To make the Slashdot car analogy, support is available for 1950s automobiles, too, but that doesn't mean we don't let GM off the hook after 10 years and stop requiring them to maintain spare parts for 1950s cars.
There's a twofold problem -- vendors iterate their OS to drive sales, even when the existing product more or less meets the feature requirements of the end user. End users don't want to buy upgrades because the systems in question still work, and not only do the upgrades cost money but they inevitably inflict transition costs and business disruption.
There needs to be some kind of regulation imposed on vendors which both increases their security patching disclosure and oversight and allows them to more aggressively obsolete a product at the end of that product's support window, forcing users past the point of obsolescence to disruptively and affirmatively acknowledge they are running a version which is obsolete.
You'd expect a lot of things, but you'd only get what was in the contract. There's what, maybe 2-3 firms globally that make MRI machines? Unless you're one of the top 2-3 global health care systems buying a decent fraction of the machines sold, you don't have the bargaining power to negotiate support concessions from these vendors.
Forever support isn't reasonable, but at the same time vendors using security update channels to push unwanted upgrades for the benefit of the vendor is equally bad.
My guess is that we're going to be getting to the end of the road of the "nasty, brutish and short" state of nature in the software industry and start seeing more regulations.
Vendors will be able to EOL their products, but will also have to supply security updates for N years after the product is officially ended. Vendors will be required to maintain a security update channel which may not be used for pushing upgrades or unrequested new products.
An interesting solution would be to let vendors "expire" a version by inserting a patch that boots the OS at a warning page requiring a firm verbal commitment ("I agree this is obsolete") before booting any further. Vendors would be REQUIRED to do this for operating systems they had obsoleted but only after their N years of post-EOL support had ended.
This way, nobody escapes the product being EOL. Customers can still use it, but must affirmatively acknowledge it is obsolete. Vendors are required to keep supporting it for a really long time after official EOL, but they can kill it more completely but only after the EOL support period.
File versioning going back in history that you can't edit, only recover from?
Regular backups, perhaps on some multiple-time-per-day schedule, stored in a security domain separate from the source backup domain seems like the most viable working solution now.
Too many of the exploits hit admin/root privileges and then attack the OS backup defenses and occasionally even backup systems running in the same security domain. You need backups not accessible by even top-level user IDs, and preferably offline.
I don't disagree that the problem is conceptually solved, but implementing the solution so it works seamlessly probably isn't "solved".
The vendor that does technical support for the MRI machine wouldn't know shit about the inserted security system and anything and everything wrong with the radiology equipment would be blamed on any third party data connections inserted downstream. Solves a security problem which may seldom be seen for IT, but whenever the imaging system doesn't work right it's now high-level triage with networking, middleware, and security people all pointing fingers at each other and the imaging vendor, and the latter will happen 10x more than the security problem it's designed to prevent.
And let's remember this is *healthcare*, which is a financial clusterfuck everywhere, so it has built-in anti-spending logic.
I'm not arguing that it couldn't be done better, but even some of the solutions like private VLANs and so forth aren't magic as you still can wind up with leakage onto those networks.
But if the machine is critical, then air-gap it, and use removable media. Transferring the data 30 times a day isn't an onerous task.
Sounds easy, until you realize that they've been pushing radiology imagery over the network for years and the entire radiology workflow has been designed around this. The machines don't have external media drives, the staff doesn't know how to do this in a way that insures your "nothing is wrong" imagery is associated with your chart doesn't get conflated with the "stage 4 cancer" imagery of someone else, there's just an entire laundry list of shit that has to happen right, be supported, etc.
I've seen a similar phenomenon in machine shops and metal fabricators where the tooling is controlled by ancient Windows versions and there just is no update for the driver software that isn't a extremely expensive machine upgrade. I don't know how the machine OEMs get away with this, really, but I'm sure at least in the medical field it has something to do with certification and probably there's a similar amount of BS associated with machine tools (ie, the PE signoff required for safety liability includes the entire control chain).
I have no idea what the solution is short of machine system vendors producing way more of their own code which would make the machines more expensive.
I would still think it would be generally useful. When was the last time you got a call on a forged number that matched a known number of someone you call regularly, especially a private party?
I don't think it's ever happened to me. My spam calls are always unknown or out of state, although there has been an uptick lately in calls that use a new technique of forging numbers in my same exchange/prefix.
But generally being able to send a unique voice message to unknown callers would be useful.
Telecom companies are self-dealing here, wanting to sell SIP services badly and not wanting to deal with another layer of compliance to see if customers are actually passing numbers they control.
It has to be made some kind of law, which of course will piss off a number people, especially in industries tightly tied to call centers who want to pass numbers out to put up appearances of being the company in question when actually they're vendors, suppliers or contractors.
I don't understand why Apple or Google don't add a "privacy" feature that provides handling of unknown callers, up to and including answering the call and playing back a user message.
What better way to prop up the desktop business than by embracing the largest mobile platforms?
I know it sounds like buzzword compliance, but if they can create mobile/desktop synergy that improves the user experience it could keep desktop OS in good shape for years to come.
I also think this is also aimed a lot at Google. It wouldn't surprise me if some of this enthusiasm for iOS wasn't the result of a back room deal that guaranteed MacOS relevance within the Office world as well as further guaranteeing access to ActiveSync and O365 for iOS. IMHO, a lot of the iPhone's continued acceptance is tied to the generally excellent ActiveSync support it has.
If it worked less well the next time MS decided to enhance Exchange and especially O365, those expensive iOS devices would get a lot less popular with a lot of people.
I had a conversation just the other day with someone who has managed to automate deployment of an entire VMware cluster as nested virtual machines on VMware.
We've considered nested virtualization at work for both production and proof of concept and demonstration where the actual physical hardware is irrelevant or where we'd prefer to keep the top level hardware/virtualization config in a given state for other purposes.
As an experiment, I built a 4 node vSAN cluster as a single VM (nested virtualization). It was too small to do anything practical, but I kept it anyway as it was a fairly portable way to preserve a time-consuming setup.
My gut instinct is that virtualization above a single level of nesting has some performance issues that haven't been addressed, but it may be simply because the hardware capable of meaningful nesting hasn't been widely available (terabyte scale RAM, 10+ GB networking, all flash storage, many cores).
I'm sure your intentions are good, but your solution is massively simplistic and woefully naive.
And the alternative is what, huge homeless camps on public land, with no sanitation, fights, assaults, and then broken people roaming around harassing others? Basically doing nothing like we do now?
Dealing with homelessness head on is of course expensive, and so is mental health. I would assume people with serious mental health problems would be "removed" from the cycle and treated in whatever way was most appropriate. For some of them, commitment may be more humane and cheaper than letting them suffer on the streets and then dealing with the side effects of schizophrenic people on the loose (fights, assaults, the cops shooting some, etc).
Hopefully the bulk of the homeless population would be able to obtain life skills and enough stability to gain permanent housing and employment -- that's the main goal. And many probably do need social worker type interventions to get this done, even if they aren't mentally ill.
But some percentage of the homeless are just anti-social deviants and who need to get it together, move on or face tougher law enforcement because the rest of us deserve to be able to walk the streets without aggressive panhandling or harassment. Once you've helped the ones who need it (mentally ill, etc) and those who want it (people who need more economic assistance stabilizing their living situation), now you're helping the ordinary citizen with some legitimate law and order.
The current situation is unacceptable, including abandoning the mentally ill to the streets as well as letting the anti-social deviants run free because we feel legitimately sorry for the segment that needs help.
I think the idea would be you'd decide to go to the homeless shelter or leave.
I don't know any rational person who would choose to live in a restricted, boot-camp type of environment if their choices were leaving completely or a less restrictive and supportive environment.
They don't have to block manual application installs, and I doubt that they will be able to get there any time soon given the giant legacy code base of all Windows applications.
They just need Apple to agree that their Windows installer for non-Win10 platforms will not run on Windows 10, only a special store-only version. This would force all Win10 iTunes users to sign up for the MS store and download the app that way, which would likely capture huge numbers of new store users.
The Windows store suffers from the chicken/egg problem of no customers and no content. A possible fix for this is to force customers into the store, and then you can lure developers since you now have all these registered users.
The big question is whether this is truly an evil deal where Microsoft and Apple have colluded in such a way that the ONLY way to install iTunes is now through the Microsoft store.
This would be a great deal for Microsoft, getting Apple to force iPhone/iPad users running Windows 10 to sign up for the Windows store.
1. Setup large dormitory style structures with staff (social workers, mental health, etc) for homeless transitional housing.
2. Vigorously enforce laws on trespass and vagrancy
3. Give repeat offenders of #2 a choice to go the homeless shelter and get evaluated or go to jail for two weeks
4. Create a separate section of the jail for homeless people, but make it more like boot camp. Mandatory wake times, showers, and labor.
At the homeless shelter, screen for mental illness and commit people with serious mental illness. Everyone else gets intensive support to not be homeless, and those who actually want not to be homeless will have the tools/support to do it.
People who *choose* homelessness and won't take support deal with strict law enforcement on vagrancy, trespass, etc. They'll move along versus spending more than a couple of cycles in a boot camp jail.
So that employees, customers and business contacts won't have to experience homeless people first hand.
This is how NYC real estate developers have managed requirements for affordable housing when they build developments targeted at the wealthy. A small, separate entrance with its own elevator to the floors with the few affordable rentals in the building is part of the building.
While I guess it's laudable to gesture by our e-commerce overlords, if they run the homeless people through an invisible side entrance to some otherwise deprecated space they don't use that just happens to be in the same building, it's hard not to think that there's a large amount of cynical motivation. Bezos gets to claim some kind of noble generosity, and Amazon gets a giant tax deduction on dead space in their building.
I can't help but think if it was really meant to do something about homelessness, Bezos would just outright fund a large hotel/dorm like structure that would offer long-term transitional housing for homeless people instead of temporary shelter, the kind of temporary home where they could get mail delivered, make phone calls, create resumes and do job searches, in addition to being fed and having a secure place to live.
We went through this financing a remodel for our house in 2003. The original appraisal was flawed in our opinion because while the structures were comparable, they all lacked the location feature of our house -- no rear neighbors, and adjacent to a 50 acre wooded lake.
The appraiser admitted that his comps were flawed -- there 4 other lakes in the city were larger, and all the homes on those lakes were mansions worth millions, so they wouldn't work as comps, and there were too few recent home sales on our lake for comparison.
The lender eventually got the appraiser to work harder at finding similar structures with scenic natural overlooks and we gained meaningful increases in appraisal. Fortunately for us, the lender would have lost the loan without the appraisal change, so they had an incentive to pressure the appraiser and accept it in underwriting.
People in suburban subdivisions are kind of fucked on appraisals, as there's little differentiation. Their house really is worth what any 4 recent sales in the same area are worth because the homes and settings are nearly all alike.
But people with unusual geographic features are also kind of fucked unless they insist that those unique features be accounted for.
A large argument for UBI is that it removes clerical overhead. All citizens, a check, the end. With a negative income tax you bring a lot of that overhead back in, because now the accountants have to make sure that every citizen is getting not a penny more in their UBI check than their income allows.
That's why you use the tax system, to make means testing just part of the tax system. If UBI is universal, everyone gets a check, so the IRS already knows what this amount is, and anyone working at a job automatically has their income reported to the IRS, so there's zero new overhead by using the progressive tax system to negate UBI income for job holders with wage income that puts them over the UBI threshold.
The net effect for someone working at a $100k/year wage job collecting $30k UBI would be higher rates of withholding (ie, withholding that treats their real income as $130k). The UBI would be essentially returned through high rates of taxation.
I never understand this line of thought. Why do you believe that even a significant minority of the population would become life-long stay-at-home-slobs? And why does that reason not already happen for the super-wealthy, the vast majority of whom (AFAIK) still hold various positions for various sums of money? Why is it impossible for a person to have worth if they don't have work?
Philosophically, we're in agreement on this issue, but I think politically you need to demonstrate an incentive to work. Plus I also think that people *would* adapt to UBI only as a lifestyle if the choice was solely UBI vs. any low wage job which eliminated UBI.
And it's not like the "idle rich" isn't already an understood concept, and many of those that are well off and could, in an accounting sense, quit their jobs, don't because they want to maintain a high expense lifestyle not sustainable by accumulated wealth or they are simply driven individuals who find work rewarding. Probably many children of the wealthy who might be able to not work wind up in jobs which are easy, inconsequential or intellectually stimulating in ways that make going to work a rewarding way to pass time. I've done work for family firms where the children of the founder have trivial executive positions in "marketing" or "product development" that amount to little more than constructive private welfare.
By and large, the people who work now would continue to work, but by making marginal work rewarding you deal with some of the potential labor shortfalls in a UBI environment where low-wage jobs stop being filled because there is no coercive economic pressure to do those jobs. I think a side benefit of UBI is that low wage jobs would have to become *better* jobs -- less demeaning, less exploitative -- to attract workers. In fact, I think *most* jobs would feel this pressure. Most middle class families have two wage earners and would collapse financially at the loss of a single earner's wages. With UBI, this would be unlikely, so employers would find that even high wage jobs that negate UBI over a year would have much more selective employees unwilling to accept unpaid overtime or the other negative working conditions imposed even on white collar jobs.
I think the challenge is that some chunk of firms (probably towards the smaller end) do have to eat the taxes, and they're the ones represented by "corporate taxes are too high".
Large firms like Apple, etc, show off the nominally large tax amounts they pay and cash in on this sentiment, even though they are able (due to size, market dominance, etc) to pass them through to customers. And they're the ones we really need to tax.
Part of me thinks that corporate tax needs to be relatively small, but then another tax based something on profits after the initial taxes. Small firms wouldn't pay much, but large firms might pay more.
Or a tax based off the ratio of executive/work compensation ratios, or a tax based on cash and short-term securities. Or some kind of tax based on sales margin, using that as a benchmark as to how likely the firm is to pass on the tax to consumers.
I think allegiance or rebellion to authority is probably the stronger sentiment for older people and younger people, respectively.
Older people see Snowden as a traitor and that resonates more than the NSA eavesdropping. Younger people see him as a rebellious hero, and that means more than their lack of concern over electronic privacy.
My 12 year old son thinks talking computers are the bomb. He always asks if we can get an Echo or a Google Home whenever he sees the commercials. If he gets ahold of an iPhone, he will go to town asking Siri questions. It's his default method of looking things up.
(No, he doesn't have his own phone, and no I don't encourage and actively discourage it so much my wife thinks I'm an asshole about it).
I always explain that these things are always listening and it's like having a stranger in our house listening to everything we say. Totally not OK.
But I think their real goal isn't adults who were raised reading 1984 in school. It's kids, who think that talking to corporate electronic systems is normal and have no sense of electronic privacy.
Worse yet, I've seen managers for whom "feedback" is merely a euphemism for "criticism" and often believe that it requires blowing some issues out of proportion if not fabricating them completely in order to have an ample supply of criticism. The apparent purpose being to create the idea in the employee's mind that they are just barely doing an acceptable job, should work harder, and should not ask for a raise/promotion.
"Praise" is reserved for totally above-and-beyond behavior that should actually be compensated financially, but won't be, because you got praise instead.
Doing the job right all the time is just expected, you don't get praise for that. Which I think is sort of a mistake, actually. It shouldn't be over the top, but employees should receive some kind of positive feedback when they're doing a decent job.
Where I work now they give out these lame awards once a year and it's always obvious they are totally political, with the winners only winning because they brown nose hard. It has the opposite effect.
I mostly and regretfully agree with the pass-through nature of corporate taxation, but I'm curious how the problem should be solved, recognizing that corporations consume great quantities of government services -- the legal system, patents & enforcement, law enforcement, and so on.
How do you handle their "user fees"? Property taxes sort of help on the local level, although these are just as pass-through as an income tax in many ways, but at least they are tied to the specific places where corporations own property and the costs they impose on local communities (roads, police, fire, etc).
Maybe the argument is to eliminate corporate taxes and just drastically raise individual taxes, treating all personal income, whether wages or capital gains, as income and taxing it progressively.
Despite the pass-through nature of corporate taxes, it seems like there needs to be *some* way of extracting taxation from corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
To make the Slashdot car analogy, support is available for 1950s automobiles, too, but that doesn't mean we don't let GM off the hook after 10 years and stop requiring them to maintain spare parts for 1950s cars.
There's a twofold problem -- vendors iterate their OS to drive sales, even when the existing product more or less meets the feature requirements of the end user. End users don't want to buy upgrades because the systems in question still work, and not only do the upgrades cost money but they inevitably inflict transition costs and business disruption.
There needs to be some kind of regulation imposed on vendors which both increases their security patching disclosure and oversight and allows them to more aggressively obsolete a product at the end of that product's support window, forcing users past the point of obsolescence to disruptively and affirmatively acknowledge they are running a version which is obsolete.
You'd expect a lot of things, but you'd only get what was in the contract. There's what, maybe 2-3 firms globally that make MRI machines? Unless you're one of the top 2-3 global health care systems buying a decent fraction of the machines sold, you don't have the bargaining power to negotiate support concessions from these vendors.
Forever support isn't reasonable, but at the same time vendors using security update channels to push unwanted upgrades for the benefit of the vendor is equally bad.
My guess is that we're going to be getting to the end of the road of the "nasty, brutish and short" state of nature in the software industry and start seeing more regulations.
Vendors will be able to EOL their products, but will also have to supply security updates for N years after the product is officially ended. Vendors will be required to maintain a security update channel which may not be used for pushing upgrades or unrequested new products.
An interesting solution would be to let vendors "expire" a version by inserting a patch that boots the OS at a warning page requiring a firm verbal commitment ("I agree this is obsolete") before booting any further. Vendors would be REQUIRED to do this for operating systems they had obsoleted but only after their N years of post-EOL support had ended.
This way, nobody escapes the product being EOL. Customers can still use it, but must affirmatively acknowledge it is obsolete. Vendors are required to keep supporting it for a really long time after official EOL, but they can kill it more completely but only after the EOL support period.
File versioning going back in history that you can't edit, only recover from?
Regular backups, perhaps on some multiple-time-per-day schedule, stored in a security domain separate from the source backup domain seems like the most viable working solution now.
Too many of the exploits hit admin/root privileges and then attack the OS backup defenses and occasionally even backup systems running in the same security domain. You need backups not accessible by even top-level user IDs, and preferably offline.
I don't disagree that the problem is conceptually solved, but implementing the solution so it works seamlessly probably isn't "solved".
The vendor that does technical support for the MRI machine wouldn't know shit about the inserted security system and anything and everything wrong with the radiology equipment would be blamed on any third party data connections inserted downstream. Solves a security problem which may seldom be seen for IT, but whenever the imaging system doesn't work right it's now high-level triage with networking, middleware, and security people all pointing fingers at each other and the imaging vendor, and the latter will happen 10x more than the security problem it's designed to prevent.
And let's remember this is *healthcare*, which is a financial clusterfuck everywhere, so it has built-in anti-spending logic.
I'm not arguing that it couldn't be done better, but even some of the solutions like private VLANs and so forth aren't magic as you still can wind up with leakage onto those networks.
But if the machine is critical, then air-gap it, and use removable media. Transferring the data 30 times a day isn't an onerous task.
Sounds easy, until you realize that they've been pushing radiology imagery over the network for years and the entire radiology workflow has been designed around this. The machines don't have external media drives, the staff doesn't know how to do this in a way that insures your "nothing is wrong" imagery is associated with your chart doesn't get conflated with the "stage 4 cancer" imagery of someone else, there's just an entire laundry list of shit that has to happen right, be supported, etc.
I've seen a similar phenomenon in machine shops and metal fabricators where the tooling is controlled by ancient Windows versions and there just is no update for the driver software that isn't a extremely expensive machine upgrade. I don't know how the machine OEMs get away with this, really, but I'm sure at least in the medical field it has something to do with certification and probably there's a similar amount of BS associated with machine tools (ie, the PE signoff required for safety liability includes the entire control chain).
I have no idea what the solution is short of machine system vendors producing way more of their own code which would make the machines more expensive.
I would still think it would be generally useful. When was the last time you got a call on a forged number that matched a known number of someone you call regularly, especially a private party?
I don't think it's ever happened to me. My spam calls are always unknown or out of state, although there has been an uptick lately in calls that use a new technique of forging numbers in my same exchange/prefix.
But generally being able to send a unique voice message to unknown callers would be useful.
Here, here.
Telecom companies are self-dealing here, wanting to sell SIP services badly and not wanting to deal with another layer of compliance to see if customers are actually passing numbers they control.
It has to be made some kind of law, which of course will piss off a number people, especially in industries tightly tied to call centers who want to pass numbers out to put up appearances of being the company in question when actually they're vendors, suppliers or contractors.
I don't understand why Apple or Google don't add a "privacy" feature that provides handling of unknown callers, up to and including answering the call and playing back a user message.
What better way to prop up the desktop business than by embracing the largest mobile platforms?
I know it sounds like buzzword compliance, but if they can create mobile/desktop synergy that improves the user experience it could keep desktop OS in good shape for years to come.
I also think this is also aimed a lot at Google. It wouldn't surprise me if some of this enthusiasm for iOS wasn't the result of a back room deal that guaranteed MacOS relevance within the Office world as well as further guaranteeing access to ActiveSync and O365 for iOS. IMHO, a lot of the iPhone's continued acceptance is tied to the generally excellent ActiveSync support it has.
If it worked less well the next time MS decided to enhance Exchange and especially O365, those expensive iOS devices would get a lot less popular with a lot of people.
I had a conversation just the other day with someone who has managed to automate deployment of an entire VMware cluster as nested virtual machines on VMware.
We've considered nested virtualization at work for both production and proof of concept and demonstration where the actual physical hardware is irrelevant or where we'd prefer to keep the top level hardware/virtualization config in a given state for other purposes.
As an experiment, I built a 4 node vSAN cluster as a single VM (nested virtualization). It was too small to do anything practical, but I kept it anyway as it was a fairly portable way to preserve a time-consuming setup.
My gut instinct is that virtualization above a single level of nesting has some performance issues that haven't been addressed, but it may be simply because the hardware capable of meaningful nesting hasn't been widely available (terabyte scale RAM, 10+ GB networking, all flash storage, many cores).
I'm sure your intentions are good, but your solution is massively simplistic and woefully naive.
And the alternative is what, huge homeless camps on public land, with no sanitation, fights, assaults, and then broken people roaming around harassing others? Basically doing nothing like we do now?
Dealing with homelessness head on is of course expensive, and so is mental health. I would assume people with serious mental health problems would be "removed" from the cycle and treated in whatever way was most appropriate. For some of them, commitment may be more humane and cheaper than letting them suffer on the streets and then dealing with the side effects of schizophrenic people on the loose (fights, assaults, the cops shooting some, etc).
Hopefully the bulk of the homeless population would be able to obtain life skills and enough stability to gain permanent housing and employment -- that's the main goal. And many probably do need social worker type interventions to get this done, even if they aren't mentally ill.
But some percentage of the homeless are just anti-social deviants and who need to get it together, move on or face tougher law enforcement because the rest of us deserve to be able to walk the streets without aggressive panhandling or harassment. Once you've helped the ones who need it (mentally ill, etc) and those who want it (people who need more economic assistance stabilizing their living situation), now you're helping the ordinary citizen with some legitimate law and order.
The current situation is unacceptable, including abandoning the mentally ill to the streets as well as letting the anti-social deviants run free because we feel legitimately sorry for the segment that needs help.
I think the idea would be you'd decide to go to the homeless shelter or leave.
I don't know any rational person who would choose to live in a restricted, boot-camp type of environment if their choices were leaving completely or a less restrictive and supportive environment.
They don't have to block manual application installs, and I doubt that they will be able to get there any time soon given the giant legacy code base of all Windows applications.
They just need Apple to agree that their Windows installer for non-Win10 platforms will not run on Windows 10, only a special store-only version. This would force all Win10 iTunes users to sign up for the MS store and download the app that way, which would likely capture huge numbers of new store users.
The Windows store suffers from the chicken/egg problem of no customers and no content. A possible fix for this is to force customers into the store, and then you can lure developers since you now have all these registered users.
The big question is whether this is truly an evil deal where Microsoft and Apple have colluded in such a way that the ONLY way to install iTunes is now through the Microsoft store.
This would be a great deal for Microsoft, getting Apple to force iPhone/iPad users running Windows 10 to sign up for the Windows store.
1. Setup large dormitory style structures with staff (social workers, mental health, etc) for homeless transitional housing.
2. Vigorously enforce laws on trespass and vagrancy
3. Give repeat offenders of #2 a choice to go the homeless shelter and get evaluated or go to jail for two weeks
4. Create a separate section of the jail for homeless people, but make it more like boot camp. Mandatory wake times, showers, and labor.
At the homeless shelter, screen for mental illness and commit people with serious mental illness. Everyone else gets intensive support to not be homeless, and those who actually want not to be homeless will have the tools/support to do it.
People who *choose* homelessness and won't take support deal with strict law enforcement on vagrancy, trespass, etc. They'll move along versus spending more than a couple of cycles in a boot camp jail.
So that employees, customers and business contacts won't have to experience homeless people first hand.
This is how NYC real estate developers have managed requirements for affordable housing when they build developments targeted at the wealthy. A small, separate entrance with its own elevator to the floors with the few affordable rentals in the building is part of the building.
While I guess it's laudable to gesture by our e-commerce overlords, if they run the homeless people through an invisible side entrance to some otherwise deprecated space they don't use that just happens to be in the same building, it's hard not to think that there's a large amount of cynical motivation. Bezos gets to claim some kind of noble generosity, and Amazon gets a giant tax deduction on dead space in their building.
I can't help but think if it was really meant to do something about homelessness, Bezos would just outright fund a large hotel/dorm like structure that would offer long-term transitional housing for homeless people instead of temporary shelter, the kind of temporary home where they could get mail delivered, make phone calls, create resumes and do job searches, in addition to being fed and having a secure place to live.
Comparables are always up for debate.
We went through this financing a remodel for our house in 2003. The original appraisal was flawed in our opinion because while the structures were comparable, they all lacked the location feature of our house -- no rear neighbors, and adjacent to a 50 acre wooded lake.
The appraiser admitted that his comps were flawed -- there 4 other lakes in the city were larger, and all the homes on those lakes were mansions worth millions, so they wouldn't work as comps, and there were too few recent home sales on our lake for comparison.
The lender eventually got the appraiser to work harder at finding similar structures with scenic natural overlooks and we gained meaningful increases in appraisal. Fortunately for us, the lender would have lost the loan without the appraisal change, so they had an incentive to pressure the appraiser and accept it in underwriting.
People in suburban subdivisions are kind of fucked on appraisals, as there's little differentiation. Their house really is worth what any 4 recent sales in the same area are worth because the homes and settings are nearly all alike.
But people with unusual geographic features are also kind of fucked unless they insist that those unique features be accounted for.
A large argument for UBI is that it removes clerical overhead. All citizens, a check, the end. With a negative income tax you bring a lot of that overhead back in, because now the accountants have to make sure that every citizen is getting not a penny more in their UBI check than their income allows.
That's why you use the tax system, to make means testing just part of the tax system. If UBI is universal, everyone gets a check, so the IRS already knows what this amount is, and anyone working at a job automatically has their income reported to the IRS, so there's zero new overhead by using the progressive tax system to negate UBI income for job holders with wage income that puts them over the UBI threshold.
The net effect for someone working at a $100k/year wage job collecting $30k UBI would be higher rates of withholding (ie, withholding that treats their real income as $130k). The UBI would be essentially returned through high rates of taxation.
I never understand this line of thought. Why do you believe that even a significant minority of the population would become life-long stay-at-home-slobs? And why does that reason not already happen for the super-wealthy, the vast majority of whom (AFAIK) still hold various positions for various sums of money? Why is it impossible for a person to have worth if they don't have work?
Philosophically, we're in agreement on this issue, but I think politically you need to demonstrate an incentive to work. Plus I also think that people *would* adapt to UBI only as a lifestyle if the choice was solely UBI vs. any low wage job which eliminated UBI.
And it's not like the "idle rich" isn't already an understood concept, and many of those that are well off and could, in an accounting sense, quit their jobs, don't because they want to maintain a high expense lifestyle not sustainable by accumulated wealth or they are simply driven individuals who find work rewarding. Probably many children of the wealthy who might be able to not work wind up in jobs which are easy, inconsequential or intellectually stimulating in ways that make going to work a rewarding way to pass time. I've done work for family firms where the children of the founder have trivial executive positions in "marketing" or "product development" that amount to little more than constructive private welfare.
By and large, the people who work now would continue to work, but by making marginal work rewarding you deal with some of the potential labor shortfalls in a UBI environment where low-wage jobs stop being filled because there is no coercive economic pressure to do those jobs. I think a side benefit of UBI is that low wage jobs would have to become *better* jobs -- less demeaning, less exploitative -- to attract workers. In fact, I think *most* jobs would feel this pressure. Most middle class families have two wage earners and would collapse financially at the loss of a single earner's wages. With UBI, this would be unlikely, so employers would find that even high wage jobs that negate UBI over a year would have much more selective employees unwilling to accept unpaid overtime or the other negative working conditions imposed even on white collar jobs.
It'll make it easier for the crew, too.
one of our many fine Chavs will be happy to instruct you on how to drink a real ale which will be available at almost any drinking establishment.
I thought Chavs all drank Carlsberg Special, which I couldn't find at any of the pubs I went to. I had to buy in a shop.
I think the challenge is that some chunk of firms (probably towards the smaller end) do have to eat the taxes, and they're the ones represented by "corporate taxes are too high".
Large firms like Apple, etc, show off the nominally large tax amounts they pay and cash in on this sentiment, even though they are able (due to size, market dominance, etc) to pass them through to customers. And they're the ones we really need to tax.
Part of me thinks that corporate tax needs to be relatively small, but then another tax based something on profits after the initial taxes. Small firms wouldn't pay much, but large firms might pay more.
Or a tax based off the ratio of executive/work compensation ratios, or a tax based on cash and short-term securities. Or some kind of tax based on sales margin, using that as a benchmark as to how likely the firm is to pass on the tax to consumers.
I think allegiance or rebellion to authority is probably the stronger sentiment for older people and younger people, respectively.
Older people see Snowden as a traitor and that resonates more than the NSA eavesdropping. Younger people see him as a rebellious hero, and that means more than their lack of concern over electronic privacy.
My 12 year old son thinks talking computers are the bomb. He always asks if we can get an Echo or a Google Home whenever he sees the commercials. If he gets ahold of an iPhone, he will go to town asking Siri questions. It's his default method of looking things up.
(No, he doesn't have his own phone, and no I don't encourage and actively discourage it so much my wife thinks I'm an asshole about it).
I always explain that these things are always listening and it's like having a stranger in our house listening to everything we say. Totally not OK.
But I think their real goal isn't adults who were raised reading 1984 in school. It's kids, who think that talking to corporate electronic systems is normal and have no sense of electronic privacy.
Worse yet, I've seen managers for whom "feedback" is merely a euphemism for "criticism" and often believe that it requires blowing some issues out of proportion if not fabricating them completely in order to have an ample supply of criticism. The apparent purpose being to create the idea in the employee's mind that they are just barely doing an acceptable job, should work harder, and should not ask for a raise/promotion.
"Praise" is reserved for totally above-and-beyond behavior that should actually be compensated financially, but won't be, because you got praise instead.
Doing the job right all the time is just expected, you don't get praise for that. Which I think is sort of a mistake, actually. It shouldn't be over the top, but employees should receive some kind of positive feedback when they're doing a decent job.
Where I work now they give out these lame awards once a year and it's always obvious they are totally political, with the winners only winning because they brown nose hard. It has the opposite effect.
I mostly and regretfully agree with the pass-through nature of corporate taxation, but I'm curious how the problem should be solved, recognizing that corporations consume great quantities of government services -- the legal system, patents & enforcement, law enforcement, and so on.
How do you handle their "user fees"? Property taxes sort of help on the local level, although these are just as pass-through as an income tax in many ways, but at least they are tied to the specific places where corporations own property and the costs they impose on local communities (roads, police, fire, etc).
Maybe the argument is to eliminate corporate taxes and just drastically raise individual taxes, treating all personal income, whether wages or capital gains, as income and taxing it progressively.
Despite the pass-through nature of corporate taxes, it seems like there needs to be *some* way of extracting taxation from corporations.