Safety nets are also for people who are permanently disabled. Disability insurance is pretty cheap, and doesn't really cost our society much even with fraud. It removes from discussion a talking point that the left likes to obsess over, but isn't really the point. Ditto providing institutional housing for the mentally disabled, like we used to do - it's cheap, and would solve about half the homeless problem.
You can have social safety nets without the government directly providing them, merely regulating them for quality. Replace Social Security with a 401K-style plan that meets certain rules - mandatory contribution to that would be better than what we have now. I'd love to see a return of "mutual aid societies" and the like: secular alternatives to government assistance if you're out of work for more than a few months, or get cancer and can't cover the bill even with insurance, or whatever.
The church used to do a bunch of this, and do it well thanks to the social pressure not to abuse it. But we're mostly a secular society now, and we need something or the government does it by default.
Actually, YouTube is already quite good at policing all user-generated content. They can absolutely check every uploaded video for audio that matches any copyrighted track (at least, any that the artist has told YouTube about via the ContentID system). They used to constantly take down videos for using copyrighted background music, now they usually just share the ad revenue with the artist. They might not match poorly-played cover songs, but those don't hurt the real artist.
They auto-match video too. YouTube movie reviewers have problems with that, since the system knows nothing of fair use.
These are solved problems - perhaps YouTube' system isn't very good technically (hard for artists to use?), but that's something to be addressed technically.
No. That's not what they want. They don't want youtube to make money off ads/advertising on music that is copyrighted and should've been taken down.
YouTube already gives a share of ad revenue to the artists. The ContentID systems aren't perfect, but if someone uploads a video of, say, a cute girl dancing to popular tune, the plumbing is already there to auto-detect the tune, associate it with the artists, and share ad revenue. Taking down the video would be lose-lose.
Google could probably make it easier for artists to engage with this system, could possibly make ContentID better, and could certainly give the artist a bigger share. However, I'm baffled why anyone would think it appropriate to take down the video, except in the narrow case where the YouTube video is nothing but the album cover (adds no value) and the artists has an official video on YouTube. But any video that adds any value at all, even lyrics on screen, can only bring in more views, and thus more ad revenue, for the artist.
This all sounds like either a negotiating ploy for a bigger cut from Google, or a hopeless attempt to force listeners to listen via some other system they can charge more for (good luck with the latter, as YouTube ad the streaming companies are just the modern version of radio, and the voters actually care about this, unlike most stuff on/.).
You've strung together a bunch of non-sequiturs - was that supposed to be an argument of some kind? Free markets and a social safety net (government-provided or otherwise) are orthogonal concepts; neither precludes the other.
Socialism, however, goes far beyond providing a safety net for the most-unlucky 5%.
Chlorine trifluoride is an amazingly scary compound. Worse than FOOF. It burns asbestos. It burns water. It burns firebricks. It burns "safety equipment, test equipment, and researchers". It emits HF as its combustion byproduct (and an HF leak will clear any lab).
When spilled, there's nothing you can do. Fortunately, it will simply eat its way down towards the center of the Earth through anything it its path until it's exhausted, so spills stay within their initial footprint.
Say what? Local governments control the right-of-way that cable companies need in order to offer service. In many places, that local government has made a deal with one cable company or another granting them exclusive access. It's corrupt local politics at its finest, and its very common.
"Renewables" don't work for shit for industrial power. It's natural gas, coal, or nuclear. A lot of heavy industry makes its own power on-site, so maybe you're right about it not being fission.
Most people live someplace that the cable is provided by a cable company with a government-granted monopoly. I was talking about cable companies. What are you talking about?
About 95% of the engineers I've worked with for the past 10 years have been recent immigrants - on a visa or green card. None of them were "outsourced", that's just what a West Coast software developer looks like. What I say is based on experience. What you just said seems to be based only on hate.
The various visas allow the same guy to do the work here, with the same costs I have, instead of someplace far cheaper. That's a good thing: for me, and for the other guy too, who deserves a job just as much as I do.
You've entirely missed my point. It's not about new jobs doing work for 1%ers, obviously. It's about the fact that for 150 years or so now, every wave of automation has produced a new wave of jobs because stuff that only 1%ers could afford before, everyone can afford now. That's just the way technology works.=: you make X cheap, and now everyone can afford Y.
, I am going to point out that there is a lot of deforestation caused by the "advanced" commercial agriculturalists of the modern world. Are you having a problem grasping that?
"Advanced" only in scare quotes, is the point. Farming the way the US did 80-100 years ago, who nevertheless needed less land than a century before them and so on. People need to eat. Best to be smart about how that food is provided. Yet the same crowd who loves the trees seems adamant against modern agriculture - but then, perhaps reason isn't their strong suit.
Cliff's Notes version is: more H1-B visas = downward pressure on tech wages, as Sanjay in Hyderabad does your job for pennies on the dollar
I see this a lot, and it's deeply stupid even by/. standards (and racist besides). Even the very dim should be able to understand that if Sanjay is in Hyderabad then he's not in the fucking US on a visa, is he? Offering Sanjay an H1-B means he now has to pay to live in the US, and he now makes a higher wage and removes some downward wage pressure. Sanjay of course is no dummy, so he's going to get a Green Card as fast as he possibly can, at which point he just another American tech worker, same as anyone else.
The more modern the farming techniques the less land needed for farming. You seem to have trouble grasping this. Low-tech agriculture means trees get cut down to make for farmland. High-tech agriculture means farmland is abandoned to the trees, as it's no longer needed to make all the food the market can take.
If they need to cut down jungle for additional farmland by definition this is low-tech agriculture.
So, then, buying some chickens from local farmers and giving them to some poorer folks, so that they can participate in the economy themselves, that would be good, right? This isn't about handing out Chicken McNuggets, it's about letting a few new families become chicken farmers.
There are plenty of aid organizations focused on the exact things you describe: education in skills directly useful in the community, making it safe for girls to go to school, helping people get a small capital stake to move beyond subsistence to some sort of small business, that sort of thing. The Gates Foundation pours millions into such organizations.
So you're saying reactors with 50 year old designs are outdated and expensive? What a shock! But we were talking about modern designs, and those are different.
If you think CO2 is bad, then nuclear is the only scalable option for baseline power. If you don't, this whole discussion is silly, as natural gas is quite cheap.
There are still hair stylists and manicurists, and they're not going anywhere. There are still the skilled trades, and they're not going anywhere. I expect a boom in jobs like decorator and home theater installer and fashion consultant and everything like that: jobs that are currently for the fairly rich, where both fashion sense and the fiddly bits of getting everything in place to look good can be left to someone who's passionate about that particular sort of thing.
The more things get cheap, the more taste and arrangement matters for social status, and the more people can on the same money afford to pay someone else to do it for them. And almost everyone is a "hobby expert" on something.
It's much shallower than doctor or lawyer (both of which are becoming less-than-great jobs, BTW, be a dentist or vet instead). Look to personal services only the 1% can afford today to be far more common tomorrow, since that's the pattern throughout history.
I'm guessing Amazon is starting to overload the capacity of all of America's combined delivery companies. Whatever they're planning to do about this, they should have done it by now, to avoid this "guaranteed (mostly)" state of affairs.
I'm sure they're watching their cashflow: it's pretty much the central focus of all small businesses. Paying a dividend signals that they're not planning to expand into more kinds of business (at least not capital-intensive kinds), and protects against hostile takeover, both of which which personally I like. Grow at what you know you're good at, not by random nonsense.
More to the point: a company with a government-granted monopoly to supply the pipe should be forbidden as part of that grant from providing the content. Make last mile a public utility, and Net Neutrality becomes a non-issue.
The specific curves were measured in 1860. The first real explanations were in 1900, inventing an entire field of physics that was essentially re-written in 1920, and it's still doing new work today. That measurement was one heck of a "this can't quite be explained by current theories".
The new experiment is probably nothing, but if it isn't it would also likely be one heck of a "this can't quite be explained by current theories". It's at least beyond mere charlatanism now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty sad when you have to reach back centuries for your progressive virtue signalling.
Safety nets are also for people who are permanently disabled. Disability insurance is pretty cheap, and doesn't really cost our society much even with fraud. It removes from discussion a talking point that the left likes to obsess over, but isn't really the point. Ditto providing institutional housing for the mentally disabled, like we used to do - it's cheap, and would solve about half the homeless problem.
You can have social safety nets without the government directly providing them, merely regulating them for quality. Replace Social Security with a 401K-style plan that meets certain rules - mandatory contribution to that would be better than what we have now. I'd love to see a return of "mutual aid societies" and the like: secular alternatives to government assistance if you're out of work for more than a few months, or get cancer and can't cover the bill even with insurance, or whatever.
The church used to do a bunch of this, and do it well thanks to the social pressure not to abuse it. But we're mostly a secular society now, and we need something or the government does it by default.
Actually, YouTube is already quite good at policing all user-generated content. They can absolutely check every uploaded video for audio that matches any copyrighted track (at least, any that the artist has told YouTube about via the ContentID system). They used to constantly take down videos for using copyrighted background music, now they usually just share the ad revenue with the artist. They might not match poorly-played cover songs, but those don't hurt the real artist.
They auto-match video too. YouTube movie reviewers have problems with that, since the system knows nothing of fair use.
These are solved problems - perhaps YouTube' system isn't very good technically (hard for artists to use?), but that's something to be addressed technically.
Plus, wasn't it Sonny, not Sony? (The Sonny Bono copyright extension.)
No. That's not what they want. They don't want youtube to make money off ads/advertising on music that is copyrighted and should've been taken down.
YouTube already gives a share of ad revenue to the artists. The ContentID systems aren't perfect, but if someone uploads a video of, say, a cute girl dancing to popular tune, the plumbing is already there to auto-detect the tune, associate it with the artists, and share ad revenue. Taking down the video would be lose-lose.
Google could probably make it easier for artists to engage with this system, could possibly make ContentID better, and could certainly give the artist a bigger share. However, I'm baffled why anyone would think it appropriate to take down the video, except in the narrow case where the YouTube video is nothing but the album cover (adds no value) and the artists has an official video on YouTube. But any video that adds any value at all, even lyrics on screen, can only bring in more views, and thus more ad revenue, for the artist.
This all sounds like either a negotiating ploy for a bigger cut from Google, or a hopeless attempt to force listeners to listen via some other system they can charge more for (good luck with the latter, as YouTube ad the streaming companies are just the modern version of radio, and the voters actually care about this, unlike most stuff on /.).
You've strung together a bunch of non-sequiturs - was that supposed to be an argument of some kind? Free markets and a social safety net (government-provided or otherwise) are orthogonal concepts; neither precludes the other.
Socialism, however, goes far beyond providing a safety net for the most-unlucky 5%.
Chlorine trifluoride is an amazingly scary compound. Worse than FOOF. It burns asbestos. It burns water. It burns firebricks. It burns "safety equipment, test equipment, and researchers". It emits HF as its combustion byproduct (and an HF leak will clear any lab).
When spilled, there's nothing you can do. Fortunately, it will simply eat its way down towards the center of the Earth through anything it its path until it's exhausted, so spills stay within their initial footprint.
Say what? Local governments control the right-of-way that cable companies need in order to offer service. In many places, that local government has made a deal with one cable company or another granting them exclusive access. It's corrupt local politics at its finest, and its very common.
Long term we won't be using nuclear fission much.
"Renewables" don't work for shit for industrial power. It's natural gas, coal, or nuclear. A lot of heavy industry makes its own power on-site, so maybe you're right about it not being fission.
Most people live someplace that the cable is provided by a cable company with a government-granted monopoly. I was talking about cable companies. What are you talking about?
About 95% of the engineers I've worked with for the past 10 years have been recent immigrants - on a visa or green card. None of them were "outsourced", that's just what a West Coast software developer looks like. What I say is based on experience. What you just said seems to be based only on hate.
The various visas allow the same guy to do the work here, with the same costs I have, instead of someplace far cheaper. That's a good thing: for me, and for the other guy too, who deserves a job just as much as I do.
You've entirely missed my point. It's not about new jobs doing work for 1%ers, obviously. It's about the fact that for 150 years or so now, every wave of automation has produced a new wave of jobs because stuff that only 1%ers could afford before, everyone can afford now. That's just the way technology works.=: you make X cheap, and now everyone can afford Y.
"Low tech" does not (only) mean "stone age.
, I am going to point out that there is a lot of deforestation caused by the "advanced" commercial agriculturalists of the modern world. Are you having a problem grasping that?
"Advanced" only in scare quotes, is the point. Farming the way the US did 80-100 years ago, who nevertheless needed less land than a century before them and so on. People need to eat. Best to be smart about how that food is provided. Yet the same crowd who loves the trees seems adamant against modern agriculture - but then, perhaps reason isn't their strong suit.
Everyone would be happier if you would just stop posting to Slashdot.
Cliff's Notes version is: more H1-B visas = downward pressure on tech wages, as Sanjay in Hyderabad does your job for pennies on the dollar
I see this a lot, and it's deeply stupid even by /. standards (and racist besides). Even the very dim should be able to understand that if Sanjay is in Hyderabad then he's not in the fucking US on a visa, is he? Offering Sanjay an H1-B means he now has to pay to live in the US, and he now makes a higher wage and removes some downward wage pressure. Sanjay of course is no dummy, so he's going to get a Green Card as fast as he possibly can, at which point he just another American tech worker, same as anyone else.
The more modern the farming techniques the less land needed for farming. You seem to have trouble grasping this. Low-tech agriculture means trees get cut down to make for farmland. High-tech agriculture means farmland is abandoned to the trees, as it's no longer needed to make all the food the market can take.
If they need to cut down jungle for additional farmland by definition this is low-tech agriculture.
So, then, buying some chickens from local farmers and giving them to some poorer folks, so that they can participate in the economy themselves, that would be good, right? This isn't about handing out Chicken McNuggets, it's about letting a few new families become chicken farmers.
There are plenty of aid organizations focused on the exact things you describe: education in skills directly useful in the community, making it safe for girls to go to school, helping people get a small capital stake to move beyond subsistence to some sort of small business, that sort of thing. The Gates Foundation pours millions into such organizations.
When you find yourself defending the VA, it's time to stop talking. Seriously.
So you're saying reactors with 50 year old designs are outdated and expensive? What a shock! But we were talking about modern designs, and those are different.
If you think CO2 is bad, then nuclear is the only scalable option for baseline power. If you don't, this whole discussion is silly, as natural gas is quite cheap.
There are still hair stylists and manicurists, and they're not going anywhere. There are still the skilled trades, and they're not going anywhere. I expect a boom in jobs like decorator and home theater installer and fashion consultant and everything like that: jobs that are currently for the fairly rich, where both fashion sense and the fiddly bits of getting everything in place to look good can be left to someone who's passionate about that particular sort of thing.
The more things get cheap, the more taste and arrangement matters for social status, and the more people can on the same money afford to pay someone else to do it for them. And almost everyone is a "hobby expert" on something.
It's much shallower than doctor or lawyer (both of which are becoming less-than-great jobs, BTW, be a dentist or vet instead). Look to personal services only the 1% can afford today to be far more common tomorrow, since that's the pattern throughout history.
I'm guessing Amazon is starting to overload the capacity of all of America's combined delivery companies. Whatever they're planning to do about this, they should have done it by now, to avoid this "guaranteed (mostly)" state of affairs.
I'm sure they're watching their cashflow: it's pretty much the central focus of all small businesses. Paying a dividend signals that they're not planning to expand into more kinds of business (at least not capital-intensive kinds), and protects against hostile takeover, both of which which personally I like. Grow at what you know you're good at, not by random nonsense.
More to the point: a company with a government-granted monopoly to supply the pipe should be forbidden as part of that grant from providing the content. Make last mile a public utility, and Net Neutrality becomes a non-issue.
It's certainly weird for a tech startup, but it's weird in a very Kickstarter-ish way, isn't it? Good on 'em, says me.
The specific curves were measured in 1860. The first real explanations were in 1900, inventing an entire field of physics that was essentially re-written in 1920, and it's still doing new work today. That measurement was one heck of a "this can't quite be explained by current theories".
The new experiment is probably nothing, but if it isn't it would also likely be one heck of a "this can't quite be explained by current theories". It's at least beyond mere charlatanism now.