What does "hurts the same" have to do with anything? That's just a baseless assertion of a moral principle - you need to argue for that principle. There's no doubt that "everyone pays the same dollar amount" is fair - totally unbiased by any prejudice. Just like settling a court case by flipping a coin would be - totally fair. Fairness is perhaps not the highest goal?
But to argue from "righteousness", you have to establish a moral basis, and humanity has never been able to agree on that. It all comes down to values, and no matter how obvious a given moral principle seems to you, intelligent people may disagree, as it's impossible to argue morality from fist principles (well, other than the "God said so" principle).
How so? The one thing the market is great at, better than any central planning committee can possibly be, is finding a price where supply meets demand. Left to itself (well, with the usual needed prevention of collusion in pricing), there will be the right number of taxis, charging the right amount for a ride.
Yes, and some other people don't want the government to control anything. They're called The Rich.
You've swallowed the propaganda whole. The government is the tool of the rich. Have you been paying so little attention to politics that you believe our government is not corrupted by large donors (corporate and otherwise)? Really?
You completely miss the point. It's the drivers who need licensing, not the company. And AFAIK, every state has some sort of separate license requirement for this unrelated to ownership of a taxi company. Why do people have such a hard time making this distinction?
You haven't experienced it, so it's not real? The typical deal at a cab company for a driver is that you pay a hefty per-day fee to rent the cab you will drive, one that takes you many hours of work to just break even. The way drivers deal with this is to sleep in the evening, wake up in time to pick up the cab at midnight, and work 48-hours straight with as little sleep as they can manage, then crash for a day, getting the most possible working hours after the hours needed to break even each day. This is not a model of safety.
No, we need a new, non-MS-tainted TPM that actually locks down the hardware layer with string cryptography that the owner of the device has the key to, not some DRM nonsense.
We also need to move beyond BIOS, one of these days, but maybe security-first this time?
Exploitive of whom? The drivers? Uber can't possibly hold a candle to cab companies in that respect! Cab companies are fucking brutal when it comes to drivers who don't own their own cars, and provide a strong incentive to work 48-hour shifts in many markets - that doesn't help anyone.
That "basic licensing requirement" has nothing at all to do with safety. Drivers need to be licensed for safety, the company license is government-granted monopoly, pure and simple.
But some people want to government to control all the things, and any excuse will do.
Opposing someone politically while not trying to drive them from your community is tolerance (but not acceptance). Tolerance is only relevant when people have beliefs contrary to your own deeply-held values. Save the conflict for appropriate venues, like the voting booth.
When I was a kid, the left was full of tolerance, while the right was casting out sinners, trying to block "the wrong people" from their neighborhoods, and so on. Now the roles have reversed. Tragic, really.
Everyone paying the same dollar amount of taxes is the only fair approach. Everything else is inherently wrong, morally and unjust. See, I can make bold assertions too.
It seems you favor the government picking a specific group of undesirable people, and taxing them more. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?
It was pretty well covered on the dextrosphere. It was hard to miss if you read right-leaning political blogs at all, as it was a perfect example of the extreme intolerance on the left, and most people at least have a friend who reads political stuff these days. You pretty much have to, if you're conservative, as the older media is just the propaganda arm of the Dem party now, and most stories that might embarrass the left in any way are boycotted cable/broadcast/print news in the US.
Yes, I fully understand that's how progressives argue the issue. Conservatives don't see it that way, especially after the eHarmony verdict a few years back. In any case, his personal beliefs are irrelevant. Tolerance is a virtue, one you apparently lack (tolerance does not imply acceptance, merely that you don't actively work to expel people from the community).
IE (across versions) has a larger share than Firefox now, right?
Firefox lost 1/3rd of its customer base in the (almost-) year following the ousting of Eich for being conservative, and is still losing share fast. It's almost like half of America is more conservative than average, or something.
Think of how a the world would be if only the strongest could protect what is theirs?
You mean, for example, if the Police weren't bound by the rules the rest of us are? That would indeed be a shocking state of affairs, and quite unjust!
"It doesn't print" is a different bug report than "it prints garbage". Sure it'd be nice to know if the printer was turned on, connected, had paper, and so on, but you can't get that from a bug report anyhow, because customers lie in bug reports. All you can trust is your telemetry data anyhow. (I used to support a complex product for a very technologically sophisticated customer base, and even then: if the advice tech support gave didn't work and it got to me, chances were the bug report was full of false data. Over time our telemetry tools got better, which helped a lot.)
How do you know "it doesn't print" isn't a complete and useful report? I haven't read the privacy statement for this, but it would be sensible for the OS to capture recent activity in a bug report, no? But perhaps I give MS too much credit - much as I think their heart's finally in the right place, I'm not sure their head is yet.
People buy their products because they enjoy using them, and that is literally the only thing that matters. Who gives a fuck about specs and checklists? What good is a 10% faster processor in a phone that looks and feels clunky?
For sure, a mechanical watch gives a warmth and vibrance to your records that digital just can't match with synthetic diamonds; I mean, somehow you always know, and anyhow spring colors are so last week it's like she doesn't even follow fashion it's hand built, you know, and other cars may be faster but look at those lines, it just makes me feel good when I wear it!
In real production code these days, "maintainable code" is what matters. Sure, on very rare occasions you'll google some algorithm you vaguely remember form college that's not already in your library, but most code just isn't performance sensitive (in an algorithmic sense) or even algorithmically interesting.
What matters is living with that code for many years after writing it, and not hating life. And that is still as much art as science. Sure, best practices continue to be formalized, but the field is still young in that respect, and I don't expect maintainability to settle down into "a set of rules to follow" before my career ends.
As if Apple's thing was "easy to use". Apple makes jewelry - design/style first, ease of use second. Admittedly, they don't let ease of use get too terrible, most of the time, but style always comes first.
TV is what the peasants watch. There are expensive TVs, but there can't be an "upper class TV". Fashion is all about pretending to be upper class* by buying over-priced status symbols, and Apple has had very few misses since Job's return in that regard. TV certainly wasn't one of them.
*The actual upper class, of course, doesn't go in for status symbols, but for expressions of either taste or conformity, but the US fashion scene is really centered in "ostentatious high income" people, not the tiny upper class anyhow.
Some will be, no doubt, but with a high enough F/M ratio you can be picky. The last time I visited my father, we happened to walk through the gym for his retirement community, and I was a bit surprised - there are definitely still women in good shape far older than I would have guessed.
However, think of the advantages - multiple orgasms and no worry about needing a half-viagra when you get older just to keep you from peeing on your shoes. So if you need to get it done anyway...:-)
If I live a few decades more, there will be several women alive my age for every man. How often you get it up can be fixed with a pill; how often you get it, not so much. If you're in your 20s, maybe it looks different, as female mortality is converging on male as gender roles in the workplace fade.
Those "IOU's" are treasury bonds. They are worth something.
No, not in the usual sense. They used to be treasury bonds - the Social Security program would sell them on the bond market to raise funds. But Reagan/Bush/Clinton sold them all to mask the deficit. Now they really are just IOUs.
It's exactly like taking a loan from your 401K. If before you had T-Bliss in your 401K, but then you borrow all that money for an emergency expense, now you just have a loan to yourself. Before, you could actually live off that money at retirement; after, you must earn new money before you can actually retire.
It's important because it was a dirty scam on the taxpayers - everyone who paid SS taxes was effectively defrauded (and by both parties, of course). Like you say, in the end it's all taxes, but it changes the true amount of the debt, already staggeringly large. And unlike US treasuries, there's no constitutional requirement to meet out social security obligations (though I expect we will, and just suffer 10%+ inflation for many years, until no one can live on that check).
Everything always ends up being priced by supply and demand, in the long run. If you distort the market too far, you get shortages and wastage, and a black market where things are priced according to supply and demand. Labor isn't an exception.
Wage, as determined by supply and demand, is the signal for how valuable one more worker at some job is to the community. That is to say, it's a mix of how valuable the work is over all, but also how much the community actually needs one more person doing that work.
None of us are entirely self-sufficient, so If you want to live, you must contribute to the community something of marginal value (that is, something there's value in even more of than what the community already has), to receive what you need. There's no escaping that: all there is is all we produce. And compensation is about the value you produce as judged by others.
Wages for the most part stay pretty close to that ideal. I think people forget how important the "supply and demand" part is.
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What does "hurts the same" have to do with anything? That's just a baseless assertion of a moral principle - you need to argue for that principle. There's no doubt that "everyone pays the same dollar amount" is fair - totally unbiased by any prejudice. Just like settling a court case by flipping a coin would be - totally fair. Fairness is perhaps not the highest goal?
But to argue from "righteousness", you have to establish a moral basis, and humanity has never been able to agree on that. It all comes down to values, and no matter how obvious a given moral principle seems to you, intelligent people may disagree, as it's impossible to argue morality from fist principles (well, other than the "God said so" principle).
How so? The one thing the market is great at, better than any central planning committee can possibly be, is finding a price where supply meets demand. Left to itself (well, with the usual needed prevention of collusion in pricing), there will be the right number of taxis, charging the right amount for a ride.
But maybe I mistook your point?
Yes, and some other people don't want the government to control anything. They're called The Rich.
You've swallowed the propaganda whole. The government is the tool of the rich. Have you been paying so little attention to politics that you believe our government is not corrupted by large donors (corporate and otherwise)? Really?
And that's even before regulatory capture.
You completely miss the point. It's the drivers who need licensing, not the company. And AFAIK, every state has some sort of separate license requirement for this unrelated to ownership of a taxi company. Why do people have such a hard time making this distinction?
You haven't experienced it, so it's not real? The typical deal at a cab company for a driver is that you pay a hefty per-day fee to rent the cab you will drive, one that takes you many hours of work to just break even. The way drivers deal with this is to sleep in the evening, wake up in time to pick up the cab at midnight, and work 48-hours straight with as little sleep as they can manage, then crash for a day, getting the most possible working hours after the hours needed to break even each day. This is not a model of safety.
We need to go back to BIOS stored in ROM.
No, we need a new, non-MS-tainted TPM that actually locks down the hardware layer with string cryptography that the owner of the device has the key to, not some DRM nonsense.
We also need to move beyond BIOS, one of these days, but maybe security-first this time?
Exploitive of whom? The drivers? Uber can't possibly hold a candle to cab companies in that respect! Cab companies are fucking brutal when it comes to drivers who don't own their own cars, and provide a strong incentive to work 48-hour shifts in many markets - that doesn't help anyone.
That "basic licensing requirement" has nothing at all to do with safety. Drivers need to be licensed for safety, the company license is government-granted monopoly, pure and simple.
But some people want to government to control all the things, and any excuse will do.
Opposing someone politically while not trying to drive them from your community is tolerance (but not acceptance). Tolerance is only relevant when people have beliefs contrary to your own deeply-held values. Save the conflict for appropriate venues, like the voting booth.
When I was a kid, the left was full of tolerance, while the right was casting out sinners, trying to block "the wrong people" from their neighborhoods, and so on. Now the roles have reversed. Tragic, really.
Everyone paying the same dollar amount of taxes is the only fair approach. Everything else is inherently wrong, morally and unjust. See, I can make bold assertions too.
It seems you favor the government picking a specific group of undesirable people, and taxing them more. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?
It was pretty well covered on the dextrosphere. It was hard to miss if you read right-leaning political blogs at all, as it was a perfect example of the extreme intolerance on the left, and most people at least have a friend who reads political stuff these days. You pretty much have to, if you're conservative, as the older media is just the propaganda arm of the Dem party now, and most stories that might embarrass the left in any way are boycotted cable/broadcast/print news in the US.
Yes, I fully understand that's how progressives argue the issue. Conservatives don't see it that way, especially after the eHarmony verdict a few years back. In any case, his personal beliefs are irrelevant. Tolerance is a virtue, one you apparently lack (tolerance does not imply acceptance, merely that you don't actively work to expel people from the community).
IE (across versions) has a larger share than Firefox now, right?
Firefox lost 1/3rd of its customer base in the (almost-) year following the ousting of Eich for being conservative, and is still losing share fast. It's almost like half of America is more conservative than average, or something.
Think of how a the world would be if only the strongest could protect what is theirs?
You mean, for example, if the Police weren't bound by the rules the rest of us are? That would indeed be a shocking state of affairs, and quite unjust!
"It doesn't print" is a different bug report than "it prints garbage". Sure it'd be nice to know if the printer was turned on, connected, had paper, and so on, but you can't get that from a bug report anyhow, because customers lie in bug reports. All you can trust is your telemetry data anyhow. (I used to support a complex product for a very technologically sophisticated customer base, and even then: if the advice tech support gave didn't work and it got to me, chances were the bug report was full of false data. Over time our telemetry tools got better, which helped a lot.)
Wow, that looks like Windows 3.1 with a taskbar. Yikes.
How do you know "it doesn't print" isn't a complete and useful report? I haven't read the privacy statement for this, but it would be sensible for the OS to capture recent activity in a bug report, no? But perhaps I give MS too much credit - much as I think their heart's finally in the right place, I'm not sure their head is yet.
People buy their products because they enjoy using them, and that is literally the only thing that matters. Who gives a fuck about specs and checklists? What good is a 10% faster processor in a phone that looks and feels clunky?
For sure, a mechanical watch gives a warmth and vibrance to your records that digital just can't match with synthetic diamonds; I mean, somehow you always know, and anyhow spring colors are so last week it's like she doesn't even follow fashion it's hand built, you know, and other cars may be faster but look at those lines, it just makes me feel good when I wear it!
In real production code these days, "maintainable code" is what matters. Sure, on very rare occasions you'll google some algorithm you vaguely remember form college that's not already in your library, but most code just isn't performance sensitive (in an algorithmic sense) or even algorithmically interesting.
What matters is living with that code for many years after writing it, and not hating life. And that is still as much art as science. Sure, best practices continue to be formalized, but the field is still young in that respect, and I don't expect maintainability to settle down into "a set of rules to follow" before my career ends.
As if Apple's thing was "easy to use". Apple makes jewelry - design/style first, ease of use second. Admittedly, they don't let ease of use get too terrible, most of the time, but style always comes first.
TV is what the peasants watch. There are expensive TVs, but there can't be an "upper class TV". Fashion is all about pretending to be upper class* by buying over-priced status symbols, and Apple has had very few misses since Job's return in that regard. TV certainly wasn't one of them.
*The actual upper class, of course, doesn't go in for status symbols, but for expressions of either taste or conformity, but the US fashion scene is really centered in "ostentatious high income" people, not the tiny upper class anyhow.
Some will be, no doubt, but with a high enough F/M ratio you can be picky. The last time I visited my father, we happened to walk through the gym for his retirement community, and I was a bit surprised - there are definitely still women in good shape far older than I would have guessed.
However, think of the advantages - multiple orgasms and no worry about needing a half-viagra when you get older just to keep you from peeing on your shoes. So if you need to get it done anyway ... :-)
If I live a few decades more, there will be several women alive my age for every man. How often you get it up can be fixed with a pill; how often you get it, not so much. If you're in your 20s, maybe it looks different, as female mortality is converging on male as gender roles in the workplace fade.
Perhaps you obsess about this a bit more than the rest of us.
Those "IOU's" are treasury bonds. They are worth something.
No, not in the usual sense. They used to be treasury bonds - the Social Security program would sell them on the bond market to raise funds. But Reagan/Bush/Clinton sold them all to mask the deficit. Now they really are just IOUs.
It's exactly like taking a loan from your 401K. If before you had T-Bliss in your 401K, but then you borrow all that money for an emergency expense, now you just have a loan to yourself. Before, you could actually live off that money at retirement; after, you must earn new money before you can actually retire.
It's important because it was a dirty scam on the taxpayers - everyone who paid SS taxes was effectively defrauded (and by both parties, of course). Like you say, in the end it's all taxes, but it changes the true amount of the debt, already staggeringly large. And unlike US treasuries, there's no constitutional requirement to meet out social security obligations (though I expect we will, and just suffer 10%+ inflation for many years, until no one can live on that check).
Everything always ends up being priced by supply and demand, in the long run. If you distort the market too far, you get shortages and wastage, and a black market where things are priced according to supply and demand. Labor isn't an exception.
Wage, as determined by supply and demand, is the signal for how valuable one more worker at some job is to the community. That is to say, it's a mix of how valuable the work is over all, but also how much the community actually needs one more person doing that work.
None of us are entirely self-sufficient, so If you want to live, you must contribute to the community something of marginal value (that is, something there's value in even more of than what the community already has), to receive what you need. There's no escaping that: all there is is all we produce. And compensation is about the value you produce as judged by others.
Wages for the most part stay pretty close to that ideal. I think people forget how important the "supply and demand" part is.