I'm not sure where you got those numbers but they are either wrong or very misleading. 234k puts you in the top 1% of wage earners in the USA. Here is a tool that lets you put in your income and it gives you where you fall. http://politicalcalculations.b... 60k falls at 80.1% based on 2013 data for an individual wage earner. 234k falls at 99.2% for an individual wage earner.
If you don't like it, move. Otherwise stop whining that the benefits of living somewhere nicer cost more.
It depends on your definition of nice and and what benefits are important to you. You couldn't pay me enough to live in SF. Yes, there are some benefits but there are many benefits to Alabama too. If I had to choose between the two, I would probably choose Alabama. Luckily though there are plenty of other places which (for me) have a much better combination of benefits.
Anything over 45 hours a week should be overtime until you hit the top 20% of income
Most people working in the IT industry ARE in the top 20%. The top 20% of wage earners(not households) in the USA starts at about 53k.
I think exempt status should only be allowed for people that both don't track their hours and have a fixed workload. Most of the IRS rules for contractor vs employee should also apply. If an employer can tell you when to start, how long to stay, can give you more work, tracks your hours, etc... then you shouldn't be allowed to be exempt.
Salaried positions only make sense in a few special cases. An accountant who is really busy at the end of each month but has very little to do in the middle is one example. Most IT doesn't fall in that category. In most jobs if you finish what you're doing there is always something more to do. If you can't run out of things to do then you shouldn't be salaried. Even for those few jobs where you can run out of things to do, if you required overtime pay then compensation would adjust accordingly where their hourly wage would be reduced a little to make up for the busy time where they are making time and a half. Another option for those few rare cases would be to allow yearly averaging and only require paying overtime if the average for the year is over 40. That would make for a nice christmas bonus. At the company I work for everyone is hourly and if you don't hit your 40, no big deal, you just get a slightly smaller paycheck that week. We encourage people to try to get close to 40 and encourage people to not go over 40 but if they do occasionally go over we pay overtime and don't question it. Most companies seem to use exempt as just a way to get more hours out of people for free.
If she wants to play with lego, by all means encourage that shit, but if she just wants to dress up and play with doll, let her play with her dolls and leave her alone!
I agree completely. But not only are genders predispositioned a certain way but each kid is predispositioned a certain way. If a boy doesn't like sports forcing it on him is probably not going to make him like it more. My son loves to draw. Sports are just not his thing. My daughter on the other hand loves sports and also wants to be a veterinarian. She also likes to play with legos and build stuff more than her brother. I didn't push one to sports and one not to sports that's just their natural disposition. That being said, most little girls are probably more open to things like being a vet or a doctor and their natural abilities are more aligned with that so if you want to attempt to get them more into science then get them some vet and doctor dress up clothes and toys. But the most important thing is don't try to push your kid into the career YOU want them to have instead help them find the career that THEY want to have. I had a friend in college that tried to do computer science because that's what he thought he should do although his real passion was music. His junior year in college he gave up and switched and became a band director. He is infinitely more happy with his choice now. Give your kid a broad range of experiences so that they know that they can do anything but then let them decide what they want to do.
Where I live there's a 5 cent difference between the cheapest and most expensive parts of the day. I wonder how cheap/efficient batteries would have to get before it would make sense to just charge the batteries at night, and use them during the day so I never have to pay the higher rate.
If this were cost effective then power companies would be doing this. I believe one of the more efficient methods of doing this is to pump water back up into a hydroelectric dam but even that's not very efficient. I also believe (again without checking) that battery storage for a solar installation pretty much doubles your cost of electricity which is why gridtie is so popular. The only reason to have large batteries is for offgrid or emergency use.
If you're offgrid and storing excess power in batteries then point in the direction of most efficiency. If you're connected to a meter and can run it backwards then point in the direction of most efficiency. If you're only producing half your own power and pay a flat rate for electricity then point in the direction of most efficiency.
There are only a few specific situations where an individual would benefit from aligning solar panels with their usage patterns instead of maximum efficiency. My guess is the majority of homeowners don't fall in that category.
If advanced ambulances are sent to the really horrific problems and basic ambulances to the basic problems then a result like "more people die near the advanced ambulances" is going to a consequence of the selection not the service. This conclusion could (in the lack of understanding that makes up the large majority of politicians) result in more harm being done to the general welfare instead of current levels of good.
There seems to be an additional selection bias implied by the article. It appears they are only counting live bodies that make it to the hospital. ALS should be able to get more borderline patients to the hospital which later die while with BLS they are more likely to be declared dead either at the scene or before they reach the hospital and therefore not counted towards that number.
This isn't true. If you send out the same CV with a male or a female name on it, the male name will get more interest, with a higher average salary.
I think it depends on the job. People hold stereotypes and biases. For nurse, nanny, chef, doctor, housekeeper, waitstaff, painter, etc.. I doubt this hold. Yes, some of those are lower paying but not all. For a housekeeper I much prefer a woman. We were once looking for a programmer who could telecomute and I got openly laughed at for suggesting trying to find a stay at home mom. The assumption was that those type of people didn't program. Although that assumption obviously isn't true, that's the bias. Likewise if you have a moving company and need to hire a lumper you're going to be naturally biased against women. It's a catch 22 as the best way to reduce those biases (where they are unnatural) is to get more people of the opposite sex into that profession. We've largely succeeded in the medical doctor field but even there I've heard women getting insulted when someone mistakenly thinks they are a nurse instead. Some professions (firefighting, lumping, and I would argue programming) are naturally biased against women and we can't do much about that.
For example, a lot of well paying jobs are found through networking.
Not sure where you live but here on planet earth most women are way better at networking than men are. You completely lost any and all credibility when you tried to imply that men are better at networking. On a somewhat related note, I've noticed more and more women moving into sales as it pays better than average and they get to use many of the skills they are good at like networking. Women are also becoming doctors more and more frequently, as again, this is a good paying job that utilizes alot of their natural skills. Women exceed men in college degrees now and have almost caught up as medical doctors: http://kff.org/other/state-ind... Programming is not one of those professions so tech companies are fighting an uphill battle. It would be far better to spend that time/effort encouraging women to go into the medical field and other high paying jobs where their natural skills like nurturing (and networking) can be advantageous.
Artificial bars. The requirement is simple, have a computer that thinks like a human.
Even that bar is way too high for current technology. Give me an AI that can outthink a rat. You can put a pair of glasses on a rat connected to a webcam and a rat can easily find food. Put that same webcam on a rc car and no AI in the world is even close to being able to compete. Based on current technology it would probably be easier to train a rat to drive the rc car to find food than it would be to train a computer. That's my definition of intelligence. Something that can accurately navigate in the real world and learn. We're not remotely close. The only good news is that once we master the "rat" then it would probably be trivial to ramp up it's intelligence where it can read and then easily pass the turing test. Let's work on getting a computerized rat before we bother with trying to get human level intelligence as you need the first before you can have the later.
If these things didn't exist, a business would be foolish to NOT hire women, since they cost less than men on salary alone.
Businesses are NOT not hiring women. The practice of paying men (or breadwinners) more for the same job is a thing of the past. If a man and a woman apply to the SAME job with the SAME qualifications then they get paid the SAME. There is actually a little bit of data showing that a woman actually get paid MORE all else being the same. The problem is that there are far fewer women that want certain type of jobs. You can attempt to change personal preferences but should we really care if people are freely choosing their careers and some people chose careers that pay more while others choose careers that pay less?
From what I've heard, that's actually part of the problem, not the fix. High end chocolate uses ALOT more actual cocoa beans than cheap chocolate. Cheap milk chocolate is 15% or less cocoa where high end chocolate can be 50% or more.
From what I've seen is that the big issue is that the farmers are not getting paid nearly enough.
Right now, Cocoa sells for approx $2800/ton and in my opinion it should be closer to $10,000 - $20,000 / ton.
This is actually the real solution, cheap cocoa is the problem. The solution will be that prices will rise to compensate until there is an equilibrium. If this becomes a significant problem then chocolate will probably go the way of other things like maple syrup, vanilla, and honey where cost sensitive places will switch to artificial or diluted alternatives while people who are willing to pay the price can still get the good stuff.
My guess is that the article provides part of the answer. The need to have scaffolding (and employees) anyways to do repairs and other tasks so you already have the sunk cost of the scaffolding so the robot would have to be considerably cheaper or be able to use the existing scaffolding.
As that glass is extremely think and presumable durable, I personally don't understand why a cheap roomba outfitted with pressure washer (and something to catch the water) couldn't do the job.
I was thinking the same thing. When I was a kid, setting off blackcats (firecrackers) in the bathroom was not unheard of. This makes that even more appealing. My biggest problem with these type of systems is that the cost/reward is so lopsided. There is so much more effective ways of saving lives than trying to protect yourself from a 1 in a million event. Children are way way more likely to be injured by their parents at home than they are by a school shooting. A tornado or a fire is probably also way more likely to injure a kid at school than a school shooting. There have to be better things to spend money on than expensive equipment that based on probabilities will likely never be used.
As an aside, we probably already have similiar laws on the books. I'm pretty sure you can't just download and listen to every private 911 call. You have to have a legitimate reason to want to access them.
I think the key is that you shouldn't be able to request access to the recording unless you personally were involved and/or there is a court order. A police's bodycam should be like video surveillance video. A nosy reporter (or a youtuber) shouldn't be able to just request hours of footage without a legitimate link just as a reporter can't force walmart to release their surveillance videos. It should be archived and relatively easy to get to for interested parties but not the general public. A compromise might be a small screen public viewing room that doesn't allow recording devices where someone could watch the tapes and then once they find what they are looking for then do an official request for that section of the video along with what they are going to do with it.
That's kindof my point. "gnome desktop" and "gnome pos" would both be your "desktop environment" aka "GUI" It's pretty hard to argue that a graphical POS doesn't fit the definition of a GUI. It's graphical and it's the user's interface.
It seems that there is a clear-cut case for GNOME, that should guarantee victory.
In what way is it "clear-cut"? Their trademark registration does not involve goods and services that involve either tablets or PoS systems.
Gnome's trademark is for "software for creating and managing a computer desktop" which a PoS definitely is. Gnome's trademark is also for "software for use as a GUI" which again clearly describes a PoS. A PoS is definitely a GUI, a rather simplistic one but definitely a gui. The fact that gnome also runs on multiple tablets and has also been previously deployed as a PoS should only strengthen their case. It seems very clear-cut to me.
I'm not a lawyer, but a POS and a desktop environment don't seem like overlapping categories for Trademark purposes.
How do you figure? They are both the frontend GUI, window manager, and most visible portion of the environment. If you asked an uninformed newbie what OS they were running on either system the most likely answer would be "gnome" though neither "gnome desktop" nor "gnome PoS" are operating systems when a normal thinks of an operating system they think of the window and gui management system. Yes, gnome is a full fledged desktop environment but that's like saying I can market bottled water under the name "coca cola" because water isn't a soda. They are both still beverages. Likewise, "gnome Pos" and "gnome desktop" are both "frontend gui and window managers for the underlying OS"
Unless Gnome is selling PoS systems, how would this infringe their trademark?
I agree that if it was in a different domain they might not have a very strong case but a PoS is basically a simplified GUI so I think there is a very strong case that there could be potential confusion between a computer running gnome desktop and a computer running gnome PoS. I have no idea why groupon would want that confusion unless they think they can steal some of gnome desktop's reputation.
There should be at least three well-tested working backups for everything thats needed: water, food, housing, etc...
I would start by creating self contained units that can survive equally well in the sahara, antartica, and underwater with minimal* air exchange with the outside. Salt water, cold, and sand are notoriously hard on equipment and if a single type of unit can survive in all 3 environments then they might have a fighting chance. My guess is we have very little that can survive 80 years in any of those 3 environments without repair materials being sent and I don't see mars being self sufficient for a very long time.
* the only reason I say minimal is that there is no reason even on mars that you couldn't do outgassing or ingassing of needed or unneeded gases. It doesn't have to be 100% self contained if there is some way to regulate correctly the amount of different gases in the environment.
Loopholes are only the tip of the iceburg. Even if you attempted to remove all the loopholes, you would still be sunk as a large multinational basically has the ability to write it's own loopholes. It also has other tricks that individuals don't have like telling random country X that they will move 30million dollars to their country if they give them below market taxes. Walmart and factories do this all the time where they will get 5 years where they don't have to pay any sales tax for building a new store. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc... are just doing it on the national instead of the local level. The only way I see of fixing this (instead of playing whack a mole) is to tax them based on sales and employment in the countries. i.e. if starbucks is selling their coffee in the USA (which they obviously are) then their profits have to be in the USA too and to do this you need to either figure out a way to treat all the shell companies that places like starbucks create as a single entity or tax them in a way that shell companies don't create an advantage.
What are people buying these for? Is it just because of the history?
Yes.
I still don't get it. So a company made a bad call and dumped inventory. In this case it was to a landfill presumably so they wouldn't flood the market and bring down cartridge prices. Also, from the looks of the titles, there were a lot of titles. My guess this is a pretty common practice. Microsoft wants full shelves of their latest OS at best buy so they ship a bunch of units, cost to them is basically nothing. The ones that don't sell get sent back and destroyed. It would be against their best interest to sell them for pennies and dilute the market. What is so special about atari doing it when everyone does it?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure where you got those numbers but they are either wrong or very misleading.
234k puts you in the top 1% of wage earners in the USA.
Here is a tool that lets you put in your income and it gives you where you fall.
http://politicalcalculations.b...
60k falls at 80.1% based on 2013 data for an individual wage earner.
234k falls at 99.2% for an individual wage earner.
If you don't like it, move. Otherwise stop whining that the benefits of living somewhere nicer cost more.
It depends on your definition of nice and and what benefits are important to you.
You couldn't pay me enough to live in SF. Yes, there are some benefits but there are many benefits to Alabama too.
If I had to choose between the two, I would probably choose Alabama. Luckily though there are plenty of other
places which (for me) have a much better combination of benefits.
Anything over 45 hours a week should be overtime until you hit the top 20% of income
Most people working in the IT industry ARE in the top 20%. The top 20% of wage earners(not households)
in the USA starts at about 53k.
I think exempt status should only be allowed for people that both don't track their hours and have a fixed workload.
Most of the IRS rules for contractor vs employee should also apply. If an employer can tell you when to start,
how long to stay, can give you more work, tracks your hours, etc... then you shouldn't be allowed to be exempt.
Salaried positions only make sense in a few special cases.
An accountant who is really busy at the end of each month but has very little to do in the middle
is one example. Most IT doesn't fall in that category. In most jobs if you finish what you're
doing there is always something more to do. If you can't run out of things to do then you shouldn't
be salaried. Even for those few jobs where you can run out of things to do, if you required overtime
pay then compensation would adjust accordingly where their hourly wage would be reduced a little
to make up for the busy time where they are making time and a half.
Another option for those few rare cases would be to allow yearly averaging and only require paying
overtime if the average for the year is over 40. That would make for a nice christmas bonus.
At the company I work for everyone is hourly and if you don't hit your 40, no big deal, you just get
a slightly smaller paycheck that week. We encourage people to try to get close to 40 and encourage
people to not go over 40 but if they do occasionally go over we pay overtime and don't question it.
Most companies seem to use exempt as just a way to get more hours out of people for free.
If she wants to play with lego, by all means encourage that shit, but if she just wants to dress up and play with doll, let her play with her dolls and leave her alone!
I agree completely. But not only are genders predispositioned a certain way but each kid is predispositioned a certain way.
If a boy doesn't like sports forcing it on him is probably not going to make him like it more.
My son loves to draw. Sports are just not his thing. My daughter on the other hand loves sports and also wants to be a veterinarian.
She also likes to play with legos and build stuff more than her brother. I didn't push one to sports and one not to sports that's just
their natural disposition.
That being said, most little girls are probably more open to things like being a vet or a doctor and their natural abilities are more aligned
with that so if you want to attempt to get them more into science then get them some vet and doctor dress up clothes and toys.
But the most important thing is don't try to push your kid into the career YOU want them to have instead help them find the
career that THEY want to have. I had a friend in college that tried to do computer science because that's what he thought he
should do although his real passion was music. His junior year in college he gave up and switched and became a band director.
He is infinitely more happy with his choice now. Give your kid a broad range of experiences so that they know that they can
do anything but then let them decide what they want to do.
Where I live there's a 5 cent difference between the cheapest and most expensive parts of the day. I wonder how cheap/efficient batteries would have to get before it would make sense to just charge the batteries at night, and use them during the day so I never have to pay the higher rate.
If this were cost effective then power companies would be doing this. I believe one of the more efficient methods of doing this is
to pump water back up into a hydroelectric dam but even that's not very efficient. I also believe (again without checking) that
battery storage for a solar installation pretty much doubles your cost of electricity which is why gridtie is so popular. The only
reason to have large batteries is for offgrid or emergency use.
If you're offgrid and storing excess power in batteries then point in the direction of most efficiency.
If you're connected to a meter and can run it backwards then point in the direction of most efficiency.
If you're only producing half your own power and pay a flat rate for electricity then point in the direction of most efficiency.
There are only a few specific situations where an individual would benefit from aligning solar panels with their usage patterns instead of maximum efficiency.
My guess is the majority of homeowners don't fall in that category.
Was selection bias accounted for?
If advanced ambulances are sent to the really horrific problems and basic ambulances to the basic problems then a result like "more people die near the advanced ambulances" is going to a consequence of the selection not the service. This conclusion could (in the lack of understanding that makes up the large majority of politicians) result in more harm being done to the general welfare instead of current levels of good.
There seems to be an additional selection bias implied by the article. It appears they are only counting live bodies that make it to the hospital.
ALS should be able to get more borderline patients to the hospital which later die while with BLS they are more likely to be declared dead either
at the scene or before they reach the hospital and therefore not counted towards that number.
This isn't true. If you send out the same CV with a male or a female name on it, the male name will get more interest, with a higher average salary.
I think it depends on the job. People hold stereotypes and biases. For nurse, nanny, chef, doctor, housekeeper, waitstaff, painter, etc.. I doubt this hold.
Yes, some of those are lower paying but not all. For a housekeeper I much prefer a woman. We were once looking for a programmer who could
telecomute and I got openly laughed at for suggesting trying to find a stay at home mom. The assumption was that those type of people didn't
program. Although that assumption obviously isn't true, that's the bias. Likewise if you have a moving company and need to hire a lumper you're
going to be naturally biased against women. It's a catch 22 as the best way to reduce those biases (where they are unnatural) is to get more
people of the opposite sex into that profession. We've largely succeeded in the medical doctor field but even there I've heard women getting
insulted when someone mistakenly thinks they are a nurse instead. Some professions (firefighting, lumping, and I would argue programming) are
naturally biased against women and we can't do much about that.
For example, a lot of well paying jobs are found through networking.
Not sure where you live but here on planet earth most women are way better at networking than men are.
You completely lost any and all credibility when you tried to imply that men are better at networking.
On a somewhat related note, I've noticed more and more women moving into sales as it pays
better than average and they get to use many of the skills they are good at like networking.
Women are also becoming doctors more and more frequently, as again, this is a good paying job that
utilizes alot of their natural skills. Women exceed men in college degrees now and have almost
caught up as medical doctors: http://kff.org/other/state-ind...
Programming is not one of those professions so tech companies are fighting an uphill battle.
It would be far better to spend that time/effort encouraging women to go into the medical field
and other high paying jobs where their natural skills like nurturing (and networking) can be advantageous.
One is in base 10, the other in base 2.
Which bases have you given the numbers of the bases in?
base bases are always in base 10.
Artificial bars. The requirement is simple, have a computer that thinks like a human.
Even that bar is way too high for current technology. Give me an AI that can outthink a rat.
You can put a pair of glasses on a rat connected to a webcam and a rat can easily find
food. Put that same webcam on a rc car and no AI in the world is even close to being
able to compete. Based on current technology it would probably be easier to train a rat
to drive the rc car to find food than it would be to train a computer.
That's my definition of intelligence. Something that can accurately navigate in the real world
and learn. We're not remotely close.
The only good news is that once we master the "rat" then it would probably be trivial to
ramp up it's intelligence where it can read and then easily pass the turing test.
Let's work on getting a computerized rat before we bother with trying to get human level
intelligence as you need the first before you can have the later.
If these things didn't exist, a business would be foolish to NOT hire women, since they cost less than men on salary alone.
Businesses are NOT not hiring women. The practice of paying men (or breadwinners) more for the same job is a thing of the past.
If a man and a woman apply to the SAME job with the SAME qualifications then they get paid the SAME. There is actually a little
bit of data showing that a woman actually get paid MORE all else being the same. The problem is that there are far fewer women
that want certain type of jobs. You can attempt to change personal preferences but should we really care if people are freely
choosing their careers and some people chose careers that pay more while others choose careers that pay less?
The Fix: Buy good Chocolate!
From what I've heard, that's actually part of the problem, not the fix.
High end chocolate uses ALOT more actual cocoa beans than cheap chocolate.
Cheap milk chocolate is 15% or less cocoa where high end chocolate can be 50% or more.
From what I've seen is that the big issue is that the farmers are not getting paid nearly enough.
Right now, Cocoa sells for approx $2800/ton and in my opinion it should be closer to $10,000 - $20,000 / ton.
This is actually the real solution, cheap cocoa is the problem. The solution will be that prices will rise
to compensate until there is an equilibrium. If this becomes a significant problem then chocolate will probably go
the way of other things like maple syrup, vanilla, and honey where cost sensitive places will switch to artificial or
diluted alternatives while people who are willing to pay the price can still get the good stuff.
My guess is that the article provides part of the answer. The need to have scaffolding (and employees) anyways
to do repairs and other tasks so you already have the sunk cost of the scaffolding so the robot would have to be
considerably cheaper or be able to use the existing scaffolding.
As that glass is extremely think and presumable durable, I personally don't understand why a cheap roomba
outfitted with pressure washer (and something to catch the water) couldn't do the job.
I was thinking the same thing. When I was a kid, setting off blackcats (firecrackers) in the bathroom
was not unheard of. This makes that even more appealing.
My biggest problem with these type of systems is that the cost/reward is so lopsided. There is
so much more effective ways of saving lives than trying to protect yourself from a 1 in a million event.
Children are way way more likely to be injured by their parents at home than they are by a school shooting.
A tornado or a fire is probably also way more likely to injure a kid at school than a school shooting.
There have to be better things to spend money on than expensive equipment that based on probabilities
will likely never be used.
As an aside, we probably already have similiar laws on the books. I'm pretty sure you can't just download
and listen to every private 911 call. You have to have a legitimate reason to want to access them.
I think the key is that you shouldn't be able to request access to the recording unless you personally were involved
and/or there is a court order. A police's bodycam should be like video surveillance video. A nosy reporter (or a youtuber)
shouldn't be able to just request hours of footage without a legitimate link just as a reporter can't force walmart to
release their surveillance videos. It should be archived and relatively easy to get to for interested parties but not
the general public. A compromise might be a small screen public viewing room that doesn't allow recording devices
where someone could watch the tapes and then once they find what they are looking for then do an official request
for that section of the video along with what they are going to do with it.
That's kindof my point. "gnome desktop" and "gnome pos" would both be your "desktop environment" aka "GUI"
It's pretty hard to argue that a graphical POS doesn't fit the definition of a GUI. It's graphical and it's the user's interface.
It seems that there is a clear-cut case for GNOME, that should guarantee victory.
In what way is it "clear-cut"? Their trademark registration does not involve goods and services that involve either tablets or PoS systems.
Gnome's trademark is for "software for creating and managing a computer desktop" which a PoS definitely is.
Gnome's trademark is also for "software for use as a GUI" which again clearly describes a PoS.
A PoS is definitely a GUI, a rather simplistic one but definitely a gui. The fact that gnome also runs on multiple tablets
and has also been previously deployed as a PoS should only strengthen their case. It seems very clear-cut to me.
I'm not a lawyer, but a POS and a desktop environment don't seem like overlapping categories for Trademark purposes.
How do you figure? They are both the frontend GUI, window manager, and most visible portion of the environment.
If you asked an uninformed newbie what OS they were running on either system the most likely answer would be "gnome"
though neither "gnome desktop" nor "gnome PoS" are operating systems when a normal thinks of an operating system
they think of the window and gui management system. Yes, gnome is a full fledged desktop environment but that's like
saying I can market bottled water under the name "coca cola" because water isn't a soda. They are both still beverages.
Likewise, "gnome Pos" and "gnome desktop" are both "frontend gui and window managers for the underlying OS"
Unless Gnome is selling PoS systems, how would this infringe their trademark?
I agree that if it was in a different domain they might not have a very strong case but a PoS is basically a simplified
GUI so I think there is a very strong case that there could be potential confusion between a computer running gnome desktop
and a computer running gnome PoS. I have no idea why groupon would want that confusion unless they think they
can steal some of gnome desktop's reputation.
There should be at least three well-tested working backups for everything thats needed: water, food, housing, etc...
I would start by creating self contained units that can survive equally well in the sahara, antartica, and underwater with minimal* air exchange with
the outside. Salt water, cold, and sand are notoriously hard on equipment and if a single type of unit can survive in all 3 environments then they
might have a fighting chance. My guess is we have very little that can survive 80 years in any of those 3 environments without repair materials
being sent and I don't see mars being self sufficient for a very long time.
* the only reason I say minimal is that there is no reason even on mars that you couldn't do outgassing or ingassing of needed or unneeded
gases. It doesn't have to be 100% self contained if there is some way to regulate correctly the amount of different gases in the environment.
Loopholes are only the tip of the iceburg. Even if you attempted to remove all the loopholes, you would still
be sunk as a large multinational basically has the ability to write it's own loopholes. It also has other tricks
that individuals don't have like telling random country X that they will move 30million dollars to their country
if they give them below market taxes. Walmart and factories do this all the time where they will get 5 years
where they don't have to pay any sales tax for building a new store. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, etc... are
just doing it on the national instead of the local level. The only way I see of fixing this (instead of playing
whack a mole) is to tax them based on sales and employment in the countries. i.e. if starbucks is selling
their coffee in the USA (which they obviously are) then their profits have to be in the USA too and to do this
you need to either figure out a way to treat all the shell companies that places like starbucks create as a
single entity or tax them in a way that shell companies don't create an advantage.
What are people buying these for? Is it just because of the history?
Yes.
I still don't get it. So a company made a bad call and dumped inventory. In this case it
was to a landfill presumably so they wouldn't flood the market and bring down cartridge prices.
Also, from the looks of the titles, there were a lot of titles. My guess this is a pretty common
practice. Microsoft wants full shelves of their latest OS at best buy so they ship a bunch of
units, cost to them is basically nothing. The ones that don't sell get sent back and destroyed.
It would be against their best interest to sell them for pennies and dilute the market.
What is so special about atari doing it when everyone does it?