While it is convenient to call things like Uber vultures on the gig-economy, eating the guts of the still-living victims of the modern economy as they lie bleeding their lives out into the street, in fact, we were warned of this back in the day, when Unions told us that the employees were too stupid or too naive to manage their own negotiations with the capitalists. The paternalistic state need not be the political state.
That said, as is usually the case, there is some truth in the hyperbole. In particular, the gig-economy presumes that people are actually fiscally self-aware enough to understand that making a living means selling your time, and if you don't want to have to sell your time till the day you have no time left to sell (as in, you are dead), you'd better be banking some income today so you can become a capitalist tomorrow (where a capitalist sells the time and values of assets they own, their capital, aka, "retired" from the simple business of selling time).
So, the gig-economy assumes people are fiscally self-aware, but experience suggests that many people grossly underestimate the costs of maintenance, operating costs, etc as they drive their assets around town trying to make money for today, but not necessarily making money for the future.
Once you use labels like "socialism" you immediately give up your ability to be heard by the very people you whose minds you might want to change. As a Republican working with the Citizens Climate Lobby I am constantly being reminded how to open minds and doors with civil, non-threatening discourse. Compare with approach against the usual rant-and-chant mobs blocking doors.
If we used the 2016 House District results as a surrogate for a stratified sample we would conclude that were everyone required to vote (as is the case in several countries), Trump would have won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. So the fact that Clinton won popular vote and Trump the electoral college is more of an artifact of the fact that we do not make voting mandatory than it is an indictment of the Electoral College.
Here's a bit of a gedankenexperiment.
How about if we open the borders to emigration? But with a twist.
For every Cuban who applies to escape the island, Cuba has to find an American who wants to live in the workers paradise. Cuba would get dedicated socialists who would (at least for a while) not complain about the conditions. Free medical, etc. for the taking. And they probably would owe lots of student loans, forgiving those might be the price the US pays (re-instate the loan if the immigrant returns to US).
Cuba would have to forgive the Cuban outbound emigrants their debts to the Cuban society that raised them (a common argument socialist governments give when asked why their borders are closed to emigration).
Allow free tourism between the two countries, anyone who overstays their visa would trigger an opening for someone going the other way.
The US would want to screen potential Cuban immigrants, no repeat of the Mariel boat lift.
Run this as a friendly cooperative experiment - we both might learn something.
Generalization. This American Republican thinks that strong encryption is a right, and that backdoors for anyone's use violate basic principles. There is a reasonably large faction within the MN GOP that certainly agrees with me, but Slashdot might not hear from them.
A simple gedankenexperiment. Would you want your fire extinguisher to have a biometric thumbprint safety switch powered by a battery that you forgot to change? Or that required up to 3 tries before it locked you out for 15 minutes?
First, we must ask if there is true correlation between the autism spectrum placement and coding skills. If there is, then it may be reasonable to use autism spectrum location as a screening variable when hiring coders (note, correlation is not causation, so be careful here).
Second, is it harder for women to grow into or be born into that pocket of coding creativity? If it is, then we should expect the ratio of successful programmers to be imbalanced, just as there is clear imbalance in the NBA based on height.
It is the worst sort of unicorn-buying for our institutions to try to "correct" such an imbalance without understanding these aspects of the problem.
You have to use a concept from judo, in which you use your opponent's strengths against them. To make this work you have to frame it as a Republican/Libertarian project that uses a universal dividend (not income) to every citizen to eliminate the voter bloc-creating effects of identity and victimhood politics, then appeal to Democrats/Lefts as the party of care-givers and soft hearts to let go of their special interest groups in favor of a fair and equitable basic income. Do NOT apply a means test, let your progressive tax rates take care of that issue. Take away the tax on corporations in exchange for overturning Citizens United, and again, let your progressive tax rates take care of the distributed income (no special category for capital gains).
At this point you have gored enough sacred cows to bring out a tsunami of lawyers and lobbyists to defeat you, but maybe that tsunami itself will be enough of a signal to the taxpayers that they will finally grow up and pay attention.
We need an algorithm that can generate good one-time use codes, that can be coded in Excel or other trivial environments and that does not include a backdoor. Once such a simple algorithm is distributed, then we can roll-our-own coded messages, in a massive civil disobedience movement. If such an algorithm already exists, we need to put it on bumper stickers, carve it into bank walls, spread it in flyers in coffee shops and stand back to see what the unintended consequences are.
Yeah, when I was in AF ROTC at Mich St Univ in 1969-1973 we were told to carry our ROTC uniforms to class in paper bags so we would not be jumped. The protesters did firebomb the Army ROTC building (1970). I went on to a career in the military bombing babies and holding cities hostage. Eventually I single handedly raped an entire civilization (retroactively, without my consent or knowledge) and established a male patriarchy.
Historically we (humans) have used public works (WPA, pyramids), bread and circuses (a form of UBI, Rome, current US welfare state strategy), war (Mongols, Crusades (in a weird way)), famine (Easter Island). Well, you get the idea.
In a previous life I worked on the SIOP and helped evaluate various (mostly counterforce) strategies. I highly recommend the books, Prisoners Dilemma (Poundstone) and Command and Control (Schlosser, don't get sidetracked by the Damascus incident story). If you have not read these sources, even if you worked on strategy and tactics at SAC (like I did), even if you taught Strategic and Tactical Sciences at the Air Force Institute of Technology (like I did), you are probably not as informed as you should be on these topics. I certainly was not then, but with maturation comes some ability to see the past for what it was.
As an activist working within the GOP I use this idea as part of an overall philosophical and pragmatic solution to the failure of free markets to deal with boundary layer conditions (which I invoke because I am a mathematician who has studied the equations, one of my posters in my office is of the Keynesian mathematical model). When I use it, I am talking with the people who see failures in current policy as being the result of wishful "unicorn" beliefs among the wishful thinkers whose belief in a goal outweighs their understanding of people, markets and freedom (see "Heaven on Earth").
The pragmatic argument I use is that a reasonable minimum salary, properly implemented, can allow us to shut off all the "death by a thousand cuts" that modern victimhood-rewarding strategies use to buy votes using the taxpayers' own money.
To understand how Israel is using their nuclear threat one has to understand the theories behind deterrence and mutual assured destruction, concepts that I used to teach at AFIT, and which few knee-jerk pacifists can get their heads around. "Math class is tough" says the Barbie doll.
That said, I did also ask the students to consider whether the key assumptions of the models are met in the Middle East, for the most part they were met when talking about the governments, but not so much with NGOs (like ISIS).
Wrong. We can quite accurately predict the behavior of a gas under pressure without knowing the individual "choices" the molecules make. Every reader of the Foundation Series (Asimov) knows this. Economics uses the same sort of aggregation.
Activity does not equal output. Yes, there will be less energy output, but it only buys us a little time so we can try to straighten out our CO2 problem.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, as is usually the case, there is some truth in the hyperbole. In particular, the gig-economy presumes that people are actually fiscally self-aware enough to understand that making a living means selling your time, and if you don't want to have to sell your time till the day you have no time left to sell (as in, you are dead), you'd better be banking some income today so you can become a capitalist tomorrow (where a capitalist sells the time and values of assets they own, their capital, aka, "retired" from the simple business of selling time).
So, the gig-economy assumes people are fiscally self-aware, but experience suggests that many people grossly underestimate the costs of maintenance, operating costs, etc as they drive their assets around town trying to make money for today, but not necessarily making money for the future.
By the way, my post is agreeing with the parent post.
Once you use labels like "socialism" you immediately give up your ability to be heard by the very people you whose minds you might want to change. As a Republican working with the Citizens Climate Lobby I am constantly being reminded how to open minds and doors with civil, non-threatening discourse. Compare with approach against the usual rant-and-chant mobs blocking doors.
If we used the 2016 House District results as a surrogate for a stratified sample we would conclude that were everyone required to vote (as is the case in several countries), Trump would have won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. So the fact that Clinton won popular vote and Trump the electoral college is more of an artifact of the fact that we do not make voting mandatory than it is an indictment of the Electoral College.
If a statement is not falsifiable then it is not science, and we can claim the universe is a simulation started by his Noodlieness last Thrusday.
Boring.
Here's a bit of a gedankenexperiment. How about if we open the borders to emigration? But with a twist.
For every Cuban who applies to escape the island, Cuba has to find an American who wants to live in the workers paradise. Cuba would get dedicated socialists who would (at least for a while) not complain about the conditions. Free medical, etc. for the taking. And they probably would owe lots of student loans, forgiving those might be the price the US pays (re-instate the loan if the immigrant returns to US).
Cuba would have to forgive the Cuban outbound emigrants their debts to the Cuban society that raised them (a common argument socialist governments give when asked why their borders are closed to emigration).
Allow free tourism between the two countries, anyone who overstays their visa would trigger an opening for someone going the other way.
The US would want to screen potential Cuban immigrants, no repeat of the Mariel boat lift.
Run this as a friendly cooperative experiment - we both might learn something.
Generalization. This American Republican thinks that strong encryption is a right, and that backdoors for anyone's use violate basic principles. There is a reasonably large faction within the MN GOP that certainly agrees with me, but Slashdot might not hear from them.
A simple gedankenexperiment. Would you want your fire extinguisher to have a biometric thumbprint safety switch powered by a battery that you forgot to change? Or that required up to 3 tries before it locked you out for 15 minutes?
I would moderate this up as +insightful
Two important questions must be answered first.
First, we must ask if there is true correlation between the autism spectrum placement and coding skills. If there is, then it may be reasonable to use autism spectrum location as a screening variable when hiring coders (note, correlation is not causation, so be careful here).
Second, is it harder for women to grow into or be born into that pocket of coding creativity? If it is, then we should expect the ratio of successful programmers to be imbalanced, just as there is clear imbalance in the NBA based on height.
It is the worst sort of unicorn-buying for our institutions to try to "correct" such an imbalance without understanding these aspects of the problem.
You have to use a concept from judo, in which you use your opponent's strengths against them. To make this work you have to frame it as a Republican/Libertarian project that uses a universal dividend (not income) to every citizen to eliminate the voter bloc-creating effects of identity and victimhood politics, then appeal to Democrats/Lefts as the party of care-givers and soft hearts to let go of their special interest groups in favor of a fair and equitable basic income. Do NOT apply a means test, let your progressive tax rates take care of that issue. Take away the tax on corporations in exchange for overturning Citizens United, and again, let your progressive tax rates take care of the distributed income (no special category for capital gains).
At this point you have gored enough sacred cows to bring out a tsunami of lawyers and lobbyists to defeat you, but maybe that tsunami itself will be enough of a signal to the taxpayers that they will finally grow up and pay attention.
Poker is 10% luck and 100% reading people. Any other numbers just don't add up.
Alternatively - they are too creative for their own good, and parse BS through their creative filters to turn crap into poetry. As in.
Wholeness -- ooh, ooh. that triggers my whole holistic reaction set (the whole meme)
quiets -- ahhh. Quieting my mental monkees (Buddhism)
infinite -- wowser! There go my favorite metaphysical thoughts, quantum consciousness anyone?
phenomena -- FUBAR! My favorite orgasm trigger other than my SO's lips on mine.
Free people should flood the system with false positives by driving through those neighborhoods regularly.
I remembered high-fiber, low calorie bread ... made with wood fiber.
See Wood pulp as fiber in bread
We need an algorithm that can generate good one-time use codes, that can be coded in Excel or other trivial environments and that does not include a backdoor. Once such a simple algorithm is distributed, then we can roll-our-own coded messages, in a massive civil disobedience movement. If such an algorithm already exists, we need to put it on bumper stickers, carve it into bank walls, spread it in flyers in coffee shops and stand back to see what the unintended consequences are.
Forgot the snark tags.
Yeah, when I was in AF ROTC at Mich St Univ in 1969-1973 we were told to carry our ROTC uniforms to class in paper bags so we would not be jumped. The protesters did firebomb the Army ROTC building (1970). I went on to a career in the military bombing babies and holding cities hostage. Eventually I single handedly raped an entire civilization (retroactively, without my consent or knowledge) and established a male patriarchy.
Historically we (humans) have used public works (WPA, pyramids), bread and circuses (a form of UBI, Rome, current US welfare state strategy), war (Mongols, Crusades (in a weird way)), famine (Easter Island). Well, you get the idea.
In a previous life I worked on the SIOP and helped evaluate various (mostly counterforce) strategies. I highly recommend the books, Prisoners Dilemma (Poundstone) and Command and Control (Schlosser, don't get sidetracked by the Damascus incident story). If you have not read these sources, even if you worked on strategy and tactics at SAC (like I did), even if you taught Strategic and Tactical Sciences at the Air Force Institute of Technology (like I did), you are probably not as informed as you should be on these topics. I certainly was not then, but with maturation comes some ability to see the past for what it was.
As an activist working within the GOP I use this idea as part of an overall philosophical and pragmatic solution to the failure of free markets to deal with boundary layer conditions (which I invoke because I am a mathematician who has studied the equations, one of my posters in my office is of the Keynesian mathematical model). When I use it, I am talking with the people who see failures in current policy as being the result of wishful "unicorn" beliefs among the wishful thinkers whose belief in a goal outweighs their understanding of people, markets and freedom (see "Heaven on Earth").
The pragmatic argument I use is that a reasonable minimum salary, properly implemented, can allow us to shut off all the "death by a thousand cuts" that modern victimhood-rewarding strategies use to buy votes using the taxpayers' own money.
To understand how Israel is using their nuclear threat one has to understand the theories behind deterrence and mutual assured destruction, concepts that I used to teach at AFIT, and which few knee-jerk pacifists can get their heads around. "Math class is tough" says the Barbie doll.
That said, I did also ask the students to consider whether the key assumptions of the models are met in the Middle East, for the most part they were met when talking about the governments, but not so much with NGOs (like ISIS).
Wrong. We can quite accurately predict the behavior of a gas under pressure without knowing the individual "choices" the molecules make. Every reader of the Foundation Series (Asimov) knows this. Economics uses the same sort of aggregation.
But the fact that they did not know reminds me that we are not them.
Activity does not equal output. Yes, there will be less energy output, but it only buys us a little time so we can try to straighten out our CO2 problem.