I've recently installed ubuntu on my kid's computers. During installation, there is a single checkbox that says "encrypt harddrive" and it's done. My kids also are notorious for changing the password to something cute and then forgetting it. I also have a box of old harddrives that I pulled from system before disposing of the systems. Again, I don't have the passwords for these old drives. If the FBI busted into my house, they would find multiple computers with encrypted drives that I don't have access to plus a box full of encrypted drives that I also don't have access to. And this somehow makes me guilty of a crime???
Comcast hates giving you what you paid for.... Comcast rewarding customers? HA!
They aren't rewarding customers. Having a nights and weekends policy would only benefit them. The extra capacity is free and being wasted at night. Yes, they might lose a small amount of money from overage fees or people that don't pay to upgrade to unlimited but this should be more than compensated for if even a small percentage of their customers scheduled their large downloads for after hours. This would increase their capacity and improve their performance instantly without them spending a dime. I'm very surprised that noone who is considering caps in the first place hasn't already done this.
For healthcare subsidies, any worker that works 30 or more hours/week is classified as 'full-time' and their employer must either provide healthcare coverage or pay a fee/penalty/tax for failing to do so.
But this encourages companies to schedule people for 29.5 hours per week. My wife had issues with that. She would get in trouble because she would sometimes clock out a few minutes late each day and the company would reprimand her for going over 30 even though it was their fault for scheduling her so close to the legal limit and then not letting her clock out when it was her time to go.
It would be much better to prorate it and give parttime employees vouchers that go towards health insurance. This would especially help the poor who many times have 2-3 parttime jobs that combined are over 40. It would also prevent the kind of abuse where companies hire a ton of parttime just to avoid benefits.
Likely people's pay is not going to go up significantly but rather many companies will hire more people to fill the gap. As a side benefit this should help unemployment.
- actually many full time employees will be fired and replaced with part time ones. Sure it will 'help' unemployment like every other thing for the last few years 'helps' unemployment by destroying full time jobs and creating part time ones. Having more part time jobs than full time jobs pushes the overall number of jobs up, this 'helps' the unemployment numbers as reported by the government.
I'm actually ok with this. I want my 7 hour work week I was promised. The key is to make sure that those 7 hours are still good paying jobs. I'm especially ok with a 30 hour workweek if I'm still making the same per hour as 60 hours. I'm even ok with losing my health insurance. I would rather pay for my own health insurance and not have to destroy my health working 60 hours a week. Full time and part time are relative terms. Who decided that 40 hours is fulltime and 30 hours is parttime? The only reason we make a distinction is because of the benefits like vacation pay, health insurance, etc.. but there is no reason that employers couldn't offer those same benefits to employees working 20 hours a week.
Even with stop requiring employers to provide health insurance at all. There still needs to be some kind of workers comp / some high risk jobs the employer must kick in something.
Worker's Comp is completely separate from health insurance. It's an insurance policy paid for by the employer that only covers accidents. Health insurance companies know this which is why even though my employer pays for both my health insurance and worker's comp, when I go to the doctor's I sometimes get a letter from my health insurance company asking me how I got the injury. They would really like to pass the charge over to the worker's comp side if they can.
of course, because of Obamacare, everyone and their dog is running 29 hour part time workers, to avoid paying through the nose for insurance for every 'full time' employee. This means there was no overtime being worked ANYWAYS.
There are several solutions to this but keeping employees salaried isn't one of them. One solution would be to stop requiring employers to provide health insurance at all and give people tax breaks to buy the type of coverage THEY want versus the type of coverage that is the cheapest for the employer. It makes no sense to have health insurance tied to your job. The only reason it is is because a long time ago it was a way to get around wage caps. Another way would be to get employers to pay insurance proportional to how many hours a person worked. If you combined the two then you could create something highly attractive to both parties that might actually have a chance of getting passed. For instance if every employer had to contribute $X dollars per hour to a savings account that the employee set up and the employee could only spend it on health insurance premiums. If someone had multiple parttime jobs then they could pool the amounts. If they were short then they could make up the difference. To sweeten the deal for the employers and encourage people to buy insurance you could even say that any money not spent at the end of the year gets returned to the employer. This would likely be a much better system than what we have now where every time you change your job you change your health insurance and the person who uses the health insurance gets no say in what kind of coverage they get.
If the pay for overtime is going to go up, that means it's less likely that a business will want you to work overtime.
That's kindof the point. The point of overtime law is to discourage companies from forcing people to work more than 40 hours per week. So I actually disagree with the headline. Likely people's pay is not going to go up significantly but rather many companies will hire more people to fill the gap. As a side benefit this should help unemployment. I work at a tech company and we pay everyone hourly. I think salaried is stupid and we should just do away with it. If they track your hours then you should automatically be hourly. If you don't set your own schedule then you should be hourly. If you can't leave at noon because things are slow then you should be hourly. If you don't have a set amount of tasks that once finished you can leave then you should be hourly. Most people shouldn't really be salaried. Nurses or anyone who has to be at their station a minimum number of hours shouldn't be salaried. Salaried should be reserved for the accountant that comes in, balances the books, and leaves or other such jobs where you can actually run out of work and go home early if you get done early.
So in other words, you don't like the fact that some players have an advantage over you because they are more skilled in one aspect of the game.
It has nothing to do with me being unskilled at it. I said I think it would be a better game. Starcraft was fun when I first started playing it and it was who could outsmart the other team. It became a lot less fun when it became who can churn out units the fastest and/or micromanage the best. That's just not fun to me. Now as a programmer, writing AI to compete with other AI on starcraft, that I would enjoy but I no longer enjoy playing starcraft as much as I used to because I don't like the micromanaging aspect. Also as a programmer, most of my job consists of automating the monotonous parts so playing a game that is monotonous doesn't appeal to me.
Because it's not showing intelligence, it's being able to click fast. We already know computers can click faster than humans, that's not a question. The "Starcraft AI" is a thing because they are trying to improve the intelligence of computers. If all they do is click fast, they have cheated on the goal of intelligence.
Just like a autonomous car is "cheating" because it has a faster reaction time than a human? If an autonomous car is a safer driver than a human, who cares how it "cheats"? For starcraft, if it really became a problem then limiting both humans and AI to X actions per second would be a reasonable compromise where X is what a fast human can do but it's still quite an accomplishment if AI can beat a human in an open ended game like starcraft.
Speaking as a intermediate starcraft player, I think starcraft would be a better game if either the number of actions per second were limited or if there was more scripting available for the human player. It sucks when the winner is the person who clicks the fastest instead of the person with the best strategy. I like RTS better than turn based but maybe some middle ground where it's realtime but there is a "click meter" that gets depleted might level the playing field a bit.
There's still some reward for working, but most people can get by without a job.
With a true *basic* income there would be plenty of incentive to work but I'm not sure what the cost of living is in greece but $2400/month sounds alot more than basic. You can't give everyone minimum wage and expect people who were used to making minimum wage to continue to work. Basic income should probably be phased in over time starting at a few hundred dollars a month and should be set at a minimal survival rate. A simple formula might be to set it at what it would take for 4 adults to share a single apartment and buy the food and supplies they need. Just a guess but if 4 adults were sharing an apartment then they could probably get by on $400/month apiece ($200/month each for rent and $200/month each for food) This is considerably lower than the $2400/month that greece is proposing and would still give plenty of incentive to work. We should probably at the same time work on providing affordable efficiency apartments for single individuals as well as free healthcare to complete the safety net.
If you wanted to get away with a higher contention ratio, you would have to reduce peak usage. But even with caps, almost everybody will use their broadband connection at the same time, the traffic peak, and "save" bandwidth when everybody else is also less interested in using their broadband connection. Unfortunately bandwidth cannot be saved. You can use it or not, but what you do has no effect on the bandwidth which is available tomorrow. Caps for saving bandwidth are like closing the window blinds to save sunlight.
I agree that monthly caps are stupid but "peak data" caps/throttles would have an effect on capacity. ISPs should be encouraging customers to download large files during offpeak times. This is where "zero rating" should be used. ISPs should be giving away custom torrent clients that don't count towards your data usage because they only download when there is excess capacity.
There are better ways of doing it than caps. There are a ton of QOS type tools that work much better than caps. Probably one of the best is where there are different buckets. For instance you get full bandwidth for the first 10G/day, after that it is throttle at halfspeed for the next 10G. You can also give free data after hours just like they used to for cellphones where it's cheaper at night. If instead of trying to gouge customers at the top with overage charges and trying to gouge customers at the bottom by selling them a high speed connection to check their email, companies actually looked at their customer base and came up with plans that were optimized for their customers instead of optimized for profit then you could make virtually everyone happy. Most of the torrent people know that they are heavy users and are smart enough to schedule downloads for overnight hours if the rules are clear. Yes, having posted limits is more complicated than just saying "unlimited" but there is really no such thing as "unlimited". Unlimited phone calls and texting only works because a person has to physically sit there and do it so it sets an artificial limit. It would be easy to have unlimited internet if the person had to be sitting in front of their computer to do it but when computers are on 24/7 then you need some sort of policy to make it fair for both heavy and light users.
hobby drivers just creaming off the most profitable jobs and allows their dedicated drivers to more easily make a living
This is the real problem with Uber. They want everything both ways. They call themself a "ride share" company but most of their drivers are dedicated drivers. If it was just a ride share and I was going there anyways then doing it for less than minimum wage would be fine. They want to call their drivers independent contractors but at the same time dictate when, where, and how much they charge (aka an employee). If I'm a contractor and I can pick up people when and where I want and charge whatever I want then that's fine too. Uber doesn't want that either They want employees they can control but the tax benefits of them being called independent contractors. Most of the recent legal problems Uber is in is not because of entrenched taxi services. They've mostly won that battle. The fights they are currently in are labor law fights and they will likely end up losing this next round and they should. They need to either be an app like ebay where independent contractors compete for customers on price, availability, etc.. or they need hire their drivers as employees.
On a related note, those "hobby drivers" that you are complaining about would not be a problem if you bid on jobs. They would also help with surges. As demand increased and bids started increasing then more hobby drivers would show up. Likewise, unprofitable routes would no longer be unprofitable as those dedicated drivers would require more to take those jobs.
But thinking about it, it makes sense. We live in a universe where it is possible, at least in theory, to simulate a smaller universe.
Why would it have to be smaller? What's to say that the resolution is the same everywhere? Maybe just like in many video games the different areas aren't active unless being interacted with by something else in the environment? Maybe stuff off in the distance is really just for looks and even if we did manage to make it to the next star then that area of that map will only start really existing once we get there. The stuff at the microscopic level could work the same way where the resolution only increases as we drill down. Quantum physics already has some weird "observer bias" stuff where observing it seems to affects it's outcome. If we are in a simulation and the resolution does vary based on how we interact with the environment then trying to find more of these type of discrepancies is likely the best way to prove we are in a simulation.
Sim theory isnt new. It was thought of because of the breakdowns in math that fail in computer sims also fail in our reality physics.
Sim theory (or at least the basic concept) predates computers by hundreds of years. One early example was in the 1600s when Descartes described an "evil demon" that took over all your senses "Matrix" style complete with other fake minds. Computers weren't around but he described all the concepts of "brain in a vat", the matrix, the 13th floor, etc.. perfectly.
Think about the figures you just threw out. 10k for every person in the usa. 300 million people = a 3.19 trillion dollar program. The entire tax revenue of 2014 is less than that!
The USA says the poverty line is currently 12k for the first person and 4k for each additional person. The poverty line is strange in that it varies based on the size of the household. 10k for a single individual would not even get them above the poverty line but 40k for a family of 4 and they would be almost double the poverty line. The payment should probably be closer to 4k(or even 2k) per person but this causes problems for shared resources like housing unless individuals and smaller households start pooling their resources.
Anyways, at 4k/individual that comes out to 1.2 trillion. The social security tax revenue alone is 1.8 trillion. That doesn't include income taxes(2.3trillion) or any of the other sources of revenue for the federal or state governments. So you could easily pay 4k/person to every man/woman/child in the USA using just the money from the social security tax revenue and still have 600 billion dollars left over. This does present a slight problem as the average social security recipient currently receives 16k per year not 4k/year but it's not as insurmountable as you make it sound.
Regardless of how you initially implement it, you're going to cause problems.
1) If you set basic income to what it takes to survive in rural america then the people in LA/NY are not going to be able to survive and/or will all leave and the big cities will come crashing down.
2) If you set basic income to what it takes to survive in NY then a large percentage of people in rural america would be better off just sitting at home which will cause rural america to crash
3) If you try to make cost of living adjustments then you cause all sorts of other problems and it's more open to manipulation by politicians.
#1 is still probably the best. I believe that is how social security currently is where you get the same amount regardless of whether you live in NY/LA or rural america.
No removal of basic income for felonies, including serial killing or terrorism. No removal of income for saying things that no one likes, including the most vile racism, sexism, or ethnocentricity you can think of No removal of income for failing to vote No removal of income for anything at all except dying, and only then if we have a death certificate or a legal process declaring them dead.
You missed the most important one: No removal of income for making money. If, for instance, basic income was set at 10k and the next 10k you made was tax-free then that would give a ton of incentive for people to still work. Another thing that people forget is that if basic income was started tomorrow and 10M people quit working then companies would have to raise wages or create other incentives to fill the gap that was just created.
Having a basic income and getting rid of welfare, social security, housing assistance, etc... would simplify things alot and would end up saving alot of money in administration.
Many people are reluctant to give their credit card info to porn sites because they are scared that they will be charged
That IS the purpose of a credit card.
Exactly. So it's not a very good way to verify someone's age. Pulling their credit would be more accurate but even more scary. Emailing a copy of driver's license is again scary and also easy for a determined kid to fake. A credit card charge of $1 is a fairly easy way of making sure kids don't access a website as even if they can sneak a credit card for a few minutes the charge will still show up (not to mention that if they are old enough to sneak a credit card and enter it in a website then they are probably old enough to see porn)
I've seen kids app try to do age verification with a math problem but this is usually to block out really young kids. Trying to create problems that the average 18 year old can always solve but a smart 11 year old can't would be difficult.
If they really want to fix the porn problem for minors then the best solution is to take porn out of the shadows (not that it's really in the shadows right now). Many people are reluctant to give their credit card info to porn sites because they are scared that they will be charged or they are scared of getting caught by a spouse. It would be relatively simple to have some place like the DMV or post office give out anonymous ids which have been age verified.
The biggest problem is that they don't want to just stop minors. There is this strange belief in many circles that porn is a gateway to rape (even though studies have shown the exact opposite). I had a friend who ended up on the sexual offender's list because at 23 he slept with a 17 year old girl (who already had a kid, btw). Anyways, one of the conditions of his probation was no porn. Seriously??? We should provide free porn and free internet to everyone on the sexual offender's list. As a society, we should *want* them to stay in their basement watching porn instead of going out prowling.
On a more serious note, all it takes is for one person to screw up for them to be caught.
I can see using this for investigating but if nothing is found then the money should be returned. I tend to go shopping at several stores right before a big trip which is atypical for me so it's common for me to get a call from my credit card company or sometimes even have my card get turned off but as soon as they verify that the transaction is fine then everything goes back to normal. They also have random triggers for money deposits or withdrawals at the bank where they write your name in a book if you hit some secret thresholds. Again, this has happened to me a few times but that was it, presumably someone investigated and decided that I was fine and moved on.
I am working on implementing something similar. Not an URL shortener, but semi-private shared data with a short URL. My first thought was the risk of someone trying to attack and steal all the records via brute force. Then I decided to track invalid requests and present a CAPTCHA after 3 failed requests from the same IP.
Isn't this easy to solve? Even with a distributed attack, each IP would only get a few hits and it's a large search space. And even if CAPTCHAS are broken, there can be more aggressive measures to follow if invalid requests still come in - including slowing down loading times on flagged IP addresses.
I did exactly this for a company I worked for. I skipped the whole captcha thing though. When I start seeing failures from an IP then I start randomly increasing the response time of the service and once I had too many failures in a fixed window then I started randomly returning "url not found" even for valid urls. We implemented it for text messages. Also, unlike most url shortening services, our urls expire after 24 hours because that is all the longer that we need them to be valid.
You shouldn't be trying to discourage a kid from playing minecraft. Minecraft is a giant creative sandbox with extremely sophisticated logical circuitry. You'd be amazed at what people build.
Yes, you CAN build anything just like you CAN build anything on an ipad or a computer. The problem I have with minecraft and other games like it is that the potential is there but what if all they do is spend hours and hours spawning and killing monsters? Or in software like tynker or scratch, they download a mario knockoff games that other people have already built and just play those. Minecraft is similar to a computer or an ipad. The potential to create anything is there but if your kid is spending 8 hours a day playing candy crush then even though the potential to learn on an ipad is there, that doesn't mean they are actually learning. Whether it is a computer, an ipad, or minecraft, you sometimes need to either limit it or at least encourage them to use it productively. A device or virtual world where "anything is possible" also means that the possibility of doing nothing is also possible. To be used in an educational setting where you actually want a kid to learn then you're likely going to have to give some kids direction and tasks to complete if you don't want them to play games all day.
Urine was believed to be sterile, but we now know this isn't true.
It's not that urine is sterile is that it's alot more sterile than what is available in the wild. It also tends to have a more similar PH and salt level to your body so if you're in the wild or in a battlefield and your only choice to sterilize some stitches is between dirty river water and urine then it's better to choose urine but if you have sterile saline or bottled water then by all means use the water.
Yep, generally your own urine won't give you any disease you don't already have. If you've got something serious and transmitted via body fluids, keep em to yourself.
I'm not sure there are any diseases transmitted via urine. It's the microscopic pieces of faeces and other bodily fluids like blood, semen, and phlegm that cause all the problems. Urine is pretty sterile and will likely kill most things it comes in contact with so if you really want to be safe then pee all over the seat before you sit down.
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encryption = malfeasance.
I've recently installed ubuntu on my kid's computers. During installation, there is a single checkbox that says "encrypt harddrive" and it's done. My kids also are notorious for changing the password to something cute and then forgetting it. I also have a box of old harddrives that I pulled from system before disposing of the systems. Again, I don't have the passwords for these old drives. If the FBI busted into my house, they would find multiple computers with encrypted drives that I don't have access to plus a box full of encrypted drives that I also don't have access to. And this somehow makes me guilty of a crime???
Comcast hates giving you what you paid for.... Comcast rewarding customers? HA!
They aren't rewarding customers. Having a nights and weekends policy would only benefit them. The extra capacity is free and being wasted at night. Yes, they might lose a small amount of money from overage fees or people that don't pay to upgrade to unlimited but this should be more than compensated for if even a small percentage of their customers scheduled their large downloads for after hours. This would increase their capacity and improve their performance instantly without them spending a dime. I'm very surprised that noone who is considering caps in the first place hasn't already done this.
For healthcare subsidies, any worker that works 30 or more hours/week is classified as 'full-time' and their employer must either provide healthcare coverage or pay a fee/penalty/tax for failing to do so.
But this encourages companies to schedule people for 29.5 hours per week. My wife had issues with that. She would get in trouble because she would sometimes clock out a few minutes late each day and the company would reprimand her for going over 30 even though it was their fault for scheduling her so close to the legal limit and then not letting her clock out when it was her time to go.
It would be much better to prorate it and give parttime employees vouchers that go towards health insurance. This would especially help the poor who many times have 2-3 parttime jobs that combined are over 40. It would also prevent the kind of abuse where companies hire a ton of parttime just to avoid benefits.
Likely people's pay is not going to go up significantly but rather many companies will hire more people to fill the gap. As a side benefit this should help unemployment.
- actually many full time employees will be fired and replaced with part time ones. Sure it will 'help' unemployment like every other thing for the last few years 'helps' unemployment by destroying full time jobs and creating part time ones. Having more part time jobs than full time jobs pushes the overall number of jobs up, this 'helps' the unemployment numbers as reported by the government.
I'm actually ok with this. I want my 7 hour work week I was promised. The key is to make sure that those 7 hours are still good paying jobs. I'm especially ok with a 30 hour workweek if I'm still making the same per hour as 60 hours. I'm even ok with losing my health insurance. I would rather pay for my own health insurance and not have to destroy my health working 60 hours a week. Full time and part time are relative terms. Who decided that 40 hours is fulltime and 30 hours is parttime? The only reason we make a distinction is because of the benefits like vacation pay, health insurance, etc.. but there is no reason that employers couldn't offer those same benefits to employees working 20 hours a week.
Even with stop requiring employers to provide health insurance at all. There still needs to be some kind of workers comp / some high risk jobs the employer must kick in something.
Worker's Comp is completely separate from health insurance. It's an insurance policy paid for by the employer that only covers accidents. Health insurance companies know this which is why even though my employer pays for both my health insurance and worker's comp, when I go to the doctor's I sometimes get a letter from my health insurance company asking me how I got the injury. They would really like to pass the charge over to the worker's comp side if they can.
of course, because of Obamacare, everyone and their dog is running 29 hour part time workers, to avoid paying through the nose for insurance for every 'full time' employee. This means there was no overtime being worked ANYWAYS.
There are several solutions to this but keeping employees salaried isn't one of them. One solution would be to stop requiring employers to provide health insurance at all and give people tax breaks to buy the type of coverage THEY want versus the type of coverage that is the cheapest for the employer. It makes no sense to have health insurance tied to your job. The only reason it is is because a long time ago it was a way to get around wage caps. Another way would be to get employers to pay insurance proportional to how many hours a person worked. If you combined the two then you could create something highly attractive to both parties that might actually have a chance of getting passed. For instance if every employer had to contribute $X dollars per hour to a savings account that the employee set up and the employee could only spend it on health insurance premiums. If someone had multiple parttime jobs then they could pool the amounts. If they were short then they could make up the difference. To sweeten the deal for the employers and encourage people to buy insurance you could even say that any money not spent at the end of the year gets returned to the employer. This would likely be a much better system than what we have now where every time you change your job you change your health insurance and the person who uses the health insurance gets no say in what kind of coverage they get.
If the pay for overtime is going to go up, that means it's less likely that a business will want you to work overtime.
That's kindof the point. The point of overtime law is to discourage companies from forcing people to work more than 40 hours per week. So I actually disagree with the headline. Likely people's pay is not going to go up significantly but rather many companies will hire more people to fill the gap. As a side benefit this should help unemployment. I work at a tech company and we pay everyone hourly. I think salaried is stupid and we should just do away with it. If they track your hours then you should automatically be hourly. If you don't set your own schedule then you should be hourly. If you can't leave at noon because things are slow then you should be hourly. If you don't have a set amount of tasks that once finished you can leave then you should be hourly. Most people shouldn't really be salaried. Nurses or anyone who has to be at their station a minimum number of hours shouldn't be salaried. Salaried should be reserved for the accountant that comes in, balances the books, and leaves or other such jobs where you can actually run out of work and go home early if you get done early.
So in other words, you don't like the fact that some players have an advantage over you because they are more skilled in one aspect of the game.
It has nothing to do with me being unskilled at it. I said I think it would be a better game. Starcraft was fun when I first started playing it and it was who could outsmart the other team. It became a lot less fun when it became who can churn out units the fastest and/or micromanage the best. That's just not fun to me. Now as a programmer, writing AI to compete with other AI on starcraft, that I would enjoy but I no longer enjoy playing starcraft as much as I used to because I don't like the micromanaging aspect. Also as a programmer, most of my job consists of automating the monotonous parts so playing a game that is monotonous doesn't appeal to me.
Because it's not showing intelligence, it's being able to click fast. We already know computers can click faster than humans, that's not a question.
The "Starcraft AI" is a thing because they are trying to improve the intelligence of computers. If all they do is click fast, they have cheated on the goal of intelligence.
Just like a autonomous car is "cheating" because it has a faster reaction time than a human? If an autonomous car is a safer driver than a human, who cares how it "cheats"? For starcraft, if it really became a problem then limiting both humans and AI to X actions per second would be a reasonable compromise where X is what a fast human can do but it's still quite an accomplishment if AI can beat a human in an open ended game like starcraft.
Speaking as a intermediate starcraft player, I think starcraft would be a better game if either the number of actions per second were limited or if there was more scripting available for the human player. It sucks when the winner is the person who clicks the fastest instead of the person with the best strategy. I like RTS better than turn based but maybe some middle ground where it's realtime but there is a "click meter" that gets depleted might level the playing field a bit.
There's still some reward for working, but most people can get by without a job.
With a true *basic* income there would be plenty of incentive to work but I'm not sure what the cost of living is in greece but $2400/month sounds alot more than basic. You can't give everyone minimum wage and expect people who were used to making minimum wage to continue to work. Basic income should probably be phased in over time starting at a few hundred dollars a month and should be set at a minimal survival rate. A simple formula might be to set it at what it would take for 4 adults to share a single apartment and buy the food and supplies they need. Just a guess but if 4 adults were sharing an apartment then they could probably get by on $400/month apiece ($200/month each for rent and $200/month each for food) This is considerably lower than the $2400/month that greece is proposing and would still give plenty of incentive to work. We should probably at the same time work on providing affordable efficiency apartments for single individuals as well as free healthcare to complete the safety net.
If you wanted to get away with a higher contention ratio, you would have to reduce peak usage. But even with caps, almost everybody will use their broadband connection at the same time, the traffic peak, and "save" bandwidth when everybody else is also less interested in using their broadband connection. Unfortunately bandwidth cannot be saved. You can use it or not, but what you do has no effect on the bandwidth which is available tomorrow. Caps for saving bandwidth are like closing the window blinds to save sunlight.
I agree that monthly caps are stupid but "peak data" caps/throttles would have an effect on capacity. ISPs should be encouraging customers to download large files during offpeak times. This is where "zero rating" should be used. ISPs should be giving away custom torrent clients that don't count towards your data usage because they only download when there is excess capacity.
There are better ways of doing it than caps. There are a ton of QOS type tools that work much better than caps. Probably one of the best is where there are different buckets. For instance you get full bandwidth for the first 10G/day, after that it is throttle at halfspeed for the next 10G. You can also give free data after hours just like they used to for cellphones where it's cheaper at night. If instead of trying to gouge customers at the top with overage charges and trying to gouge customers at the bottom by selling them a high speed connection to check their email, companies actually looked at their customer base and came up with plans that were optimized for their customers instead of optimized for profit then you could make virtually everyone happy. Most of the torrent people know that they are heavy users and are smart enough to schedule downloads for overnight hours if the rules are clear. Yes, having posted limits is more complicated than just saying "unlimited" but there is really no such thing as "unlimited". Unlimited phone calls and texting only works because a person has to physically sit there and do it so it sets an artificial limit. It would be easy to have unlimited internet if the person had to be sitting in front of their computer to do it but when computers are on 24/7 then you need some sort of policy to make it fair for both heavy and light users.
hobby drivers just creaming off the most profitable jobs and allows their dedicated drivers to more easily make a living
This is the real problem with Uber. They want everything both ways. They call themself a "ride share" company but most of their drivers are dedicated drivers. If it was just a ride share and I was going there anyways then doing it for less than minimum wage would be fine. They want to call their drivers independent contractors but at the same time dictate when, where, and how much they charge (aka an employee). If I'm a contractor and I can pick up people when and where I want and charge whatever I want then that's fine too. Uber doesn't want that either They want employees they can control but the tax benefits of them being called independent contractors. Most of the recent legal problems Uber is in is not because of entrenched taxi services. They've mostly won that battle. The fights they are currently in are labor law fights and they will likely end up losing this next round and they should. They need to either be an app like ebay where independent contractors compete for customers on price, availability, etc.. or they need hire their drivers as employees.
On a related note, those "hobby drivers" that you are complaining about would not be a problem if you bid on jobs. They would also help with surges. As demand increased and bids started increasing then more hobby drivers would show up. Likewise, unprofitable routes would no longer be unprofitable as those dedicated drivers would require more to take those jobs.
But thinking about it, it makes sense. We live in a universe where it is possible, at least in theory, to simulate a smaller universe.
Why would it have to be smaller? What's to say that the resolution is the same everywhere? Maybe just like in many video games the different areas aren't active unless being interacted with by something else in the environment? Maybe stuff off in the distance is really just for looks and even if we did manage to make it to the next star then that area of that map will only start really existing once we get there. The stuff at the microscopic level could work the same way where the resolution only increases as we drill down. Quantum physics already has some weird "observer bias" stuff where observing it seems to affects it's outcome. If we are in a simulation and the resolution does vary based on how we interact with the environment then trying to find more of these type of discrepancies is likely the best way to prove we are in a simulation.
Sim theory isnt new. It was thought of because of the breakdowns in math that fail in computer sims also fail in our reality physics.
Sim theory (or at least the basic concept) predates computers by hundreds of years. One early example was in the 1600s when Descartes described an "evil demon" that took over all your senses "Matrix" style complete with other fake minds. Computers weren't around but he described all the concepts of "brain in a vat", the matrix, the 13th floor, etc.. perfectly.
Think about the figures you just threw out. 10k for every person in the usa. 300 million people = a 3.19 trillion dollar program. The entire tax revenue of 2014 is less than that!
The USA says the poverty line is currently 12k for the first person and 4k for each additional person. The poverty line is strange in that it varies based on the size of the household. 10k for a single individual would not even get them above the poverty line but 40k for a family of 4 and they would be almost double the poverty line. The payment should probably be closer to 4k(or even 2k) per person but this causes problems for shared resources like housing unless individuals and smaller households start pooling their resources.
Anyways, at 4k/individual that comes out to 1.2 trillion. The social security tax revenue alone is 1.8 trillion. That doesn't include income taxes(2.3trillion) or any of the other sources of revenue for the federal or state governments. So you could easily pay 4k/person to every man/woman/child in the USA using just the money from the social security tax revenue and still have 600 billion dollars left over. This does present a slight problem as the average social security recipient currently receives 16k per year not 4k/year but it's not as insurmountable as you make it sound.
Regardless of how you initially implement it, you're going to cause problems.
1) If you set basic income to what it takes to survive in rural america then the people in LA/NY are not going to be able to survive and/or will all leave and the big cities will come crashing down.
2) If you set basic income to what it takes to survive in NY then a large percentage of people in rural america would be better off just sitting at home which will cause rural america to crash
3) If you try to make cost of living adjustments then you cause all sorts of other problems and it's more open to manipulation by politicians.
#1 is still probably the best. I believe that is how social security currently is where you get the same amount regardless of whether you live in NY/LA or rural america.
No removal of basic income for felonies, including serial killing or terrorism.
No removal of income for saying things that no one likes, including the most vile racism, sexism, or ethnocentricity you can think of
No removal of income for failing to vote
No removal of income for anything at all except dying, and only then if we have a death certificate or a legal process declaring them dead.
You missed the most important one: No removal of income for making money.
If, for instance, basic income was set at 10k and the next 10k you made was tax-free then that would give a ton of incentive for people to still work.
Another thing that people forget is that if basic income was started tomorrow and 10M people quit working then companies would have to raise wages or create other incentives to fill the gap that was just created.
Having a basic income and getting rid of welfare, social security, housing assistance, etc... would simplify things alot and would end up saving alot of money in administration.
That IS the purpose of a credit card.
Exactly. So it's not a very good way to verify someone's age. Pulling their credit would be more accurate but even more scary. Emailing a copy of driver's license is again scary and also easy for a determined kid to fake. A credit card charge of $1 is a fairly easy way of making sure kids don't access a website as even if they can sneak a credit card for a few minutes the charge will still show up (not to mention that if they are old enough to sneak a credit card and enter it in a website then they are probably old enough to see porn)
I've seen kids app try to do age verification with a math problem but this is usually to block out really young kids. Trying to create problems that the average 18 year old can always solve but a smart 11 year old can't would be difficult.
If they really want to fix the porn problem for minors then the best solution is to take porn out of the shadows (not that it's really in the shadows right now). Many people are reluctant to give their credit card info to porn sites because they are scared that they will be charged or they are scared of getting caught by a spouse. It would be relatively simple to have some place like the DMV or post office give out anonymous ids which have been age verified.
The biggest problem is that they don't want to just stop minors. There is this strange belief in many circles that porn is a gateway to rape (even though studies have shown the exact opposite). I had a friend who ended up on the sexual offender's list because at 23 he slept with a 17 year old girl (who already had a kid, btw). Anyways, one of the conditions of his probation was no porn. Seriously??? We should provide free porn and free internet to everyone on the sexual offender's list. As a society, we should *want* them to stay in their basement watching porn instead of going out prowling.
On a more serious note, all it takes is for one person to screw up for them to be caught.
I can see using this for investigating but if nothing is found then the money should be returned. I tend to go shopping at several stores right before a big trip which is atypical for me so it's common for me to get a call from my credit card company or sometimes even have my card get turned off but as soon as they verify that the transaction is fine then everything goes back to normal. They also have random triggers for money deposits or withdrawals at the bank where they write your name in a book if you hit some secret thresholds. Again, this has happened to me a few times but that was it, presumably someone investigated and decided that I was fine and moved on.
I am working on implementing something similar. Not an URL shortener, but semi-private shared data with a short URL. My first thought was the risk of someone trying to attack and steal all the records via brute force. Then I decided to track invalid requests and present a CAPTCHA after 3 failed requests from the same IP.
Isn't this easy to solve? Even with a distributed attack, each IP would only get a few hits and it's a large search space. And even if CAPTCHAS are broken, there can be more aggressive measures to follow if invalid requests still come in - including slowing down loading times on flagged IP addresses.
I did exactly this for a company I worked for. I skipped the whole captcha thing though. When I start seeing failures from an IP then I start randomly increasing the response time of the service and once I had too many failures in a fixed window then I started randomly returning "url not found" even for valid urls. We implemented it for text messages. Also, unlike most url shortening services, our urls expire after 24 hours because that is all the longer that we need them to be valid.
You shouldn't be trying to discourage a kid from playing minecraft. Minecraft is a giant creative sandbox with extremely sophisticated logical circuitry.
You'd be amazed at what people build.
Yes, you CAN build anything just like you CAN build anything on an ipad or a computer. The problem I have with minecraft and other games like it is that the potential is there but what if all they do is spend hours and hours spawning and killing monsters? Or in software like tynker or scratch, they download a mario knockoff games that other people have already built and just play those. Minecraft is similar to a computer or an ipad. The potential to create anything is there but if your kid is spending 8 hours a day playing candy crush then even though the potential to learn on an ipad is there, that doesn't mean they are actually learning. Whether it is a computer, an ipad, or minecraft, you sometimes need to either limit it or at least encourage them to use it productively. A device or virtual world where "anything is possible" also means that the possibility of doing nothing is also possible. To be used in an educational setting where you actually want a kid to learn then you're likely going to have to give some kids direction and tasks to complete if you don't want them to play games all day.
Urine was believed to be sterile, but we now know this isn't true.
It's not that urine is sterile is that it's alot more sterile than what is available in the wild. It also tends to have a more similar PH and salt level to your body so if you're in the wild or in a battlefield and your only choice to sterilize some stitches is between dirty river water and urine then it's better to choose urine but if you have sterile saline or bottled water then by all means use the water.
Yep, generally your own urine won't give you any disease you don't already have. If you've got something serious and transmitted via body fluids, keep em to yourself.
I'm not sure there are any diseases transmitted via urine. It's the microscopic pieces of faeces and other bodily fluids like blood, semen, and phlegm that cause all the problems. Urine is pretty sterile and will likely kill most things it comes in contact with so if you really want to be safe then pee all over the seat before you sit down.