I've been working "regular" jobs since 1978. None of the jobs I have worked were "9-5"; all required 8 hours of actual work; some had a nominal 30 minute lunch break, others 1 hour, planned into the schedule. Much of my "career" was in one company that gave all of its workers flexibility in start/stop times (and even in the number of hours worked per day), but we had to have 80 hours of actual work in every two weeks.
I was able to afford a house in my first full time job after graduating college with a B.S.; but that was because I was being paid southern California wages while working in Tennessee. Among my co-workers there was always a mix of single-earner and dual-earner families; individual circumstances varied, but there was not a general condition where one spouse worked and the other stayed home.
Retirement is looking pretty likely/good now, mostly because I've had a two-earner household since getting married, my spouse and I share similar economic traits, and we have both (even before getting married) saved the maximum that we could in CODA/401(k) plans at work, put away additional money to boot, only owned two different homes in 20+ years, paid cash for our cars and drove them for 15 to 20 years, don't have cable TV, (mostly) avoided personal mobile phones, and engaged in other "saving by not spending" behaviors.
I've heard stories about the 1950s and 1960s in the US where single-earner households were the norm, everyone had a comfortable middle class lifestyle, and looked forward to a comfortable retirement. I think those stories had about as much reality in them as the idea that just a few decades ago everyone really worked 9-5, regular Joe's could afford a house plus a car or two in a single earner household, etc.
Where I live, electric power is still too cheap (on the order of $0.11/KWH) to economically justify a private solar installation. If the PV panels drop another 50% in price that will change (for me, anyway). If we can figure out how to account for total lifetime system costs for all energy production solutions and charge accordingly, the current PV panel cost might work economically.
Having seen lives ruined by drugs, I'm not sure that the characterization of drug-related crimes as "victimless" is accurate, especially as one moves up the ladder of drugs. Having said that, I believe that penalties for certain crimes are out of balance than for others, and effort spent normalizing crime and punishment Would reduce minority incarceration. I'm not convinced it would reduce it to the same ratios as the general population, however.
Solar is not a fuel per se, but is the exploitation of an energy source just as any other system that helps us do work. The original energy generation just takes place outside of the system, unlike (for example) combustion-based energy production where the system must first combust a fuel, then capture the energy that is generated.
Wind power, wave power, and standard hydro-electric power also rely on exploiting energy generated outside of the system. Excluding forms of energy capture/exploitation that don't generate the energy within the system boundary seems somewhat arbitrary.
I am not a physicist, so this is just me muddling through, but why do you think that an 8 or 9 minute delay in the gravity force would cause Newtonian physics not to work? If the attractive force due to gravity is constantly in effect, it wouldn't matter where the planet Earth was 8 or 9 minutes prior to its present location, the force would have still been felt. If the force suddenly switched off it would be interesting, because theoretically the planet would continue to orbit for another 8 or 9 minutes, but it would require a sensor much closer to the sun (that could survive the loss of the attractive force, and that could be retrieved and accessed later) with a synchronized clock to show that the event that switched off gravity happened earlier (because no evidence of the event could arrive at planet Earth earlier than the loss of gravity because of the universal speed limit).
Who keeps an eye on the Kiva robots as they roam the stacks... how do we know that they haven't worked out a primitive tapping or wiggling communications protocol (like bees) that they can use without alerting the IT staff? This could be how it begins...
I guess I naively thought that seniors would have have been one of the segments of the population least affected by the "financial downturn" of 2008 or so. Seniors who already owned their houses, either outright or with a fixed rate mortgage, would not have been forced out unless they were dependent on an income stream from an investment asset mix that was too risky for their age. My mom, for example, wasn't affected at all; her house was paid for, social security was her primary income, and her appropriate-for-her-age asset mix for her small IRA was unaffected by the financial shenanigans that unfolded. Camp hosts that I've met made a deliberate choice to live "on the road" (often in a pricey RV). They like being mobile, and enjoy being able to park rent-free in a campground for the season.
I wonder if the author has evidence or surveys showing the origins of this worker population?
It's not even a "notch"; its substantial width precludes that term being the correct way to describe it, except in the poorly educated mind of the journalist who first referred to it in that fashion. It's a sensor bar that doesn't extend all the way across the phone, with little display areas extending up on both sides for some reason. And getting worked up about it seems like a tempest in a teapot. It is remotely possible that it is a marketing ploy to gain mindshare/free publicity.
I have a Mac with a 3 TB Fusion drive; it's from 2013. It is a virtual disk with two physical volumes, one electronic, one rotating magnetic media. It automatically migrates frequently used files to the electronic media, and less frequently used files to the rotating magnetic media. It works great; my Mac boots quickly; apps start quickly. I have a decent amount of storage for videos, pictures, and audio at the same time. I don't view it as a way to "cheap out" but rather a clever bit of engineering that gives me the best of both types of media.
1. Joe Citizen is held liable for paying back Big Corporation for goods/services that Big Corporation claims it provided to Joe Citizen, on the flimsy basis that an individual claiming to be Joe Citizen showed Big Corporation Joe Citizen's name and social security number (as a ridiculously low-level of proof that they really were Joe Citizen), or
2. If Joe Citizen wants to buy things on credit, Joe Citizen provides a picture of himself along with some other credentials to prove he really *is* Joe Citizen?
The "ID to vote" issue is completely separate, I believe. It doesn't involve an innocent person from trying to prove a negative - that they didn't get goods/services someone else claims that they did. The current hoops that an "identity theft" victim must go through only exist because of a meme perpetuated by creditors that their current extremely weak process of authenticating the individuals to whom they provide goods and services is sufficient to warrant the legal system to putting the burden of proof on an individual that they DIDN'T get goods and services that the creditor claims that they did. We need a few court cases where the creditor trots out nothing more than a piece of paper with an individual's social security number on it as proof that they provided goods and services to the individual to whom the social security number belongs, whereupon the judge laughs and dismisses the case for a lack of evidence, in order to turn things around. Once creditors know that they can't depend on the court system to be their "enforcer" unless they have much better proof of a debt, the creditors will come up with an improved system quickly, I think.
Using an SSN (or other nationally valid identifier) for "identity" is one thing; using it as *proof* of identity (i.e., as an authenticator) is another. Any business using an SSN as an authenticator and trying to hang a debt around the neck of the person identified by the SSN should be laughed out of court.
The burden should not be on the shoulders of the "identity theft" victim to prove the negative (that they did not get the goods/services the creditor is claiming that they got), but rather on the shoulders of the creditor, to prove to just whom they gave those goods and services. As soon as that is recognized in law, I think a lot of the "identity theft" problems will go away. It may be harder to obtain goods and services on credit, however.
I have heard that the "end run" around the insider trading rule is for the insiders to have standing orders to sell at periodic intervals, all publicly disclosed as required. Then, if the insider determines that they DON'T want to sell, they cancel the order. If something comes up that makes them want to sell, they take no action, and the sales goes through automatically.
Well... looking to the future, perhaps the US should eliminate tax incentives for having children (no more deductions for dependents). Keeping incentives to increase the population while we are looking at needing much less labor and the world is looking at possible over population problems seems a bit out of touch.
I don't think that there is a silver bullet RF-based last mile solution that would remove the need to deal with the issue of cable/phone providers and whether they are classified as a utility or otherwise need government regulation to keep the "free market" from steamrolling the general population.
Whether or not RF is suitable as the last mile depends on the number of subscribers and their bandwidth expectations. Guided solutions (wire/cable/optical fiber) have far greater capacity and better reliability than RF solutions in general. Today's wireless could probably easily handle the bandwidth expectations of 15 years ago, but now we want high bandwidth streaming audio/video, low latency game playing, and other applications that go way beyond surfing the web, sending e-mail, etc.
I've been doing networking for 29 years, and it is not unusual to experience people without a clue talking about how to do this or that in a manner that exposed their cluelessness to knowledgeable individuals, but sounded insightful to others. I've noticed that this behavior is more general; people seem to assume that what they only know from the outside must be easy, while what they know in more detail (especially if it's their vocation) is hard. As a consultant, I learned to listen to their ideas, pull out the nuggets of their needs, and (if necessary) educate them on aspects that were not as easy as they thought. I did not act in as disciplined a manner all the time.
RFID cards for toll booths started out as optional; now there are tolls that can only be paid using the RFID card (or, in some cases, a camera takes a picture of your license plate and you pay the toll plus a $3 surcharge for the "convenience").
I'm confused; there isn't any reason why Comcast can't sell a particular service to automobile manufacturers, or self-driving car users, etc. Any ISP can provide a speciality service to anyone they want to provide it to, at least that is my understanding.
I thought that the idea of net neutrality and common carrier status is that if I (a consumer) purchase a general purpose Internet service, Comcast (the provider), doesn't interfere with the data that I want to transmit/receive over that service, regardless of where the data comes from; and doesn't start charging more just because the data is coming from source A rather than B.
or the people who think its cool to store their huge collections of personal pictures and movies on their work desktop computer and jam up the backups
or the people who think its cool to stream audio and even video all day long onto their desktop off of the Internet (and then complain about slow Internet access)
or the people who never met a piece of freeware that they could say "no" to
There may be organizations filled with people who all know to do the "right" think and not the wrong thing, but - in my experience, once you get beyond 100 or so people, the odds of having incidents and problems caused by individuals who had no clue what the impact of their actions would be start to climb exponentially, training or no
I have almost the same problem with Amazon shipments that are sent USPS (which is a fair number of them). My neighborhood has mailbox kiosks that USPS puts mail into. If a package won't fit in the kiosk, sometimes (depending on the USPS carrier) it will end up on my doorstop. There is also a good chance that I'll just get a slip of paper in my mailbox along with a notice that the USPS carrier "attempted delivery," and I have to drive to the post office the next day to pick up my package. I hate having to make a trip into town just to pick up a package; that's one of the reasons I bought it from Amazon in the first place - avoid burning the gasoline to drive myself into town and back.
Having said that, I'm all for the USPS shipping charge being the actual cost of providing the service. USPS should not be subsidizing my package delivery.
I didn't mean to imply that anyone needed to be blamed or was at fault. For instance, I could set out to move a 2000 pound rock using my bare hands, with no tools/levers/etc. I would probably fail, but I don't think anyone would blame me for my failure. So it can be when economic circumstances change, and a place that *was* viable becomes no longer viable. Sometimes people come up with clever answers - a new industry, some kind of tourism, etc. But not always.
I did a (very) small amount of work back in the 2000s in North Dakota. The population was dwindling, and people (through the government) were trying to figure out how to be viable, and especially how to keep everyone from leaving. The idea at the time was focused on making sure that the kids got a 21st education with the hope that some of them would stick around and work virtually. Then improved methods of oil extraction were developed and North Dakota had a bit of a boom. And so it goes.
"governments" are fundamentally institutions created by the people whom they serve. So, yes "governments" should strive to make the area in which their constituents live economically viable. However, that's *local government* in the US. The state government doesn't have a duty to make every local hamlet economically viable, nor does the federal government have a duty to make every state economically viable.
So if the people must move, then they (and their government) have failed.
Thanks for posting the list. Maine has an interesting policy: a regular merchant can't charge a surcharge to someone using a credit card, but the *government* can do so. I can't fathom how the lawmakers thought it was ok for the government, but not for the merchants. Methinks they are a misguided attempt to "protect" consumers who use credit cards, but why its ok to force merchants to accept a lower price from some people than from others is beyond my understanding.
I have to agree - I think the "Fuck You" theory is the best explanation for Trump as president. Maybe we will get some better candidates (from both sides) next time.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been working "regular" jobs since 1978. None of the jobs I have worked were "9-5"; all required 8 hours of actual work; some had a nominal 30 minute lunch break, others 1 hour, planned into the schedule. Much of my "career" was in one company that gave all of its workers flexibility in start/stop times (and even in the number of hours worked per day), but we had to have 80 hours of actual work in every two weeks.
I was able to afford a house in my first full time job after graduating college with a B.S.; but that was because I was being paid southern California wages while working in Tennessee. Among my co-workers there was always a mix of single-earner and dual-earner families; individual circumstances varied, but there was not a general condition where one spouse worked and the other stayed home.
Retirement is looking pretty likely/good now, mostly because I've had a two-earner household since getting married, my spouse and I share similar economic traits, and we have both (even before getting married) saved the maximum that we could in CODA/401(k) plans at work, put away additional money to boot, only owned two different homes in 20+ years, paid cash for our cars and drove them for 15 to 20 years, don't have cable TV, (mostly) avoided personal mobile phones, and engaged in other "saving by not spending" behaviors.
I've heard stories about the 1950s and 1960s in the US where single-earner households were the norm, everyone had a comfortable middle class lifestyle, and looked forward to a comfortable retirement. I think those stories had about as much reality in them as the idea that just a few decades ago everyone really worked 9-5, regular Joe's could afford a house plus a car or two in a single earner household, etc.
Where I live, electric power is still too cheap (on the order of $0.11/KWH) to economically justify a private solar installation. If the PV panels drop another 50% in price that will change (for me, anyway). If we can figure out how to account for total lifetime system costs for all energy production solutions and charge accordingly, the current PV panel cost might work economically.
Having seen lives ruined by drugs, I'm not sure that the characterization of drug-related crimes as "victimless" is accurate, especially as one moves up the ladder of drugs. Having said that, I believe that penalties for certain crimes are out of balance than for others, and effort spent normalizing crime and punishment Would reduce minority incarceration. I'm not convinced it would reduce it to the same ratios as the general population, however.
Solar is not a fuel per se, but is the exploitation of an energy source just as any other system that helps us do work. The original energy generation just takes place outside of the system, unlike (for example) combustion-based energy production where the system must first combust a fuel, then capture the energy that is generated.
Wind power, wave power, and standard hydro-electric power also rely on exploiting energy generated outside of the system. Excluding forms of energy capture/exploitation that don't generate the energy within the system boundary seems somewhat arbitrary.
Just remember, everyone will be dancing naked. Everyone. Not just the ones in your febrile imagination.
I am not a physicist, so this is just me muddling through, but why do you think that an 8 or 9 minute delay in the gravity force would cause Newtonian physics not to work? If the attractive force due to gravity is constantly in effect, it wouldn't matter where the planet Earth was 8 or 9 minutes prior to its present location, the force would have still been felt. If the force suddenly switched off it would be interesting, because theoretically the planet would continue to orbit for another 8 or 9 minutes, but it would require a sensor much closer to the sun (that could survive the loss of the attractive force, and that could be retrieved and accessed later) with a synchronized clock to show that the event that switched off gravity happened earlier (because no evidence of the event could arrive at planet Earth earlier than the loss of gravity because of the universal speed limit).
Who keeps an eye on the Kiva robots as they roam the stacks... how do we know that they haven't worked out a primitive tapping or wiggling communications protocol (like bees) that they can use without alerting the IT staff? This could be how it begins...
I guess I naively thought that seniors would have have been one of the segments of the population least affected by the "financial downturn" of 2008 or so. Seniors who already owned their houses, either outright or with a fixed rate mortgage, would not have been forced out unless they were dependent on an income stream from an investment asset mix that was too risky for their age. My mom, for example, wasn't affected at all; her house was paid for, social security was her primary income, and her appropriate-for-her-age asset mix for her small IRA was unaffected by the financial shenanigans that unfolded. Camp hosts that I've met made a deliberate choice to live "on the road" (often in a pricey RV). They like being mobile, and enjoy being able to park rent-free in a campground for the season.
I wonder if the author has evidence or surveys showing the origins of this worker population?
It's not even a "notch"; its substantial width precludes that term being the correct way to describe it, except in the poorly educated mind of the journalist who first referred to it in that fashion. It's a sensor bar that doesn't extend all the way across the phone, with little display areas extending up on both sides for some reason. And getting worked up about it seems like a tempest in a teapot. It is remotely possible that it is a marketing ploy to gain mindshare/free publicity.
I have a Mac with a 3 TB Fusion drive; it's from 2013. It is a virtual disk with two physical volumes, one electronic, one rotating magnetic media. It automatically migrates frequently used files to the electronic media, and less frequently used files to the rotating magnetic media. It works great; my Mac boots quickly; apps start quickly. I have a decent amount of storage for videos, pictures, and audio at the same time. I don't view it as a way to "cheap out" but rather a clever bit of engineering that gives me the best of both types of media.
Which is more ridiculous:
1. Joe Citizen is held liable for paying back Big Corporation for goods/services that Big Corporation claims it provided to Joe Citizen, on the flimsy basis that an individual claiming to be Joe Citizen showed Big Corporation Joe Citizen's name and social security number (as a ridiculously low-level of proof that they really were Joe Citizen), or
2. If Joe Citizen wants to buy things on credit, Joe Citizen provides a picture of himself along with some other credentials to prove he really *is* Joe Citizen?
The "ID to vote" issue is completely separate, I believe. It doesn't involve an innocent person from trying to prove a negative - that they didn't get goods/services someone else claims that they did. The current hoops that an "identity theft" victim must go through only exist because of a meme perpetuated by creditors that their current extremely weak process of authenticating the individuals to whom they provide goods and services is sufficient to warrant the legal system to putting the burden of proof on an individual that they DIDN'T get goods and services that the creditor claims that they did. We need a few court cases where the creditor trots out nothing more than a piece of paper with an individual's social security number on it as proof that they provided goods and services to the individual to whom the social security number belongs, whereupon the judge laughs and dismisses the case for a lack of evidence, in order to turn things around. Once creditors know that they can't depend on the court system to be their "enforcer" unless they have much better proof of a debt, the creditors will come up with an improved system quickly, I think.
Using an SSN (or other nationally valid identifier) for "identity" is one thing; using it as *proof* of identity (i.e., as an authenticator) is another. Any business using an SSN as an authenticator and trying to hang a debt around the neck of the person identified by the SSN should be laughed out of court.
The burden should not be on the shoulders of the "identity theft" victim to prove the negative (that they did not get the goods/services the creditor is claiming that they got), but rather on the shoulders of the creditor, to prove to just whom they gave those goods and services. As soon as that is recognized in law, I think a lot of the "identity theft" problems will go away. It may be harder to obtain goods and services on credit, however.
I have heard that the "end run" around the insider trading rule is for the insiders to have standing orders to sell at periodic intervals, all publicly disclosed as required. Then, if the insider determines that they DON'T want to sell, they cancel the order. If something comes up that makes them want to sell, they take no action, and the sales goes through automatically.
Well... looking to the future, perhaps the US should eliminate tax incentives for having children (no more deductions for dependents). Keeping incentives to increase the population while we are looking at needing much less labor and the world is looking at possible over population problems seems a bit out of touch.
Can you hear me now?
I don't think that there is a silver bullet RF-based last mile solution that would remove the need to deal with the issue of cable/phone providers and whether they are classified as a utility or otherwise need government regulation to keep the "free market" from steamrolling the general population.
Whether or not RF is suitable as the last mile depends on the number of subscribers and their bandwidth expectations. Guided solutions (wire/cable/optical fiber) have far greater capacity and better reliability than RF solutions in general. Today's wireless could probably easily handle the bandwidth expectations of 15 years ago, but now we want high bandwidth streaming audio/video, low latency game playing, and other applications that go way beyond surfing the web, sending e-mail, etc.
I've been doing networking for 29 years, and it is not unusual to experience people without a clue talking about how to do this or that in a manner that exposed their cluelessness to knowledgeable individuals, but sounded insightful to others. I've noticed that this behavior is more general; people seem to assume that what they only know from the outside must be easy, while what they know in more detail (especially if it's their vocation) is hard. As a consultant, I learned to listen to their ideas, pull out the nuggets of their needs, and (if necessary) educate them on aspects that were not as easy as they thought. I did not act in as disciplined a manner all the time.
RFID cards for toll booths started out as optional; now there are tolls that can only be paid using the RFID card (or, in some cases, a camera takes a picture of your license plate and you pay the toll plus a $3 surcharge for the "convenience").
Could chip implants become required?
I'm confused; there isn't any reason why Comcast can't sell a particular service to automobile manufacturers, or self-driving car users, etc. Any ISP can provide a speciality service to anyone they want to provide it to, at least that is my understanding.
I thought that the idea of net neutrality and common carrier status is that if I (a consumer) purchase a general purpose Internet service, Comcast (the provider), doesn't interfere with the data that I want to transmit/receive over that service, regardless of where the data comes from; and doesn't start charging more just because the data is coming from source A rather than B.
or the people who think its cool to store their huge collections of personal pictures and movies on their work desktop computer and jam up the backups
or the people who think its cool to stream audio and even video all day long onto their desktop off of the Internet (and then complain about slow Internet access)
or the people who never met a piece of freeware that they could say "no" to
There may be organizations filled with people who all know to do the "right" think and not the wrong thing, but - in my experience, once you get beyond 100 or so people, the odds of having incidents and problems caused by individuals who had no clue what the impact of their actions would be start to climb exponentially, training or no
I have almost the same problem with Amazon shipments that are sent USPS (which is a fair number of them). My neighborhood has mailbox kiosks that USPS puts mail into. If a package won't fit in the kiosk, sometimes (depending on the USPS carrier) it will end up on my doorstop. There is also a good chance that I'll just get a slip of paper in my mailbox along with a notice that the USPS carrier "attempted delivery," and I have to drive to the post office the next day to pick up my package. I hate having to make a trip into town just to pick up a package; that's one of the reasons I bought it from Amazon in the first place - avoid burning the gasoline to drive myself into town and back.
Having said that, I'm all for the USPS shipping charge being the actual cost of providing the service. USPS should not be subsidizing my package delivery.
I didn't mean to imply that anyone needed to be blamed or was at fault. For instance, I could set out to move a 2000 pound rock using my bare hands, with no tools/levers/etc. I would probably fail, but I don't think anyone would blame me for my failure. So it can be when economic circumstances change, and a place that *was* viable becomes no longer viable. Sometimes people come up with clever answers - a new industry, some kind of tourism, etc. But not always.
I did a (very) small amount of work back in the 2000s in North Dakota. The population was dwindling, and people (through the government) were trying to figure out how to be viable, and especially how to keep everyone from leaving. The idea at the time was focused on making sure that the kids got a 21st education with the hope that some of them would stick around and work virtually. Then improved methods of oil extraction were developed and North Dakota had a bit of a boom. And so it goes.
"governments" are fundamentally institutions created by the people whom they serve. So, yes "governments" should strive to make the area in which their constituents live economically viable. However, that's *local government* in the US. The state government doesn't have a duty to make every local hamlet economically viable, nor does the federal government have a duty to make every state economically viable.
So if the people must move, then they (and their government) have failed.
Thanks for posting the list. Maine has an interesting policy: a regular merchant can't charge a surcharge to someone using a credit card, but the *government* can do so. I can't fathom how the lawmakers thought it was ok for the government, but not for the merchants. Methinks they are a misguided attempt to "protect" consumers who use credit cards, but why its ok to force merchants to accept a lower price from some people than from others is beyond my understanding.
I have to agree - I think the "Fuck You" theory is the best explanation for Trump as president. Maybe we will get some better candidates (from both sides) next time.