The demographic you're trying to fear-monger votes out of is dying off and an ever-increasing percentage of voters think this makes you look like an unelectable fool.
Well $20/hr is ~$40K a year. Which is completely survivable, but probably rough with 4 kids. As long as you don't live outside of your means you can make it.
But a DBA and sysadmin with 15 years experience? I can say for certain that coward is not getting paid enough. Even in Cheap-ass Iowa, he'd make more. Unless he's got issues, a record, or is generally incompetent. And not being sociable enough to get through an interview is filed under "has issues".
It's not that he's destitute, or has a horrible life. It's that people with his skillset are generally valued far above that. It's enough to make someone bitter. Which unfortunately, can make people lead a horrible life.
Did he think he'd utilize his mathematics PHD in State Center Iowa? The place has literally two restaurants.
Cry me a fucking river if you don't understand that you have to follow the job. We're not telling you that you need to go live like a gypsy, never establishing roots. (Although if you can do that, there's some great money to be had.) You just have to move once to be in an area that can support you.
I fully understand that it's a lot nicer if you can be close to your family. Especially when there's grandkids. But if the choice is a upper-middle income away from mommy, or AN EXCESS OF THREE YEARS UNEMPLOYMENT, come on dude.
But I actually do like a good book, music, and I've got favorite artists. I even occasionally pay for it. This is a direct measurement of how much I value the arts. This is their income. This is what that artsy industry needs to survive on. Welcome to capitalism.
Literature though? Literature professors? They mostly read. And what they do write primarily targets other literature fans. Economically it's just so much masturbation. It moves money about the literature crowd, but there's no money coming in. The sort of thing people have as a hobby on the side that COSTS money.
But hey, I'm actually a big fan of the idea that basic needs should be provided for. Enough calories to keep off starvation. A roof over your head. Enough space to stretch out as you sleep. A safety net to catch people down on their luck. To let them take risks. And yeah, to keep the perpetual dropouts from dying in the street or jumping me for loose change. But if no-one is going to buy your art, get used to being a starving artist.
Politics, war, and business. Because it's easy to sway, invade, and capitalize those silly artists who haven't even heard of a naked short, a dead drop, or a punji stick.
There's a good argument out there that con men, while hideous scum of the earth that deserve all the horrors we can inflict upon them, make the populace a little wiser.
Oh I understand the Fed is doing a job by controlling inflation. I just think a decentralized currency with no master and no money printers would be a good thing. You're most certainly right about it being novel.
Holding excess cash, whether it be dollars [...is foolish]
Yes, that's exactly right. And that's the goal of the central bank that's in charge of inflation. They, and their bosses, don't want you to just hang onto your cash. They want you to use it as a medium of exchange, but when it comes to savings, they want you to invest it in other things. That helps the economy. "Putting savings to work" as it were.
or [holding excess] bitcoins, is foolish due to inflation
Uhhhhhh.... yeah.... that was kind of a concern a while ago when coins were easier to mine, but now that they're harder to crunch it's not really a worry. I mean, this was one of the leading reasons that bitcoins was considered viable. It solves inflation. I mean, the part where people just say "fuck it" and print more money for themselves. You can't do that with bitcoins. There's no central authority to control inflation, it's going to swing in value according to it's ACTUAL VALUE without politicians and the FED having a say about how many bitcoins they get to genesis.
and in the case of bitcoin exchange rate risk.
Wow... So did you know you can exchange dollars for yen, euros, or reals? Yeah, they all have exchange rates that kinda go up and down. Just.. you know... fyi.
Yes, they're parasites, but they're better than the older parasites that did the same thing and gouged us even more. All the old-money players that are proposing rules to stop the HFT from eating their lunch can't be trusted any more than you trust the HFT.
The bid-ask gap does end up getting reduced because there's more than one HFT and they compete with each other.
Also note, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, that this sort of game only works between exchanges. If you have a $10 bid and someone asks at $9.99 ON THE SAME EXCHANGE, the exchange simply hooks you up and there's an established way to deal with the difference. But the NYSE and the London Stock exchange and Mt.Gox don't work with each other like that. Since you're on different exchanges, you don't know about the guy with the ask price. HFT types work really hard at being the first to notice that imbalance. Or "gap" if you will. If we had some sort of unified global exchange, this would all be moot.
Every item in your hands was built and delivered to you by somebody with more money than you.
My mouse and keyboard were made by wage-slave labor in China. One was delivered to me by a wage-slave retail kid and the other was from some guy in a delivery truck I never saw.
Jesus fucking Christ, what kind of mouse do you use?
It was mentioned on NPR earlier. They had some currency consultant on and they were talking about Bitcoins. They were traded on "Mount Gox". He thought there was a huge bitcoin bubble, that people were investing in them as gamble, and that he expected the currency would get regulated in the near future.
If they get too bad they no longer have a job. (Ask the Bakers at Hostess)
And they'd point out that their last 7 CEOs in the last decade probably had a hand in pile driving the company into the dirt. That the golden parachutes, bonuses, and wage increases all while the company tanked were unwarranted. And they'd say the raiding of the pension funds were outright fraud and should put people in prison.
Ask them who should suffer when a company shrinks and I'd like to think they'd say "everyone", and not just the workers. But they probably wouldn't because they're pissed that profits are privatized and losses are socialized. Let's hope they get bought by someone who doesn't have their head up their ass and they have some management that does more than simply collect their bonus and ditch the company. Because the hardships they've gone through are undeserved.
Yeah probably. But then again, you're probably the sort that thinks if they see an ad for medicine while they get mail from your doctor that there's a jackboot thug watching a monitor with your email on it.
Wait a sec... Holy shit dude, you need to get a new doctor! Email is not secure or private. If your doctor emailed you about something you didn't want anyone to know, he is violating HIPPA all over the place.
Correct, Google doesn't "sit around reading people's email". You are also correct in that they "mine users's mail for advertising purposes". If you don't understand the difference you may not belong on Slashdot.
Ugh, this again. This is one of those things that gets slung around constantly when Christians and Atheists bicker. Ok, just to cut to the chase a little: On a philosophical level, everything you think is true has to be accepted on faith... at SOME level. But once an idea like this applies to literally EVERYTHING, the idea doesn't mean much when you're trying to distinguish between baseless religions and established facts. Which is why philosophy is bloody worthless.
But here we go! So if you think about it, you have to have faith that 1+1=2. What? Isn't that obvious? No, actually it isn't. You have to define what '1', '2' '+' and '=' are. And you can do that. You have a set of integers, you define actions like addition and equivalency. But wait, what do you mean by "integer", or even "set"? Well a set is a group of concepts. And before you can have a set and you put things in it, you have to nail down the idea that you can have an empty set.
How do you prove that the idea of an empty set is possible? You don't. You just have to accept it. You can call it an axiom if you want, but you have to simply accept that it's true. The other way to describe that is to have faith that it's true. If it's not true, holy moly shit gets weird, but it's not something we can actually prove. High level mathematics is crazy, eh?
If you don't think about it, we usually call that blind faith.
It's not illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of their brain activity. Should it be?
I think that's too big of a blanket statement. Leaves out too many details. It's not as simple as that. See below.
Can you judge someone on the basis of their biology?
Well, yes, I can personally judge people based on whatever I damn well feel like. Yay liberty. But if I were to, say, hire someone based on their biology, specifically whether or not they have blond hair, or an Y chromosome, or hadn't hit menopause, or had grey hair, or you know, other biological stuff, sometimes that could land you with a big fat law-suit for discrimination. And rightly so. Other times you need to hire young blonds because it's an acting role, and that's ok.
So the answer is yes and no because it's a bad question that's overly broad.
Is it really that person's fault anymore if a part of their body preselects them to wrongdoing?
Yes. If someone has the gene which makes them ludicrously susceptible to alcohol addiction, it's up to them not to get addicted, break their addiction, know their weaknesses, be a functioning addict and/or otherwise be a functional member of society.
If you have anger-management issues you need to deal with that. We all have strengths and weaknesses, to say that you are not the owner of said traits detracts from what it is that makes you, you. If we separate people from owning their own traits, there's really no incentive to fix them. If being a drunkard is somehow socially acceptable or otherwise excused, we will have more drunkards because more people will stop fighting to fix their issues.
All that said, we generally react poorly to the concept of fault. Rather than punishing those at fault, we should work on fixing them. Rather than trials and judgements being about what punishment people deserve, it should be more like "yep, you're fucked up, time to fix you". And just so you don't think I'm some bleeding-heart hippy, some cases aren't worth fixing, and it's time to take them out back and shoot them or lock them away forever so they don't hurt others.
Where does liability start?
Your actions. I reject the idea that the "pre-disposed-to-violence" types are not liable for the violence they cause. We all have our collection of quirks, oddities, and problems. If you cannot contain your problems and be a functional member of society, you're liable for that. Sociopaths don't get a free-ride for murder, drunkards don't get excused for public intoxication.
Can you fix people?
To an extent, for most problems. The easily-addicted sort need to clean up and stay away from the sauce. The violent types need to channel that in constructive way or punch a bag of potatoes rather than building a doomsday device. Counseling, planning, therapy, medication, and such can help, but they can't inject 20cc's of wisdom yet, and there are a LOT of issues we don't understand yet. And despite the best counselors, a willing reformee, a known problem, and all the right steps... sometimes the flaw is just too deep. We shouldn't spend 50 years of resources so Manson-types can go be janitors for 5 years before they kick the bucket.
Should you?
It depends. For convicted felons? Yes, I think they've lost the right to be fuckups and the fix, if any, should be forced upon them. They cannot be trusted to contain/deal with/or fix themselves. For friends and family, yes, because you love them. You should do what you can to try and fix them, and they have the option to accept or refuse. For others? eeeeh, as long as it's no skin off my teeth I'd say live and let live.
There's this whole idea of society and by helping others I help myself. The whole "rising tides lift all boats" thing. But by and far the attempts I've see to try and pro-actively fix aspects of society have caused more problems
Because when I went to school it was to automate those guys out of a job.
I mean, that was my "big plan" at least. I got a nice well rounded education and went off into entirely different fields of programming and software engineering, but senior design project was to automate a gas-powered helicopter. We had a big clunky accelerometer that fell off a fighter jet from a friend in the industry. Ludicrously advanced for students at the time and horribly outmatched by a wiimote a few years later. All in all it was a good project. Would have been nice to work professionally on autonomous UAVs, but that's a little hard to do in Iowa.
I like it. A place for old cynical bastards to laugh at young entrepreneurial types. We can call it BeatDown. That's right, the startups get beat down.
You put out a beatdown of 1/100th of his "predicted value" in 10 years and someone buys that, giving you that money. You agree to buy one 1/100th his company worth of shares in 10 years and give it to the investor.
If the startup goes broke, you owe nothing. If they turn into the next facebook, yer SCREWED. (Buy hey, that's pretty rare)
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Senator Feinstein,
The demographic you're trying to fear-monger votes out of is dying off and an ever-increasing percentage of voters think this makes you look like an unelectable fool.
Sincerely,
A democrat under 30.
Well $20/hr is ~$40K a year. Which is completely survivable, but probably rough with 4 kids. As long as you don't live outside of your means you can make it.
But a DBA and sysadmin with 15 years experience? I can say for certain that coward is not getting paid enough. Even in Cheap-ass Iowa, he'd make more. Unless he's got issues, a record, or is generally incompetent. And not being sociable enough to get through an interview is filed under "has issues".
It's not that he's destitute, or has a horrible life. It's that people with his skillset are generally valued far above that. It's enough to make someone bitter. Which unfortunately, can make people lead a horrible life.
Did he think he'd utilize his mathematics PHD in State Center Iowa? The place has literally two restaurants.
Cry me a fucking river if you don't understand that you have to follow the job. We're not telling you that you need to go live like a gypsy, never establishing roots. (Although if you can do that, there's some great money to be had.) You just have to move once to be in an area that can support you.
I fully understand that it's a lot nicer if you can be close to your family. Especially when there's grandkids. But if the choice is a upper-middle income away from mommy, or AN EXCESS OF THREE YEARS UNEMPLOYMENT, come on dude.
Sounds about right for Slashdot.
But I actually do like a good book, music, and I've got favorite artists. I even occasionally pay for it. This is a direct measurement of how much I value the arts. This is their income. This is what that artsy industry needs to survive on. Welcome to capitalism.
Literature though? Literature professors? They mostly read. And what they do write primarily targets other literature fans. Economically it's just so much masturbation. It moves money about the literature crowd, but there's no money coming in. The sort of thing people have as a hobby on the side that COSTS money.
But hey, I'm actually a big fan of the idea that basic needs should be provided for. Enough calories to keep off starvation. A roof over your head. Enough space to stretch out as you sleep. A safety net to catch people down on their luck. To let them take risks. And yeah, to keep the perpetual dropouts from dying in the street or jumping me for loose change. But if no-one is going to buy your art, get used to being a starving artist.
Politics, war, and business. Because it's easy to sway, invade, and capitalize those silly artists who haven't even heard of a naked short, a dead drop, or a punji stick.
There's a good argument out there that con men, while hideous scum of the earth that deserve all the horrors we can inflict upon them, make the populace a little wiser.
Oh I understand the Fed is doing a job by controlling inflation. I just think a decentralized currency with no master and no money printers would be a good thing. You're most certainly right about it being novel.
I think you need to relearn what "built by" means.
Holding excess cash, whether it be dollars [...is foolish]
Yes, that's exactly right. And that's the goal of the central bank that's in charge of inflation. They, and their bosses, don't want you to just hang onto your cash. They want you to use it as a medium of exchange, but when it comes to savings, they want you to invest it in other things. That helps the economy. "Putting savings to work" as it were.
or [holding excess] bitcoins, is foolish due to inflation
Uhhhhhh.... yeah.... that was kind of a concern a while ago when coins were easier to mine, but now that they're harder to crunch it's not really a worry. I mean, this was one of the leading reasons that bitcoins was considered viable. It solves inflation. I mean, the part where people just say "fuck it" and print more money for themselves. You can't do that with bitcoins. There's no central authority to control inflation, it's going to swing in value according to it's ACTUAL VALUE without politicians and the FED having a say about how many bitcoins they get to genesis.
and in the case of bitcoin exchange rate risk.
Wow... So did you know you can exchange dollars for yen, euros, or reals? Yeah, they all have exchange rates that kinda go up and down. Just.. you know... fyi.
Yes, they're parasites, but they're better than the older parasites that did the same thing and gouged us even more. All the old-money players that are proposing rules to stop the HFT from eating their lunch can't be trusted any more than you trust the HFT.
The bid-ask gap does end up getting reduced because there's more than one HFT and they compete with each other.
Also note, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, that this sort of game only works between exchanges. If you have a $10 bid and someone asks at $9.99 ON THE SAME EXCHANGE, the exchange simply hooks you up and there's an established way to deal with the difference. But the NYSE and the London Stock exchange and Mt.Gox don't work with each other like that. Since you're on different exchanges, you don't know about the guy with the ask price. HFT types work really hard at being the first to notice that imbalance. Or "gap" if you will. If we had some sort of unified global exchange, this would all be moot.
Every item in your hands was built and delivered to you by somebody with more money than you.
My mouse and keyboard were made by wage-slave labor in China. One was delivered to me by a wage-slave retail kid and the other was from some guy in a delivery truck I never saw.
Jesus fucking Christ, what kind of mouse do you use?
It was mentioned on NPR earlier. They had some currency consultant on and they were talking about Bitcoins. They were traded on "Mount Gox". He thought there was a huge bitcoin bubble, that people were investing in them as gamble, and that he expected the currency would get regulated in the near future.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA, Oh boy, WOW dude... just... wow.
If they get too bad they no longer have a job. (Ask the Bakers at Hostess)
And they'd point out that their last 7 CEOs in the last decade probably had a hand in pile driving the company into the dirt. That the golden parachutes, bonuses, and wage increases all while the company tanked were unwarranted. And they'd say the raiding of the pension funds were outright fraud and should put people in prison.
Ask them who should suffer when a company shrinks and I'd like to think they'd say "everyone", and not just the workers. But they probably wouldn't because they're pissed that profits are privatized and losses are socialized. Let's hope they get bought by someone who doesn't have their head up their ass and they have some management that does more than simply collect their bonus and ditch the company. Because the hardships they've gone through are undeserved.
So shut your trap you little Kock-sucker.
Yeah probably. But then again, you're probably the sort that thinks if they see an ad for medicine while they get mail from your doctor that there's a jackboot thug watching a monitor with your email on it.
Wait a sec... Holy shit dude, you need to get a new doctor! Email is not secure or private. If your doctor emailed you about something you didn't want anyone to know, he is violating HIPPA all over the place.
Correct, Google doesn't "sit around reading people's email". You are also correct in that they "mine users's mail for advertising purposes". If you don't understand the difference you may not belong on Slashdot.
I can tell you WITHIN SECONDS of turning on a variety of appliances BLINDFOLDED and from up to 5 meters distance.
Yeah, my fridge buzzes too.
The Muslim Brotherhood isn't isolationist like, e.g., the Taliban nor do they have anything in particular against the West
Oh, well they don't sound all that bad...
They're more like what you'd get with Pat Robertson and his ultra-conservative compatriots controlling all three branches of the government.
OH GOD KILL IT WITH FIRE!
So how do you distinguish between atheists and those who follow nontheistic religions?
Ugh, this again. This is one of those things that gets slung around constantly when Christians and Atheists bicker. Ok, just to cut to the chase a little: On a philosophical level, everything you think is true has to be accepted on faith... at SOME level. But once an idea like this applies to literally EVERYTHING, the idea doesn't mean much when you're trying to distinguish between baseless religions and established facts. Which is why philosophy is bloody worthless.
But here we go! So if you think about it, you have to have faith that 1+1=2. What? Isn't that obvious? No, actually it isn't. You have to define what '1', '2' '+' and '=' are. And you can do that. You have a set of integers, you define actions like addition and equivalency. But wait, what do you mean by "integer", or even "set"? Well a set is a group of concepts. And before you can have a set and you put things in it, you have to nail down the idea that you can have an empty set.
How do you prove that the idea of an empty set is possible? You don't. You just have to accept it. You can call it an axiom if you want, but you have to simply accept that it's true. The other way to describe that is to have faith that it's true. If it's not true, holy moly shit gets weird, but it's not something we can actually prove. High level mathematics is crazy, eh?
If you don't think about it, we usually call that blind faith.
So... just so we can get a guage of what you mean by "extraordinary evidence", do you believe in evolution?
But you know... I really don't think that "Minority get discriminated against, news at 11" is all that extraordinary of a claim.
And if there was a brain scan that identified homosexuals there would be churches that pushed parents to "have their children tested".
But I like to have faith in democracy and that the majority would abstain from such behavior.
It's not illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of their brain activity. Should it be?
I think that's too big of a blanket statement. Leaves out too many details. It's not as simple as that. See below.
Can you judge someone on the basis of their biology?
Well, yes, I can personally judge people based on whatever I damn well feel like. Yay liberty. But if I were to, say, hire someone based on their biology, specifically whether or not they have blond hair, or an Y chromosome, or hadn't hit menopause, or had grey hair, or you know, other biological stuff, sometimes that could land you with a big fat law-suit for discrimination. And rightly so. Other times you need to hire young blonds because it's an acting role, and that's ok.
So the answer is yes and no because it's a bad question that's overly broad.
Is it really that person's fault anymore if a part of their body preselects them to wrongdoing?
Yes. If someone has the gene which makes them ludicrously susceptible to alcohol addiction, it's up to them not to get addicted, break their addiction, know their weaknesses, be a functioning addict and/or otherwise be a functional member of society.
If you have anger-management issues you need to deal with that. We all have strengths and weaknesses, to say that you are not the owner of said traits detracts from what it is that makes you, you. If we separate people from owning their own traits, there's really no incentive to fix them. If being a drunkard is somehow socially acceptable or otherwise excused, we will have more drunkards because more people will stop fighting to fix their issues.
All that said, we generally react poorly to the concept of fault. Rather than punishing those at fault, we should work on fixing them. Rather than trials and judgements being about what punishment people deserve, it should be more like "yep, you're fucked up, time to fix you". And just so you don't think I'm some bleeding-heart hippy, some cases aren't worth fixing, and it's time to take them out back and shoot them or lock them away forever so they don't hurt others.
Where does liability start?
Your actions. I reject the idea that the "pre-disposed-to-violence" types are not liable for the violence they cause. We all have our collection of quirks, oddities, and problems. If you cannot contain your problems and be a functional member of society, you're liable for that. Sociopaths don't get a free-ride for murder, drunkards don't get excused for public intoxication.
Can you fix people?
To an extent, for most problems. The easily-addicted sort need to clean up and stay away from the sauce. The violent types need to channel that in constructive way or punch a bag of potatoes rather than building a doomsday device. Counseling, planning, therapy, medication, and such can help, but they can't inject 20cc's of wisdom yet, and there are a LOT of issues we don't understand yet. And despite the best counselors, a willing reformee, a known problem, and all the right steps... sometimes the flaw is just too deep. We shouldn't spend 50 years of resources so Manson-types can go be janitors for 5 years before they kick the bucket.
Should you?
It depends. For convicted felons? Yes, I think they've lost the right to be fuckups and the fix, if any, should be forced upon them. They cannot be trusted to contain/deal with/or fix themselves. For friends and family, yes, because you love them. You should do what you can to try and fix them, and they have the option to accept or refuse. For others? eeeeh, as long as it's no skin off my teeth I'd say live and let live.
There's this whole idea of society and by helping others I help myself. The whole "rising tides lift all boats" thing. But by and far the attempts I've see to try and pro-actively fix aspects of society have caused more problems
Damn, read that as "sandwich" and thought I was at the onion... maybe I'm hungry.
Because when I went to school it was to automate those guys out of a job.
I mean, that was my "big plan" at least. I got a nice well rounded education and went off into entirely different fields of programming and software engineering, but senior design project was to automate a gas-powered helicopter. We had a big clunky accelerometer that fell off a fighter jet from a friend in the industry. Ludicrously advanced for students at the time and horribly outmatched by a wiimote a few years later. All in all it was a good project. Would have been nice to work professionally on autonomous UAVs, but that's a little hard to do in Iowa.
But talk about a degree with a shelf life.
Buddhism. Everyone comes back in a free-for-all deathfest and only the truly enlightened manage to step away from the keyboard.
It'd be Hinduism if it were TF2. You come back, but on the same team and generally in the same role.
I like it. A place for old cynical bastards to laugh at young entrepreneurial types.
We can call it BeatDown. That's right, the startups get beat down.
You put out a beatdown of 1/100th of his "predicted value" in 10 years and someone buys that, giving you that money.
You agree to buy one 1/100th his company worth of shares in 10 years and give it to the investor.
If the startup goes broke, you owe nothing. If they turn into the next facebook, yer SCREWED. (Buy hey, that's pretty rare)