We need to completely rethink the field of economics in terms of time, which is truly more important than money, but harder to count.
Our very own Slashdot denizen bluelucidfox has been trying to do precisely that. He veers between seriously interesting, possibly insightful and "wat". He's sort of been using Slashdot as a sounding board, and the results are mixed, at best. Slashdot is having trouble coming to grips with the ideas and he's having trouble expressing some of them.
Speaking as someone who took many semesters of economics classes at university, I feel comfortable saying that his theories come a lot closer to reality than any of the bullshit spouted out of those assholes. (With the possible exception of the handful of empiricists, who are universally derided or ignored by the vast majority of academic economists, who are theoreticians.) The academics start with a wildly wrong model of human psychology, then compound their stupidity with alleged "mathematics" which are not even wrong. bluelucidfox is trying to explain history. He lacks academic rigour, perhaps inevitably, but he has at least a nodding acquaintance with reality. We'll see how far he gets.
It's possible that by opening the platform up to locally installed apps and more local storage they may damage the essential appeal.
That seems unlikely. The addition of locally installed apps and more local storage doesn't mean they will lose all of the support for back-end services. Logging in with your Google account to a new machine will still give you access to all your apps. The locally installed ones will start downloading in the background, and meanwhile the online versions will be available. Your local files will start downloading from online backup.
Now if you took advantage of locally installed apps and that local storage to keep the machine offline entirely for some considerable time, preventing automated backup, you might have a problem. But that seems like an unusual use case, and I bet ChromeOS will start prompting you. "No backup for 5 days. Maybe you should turn on your wifi." So to really get yourself in trouble, you'll have to seriously work at it. In which case, you get what you deserve.
Actually, there's a surplus because nobody wants to hire/pay for quality.
Even with total compensation packages hovering around $100k-$150k in the Midwest it can be hard to snipe top talent from other companies.
I already have a total compensation package over $100k in the Midwest. If you want to snipe me, you have to pay more than that, especially if you want to double my commute. Do you understand "more"? It means "not the same". I've already declined to pursue a $150k salary, nevermind the total package, just because it's not enough of a bump to make me lengthen my commute. Your package is "hovering". That's your problem right there. Push harder. We are worth literally millions to your company, and we know it.
I don't know how much it matters in other markets but seems to be a lot of interest in 4k gaming lately.
4K and VR. I haven't replaced my entire desktop in 8 years (but I have upgraded the video card twice). The video card trick only works about twice though. After that the older CPU (and especially the older CPU's memory technology) really starts to drag it down. A GTX 1080 paired with an 8 year old CPU is substantially crippled. This is the year people who bought high end machines in the late '00s finally have to budge off the plateau they have been comfortably occupying all this time. 4K and VR are both seriously demanding, and no longer is dialing down the detail acceptable (or why did you buy 4x as many pixels to start with?).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: at the rate things are going, we're going to end up with NO internet at all, only 'walled gardens' within national borders, that are utterly useless for anything serious due to lack of connectivity and too many controls, along with a useless substitute for actual encryption.
Remember, telecommunications companies are people too. For once, corporate control of so many governments worldwide will work in our favor. They can't actually cut the cables. The telcos make too much money off of them to allow that. At best, they'll all buy Great Firewalls, and the rest of the world's population will catch up with the general Chinese population, who are already adept at tunneling through the Great Firewall.
The average 3 felonies per day that everyone already commits will rise to 4 and life will go on. The government will make horrible examples of a handful of people, and the rest of the population will ignore it and continue breaking the law. The rule of law is coming to an end faster all the time. I had hope that I wouldn't live long enough to see it. Seems now that I will.
I believe there was this exact situation where a previous owner had a path thru their private property to the beach in northern california. They sold the land and the new owner put in a gate blocking access. New owner had to remove the gate under court order under some legal argument.
It's called a public easement, and it doesn't require any judge shopping to get it recognized. It has precedents in English common law (on which US law is based and on which it depends) dating back four or five hundred years.
Amazon, and unfortunately NewEgg, are both cutting their own throat in this regard. They forget that one of the services a store provides is selection. In both directions. Variety of available wares and culling of worthless duplicates. Amazon and NewEgg are absolutely buried under thousands of copies of the exact same product using literally the exact same photograph but somehow with unique listings that differ by one or two or zero cents. All of which have bullshit tags and bullshit categories.
This is not valuable to me. This is absolutely stupid for me, as a customer. It wastes my time, totally pollutes search results, and annoys the shit out of me. Enough that I will choose another store, even a brick and mortar store, just because the signal to noise ratio has become so horrendous I literally can't find what I'm looking for.
NewEgg are you listening? I know Amazon is not. But NewEgg, I expected better. NewEgg had useful, reliable, helpful category- and specification-based search for more than a decade, long before Amazon's half-assed attempt. Now it's been overrun by asshole third-worlders hawking $2 useless plastic shit I don't want, don't need, and REALLY don't want to see when I'm searching for a goddamned video card. A vinyl sticker designed for a Macbook cover is not a video card! Curate your collections! It matters!
What self-respecting tech worker wears anything that would need dry cleaning? What is this, 1971?
My current employer offers on-site pickup and delivery for dry cleaning to this day. It really does look like they think it's 1971. It's not free, either. Not even cheap. Just local. I've never once seen something on the rack in my building. In the building full of sales droids and business types, the service gets used. Go figure. And that would be why the company continues to spend money on it. Some middle manager is using the service regularly, and has the clout to keep it, even if 1000 other people never use it.
Tablets are for consumption, not production. Only now are people realizing this, so their tablet upgrades are laptops or nothing.
Most people either didn't even think about this or already knew this. It was only idiot analysts proclaiming the end of the desktop PC, where production happens. I certainly said this years ago, and so did a lot of Slashdot. We knew.
If you don't need a video clipboard, you don't need a tablet.
I finally came up with a use case for a video clipboard this year. Perfect timing. With sales in the toilet, the discounts should be spectacular this Black Friday.
One thing I've been wondering about though. A tablet is basically an LCD panel, right? With a tiny computer and a big skinny battery grafted onto it. Is any manufacturer retaining those features, plus supporting video input? Like with a mini-DisplayPort connector? Is anybody making a tablet that can double as an auxiliary screen for a desktop or laptop?
The South Lake Union area where the main campus is located was a dump, full of warehouses, abandoned buildings, parking lots, hookers and crack dealers. Today that region is unrecognizable to someone who visited only five or six years ago, in a good way.
Still full of parking lots, hookers, and crack dealers, but now they've got class.
And Star Wars, Disney is flogging it to death. Time for some new _sci _fi_ universes - preferably ones that are creative commons from the outset so some corp like paramount can't use it's grubby influence to limit the possibilities in the stories.
You might be interested in Orion's Arm. A collaboratively developed hard SF universe originally heavily based on Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, it has since branched out, picking up elements of Ian M. Banks' Culture universe and David Brin's Uplift Universe, plus generated new material. Two short story collections have been formally published in paper. Unfortunately, the main website is broken at the moment. Interest in the project has been waning for some time. Apparently it has reached a fairly severe nadir.
A Fire Upon the Deep was an incredibly broad setting with lots of room to grow and Orion's Arm pushed it right to the wall. Setting stories in that universe is actually difficult because it's so very big, but it's even worse for visual artists. The universe is so vast and complex in its writing that it doesn't attract many talented illustrators, let alone filmmakers. So it languishes in obscurity. You might investigate the domain and send an email to get the site back online.
This explains why women fare worse and give up sooner in interviews than men. Boys are taught from a young age to keep getting up, keep trying, failure is okay and is how we learn. Praises and complements don't make us stronger, failure and pain make us stronger. Girls are taught that the prettiest girl gets a free ride in life. She was innately born to be beautiful, she was perfect without trying. Their self worth is programmed to be externalized from a young age to where validation and praise from others defines who a young woman is.
Women suck at programming because the patriarchy programmed them to be that way.
You don't get to call it "the patriarchy" when it's the girl's mother who programmed her that way. And her sisters and her female classmates and her fashion magazines (written by women).
Nope. The fastest and cheapest way to become a monopoly in an unregulated economy is to bring in the Pinkertons [wikipedia.org], establish a company town [wikipedia.org], and extract all of the profit for any and all economic activity for yourself. Rockefeller reduced his costs by murdering strikers [wikipedia.org] using every armed force he could get his hands on, which was most of them. The tricks and techniques utilized by unregulated monopolies to extend and enhance their dominance are many and varied, and it is historical fact that a sufficiently advanced monopoly can and will arrogate the nominal government monopoly on force unto itself, either explicitly using some organization like the Pinkerton Agency or covertly, in the case of Rockefeller getting the Colorado National Guard called out for his benefit.
All this babble about the perils of unregulated markets and then you trot out an example which uses government force to enforce the monopoly.
There are two examples in the quoted paragraph. The Pinkerton Agency was not and is not a governmental organization.
Monopolies are very easy to create in an unregulated economy.
Nope. In an unregulated economy, the only way to make a monopoly is by offering your products or services at a better price than your competition. Rockefeller came close, and he did so by drastically reducing his costs *and* prices.
Nope. The fastest and cheapest way to become a monopoly in an unregulated economy is to bring in the Pinkertons, establish a company town, and extract all of the profit for any and all economic activity for yourself. Rockefeller reduced his costs by murdering strikers using every armed force he could get his hands on, which was most of them. The tricks and techniques utilized by unregulated monopolies to extend and enhance their dominance are many and varied, and it is historical fact that a sufficiently advanced monopoly can and will arrogate the nominal government monopoly on force unto itself, either explicitly using some organization like the Pinkerton Agency or covertly, in the case of Rockefeller getting the Colorado National Guard called out for his benefit.
Even Smith acknowledged this fact.
Smith subscribed to a common misconception. That doesn't make him right.
Adam Smith knew it was a fact because he had already seen it happen with the East India Company, which had operated as a monopoly in every market in which it did business and as de facto government of India for over 150 years at the time he wrote Wealth of Nations. He was not reciting some bullshit academic theory like the one you spout. The consequences of monopoly in an unregulated economy were the reality on the ground for his entire lifetime. Mr. Smith was busy writing his book as East India Company tea was being dumped into Boston harbor. Fortunately for him, he was living in Paris at the time, so his afternoon tea was not interrupted. Still, he knew exactly what an unregulated monopoly was capable of. The later activities of Carnegie and Rockefeller and other Gilded Age robber barons were a pale imitation of their predecessor.
Reducing costs... Pfft. Where do you get this crap, The Toddler's Guide to the Republican Party Platform?
We have a name for this. It's called Visual Programming, and it sucks. Really, it does. Even better, this physical version of the concept retains all the suck of the original, then adds extra suck, when you run out of the control bloks you need.
This whole concept bizarrely teaches physical limitations in the one realm where physical limitations do not apply: programming[1]. Your programs are limited by the number and type of "lines of code" that you have in the bucket. *boggle* Project Bloks is likely to drive a new generation of coders to develop a level of terseness that would make a Perl devotee weep. Is that really what you want?
I'm sure this is entertaining for about 5 minutes. After that, even the five year olds shown in the video will lose interest. Thankfully, there will be no new generation of Perl mavens with a bucket full of regexes.
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[1] In this house, young lady, we obey the.... yeah yeah, put your hand down, you in the back. You know what I meant.
This is like arguing the content of a person's wallet is not private because of the existence of pick-pockets.
Not precisely. It's like arguing that, since you're now being followed at close range by every pick-pocket in the world, you're guaranteed to have your pocket picked sooner or later, so you are now expecting to lose your wallet.
Which doesn't make the opinion any less insane.
Most people don't understand that through the Internet, every pick-pocket in the world is standing right behind them, every con man in the world is ringing their doorbell, and every peeper in the world is outside their window. There aren't any more criminals per capita now than there ever were. There might even be fewer of them, if statistics are to be believed. It's just that it seems like there are a lot more of them because all of them have direct access to each and every one of us, all the time. Fifteen years ago, I was completely immune to a con man living in Nigeria. There was no way in hell he could reach me to even attempt to con me. Now I have to watch my email carefully for every single con man living in Nigeria. Every single one of them is effectively on my doorstep, every minute of every day. And thanks to a voracious media trolling for clicks, even if I successfully maintain my vigilance, I will hear about my neighbor whose vigilance failed. And my other neighbor. And my other neighbor. Even my "neighbor" who lives 1000km away. So now I'm convinced that the world is a scary place full of criminals and somebody has to DO something.
Though of course I'm still blithely convinced it "can't happen to me." Humans excel at holding two mutually contradictory opinions simultaneously. I still have an expectation of privacy in my digital personal effects because it can't happen to me, but I'm still scared of everything all the time. (The generic 'I' of much of the world.)
Sounds like dicta. Not as big a deal as it could be then, since dicta are not binding.
And yet a big enough deal. Because this case did involve a series of properly executed warrants and involves an unsympathetic defendant, it will stand on appeal. That means that dicta is going to show up in LexisNexis searches of successful cases and some prosecutor somewhere is going to attempt to cite it in a different case that does not involve the correct set of warrants, in hopes that another judge won't inquire too closely, or notice exactly how unconstitutional the theory is, and lets it fly. Wash, rinse, and repeat a few times and lo and behold, a binding precedent appears.
This particular case is a campfire in the middle of a drought-stricken forest. If we are very fortunate, it stays contained in its little ring of stones. The unconstitutional sparks that fly off it get stamped out by another more vigilant judge and it becomes an academic curiosity. If we are unfortunate, some authoritarian asshole lets the sparks fly, and now we have a brush fire. There's some chance of putting it out, but now it requires a whole different level of effort, and some serious luck by well prepared firefighters. If they are insufficiently lucky or insufficiently prepared, we've got a forest fire on our hands.
First he's going to get you to pay for an electric car. Then he's going to get you to pay for a household robot. Then he's going to get you to pay for solar panels to power the electric car and the autonomous AI robot.
What do you call a million independently powered autonomous AI household robots driving Tesla cars?
Elon Musk's private army!
Also, I have a newsletter you might be interested in.
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Ok ok, I obviously didn't have enough random capital letters and exclamation marks to have a newsletter. Still... Robot army! You heard it here first!
You don't think it'd be possible to give money to individual farmers?
Not checks, no. Even giving cash is ineffective. Those farmers do not have bank accounts, and they know better than to try to open one. In a country being run as a kleptocracy, banks are run by and for only the most wealthy and well-connected. If you are not part of the in crowd, your deposits will be stolen with bogus fees so fast it will make your head spin.
This is something people from the developed world have been failing to grasp for about 100 years now, having grown up with it since birth and taking it for granted. Especially Republicans do not understand this at all. The quality and honesty of government, in the persons of each and every person in that government, is fantastically important in the development of a region. Look around the world. Everywhere the government is a warlord, or a kleptocracy, or a theocracy, or completely nonexistent is a hellhole, and has been a hellhole for generations. Starving a government until it is "small enough to drown in a bathtub" is the very fastest way to turn a region into a hellhole. Grover Norquist is the blindest fool the US has produced in the past half century.
It is the function of government to establish infrastructure. The four most important pieces of infrastructure are water, sewage, roads, and finances. The water must be clean or people die. The sewage must be dealt with or people die. The roads must exist or people can't move themselves or products. The financial system must be available and scrupulously honest or people can't trade, can't borrow, and can't have a market any more advanced than a bartering bazaar, which is ridiculous inefficient. And the function of the government is to establish these things and to KILL any motherfucker who damages them. That's the government monopoly on force that the lunatics are always complaining about. Any government that does not do these things or fails to back up their effectiveness and integrity with force is a failed state.
Bolivia is a failed state. No, you can't give money to individual farmers. It will be stolen from them.
One has to wonder, since this kind of thing is usually covered up by the "victim", just how the FBI know how much of it is going on.
Easy. They don't. Given the specificity of that number, it's the sum of the reported cases. The actual number of cases is much much bigger, both in count and in losses. Many companies are successfully hiding it, from the FBI, from their insurance company, from their stockholders, and from the public.
When RFC 822 was written in 1982, it was competing against a bunch of different email formats already in use since the late '70s. RFC 733, written in 1977, was supposed to have unified many of those formats and features already. It didn't, quite, so another attempt was made. To make a long story short, Internet email as we know it was in an uphill battle against entrenched formats, so to get it to fly, it had to be extraordinarily permissive. Minor things like authenticity of identity weren't even a consideration.
Those days are over. Email has been adopted. There isn't even a dash in the name anymore. Authenticity of identity is now exceedingly important. $3 billion ($6 billion? $9 billion?) important. Perhaps it's time for companies to get a grip on their inter-business relationships, so they can be confident that an invoice is legitimate. Outlook has signature features[1]. Nobody uses them. Maybe it's time.
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[1] Let's not pretend the vast majority of businesses are using anything other than Outlook.
Slashdot Mirror
Linus is meaner than that.
We need to completely rethink the field of economics in terms of time, which is truly more important than money, but harder to count.
Our very own Slashdot denizen bluelucidfox has been trying to do precisely that. He veers between seriously interesting, possibly insightful and "wat". He's sort of been using Slashdot as a sounding board, and the results are mixed, at best. Slashdot is having trouble coming to grips with the ideas and he's having trouble expressing some of them.
Speaking as someone who took many semesters of economics classes at university, I feel comfortable saying that his theories come a lot closer to reality than any of the bullshit spouted out of those assholes. (With the possible exception of the handful of empiricists, who are universally derided or ignored by the vast majority of academic economists, who are theoreticians.) The academics start with a wildly wrong model of human psychology, then compound their stupidity with alleged "mathematics" which are not even wrong. bluelucidfox is trying to explain history. He lacks academic rigour, perhaps inevitably, but he has at least a nodding acquaintance with reality. We'll see how far he gets.
It's possible that by opening the platform up to locally installed apps and more local storage they may damage the essential appeal.
That seems unlikely. The addition of locally installed apps and more local storage doesn't mean they will lose all of the support for back-end services. Logging in with your Google account to a new machine will still give you access to all your apps. The locally installed ones will start downloading in the background, and meanwhile the online versions will be available. Your local files will start downloading from online backup.
Now if you took advantage of locally installed apps and that local storage to keep the machine offline entirely for some considerable time, preventing automated backup, you might have a problem. But that seems like an unusual use case, and I bet ChromeOS will start prompting you. "No backup for 5 days. Maybe you should turn on your wifi." So to really get yourself in trouble, you'll have to seriously work at it. In which case, you get what you deserve.
Actually, there's a surplus because nobody wants to hire/pay for quality.
Even with total compensation packages hovering around $100k-$150k in the Midwest it can be hard to snipe top talent from other companies.
I already have a total compensation package over $100k in the Midwest. If you want to snipe me, you have to pay more than that, especially if you want to double my commute. Do you understand "more"? It means "not the same". I've already declined to pursue a $150k salary, nevermind the total package, just because it's not enough of a bump to make me lengthen my commute. Your package is "hovering". That's your problem right there. Push harder. We are worth literally millions to your company, and we know it.
I don't know how much it matters in other markets but seems to be a lot of interest in 4k gaming lately.
4K and VR. I haven't replaced my entire desktop in 8 years (but I have upgraded the video card twice). The video card trick only works about twice though. After that the older CPU (and especially the older CPU's memory technology) really starts to drag it down. A GTX 1080 paired with an 8 year old CPU is substantially crippled. This is the year people who bought high end machines in the late '00s finally have to budge off the plateau they have been comfortably occupying all this time. 4K and VR are both seriously demanding, and no longer is dialing down the detail acceptable (or why did you buy 4x as many pixels to start with?).
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: at the rate things are going, we're going to end up with NO internet at all, only 'walled gardens' within national borders, that are utterly useless for anything serious due to lack of connectivity and too many controls, along with a useless substitute for actual encryption.
Remember, telecommunications companies are people too. For once, corporate control of so many governments worldwide will work in our favor. They can't actually cut the cables. The telcos make too much money off of them to allow that. At best, they'll all buy Great Firewalls, and the rest of the world's population will catch up with the general Chinese population, who are already adept at tunneling through the Great Firewall.
The average 3 felonies per day that everyone already commits will rise to 4 and life will go on. The government will make horrible examples of a handful of people, and the rest of the population will ignore it and continue breaking the law. The rule of law is coming to an end faster all the time. I had hope that I wouldn't live long enough to see it. Seems now that I will.
I believe there was this exact situation where a previous owner had a path thru their private property to the beach in northern california. They sold the land and the new owner put in a gate blocking access. New owner had to remove the gate under court order under some legal argument.
It's called a public easement, and it doesn't require any judge shopping to get it recognized. It has precedents in English common law (on which US law is based and on which it depends) dating back four or five hundred years.
Amazon, and unfortunately NewEgg, are both cutting their own throat in this regard. They forget that one of the services a store provides is selection. In both directions. Variety of available wares and culling of worthless duplicates. Amazon and NewEgg are absolutely buried under thousands of copies of the exact same product using literally the exact same photograph but somehow with unique listings that differ by one or two or zero cents. All of which have bullshit tags and bullshit categories.
This is not valuable to me. This is absolutely stupid for me, as a customer. It wastes my time, totally pollutes search results, and annoys the shit out of me. Enough that I will choose another store, even a brick and mortar store, just because the signal to noise ratio has become so horrendous I literally can't find what I'm looking for.
NewEgg are you listening? I know Amazon is not. But NewEgg, I expected better. NewEgg had useful, reliable, helpful category- and specification-based search for more than a decade, long before Amazon's half-assed attempt. Now it's been overrun by asshole third-worlders hawking $2 useless plastic shit I don't want, don't need, and REALLY don't want to see when I'm searching for a goddamned video card. A vinyl sticker designed for a Macbook cover is not a video card! Curate your collections! It matters!
</rant>
What self-respecting tech worker wears anything that would need dry cleaning? What is this, 1971?
My current employer offers on-site pickup and delivery for dry cleaning to this day. It really does look like they think it's 1971. It's not free, either. Not even cheap. Just local. I've never once seen something on the rack in my building. In the building full of sales droids and business types, the service gets used. Go figure. And that would be why the company continues to spend money on it. Some middle manager is using the service regularly, and has the clout to keep it, even if 1000 other people never use it.
Anyone who knows there are 7 to 10 inch standalone LCD screens available knows they can get one for $100 or less instead of paying for a tablet...
I am aware. Point is, I do want to pay for a tablet. I was wondering if I could eke a little more use out of it.
The OEMs want tablets to be as isolated as possible so they have to rely on the cloud and users are mentally primed for SaaS.
That about dashes my hopes. Yep, that's what they want. Damn.
Tablets are for consumption, not production. Only now are people realizing this, so their tablet upgrades are laptops or nothing.
Most people either didn't even think about this or already knew this. It was only idiot analysts proclaiming the end of the desktop PC, where production happens. I certainly said this years ago, and so did a lot of Slashdot. We knew.
If you don't need a video clipboard, you don't need a tablet.
I finally came up with a use case for a video clipboard this year. Perfect timing. With sales in the toilet, the discounts should be spectacular this Black Friday.
One thing I've been wondering about though. A tablet is basically an LCD panel, right? With a tiny computer and a big skinny battery grafted onto it. Is any manufacturer retaining those features, plus supporting video input? Like with a mini-DisplayPort connector? Is anybody making a tablet that can double as an auxiliary screen for a desktop or laptop?
Trump is America's answer to Putin. America cannot be outdone by Russia, so Trump is our strategy to out-Putin Putin.
Dear God please no pictures of Trump with his shirt off.
Verizon does it for 90 days. The Russians do for 180 days. What's the difference?
90
Goddamn New Math...
The South Lake Union area where the main campus is located was a dump, full of warehouses, abandoned buildings, parking lots, hookers and crack dealers. Today that region is unrecognizable to someone who visited only five or six years ago, in a good way.
Still full of parking lots, hookers, and crack dealers, but now they've got class.
RIP Star Trek, You will be missed.
And Star Wars, Disney is flogging it to death. Time for some new _sci _fi_ universes - preferably ones that are creative commons from the outset so some corp like paramount can't use it's grubby influence to limit the possibilities in the stories.
You might be interested in Orion's Arm. A collaboratively developed hard SF universe originally heavily based on Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, it has since branched out, picking up elements of Ian M. Banks' Culture universe and David Brin's Uplift Universe, plus generated new material. Two short story collections have been formally published in paper. Unfortunately, the main website is broken at the moment. Interest in the project has been waning for some time. Apparently it has reached a fairly severe nadir.
A Fire Upon the Deep was an incredibly broad setting with lots of room to grow and Orion's Arm pushed it right to the wall. Setting stories in that universe is actually difficult because it's so very big, but it's even worse for visual artists. The universe is so vast and complex in its writing that it doesn't attract many talented illustrators, let alone filmmakers. So it languishes in obscurity. You might investigate the domain and send an email to get the site back online.
This explains why women fare worse and give up sooner in interviews than men. Boys are taught from a young age to keep getting up, keep trying, failure is okay and is how we learn. Praises and complements don't make us stronger, failure and pain make us stronger. Girls are taught that the prettiest girl gets a free ride in life. She was innately born to be beautiful, she was perfect without trying. Their self worth is programmed to be externalized from a young age to where validation and praise from others defines who a young woman is.
Women suck at programming because the patriarchy programmed them to be that way.
You don't get to call it "the patriarchy" when it's the girl's mother who programmed her that way. And her sisters and her female classmates and her fashion magazines (written by women).
Nope. The fastest and cheapest way to become a monopoly in an unregulated economy is to bring in the Pinkertons [wikipedia.org], establish a company town [wikipedia.org], and extract all of the profit for any and all economic activity for yourself. Rockefeller reduced his costs by murdering strikers [wikipedia.org] using every armed force he could get his hands on, which was most of them. The tricks and techniques utilized by unregulated monopolies to extend and enhance their dominance are many and varied, and it is historical fact that a sufficiently advanced monopoly can and will arrogate the nominal government monopoly on force unto itself, either explicitly using some organization like the Pinkerton Agency or covertly, in the case of Rockefeller getting the Colorado National Guard called out for his benefit.
All this babble about the perils of unregulated markets and then you trot out an example which uses government force to enforce the monopoly.
There are two examples in the quoted paragraph. The Pinkerton Agency was not and is not a governmental organization.
Monopolies are very easy to create in an unregulated economy.
Nope. In an unregulated economy, the only way to make a monopoly is by offering your products or services at a better price than your competition. Rockefeller came close, and he did so by drastically reducing his costs *and* prices.
Nope. The fastest and cheapest way to become a monopoly in an unregulated economy is to bring in the Pinkertons, establish a company town, and extract all of the profit for any and all economic activity for yourself. Rockefeller reduced his costs by murdering strikers using every armed force he could get his hands on, which was most of them. The tricks and techniques utilized by unregulated monopolies to extend and enhance their dominance are many and varied, and it is historical fact that a sufficiently advanced monopoly can and will arrogate the nominal government monopoly on force unto itself, either explicitly using some organization like the Pinkerton Agency or covertly, in the case of Rockefeller getting the Colorado National Guard called out for his benefit.
Even Smith acknowledged this fact.
Smith subscribed to a common misconception. That doesn't make him right.
Adam Smith knew it was a fact because he had already seen it happen with the East India Company, which had operated as a monopoly in every market in which it did business and as de facto government of India for over 150 years at the time he wrote Wealth of Nations. He was not reciting some bullshit academic theory like the one you spout. The consequences of monopoly in an unregulated economy were the reality on the ground for his entire lifetime. Mr. Smith was busy writing his book as East India Company tea was being dumped into Boston harbor. Fortunately for him, he was living in Paris at the time, so his afternoon tea was not interrupted. Still, he knew exactly what an unregulated monopoly was capable of. The later activities of Carnegie and Rockefeller and other Gilded Age robber barons were a pale imitation of their predecessor.
Reducing costs... Pfft. Where do you get this crap, The Toddler's Guide to the Republican Party Platform?
Endlessly reinventing the same tired old wheel.
We have a name for this. It's called Visual Programming, and it sucks. Really, it does. Even better, this physical version of the concept retains all the suck of the original, then adds extra suck, when you run out of the control bloks you need.
This whole concept bizarrely teaches physical limitations in the one realm where physical limitations do not apply: programming[1]. Your programs are limited by the number and type of "lines of code" that you have in the bucket. *boggle* Project Bloks is likely to drive a new generation of coders to develop a level of terseness that would make a Perl devotee weep. Is that really what you want?
I'm sure this is entertaining for about 5 minutes. After that, even the five year olds shown in the video will lose interest. Thankfully, there will be no new generation of Perl mavens with a bucket full of regexes.
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[1] In this house, young lady, we obey the.... yeah yeah, put your hand down, you in the back. You know what I meant.
This is like arguing the content of a person's wallet is not private because of the existence of pick-pockets.
Not precisely. It's like arguing that, since you're now being followed at close range by every pick-pocket in the world, you're guaranteed to have your pocket picked sooner or later, so you are now expecting to lose your wallet.
Which doesn't make the opinion any less insane.
Most people don't understand that through the Internet, every pick-pocket in the world is standing right behind them, every con man in the world is ringing their doorbell, and every peeper in the world is outside their window. There aren't any more criminals per capita now than there ever were. There might even be fewer of them, if statistics are to be believed. It's just that it seems like there are a lot more of them because all of them have direct access to each and every one of us, all the time. Fifteen years ago, I was completely immune to a con man living in Nigeria. There was no way in hell he could reach me to even attempt to con me. Now I have to watch my email carefully for every single con man living in Nigeria. Every single one of them is effectively on my doorstep, every minute of every day. And thanks to a voracious media trolling for clicks, even if I successfully maintain my vigilance, I will hear about my neighbor whose vigilance failed. And my other neighbor. And my other neighbor. Even my "neighbor" who lives 1000km away. So now I'm convinced that the world is a scary place full of criminals and somebody has to DO something.
Though of course I'm still blithely convinced it "can't happen to me." Humans excel at holding two mutually contradictory opinions simultaneously. I still have an expectation of privacy in my digital personal effects because it can't happen to me, but I'm still scared of everything all the time. (The generic 'I' of much of the world.)
Hence, this judge, and this opinion.
Sounds like dicta. Not as big a deal as it could be then, since dicta are not binding.
And yet a big enough deal. Because this case did involve a series of properly executed warrants and involves an unsympathetic defendant, it will stand on appeal. That means that dicta is going to show up in LexisNexis searches of successful cases and some prosecutor somewhere is going to attempt to cite it in a different case that does not involve the correct set of warrants, in hopes that another judge won't inquire too closely, or notice exactly how unconstitutional the theory is, and lets it fly. Wash, rinse, and repeat a few times and lo and behold, a binding precedent appears.
This particular case is a campfire in the middle of a drought-stricken forest. If we are very fortunate, it stays contained in its little ring of stones. The unconstitutional sparks that fly off it get stamped out by another more vigilant judge and it becomes an academic curiosity. If we are unfortunate, some authoritarian asshole lets the sparks fly, and now we have a brush fire. There's some chance of putting it out, but now it requires a whole different level of effort, and some serious luck by well prepared firefighters. If they are insufficiently lucky or insufficiently prepared, we've got a forest fire on our hands.
This case isn't a big deal. Yet.
First he's going to get you to pay for an electric car. Then he's going to get you to pay for a household robot. Then he's going to get you to pay for solar panels to power the electric car and the autonomous AI robot.
What do you call a million independently powered autonomous AI household robots driving Tesla cars?
Elon Musk's private army!
Also, I have a newsletter you might be interested in.
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Ok ok, I obviously didn't have enough random capital letters and exclamation marks to have a newsletter. Still... Robot army! You heard it here first!
I don't care of gives me the ability to poop gold bullion. I'm never going to use it.
Hold on, hold on. It depends. What shape is this gold bullion?
You don't think it'd be possible to give money to individual farmers?
Not checks, no. Even giving cash is ineffective. Those farmers do not have bank accounts, and they know better than to try to open one. In a country being run as a kleptocracy, banks are run by and for only the most wealthy and well-connected. If you are not part of the in crowd, your deposits will be stolen with bogus fees so fast it will make your head spin.
This is something people from the developed world have been failing to grasp for about 100 years now, having grown up with it since birth and taking it for granted. Especially Republicans do not understand this at all. The quality and honesty of government, in the persons of each and every person in that government, is fantastically important in the development of a region. Look around the world. Everywhere the government is a warlord, or a kleptocracy, or a theocracy, or completely nonexistent is a hellhole, and has been a hellhole for generations. Starving a government until it is "small enough to drown in a bathtub" is the very fastest way to turn a region into a hellhole. Grover Norquist is the blindest fool the US has produced in the past half century.
It is the function of government to establish infrastructure. The four most important pieces of infrastructure are water, sewage, roads, and finances. The water must be clean or people die. The sewage must be dealt with or people die. The roads must exist or people can't move themselves or products. The financial system must be available and scrupulously honest or people can't trade, can't borrow, and can't have a market any more advanced than a bartering bazaar, which is ridiculous inefficient. And the function of the government is to establish these things and to KILL any motherfucker who damages them. That's the government monopoly on force that the lunatics are always complaining about. Any government that does not do these things or fails to back up their effectiveness and integrity with force is a failed state.
Bolivia is a failed state. No, you can't give money to individual farmers. It will be stolen from them.
One has to wonder, since this kind of thing is usually covered up by the "victim", just how the FBI know how much of it is going on.
Easy. They don't. Given the specificity of that number, it's the sum of the reported cases. The actual number of cases is much much bigger, both in count and in losses. Many companies are successfully hiding it, from the FBI, from their insurance company, from their stockholders, and from the public.
When RFC 822 was written in 1982, it was competing against a bunch of different email formats already in use since the late '70s. RFC 733, written in 1977, was supposed to have unified many of those formats and features already. It didn't, quite, so another attempt was made. To make a long story short, Internet email as we know it was in an uphill battle against entrenched formats, so to get it to fly, it had to be extraordinarily permissive. Minor things like authenticity of identity weren't even a consideration.
Those days are over. Email has been adopted. There isn't even a dash in the name anymore. Authenticity of identity is now exceedingly important. $3 billion ($6 billion? $9 billion?) important. Perhaps it's time for companies to get a grip on their inter-business relationships, so they can be confident that an invoice is legitimate. Outlook has signature features[1]. Nobody uses them. Maybe it's time.
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[1] Let's not pretend the vast majority of businesses are using anything other than Outlook.