All you need to do to turn a capitalist nation to a fascist one is have the 1% make a deal with the government. This scares the shit out of me.
That's not how fascism happens, or what it is, outside of political propaganda. Fascism is a central planning system where the government controls all important business, but allow the "owners" to keep the profits (well, sometimes: Hitler imposed as 102% tax rate on corporate profits for anything war-related). It's a pretty bad deal for the 1%, and only looks appealing when compared to communism.
Fascism is a system that applets to a dictator looking to take over the economy while minimizing resistance from the 1%. It's not a system that particularly appeals to the 1%.
A copy is a copy in the copy is a backup and it doesn't really matter where you store it as long as your whole strategy makes sense.
Anything online, especially at the same site or accessible from the same site, is a convenience, not a backup strategy. Sure, it's handy when someone says "oops", but it doesn't protect your business.
I certainly don't blame people for trying to get off tape backups, and they are kind of a huge and slow pain in the ass.
LTO-8 is 360 MB/s assuming no compression, for a single drive. An internet pipe that give you better than 3.6 Gb/s upload is impressive for a small business.
Cloud backups make sense when all your data is already in the cloud. You don't really have much choice at that point. Or if your data changes slowly, as you can do that first upload via physical means (e.g. snowball, or even snowmobile for PB). But at least do a daily key rotation (or a service that promises WORM) to limit the damage a malicious actor can do.
I think China has proven that a totalitarian communist system can incorporate a lot of capitalism and just keep on oppressing for a while. Xi Jinping has been seriously cracking down, true, but I think it's still too soon to count out the rising middle class. The problem is that for capitalism to work you have to give people a fair degree of economic freedom, and that makes them begin to expect quite a bit of social freedom as well.
That sounded reasonable 20 and 40 years ago, too, but sadly there's no evidence to support this belief.
It used to be believed by reasonable people that communism and capitalism were fundamentally incompatible, and tat capitalism brought democracy along with it. History justified those beliefs, at the time. Sending business to China was seen as a way to subvert the communist/totalitarian system by injecting capitalism.
However, China has proven that a totalitarian communist system can incorporate a lot of capitalism and just keep on oppressing. I think that changes the answer, at least for some of us.
Of course, there's also the question of the ethics of globalism vs protectionism, but that's not specific to China.
Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has remained the same for the last 50 years. We shifted from labor intensive to capital intensive manufacturing. Automation has lowered the number of jobs in this sector. America is still a manufacturing powerhouse.
This. Further, we've never had fewer manufacturing jobs decade over decade, though it's fallen as a percentage of jobs as the country has grown.
It's mostly consumer goods that are made overseas, because US consumers mostly want cheap instead of good (though the story is reversed for cars). But there are many industries beyond consumer goods.
Several years ago Google lost all their online storage for some chunk of users. They talked about restoring from tape, so a least once upon a time they had tape backups.
Please point to even a single example of a car rental firm charging less for a 7-day rental than they do for a 5-day rental that starts on the same date.
That's not so rare. Weekly rental rates are less per day than daily (some companies do this for a monthly rental instead of weekly). Sometimes it's a lot less, depending on the market, especially for a monthly rental. None of them are going to be upset if you return the car early.
Ps: can we stop selling each other's users and advertising content and get back to developing selling real stuff, fly to moon and mars and fun things like that?
Don't worry, there are a lot of humans and we can do both. For more MBAs than rocket scientists after all, and it's not like the humans who can make valuable contributions are being lured into the user-selling business.
Would love to see evidence ad companies are wasting billions of dollars a year understanding their market...ad targeting has been going on since.....newspapers in the 18th century at least
That's not what he's saying. Advertising e.g. bicycles on a cycle-related reddit is targeted advertising, but it doesn't require tracking individual user browsing history. Advertising bicycles later on to that same user when he's looking for e.g. a video card is what doesn't seem to yield much.
If you see posts on/b/ you should probably also know the first rule of/b/.
/b/ stands for "bland" these days. The old spirit is long, long gone./pol/ still gets up to some shenanigans, but the cancer killing/b/ actually killed it years ago.
This passenger behavior is just a form of arbitrage. The airlines have created unequal markets for point-to-point travel, and some clever people are taking advantage. Arbitrage is as old as markets, is never going away, and almost always benefits consumers.
The airlines are presumably hoping for some sort of regulatory capture to distort the market, but I don't see them having much luck with that in Europe. They'd have better luck buying a Senate committee here in the US.
In terms of studies, though: people who play KSP and Factorio are statistically much better at circuit design, and probably at heart surgery and patent law, than the general public. You can't conclude much from that, obviously.
I do think that gaming of any kind (not limited to computers) that requires problem solving will of course make you better at solving similar problems, just because you've thought through the problem. It would be amazing if someone could leverage that for some real world benefit, but I've never heard of it. "Educational games" have thus far been pretty weak.
I did low-level code for ~15 years without ever having a memory leak or memory safety bug. Not because I'm especially diligent, but because I was in areas where it just didn't come up. From primitive assembly (with no dynamic memory allocation in the first place, it's hard to screw it up) to C++ done right.
Those odd corner cases are nearly the same set of places where it still makes sense to use low-level languages in the fist place. These days, if you're creating a large C code base where you're constantly allocating and freeing resources, it's almost certainly the wrong tool for the job. OTOH, if half your variables are "const volatile" because they're really memory-mapped sensors, or you only allocate memory at startup because you can't do anything dynamic in your hard realtime system, then it's both the right tool and these memory-use bugs are barely relevant.
The FDIC has your back up to a point. If there are mass bank failures and the FDIC fails, having two bank accounts is useless. All that works then is a gun and a neighbor who has lots of food and gold and hates guns.
Real good financial advisers advise to only invest as much as you can safely loose, many will just say you are not investing enough.
Investing and speculating are very different things, though they sometimes use the same tools and thus look somewhat similar. One cannot invest in bitcoin.
We no longer invest in Apple, because Apple is trying to make the next big thing, we invest in Apple because its stock has historically risen.
Some do one, some do the other. But that's somewhat orthagonal to investment vs speculation. Buying Apple stock because you are literally betting that their next thing will be big is speculative. Doing the same with a large basket of companies with a statistical track record of the next big thing can be a sound investment. Heck, in the modern world it's hard to see buying the stock of any one company as anything but speculative.
Actual investing is still very much a thing, however, and it's where most of the big money is, from pension funds to trust funds.
I've read some theories that people who can't save money are people who can't picture the future where they will need that money, I wonder if other moral issues are similar where people just can't think out and picture the consequences of their actions. By playing through moral scenarios of any kind, people are kind of forced to think about the situation and can see it somewhat in real life.
I think there's something to that, but I think you missed something more basic here. In order to enjoy video games (or movies) you require a certain minimum level of ability to think abstractly. Some percentage of the population simply can't. People who play video games are going to be able to reason about anything slightly better than the general public, statistically, but it's just correlation without causation.
Games that require any sort of problem solving (as opposed to just action in the moment) will raise the bar some more, and you'd get a larger statistical correlation with ability to reason about anything.
One small study can provide evidence towards a claim, but it can't "prove" anything. Their methodology seems dubious. But that's sort of a side note: there's no benefit to be had either way from "yet another government charity".
All of them are means tested in some way, which quals all that administrative overhead that UBI is supposed to avoid.
Yup, it's not even UBI a that point. All government organizations eventually divert from their charter, but to do so before the program even begins is something special.
There is no problem with plastic. There is only a problem with garbage being dumped at sea. Changing packaging to reduce our standard of living doesn't address the problem of garbage being dumped at sea.
Although it is dubious if the German space scientists were really Nazis.
Murder Van Braun knowingly made weapons that could only be used to attack civilians, and were used that way every day. Being a Nazi or not is small potatoes in comparison, he's drenched in the blood of murdered children. This isn't like the moral quagmire around building ICBMs (which, arguably, prevented war).
NASA is pretty useless, but that's not where the US space industry is any more. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin will be man-rating launch systems this year. Blue Origin will only be suborbital this year, but they plan to do it a lot - New Shepard is extremely re-usable. SpaceX will have us back to putting men into orbit, probably this year.
Apollo-era NASA did great things, but it was 100% focused on "man on moon", and 0% focused on building a platform for future rocketry. They wen off the rails with the shuttle, and never recovered. That may have set US space exploration back 20 years, but the current pace of innovation is pretty amazing.
Launch costs have come down a lot in the past 5 years, and are on the threshold of changing the game entirely. Man industries, starting with power generation, will have good financial incentive to move into space for profit, if launch costs were only low enough. We're just about there.
No, it really didn't prove much, beyond "UBI is not a magic pill". I see no evidence that it's actually worse than other forms of government charity, and with no cliff to punish those who do seek work, it's at least slightly better than some alternatives.
The real benefit, though, would be administrative simplicity. That's why it's only worth doing if it replaced multiple other programs. Otherwise, there's no clear advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
All you need to do to turn a capitalist nation to a fascist one is have the 1% make a deal with the government. This scares the shit out of me.
That's not how fascism happens, or what it is, outside of political propaganda. Fascism is a central planning system where the government controls all important business, but allow the "owners" to keep the profits (well, sometimes: Hitler imposed as 102% tax rate on corporate profits for anything war-related). It's a pretty bad deal for the 1%, and only looks appealing when compared to communism.
Fascism is a system that applets to a dictator looking to take over the economy while minimizing resistance from the 1%. It's not a system that particularly appeals to the 1%.
Any backup is a backup
Semantics.
A copy is a copy in the copy is a backup and it doesn't really matter where you store it as long as your whole strategy makes sense.
Anything online, especially at the same site or accessible from the same site, is a convenience, not a backup strategy. Sure, it's handy when someone says "oops", but it doesn't protect your business.
I certainly don't blame people for trying to get off tape backups, and they are kind of a huge and slow pain in the ass.
LTO-8 is 360 MB/s assuming no compression, for a single drive. An internet pipe that give you better than 3.6 Gb/s upload is impressive for a small business.
Cloud backups make sense when all your data is already in the cloud. You don't really have much choice at that point. Or if your data changes slowly, as you can do that first upload via physical means (e.g. snowball, or even snowmobile for PB). But at least do a daily key rotation (or a service that promises WORM) to limit the damage a malicious actor can do.
I think China has proven that a totalitarian communist system can incorporate a lot of capitalism and just keep on oppressing for a while. Xi Jinping has been seriously cracking down, true, but I think it's still too soon to count out the rising middle class. The problem is that for capitalism to work you have to give people a fair degree of economic freedom, and that makes them begin to expect quite a bit of social freedom as well.
That sounded reasonable 20 and 40 years ago, too, but sadly there's no evidence to support this belief.
The context has also changed a lot.
It used to be believed by reasonable people that communism and capitalism were fundamentally incompatible, and tat capitalism brought democracy along with it. History justified those beliefs, at the time. Sending business to China was seen as a way to subvert the communist/totalitarian system by injecting capitalism.
However, China has proven that a totalitarian communist system can incorporate a lot of capitalism and just keep on oppressing. I think that changes the answer, at least for some of us.
Of course, there's also the question of the ethics of globalism vs protectionism, but that's not specific to China.
Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has remained the same for the last 50 years. We shifted from labor intensive to capital intensive manufacturing. Automation has lowered the number of jobs in this sector. America is still a manufacturing powerhouse.
This. Further, we've never had fewer manufacturing jobs decade over decade, though it's fallen as a percentage of jobs as the country has grown.
It's mostly consumer goods that are made overseas, because US consumers mostly want cheap instead of good (though the story is reversed for cars). But there are many industries beyond consumer goods.
Several years ago Google lost all their online storage for some chunk of users. They talked about restoring from tape, so a least once upon a time they had tape backups.
No offsite backups? No tapes????
Who designed the disaster plan for these guys?
The plan was a disaster - mission complete!
An online copy is not a backup, guys. It can be a great cache of a backup, but it's not a backup. Who still doesn't know this?
Please point to even a single example of a car rental firm charging less for a 7-day rental than they do for a 5-day rental that starts on the same date.
That's not so rare. Weekly rental rates are less per day than daily (some companies do this for a monthly rental instead of weekly). Sometimes it's a lot less, depending on the market, especially for a monthly rental. None of them are going to be upset if you return the car early.
If you dislike the standard practices of the airlines, and the terms and conditions they attach to their tickets, perhaps find another way to travel?
Collusion between businesses in a market to fix prices or terms is not OK.
Airlines are well known to screw the customer in every possible way not prevented by law. It's the wrong industry to stand up for.
Ps: can we stop selling each other's users and advertising content and get back to developing selling real stuff, fly to moon and mars and fun things like that?
Don't worry, there are a lot of humans and we can do both. For more MBAs than rocket scientists after all, and it's not like the humans who can make valuable contributions are being lured into the user-selling business.
Would love to see evidence ad companies are wasting billions of dollars a year understanding their market...ad targeting has been going on since.....newspapers in the 18th century at least
That's not what he's saying. Advertising e.g. bicycles on a cycle-related reddit is targeted advertising, but it doesn't require tracking individual user browsing history. Advertising bicycles later on to that same user when he's looking for e.g. a video card is what doesn't seem to yield much.
If you see posts on /b/ you should probably also know the first rule of /b/.
/b/ stands for "bland" these days. The old spirit is long, long gone. /pol/ still gets up to some shenanigans, but the cancer killing /b/ actually killed it years ago.
This passenger behavior is just a form of arbitrage. The airlines have created unequal markets for point-to-point travel, and some clever people are taking advantage. Arbitrage is as old as markets, is never going away, and almost always benefits consumers.
The airlines are presumably hoping for some sort of regulatory capture to distort the market, but I don't see them having much luck with that in Europe. They'd have better luck buying a Senate committee here in the US.
In terms of studies, though: people who play KSP and Factorio are statistically much better at circuit design, and probably at heart surgery and patent law, than the general public. You can't conclude much from that, obviously.
I do think that gaming of any kind (not limited to computers) that requires problem solving will of course make you better at solving similar problems, just because you've thought through the problem. It would be amazing if someone could leverage that for some real world benefit, but I've never heard of it. "Educational games" have thus far been pretty weak.
I did low-level code for ~15 years without ever having a memory leak or memory safety bug. Not because I'm especially diligent, but because I was in areas where it just didn't come up. From primitive assembly (with no dynamic memory allocation in the first place, it's hard to screw it up) to C++ done right.
Those odd corner cases are nearly the same set of places where it still makes sense to use low-level languages in the fist place. These days, if you're creating a large C code base where you're constantly allocating and freeing resources, it's almost certainly the wrong tool for the job. OTOH, if half your variables are "const volatile" because they're really memory-mapped sensors, or you only allocate memory at startup because you can't do anything dynamic in your hard realtime system, then it's both the right tool and these memory-use bugs are barely relevant.
The FDIC has your back up to a point. If there are mass bank failures and the FDIC fails, having two bank accounts is useless. All that works then is a gun and a neighbor who has lots of food and gold and hates guns.
Government mind control is all done via HAARP these days - it comes from below. Tinfoil hats do nothing. You need tinfoil shoes.
Real good financial advisers advise to only invest as much as you can safely loose, many will just say you are not investing enough.
Investing and speculating are very different things, though they sometimes use the same tools and thus look somewhat similar. One cannot invest in bitcoin.
We no longer invest in Apple, because Apple is trying to make the next big thing, we invest in Apple because its stock has historically risen.
Some do one, some do the other. But that's somewhat orthagonal to investment vs speculation. Buying Apple stock because you are literally betting that their next thing will be big is speculative. Doing the same with a large basket of companies with a statistical track record of the next big thing can be a sound investment. Heck, in the modern world it's hard to see buying the stock of any one company as anything but speculative.
Actual investing is still very much a thing, however, and it's where most of the big money is, from pension funds to trust funds.
I've read some theories that people who can't save money are people who can't picture the future where they will need that money, I wonder if other moral issues are similar where people just can't think out and picture the consequences of their actions. By playing through moral scenarios of any kind, people are kind of forced to think about the situation and can see it somewhat in real life.
I think there's something to that, but I think you missed something more basic here. In order to enjoy video games (or movies) you require a certain minimum level of ability to think abstractly. Some percentage of the population simply can't. People who play video games are going to be able to reason about anything slightly better than the general public, statistically, but it's just correlation without causation.
Games that require any sort of problem solving (as opposed to just action in the moment) will raise the bar some more, and you'd get a larger statistical correlation with ability to reason about anything.
The boys in blue are a giant heavily armed gang and you generally don't want them gunning for you.
Nah, you just drive through a car wash and it's fine.
One small study can provide evidence towards a claim, but it can't "prove" anything. Their methodology seems dubious. But that's sort of a side note: there's no benefit to be had either way from "yet another government charity".
All of them are means tested in some way, which quals all that administrative overhead that UBI is supposed to avoid.
Yup, it's not even UBI a that point. All government organizations eventually divert from their charter, but to do so before the program even begins is something special.
There is no problem with plastic. There is only a problem with garbage being dumped at sea. Changing packaging to reduce our standard of living doesn't address the problem of garbage being dumped at sea.
Although it is dubious if the German space scientists were really Nazis.
Murder Van Braun knowingly made weapons that could only be used to attack civilians, and were used that way every day. Being a Nazi or not is small potatoes in comparison, he's drenched in the blood of murdered children. This isn't like the moral quagmire around building ICBMs (which, arguably, prevented war).
NASA is pretty useless, but that's not where the US space industry is any more. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin will be man-rating launch systems this year. Blue Origin will only be suborbital this year, but they plan to do it a lot - New Shepard is extremely re-usable. SpaceX will have us back to putting men into orbit, probably this year.
Apollo-era NASA did great things, but it was 100% focused on "man on moon", and 0% focused on building a platform for future rocketry. They wen off the rails with the shuttle, and never recovered. That may have set US space exploration back 20 years, but the current pace of innovation is pretty amazing.
Launch costs have come down a lot in the past 5 years, and are on the threshold of changing the game entirely. Man industries, starting with power generation, will have good financial incentive to move into space for profit, if launch costs were only low enough. We're just about there.
No, it really didn't prove much, beyond "UBI is not a magic pill". I see no evidence that it's actually worse than other forms of government charity, and with no cliff to punish those who do seek work, it's at least slightly better than some alternatives.
The real benefit, though, would be administrative simplicity. That's why it's only worth doing if it replaced multiple other programs. Otherwise, there's no clear advantage.