The lifeblood of any business is customers, more customers is never a bad thing.
I'm guessing you had some reasons to think you are unlikely to end up destittute if it failed - perhaps you knew you had relatives who would take you in while you got back on your feet, perhaps you owned your home, perhaps you are highly educated and knew re-entering the job market would not be difficult or take excessively long. Your personal experience cannot be extrapolated from. Many people cannot risk their savings on a business - because if it goes wrong their family is out on the street. If they have a way to guarantee not being out on the street until they get back on their feet- then they can. Your logical fallacy is: anecdotal. The empirical FACT is: that every UBI experiment ever done saw a massive upsurge in entrepeneurship by providing a risk-floor. No they were not starting a business with 'other people's money' - they were just putting a floor on the risk that didn't involve starvation.
> which brings the value of that income to nothing. Then how come in 200 years of large-scale, long-term experiments - this has NEVER happened ?
>'Industrial Revolution caused massive poverty Erm it did - in fact it caused, in England, the worst poverty in HISTORY -the average medieval PEASANT was (about 200 tmes) richer than the typical working class person in the Industrial revolution. Sure it ALSO produced massive weatlh - but only for a very small number of people. The average working class person in London would have been BETTER OFF as a subsistence farmer - subsistence farmers reliably EAT - those people didn't, especially as factories mostly employed children rather than their parents (because they were cheaper) and people just had to accept a child mortality rate of over 90% (it was 50% a hundred years earlier). And you are still ignoring that UBI has been extensively, scientifically, studied - and NONE of your predictions has EVER happened.
So much dumb. So you think a business would not want to gain the money 'taken' from all his competitors ? You do not get that people with families and no real wealth can rarely take the huge risk of starting a business because if they are one of the 80% who fail their family is destitute. If you know you have UBI you can take the risk: there us a fallback if it all goes wrong. And of course they do not employ people with UBI - they employ people when the business grows - out of profit.
And finally: you cited beliefs, the premises of your arguments are ideology you have so absorbed you think they are facts. I cited 200 years of scientific testing and overwhelming empirical proof. Empirical proof trumps ideologically inspired axioms every time. You are not being rational. You are just practising religion - except your gods are rich people, and lies they tell to get richer you believe as truisms
We were discussing UBI - not minimum wage - there is absolutely ZERO reason to think anything you have to say about minimum wage could possibly apply to UBI as the two systems have less than nothing in common. Even then for every paper that claims that minimum wage hurts employment there are three that show it has little or no effect at all - the difference being the latter three tend not to use flagrantly stupid research methodologies *designed* to get the outcome some rich funder wants. It's like that number republicans shouted so loudly a couple of years ago about how "Obamacare kills jobs" - except that wasn't anywhere in the source (the CBO report), the CBO had ACTUALLY found that, thanks to Obamacare, lots of people were doing things like quitting their job to start a business, or take a better job that they could not take before because it lacked health insurance. Obamacare had made "stay with this employer or lose your insurance" not a problem anymore - and this had made people more free to quit bad jobs. But republicans completely forgot to mention that the 'job losses' in the source were VOLUNTARY, let alone that the overwhelming majority of those people were not becoming unemployed - they were CHANGING jobs, not LOSING them. In case you were wondering: that's a GOOD thing. It's less good if you're an exploitative employer who wants as many people as possible to be desperate for any job at all so you can employ them for peanuts under shitty conditions - but it's GREAT for society when employers like that go out of business.
There are always some essentials being left out - exactly to make it less regressive, but nothing makes it "not regressive at all" - even a fuel tax is regressive, even on people who don't drive or use public transport. Food and clothes have to be transported to as well - a fuel tax makes those things more expensive too.
More in dollars ? No. More as percentage of income - hell yes, and that makes it extremely regressive. Sales taxes are the most regressive form there is. It punishes the poor while the rich barely notice.
Well, let's ask the *science*. London did an experiment a year or two ago. They found about 20 homeless drug addicts and gave them each 2000 pounds. That's quite a bit of cash to addicts at that - mega-binge here we come ! They checked in on them a year later. All of them were clean, most had spent quite a bit of that money on private rehab centers, the others had gotten clean in other ways - 16 had jobs and 4 had started their own businesses.
It will stop the methhead stealing your tools - by giving him the one thing he never had before: hope, and with hope comes striving.
More importantly - it puts a floor on risk, and that means poor people can actually dare take the risk of starting businesses, people who couldn't think of it now because if it goes wrong they would be destitute no longer have that fear. UBI has, in every experiment ever done, led to a massive upsurge in entrepeneurship. The thing that the GP is getting wrong is thinking purely in terms of money - but humans are more complex in their motivations than that. People have dreams and goals they want to realize, a basic "you will survive" guarantee doesn't change that- or change that they need to find some way of producing value to earn additional money in order to pursue those goals and dreams. And sure, people will consider other things they care about - like being with their kids. You'll probably see a significant upsurge in freelance and small business people working from home - to be with their kids, making things automation cannot ever really produce (sorry but what makes a handmade thing special will simply not exist if it's made by a robot). It solves the greatest tragedy of capitalism: all the world class poets who spend their lives as mediocre blacksmiths just to eat, and all the brilliant blacksmiths who by luck of birth spend their lives writing terrible poetry instead.
In what insane world is businesses "pushed away" by people having money to spend ?
And I am prepared to bet when the results come in you'll be proven wrong - because we've been doing experiments like this for decades and you've been wrong EVERY OTHER TIME.
What WILL happen ? A tiny reduction in the workforce: caused by mothers taking extended maternity leave and young people who otherwise couldn't afford it going to get a college education. A massive drop in the unemployment rate as people who could never DARE risk it before suddenly are able to open their own businesses - and employ their neighbours. Increases in the people's average healthcare (with subsequent reduced costs for Canada's single payer healthcare) and a thousand other good things. Bad outcomes: none. They did this exact same experiment, in Canada in the 1960s under the name MinCome. We know what the results were. There is no reason to believe they won't be replicated YET AGAIN as in all the the hundreds of other experiments that have been done in this regard for over 200 years now. In all that time - there was exactly ONE experiment where a failure was reported, the report claimed an 'increase in sloth, lack of willingness to work, increased abuse of the bottle and sexual immorality'. It's an interesting case - since it was the first ever UBI experiment and it happened in England almost 200 years ago now to deal with the massive poverty the Industrial Revolution caused. It was also the very first example of a government commissioning a massive piece of research (over 15000 interviews) to build up a huge stack of big-data from which to draw a report in order to smartly evaluate a policy. There's just one problem: the report was a complete fraud and fabrication. In fact, it was written BEFORE the interviews were even done by a bunch of fraudsters who just wrote what they thought probably would happen based on their own puritan belief systems. They never even READ the data they claimed their report was based on. It would take over a century before anybody ever actually did. When they did - they discovered the exact OPPOSITE in the data from what the report said was in there - yet another resounding success. That report even blamed the UBI for the worker's protest marches of 1821 - ignoring that these happened ALL OVER England, not just in the one little town where the UBI experiment happened.
The only experiment where UBI was EVER reported as anything but a massive economic and social success -was a flagrant fraud.
Oh, and if you hired a P.I. to find out everything he could about the potential buyer to help you push the price up - that would be a fellony. That's exactly what these companies do - and it ought to be just as illegal.
It's entirely new. Because it's NOT the highest price the market will bear. It's the highest price YOU PERSONALLY will bear.
The only places that has previously existed is big-ticket items where corporations are rarely involved - like selling a house and trying to negotiate the highest price a potential buyer may pay, but at least that was a negotiation between relative equals. You were both just individuals without an army of lawyers, and both at least economically strong enough to buy a house like that.
As bad as these things are, nothing is as evil as infomercials. I'm pretty sure Amazon has never taken the fuel out of a 5 dollar barbeque lighter and then sold it for 50 dollars as an 'electric muscle stimulator'.
Yes, that shit really happened, the guy who did it was Billy Blank's business partner who also helped him do the infomercials for Tai Bo.
You can stick your fingers in your ears and go "neener neener neener" if you see me coming down the street, and stop reading websites where I post things.
Thats not a first class object. Having an approximate work-around for one use-case is good - but not comparable. In python I can all methods on methods, and access their attributes, in clean and elegant ways with no hackishness.
Nice. I use the technique extensively in my code- it's elegant, easy to use, fast and powerful - I personally think it should be in every python coder's toolbox - but for implementing a lookup table for a markup language is one of the most elegant I've seen:) i will certainly be remembering this if I ever need to create a DSL again.
That's actually a very similar technique - and its a perfectly valid one, it's also a very FAST one since accessing an array element (or for that matter a dictionary value by key) is an atomic operation that only requires a single CPU instruction. Python making functions first-class object is, effectively, a very elegant way of bringing the capabilities of C's function-pointers into a high-level object oriented language, and a bit easier to work with since you're not (visibly) dealing with pointers since you can address the function by name.
def test( str ):
print("Hello %s" %str)
test('John') #Calls the function - prints 'Hello John' mydict = {'X': test} # Address the function, stores it as a value in the dictionary, does not run it mydict[X]('Mike') #Prints 'Hello Mike'
It is also possible to use a function as the KEY in a dictionary - though I've never seen anybody actually do that and I would be hard pressed to come up with any use-case for doing so.
Stallman has never opposed commercialism - he has no problem with people earning a living - you just shouldn't get to earn money by ripping people off (stealing their freedom is arguably worse than stealing their money - and that's what's happening, it may be cleverly disguised but conjobs always are - they are still fraud).
When he started there was no such thing as an entire operating system of free software and no hardware you could run it on. This exists today - it didn't then. It's not as readily and easily available as it should be - but it exists. And, as he rightfully pointed out, if he had compromised the ideal of that existing - it would still not exist at all. It only exists because he never settled for less than that.
I would argue that OO remains the best paradigm we have for constructing data presentation - especially when the data represents something that exists in the real world (or a reasonable facsimile as in GUI programming or video-game dev). Functional programming on the other hand - is often the best paradigm we have for data processing, especially big data processing. Use them each in their own domains and break these rules-of-thumb whenever it makes sense to.
Slashdot Mirror
No taxation is not theft.
The lifeblood of any business is customers, more customers is never a bad thing.
I'm guessing you had some reasons to think you are unlikely to end up destittute if it failed - perhaps you knew you had relatives who would take you in while you got back on your feet, perhaps you owned your home, perhaps you are highly educated and knew re-entering the job market would not be difficult or take excessively long. Your personal experience cannot be extrapolated from. Many people cannot risk their savings on a business - because if it goes wrong their family is out on the street. If they have a way to guarantee not being out on the street until they get back on their feet- then they can. Your logical fallacy is: anecdotal.
The empirical FACT is: that every UBI experiment ever done saw a massive upsurge in entrepeneurship by providing a risk-floor. No they were not starting a business with 'other people's money' - they were just putting a floor on the risk that didn't involve starvation.
> which brings the value of that income to nothing.
Then how come in 200 years of large-scale, long-term experiments - this has NEVER happened ?
>'Industrial Revolution caused massive poverty
Erm it did - in fact it caused, in England, the worst poverty in HISTORY -the average medieval PEASANT was (about 200 tmes) richer than the typical working class person in the Industrial revolution. Sure it ALSO produced massive weatlh - but only for a very small number of people. The average working class person in London would have been BETTER OFF as a subsistence farmer - subsistence farmers reliably EAT - those people didn't, especially as factories mostly employed children rather than their parents (because they were cheaper) and people just had to accept a child mortality rate of over 90% (it was 50% a hundred years earlier). And you are still ignoring that UBI has been extensively, scientifically, studied - and NONE of your predictions has EVER happened.
So much dumb. So you think a business would not want to gain the money 'taken' from all his competitors ?
You do not get that people with families and no real wealth can rarely take the huge risk of starting a business because if they are one of the 80% who fail their family is destitute. If you know you have UBI you can take the risk: there us a fallback if it all goes wrong.
And of course they do not employ people with UBI - they employ people when the business grows - out of profit.
And finally: you cited beliefs, the premises of your arguments are ideology you have so absorbed you think they are facts. I cited 200 years of scientific testing and overwhelming empirical proof. Empirical proof trumps ideologically inspired axioms every time. You are not being rational. You are just practising religion - except your gods are rich people, and lies they tell to get richer you believe as truisms
Here is a great article on it, which covers some later experiments as well https://thecorrespondent.com/4...
We were discussing UBI - not minimum wage - there is absolutely ZERO reason to think anything you have to say about minimum wage could possibly apply to UBI as the two systems have less than nothing in common. Even then for every paper that claims that minimum wage hurts employment there are three that show it has little or no effect at all - the difference being the latter three tend not to use flagrantly stupid research methodologies *designed* to get the outcome some rich funder wants.
It's like that number republicans shouted so loudly a couple of years ago about how "Obamacare kills jobs" - except that wasn't anywhere in the source (the CBO report), the CBO had ACTUALLY found that, thanks to Obamacare, lots of people were doing things like quitting their job to start a business, or take a better job that they could not take before because it lacked health insurance. Obamacare had made "stay with this employer or lose your insurance" not a problem anymore - and this had made people more free to quit bad jobs. But republicans completely forgot to mention that the 'job losses' in the source were VOLUNTARY, let alone that the overwhelming majority of those people were not becoming unemployed - they were CHANGING jobs, not LOSING them.
In case you were wondering: that's a GOOD thing. It's less good if you're an exploitative employer who wants as many people as possible to be desperate for any job at all so you can employ them for peanuts under shitty conditions - but it's GREAT for society when employers like that go out of business.
There are always some essentials being left out - exactly to make it less regressive, but nothing makes it "not regressive at all" - even a fuel tax is regressive, even on people who don't drive or use public transport. Food and clothes have to be transported to as well - a fuel tax makes those things more expensive too.
Both are probably true for different subsets of criminals.
More in dollars ? No. More as percentage of income - hell yes, and that makes it extremely regressive. Sales taxes are the most regressive form there is. It punishes the poor while the rich barely notice.
Well, let's ask the *science*. London did an experiment a year or two ago. They found about 20 homeless drug addicts and gave them each 2000 pounds. That's quite a bit of cash to addicts at that - mega-binge here we come !
They checked in on them a year later. All of them were clean, most had spent quite a bit of that money on private rehab centers, the others had gotten clean in other ways - 16 had jobs and 4 had started their own businesses.
It will stop the methhead stealing your tools - by giving him the one thing he never had before: hope, and with hope comes striving.
More importantly - it puts a floor on risk, and that means poor people can actually dare take the risk of starting businesses, people who couldn't think of it now because if it goes wrong they would be destitute no longer have that fear.
UBI has, in every experiment ever done, led to a massive upsurge in entrepeneurship. The thing that the GP is getting wrong is thinking purely in terms of money - but humans are more complex in their motivations than that. People have dreams and goals they want to realize, a basic "you will survive" guarantee doesn't change that- or change that they need to find some way of producing value to earn additional money in order to pursue those goals and dreams.
And sure, people will consider other things they care about - like being with their kids. You'll probably see a significant upsurge in freelance and small business people working from home - to be with their kids, making things automation cannot ever really produce (sorry but what makes a handmade thing special will simply not exist if it's made by a robot).
It solves the greatest tragedy of capitalism: all the world class poets who spend their lives as mediocre blacksmiths just to eat, and all the brilliant blacksmiths who by luck of birth spend their lives writing terrible poetry instead.
In what insane world is businesses "pushed away" by people having money to spend ?
And I am prepared to bet when the results come in you'll be proven wrong - because we've been doing experiments like this for decades and you've been wrong EVERY OTHER TIME.
What WILL happen ? A tiny reduction in the workforce: caused by mothers taking extended maternity leave and young people who otherwise couldn't afford it going to get a college education. A massive drop in the unemployment rate as people who could never DARE risk it before suddenly are able to open their own businesses - and employ their neighbours. Increases in the people's average healthcare (with subsequent reduced costs for Canada's single payer healthcare) and a thousand other good things. Bad outcomes: none.
They did this exact same experiment, in Canada in the 1960s under the name MinCome. We know what the results were. There is no reason to believe they won't be replicated YET AGAIN as in all the the hundreds of other experiments that have been done in this regard for over 200 years now.
In all that time - there was exactly ONE experiment where a failure was reported, the report claimed an 'increase in sloth, lack of willingness to work, increased abuse of the bottle and sexual immorality'. It's an interesting case - since it was the first ever UBI experiment and it happened in England almost 200 years ago now to deal with the massive poverty the Industrial Revolution caused. It was also the very first example of a government commissioning a massive piece of research (over 15000 interviews) to build up a huge stack of big-data from which to draw a report in order to smartly evaluate a policy.
There's just one problem: the report was a complete fraud and fabrication. In fact, it was written BEFORE the interviews were even done by a bunch of fraudsters who just wrote what they thought probably would happen based on their own puritan belief systems. They never even READ the data they claimed their report was based on.
It would take over a century before anybody ever actually did. When they did - they discovered the exact OPPOSITE in the data from what the report said was in there - yet another resounding success.
That report even blamed the UBI for the worker's protest marches of 1821 - ignoring that these happened ALL OVER England, not just in the one little town where the UBI experiment happened.
The only experiment where UBI was EVER reported as anything but a massive economic and social success -was a flagrant fraud.
Oh, and if you hired a P.I. to find out everything he could about the potential buyer to help you push the price up - that would be a fellony. That's exactly what these companies do - and it ought to be just as illegal.
It's entirely new. Because it's NOT the highest price the market will bear. It's the highest price YOU PERSONALLY will bear.
The only places that has previously existed is big-ticket items where corporations are rarely involved - like selling a house and trying to negotiate the highest price a potential buyer may pay, but at least that was a negotiation between relative equals. You were both just individuals without an army of lawyers, and both at least economically strong enough to buy a house like that.
As bad as these things are, nothing is as evil as infomercials. I'm pretty sure Amazon has never taken the fuel out of a 5 dollar barbeque lighter and then sold it for 50 dollars as an 'electric muscle stimulator'.
Yes, that shit really happened, the guy who did it was Billy Blank's business partner who also helped him do the infomercials for Tai Bo.
Screw that, I'll build my own traincar.. with blackjack... and hookers, on second thought, screw the taincar.
We are discussing syntax. That rather makes it an important consideration to the discussion.
I never said it was the *only* way to do encapsulation - I said it was arguably the best way we have.
You can stick your fingers in your ears and go "neener neener neener" if you see me coming down the street, and stop reading websites where I post things.
Thats not a first class object. Having an approximate work-around for one use-case is good - but not comparable. In python I can all methods on methods, and access their attributes, in clean and elegant ways with no hackishness.
I could see that in performance heavy FPS's and such - but the idea of trying to code an RPG without objects seems mindbogglingly painful.
Nice. I use the technique extensively in my code- it's elegant, easy to use, fast and powerful - I personally think it should be in every python coder's toolbox - but for implementing a lookup table for a markup language is one of the most elegant I've seen :) i will certainly be remembering this if I ever need to create a DSL again.
That's actually a very similar technique - and its a perfectly valid one, it's also a very FAST one since accessing an array element (or for that matter a dictionary value by key) is an atomic operation that only requires a single CPU instruction. Python making functions first-class object is, effectively, a very elegant way of bringing the capabilities of C's function-pointers into a high-level object oriented language, and a bit easier to work with since you're not (visibly) dealing with pointers since you can address the function by name.
def test( str ):
print("Hello %s" %str)
test('John') #Calls the function - prints 'Hello John'
mydict = {'X': test} # Address the function, stores it as a value in the dictionary, does not run it
mydict[X]('Mike') #Prints 'Hello Mike'
It is also possible to use a function as the KEY in a dictionary - though I've never seen anybody actually do that and I would be hard pressed to come up with any use-case for doing so.
Stallman has never opposed commercialism - he has no problem with people earning a living - you just shouldn't get to earn money by ripping people off (stealing their freedom is arguably worse than stealing their money - and that's what's happening, it may be cleverly disguised but conjobs always are - they are still fraud).
You mean like Shakespeare used to do ?
It's still a product people want to pay for, otherwise there wouldn't be any patrons, it's just the method of payment that's changed.
When he started there was no such thing as an entire operating system of free software and no hardware you could run it on. This exists today - it didn't then. It's not as readily and easily available as it should be - but it exists. And, as he rightfully pointed out, if he had compromised the ideal of that existing - it would still not exist at all. It only exists because he never settled for less than that.
I would argue that OO remains the best paradigm we have for constructing data presentation - especially when the data represents something that exists in the real world (or a reasonable facsimile as in GUI programming or video-game dev). Functional programming on the other hand - is often the best paradigm we have for data processing, especially big data processing. Use them each in their own domains and break these rules-of-thumb whenever it makes sense to.