You dont seem to answer the question of why is there a floor to living wage but instead just try to throw the idea around like a weapon.
If automation makes nearly all things cheaper to manufacture, then why is the cost of living always rising instead of always falling?
Part of it is that the standard of living has always been rising (in spite of the non-stop claims that the poor get poorer) for everyone. The effect this has on what we consider the cost of living is certainly a meaningful amount.
Another part of it is minimum wage. Minimum wage seems fine as long as you have jobs for everybody that wants one but as people become and remain unemployed then they are no longer part of the market, and someone with no money cannot effect market prices because no price is low enough to get them to buy. The effect this has is also certainly a meaningful amount because you simply cannot argue with the fundamentals of economics: supply and demand.
A third part is restrictions to basic liberty. You cannot even catch a fish in this day and age without a license to do so, and if your chickens have laid more eggs than you need you still cannot just go ahead and trade them for milk with your neighbor with the cow because thats considered dangerous in an unregulated manner in both cases and thus illegal for both of you.
And even though people now work well past the prime of their life, they expect their income to keep rising, which is an absurd expectation but somehow people no longer second-guess the entire idea. So in non-unionized places the older folks get a layoff to make room for younger, cheaper, more productive folks; while in unionized places the older, more expensive, less productive folks remain on while the company grows increasingly less efficient. In other words, wages seem to now have little to do with the value of the employee until the breaking point in both cases, where the employee becomes the unemployed.
None of this matters when everyone that wants a job can get one. It matters a lot when the jobs are no longer there, and in fact these things and more are the reasons why there arent enough jobs.
When we started automating our farms, there was the side benefit that industry was booming and needed those very same offset farmers to fill the factory floors.
Industry boomed because of the large available labor force. It wasn't a coincidence.
Seems sort of disingenuous to compare on the terms that you have, since Microsoft is part of that games industry you compared them to...
No doubt Microsoft is making more money than ever, but I seem to recall one specific Microsoft employee leave to form a game company because he observed that Quake was the #1 selling software application... oh yeah.. that was Gabe Newell, who started Valve and now owns Steam.
Yes, thats what many "end of the desktop" proponents dont seem to understand. Even if these mobile operating systems satisfied 95% of the things people often do with a computer, most people would still have their own 5% niche need that the mobile OS is completely inappropriate for and the device hardware itself completely under-powered for.
You have to wonder how tech-literate these "end-of-the-desktop" proponents really are, since clearly they are just consumers of data at most. of course they will challenge you to give them some reason for desktops and you will of course give them a specific answer, and they will of course say that only 5% of people do that.. an argument that ignores the fact that my 5% is different from your 5% is different from someone elses 5%.... but most people have a 5%.
Do you think that homosexuals want to get married because of their devotion to the institution of marriage, or do you think that they want to get married so that they get special rights that single people dont have?
Hint: its the later, not the former.
Its special rights that by default people do not have that they are after. Thats not equality.. thats the fucking opposite of equality.
Because as it stands, even after today, it's not fair.
Its even less fair than it was before today...
Just figured I'd point that out, because the bullshit phrasing of "equal rights" that the homosexual lobby uses is as I said, bullshit. They want to be included in the "special rights" group, and adding more to that group would only bring us closer to equality if that group consisted of 50% or more of the people already, but its less than 50%, and the cost if being single is significant.
For instance, it relates tax rate to government income, but many people act as if it relates tax rate to societal benefit.
Don't forget the moral dilemma inherent in it.
Now to start off with, I believe that the Laffer curve does apply in the best way that it can within the noisy system we call the economy.
But suppose they could in fact figure out the Laffer curve to a great deal of confidence. Now then, is it moral for the government to use this knowledge to maximizing its revenue? Remember that the government does it via its monopoly on prison cells and men with guns.
I believe that the only moral choice within tax policy is a tax policy that maximizes the growth rate of GDP. Think about how quickly our budget problems would be solved if we were to lock spending at current levels (adjusted for inflation) and found a tax policy that brought the growth rate of our GDP back up to an annual 7%. It wouldnt take but a decade or so to balance the national budget and then spending could be allowed to rise in step with GDP, and 50 years down that road paying off the debt that did accumulate before the balance would be trivial.
Some would argue that an annual GDP growth rate of 7% is not sustainable, however some countries have sustained higher average rates for many decades. Hell, at one time even we did it, or we wouldnt be the king of the hill that we are today.
The obstacle in front of this line of reasoning are the people that want to increase spending now, the people that simply cannot wait until we can trivially afford it.
Another nice feature would be protecting only patents actually used in products made by the inventor or its partners
How about going back to only allowing patents on manufacturing processes, rather than fucking products?
This is real simple folks. The government providers the service of patent protection in exchange for the publication of knowledge. The extremely simple idea being that trade secrets are bad for innovation, that the public benefits when there are fewer trade secrets.
Products are not and can not be trade secrets so there is, in fact, absolutely zero benefit to the public for patents on products. Why should the government provide a service that affords zero benefit to the public? It of course should not.
There are a few exceptions though – companies will not be required to pass on the data in cases where there are "justified national security reasons", companies like Facebook and Google who fall under Data Protection Directive, companies that take steps such as encryption of data.
This reminds me of the Data Retention Directive, passed in what... 2006?
First they require you to keep all data... then they require you to protect the data they made you keep.
Here is a thought: The best way to let me protect my data is to let me delete it.
So you believe then that its OK for someone to steal another idea
Your argument that ideas should be property is circular because you have, right here and without justification, declared that ideas are property.
You will find that in your search for a real justification instead of this bullshit circular one you just tried to sell us, that you will learn the history of patents and the original form that they took here in America.
Patents were addressing the problem of trade secrets, of closely guarded manufacturing processes. The natural order of things is that if you have come up with a better way of manufacturing something that you keep it a secret, and if you are successful at keeping it a secret then you enjoy a large advantage over your competitors.
The observation that its both true that its hard to keep secrets and that society doesnt benefit from secrets is obvious. The justification for patents is that you no longer have to try to keep your manufacturing process a secret, that the government is willing to grant you exclusive rights to it for a limited time, but this service is in exchange for public publication of your process. You still have liberty and can choose not to patent your process, but then you run the risk of a competitor spying on you or independently coming up with it themselves.
But what we have today is a situation where not only are manufacturing processes patented, but also features of the products that those processes make. One-click, rounded corners, and so on.
You see that the justification for manufacturing process patents doesnt justify these new types, for these new types cannot be kept secret and in fact are by definition only valuable when they arent a secret and are displayed openly as features of the product. The public doesnt win when the government protects these new forms of patents, its quite the opposite; the public loses when the government protects them.
Whether you think what he did was good aside, he's absolutely guilty of distributing confidential information and has admitted it.
He has admitted to violating a contract, but contracts are superseded by the laws of the land. He is accused of treason, for which he has not admitted to nor has what he admitted to indicate treason. What he has admitted to is that he observed the government breaking the law.
I'm with you on OS/2 2.0's technical superiority over Win 3.1 and Win 9x. A true 32-bit OS, real multitasking, real multithreading, real memory protection, etc.
Except for the fact that OS/2 2.0 was still 16-bit, sure.
OS/2 2.0 and OS/2 3.0 were being developed side-by-side before the MS/IBM split, with 2.0 remaining 16-bit while 3.0 being a full 32-bit OS (remember that there was a 16-bit protected mode available starting with the 80286, which is what OS/2 2.0 used)
A key factor that younger people dont realize and many older people don't know is that IBM always viewed OS/2 as a way to sell hardware. It was named OS/2 because it was meant for IBM's PS/2 hardware. IBM wanted OS/2 to help defend them against the clones. For instance they originally wanted OS/2 2.0 to only support their proprietary PS/2 ports, and they also didnt want it to support EGA or VGA graphics (PS/2' hardware didnt support EGA or VGA graphics, instead they only supported Monochrome, CGA, and IBM's proprietary MCGA.)
It is not a coincidence that after the split Microsoft walked away with the multi-platform NT OS/2 3.0 codebase while IBM retained the single-platform 2.0 codebase.
It is certainly the case that Microsoft dragged its feet with OS/2 2.0, but its not the case that IBM wasn't also at fault for its eventual failure. IBM to this day continues to view software as a means of selling hardware. They undoubtedly remain the second most successful computer hardware company in the world, only overtaken by Apple and then only recently. Their mistake was severely under-estimating Microsoft's position, not expecting a lowly software company to be able to simply cut them out of the loop.
I think the Obama bashing is coming out because Obama said he was going to bring about change that America needs and he even spoke out specifically against secret spying on citizens.
This shit is in the news because the Obama administration declared war on news agencies by spying on reporters communications. Full stop.
They went after the people that were playing along, and now they are not.
Is it really necessary to have the same number of qubit as the problem, tho?
Here we are talking about factoring a number that is the product of two large probable-primes, and the sum of their binary lengths is 2048 so the numbers themselves are approximately ~1024 bits each.
There are ciritical fixes released for the.net API every so often via windows update. Neither are flawless in that regard.
It seems to me that Microsoft tries hard to make sure that updates to the framework dont break existing programs, whereas it doesnt seem like Oracle even makes an attempt.
I am amazed at how few of the people here know what Cogent is doing, even though this is just another in a long line of slashdot-featured stories about Cogent.
Cogent isn't the only ISP out there for Verizon to choose from.
Why open your mouth when you don't know what you are talking about? You did know that you didn't know what you were talking about, right? Right? yeah.. you did...
Verizon is a tier 1 provider.
Cogent acts like a tier 1 provider, but isn't.
Cogent has run into this "problem" more than once, and more than a few times it was before Netflix used them as a provider. The problem is that Cogent dumps data onto other peoples networks as fast as possible, even when its a significantly longer route than if they had moved the data themselves most of the way.
The only reason that any of the tier 1 providers put up with Cogent at all is because Cogent landed quite a few CDN deals that people feel are important, and they landed those deals by offering a lower cost that was only enabled by their bad faith routing practices.
The fair thing is for Cogent to stop existing entirely.
just make it so there is no 'do overs' and make them stand by the trades they make ie dumping stock below real value due to a glitch.
Exactly.
The problem isnt with HFT's. The problem is with the exchange commissions setting up rules that dont treat each trade equally, and at least in America the exchange commission is an arm of the government. The upshot of this fact is that the government has created the problem with some of its regulations, so the solution isnt contained in 'more regulations'.. the solution is 'less regulations, specifically the ones creating the problem'
You seem to have a desperate need to believe you are the only person who knows the difference.
I am not the only person that knows the difference. For example, yesterday you did not but today you now do thanks to me. Anyone can click on your name there and see your posts that quite clearly demonstrate that you did not have a grasp of the concept.
You are welcome. Next time, stick to subjects that you know something the fuck about when you decide to act like an expert.
Slashdot Mirror
You dont seem to answer the question of why is there a floor to living wage but instead just try to throw the idea around like a weapon.
If automation makes nearly all things cheaper to manufacture, then why is the cost of living always rising instead of always falling?
Part of it is that the standard of living has always been rising (in spite of the non-stop claims that the poor get poorer) for everyone. The effect this has on what we consider the cost of living is certainly a meaningful amount.
Another part of it is minimum wage. Minimum wage seems fine as long as you have jobs for everybody that wants one but as people become and remain unemployed then they are no longer part of the market, and someone with no money cannot effect market prices because no price is low enough to get them to buy. The effect this has is also certainly a meaningful amount because you simply cannot argue with the fundamentals of economics: supply and demand.
A third part is restrictions to basic liberty. You cannot even catch a fish in this day and age without a license to do so, and if your chickens have laid more eggs than you need you still cannot just go ahead and trade them for milk with your neighbor with the cow because thats considered dangerous in an unregulated manner in both cases and thus illegal for both of you.
And even though people now work well past the prime of their life, they expect their income to keep rising, which is an absurd expectation but somehow people no longer second-guess the entire idea. So in non-unionized places the older folks get a layoff to make room for younger, cheaper, more productive folks; while in unionized places the older, more expensive, less productive folks remain on while the company grows increasingly less efficient. In other words, wages seem to now have little to do with the value of the employee until the breaking point in both cases, where the employee becomes the unemployed.
None of this matters when everyone that wants a job can get one. It matters a lot when the jobs are no longer there, and in fact these things and more are the reasons why there arent enough jobs.
When we started automating our farms, there was the side benefit that industry was booming and needed those very same offset farmers to fill the factory floors.
Industry boomed because of the large available labor force. It wasn't a coincidence.
...on a phone.
They said the same about the desktop.
"Desktops arent workstations.. they dont need multiple users."
Seems sort of disingenuous to compare on the terms that you have, since Microsoft is part of that games industry you compared them to...
No doubt Microsoft is making more money than ever, but I seem to recall one specific Microsoft employee leave to form a game company because he observed that Quake was the #1 selling software application... oh yeah.. that was Gabe Newell, who started Valve and now owns Steam.
Yes, thats what many "end of the desktop" proponents dont seem to understand. Even if these mobile operating systems satisfied 95% of the things people often do with a computer, most people would still have their own 5% niche need that the mobile OS is completely inappropriate for and the device hardware itself completely under-powered for.
You have to wonder how tech-literate these "end-of-the-desktop" proponents really are, since clearly they are just consumers of data at most. of course they will challenge you to give them some reason for desktops and you will of course give them a specific answer, and they will of course say that only 5% of people do that.. an argument that ignores the fact that my 5% is different from your 5% is different from someone elses 5%.... but most people have a 5%.
how is it bullshit?
Do you think that homosexuals want to get married because of their devotion to the institution of marriage, or do you think that they want to get married so that they get special rights that single people dont have?
Hint: its the later, not the former.
Its special rights that by default people do not have that they are after. Thats not equality.. thats the fucking opposite of equality.
Because as it stands, even after today, it's not fair.
Its even less fair than it was before today...
Just figured I'd point that out, because the bullshit phrasing of "equal rights" that the homosexual lobby uses is as I said, bullshit. They want to be included in the "special rights" group, and adding more to that group would only bring us closer to equality if that group consisted of 50% or more of the people already, but its less than 50%, and the cost if being single is significant.
Yes.
Any other questions?
For instance, it relates tax rate to government income, but many people act as if it relates tax rate to societal benefit.
Don't forget the moral dilemma inherent in it.
Now to start off with, I believe that the Laffer curve does apply in the best way that it can within the noisy system we call the economy.
But suppose they could in fact figure out the Laffer curve to a great deal of confidence. Now then, is it moral for the government to use this knowledge to maximizing its revenue? Remember that the government does it via its monopoly on prison cells and men with guns.
I believe that the only moral choice within tax policy is a tax policy that maximizes the growth rate of GDP. Think about how quickly our budget problems would be solved if we were to lock spending at current levels (adjusted for inflation) and found a tax policy that brought the growth rate of our GDP back up to an annual 7%. It wouldnt take but a decade or so to balance the national budget and then spending could be allowed to rise in step with GDP, and 50 years down that road paying off the debt that did accumulate before the balance would be trivial.
Some would argue that an annual GDP growth rate of 7% is not sustainable, however some countries have sustained higher average rates for many decades. Hell, at one time even we did it, or we wouldnt be the king of the hill that we are today.
The obstacle in front of this line of reasoning are the people that want to increase spending now, the people that simply cannot wait until we can trivially afford it.
Another nice feature would be protecting only patents actually used in products made by the inventor or its partners
How about going back to only allowing patents on manufacturing processes, rather than fucking products?
This is real simple folks. The government providers the service of patent protection in exchange for the publication of knowledge. The extremely simple idea being that trade secrets are bad for innovation, that the public benefits when there are fewer trade secrets.
Products are not and can not be trade secrets so there is, in fact, absolutely zero benefit to the public for patents on products. Why should the government provide a service that affords zero benefit to the public? It of course should not.
There are a few exceptions though – companies will not be required to pass on the data in cases where there are "justified national security reasons", companies like Facebook and Google who fall under Data Protection Directive, companies that take steps such as encryption of data.
This reminds me of the Data Retention Directive, passed in what... 2006?
First they require you to keep all data... then they require you to protect the data they made you keep.
Here is a thought: The best way to let me protect my data is to let me delete it.
So you believe then that its OK for someone to steal another idea
Your argument that ideas should be property is circular because you have, right here and without justification, declared that ideas are property.
You will find that in your search for a real justification instead of this bullshit circular one you just tried to sell us, that you will learn the history of patents and the original form that they took here in America.
Patents were addressing the problem of trade secrets, of closely guarded manufacturing processes. The natural order of things is that if you have come up with a better way of manufacturing something that you keep it a secret, and if you are successful at keeping it a secret then you enjoy a large advantage over your competitors.
The observation that its both true that its hard to keep secrets and that society doesnt benefit from secrets is obvious. The justification for patents is that you no longer have to try to keep your manufacturing process a secret, that the government is willing to grant you exclusive rights to it for a limited time, but this service is in exchange for public publication of your process. You still have liberty and can choose not to patent your process, but then you run the risk of a competitor spying on you or independently coming up with it themselves.
But what we have today is a situation where not only are manufacturing processes patented, but also features of the products that those processes make. One-click, rounded corners, and so on.
You see that the justification for manufacturing process patents doesnt justify these new types, for these new types cannot be kept secret and in fact are by definition only valuable when they arent a secret and are displayed openly as features of the product. The public doesnt win when the government protects these new forms of patents, its quite the opposite; the public loses when the government protects them.
Otherwise the message gets lost in the creepiness.
The message .. is .. that its creepy.
I heard that he was on his way to meet with John Galt.
Whether you think what he did was good aside, he's absolutely guilty of distributing confidential information and has admitted it.
He has admitted to violating a contract, but contracts are superseded by the laws of the land. He is accused of treason, for which he has not admitted to nor has what he admitted to indicate treason. What he has admitted to is that he observed the government breaking the law.
I'm with you on OS/2 2.0's technical superiority over Win 3.1 and Win 9x. A true 32-bit OS, real multitasking, real multithreading, real memory protection, etc.
Except for the fact that OS/2 2.0 was still 16-bit, sure.
OS/2 2.0 and OS/2 3.0 were being developed side-by-side before the MS/IBM split, with 2.0 remaining 16-bit while 3.0 being a full 32-bit OS (remember that there was a 16-bit protected mode available starting with the 80286, which is what OS/2 2.0 used)
A key factor that younger people dont realize and many older people don't know is that IBM always viewed OS/2 as a way to sell hardware. It was named OS/2 because it was meant for IBM's PS/2 hardware. IBM wanted OS/2 to help defend them against the clones. For instance they originally wanted OS/2 2.0 to only support their proprietary PS/2 ports, and they also didnt want it to support EGA or VGA graphics (PS/2' hardware didnt support EGA or VGA graphics, instead they only supported Monochrome, CGA, and IBM's proprietary MCGA.)
It is not a coincidence that after the split Microsoft walked away with the multi-platform NT OS/2 3.0 codebase while IBM retained the single-platform 2.0 codebase.
It is certainly the case that Microsoft dragged its feet with OS/2 2.0, but its not the case that IBM wasn't also at fault for its eventual failure. IBM to this day continues to view software as a means of selling hardware. They undoubtedly remain the second most successful computer hardware company in the world, only overtaken by Apple and then only recently. Their mistake was severely under-estimating Microsoft's position, not expecting a lowly software company to be able to simply cut them out of the loop.
I think the Obama bashing is coming out because Obama said he was going to bring about change that America needs and he even spoke out specifically against secret spying on citizens.
This shit is in the news because the Obama administration declared war on news agencies by spying on reporters communications. Full stop.
They went after the people that were playing along, and now they are not.
Is it really necessary to have the same number of qubit as the problem, tho?
Here we are talking about factoring a number that is the product of two large probable-primes, and the sum of their binary lengths is 2048 so the numbers themselves are approximately ~1024 bits each.
There are ciritical fixes released for the .net API every so often via windows update. Neither are flawless in that regard.
It seems to me that Microsoft tries hard to make sure that updates to the framework dont break existing programs, whereas it doesnt seem like Oracle even makes an attempt.
Exactly.
I am amazed at how few of the people here know what Cogent is doing, even though this is just another in a long line of slashdot-featured stories about Cogent.
Cogent isn't the only ISP out there for Verizon to choose from.
Why open your mouth when you don't know what you are talking about? You did know that you didn't know what you were talking about, right? Right? yeah.. you did...
Verizon is a tier 1 provider.
Cogent acts like a tier 1 provider, but isn't.
Cogent has run into this "problem" more than once, and more than a few times it was before Netflix used them as a provider. The problem is that Cogent dumps data onto other peoples networks as fast as possible, even when its a significantly longer route than if they had moved the data themselves most of the way.
The only reason that any of the tier 1 providers put up with Cogent at all is because Cogent landed quite a few CDN deals that people feel are important, and they landed those deals by offering a lower cost that was only enabled by their bad faith routing practices.
The fair thing is for Cogent to stop existing entirely.
just make it so there is no 'do overs' and make them stand by the trades they make ie dumping stock below real value due to a glitch.
Exactly.
.. the solution is 'less regulations, specifically the ones creating the problem'
The problem isnt with HFT's. The problem is with the exchange commissions setting up rules that dont treat each trade equally, and at least in America the exchange commission is an arm of the government. The upshot of this fact is that the government has created the problem with some of its regulations, so the solution isnt contained in 'more regulations'
I have noticed that you have degraded into a blathering idiot with no remaining argument.
You seem to have a desperate need to believe you are the only person who knows the difference.
I am not the only person that knows the difference. For example, yesterday you did not but today you now do thanks to me. Anyone can click on your name there and see your posts that quite clearly demonstrate that you did not have a grasp of the concept.
You are welcome. Next time, stick to subjects that you know something the fuck about when you decide to act like an expert.
Do I really have to Google Scholar it for you?
What The Fuck man, are you still living in the 90's?