The link to the previous slashdot article states that traffic fines collect 300k per officer. Strangely no one in the previous article mentioned that based on the numbers given that would make there only be 20k officers in the USA. In reality, according to google, there are 900k sworn officers which would make traffic fines only account for 7k per officer. Still a significant amount but nowhere near the 300k mentioned in the previous article.
There isn't any aspect of life where the wealthy don't benefit more than the rest of us.
Although I mostly agree with this statement, this is actually one area where the poor *could* benefit more. First off, paying for organs would make more organs available and secondly, 10k is a lot more useful to a poor family that just lost someone than it is to a rich family that just lost someone. Obviously there needs to be checks (especially on the still living) to make sure it's not abused but most poor people don't have life insurance and an extra 10k-100k at death could actually benefit their family greatly.
Micromanaging is for kindergarten teachers. You have a team of devs because they know how to code and you probably don't, keep thy nose in thine own trough.
As a manager I hate to micromanage and I've discovered that there are two types of developers: Those that can self-manage and those that can't. Being a small shop we are unable to efficiently micromanage the later type of employees and eventually have to let them go. I've stayed in contact with a few of these later type that get into a highly structured and micromanaged business and they do just fine even though they were incapable of completing even simple projects if left on their own.
Reply is that, just like driving, nobody REALLY wants that because oftentimes (not always, OBVIOUSLY) driving is not an act of utility, but a thing of passion and pleasure, just like eating. Or motorcycle riding. Or shooting firearms. Or shooting fireworks.
I would venture to say that 90%+ of miles driven in a given day are the "daily grind" type not the pleasure type. If we're talking about driving within 25 miles of a major city then we are approaching 100%. Sure, some people enjoy driving out in the country on backroads or some scenic road but that's a very small percentage. If/When we get self-driving cars then non-self driving cars will probably go the same way as horses. They become a hobby that people do on occasion for fun but rarely for practical purposes.
I hope your bottom line does not depend on American sales of your product. Your line of reasoning is that Americans are too expensive to employ and thus do not deserve a job. Once you left with only foreign workers who will buy your product?
I think it depends on what "Americans" we are talking about. Where I work we haven't outsourced anything overseas *yet* but it seems like we have almost weekly discussions on how to offload anything and everything possible from the IT department to another non-technical department. The reason being is that our IT employees average $35-$45 dollars per hour while our non-technical staff averages $15-$25 dollars per hour so anything we can move out of the technical realm into the non-technical realm saves the company a ton of money. I don't see Americans getting pushed completely out but I do see programmer salaries dropping to be on more on par with other 4 year degrees instead of the 200% or more they currently command.
I'm not trying to troll, but am genuinely curious as to what you're doing if you've got several hundred servers running that are at enough of a risk of locking up hard enough that they need a physical power cycle to reset them?
They are linux boxes and they actually rarely hard locked. The problem is that they are all in remote locations several states away with no way to reboot them if something does go wrong so even if they only freeze once a year it is alot cheaper to put a watchdog timer in them than to pay someone to drive there to press the power button.
Cool! My solution in the 90's to that problem was to find some ip power switches so I could power cycle the devices remotely. It wouldn't be an acceptable solution today.
That would have probably worked except in this case the servers are what are providing the connection so if they go down so does the connection. Telemetry operations where you are operating a remote server over a single pipe and have no easy way to repair it or even reboot it makes for quite a few creative solutions to try to not have to send a technician to a remote location.
I checked out a book on tape at the library called "What would MacGyver do" about true stories. After listening to several real stories I realized that just myself and my immediate family could fill an entire book full of better "hacks" that were listed in that book. Most of them I had never considered "note worthy" until finding a entire book with many other less note-worthy stories in it.
The hack I'm probably most proud of is rather simple. My work was needing a watchdog timer to reboot locked servers and most of the off the shelf solutions were several hundred dollars so instead I created a simple program on an arduino that connected to the power button and the usb port so it could "press" the power button if there was a hard lock. It has been deployed with several hundred servers at this point and at a fraction of the cost of most other solutions.
It would have to be for some distance outside of the whitehouse as well, as a safe measure. Drones do have failsafes that could be programmed to continue its course should it lose GPS, thus the reason for the extra distance.
Yeah, my guess is they won't do much until after the first successful attack. Creating a half mile deadzone though wouldn't be a too big of deal. You might see a comeback of payphones, emergency call boxes, paper maps and the like in that area to compensate but it really wouldn't be that big of a deal.
The bigger deal is what to do with them everywhere else. How do you protect schools, hospitals, playgrounds, city halls, restaurants, etc... Granted a backpack bomb is still fairly easy but it gets alot easier when you can be miles away.
If you don't mind dying from the radiation damage before we get out of the solar system... wait, that does help with the overpopulation problem....
My guess is that when/if we figure out how to "cure" aging we'll also be pretty far along the curve to cure cancer and radiation damage as those are very interwoven domains and it would be very difficult to fully "cure" aging without also having the technology to control cancer and random mutations caused by slightly too much radiation.
You would need very expensive jammers to be effective against drones. The power needed to jam every direction in the sky increases exponentially by distance.
Jamming would never really be a viable solution in a city except during an actual attack. It would cause more damage then it could ever hope to prevent. It would have to block the radios and GPS used by planes, helicopters, police, firefighters, and anything else remotely near the jammer, to actually be effective at blocking a radio controlled drone.
Nonsense. Get directional GPS antennas and point them straight up into the sky and surround the whitehouse. While you're at it point some EMP guns straight up in the air too. Nothing is suppose to be flying over the whitehouse so you don't have to worry about disrupting civilian planes, etc... Making them powerful enough to go a few thousand feet straight up but not powerful enough to interfere with LEO satelites would be simple. If you used a directional antenna (again pointed straight up and surrounding the whitehouse) to block all signals then the only drones you would have to worry about would be ones that navigated via visual cues which would be considerably harder to do.
This is just the patent for Google Panda. I'm surprised they waited until after their April Fool's joke to get this patent but it might have been that the Google Panda was really ment as a joke then they started getting a bunch of "I really want one" messages and decided that they better patent it.
What I am saying is that if that is getting through the system there are probably a lot of other things in there that you don't even know exist. A better system would not only deal with this bead issue which is irrelevant to me. But it would also deal with a wide variety of other contaminants that you don't even know are in there.
Consider further we're looking increasingly to closed loop sewage treatment facilities that output water INTO your tap directly from the sewage treatment facility. They're already strongly considering that in California.
My point is that the stupid beads don't matter and what this really indicates is that the water treatment systems needs to be upgraded.
There are a lot of things that we DO know about. Prescription drugs for the most part are not filtered out in sewage treatment plants. Some like birth control pills are actually in high enough doses that they are starting to affect the wildlife. I agree that the sewage treatment plants need to be upgraded and a closed loop via distilation or reverse osmosis would be expensive but might be the best way to make sure 100% of the bad stuff doesn't make it out.
> The world has changed a lot since then. I would gladly pay $40 for a good browser Not really - you've just become richer:-P
Possibly, but that's not the real reason. The real reason is that I spend several hours every day using my browser. If I occasionally used my browser then ads would be no big deal but for something that I use for thousands of hours per year then $40 is a cheap price to pay. I have no problem paying for stuff that I spend a majority of my time using like my office chair, my bed, and yes, my browser.
Remember when the Netscape web browser cost $40? Remember buying one? Me neither.
Looks like it's time to start uninstalling Firefox across all computers...
The world has changed a lot since then. I would gladly pay $40 for a good browser before I will put up with ads. I use my browser too much to put up with ads. Luckily, I don't have to as there are still several good free ones.
Look more closely. Are the the stone tools out of place in the volcanic sedimentary strata they are found in (xenolith)? Stone tools are often made of chert or some other material completely unrelated to the volcanic material that entombs them. Do they share similar fracture patterns to other xenoliths? Are they the right size to be held in a humanoid hand. The evidence adds up. Fascinating.
Ok, so even if they are stone tools, I thought it was impossible to calculate the age of stone artifacts. Sure, you know how old the rock is but not when the rock was made into a tool.
I am all for fair compensation, but am I truly frightened when U.S. workers make more in one hour than Mexican workers make in a day.
If jobs are to remain, our workforce must be far more productive than our global competition. We should be demanding more worker education, which would likely impact wages far more than legislative mandate. Simply making the workforce more expensive with no realistic improvements will only enlarge the class of the permanent unemployed.
Japan has the right idea. They have invested a ton in high skill jobs and let china pick up alot of the low margin skills. The good news is that manufacturing jobs are slowly coming back to the USA. The bad news is that it is mostly robotic manufacturing that has a highly skilled skeleton crew keeping all the computers and machines running.
Perhaps they would be happier being employees, then. I await their conversion to the wage earner world. I will be waiting a long, long time, won't I?
Not really. A large percentage of small business owners go back to being employees every year. The success rate of small business is rather low. A lot of people start a business, find out it's harder than they think, lose a lot of money and go back to being an employee of someone else.
I am an employer and I actually like my employees a lot.
I never said that I hated my employees but rather that I hated having employees. It doesn't matter how good the employees are at the end of the day they are still something else you have to deal with.
2) The key to growing your two bit operation is hiring people smarter than you and let them do their thing.
Not every business or business model works that way. Mcdonalds would go out of business tomorrow if they hired people "smarter than them". As this article is about minimum wage then most of the people we are talking about are NOT smarter than the business owner or they wouldn't be on minimum wage. Most businesses require some form of "cheap" labor and most if not all of that cheap labor is less smart than the business owner or it wouldn't be cheap anymore.
Spoken like who has NEVER worked in a large corp (10,000+) where number of employees is a status symbol. Who will gladly pickup that extra work small companies won't, because that large corp has figured out how to scale their business.
Great. So all the small businesses go out of business and everyone works for a handful of big megacorporations. I know this is where we are heading but I'm not sure it's the best place to go as then the individual loses all that remains of any negotiating power.
Likewise, a third option is you could reduce your net revenue.
That's assuming you CAN reduce your net revenue. Most small business owners I know pay their employees almost as much as they themself make and many actually make less than what they could make working for someone else. They own a small business because they enjoy it but they will close their doors if their payroll increases by 20k because the money just isn't there.
Yes, raising wages increases productivity but not for the reason that you think. When you hire a $15/hour housekeeper you get someone better, more reliable, more stable, etc... but it's because you're not hiring the same person. If you hire a housekeeper who is willing to work for $8/hour and then pay them $15/hour you won't see the same boost in quality.
While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.
Work is fungible. Perhaps you had said worker hammering roofing nails manually and after the wage increase you decide to buy a nail gun to increase their productivity. In fact historically union shops have lead the way in increases in productivity for exactly this reason. This is well documented.
Or you buy that nail gun and hire 1/10 the number of people or you just do it yourself or you buy a robot and let the robot do the work. Go to South America and you still have ditch diggers and very little heavy machinery because labor is still relatively cheap. In the USA you still have ditch diggers but you have 1 guy with a heavy machine doing what it used to take 100 guys to do. I'm actually surprised we haven't seen an employeeless fast food restaurant yet or at least one that only has a single cook.
Because the manager knows that if he fires that worker, he shrinks his own little empire by one worker?
Spoken like who has NEVER actually had an employee. Every small business owner I know hates having employees. Employees add stress. The only reason a business hires people is because they either can't do it all on their own or because employees make them more money than they cost. That spread doesn't have to be much. If you have 20 employees and each employee makes you $1/hour more than you pay them then assuming you are working yourself you are doing pretty good. Now, if minimum wage jumps by $5 per hour then that $1 per hour profit is gone and you either charge more or you fire that employee and figure out how to do it without. I've met many a small business owners who have talked about getting rid of their employees and turning away work just because the amount of extra money an employee brings in is barely worth the headache of having ermployees. A massive wage hike would make that a lot easier. One such company that did just that was Churchill Trucklines from a town near me. The workers went on strike and demanded more money and the owner said screw it I don't need this headache and layed off all 2000 employees.
Slashdot Mirror
The link to the previous slashdot article states that traffic fines collect 300k per officer.
Strangely no one in the previous article mentioned that based on the numbers given that
would make there only be 20k officers in the USA. In reality, according to google,
there are 900k sworn officers which would make traffic fines only account for 7k per
officer. Still a significant amount but nowhere near the 300k mentioned in the previous
article.
There isn't any aspect of life where the wealthy don't benefit more than the rest of us.
Although I mostly agree with this statement, this is actually one area where the poor *could* benefit more.
First off, paying for organs would make more organs available and secondly, 10k is a lot more useful to
a poor family that just lost someone than it is to a rich family that just lost someone. Obviously there
needs to be checks (especially on the still living) to make sure it's not abused but most poor people
don't have life insurance and an extra 10k-100k at death could actually benefit their family greatly.
Micromanaging is for kindergarten teachers. You have a team of devs because they know how to code and you probably don't, keep thy nose in thine own trough.
As a manager I hate to micromanage and I've discovered that there are two types of developers: Those that can self-manage and those
that can't. Being a small shop we are unable to efficiently micromanage the later type of employees and eventually have to let them go.
I've stayed in contact with a few of these later type that get into a highly structured and micromanaged business and they do just fine
even though they were incapable of completing even simple projects if left on their own.
Reply is that, just like driving, nobody REALLY wants that because oftentimes (not always, OBVIOUSLY) driving is not an act of utility, but a thing of passion and pleasure, just like eating. Or motorcycle riding. Or shooting firearms. Or shooting fireworks.
I would venture to say that 90%+ of miles driven in a given day are the "daily grind" type not the pleasure type.
If we're talking about driving within 25 miles of a major city then we are approaching 100%.
Sure, some people enjoy driving out in the country on backroads or some scenic road but that's a very small percentage.
If/When we get self-driving cars then non-self driving cars will probably go the same way as horses. They become
a hobby that people do on occasion for fun but rarely for practical purposes.
I hope your bottom line does not depend on American sales of your product. Your line of reasoning is that Americans are too expensive to employ and thus do not deserve a job. Once you left with only foreign workers who will buy your product?
I think it depends on what "Americans" we are talking about.
Where I work we haven't outsourced anything overseas *yet* but it seems
like we have almost weekly discussions on how to offload anything and
everything possible from the IT department to another non-technical department.
The reason being is that our IT employees average $35-$45 dollars per hour
while our non-technical staff averages $15-$25 dollars per hour so anything we
can move out of the technical realm into the non-technical realm saves
the company a ton of money. I don't see Americans getting pushed completely
out but I do see programmer salaries dropping to be on more on par with other
4 year degrees instead of the 200% or more they currently command.
I'm not trying to troll, but am genuinely curious as to what you're doing if you've got several hundred servers running that are at enough of a risk of locking up hard enough that they need a physical power cycle to reset them?
They are linux boxes and they actually rarely hard locked. The problem is that they are all
in remote locations several states away with no way to reboot them if something does go wrong
so even if they only freeze once a year it is alot cheaper to put a watchdog timer in them
than to pay someone to drive there to press the power button.
Cool! My solution in the 90's to that problem was to find some ip power switches so I could power cycle the devices remotely. It wouldn't be an acceptable solution today.
That would have probably worked except in this case the servers are what are providing the
connection so if they go down so does the connection. Telemetry operations where you are
operating a remote server over a single pipe and have no easy way to repair it or even reboot
it makes for quite a few creative solutions to try to not have to send a technician to a remote
location.
I'm a professional hacker, you insensitive clod!
I checked out a book on tape at the library called "What would MacGyver do" about true stories.
After listening to several real stories I realized that just myself and my immediate family could
fill an entire book full of better "hacks" that were listed in that book. Most of them I had never
considered "note worthy" until finding a entire book with many other less note-worthy stories in it.
The hack I'm probably most proud of is rather simple. My work was needing a watchdog timer
to reboot locked servers and most of the off the shelf solutions were several hundred dollars
so instead I created a simple program on an arduino that connected to the power button and
the usb port so it could "press" the power button if there was a hard lock. It has been deployed
with several hundred servers at this point and at a fraction of the cost of most other solutions.
It would have to be for some distance outside of the whitehouse as well, as a safe measure. Drones do have failsafes that could be programmed to continue its course should it lose GPS, thus the reason for the extra distance.
Yeah, my guess is they won't do much until after the first successful attack.
Creating a half mile deadzone though wouldn't be a too big of deal. You might
see a comeback of payphones, emergency call boxes, paper maps and the like
in that area to compensate but it really wouldn't be that big of a deal.
The bigger deal is what to do with them everywhere else. How do you protect
schools, hospitals, playgrounds, city halls, restaurants, etc... Granted a backpack
bomb is still fairly easy but it gets alot easier when you can be miles away.
If you don't mind dying from the radiation damage before we get out of the solar system... wait, that does help with the overpopulation problem....
My guess is that when/if we figure out how to "cure" aging we'll also be pretty far along the curve to cure cancer and radiation damage
as those are very interwoven domains and it would be very difficult to fully "cure" aging without also having the technology to control
cancer and random mutations caused by slightly too much radiation.
You would need very expensive jammers to be effective against drones. The power needed to jam every direction in the sky increases exponentially by distance.
Jamming would never really be a viable solution in a city except during an actual attack. It would cause more damage then it could ever hope to prevent. It would have to block the radios and GPS used by planes, helicopters, police, firefighters, and anything else remotely near the jammer, to actually be effective at blocking a radio controlled drone.
Nonsense. Get directional GPS antennas and point them straight up into the sky and surround the whitehouse. While you're at it point some EMP guns straight up in the air too. Nothing is suppose to be flying over the whitehouse so you don't have to worry about disrupting civilian planes, etc... Making them powerful enough to go a few thousand feet straight up but not powerful enough to interfere with LEO satelites would be simple. If you used a directional antenna (again pointed straight up and surrounding the whitehouse) to block all signals then the only drones you would have to worry about would be ones that navigated via visual cues which would be considerably harder to do.
This is just the patent for Google Panda. I'm surprised they waited until after their April Fool's joke to
get this patent but it might have been that the Google Panda was really ment as a joke then they
started getting a bunch of "I really want one" messages and decided that they better patent it.
What I am saying is that if that is getting through the system there are probably a lot of other things in there that you don't even know exist. A better system would not only deal with this bead issue which is irrelevant to me. But it would also deal with a wide variety of other contaminants that you don't even know are in there.
Consider further we're looking increasingly to closed loop sewage treatment facilities that output water INTO your tap directly from the sewage treatment facility. They're already strongly considering that in California.
My point is that the stupid beads don't matter and what this really indicates is that the water treatment systems needs to be upgraded.
There are a lot of things that we DO know about. Prescription drugs for the most part are not filtered out in sewage treatment plants.
Some like birth control pills are actually in high enough doses that they are starting to affect the wildlife. I agree that the sewage
treatment plants need to be upgraded and a closed loop via distilation or reverse osmosis would be expensive but might be the best
way to make sure 100% of the bad stuff doesn't make it out.
> The world has changed a lot since then. I would gladly pay $40 for a good browser :-P
Not really - you've just become richer
Possibly, but that's not the real reason. The real reason is that I spend several hours every day
using my browser. If I occasionally used my browser then ads would be no big deal but for something
that I use for thousands of hours per year then $40 is a cheap price to pay. I have no problem paying
for stuff that I spend a majority of my time using like my office chair, my bed, and yes, my browser.
Remember when the Netscape web browser cost $40? Remember buying one? Me neither.
Looks like it's time to start uninstalling Firefox across all computers...
The world has changed a lot since then. I would gladly pay $40 for a good browser before I will put up with ads. I use
my browser too much to put up with ads. Luckily, I don't have to as there are still several good free ones.
Look more closely. Are the the stone tools out of place in the volcanic sedimentary strata they are found in (xenolith)? Stone tools are often made of chert or some other material completely unrelated to the volcanic material that entombs them. Do they share similar fracture patterns to other xenoliths? Are they the right size to be held in a humanoid hand. The evidence adds up. Fascinating.
Ok, so even if they are stone tools, I thought it was impossible to calculate the age of stone artifacts.
Sure, you know how old the rock is but not when the rock was made into a tool.
I am all for fair compensation, but am I truly frightened when U.S. workers make more in one hour than Mexican workers make in a day.
If jobs are to remain, our workforce must be far more productive than our global competition. We should be demanding more worker education, which would likely impact wages far more than legislative mandate. Simply making the workforce more expensive with no realistic improvements will only enlarge the class of the permanent unemployed.
Japan has the right idea. They have invested a ton in high skill jobs and let china
pick up alot of the low margin skills. The good news is that manufacturing jobs
are slowly coming back to the USA. The bad news is that it is mostly robotic
manufacturing that has a highly skilled skeleton crew keeping all the computers
and machines running.
Perhaps they would be happier being employees, then. I await their conversion to the wage earner world. I will be waiting a long, long time, won't I?
Not really. A large percentage of small business owners go back to being employees
every year. The success rate of small business is rather low. A lot of people start
a business, find out it's harder than they think, lose a lot of money and go back to
being an employee of someone else.
I am an employer and I actually like my employees a lot.
I never said that I hated my employees but rather that I hated having employees.
It doesn't matter how good the employees are at the end of the day they are still
something else you have to deal with.
2) The key to growing your two bit operation is hiring people smarter than you and let them do their thing.
Not every business or business model works that way. Mcdonalds would go out of business
tomorrow if they hired people "smarter than them". As this article is about minimum wage
then most of the people we are talking about are NOT smarter than the business owner or
they wouldn't be on minimum wage. Most businesses require some form of "cheap" labor
and most if not all of that cheap labor is less smart than the business owner or it wouldn't
be cheap anymore.
Spoken like who has NEVER worked in a large corp (10,000+) where number of employees is a status symbol. Who will gladly pickup that extra work small companies won't, because that large corp has figured out how to scale their business.
Great. So all the small businesses go out of business and everyone works for a handful of big megacorporations. I know this is where we are heading but I'm not sure it's the best place to go
as then the individual loses all that remains of any negotiating power.
Likewise, a third option is you could reduce your net revenue.
That's assuming you CAN reduce your net revenue. Most small business owners I know pay their
employees almost as much as they themself make and many actually make less than what they
could make working for someone else. They own a small business because they enjoy it but they
will close their doors if their payroll increases by 20k because the money just isn't there.
Aaaaand... you crashed into the water. Raising wages increases productivity, demonstrably so: http://www.raisetheminimumwage...
Yes, raising wages increases productivity but not for the reason that you think. When you hire a $15/hour housekeeper
you get someone better, more reliable, more stable, etc... but it's because you're not hiring the same person. If you
hire a housekeeper who is willing to work for $8/hour and then pay them $15/hour you won't see the same boost in
quality.
While you're at it, also explain why businesses would pay $15/h for a worker who doesn't increase revenue by significantly more than $15 for each hour he works.
Work is fungible. Perhaps you had said worker hammering roofing nails manually and after the wage increase you decide to buy a nail gun to increase their productivity. In fact historically union shops have lead the way in increases in productivity for exactly this reason. This is well documented.
Or you buy that nail gun and hire 1/10 the number of people or you just do it yourself or you buy a robot and let the robot do the work.
Go to South America and you still have ditch diggers and very little heavy machinery because labor is still relatively cheap.
In the USA you still have ditch diggers but you have 1 guy with a heavy machine doing what it used to take 100 guys to do.
I'm actually surprised we haven't seen an employeeless fast food restaurant yet or at least one that only has a single cook.
Because the manager knows that if he fires that worker, he shrinks his own little empire by one worker?
Spoken like who has NEVER actually had an employee. Every small business owner I know hates having employees.
Employees add stress. The only reason a business hires people is because they either can't do it all on their own or
because employees make them more money than they cost. That spread doesn't have to be much. If you have 20
employees and each employee makes you $1/hour more than you pay them then assuming you are working yourself
you are doing pretty good. Now, if minimum wage jumps by $5 per hour then that $1 per hour profit is gone and you
either charge more or you fire that employee and figure out how to do it without. I've met many a small business
owners who have talked about getting rid of their employees and turning away work just because the amount of extra
money an employee brings in is barely worth the headache of having ermployees. A massive wage hike would
make that a lot easier. One such company that did just that was Churchill Trucklines from a town near me. The
workers went on strike and demanded more money and the owner said screw it I don't need this headache and
layed off all 2000 employees.