90% of people don't operate on "needs". The other 10% are either poor (need and frugality is enforced by harsh boundary conditions), or they are headed to financial independence where they will be just as happy (or happier) as the 90% until they "retire", then be about double as happy once they hit financial inpendence and are either working on what they love, or retired entirely.
Wasting over well over a grand a year on a new shiny phone with a massive data plan so you can stream cat videos to numb the pain of their wage slavery just further traps further. Spending $60k every few year on a shiny SUV that depreciates alarmingly fast so you can sit in traffic to get to your wage slave location traps you. I could go on, but "need" is so far gone as a concept these days it is not funny.
We are misers, and are careful with it. $34/mo typically for 2 phones on Ting. I can't fathom wasting $120/mo for 2 lines. If I am in a quiet enough location to want to do much with my phone I can usually find WiFi. But I have never been a phone zombie. Watching TV on a small screen while walking down a noisy street is not my idea of a good time.
A little discipline saves us from the scourge of emails. Nobody should be getting 100's of emails a day. 20-30 tops. Beyond that you and you are likely a micro-manager who needs to delegate and trust your employees more. Either that or you have some overly chatty people that need to be reminded to keep emails on-point and directed to just the correct recipients.
We have cubes that let sounds carry way too well. Often this is helpful to overhear technical discussions that I should eavesdrop on for future reference, or join into to help clear things up. The downside is that talking on the phone, or in this case recording a bunch of voice messages is very intrusive to others who are concentrating, it actually stifles a lot of discussion as we all become very aware that half the team will overheard anything above a whisper.
So unless I have a real office with a door I can shut, then no thank you.
All that said, we recently had an overseas ASIC layout guy help us through a crunch. If I could have easily done screen capture while gesturing instructions with the mouse with voice over I could have reduced the amount of time and effort it took to convey very visual oriented instructions that he needed to clearly understand while I was asleep. Much of the communications was done with a morning call (his end of day) to determine what the snags were, followed up with fresh instructions at my end of day with a status update and scribbled on screen shots. However, I only spent about an hour at most actually making up his instructions over a 2 week period, so the potential savings were not high. Much of the time was spent researching design to make sure I actually understood what the layout guy needed to do.
I want the cheap phones to not be crippled with inadequately small storage, non-removable bloatware, and to be finally killed by pushed updates that cripple it to the point of not being able to make calls (i.e. with the bloatware updates and uses of the few remaining megabytes of storage).
Both our previous phones were through Virgin Mobile, and within about 9 months, with almost no additional apps, they became frustratingly slow and useless. So 2 years ago I plunked down way too much for an unlocked iphone 5s for the wife (about $400), and got a nexus 6 for me a year ago as they were closing out for $400. Both are overkill for us, but don't come with bloatware that cripples them, and they actually get security updates semi-regularly. We have them on Ting for $34 a month for both phones for our amount of usage. We plan to keep them that way till they die and repeat the process. It sucks that you have to overpay for overkill hardware to avoid getting an unsupported bloated POS.
Live close to work, ride your bike, and same $$$. Your life will be healthier, while your bank account will be richer, and you will feel better. Maybe even enough better that you will become smug enough to post about it on the interwebs!
DVD's and Blu-Rays are rife with crap I can't readily skip through. So I mash at a bunch of buttons till I get past the falsely advertised "Fast-Play" previews. Now frustrated I get to my movie.
Or I go to the movie theater and end up pay $25 for the early bird special for the three of us, smuggle in some snacks, suffer through 20 minutes of previews and faux newsy crap (or get bad seats if I come later). Good movies are crowded, and cell phone glow is a frequent distraction. Theaters are not much better/worse than in my youth, but they sure feel like they price gouge worse than I remember.
So yeah, we buy just a few movies per year, and go to only 2-3 in the theaters a year. Pirates clear out all the annoying crap, while law abiding citizens like me have to suffer through all the force fed marketing crap to see a movie I just paid through the nose for.
Where the hell were you? The housing market crashed, but so much more went with it. Lots of folks got laid off. The lucky ones who got a new job often found that they were deep underwater in their house, even if they put 20% down.
Being part of an interlinked economy means that nobody is an island. Crappy loan products peddled to suckers can blow up a bank and take down everyone else with it. Young folks hitting the job market at that time were SOL. Colleges are not subsidized nearly like they used to be, so the same degree you have costs a lot more (usually necessitating student loans). Companies shipped all the lower end jobs overseas, taking away entry level jobs to gain experience. So the few open positions of any consequence for a few years after 2008 all required 5-10 years experience and super specific job skills.
We littered the country with a whole heap of well educated debtors that really struggled to get a decent job. Many of them did get crap jobs, and many had to go live with their parents due to the crushing debt they got that could not be serviced on a service job.
The touch interface sucks for a lot of things, making it a lame replacement for many things. Browsing the web is good. Games are are largely bad. Many really need a game pad or mouse style input to be decent. So while an ipad can easily run doom or quake level stuff with ease, mostly the bad control interface ruins them.
Typing sucks on a touch interface, too slow for anything beyond a few sentences at a time.
So our ipads mostly get used to watch Netflix while cooking dinner, playing music, checking news, and not much more. Much of the promise is ruined by a lack of mouse and keyboard.
With a sample of 1 death, the two are statistically equivalent. Maybe after we ~10-20 Tesla deaths with autopilot we can properly compare, but for now...
Very true. It is easy to see a lower income family with an iphone and judge, but it is not fair. A fridge used to be a luxury item, now they are cheap and last forever. Smart phones are quickly turning into the same, hard to live life without one it seems.
Healthcare and just about anything that has not gone through the automation revolution has not gotten cheaper compared to median wages, rather the opposite.
Selling 11 copies of something this year versus 1 last year is 1000% growth! Unless the total sold in the denominator was significant, growth is a terrible metric.
20 months ago VR headsets were developer betas only, so I would guess the number of searches relative to all porn searches was miniscule. I am willing to bet the number is still miniscule, just not quite so as before. Whoop.
Until "autonomous" means exactly that, we will have people lulled into not paying attention, and a driving system that cannot handle everything that is thrown at it. The result will be crashes.
No manner of EULA, or cries of BETA will get around that predictable result.
Expecting human nature to change to match your product's limitation is a fool's journey.
Windows 7 is still no panacea either. I've kept 10 off my home box, but a simple LAN card swap (to play nice with a hackintosh install) triggered the whole authentication process with piracy accusations, and that is not resolving through the automated process. I'm using my home PC so little that I am getting close to just shelving it and being done with Windows at home entirely. I swear that I spend almost as much time waiting for updates to install as I do using it anyway.
Sometimes the point of an activity is to have no point. After a full day of slinging transistors around, followed by power struggles with a 3 year old, I like some brainless downtime. The anti-TV crowd look down their nose at this, but eff them.
Most of us need some down time. You choose riding a high horse as your hobby to kill time, not all of the rest of us did. Out of curiosity, how much time per day do you waste on slashdot?
Passwords in general have been obsolete for years, but not replaced. Password policies have made this worse. I have 4 different passwords and a chip card at work alone (WTF?). Dozens of websites want passwords, many of which I only need to access monthly or yearly. Many have policies that get in the way of good password practices (many have very short character limits, which is stupid beyond belief). So I readily admit I reuse the same burner password and login for many low importance sites rather than having to reset my accounts every month or three when I need access. We need better, but usually just resort to vilifying the beleaguered users who get compromised.
There should be a 10x penalty for billing errors, or some other type of real teeth.
Inevitably this stuff leads to a fine that costs less than the infraction profited, and maybe a class action lawsuit that might resolve after several years with tiny vouchers for the class members.
Short of campaign finance reform to cut out the root of the problem (lawmakers beholden to companies instead of the electorate) I don't see this or many other problems ever coming close to resolving.
Monopolies in utilities like internet access should be regulated as monopolistic utilities.
I've never had an issue where my headphones picked up noticeable interference. Never. Mostly loud office conversations that I notice when trying to listen to music (or drown out loud office conversations to be bluntly honest)
Besides, if I did I would hear some pops and hiss, but still hear my music. Digital bit streams just cut out when interference is enough to cause bit errors.
It is still the lowest common denominator of video ports. When all also in the stupid conference room is mis-configured to the point of uselessness you connect to VGA. However I have not seen anyone actually request their monitor be hooked up via VGA, it is just nice to have as a last ditch option to still be able to have your meeting.
Go contract free. We shaved down to $35 a month for two phones, but both were purchased outright. I minimize could buy new phones yearly compared to what most folks pay for their monthly contract. Though in reality we funnelled the savings into a little more retirement savings. Not sexy, but neither is working well into your 60's in the tech industry.
Prime age is a better metric. We are at 81% there, which it not far from historical maximums. There are those who choose to be stay-at-home, or who cannot work due to disabilities, so even saying the "true" number is 19% is disingenuous to all but the tinfoil hat brigade who won't trust any government statistic unless it can be warped to their narrative.
Prime age (25-54) participation is a better metric, as it factors out the very young and the very old who muddy the waters. We are back to 2012, or 1985 levels at about 81%. At worst the USA is at 19% unemployment, but there are a decent number of people who are stay-at-home by choice, or who simply cannot work. I think the official metrics of ~5% are far more accurate that the tinfoil brigade will ever admit to.
Far more important is that we have large swaths of the burger flipping set that are counted as full time employed, but make far far too little to reasonably live a healthy life one.
Slashdot Mirror
90% of people don't operate on "needs". The other 10% are either poor (need and frugality is enforced by harsh boundary conditions), or they are headed to financial independence where they will be just as happy (or happier) as the 90% until they "retire", then be about double as happy once they hit financial inpendence and are either working on what they love, or retired entirely.
Wasting over well over a grand a year on a new shiny phone with a massive data plan so you can stream cat videos to numb the pain of their wage slavery just further traps further. Spending $60k every few year on a shiny SUV that depreciates alarmingly fast so you can sit in traffic to get to your wage slave location traps you. I could go on, but "need" is so far gone as a concept these days it is not funny.
We are misers, and are careful with it. $34/mo typically for 2 phones on Ting. I can't fathom wasting $120/mo for 2 lines. If I am in a quiet enough location to want to do much with my phone I can usually find WiFi. But I have never been a phone zombie. Watching TV on a small screen while walking down a noisy street is not my idea of a good time.
A little discipline saves us from the scourge of emails. Nobody should be getting 100's of emails a day. 20-30 tops. Beyond that you and you are likely a micro-manager who needs to delegate and trust your employees more. Either that or you have some overly chatty people that need to be reminded to keep emails on-point and directed to just the correct recipients.
We have cubes that let sounds carry way too well. Often this is helpful to overhear technical discussions that I should eavesdrop on for future reference, or join into to help clear things up. The downside is that talking on the phone, or in this case recording a bunch of voice messages is very intrusive to others who are concentrating, it actually stifles a lot of discussion as we all become very aware that half the team will overheard anything above a whisper.
So unless I have a real office with a door I can shut, then no thank you.
All that said, we recently had an overseas ASIC layout guy help us through a crunch. If I could have easily done screen capture while gesturing instructions with the mouse with voice over I could have reduced the amount of time and effort it took to convey very visual oriented instructions that he needed to clearly understand while I was asleep. Much of the communications was done with a morning call (his end of day) to determine what the snags were, followed up with fresh instructions at my end of day with a status update and scribbled on screen shots. However, I only spent about an hour at most actually making up his instructions over a 2 week period, so the potential savings were not high. Much of the time was spent researching design to make sure I actually understood what the layout guy needed to do.
I want the cheap phones to not be crippled with inadequately small storage, non-removable bloatware, and to be finally killed by pushed updates that cripple it to the point of not being able to make calls (i.e. with the bloatware updates and uses of the few remaining megabytes of storage).
Both our previous phones were through Virgin Mobile, and within about 9 months, with almost no additional apps, they became frustratingly slow and useless. So 2 years ago I plunked down way too much for an unlocked iphone 5s for the wife (about $400), and got a nexus 6 for me a year ago as they were closing out for $400. Both are overkill for us, but don't come with bloatware that cripples them, and they actually get security updates semi-regularly. We have them on Ting for $34 a month for both phones for our amount of usage. We plan to keep them that way till they die and repeat the process. It sucks that you have to overpay for overkill hardware to avoid getting an unsupported bloated POS.
Live close to work, ride your bike, and same $$$. Your life will be healthier, while your bank account will be richer, and you will feel better. Maybe even enough better that you will become smug enough to post about it on the interwebs!
DVD's and Blu-Rays are rife with crap I can't readily skip through. So I mash at a bunch of buttons till I get past the falsely advertised "Fast-Play" previews. Now frustrated I get to my movie.
Or I go to the movie theater and end up pay $25 for the early bird special for the three of us, smuggle in some snacks, suffer through 20 minutes of previews and faux newsy crap (or get bad seats if I come later). Good movies are crowded, and cell phone glow is a frequent distraction. Theaters are not much better/worse than in my youth, but they sure feel like they price gouge worse than I remember.
So yeah, we buy just a few movies per year, and go to only 2-3 in the theaters a year. Pirates clear out all the annoying crap, while law abiding citizens like me have to suffer through all the force fed marketing crap to see a movie I just paid through the nose for.
Where the hell were you? The housing market crashed, but so much more went with it. Lots of folks got laid off. The lucky ones who got a new job often found that they were deep underwater in their house, even if they put 20% down.
Being part of an interlinked economy means that nobody is an island. Crappy loan products peddled to suckers can blow up a bank and take down everyone else with it. Young folks hitting the job market at that time were SOL. Colleges are not subsidized nearly like they used to be, so the same degree you have costs a lot more (usually necessitating student loans). Companies shipped all the lower end jobs overseas, taking away entry level jobs to gain experience. So the few open positions of any consequence for a few years after 2008 all required 5-10 years experience and super specific job skills.
We littered the country with a whole heap of well educated debtors that really struggled to get a decent job. Many of them did get crap jobs, and many had to go live with their parents due to the crushing debt they got that could not be serviced on a service job.
Anyone else starting to think that soon Amazon will turn into the distopian Wall-E mega-store? Bezos already has his space hobby going as a side gig.
The touch interface sucks for a lot of things, making it a lame replacement for many things. Browsing the web is good. Games are are largely bad. Many really need a game pad or mouse style input to be decent. So while an ipad can easily run doom or quake level stuff with ease, mostly the bad control interface ruins them.
Typing sucks on a touch interface, too slow for anything beyond a few sentences at a time.
So our ipads mostly get used to watch Netflix while cooking dinner, playing music, checking news, and not much more. Much of the promise is ruined by a lack of mouse and keyboard.
With a sample of 1 death, the two are statistically equivalent. Maybe after we ~10-20 Tesla deaths with autopilot we can properly compare, but for now...
Very true. It is easy to see a lower income family with an iphone and judge, but it is not fair. A fridge used to be a luxury item, now they are cheap and last forever. Smart phones are quickly turning into the same, hard to live life without one it seems.
Healthcare and just about anything that has not gone through the automation revolution has not gotten cheaper compared to median wages, rather the opposite.
Selling 11 copies of something this year versus 1 last year is 1000% growth! Unless the total sold in the denominator was significant, growth is a terrible metric.
20 months ago VR headsets were developer betas only, so I would guess the number of searches relative to all porn searches was miniscule. I am willing to bet the number is still miniscule, just not quite so as before. Whoop.
Until "autonomous" means exactly that, we will have people lulled into not paying attention, and a driving system that cannot handle everything that is thrown at it. The result will be crashes.
No manner of EULA, or cries of BETA will get around that predictable result.
Expecting human nature to change to match your product's limitation is a fool's journey.
Windows 7 is still no panacea either. I've kept 10 off my home box, but a simple LAN card swap (to play nice with a hackintosh install) triggered the whole authentication process with piracy accusations, and that is not resolving through the automated process. I'm using my home PC so little that I am getting close to just shelving it and being done with Windows at home entirely. I swear that I spend almost as much time waiting for updates to install as I do using it anyway.
Grumble...
This. The doping limits are set too high to catch anyone except those who are really sloppy. The short bans are slaps on the wrist. It is all a sham.
+1
Sometimes the point of an activity is to have no point. After a full day of slinging transistors around, followed by power struggles with a 3 year old, I like some brainless downtime. The anti-TV crowd look down their nose at this, but eff them.
Most of us need some down time. You choose riding a high horse as your hobby to kill time, not all of the rest of us did. Out of curiosity, how much time per day do you waste on slashdot?
+1, Wish I had mod points.
Passwords in general have been obsolete for years, but not replaced. Password policies have made this worse. I have 4 different passwords and a chip card at work alone (WTF?). Dozens of websites want passwords, many of which I only need to access monthly or yearly. Many have policies that get in the way of good password practices (many have very short character limits, which is stupid beyond belief). So I readily admit I reuse the same burner password and login for many low importance sites rather than having to reset my accounts every month or three when I need access. We need better, but usually just resort to vilifying the beleaguered users who get compromised.
There should be a 10x penalty for billing errors, or some other type of real teeth.
Inevitably this stuff leads to a fine that costs less than the infraction profited, and maybe a class action lawsuit that might resolve after several years with tiny vouchers for the class members.
Short of campaign finance reform to cut out the root of the problem (lawmakers beholden to companies instead of the electorate) I don't see this or many other problems ever coming close to resolving.
Monopolies in utilities like internet access should be regulated as monopolistic utilities.
I've never had an issue where my headphones picked up noticeable interference. Never. Mostly loud office conversations that I notice when trying to listen to music (or drown out loud office conversations to be bluntly honest)
Besides, if I did I would hear some pops and hiss, but still hear my music. Digital bit streams just cut out when interference is enough to cause bit errors.
It is still the lowest common denominator of video ports. When all also in the stupid conference room is mis-configured to the point of uselessness you connect to VGA. However I have not seen anyone actually request their monitor be hooked up via VGA, it is just nice to have as a last ditch option to still be able to have your meeting.
Go contract free. We shaved down to $35 a month for two phones, but both were purchased outright. I minimize could buy new phones yearly compared to what most folks pay for their monthly contract. Though in reality we funnelled the savings into a little more retirement savings. Not sexy, but neither is working well into your 60's in the tech industry.
Prime age is a better metric. We are at 81% there, which it not far from historical maximums. There are those who choose to be stay-at-home, or who cannot work due to disabilities, so even saying the "true" number is 19% is disingenuous to all but the tinfoil hat brigade who won't trust any government statistic unless it can be warped to their narrative.
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
College grads over 25 are down at a 2% unemployment rate (2008 and 1996 levels).
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
Prime age (25-54) participation is a better metric, as it factors out the very young and the very old who muddy the waters. We are back to 2012, or 1985 levels at about 81%. At worst the USA is at 19% unemployment, but there are a decent number of people who are stay-at-home by choice, or who simply cannot work. I think the official metrics of ~5% are far more accurate that the tinfoil brigade will ever admit to.
https://research.stlouisfed.or...
Far more important is that we have large swaths of the burger flipping set that are counted as full time employed, but make far far too little to reasonably live a healthy life one.