large places, and their people are not corrupted yet with ideas that everyone owes them a fine living.
Add to the problem the duality of the salary. A salary that barely feeds a US worker is a windfall in the 3rd world. Work in the USA for up to 6 years, come back, open a business on all that money, and you are set for life. This is how Mexicans operate, for example.
So both sides in this dispute are correct, in their own way. The US tech worker is forced to compete with the best of the best of the whole world, and he cannot win that competition unless he is aided by his own brilliance (it does happen!) or unique skills, or requirements of citizenship (for classified work.) In nearly every other case a foreign coder is a better match for the employer.
It's a stable idiom, and it came into being before the calculus.
People who want to study useless $H!T like art and literature should do so on their own dime and make sure they have a plan to earn a basic income of their own.
Or, instead of regurgitating someone else's books into dissertations, they should make their own art. Interesting but reasonably priced books will be purchased. Books about Joseph K. being {guilty,not_guilty} is not one that would interest the masses. I personally wouldn't want to read one, unless it is really interesting, not a recount of angels dancing on the head of a pin.
The professor may be describing the realities correctly, but this shouldn't be interpreted as complaining. It's more like a warning. The fact of life is that literature studies are in demand only as long as there are students who want them. There are fewer and fewer of those, for obvious reasons - those studies do not give you a job because you do not learn anything useful. They'd benefit a writer, but most of those students are not writers and will never be writers. Today's society needs workers who make things, not poets who sing about someone else's work. (Poets seem to spring up on their own anyway, like mushrooms.)
I've tried and abandoned the use of noscript twice. There's just too much (legitimate) out there that doesn't work with it turned on.
I use NoScript and it works great. However I have Chrome and IE also installed, and I use them when I buy something. The Firefox install is for casual browsing, and it is very safe. But if a reasonably trusted site that I need asks for too many items unblocked, I just use Chrome.
How about "No" ?
What kind of support you expect to have on an opened and hacked WinRT tablet, with some parts missing and other replaced, and with wires soldered to test points? On a product that is officially discontinued?
Once you start soldering, all support and warranties fly out of the window. You are on your own. Those who are not comfortable with that should buy a finished product, or R-Pi - at least that one is *intended* for hacking. Not that you will get far with support if you burn the I/O with 120V AC.
With regard to quality, where do you think those WinRT tablets are made? In Redmond, perhaps, in MS's own basement?
If you are worried about performance of the CPU, or the amount of memory... MS has no exclusive control over that. If the market wants a tablet with this and that hardware, China will put it together, very quickly. If that's only you who wants 16 GB of DDR3 RAM in a tablet... sorry, you'll have to make your own.
To make it really useful, you'd need to flash a proper bootloader on it and install a proper OS on it. That procedure might or might not involve a soldering iron.
I might be technically capable of this work, but what financial or other reasons would I have to bother? It is not trivial to open a tablet that is glued together and is not designed to be opened. It is not trivial to solder a JTAG connector, or to make a needle probe jig for connecting to onboard test points. It is not trivial to develop the new bootloader. All this effort for what? To reward MS for making a bad product by buying their garbage and then investing my personal time and personal time of hundreds of other developers? Don't we have better things to do with our time and skills? A generic Chinese ARM board for a tablet can be bought, along with a working tablet, in a box, for under $100. I would rather reward the people who didn't go out of their way to screw me with secure boot.
I figure everyone who were talked into buying a Windows CE laptop back in the day is probably a candidate for Windows RT.
Back then they didn't know any better. CE was better than PalmOS. The market is mature now, and it is ruled by iOS and Android. WinCE and WinRT are in the noise, for very good (and different) reasons.
Microsoft is in a bad position. It has to compete with two excellent and zero-cost OSes that are not encumbered with legacy expectations and are designed specifically to do what they do. Microsoft has to charge pretty penny for their product, but it is not even as good as the competition. Microsoft probably feels already that its best days are in the past. There is simply no market that would be interested in buying their new OS. The competition would be still better if you have to pay for it, but you do not. (Perhaps Apple sets aside some revenue to pay iOS coders, but from POV of the customer he buys a complete product.)
I think MS's best bet is to continue the server line of products, and to resurrect usable PC desktop (get rid of Metro on PCs.) This will buy them another decade or two of good revenue. In the end, though, PCs will die out, and MS will have to change. MS refuses to change, and if they are persistent in that then it will do them in.
You can't refuse to take the official currency
Generally, only the government cannot refuse to take the official currency as taxes. Everyone else must take it for payment of debts... if there are debts. But there are catches.
First, you cannot force me (or my business) to sell you anything, be it a product or a service. Anti-discrimination laws do limit that freedom somewhat, but as long as the merchant does not deny the purchase on protected grounds he is OK. It doesn't matter how you want to pay if the item is not for sale.
Second, you can avoid creation of debt. For example, you can exchange your house for a sack of tulip bulbs. The buyer cannot give you a bunch of USD instead of tulip bulbs because that's not what the contract says. If you sell a rare stamp the buyer cannot just give you the 5 cents of its face value.
A bitcoin transaction would have to be treated as a barter deal, with the value of it calculated from whatever other information is available. For example, it can be your own prices of the same product in different currencies; or it can be an average exchange rate. This is all difficult to do for merchants because they are not setup to sell for anything but the local currency. This makes them vulnerable because the tax authorities *will* find something wrong, even if the merchant did everything in his power to do it right. Volatility of BC only adds to this problem; not only you have to convert the transaction's value to the local currency at the exact instant of the transaction, you also are vulnerable to fluctuations of the exchange rate. BC is a nice toy currency, but the real world is not interested in toys. The real world is interested in stuff that works - and specifically in stuff that accountants understand. It is tough enough to even deal with USD; adding BC to the mix is guaranteed to trigger an IRS audit. That one audit will cost you all the extra profit that you may have earned over a century of BC sales.
Small transactions will be on the (short term) honour system.
And for a very short period of time. There will be always enough dishonest people who will pretend to pay, but in reality they will send the money to one of their own wallets. Do you think nobody will find it cool to have free coffee and free sandwiches, every day, just because they can? Do you think fast food places will be able to keep a record of patrons? If they want to do that, how would they, and what recourse do they have? The contract law will not be on their side if they deliver a product without ensuring that the payment have arrived. Due diligence is expected. Once the goods change hands, the deal is done. If you were given fake goods... it's a fraud case; but good luck writing a police report for $3.99. The police will file it in their bathroom; the officer will also quietly tell you to be more vigilant next time about your money.
The problem is quite complex also because there are no tags on transactions. You have addresses, but you do not know what address paid for this or that cup of coffee. This means that you cannot associate patrons, visits, purchases, payments and confirmations. You also cannot forbid service to people who you think failed to pay a week ago. What you think is not relevant; the business may have a right to refuse service to anyone for any reason, but by doing so you will throw a lot of babies with the bathwater. You also will not be punishing the freeloaders because they simply go somewhere else. BC merchants will be in a bad spot, compared to their non-BC counterparts who require honest cash up front.
Did that work for torrenting?
As matter of fact, yes. Perhaps not for everyone; but among my friends everyone is very much aware, and downloads of free music are at zero level now. Or maybe they already have everything that is worth having :-)
I dont know any merchants using bitcoin terminals.
What else are they going to use if BC makes its way into retail? The checkout process must be foolproof just as it is today with existing cash and card registers. Clerks are not rocket scientists, and they aren't going to use a computer to register your payment in bitcoins.
Bitcoin does not have any physical component, so no cash register is required.
Your bank account doesn't have any physical component either. May I have your login and password?
a better solution would to have the bitcoin system built into the food server system so that your receipt would have a QR code printed directly on it. Then you just use your cell phone to pay the bill without contacting the waitstaff
This opens just WONDERFUL possibilities for tax evasion. Cash registers are used to *register* transactions ... why would a store want to have a hardcopy record of all sales? Because the taxman says so, not because the store owner is so eager to report his revenue. Paying "under the table" will not be looked at kindly by the said taxman. All sales must be documented, and tax people are familiar with all evasion schemes in retail. "Cash under the table" is one of the oldest schemes. A plumber may be able to hide some of his revenue this way, but a restaurant cannot flaunt it.
When is the last time you saw a credit card or bank card swipe device in a vault like device?
Those card readers that you see at checkout are actually built like a mini-vault.
This is because like credit card, bitcoin is purely a digital component and so the actual funds do not exist at the store or in the customers hands.
The "digital component" qualifier is irrelevant here. What is relevant is somewhat different. The merchant needs to know that your payment went through; for that he must receive several (6) confirmation blocks from the BC network. If that doesn't happen you need to know where your money went. Do you believe that there won't be an error, ever? For example, you are paying $500 for a printer. You scanned a QR code and the money went out. You wait, then wait some more, and nothing happens. What do you do? You double-check, and it appears that someone pulled a practical joke - the QR code that is printed at the cash register is replaced with some other QR code that points to some other, unknown address. (You can't tell the difference by just looking at the QR code.) The transaction is already part of the network. What are your options? With a c/c this won't happen because you do not request payment, the store does. But even if you make a mistake you can revert the c/c payment. Can you take Bitcoins back?
I have never heard of a merchant giving out goods for free based on some defective terminal.
This happens whenever counterfeit payment instruments are presented. Often it's cash, but it can be stolen cards too. Happens all the time, and c/c issuers issue chargebacks. They lose no money, the customer loses no money... but the merchant does; it loses it all. That's how the system works.
When is the last time you handed a merchant cash and he put it in the till and never gave you the goods that you just purchased from him? This never happens, because a business would not last long with a policy like that.
eBay and PayPal are excellent examples. I am glad that you never were their victim.
Because unlike a credit card, you are not handing out a piece of your personal information every time you make a transaction. It is very easy for a deciteful merchant to copy your credit card information or bank card magnetic strip
That payment system needs to be sorted out before BC can become useful. If you execute the transaction then you will NOT be allowed to take the goods and leave before the confirmation blocks arrive. This takes about 10 minutes, an unacceptably long time. If you do not execute the transaction then you in addition
Let me end this right now. It's unregulateable.
It's trivial to regulate. On the mild end of regulation a BC user probably violates a few IRS and local taxation laws per transaction. On the harsh end of regulation BC transactions may be made illegal.
You can still hold illegal BCs and you can use them - just as you can own a "hot" handgun and carry it illegally. Once you are apprehended this becomes an additional charge. Nobody will to go after you unless you are "a person of interest." Once the authorities want you arrested, an illegal BC "money laundering" operation charge will do the job nicely; tax evasion, through IRS channels, is also a good method to keep you in jail until you break and start talking. You as a person are irrelevant; the authorities are interested in the whole network. A few major convictions will send a loud and clear signal to all BC users that the game is not worth it.
there is now a very real delay in transactions going through: more than enough to scuttle any chance to use bitcoin for anything other than a curiosity and which will only get worse.
Nonatomicity of transactions (caused by delays in processing, for example) will result in you being able to pay for two products with the same bitcoin. Credit card transactions are atomic, and besides c/c does not transfer assets. BC transactions do that.
While an Internet seller may be able to detect the failure in time and refuse to ship, a brick-and-mortar store cannot do the same; so if several people walk in with copies of the same wallet and buy a $1,000 TV at the exact same time their transactions will be registered.
The official solution is to wait for several (six) confirmation blocks. But that can take 10 minutes on average - and more if BC sees more use. Do I want to wait 10 to 30 minutes at the store until my payment goes through? No way. Those [mythical?] BC users who buy coffee with their BCs, do they wait 10 minutes before they are given a cup?
Nobody is on the scale of Bitcoin these days.
The government can always scale the BC network down by blocking, or damaging, BC connections at the router level. China has the capability, for example, and they are using it for more complex blocking.
At the same time the government can use your tax money to build custom ASIC hardware that sits directly at 100 Gbps links and sends whatever data the NSA wants sent.
Just curious. How long before technology gets to the point you can defeat the encryption of a bitcoin?
It's very simple even today. The criminal hacks the BC terminal at the merchant, and from that point on - until detected - the merchant gives his wares out in exchange for invalid bitcoins (that his terminal sees as always valid.) The card reader at the grocery store is far more secure, and on top of that you have contractual protection. A Bitcoin terminal - not so much.
BC is also nonfunctional if there is no Internet or no power. It's a currency for a stable, well connected society. You cannot depend on your Bitcoins as you travel, for example, because no bank is likely to give you money in exchange for numbers. BC is only good if you use it for occasional, incidental purchases that do not matter - like buying coffee on your way to work. But a bank card works there just as well. It can even work offline, when the Internet is down, at the low cost of a few sheets of carbon copy paper.
The only one obvious advantage of BC is in black market operations and money laundering. Do terrorist groups accept donations in BC already? If not, they will soon. Good company to be in.
My guess is that it would be obvious that your tractor weighs a whole heck of a lot more than the previous tractors.
Not if you detach a part with a similar weight. Besides, this matters only if you ship one modified device among many unmodified ones. This doesn't have to be the case. You are not that supervillain (I hope :-)
But I believe that a fully assembled MIRV warhead weighs about 1000kg
A Caterpillar D9 weighs 49 tons, and D11 weighs 104 tons. Do you think your puny extra ton of something will be noticeable? "Yes, sir, we put a couple of spare tracks into the package." But in reality nobody knows how much a given unique machine is supposed to weigh. All the shipper knows is how much it actually weighs because you pay money for that. Naturally, if you send a container that says "1 ton" and in reality it breaks the deck of the ship then you'll have some explaining to do. But if you ship a machine that weighs 48 tons, or 50 tons, or 46 tons, it's all irrelevant details.
In other words, an attacker with clean papers only needs to buy a Cat in the USA, then sign up for a contract in some 3rd world country. He ships the machine there, does the "work", and then returns it on another vessel. The papers are all in order; why would a customs agent be suspicious?
So what are the gieger counters at US train stations detecting, apart from the gullibility of politicians?
As long as significant kickbacks are detected at the offices of those politicians, nothing else is really required.
However those counters will happily detect short-lived, unstable isotopes that are carried unshielded. In essence, they are protection against idiots who carry radioactive materials on their bodies but cannot afford a cheap, consumer grade Geiger counter. They will also catch mules who carry these materials unknowingly.
As it often happens, none of such protections ever work against professionals. It would be too expensive to equip thousands of entry points, and all back roads across two borders, and all ocean coasts with barriers and detectors that could stop James Bond and his ilk. It just so happens that clean Uranium is pretty stable. Its half-life is 703 million years, so its atoms are not too likely to fission without being seriously prodded by external neutrons (such as in a reactor or in a bomb.) Highly radioactive components are formed as products of those nuclear reactions. The purified metal is bad for you only because it is toxic, as all heavy metals are. Wash your hands and you will be OK.
They test every ship with a geiger counter. The containers with the nuke would be found very quickly.
Uranium-based nukes are not sufficiently radioactive for that. The metal itself is a weak alpha emitter. That alone can be blocked with a mere sheet of paper. But the bomb is enclosed in a metal casing that absorbs pretty much everything. Given the size of the bomb and the size of the available volume for concealment, you could even shield a gamma emitter with enough lead, and nobody would know.
To further complicate your inspection job, container ships are loaded so much that you cannot even access containers inside the stack until the ship is at the pier and cranes are working on it, layer by layer. By then it's kind of too late. You could try inspections at the port of origin, but that is hard - you have no rights there, on the foreign soil, and the locals are in charge. You can approve one container, but a completely different one gets loaded.