I would love for it to go to a special gate where I could specify questions like âoeplease type the name of the personâ(TM)s daughterâ(TM)s name.â or âoeplease type the company of the person you are trying to reachâ. Most people should be able to come up with a question or two that legitimate callers would be able to answer.
The only way arbitrage works is if you allow your car to not stay at full capacity in which case why have all the batteries in the first place
My ICE car has a 70 litre tank; do you really think I keep it topped off at all times? If not, do you think all that tank space is just wasteful?
You do understand that the daily length of travel for most people can vary greatly over the course of a year, right?
There is a huge difference. Your 70 litre tank weighs almost nothing empty. An electric car takes a huge weight penalty for every extra amount of juice. Also, with a gasoline car, there are stations every 5 miles and it takes 5 minutes to fill up so even if you start your trip with a quarter tank, you can easily top off whenever you need to. We aren't there with electric cars yet. Electric cars already have a limited range and recharging while traveling is still impractical.
My wife has a Tesla with a 240 mile range, and on 95% of days she uses less than 20% of the capacity. The rest could be available for energy price arbitrage.
The car starts charging at 2 am, when electricity prices are lowest. The power companies need to fill the gap from 4pm to 7pm when power use peaks, but solar is fading.
The only way arbitrage works is if you allow your car to not stay at full capacity in which case why have all the batteries in the first place. It's possible it could work in a situation where you arrive home with 80% capacity and you don't plan on leaving for the rest of the day so you let your car run down to 50% capacity during peak 4pm-7pm times knowing that it will be back at 100% before you are ready to leave in the morning but it still has a penalty and if we are talking about solar, the cheapest electricity will likely be midday which is when your car will likely be away from home and you will also want the battery already fully charged.
How about the sum of accidental and deliberate gun death?
Both accidental and deliberate are extremely small especially if you take out suicide. Suicide on the other hand is the second leading cause of death of kids 10-17 but kids tend to use other methods like trains, jumping, and hanging rather than guns: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
For those saying I should have checked the permissions when I was hired, I tried, but security was not a priority at the time. Funny enough, as soon as this happened I was able to check permissions and change permissions and access to folders to mitigate it from happening as bad as last time.
Something similar happened at my work. I was never allowed to implement 2FA until the day that our CEO fell for a phishing email. The very next day I was allowed to activate companywide 2FA with a 2 week grace period for everyone to get it activated. So sometimes it's not even about the funding but about giving IT the authority to implement security measures that might inconvenience the users.
They should make it illegal to pay. It is and should be considered "Providing material support for terrorism" and anyone caught paying for ransomware should be fined and thrown in prison. Not that I want victims to suffer twice but it should hopefully put a stop to this nonsense. I really don't understand why anyone pays anyways. I wonder how often they pay and still don't get their files. My guess is even after paying the odds of getting your files back are pretty low.
Ransomware is "rare"?! Hardly. Ransomware has grown into a multi-billion dollar business. It has been a significant threat (if not THE significant threat) for the last two years in business.
Do you know anyone personally who has been affected by it? Yes, it's a multibillion dollar business but the odds of it happening to any one business is still extremely rare. I know lots of people who have died in a car accident. I know lots of people who have had to pay fines because their taxes weren't done correctly. I know lots of people who have had speeding tickets, parking tickets, etc... I even know lots of people who have had account credentials stolen from phishing as well as people who have had credit card numbers stolen. But other than hearing it on the news, ransomware is still something that happens to someone else. And I'm my extended family's tech support of last resort so I get calls all the time when hard drives crash, malware starts creating popups, etc...but I've yet to get a call about ransomware. Just like home invasions or school shootings, it's still mostly something abstract that happens to someone else and therefore isn't taken seriously by most.
The problem is that ransomware is extremely rare. If the trash isn't taken out for two weeks, everyone notices. If backups aren't done for two years noone notices until the day they all wake up without a job.
From your own link, median net compensation was $46,641 in 2016
That is the average. The median from the same link is 30,533. The average is higher because of a bunch of rich people at the top. I realize that movie professionals make considerably more than that but my point really was the huge opportunity cost that we waste on entertainment.
Except using $50k is a stupid baseline, first nobody but a fastfood worker or similar low wage job actually costs their employer only $50k per year in the west.
Basically, a billion dollars is approximately 100k man-years of labor if you use the median global income. You could literally hire 10k people to work for you for 10 years (or 1k+ people for life).
I realize that other movies and entertainment spend similar amounts of money but it's mind-boggling that we are using so much labor and resources for something so immaterial.
In Blue Origin every year? So the real thing costs as much as the fake, amazing.
I thought the same thing. $1 billion represents at least 20,000 man years (at 50k/year). Is a TV show really the best use of this? The extravagance of the pyramids pale in comparison to what we waste on entertainment today. Can you imagine actually deciding to put 20k people to work on a single project like this? It's absolutely fascinating that we have this much excess labor but we shouldn't be squandering it.
Steve Wozniak and Linus Torvald are both famous because they helped create multibillion dollar products. Basically they are famous for creating a rich and powerful product even if they themself are not rich and powerful. They are a fascination because they let their billion dollar ideas get away.
"Meanwhile, more than half of the respondents (57%) were able to correctly identify a male leader in tech, with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg being the most commonly cited names."
All 4 of which are famous not for tech but for being rich figureheads. If you excluded the half dozen super famous then people would likely not do any better. Ask the average person to name 3 people (male or female) in a specific field like AI, biotech, etc... It's not surprising that 3 of the 4 people who were named were in charge of some of the largest companies on earth. Elon Musk is the outlier but that's just because like Trump and Tony Stark he intentionally keeps himself in the limelight.
Home users are home users, no matter the size of the home. Having them pay differently is discriminating.
In most places they already pay differently. They pay less per kwh. We shouldn't be giving a discount for wasting more energy. We don't do that for gas and there are a ton of situations like taxes where we have rich paying more. What you tax you get less of. I would much rather see us tax energy usage than income. This would also solve the whole millionaire paying less taxes because his income is from investments. We should tax consumption of finite resources not income.
2) Forcing everyone with a job to take a 50% pay cut would disrupt the lives of the employed, and they would hate you for it. 3) There will be twice as much competition for every job and effectively every one would now have to have 2 jobs to make ends meet.
I'm not proposing cutting the workweek to 20 hours tomorrow. We don't have anywhere near 50% unemployment so that would make no sense. At this point even capping it at 40 would generate some jobs as many people work more than 40 hours per week. I would also propose not allowing people to work more than 40 hours per week even if they work multiple jobs. If we dropped the maximum number of hours a person could work by 1 hour per year then it would be a nice smooth 40 year transition but in reality it should probably be much slower than that. It could be something as simple as anytime that unemployment stayed above 10% for a year the following year the maximum workweek dropped by 1 hour. A 1 hour drop in the maximum workweek should drop unemployment by about 2.5% if all those jobs are still done. Basically, it should be possible to control unemployment by manipulating the maximum workweek allowed.
"charging that same if not more for energy usage to heavy users would help reduce the demand for fossil fuels where it matters."
Only it wouldn't. It would increase the price of the end product, that's all.
You're assuming that the heavy users are all factories. The person with a 6k sqft house generally uses more energy than the person with a 3k sqft house who uses more than the person with a 1k sqft house. Just like when gas prices go up demand for large vehicles go down, if utilities went up for larger houses then the demand for larger houses would go down and demand for more energy efficiency would go up.
You know what's funny? Here in my 3rd world country, I could apply for Industrial power, pay an installation tax for 380V power and then mine away as much as I desire, while paying FAR LESS per KW/h than a home user would. I guess 'murica has it backwards...
America is mostly like that too. I think we should be going the opposite direction though. I think we should stop giving bulk discounts for electricity or maybe even charge more for electricity to heavy users. If we are really concerned with conservation, charging that same if not more for energy usage to heavy users would help reduce the demand for fossil fuels where it matters.
That's not a given. Costs would rise, as you can't employ 2 50% workers for the cost of one. It assumes sufficient discretionary spending from 50% workers to support the current economy.
But how is half the population at 100% employment and half the population at 0% employment any better than all the population at 50% employment? At least with all the population at 50% employment everyone is kindof all in it together. UBI just sounds like some horrible dystopia where the people who can fight for the few remaining jobs get to live like kings while everyone else lives on the scraps. A gradual reduction in the workweek would allow everyone to get used to working less and having more leisure and wouldn't create a bloodbath of people fighting for fewer and fewer jobs.
We either plan for it now or start buying pitchforks and torches. And oiling up the guillotines because we _will_ eat the rich.
UBI is a terrible idea. How exactly does it solve the problem of the haves vs the have nots? It's basically another name for welfare. The people who are lucky to have good paying jobs will be fine and everyone else will get the bare minimum to survive. It will not prevent the pitchforks at all.
A solution that would work much better would be to slowly reduce the legal work week. If the legal work week was only 20 hours a week, there would be double the number of jobs. We are already seeing a situation where the richer 50% of the population are working more hours per week than the poorer 50%, if we slowly reduced the work week then we could both equalize the amount of work and the amount of leisure. It would also put in motion the ability to continue to drop the workweek from 38 to 36 to 20 to 10 or to however low we need it to maintain full employment for everyone.
Personally, I would rather see government work programs to clean up parks, etc... before UBI. UBI just doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Maybe the solution to fix our out of touch congress is to make them even more out of touch. If the members of congress were allowed no contact with lobbyists or anyone else during their term and their assets were frozen for their entire term then maybe they could make neutral decisions for the good of everyone. I think hitchhikers guide got it right having a neutral third party in charge.
There's a huge difference between copyright and patent.
A book isn't a machine or technique, so it's not like technological advancement is hanging on being able to use a copyright work.
I think they are very similar. In both cases the advantage of the public domain is derivative works. Look at Disney. Many of their movies are based on stories in the public domain. Same with Shakespeare. There are a ton of derivative stories based on Shakespeare stories. Copyright and patents serve the same purpose. They both allow a limited monopoly to encourage society to produce. The vast majority of works get most of their revenue in the first 20 years. This is plenty of time to encourage production and it's doubtful people would not publish something because they *only* have protection for 20 years. Very few business plans hinge on not being profitable for the first 20 years.
First 20 years free. Then an escalating payment is required for each 20 year renewal afterward. Simply requiring a payment will solve the orphan works problem. This solution also lets Disney keep Mickey under copyright forever if they keep paying the escalating renewal fees. This is a simple solution to keeping commercially profitable works under copyright and letting everything else revert to the public domain.
Although this is better than the current system, I don't see why we need to allow extensions at all. Patents don't allow extensions. 20 years seems to be plenty of time for a creator to be fairly compensated for their work. Most people who do work for hire only get compensated when they actually do the work. Residual income is great but it makes no sense to have indefinite residual income for something you created 2 decades ago.
"While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, "
But not their great grand-children.
Exactly. And furthermore why should certain activities have longer protections that others? If I do a work for hire whether it is building a deck or writing an app, I get paid and that's it. If I create a new product, I get patent protection for 20 years and that's it. Why is copyright protection so much longer than other activities? If you publish a book or movie then you should be able to sell it for 20 years and then it should immediately go to the public domain and people should be allowed to make derivatives, stream it, etc... free of charge. 20 years exclusive rights for something you create is plenty fair and is much longer than most other forms of work.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be an interesting argument. We tried to comply but both of our employees objected on moral grounds.
I would love for it to go to a special gate where I could specify questions like âoeplease type the name of the personâ(TM)s daughterâ(TM)s name.â or âoeplease type the company of the person you are trying to reachâ. Most people should be able to come up with a question or two that legitimate callers would be able to answer.
The only way arbitrage works is if you allow your car to not stay at full capacity in which case why have all the batteries in the first place
My ICE car has a 70 litre tank; do you really think I keep it topped off at all times? If not, do you think all that tank space is just wasteful?
You do understand that the daily length of travel for most people can vary greatly over the course of a year, right?
There is a huge difference. Your 70 litre tank weighs almost nothing empty. An electric car takes a huge weight penalty for every extra amount of juice. Also, with a gasoline car, there are stations every 5 miles and it takes 5 minutes to fill up so even if you start your trip with a quarter tank, you can easily top off whenever you need to. We aren't there with electric cars yet. Electric cars already have a limited range and recharging while traveling is still impractical.
My wife has a Tesla with a 240 mile range, and on 95% of days she uses less than 20% of the capacity. The rest could be available for energy price arbitrage.
The car starts charging at 2 am, when electricity prices are lowest. The power companies need to fill the gap from 4pm to 7pm when power use peaks, but solar is fading.
The only way arbitrage works is if you allow your car to not stay at full capacity in which case why have all the batteries in the first place. It's possible it could work in a situation where you arrive home with 80% capacity and you don't plan on leaving for the rest of the day so you let your car run down to 50% capacity during peak 4pm-7pm times knowing that it will be back at 100% before you are ready to leave in the morning but it still has a penalty and if we are talking about solar, the cheapest electricity will likely be midday which is when your car will likely be away from home and you will also want the battery already fully charged.
How about the sum of accidental and deliberate gun death?
Both accidental and deliberate are extremely small especially if you take out suicide. Suicide on the other hand is the second leading cause of death of kids 10-17 but kids tend to use other methods like trains, jumping, and hanging rather than guns: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
For those saying I should have checked the permissions when I was hired, I tried, but security was not a priority at the time. Funny enough, as soon as this happened I was able to check permissions and change permissions and access to folders to mitigate it from happening as bad as last time.
Something similar happened at my work. I was never allowed to implement 2FA until the day that our CEO fell for a phishing email. The very next day I was allowed to activate companywide 2FA with a 2 week grace period for everyone to get it activated. So sometimes it's not even about the funding but about giving IT the authority to implement security measures that might inconvenience the users.
And no we didn't pay, we just lost the files.
They should make it illegal to pay. It is and should be considered "Providing material support for terrorism" and anyone caught paying for ransomware should be fined and thrown in prison. Not that I want victims to suffer twice but it should hopefully put a stop to this nonsense. I really don't understand why anyone pays anyways. I wonder how often they pay and still don't get their files. My guess is even after paying the odds of getting your files back are pretty low.
Ransomware is "rare"?! Hardly. Ransomware has grown into a multi-billion dollar business. It has been a significant threat (if not THE significant threat) for the last two years in business.
Do you know anyone personally who has been affected by it? Yes, it's a multibillion dollar business but the odds of it happening to any one business is still extremely rare. I know lots of people who have died in a car accident. I know lots of people who have had to pay fines because their taxes weren't done correctly. I know lots of people who have had speeding tickets, parking tickets, etc... I even know lots of people who have had account credentials stolen from phishing as well as people who have had credit card numbers stolen. But other than hearing it on the news, ransomware is still something that happens to someone else. And I'm my extended family's tech support of last resort so I get calls all the time when hard drives crash, malware starts creating popups, etc...but I've yet to get a call about ransomware. Just like home invasions or school shootings, it's still mostly something abstract that happens to someone else and therefore isn't taken seriously by most.
The problem is that ransomware is extremely rare. If the trash isn't taken out for two weeks, everyone notices. If backups aren't done for two years noone notices until the day they all wake up without a job.
Not to Apple as a whole but 16k/day would likely significantly affect the profitability of that particular repair center.
From your own link, median net compensation was $46,641 in 2016
That is the average. The median from the same link is 30,533. The average is higher because of a bunch of rich people at the top.
I realize that movie professionals make considerably more than that but my point really was the huge opportunity cost that we waste on entertainment.
Except using $50k is a stupid baseline, first nobody but a fastfood worker or similar low wage job actually costs their employer only $50k per year in the west.
I was being generous with the $50k. The median income in the USA is around $30k ( https://www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and is only about $10k if you are looking at worldwide income.
Basically, a billion dollars is approximately 100k man-years of labor if you use the median global income. You could literally hire 10k people to work for you for 10 years (or 1k+ people for life).
I realize that other movies and entertainment spend similar amounts of money but it's mind-boggling that we are using so much labor and resources for something so immaterial.
In Blue Origin every year? So the real thing costs as much as the fake, amazing.
I thought the same thing. $1 billion represents at least 20,000 man years (at 50k/year).
Is a TV show really the best use of this?
The extravagance of the pyramids pale in comparison to what we waste on entertainment today.
Can you imagine actually deciding to put 20k people to work on a single project like this?
It's absolutely fascinating that we have this much excess labor but we shouldn't be squandering it.
Steve Wozniak and Linus Torvald are both famous because they helped create multibillion dollar products. Basically they are famous for creating a rich and powerful product even if they themself are not rich and powerful. They are a fascination because they let their billion dollar ideas get away.
It's only 3 paragraphs, but let me RTFA for you:
"Meanwhile, more than half of the respondents (57%) were able to correctly identify a male leader in tech, with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg being the most commonly cited names."
All 4 of which are famous not for tech but for being rich figureheads. If you excluded the half dozen super famous then people would likely not do any better. Ask the average person to name 3 people (male or female) in a specific field like AI, biotech, etc... It's not surprising that 3 of the 4 people who were named were in charge of some of the largest companies on earth. Elon Musk is the outlier but that's just because like Trump and Tony Stark he intentionally keeps himself in the limelight.
Home users are home users, no matter the size of the home. Having them pay differently is discriminating.
In most places they already pay differently. They pay less per kwh. We shouldn't be giving a discount for wasting more energy. We don't do that for gas and there are a ton of situations like taxes where we have rich paying more. What you tax you get less of. I would much rather see us tax energy usage than income. This would also solve the whole millionaire paying less taxes because his income is from investments. We should tax consumption of finite resources not income.
2) Forcing everyone with a job to take a 50% pay cut would disrupt the lives of the employed, and they would hate you for it.
3) There will be twice as much competition for every job and effectively every one would now have to have 2 jobs to make ends meet.
I'm not proposing cutting the workweek to 20 hours tomorrow. We don't have anywhere near 50% unemployment so that would make no sense. At this point even capping it at 40 would generate some jobs as many people work more than 40 hours per week. I would also propose not allowing people to work more than 40 hours per week even if they work multiple jobs. If we dropped the maximum number of hours a person could work by 1 hour per year then it would be a nice smooth 40 year transition but in reality it should probably be much slower than that. It could be something as simple as anytime that unemployment stayed above 10% for a year the following year the maximum workweek dropped by 1 hour. A 1 hour drop in the maximum workweek should drop unemployment by about 2.5% if all those jobs are still done. Basically, it should be possible to control unemployment by manipulating the maximum workweek allowed.
"charging that same if not more for energy usage to heavy users would help reduce the demand for fossil fuels where it matters."
Only it wouldn't. It would increase the price of the end product, that's all.
You're assuming that the heavy users are all factories. The person with a 6k sqft house generally uses more energy than the person with a 3k sqft house who uses more than the person with a 1k sqft house. Just like when gas prices go up demand for large vehicles go down, if utilities went up for larger houses then the demand for larger houses would go down and demand for more energy efficiency would go up.
You know what's funny? Here in my 3rd world country, I could apply for Industrial power, pay an installation tax for 380V power and then mine away as much as I desire, while paying FAR LESS per KW/h than a home user would.
I guess 'murica has it backwards...
America is mostly like that too. I think we should be going the opposite direction though. I think we should stop giving bulk discounts for electricity or maybe even charge more for electricity to heavy users. If we are really concerned with conservation, charging that same if not more for energy usage to heavy users would help reduce the demand for fossil fuels where it matters.
That's not a given. Costs would rise, as you can't employ 2 50% workers for the cost of one. It assumes sufficient discretionary spending from 50% workers to support the current economy.
But how is half the population at 100% employment and half the population at 0% employment any better than all the population at 50% employment? At least with all the population at 50% employment everyone is kindof all in it together. UBI just sounds like some horrible dystopia where the people who can fight for the few remaining jobs get to live like kings while everyone else lives on the scraps. A gradual reduction in the workweek would allow everyone to get used to working less and having more leisure and wouldn't create a bloodbath of people fighting for fewer and fewer jobs.
We either plan for it now or start buying pitchforks and torches. And oiling up the guillotines because we _will_ eat the rich.
UBI is a terrible idea. How exactly does it solve the problem of the haves vs the have nots? It's basically another name for welfare. The people who are lucky to have good paying jobs will be fine and everyone else will get the bare minimum to survive. It will not prevent the pitchforks at all.
A solution that would work much better would be to slowly reduce the legal work week. If the legal work week was only 20 hours a week, there would be double the number of jobs. We are already seeing a situation where the richer 50% of the population are working more hours per week than the poorer 50%, if we slowly reduced the work week then we could both equalize the amount of work and the amount of leisure. It would also put in motion the ability to continue to drop the workweek from 38 to 36 to 20 to 10 or to however low we need it to maintain full employment for everyone.
Personally, I would rather see government work programs to clean up parks, etc... before UBI. UBI just doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Maybe the solution to fix our out of touch congress is to make them even more out of touch. If the members of congress were allowed no contact with lobbyists or anyone else during their term and their assets were frozen for their entire term then maybe they could make neutral decisions for the good of everyone. I think hitchhikers guide got it right having a neutral third party in charge.
There's a huge difference between copyright and patent.
A book isn't a machine or technique, so it's not like technological advancement is hanging on being able to use a copyright work.
I think they are very similar. In both cases the advantage of the public domain is derivative works. Look at Disney. Many of their movies are based on stories in the public domain. Same with Shakespeare. There are a ton of derivative stories based on Shakespeare stories.
Copyright and patents serve the same purpose. They both allow a limited monopoly to encourage society to produce. The vast majority of works get most of their revenue in the first 20 years. This is plenty of time to encourage production and it's doubtful people would not publish something because they *only* have protection for 20 years. Very few business plans hinge on not being profitable for the first 20 years.
First 20 years free. Then an escalating payment is required for each 20 year renewal afterward. Simply requiring a payment will solve the orphan works problem. This solution also lets Disney keep Mickey under copyright forever if they keep paying the escalating renewal fees. This is a simple solution to keeping commercially profitable works under copyright and letting everything else revert to the public domain.
Although this is better than the current system, I don't see why we need to allow extensions at all. Patents don't allow extensions. 20 years seems to be plenty of time for a creator to be fairly compensated for their work. Most people who do work for hire only get compensated when they actually do the work. Residual income is great but it makes no sense to have indefinite residual income for something you created 2 decades ago.
"While writers and publishers deserve fair compensation, "
But not their great grand-children.
Exactly. And furthermore why should certain activities have longer protections that others? If I do a work for hire whether it is building a deck or writing an app, I get paid and that's it. If I create a new product, I get patent protection for 20 years and that's it. Why is copyright protection so much longer than other activities? If you publish a book or movie then you should be able to sell it for 20 years and then it should immediately go to the public domain and people should be allowed to make derivatives, stream it, etc... free of charge. 20 years exclusive rights for something you create is plenty fair and is much longer than most other forms of work.