The only way it's economically viable for most people to get someone else to go shopping at a retail store for them is to pay that person much, much less than it otherwise would cost conventionally to do that.
The gig economy seems entirely oriented around pay schemes that are so complicated that most of the people signing up to do the work can't figure out up front they won't make any money doing the work.
I think some of these mistakes are really kind of interesting in an epistemological way. They remind me of a child making what are apparently nonsense associations between things that turn out to be weirdly insightful. Adults don't make the same comparisons mostly because they've been taught they're wrong, not because they actually are.
but it's not at all clear that the existence of such businesses offers any benefit to society to justify the many risks they inherently create
I'm not defending Facebook, but I think economists would argue that advertising and marketing are major business inefficiencies -- you can spend a lot less and be a lot more effective if you have a better idea who should see your ad. I'd imagine the theory goes that consumers get ads more tailored to what they actually are interested in (no more Tampax ads for me) and businesses waste less money on ineffective marketing tasks.
That being said, I think economists are quick to support so-called solutions which appear to address inefficiency but are reluctant to speculate on the costs of the solution because they can't easily quantify concepts like "privacy" or they just make blanket statements that consumers don't really see any utility value in privacy.
Isn't the bigger question "When will virtualization vendors stop supporting it?"
It almost doesn't matter as long as the major virtualization platforms continue to support BIOS boot. Supporting older software on new hardware has long been a strength of virtualization.
The big players like Google, Apple, and Facebook already evade the problem of startups by buying them out. I read someplace they've perverted the so-called startup culture by making getting bought out the number one goal.
And when they don't bother, they just take a page from Microsoft's book and add the startup's features to their own product.
First-past-the-poll voting is reductive and always result in a two party system. You can't vote for the people you want, just the people you agree with more.
We have ranked choice voting in my city for municipal elections. I voted for it when it was up as a charter amendment, but after the recent election I worry it has its own weird flaws.
In a couple of races, the person who got the outright most 1st choice votes lost the election. I can certainly see situations where this happens and it creates a sense of lack of representation.
It also tends to result in a lot of candidates, often with widely overlapping stands on issues. The leading candidates seem prone to co-opt ideas of marginal candidates, which in theory is good because it means that they're adopting issues important to minority (small, not just racial) constituencies. But in practice it felt like me-too-ism and not sincere adoption of those platform ideas.
I also think it prevented meaningful debate on issues during the campaign. 3 of the 5 candidates seemed pretty interchangeable, and I think this kept the debates from being very meaningful, and most of the 3 wound up ultimately supporting one candidate by the final round of voting.
I'd almost prefer a open runoff system, where "round 1" was an election similar to a US primary but not party based (ie, the winners could in theory be members of the same party). Round 1 would reduce the field to the top 3 vote getters, and then round 2 would choose the winner. I think this would reduce the field of minor variant candidates and the second round campaigning would force the candidates to provide more substantive differentiation, and spend less time me-tooing similar candidate positions.
I'm curious if even Amazon has the ability to cut Whole Foods prices significantly without significantly cutting quality.
I'm not a Whole Foods shopper, but it strikes me that a lot of the products in that store are from small scale producers. Amazon could tell them to cut their prices or get lost, but I'm guessing a lot would just choose not to sell at Whole Foods, and I don't think Amazon would be able to find a ton of replacement products.
I also don't think that many of the organic-and-natural type product producers have the scale/ability to make a shitty version of their product that would enable them to meet Amazon pricing demands.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it may just be that the organic-and-natural food segment is just plain expensive and not even Amazon can cut those costs.
You only flat rate what you're guaranteed able to deliver and you must treat the contract of deliverables like it was handed to you directly by Jesus and never touch anything outside the guaranteed deliverable.
Otherwise, you sell your time by the hour. Do you know any attorney or doctor that will take random cases off the street and offer flat rate care? Most will only flat rate a very narrow spectrum of things (bladder infection or uncontested divorce), everything else is billed by the hour because there are too many unknowns and no way to guarantee outcomes.
I have been in consulting for just about 15 years and I've had a number of occasions where clients with fucked up environments have wanted them "fixed" where the only guaranteed fix was replacement and the refused that and told me to try anyway. More than a couple have tried to not pay, insisting "I didn't do anything" -- and the best defense is telling them they're buying my TIME not an OUTCOME.
And when I do negotiate flat rate projects it's for a total dollar figure, NOT a number of hours. I estimate a completion date, but no specific work hours. A handful have sharpened their pencils and tried to argue they were paying too much after the successful completion of a project, estimating my actual work time and dividing into the fee, but very few. These I just show signed contracts to and ask if it's actually their signature on the document, and this shuts them up. If they're actually thoughtful about questioning me (and not just haggling), I explain that flat rate projects have risks, and I have to build in risks mitigation into my fee. Things can and do go sideways, and I always cover my clients (within the scope of the contract) even if it costs me money. But I seldom flat rate unless I know I can eliminate most risks. Sometimes it works out for me, and I make more profit, sometimes I make little profit, but almost never do I lose money.
This isn't harassment, really, it's just ordinary favoritism. I've experienced myself, where I had the expertise and the title, but the favorite/buddy got the work.
Unless you were lucky enough to have roasted meat, probably most everything you ate was some kind of stew or porridge. It was an easy way to extend what meat and animal fats you have while supplementing it with grains or vegetables when they were available. If you kept adding water, it stayed edible for a while over the fire, extending how long you could eat it without a lot of preparation.
And let's not forget that a good soft stew is about the ideal food when your teeth are half rotted out of your head.
Local herbs were probably the most common flavor enhancer, since they were local. And you probably salted the shit out of it if you could afford the salt in some attempt to make it all palatable.
It was designed in the 1980s and the last one was made in 2004.
If I were to hazard a guess, it wasn't designed for remote radio configuration but became so due to some kinds of electronics add-ons or upgrades that created an unexpected vulnerability.
I'd also guess that this problem, if its validated and well-understood from a capability and risk perspective, will just contribute to accelerating plane's economic end of life. I'd imagine some percentage of early 757s have already been retired or moved to freighter roles.
It may be that these security risks are simply mitigated by not flying people on them and converting them into freighters. If Boeing was forced to do anything by carriers, I would imagine they would just turn this into a negotiation for swapping 757s for new planes and convincing freight carriers it's in their interest to buy low-cycle 757s Boeing has converted into freighters for them.
I switched to FreeBSD from Linux ages ago because it was a complete system. Linux was a kernel with a bunch of utilities bolted onto it, and there was That One Day where I was trying to upgrade something and needed a key utility for configuring something and it wouldn't run, and there was no "source" for an updated version. I gave FreeBSD a spin and just liked that everything was a part of a larger whole, and not a bunch of pieces with varying standards.
FreeBSD can have other problems, sometimes certain ports are broken for a long time, for example, but generally speaking the base system always works.
Ironically, I think that "the Linux desktop" actually has contributed to Linux large OSS market share, despite it never quite being the year of the Linux desktop. I think that when distros emerged with out-of-the-box GUIs and browsers a lot of technically oriented people who might not have run a CLI-only OS were able to "get into" Linux because the GUI was just good enough to be basically usable, even if it wasn't feature complete with Windows.
Listen, I'm sorry I called you a lazy nig*er. That wasn't right, I should have called you a motivationally challenged African American. Sorry. Now get over it.
I'm not sure it was that much "easier" years ago. There were a lot more newspapers and in many cities they actually competed with each other, plus there were a lot of ethnic group centric newspapers, often published in a non-English language (although this is probably pre-WWII). You might swing some plurality getting Hearst on your side, but there were still a lot of people who weren't reading his papers or outright didn't trust them.
Plus I think in less media saturated times, people were more influenced by actual real people opinion leaders -- ministers, union bosses, ward boss, local individuals who had real-world local influence. And a lot of those locals had their hands out, too.
I think back in those days it took more effort because you had to influence more actual people with vested interests in what control they had and get them to spread your message. And in many cases the message had to be spread by word of actual mouth -- at the church, at the local tavern, in the union hall, and so on.
Despite the so-called diversity of the Internet, I think it's actually easier now because so much of it can be automated across a handful of electronic networks and people are so much more invested in the value of electronic media. Nobody gives a shit what their minister says, they don't have a union rep and little connection to local political figures. They care what their friends say, but their "friends" are on Facebook or Instagram and are sharing the chosen electronic message.
Fucking "bug fixes" and "performance enhancements" are too generic and hide problems and make it hard to diagnose problems that might occur in new releases.
This matters less with appy app store apps, but few tell you anything more than "We update our app frequently to maximize our tracking and resale of your data".
Fucking Microsoft has become the new king of major patches with almost no data, or at the very least a KB scavenger hunt to get an idea of what was crammed in.
I think Uncle Xi is really serious about corruption and pollution, and my guess is where you have excess pollution you also have corruption.
Xi may be willing to take on some polluters at the cost of higher product prices if he can push those costs onto foreign consumers due to lack of competition. This externalizes the costs of cleaner production. Busting local officials taking bribes in exchange for allowing the pollution helps his image and further solidifies his power.
Solution for this means artificial price supports for crop waste, so that it is converted into appropriate fuel, and reducing all tax exemptions and exclusions for all fossil fuels.
I can't imagine gold as a great way to store wealth unless you plan to hold it for an extremely long time. I think it has too much near-term volatility to be much more than a long-horizon store of wealth.
To me this is kind of like a statement that what we really need is just one common cellular network, and that "competition" between carriers mostly just results in duplication of facilities and underutilized spectrum.
Getting those entrenched vendors to adapt to anything is hard because they want to keep collecting license fees without having to modernize the applications.
I work with a vertical market app that still uses *filesharing* databases. They have a weird lock on a very specific vertical market and their people are literally happy to tell you they have NO plans to move to a SQL-type database application, despite a huge demand for the application on mobile and other non-Windows based platforms where network database connectivity is the only sane thing to do.
Because of this, clients who want any kind of "mobile" access wind up running Windows VMs (some run whole desktop machines, even) so they can RDP over wireless or wifi networks without reliability problems to the file server. It's astonishingly complicated when the vendor could just fix it with a database access paradigm from the late 20th century.
I'm sort of convinced if calendaring could have been hacked into the IMAP standard at some point in the late 1990s, it would have killed off a lot of the Outlook/Exchange momentum.
I didn't think so, but I was responding to the parent poster's comment about "guards to guard the gold vaults".
It does kind of pique my interest generally how a place like Jersey holds Apple's $236 billion cash hoard and what the financial mechanics are of moving that kind of money across international borders and what actual form it takes, and what the security associated with it is.
My guess would just be electronic accounts tied to US treasury instruments, but the security gets to be kind of interesting as Jersey is something of an independent nation. What would happen if the Jersey government and bank officials were coerced into seizing those assets under some kind of US tax probe?
I would think that would be too volatile and kind of bulky, not to mention high risk to move around. Apple's $236 billion cash hoard in Jersey would be something like 300 cubic meters of gold.
I think it's in the nature of the all-volunteer military that they wind up doing the equivalent of HR sanitation work, sifting through a ton of no-other-options people and winding up with some heavy rejects.
I think the military just want these people out and off their cost structures. Reporting them, labeling them and dealing with the inevitable claims that result from anything other than cutting them loose and closing their files would cost them money. Inevitably many would claim their problems were made worse by their experience in the military and demand compensation, treatment, not to mention claims of third parties who would claim they suffered as well.
I know little about this Texas shooter other than his experience of military discipline I've read about, but I kind of wonder if the whole military experience made whatever his problems were worse. Not because the military system is bad per se, but his personality was such an awful fit that everything they did just exacerbated his mental problems.
As an added bonus, I can tell them to punt someone I don't like because I feel like it, and the contracting place removes them. No separation, no work on my side other than locking some accounts. Plus, I don't have to worry about HR and interviews.
In this Weinsteinian era, it starts to make me wonder how much sexual harassment gets swept under the rug in this system.
Pressure some woman for sex and when she doesn't deliver, tell the body shop she's not working out and you want her replaced. Given the generally low ethics associated with body shops, I can totally see them playing into serial offenders and sending them easy prey.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way it's economically viable for most people to get someone else to go shopping at a retail store for them is to pay that person much, much less than it otherwise would cost conventionally to do that.
The gig economy seems entirely oriented around pay schemes that are so complicated that most of the people signing up to do the work can't figure out up front they won't make any money doing the work.
I think some of these mistakes are really kind of interesting in an epistemological way. They remind me of a child making what are apparently nonsense associations between things that turn out to be weirdly insightful. Adults don't make the same comparisons mostly because they've been taught they're wrong, not because they actually are.
but it's not at all clear that the existence of such businesses offers any benefit to society to justify the many risks they inherently create
I'm not defending Facebook, but I think economists would argue that advertising and marketing are major business inefficiencies -- you can spend a lot less and be a lot more effective if you have a better idea who should see your ad. I'd imagine the theory goes that consumers get ads more tailored to what they actually are interested in (no more Tampax ads for me) and businesses waste less money on ineffective marketing tasks.
That being said, I think economists are quick to support so-called solutions which appear to address inefficiency but are reluctant to speculate on the costs of the solution because they can't easily quantify concepts like "privacy" or they just make blanket statements that consumers don't really see any utility value in privacy.
Isn't the bigger question "When will virtualization vendors stop supporting it?"
It almost doesn't matter as long as the major virtualization platforms continue to support BIOS boot. Supporting older software on new hardware has long been a strength of virtualization.
The big players like Google, Apple, and Facebook already evade the problem of startups by buying them out. I read someplace they've perverted the so-called startup culture by making getting bought out the number one goal.
And when they don't bother, they just take a page from Microsoft's book and add the startup's features to their own product.
First-past-the-poll voting is reductive and always result in a two party system. You can't vote for the people you want, just the people you agree with more.
We have ranked choice voting in my city for municipal elections. I voted for it when it was up as a charter amendment, but after the recent election I worry it has its own weird flaws.
In a couple of races, the person who got the outright most 1st choice votes lost the election. I can certainly see situations where this happens and it creates a sense of lack of representation.
It also tends to result in a lot of candidates, often with widely overlapping stands on issues. The leading candidates seem prone to co-opt ideas of marginal candidates, which in theory is good because it means that they're adopting issues important to minority (small, not just racial) constituencies. But in practice it felt like me-too-ism and not sincere adoption of those platform ideas.
I also think it prevented meaningful debate on issues during the campaign. 3 of the 5 candidates seemed pretty interchangeable, and I think this kept the debates from being very meaningful, and most of the 3 wound up ultimately supporting one candidate by the final round of voting.
I'd almost prefer a open runoff system, where "round 1" was an election similar to a US primary but not party based (ie, the winners could in theory be members of the same party). Round 1 would reduce the field to the top 3 vote getters, and then round 2 would choose the winner. I think this would reduce the field of minor variant candidates and the second round campaigning would force the candidates to provide more substantive differentiation, and spend less time me-tooing similar candidate positions.
I'm curious if even Amazon has the ability to cut Whole Foods prices significantly without significantly cutting quality.
I'm not a Whole Foods shopper, but it strikes me that a lot of the products in that store are from small scale producers. Amazon could tell them to cut their prices or get lost, but I'm guessing a lot would just choose not to sell at Whole Foods, and I don't think Amazon would be able to find a ton of replacement products.
I also don't think that many of the organic-and-natural type product producers have the scale/ability to make a shitty version of their product that would enable them to meet Amazon pricing demands.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it may just be that the organic-and-natural food segment is just plain expensive and not even Amazon can cut those costs.
No!
You only flat rate what you're guaranteed able to deliver and you must treat the contract of deliverables like it was handed to you directly by Jesus and never touch anything outside the guaranteed deliverable.
Otherwise, you sell your time by the hour. Do you know any attorney or doctor that will take random cases off the street and offer flat rate care? Most will only flat rate a very narrow spectrum of things (bladder infection or uncontested divorce), everything else is billed by the hour because there are too many unknowns and no way to guarantee outcomes.
I have been in consulting for just about 15 years and I've had a number of occasions where clients with fucked up environments have wanted them "fixed" where the only guaranteed fix was replacement and the refused that and told me to try anyway. More than a couple have tried to not pay, insisting "I didn't do anything" -- and the best defense is telling them they're buying my TIME not an OUTCOME.
And when I do negotiate flat rate projects it's for a total dollar figure, NOT a number of hours. I estimate a completion date, but no specific work hours. A handful have sharpened their pencils and tried to argue they were paying too much after the successful completion of a project, estimating my actual work time and dividing into the fee, but very few. These I just show signed contracts to and ask if it's actually their signature on the document, and this shuts them up. If they're actually thoughtful about questioning me (and not just haggling), I explain that flat rate projects have risks, and I have to build in risks mitigation into my fee. Things can and do go sideways, and I always cover my clients (within the scope of the contract) even if it costs me money. But I seldom flat rate unless I know I can eliminate most risks. Sometimes it works out for me, and I make more profit, sometimes I make little profit, but almost never do I lose money.
This isn't harassment, really, it's just ordinary favoritism. I've experienced myself, where I had the expertise and the title, but the favorite/buddy got the work.
Unless you were lucky enough to have roasted meat, probably most everything you ate was some kind of stew or porridge. It was an easy way to extend what meat and animal fats you have while supplementing it with grains or vegetables when they were available. If you kept adding water, it stayed edible for a while over the fire, extending how long you could eat it without a lot of preparation.
And let's not forget that a good soft stew is about the ideal food when your teeth are half rotted out of your head.
Local herbs were probably the most common flavor enhancer, since they were local. And you probably salted the shit out of it if you could afford the salt in some attempt to make it all palatable.
It was designed in the 1980s and the last one was made in 2004.
If I were to hazard a guess, it wasn't designed for remote radio configuration but became so due to some kinds of electronics add-ons or upgrades that created an unexpected vulnerability.
I'd also guess that this problem, if its validated and well-understood from a capability and risk perspective, will just contribute to accelerating plane's economic end of life. I'd imagine some percentage of early 757s have already been retired or moved to freighter roles.
It may be that these security risks are simply mitigated by not flying people on them and converting them into freighters. If Boeing was forced to do anything by carriers, I would imagine they would just turn this into a negotiation for swapping 757s for new planes and convincing freight carriers it's in their interest to buy low-cycle 757s Boeing has converted into freighters for them.
I switched to FreeBSD from Linux ages ago because it was a complete system. Linux was a kernel with a bunch of utilities bolted onto it, and there was That One Day where I was trying to upgrade something and needed a key utility for configuring something and it wouldn't run, and there was no "source" for an updated version. I gave FreeBSD a spin and just liked that everything was a part of a larger whole, and not a bunch of pieces with varying standards.
FreeBSD can have other problems, sometimes certain ports are broken for a long time, for example, but generally speaking the base system always works.
Ironically, I think that "the Linux desktop" actually has contributed to Linux large OSS market share, despite it never quite being the year of the Linux desktop. I think that when distros emerged with out-of-the-box GUIs and browsers a lot of technically oriented people who might not have run a CLI-only OS were able to "get into" Linux because the GUI was just good enough to be basically usable, even if it wasn't feature complete with Windows.
So if the exchange went like this...
Listen, I'm sorry I called you a lazy nig*er. That wasn't right, I should have called you a motivationally challenged African American. Sorry. Now get over it.
I'm not sure it was that much "easier" years ago. There were a lot more newspapers and in many cities they actually competed with each other, plus there were a lot of ethnic group centric newspapers, often published in a non-English language (although this is probably pre-WWII). You might swing some plurality getting Hearst on your side, but there were still a lot of people who weren't reading his papers or outright didn't trust them.
Plus I think in less media saturated times, people were more influenced by actual real people opinion leaders -- ministers, union bosses, ward boss, local individuals who had real-world local influence. And a lot of those locals had their hands out, too.
I think back in those days it took more effort because you had to influence more actual people with vested interests in what control they had and get them to spread your message. And in many cases the message had to be spread by word of actual mouth -- at the church, at the local tavern, in the union hall, and so on.
Despite the so-called diversity of the Internet, I think it's actually easier now because so much of it can be automated across a handful of electronic networks and people are so much more invested in the value of electronic media. Nobody gives a shit what their minister says, they don't have a union rep and little connection to local political figures. They care what their friends say, but their "friends" are on Facebook or Instagram and are sharing the chosen electronic message.
Fucking "bug fixes" and "performance enhancements" are too generic and hide problems and make it hard to diagnose problems that might occur in new releases.
This matters less with appy app store apps, but few tell you anything more than "We update our app frequently to maximize our tracking and resale of your data".
Fucking Microsoft has become the new king of major patches with almost no data, or at the very least a KB scavenger hunt to get an idea of what was crammed in.
I think Uncle Xi is really serious about corruption and pollution, and my guess is where you have excess pollution you also have corruption.
Xi may be willing to take on some polluters at the cost of higher product prices if he can push those costs onto foreign consumers due to lack of competition. This externalizes the costs of cleaner production. Busting local officials taking bribes in exchange for allowing the pollution helps his image and further solidifies his power.
Solution for this means artificial price supports for crop waste, so that it is converted into appropriate fuel, and reducing all tax exemptions and exclusions for all fossil fuels.
Is that all? I'm sure we'll get right on that.
I can't imagine gold as a great way to store wealth unless you plan to hold it for an extremely long time. I think it has too much near-term volatility to be much more than a long-horizon store of wealth.
Agreed.
To me this is kind of like a statement that what we really need is just one common cellular network, and that "competition" between carriers mostly just results in duplication of facilities and underutilized spectrum.
Getting those entrenched vendors to adapt to anything is hard because they want to keep collecting license fees without having to modernize the applications.
I work with a vertical market app that still uses *filesharing* databases. They have a weird lock on a very specific vertical market and their people are literally happy to tell you they have NO plans to move to a SQL-type database application, despite a huge demand for the application on mobile and other non-Windows based platforms where network database connectivity is the only sane thing to do.
Because of this, clients who want any kind of "mobile" access wind up running Windows VMs (some run whole desktop machines, even) so they can RDP over wireless or wifi networks without reliability problems to the file server. It's astonishingly complicated when the vendor could just fix it with a database access paradigm from the late 20th century.
I'm sort of convinced if calendaring could have been hacked into the IMAP standard at some point in the late 1990s, it would have killed off a lot of the Outlook/Exchange momentum.
I didn't think so, but I was responding to the parent poster's comment about "guards to guard the gold vaults".
It does kind of pique my interest generally how a place like Jersey holds Apple's $236 billion cash hoard and what the financial mechanics are of moving that kind of money across international borders and what actual form it takes, and what the security associated with it is.
My guess would just be electronic accounts tied to US treasury instruments, but the security gets to be kind of interesting as Jersey is something of an independent nation. What would happen if the Jersey government and bank officials were coerced into seizing those assets under some kind of US tax probe?
Do tax havens really hold assets in gold?
I would think that would be too volatile and kind of bulky, not to mention high risk to move around. Apple's $236 billion cash hoard in Jersey would be something like 300 cubic meters of gold.
I think it's in the nature of the all-volunteer military that they wind up doing the equivalent of HR sanitation work, sifting through a ton of no-other-options people and winding up with some heavy rejects.
I think the military just want these people out and off their cost structures. Reporting them, labeling them and dealing with the inevitable claims that result from anything other than cutting them loose and closing their files would cost them money. Inevitably many would claim their problems were made worse by their experience in the military and demand compensation, treatment, not to mention claims of third parties who would claim they suffered as well.
I know little about this Texas shooter other than his experience of military discipline I've read about, but I kind of wonder if the whole military experience made whatever his problems were worse. Not because the military system is bad per se, but his personality was such an awful fit that everything they did just exacerbated his mental problems.
As an added bonus, I can tell them to punt someone I don't like because I feel like it, and the contracting place removes them. No separation, no work on my side other than locking some accounts. Plus, I don't have to worry about HR and interviews.
In this Weinsteinian era, it starts to make me wonder how much sexual harassment gets swept under the rug in this system.
Pressure some woman for sex and when she doesn't deliver, tell the body shop she's not working out and you want her replaced. Given the generally low ethics associated with body shops, I can totally see them playing into serial offenders and sending them easy prey.