You can't survive on it when your pre-tax, gross income is less than the average one bedroom apartment costs per month, as is the case in Los Angeles.
Why can't you survive in a studio apartment, or a bedroom in a shared apartment?
Excellent question. What is the socially acceptable situation that people that work at McDonalds have to live in? I vote for a box in an alley. Too harsh? Ok, they can live in unheated worker dorms in the basements of office buildings. Oh, you mean that these so-called 'people' have families they are trying to support? Damn you and your needy requirements. Ok, all 5 of you into the studio apartment, but I better not hear a peep out of you.
McDonald's already has touchscreen systems where customers can touch pictures of food and run their own card to order, I suspect these will be quickly rolled out in any jurisdiction that raises the minimum wage to $15/hour
The minimum wage part is a red herring. It has little to do with it; yes, there is a marginal increase in the pressure to automate when the wage is $15 versus $12, but really the automation is either worth it or not. The acceptance by the consumer, the effect on the flow of restaurant / speed of delivery, and the other costs and benefits (capex vs opex and finance and borrowing rates, insurance, maintenance, effect on vandalism, robbery, people stealing from the till, managing the employees, hiring and firing and getting sued) means that automation is a complicated decision not entirely based on the wage of the person. Yes, it will ever so slightly happen faster at $15 than $12, but not much; that is not one of the driving factors.
Robots/Automation for existing jobs Must Be Stopped.
If not outright halted, then either tax it so goddamn much it's not economically viable, or make robots/automation programs forbidden for corporations to own - let people own robots on a 1-1 basis. Sure, you can hire my robot for $50k/year + medical (for me) + service plan (for robot).
Maybe I'm wasting my time thinking about this, but I don't think that this will work, from either a political or enforcement point of view. How would you write a law that had the effect that you want? You could say 'you can't replace a person with a robot', but the technology in restaurants (and offices and warehouses and factories) changes all the time; the number of employees changes all the time. the result is that people change what they are doing and what they are doing over time. If you employee 10 people this month, make a bunch of changes (technology, operations, menu changes, supply chain, etc.) and next month you have 9 employees, have you 'replaced a person with a robot'? Maybe, maybe not, and there is no way to draw a line. Maybe you have 9 because business is slower; maybe the lettuce is being washed and cut earlier in the supply line, does that count?
The world is not static, and it's never clear when there is a 1-for-1 replacement of people with technology. We don't have lots of jobs that used to exist because they have been automated. The only way to have prevented that is to make everything exactly the way it was, and never do anything. That doesn't work.
Microsoft has been emphasizing for years that you really must have recommended updates turned on, to keep the computer safe. It's BS to claim at this point that it is the users' own fault for having it on.
Also, download speeds are mostly worthless. Upload speeds are where the money is.
Um....what? Not for home use, it's not. For businesses, upload speeds are important, but for people streaming content to their homes (i.e. the vast majority of consumers), download speeds (and consistency) are what they care about. That said, you are correct that the speedtest sites are a poor test since ISPs shape their traffic to do well on them.
Most of it is rather low threat, though it's going to be around for a long time. That 'long time' part is the real kicker. The thing about highly radioactive material is that it's not highly radioactive for that long. It's the stuff that is pretty bad but lasts thousands of years that is the real problem. How do you create a storage facility that won't leak for thousands of years? The consensus is that it's better to have it in one place that is really geologically stable. What we have now is a bunch of spread out locations, and that's terrible. The political problem is that nobody wants to be the 'one place' that it all ends up.
Absolutely, and they do. But, what is the cost of the resistors, both capital and maintenance? What are the benefits and costs for having and using them? It could very well make more sense economically to not have the resistors and pay someone to take the power. It certainly is more productive to have someone use the power for _something_, even if it is electric resistive heating or inductive melting rather than just pump it into the atmosphere.
A political problem is still a problem. Even with a good technical solution, it has to be implemented and carried out. The whole lets-bury-it-in-a-mountain thing was a huge fiasco, since Nevada was perfectly happy to take the money to be considered as a solution, and then refused to actually be the solution. The fact is that we don't have any place to do it, and are not likely to in the foreseeable future.
This is a common misconception. You would think that you should be able to just have the generators running and producing power and just have it go nowhere. The end consumer just plugs in their computer and starts up, so it _looks_ like it is a infinitely scalable source of power, and it doesn't really matter if you are running it or not. In practice, there has to be a careful balance between the amount of energy produced and the energy consumed. Too little power being generated and you get brownouts / the voltage drops. Too much power and you have too high voltage / exploding transformers.
The time scale for balancing is on the order of seconds. They do this by having a variety of different sources of power, including base load (coal, nuclear for example) and quick response (some hydro, gas turbine) and pushing / pulling power from other locations that either have too much or too little, or having pumped hydro storage, or having some consumers that have power needs that you can control. Renewable power is one part of the power equation, and in some ways it is good (since it peaks approximately during peak power needed) and in some ways it is bad (you can't control it or demand more when you want more).
I think that almost any point in time is arbitrary. For just about any stage / time, you could point out a first that occurs. 14 days is especially arbitrary because it's 2 weeks of calendar time. Plus, it's especially arbitrary in the context of abortion discussions (which cast a long shadow over everything related to human development), because religious people typically point to the fertilization of the egg as 'the' moment when it gets a right-to-life. 14 days is irrelevant to that.
Also this business is a STUPID idea. There is always a premium for delivery and for the premium for a delivery of a hazardous liquid should be so high as to make this a financially stupid idea. Gasoline stations are plentiful, on roads, normal people never run out of it and don't need the minor time savings of delivery.
People pay for stupid things all the time. Sure, I could go get my groceries, but I can just pay someone else to deliver them to me; someone else cuts my grass too. There should certainly be some regulation because its a moderately hazardous liquid. But, why the hate? Why _should_ it be so high that it won't work financially? Free market and all that. There's plenty of rich people for whom paying $4 a gallon makes sense so they don't have to go to the gas station. Let 'em.
Yeah, with wife and kids, and them all streaming netflix an hour or two, my work from home (and having to transfer imagery, docker images, etc.), plus gaming (Eve, roblox, minecraft server), it's easy to blow through 300GB in a month. Not every month, but enough.
I'm not sure. With the mergers, the lobbyists, wholly owned legislators, content provider-ISP relationships, etc., I think that it may not be the future. They are doing everything they can to reduce the community broadband competition, like they did everything to gain monopolies in their service areas. A lot depends on who runs the FCC. The decision to override the state laws against community broadband (see this) could easily be overturned by the next administration. It could easily kill your service.
I would feel better if the people that were so against abortions were also pro-contraception. Unfortunately, the same people that want to keep women from having abortions seem hell-bent in making it more difficult to prevent the pregnancy in the first place. See this
I would not consider myself a "pro-lifer" (well, I am pro-life but not in the politicized sense), but I do consider an act like abortion to be pretty sad. So if you have some sort of argument that would allay this conflict, please share.
I myself am rather conflicted. I'm all for killing babies, but I don't like the idea of giving women a choice about anything.
The overwhelming majority of people enter sexual relationships. And if you are in a sexual relationship, then you need birth control to avoid pregnancy. (Yes, you can argue 'what if you are gay', 'what if you are too old to get pregnant', those are a minority).
Sure, you can pretend that you can avoid pregnancy by just not having sex. "How hard is that?" Pretty much impossible for the most people. If you think that not having sex is a reasonable way to avoid pregnancy, then you are living in a fantasy world. In the real world, where people actually act like people, they have sex and in order to not get pregnant, they need birth control.
Honestly, reading your posts, I think that you have an idealistic view of the world that just doesn't work.
There are actually some really good books in the lists that are now "tainted" by these shenanigans.
How are they "shenanigans" if lists are simply good books to read?
Because of the inclusion of "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and similar ilk. If the puppies wanted to make a list of the best books / stories regardless of political bias, that would be great. If they want to make a troll list and get it to win to indicate the absurdity of a literary popularity contest, that would be good too (and potentially funny). But, if you mix them, then you are just sowing confusion and diluting your message.
Serious question: Is 'The Commuter' any good, or is it a troll? It's in the same category as "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and promoted by the same group. Should I read it or not? The promoted list has Sanderson and Bujold and then some people I dont know, but based on book reviews I think maybe I should read them, and then I look at the short form, and they have the "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic". WTF?
Yeah, I know, I should not use the Hugos or the Nebulas to adjust my reading list, but honestly there is sooooo much to read and so little time, that I'd like to think that they might be useful.
I would like to see the Vox Day response to these questions.
I kind of get the argument that the Hugos were being previously dominated by people with left-wing agendas. The Puppies (in their various forms) rebelled against it and so made their own slate, and claimed that it was a better list because it was better science fiction, without the bias. Got it; great; good idea. But, why add "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"? What is the point that you are trying to make with that?
That's a good idea: You can only be on a bill for 20 years, then they have to put someone else on it. It's not like there are not enough people to put on bills.
People don't demonize Warren Buffet or Elon Musk, and they made lots of money. They have demonized Lloyd Blankfein, and Kenneth Lay, and Dennis Kozlowski, and (yes) Mitt Romney. There is a difference in terms of how they made their money and how they have (or not) abused the system. There are a large number of people making obscene amounts of money by fraud, rigging the system, lobbying congress, and screwing things up for the rest of the planet. "The Big Short" is a good example.
They have one of the worlds experts on computer vision (Yann LeCun). They own a VR company (Oculus Rift). They hired Vladimir Vapnik (co-creator of Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory; google it). They have been doing lots of stuff in free internet (internet.org, Aries, Facebook Zero, etc.).
There is lots of 'stuff' there for them to work with. I just doubt that they have the management or business capabilities to make their company a technology leader (as opposed to buying). I am not convinced that Dugan is the solution. The problem isn't the technology per se; the problem is managing it like a business, making it a long-term positive financial decision. Can she help with that? I don't know.
You cannot always know what some other agency is going to deem classified. Yes, the nuclear launch codes are going to be classified. No, the starbucks order is not going to be classified. In the middle is a gray area going from offwhite to damn near black, with some being pretty obviously classified and some almost certainly classified and she should have known it. More importantly, if you write sentence 1 (unclassified by itself) and then write sentence 2 (unclassified by itself), the paragraph can easily be classified at a high level. That's why you have people whose job it is to classify and declassify things.
To date, the things she did that I can tell: 1) received unmarked emails that 'follow' classified documents that the NSA and CIA say should have been classified; 2) told someone to fax a document without sensitive markings (might have been classified, don't know) 3) received and sent out emails that should have been classified regarding the verbal communications between foreign governments and the US government. See here.
I think that the 3 is the worse, because it particularly relates to her job and supposed training. hat is, information told to the government in confidence by foreign governments is the State Dept bread and butter, and so should have been immediately classified and handled properly.
Well, now, I'm really confused. Who released her name? One a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say Hillary's email is probably a 5. If it was marked, then it's a 7. Purposely outing a intel operative is an 8.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't you survive in a studio apartment, or a bedroom in a shared apartment?
Excellent question. What is the socially acceptable situation that people that work at McDonalds have to live in? I vote for a box in an alley. Too harsh? Ok, they can live in unheated worker dorms in the basements of office buildings. Oh, you mean that these so-called 'people' have families they are trying to support? Damn you and your needy requirements. Ok, all 5 of you into the studio apartment, but I better not hear a peep out of you.
McDonald's already has touchscreen systems where customers can touch pictures of food and run their own card to order, I suspect these will be quickly rolled out in any jurisdiction that raises the minimum wage to $15/hour
The minimum wage part is a red herring. It has little to do with it; yes, there is a marginal increase in the pressure to automate when the wage is $15 versus $12, but really the automation is either worth it or not. The acceptance by the consumer, the effect on the flow of restaurant / speed of delivery, and the other costs and benefits (capex vs opex and finance and borrowing rates, insurance, maintenance, effect on vandalism, robbery, people stealing from the till, managing the employees, hiring and firing and getting sued) means that automation is a complicated decision not entirely based on the wage of the person. Yes, it will ever so slightly happen faster at $15 than $12, but not much; that is not one of the driving factors.
Too late. College educations already are not a guarantee of a job, or a job that is worth the debt.
Robots/Automation for existing jobs Must Be Stopped.
If not outright halted, then either tax it so goddamn much it's not economically viable, or make robots/automation programs forbidden for corporations to own - let people own robots on a 1-1 basis. Sure, you can hire my robot for $50k/year + medical (for me) + service plan (for robot).
Maybe I'm wasting my time thinking about this, but I don't think that this will work, from either a political or enforcement point of view. How would you write a law that had the effect that you want? You could say 'you can't replace a person with a robot', but the technology in restaurants (and offices and warehouses and factories) changes all the time; the number of employees changes all the time. the result is that people change what they are doing and what they are doing over time. If you employee 10 people this month, make a bunch of changes (technology, operations, menu changes, supply chain, etc.) and next month you have 9 employees, have you 'replaced a person with a robot'? Maybe, maybe not, and there is no way to draw a line. Maybe you have 9 because business is slower; maybe the lettuce is being washed and cut earlier in the supply line, does that count?
The world is not static, and it's never clear when there is a 1-for-1 replacement of people with technology. We don't have lots of jobs that used to exist because they have been automated. The only way to have prevented that is to make everything exactly the way it was, and never do anything. That doesn't work.
Microsoft has been emphasizing for years that you really must have recommended updates turned on, to keep the computer safe. It's BS to claim at this point that it is the users' own fault for having it on.
Also, download speeds are mostly worthless. Upload speeds are where the money is.
Um....what? Not for home use, it's not. For businesses, upload speeds are important, but for people streaming content to their homes (i.e. the vast majority of consumers), download speeds (and consistency) are what they care about. That said, you are correct that the speedtest sites are a poor test since ISPs shape their traffic to do well on them.
Most of it is rather low threat, though it's going to be around for a long time. That 'long time' part is the real kicker. The thing about highly radioactive material is that it's not highly radioactive for that long. It's the stuff that is pretty bad but lasts thousands of years that is the real problem. How do you create a storage facility that won't leak for thousands of years? The consensus is that it's better to have it in one place that is really geologically stable. What we have now is a bunch of spread out locations, and that's terrible. The political problem is that nobody wants to be the 'one place' that it all ends up.
Absolutely, and they do. But, what is the cost of the resistors, both capital and maintenance? What are the benefits and costs for having and using them? It could very well make more sense economically to not have the resistors and pay someone to take the power. It certainly is more productive to have someone use the power for _something_, even if it is electric resistive heating or inductive melting rather than just pump it into the atmosphere.
A political problem is still a problem. Even with a good technical solution, it has to be implemented and carried out. The whole lets-bury-it-in-a-mountain thing was a huge fiasco, since Nevada was perfectly happy to take the money to be considered as a solution, and then refused to actually be the solution. The fact is that we don't have any place to do it, and are not likely to in the foreseeable future.
This is a common misconception. You would think that you should be able to just have the generators running and producing power and just have it go nowhere. The end consumer just plugs in their computer and starts up, so it _looks_ like it is a infinitely scalable source of power, and it doesn't really matter if you are running it or not. In practice, there has to be a careful balance between the amount of energy produced and the energy consumed. Too little power being generated and you get brownouts / the voltage drops. Too much power and you have too high voltage / exploding transformers.
The time scale for balancing is on the order of seconds. They do this by having a variety of different sources of power, including base load (coal, nuclear for example) and quick response (some hydro, gas turbine) and pushing / pulling power from other locations that either have too much or too little, or having pumped hydro storage, or having some consumers that have power needs that you can control. Renewable power is one part of the power equation, and in some ways it is good (since it peaks approximately during peak power needed) and in some ways it is bad (you can't control it or demand more when you want more).
I think that almost any point in time is arbitrary. For just about any stage / time, you could point out a first that occurs. 14 days is especially arbitrary because it's 2 weeks of calendar time. Plus, it's especially arbitrary in the context of abortion discussions (which cast a long shadow over everything related to human development), because religious people typically point to the fertilization of the egg as 'the' moment when it gets a right-to-life. 14 days is irrelevant to that.
Also this business is a STUPID idea. There is always a premium for delivery and for the premium for a delivery of a hazardous liquid should be so high as to make this a financially stupid idea. Gasoline stations are plentiful, on roads, normal people never run out of it and don't need the minor time savings of delivery.
People pay for stupid things all the time. Sure, I could go get my groceries, but I can just pay someone else to deliver them to me; someone else cuts my grass too. There should certainly be some regulation because its a moderately hazardous liquid. But, why the hate? Why _should_ it be so high that it won't work financially? Free market and all that. There's plenty of rich people for whom paying $4 a gallon makes sense so they don't have to go to the gas station. Let 'em.
Yeah, with wife and kids, and them all streaming netflix an hour or two, my work from home (and having to transfer imagery, docker images, etc.), plus gaming (Eve, roblox, minecraft server), it's easy to blow through 300GB in a month. Not every month, but enough.
[nice story omitted] This is the future.
I'm not sure. With the mergers, the lobbyists, wholly owned legislators, content provider-ISP relationships, etc., I think that it may not be the future. They are doing everything they can to reduce the community broadband competition, like they did everything to gain monopolies in their service areas. A lot depends on who runs the FCC. The decision to override the state laws against community broadband (see this) could easily be overturned by the next administration. It could easily kill your service.
Can you please give a specific example?
I would feel better if the people that were so against abortions were also pro-contraception. Unfortunately, the same people that want to keep women from having abortions seem hell-bent in making it more difficult to prevent the pregnancy in the first place. See this
I would not consider myself a "pro-lifer" (well, I am pro-life but not in the politicized sense), but I do consider an act like abortion to be pretty sad. So if you have some sort of argument that would allay this conflict, please share.
I myself am rather conflicted. I'm all for killing babies, but I don't like the idea of giving women a choice about anything.
Theoretically, no. Practically, yes.
The overwhelming majority of people enter sexual relationships. And if you are in a sexual relationship, then you need birth control to avoid pregnancy. (Yes, you can argue 'what if you are gay', 'what if you are too old to get pregnant', those are a minority).
Sure, you can pretend that you can avoid pregnancy by just not having sex. "How hard is that?" Pretty much impossible for the most people. If you think that not having sex is a reasonable way to avoid pregnancy, then you are living in a fantasy world. In the real world, where people actually act like people, they have sex and in order to not get pregnant, they need birth control.
Honestly, reading your posts, I think that you have an idealistic view of the world that just doesn't work.
There are actually some really good books in the lists that are now "tainted" by these shenanigans.
How are they "shenanigans" if lists are simply good books to read?
Because of the inclusion of "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and similar ilk. If the puppies wanted to make a list of the best books / stories regardless of political bias, that would be great. If they want to make a troll list and get it to win to indicate the absurdity of a literary popularity contest, that would be good too (and potentially funny). But, if you mix them, then you are just sowing confusion and diluting your message.
Serious question: Is 'The Commuter' any good, or is it a troll? It's in the same category as "Space Raptor Butt Invasion" and promoted by the same group. Should I read it or not? The promoted list has Sanderson and Bujold and then some people I dont know, but based on book reviews I think maybe I should read them, and then I look at the short form, and they have the "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic". WTF?
Yeah, I know, I should not use the Hugos or the Nebulas to adjust my reading list, but honestly there is sooooo much to read and so little time, that I'd like to think that they might be useful.
I would like to see the Vox Day response to these questions.
I kind of get the argument that the Hugos were being previously dominated by people with left-wing agendas. The Puppies (in their various forms) rebelled against it and so made their own slate, and claimed that it was a better list because it was better science fiction, without the bias. Got it; great; good idea. But, why add "Space Raptor Butt Invasion"? What is the point that you are trying to make with that?
That's a good idea: You can only be on a bill for 20 years, then they have to put someone else on it. It's not like there are not enough people to put on bills.
People don't demonize Warren Buffet or Elon Musk, and they made lots of money. They have demonized Lloyd Blankfein, and Kenneth Lay, and Dennis Kozlowski, and (yes) Mitt Romney. There is a difference in terms of how they made their money and how they have (or not) abused the system. There are a large number of people making obscene amounts of money by fraud, rigging the system, lobbying congress, and screwing things up for the rest of the planet. "The Big Short" is a good example.
They have one of the worlds experts on computer vision (Yann LeCun). They own a VR company (Oculus Rift). They hired Vladimir Vapnik (co-creator of Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory; google it). They have been doing lots of stuff in free internet (internet.org, Aries, Facebook Zero, etc.).
There is lots of 'stuff' there for them to work with. I just doubt that they have the management or business capabilities to make their company a technology leader (as opposed to buying). I am not convinced that Dugan is the solution. The problem isn't the technology per se; the problem is managing it like a business, making it a long-term positive financial decision. Can she help with that? I don't know.
You cannot always know what some other agency is going to deem classified. Yes, the nuclear launch codes are going to be classified. No, the starbucks order is not going to be classified. In the middle is a gray area going from offwhite to damn near black, with some being pretty obviously classified and some almost certainly classified and she should have known it. More importantly, if you write sentence 1 (unclassified by itself) and then write sentence 2 (unclassified by itself), the paragraph can easily be classified at a high level. That's why you have people whose job it is to classify and declassify things.
To date, the things she did that I can tell: 1) received unmarked emails that 'follow' classified documents that the NSA and CIA say should have been classified; 2) told someone to fax a document without sensitive markings (might have been classified, don't know) 3) received and sent out emails that should have been classified regarding the verbal communications between foreign governments and the US government. See here.
I think that the 3 is the worse, because it particularly relates to her job and supposed training. hat is, information told to the government in confidence by foreign governments is the State Dept bread and butter, and so should have been immediately classified and handled properly.
Well, now, I'm really confused. Who released her name? One a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say Hillary's email is probably a 5. If it was marked, then it's a 7. Purposely outing a intel operative is an 8.