If a country enters into a binding diplomatic agreement with other countries to regulate X, they can't then change the rules on X for their own benefit. Basically the agreed to align their sovereign law with the diplomatic arrangement.
In terms of figuring it out, how simple do you think this agreement is on paper? Six lines in the middle of an A10 sheet with room for big signatures?
I would imagine that the EU tax regulations extend for volumes and that almost no one person understands them fully. I'd wager that most of the regulations are in extremely abstract terms and are not highly specific, allowing Apple to define their business to fit where they want it to fit in the tax code, rather than the tax code defining their taxing obligations.
It takes an actual tax court ruling to actually decide if what Apple is trying to do meets the letter of the law.
And at the end of the day, there's politics that rules it all. The EU isn't going to allow member countries to act as tax havens, especially with the volatility of north/south economies among member states. They're going to demand maximum compliance with tax revenue.
The global demands for revenue will keep Apple from finding another tax haven it can use unless it chooses to align politically with a regime powerful enough to shield it from the US and the EU, but then it runs the risk of other kinds of coercion which might cost as much or more.
Taxes seldom make common understandable sense, even at the US 1040 form level. I've done the long form, by hand, for my 3 person, two income family with $4k in stock ownership. Even with such a basic, boiler-plate kind of setup there were many places where there was ambiguity (at least to me, a non-tax expert).
At the level of multinational corporations it's all totally ambiguous. You basically have only the complex letter of the law and past rulings to go on and with a company like Apple who designs a complex product in one country, builds it in some others, and sells it globally, they have a wide latitude to define the nature of where and what they do for tax purposes and the only way their unique setup will get evaluated is by the ultimate arbiters of the tax law, which in this case sounds like the EU.
Apple thought they could construct a tax shelter scheme and Ireland was a willing participant, probably with backroom deals that Apple would guarantee a certain portion of the tax-exempt capital on deposit in Irish banks as a long-term deposit, enabling Irish banking to basically get a capital infusion.
Suppose you answer that question, what does it matter in terms of moving forward on Mars exploration?
It doesn't really change the equation in terms of human exploration or establishing any kind of base there. I'm not even sure it informs the rover exploration missions other than influencing the science they do, although even then I doubt you'd get away with an exclusionary rover that was solely designed for "did Mars support life?" or could even design one if that was possible.
The planet is too big and the exploration to really answer the question is so extensive it doesn't seem like it's a very easy question to answer definitively, and even if you did you're back to square 1 -- what does it mean, outside of the mostly philosophical question of extraterrestrial life.
What about consciousness transfer to fully synthetic android type bodies?
I keep thinking that the a reasonably likely way an advanced civilization would conquer the problems of relativity and distance is by altering the relationship with time. If consciousness can be transferred into a synthetic machine and time is no longer defined around human lifespans, interstellar distances no longer matter because a trip of a 10,000 years doesn't matter.
I would wager if we do encounter alien intelligence they will be former biological beings who have transferred to machine consciousness and can live forever.
I didn't make an exhaustive search because I don't have a pressing personal need. I make do with electrical tape for the most part or if I want a more permanent solution, liquid vinyl (similar to Dip-it, but in small bottles meant to be used as a kind of electrical tape).
I haven't had a client bitch about bright LEDs that need to be visible but just dimmer, so my solutions have been all I've really felt the need to use.
I did look in a cursory way and I saw lots of people asking and I got results for large size tinting rolls used for car window tinting, but nothing obvious the size of a roll of Scotch tape.
Basically, I thought that one way this whole internet thing worked is that if somebody actually had experience and a direct answer for something with a less-than-obvious search results, they'd share it.
Does anybody make a something like Scotch tape except that instead of being transparent its got about a 90% tint to it?
Of course there are about a 1001 DIY equivalents, from electrical tape to permanent (or even paint-type) markers, but often the DIY solutions have drawbacks that make the lights either impossible to see or require some other intervention (getting a ladder to remove the tape..).
Tinting film for cars works, more or less, but it comes on rolls that are impractically large. Something the size of a scotch tape dispenser would be better.
If the people saying the U.S. should've adopted GSM had gotten their wish, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down below 1 Mbps. When a competitor introduces a far-superior product, it forces the other players in the market to improve, instead of sitting on their asses not improving things because people are paying them anyway.
The contra to this argument is that differing standards forced carrier lock-in, keeping consumers stuck with a device that wouldn't work on other carrier networks, allowing them to it on their asses and not improving things because people couldn't easily leave the carriers they were on.
Had the US adopted a carrier-neutral standard users could have easily switched carriers without buying a new device and device portability and consumer choice would have driven carrier improvements instead of consumers being forced to sit around and wait for a carrier to adopt improvements to their unique signalling.
My first question is whether there's an actual harm being experienced by non-white renters. Are they experiencing an inability to rent on AirBnB? Short term housing in general, such as hotels or resorts?
How picky are AirBnB renters allowed to be generally? AFAIK where I live if you own a duplex or some other owner-occupied property you're allowed to refuse rental to anyone.
My sense is that as long as it doesn't meaningfully prevent people from renting in an area, who cares? If someone doesn't like me because of my race or ethnicity or whatever, I'd guess I'd rather not stay in their house anyway, so those people who turn me down are doing us both a favor. It's only really a problem if it seriously limits the number of places I can stay.
The thing is, nobody else wants those channels, either. They get turned on at the doggy daycare or in the day room at the insane asylum only.
But the reality is that the parent networks/companies want them and they will just charge you the same $120 a month for the 5 channels because their business model isn't based on shrinking their business and shuttering the expanded delivery footprint they enjoy now.
AFAICT, the outsourcing savings are usually spreadsheet savings up front measured with optimistic labor costs of lower paid workers.
Lost in these models are the inevitable cost increases that happen over time. Increased consulting management fees required from the inevitable management maze that gets created, adding in additional outsourcing bodies, often higher rate bodies with more skills when the cheap bodies aren't good enough, longer implementation cycles caused by the transient nature of outsourced workers who lack institutional knowledge and organizational buy-in.
Then you get the service reductions, either because the outsourced staff aren't as good, deliberate service reductions as organization management attempts to contain spiraling costs, or service underdelivery by outsourcers working under fixed price contracts who face pressure from the outsourcing company who want to retain their own profit margins.
I would argue that the basic economics of outsourcing don't make sense. The macro economy of an organization has a kind of invisible hand effect that sets the cost of IT services at a given service level. The idea that it's possible to deliver the same services at a lower cost while extracting a profit for the outsourcing provider without a loss in service delivery is like believing in free energy.
Organizations that decide to fix their IT environments with outsourcing are basically admitting a failure of management, either the inability to manage their IT department or their entire organization. Sure, some IT departments are broken, but who's fault is it they got that way? Almost never the line level IT worker or even first tier of management.
In many of those cases, Apple went from their proprietary solution to something more open. AppleTalk ran over LocalTalk--Apple's proprietary networking (which was basically twisted pair). Another company--I don't remember their name--came alone and just used cheaper wires (PhoneNet). Apple developed EtherTalk--AppleTalk over Ethernet--before going to TCP/IP.
Farallon developed PhoneNet which ran LocalTalk over telephone patch cords via dongle connected to the serial port. They even made a LocalTalk/Ethernert bridge device to allow internetworking as was as the StarController hub-like connector for non-daisy chain setups.
I'm not sure Apple's transition from LocalTalk to Ethernet was driven by a desire to adopt a more open technology than it was to escape a clearly dead end solution that was non-scalable, limited to RS-422 speeds and often daisy chained.
Apple were also at the time actually interested in business computing markets as well as larger educational institutions and LocalTalk was a monster pain in the ass due to scaling problems. The switch to LocalTalk-over-Ethernet aka EtherTalk was pretty much mandatory for Mac networking in any large topology or internetwork.
Regardless of EtherTalk's use of a standard layer 2 transport, it was still highly proprietary. And you could also argue that they hung onto it for too long, way past the point at which TCP/IP was the obvious future. Transport performance with AppleTalk was god-awful and when AppleShare/IP finally began emerging it was obvious how much faster it was than AppleShare on EtherTalk.
If large batteries become cheap enough and powerful enough to make sense in houses, I wouldn't be surprised to see a building code change that requires them to be encased in some kind of fire-resistant box and/or have a thermal switch that shuts them off in the event of a fire.
I can only imagine that there is some kind of crypto signing taking place, what I can't figure out is how they manage to keep a lid on forgeries and keep the chip in the cable so dirt cheap that Amazon can sell licensed cables for $8.
I'd wager Apple wanted a chip capable of significant processing power able to fully encrypt the handshake but that vendors pushed back against a $10 component for just charging cable authentication and they were stuck with a dumber chip which could have some data sniffed.
What I don't understand is why the Chinese haven't used their usual trick, funneling the day-shift product to the greymarket on the night shift, putting legitimate vendor chips into greymarket products. If Apple were to grenade these, they grenade a bunch of legitimate products, too.
A zillion years ago, some person had attributes that made them a better hunter. They brought home the best meat and their children ate better, so they got to breed with better mates. These hunting abilities overlapped with fighting abilities, so not only could they get better food, they could neutralize local rivals or lead the fighting against the tribe on the other side of the river.
These people became clan, then tribal leaders. Eventually more formalized class systems enforced these breeding systems and became the aristocracy, which had elaborate rules about who could marry whom.
I'd guess that most of the genetic advantages fell away early on and that later "good breeding" was less about genetics and more about access to high-quality foods during pregnancy and youth which contributed to better development. Later on it was probably even less about nutrition and more about access to material resources, like better weapons, armor or education.
What's funny about the genetic aspect of "good breeding" is that I have a client that is a high-end country club, and in the summer when the pool is open, nearly everyone has a perfect body. What's genetic and what's not, I don't know, but it's hard to escape the feeling that there's not some kind of selection process there.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but why provide lightning based earbuds instead of a lightning to 3.5mm adapter?
I'm guessing that an adapter is electrically identical except it has a 3.5mm jack instead of actual tiny speakers.
I would think it would be cheaper to provide an adapter, but maybe I should dial up my cynicism and presume that an adapter sends the message "keep using your existing headphones" and lightning earbuds says "buy new headphones, your old ones are obsolete."
It starts to make me wonder if even a $39.95 Apple 3.5mm adapter will even be allowed to be sold with the idea that either consumers will have the choice of: just OK existing Bluetooth audio, Apple "enhanced" wireless for higher fidelity or direct lightning. Apple only misses a cut on the first one, but the tradeoff is whether standard BT audio is good enough.
I don't know if this is how it works or not, but I seem to remember that lightning connectors used some kind of chip which handshakes with the phone using Apple-provided signed key.
Knockoff vendor manages to sniff licensed cable and phone handshake, steals the keys used in the exchange and puts them in their cable. Cable then "works" at the time of manufacture. Apple lightning licensing enforcement buys knockoff products, checks keys used, and revokes "stolen" vendor keys and knockoff cable stops working.
Ordinarily this would be a problem if the licensed product was only issued a single key. But maybe Apple issues 10 keys to each licensed product and the handshake protocol involves the chip providing keys to the phone until a "good" key is found.
This way the licensed product keeps working because it has a set of backup keys and the odds of them all being used by knockoff vendors are low as the secondary keys aren't provided in the handshake unless the previous ones are rejected during handshake.
Even if all of a vendor's issued keys for a product are used in knockoffs, maybe Apple agrees not to revoke the last product key with the idea that it will take so long to reach this point that it won't matter. Maybe vendors are required to refresh their chip and keys every N units or N months so that a good, unrevoked key is very hard to find and Apple could revoke the last vendor key for a product after N years with the idea that by then the majority of legitimate cables will be worn out or no longer in use.
I just made all this up off the top of my head, so don't kill me over the lack of feasibility or holes, but it does conceptually at least seem to provide a process by which Apple could enforce lightning product licensing yet still account for knockoff cables which seem to work. My wife has a knockoff cable that worked fine for a few months and then quit working. She was using it on her bedside stand with a quality charger, so wear and tear wasn't an issue but both her iPhone and iPad still work fine with licensed cables.
I'd be surprised if a UBI that is a flat check sent to everyone would be economically viable; from what I've read, a negative income tax scheme almost seems necessary for financial viability and to cut somewhat the inflationary pressure of just adding $x to everyone's income.
As much as I would rather just force corporations and the extremely rich to disgorge profits above whatever number is necessary to reinvest in the business, I think it's less simple than that.
The other problem I don't know how you deal with is what prevents a UBI from simply raising the price of everything by the amount of UBI everyone gets? How do you guarantee food, shelter and clothing will be always available at UBI income rates without price controls?
They always feed the rumor mill as it serves as free publicity to drum up interest in what isn't very interesting anymore.
The NY Times even reported on the iPhone 7 rumors, saying that the rumor mongering was stronger this time around than it has been and that's evidence that the brand hasn't lost that much cache.
You might even argue that the whole headphone jack removal was deliberate false information to gin up hype about the phone release. Better to have people arguing about the potential of you doing something unpopular than to not have people arguing about you at all.
IMHO, Apple has reached the limit of peak cycling for their phones. There's almost no incremental improvement they can deliver that means much anymore. They need either a quantum leap in design that limits on existing materials, manufacturing or power consumption can't deliver or need to start figuring out how to expand the walled garden of the phone as a functional platform instead of just seeing it as a version churn annuity.
I think another and potentially larger payoff from a mostly exemption-free draft is that it puts all kinds of people together to achieve a common purpose, cutting across class and ethnic lines.
When the rich kid from the suburbs, the blue collar kid from some small town, the kid from the barrio and the kid from the ghetto and others are forced to work together I think it radically reshapes their attitudes about people they never interact with. "There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless. And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps. Do you maggots understand that?"
I think school desegregation was supposed to have this side effect, too, but it ended up worse as affluent people moved to economically and geographically isolated suburbs, resulting in not only ethnic sorting but ethnic sorting with a class hierarchy, too.
I was kind of wondering if that was part of the training protocol.
Ideally they would have a collection of actual child porn storage devices minimally handled by third parties during evidence collection. It wouldn't surprise me at all if these had some unique scent profile identifiable to dogs, possibly due to either semen from masturbation or from arousal pheromones accumulated during repeat handling while sexually stimulated.
A scent cocktail comprised of bodily fluids, pheromones and electronics might actually be more useful than just electronics themselves, at least if you were specifically targeting child porn.
My guess, though, is that cops probably see some broader utility in finding portable electronic media generally, and dogs trained for this could be used in tax investigations or other types of things where hidden information is involved but sexuality isn't. I mean, "think of the children" is the excuse, rousting anybody is the real rationale.
UBI may render a de jure minimum wage obsolete enough to eliminate it, but there would still be a de facto minimum wage necessary to attract labor to work at any job, since thanks to UBI "work" would be unnecessary for basic subsistence. If you posit a progressive negative income tax associated with UBI -- as earned income increases, UBI declines, a wage floor similar to a minimum wage would exist probably just below the threshold at which UBI payments start to decrease.
Illegal immigrants would be willing to below this wage floor, reducing the incentive for employers to attract UBI recipients into jobs. It would also reduce the incentive for employers to raise working standards to accommodate the intangible and external costs to UBI recipients.
I think the overall negative bottom line here is that with a pool of labor willing to work below a wage floor associated with UBI, you undermine the incentives for UBI recipients to work by reducing the number of jobs that are good enough and pay enough to be worth working at.
IMHO, any long-term UBI scheme *must* have sufficient labor incentive to work in order to maintain the labor productivity and economic growth necessary for UBI to remain economically viable. I'd also wager there's a social rationale -- admittedly paternalistic -- to maintain some kind of work-like activity structure for the majority of the population to constrain what I would call the "idle hands are the Devil's workshop" effect. People don't do well with no life purpose, and the majority of people tend to engage in socially corrosive behaviors without something to base their life around, and I think it would be worse for UBI recipients whose UBI would only really cover food and shelter and not provide the resources for hobbies or other ways of using time in a less destructive manner.
In my mind, the value of UBI isn't just in reducing benefits costs or the reduction in poverty, but as a catalyst to improve the work by reducing its coercive nature and eliminating the kinds of perverse incentives that keep people from living productive lives.
Illegal immigrants? This is certainly a problem that needs addressing, but it's not going to be some sort of drain on an UBI system. In fact, it might help with that issue: Illegal immigrants are unlikely to apply because it significantly increases the chances of being discovered and deported, and without minimum wage in place it becomes far harder for them to survive so they have less incentive to come over.
The risk posed by illegal immigrants isn't about them receiving it, but their presence generally warps the labor market in ways that's not good for UBI or any minimum wage scheme, since they will work for less than minimum wage and in worse working conditions due to their illegal status.
I generally think there's enough wealth generated by the US economy that a UBI or any other democratic socialist set of policies could work. The Scandahoovians have mostly made it work, but it seems existentially dependent on a self-contained and homogeneous population with low rates of immigration, and I think a UBI works about the same. Start tipping the demographic balance towards low income immigrants even a little and I think it becomes much harder to maintain from an economic potential since it takes these immigrants at least 2 generations to achieve levels of economic productivity necessary to balance out UBI costs.
I support UBI in principal, but I'm not sure it would work without far stricter immigration controls than we in the US seem to be able to agree on, especially with a non-trivial amount of the population apparently supportive of open border policies via issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants or sanctuary city policies.
But they don't work. They've got executive officers who are supposed to be overseen by the board sitting on them, they're loaded with fluffy famous people and back-scratching officers from other companies. Their elections are farces, controlled by ridiculous bylaws that make Soviet elections look like legitimate democracy. On paper they represent shareholders, in reality they are marionettes of management.
And at the end of it, how often are they actually engaged in the company's business? Close enough to never to be indistinguishable from never.
I think the best basic income schemes have a negative progressive income tax basis to them. You lose the basic income as your regular income increases and at some level of earned income you don't get any basic income.
This provides a work incentive, since even the lowest form of work produces income gains over basic.
I think low wage employers would end up really hating basic income because while they might not be forced to pay more, they would probably have to improve their working conditions and employee treatment. I think what discourages a lot of impoverished people from working isn't the nature of the work itself, it's the nature of the management combined with the low pay. Unrealistic labor goals, bad shifts, intrusive and arbitrary policies, and so on.
There's a bunch of blue collar jobs I'd do, even for less money, but I just couldn't tolerate the way blue collar employees get treated. High school was less confrontational and paternalistic.
I think there are serious obstacles to any kind of basic income scheme. For one, I think employers generally fear any world where unemployment isn't an existential threat for employees -- I think it radically reshapes the balance of power. Immigration is a real problem -- how do you contain a basic income system to the basic margins of your economy?
Traditional corporations have a board (which is elected by shareholders, at least nominally) and then executive officers who are actually supposed to run the company. I don't know anything about business organization theory, but I'm guessing that in some pure sense corporations are already technically structured around the idea of some kind of democratic management.
I think the problem is that in so many corporations, the board is relatively weak and not very involved in much oversight. They also tend to have at least one executive officer on the board, which IMHO corrupts the oversight role of the board. There's also the question of board member elections -- are they a real thing, or is their election some kind of structured rubber stamp where they get elected by default? The end result is they are marionettes controlled by the executive officers, barring some big-name investor buying a significant percentage of the stock and demanding seats on the board.
I think a more democratic management of corporations would be possible, but I think it would take a careful structuring. You would still need some level of technical leadership, people who can intelligently manage the business of the company where technical information makes sense -- finance, taxation, HR, and these people should probably be hired the usual way.
But instead of these people making all of the decisions, I think there's probably room for an elected, board-like entity that they report to that could be elected by the entire workforce who could set some kind of affirmative company policies, directions, and so on, as well as review and overrule senior management decisions. Some kind of hybrid between what a board is supposed to be doing now, but with more involvement in day-day operations. It would also be critical that this oversight board be elected *from* the rank and file *by* the rank and file, with membership apportioned among the business units. Senior management would be exempt from membership or voting and with risk of termination for any interference with board elections or decisions.
I don't know what it would do for the company's business success, but it would probably result in a company that's better to work for, with saner executive pay and saner general management policies.
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If a country enters into a binding diplomatic agreement with other countries to regulate X, they can't then change the rules on X for their own benefit. Basically the agreed to align their sovereign law with the diplomatic arrangement.
In terms of figuring it out, how simple do you think this agreement is on paper? Six lines in the middle of an A10 sheet with room for big signatures?
I would imagine that the EU tax regulations extend for volumes and that almost no one person understands them fully. I'd wager that most of the regulations are in extremely abstract terms and are not highly specific, allowing Apple to define their business to fit where they want it to fit in the tax code, rather than the tax code defining their taxing obligations.
It takes an actual tax court ruling to actually decide if what Apple is trying to do meets the letter of the law.
And at the end of the day, there's politics that rules it all. The EU isn't going to allow member countries to act as tax havens, especially with the volatility of north/south economies among member states. They're going to demand maximum compliance with tax revenue.
The global demands for revenue will keep Apple from finding another tax haven it can use unless it chooses to align politically with a regime powerful enough to shield it from the US and the EU, but then it runs the risk of other kinds of coercion which might cost as much or more.
Taxes seldom make common understandable sense, even at the US 1040 form level. I've done the long form, by hand, for my 3 person, two income family with $4k in stock ownership. Even with such a basic, boiler-plate kind of setup there were many places where there was ambiguity (at least to me, a non-tax expert).
At the level of multinational corporations it's all totally ambiguous. You basically have only the complex letter of the law and past rulings to go on and with a company like Apple who designs a complex product in one country, builds it in some others, and sells it globally, they have a wide latitude to define the nature of where and what they do for tax purposes and the only way their unique setup will get evaluated is by the ultimate arbiters of the tax law, which in this case sounds like the EU.
Apple thought they could construct a tax shelter scheme and Ireland was a willing participant, probably with backroom deals that Apple would guarantee a certain portion of the tax-exempt capital on deposit in Irish banks as a long-term deposit, enabling Irish banking to basically get a capital infusion.
Suppose you answer that question, what does it matter in terms of moving forward on Mars exploration?
It doesn't really change the equation in terms of human exploration or establishing any kind of base there. I'm not even sure it informs the rover exploration missions other than influencing the science they do, although even then I doubt you'd get away with an exclusionary rover that was solely designed for "did Mars support life?" or could even design one if that was possible.
The planet is too big and the exploration to really answer the question is so extensive it doesn't seem like it's a very easy question to answer definitively, and even if you did you're back to square 1 -- what does it mean, outside of the mostly philosophical question of extraterrestrial life.
What about consciousness transfer to fully synthetic android type bodies?
I keep thinking that the a reasonably likely way an advanced civilization would conquer the problems of relativity and distance is by altering the relationship with time. If consciousness can be transferred into a synthetic machine and time is no longer defined around human lifespans, interstellar distances no longer matter because a trip of a 10,000 years doesn't matter.
I would wager if we do encounter alien intelligence they will be former biological beings who have transferred to machine consciousness and can live forever.
I didn't make an exhaustive search because I don't have a pressing personal need. I make do with electrical tape for the most part or if I want a more permanent solution, liquid vinyl (similar to Dip-it, but in small bottles meant to be used as a kind of electrical tape).
I haven't had a client bitch about bright LEDs that need to be visible but just dimmer, so my solutions have been all I've really felt the need to use.
I did look in a cursory way and I saw lots of people asking and I got results for large size tinting rolls used for car window tinting, but nothing obvious the size of a roll of Scotch tape.
Basically, I thought that one way this whole internet thing worked is that if somebody actually had experience and a direct answer for something with a less-than-obvious search results, they'd share it.
Does anybody make a something like Scotch tape except that instead of being transparent its got about a 90% tint to it?
Of course there are about a 1001 DIY equivalents, from electrical tape to permanent (or even paint-type) markers, but often the DIY solutions have drawbacks that make the lights either impossible to see or require some other intervention (getting a ladder to remove the tape..).
Tinting film for cars works, more or less, but it comes on rolls that are impractically large. Something the size of a scotch tape dispenser would be better.
If the people saying the U.S. should've adopted GSM had gotten their wish, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down below 1 Mbps. When a competitor introduces a far-superior product, it forces the other players in the market to improve, instead of sitting on their asses not improving things because people are paying them anyway.
The contra to this argument is that differing standards forced carrier lock-in, keeping consumers stuck with a device that wouldn't work on other carrier networks, allowing them to it on their asses and not improving things because people couldn't easily leave the carriers they were on.
Had the US adopted a carrier-neutral standard users could have easily switched carriers without buying a new device and device portability and consumer choice would have driven carrier improvements instead of consumers being forced to sit around and wait for a carrier to adopt improvements to their unique signalling.
My first question is whether there's an actual harm being experienced by non-white renters. Are they experiencing an inability to rent on AirBnB? Short term housing in general, such as hotels or resorts?
How picky are AirBnB renters allowed to be generally? AFAIK where I live if you own a duplex or some other owner-occupied property you're allowed to refuse rental to anyone.
My sense is that as long as it doesn't meaningfully prevent people from renting in an area, who cares? If someone doesn't like me because of my race or ethnicity or whatever, I'd guess I'd rather not stay in their house anyway, so those people who turn me down are doing us both a favor. It's only really a problem if it seriously limits the number of places I can stay.
The thing is, nobody else wants those channels, either. They get turned on at the doggy daycare or in the day room at the insane asylum only.
But the reality is that the parent networks/companies want them and they will just charge you the same $120 a month for the 5 channels because their business model isn't based on shrinking their business and shuttering the expanded delivery footprint they enjoy now.
AFAICT, the outsourcing savings are usually spreadsheet savings up front measured with optimistic labor costs of lower paid workers.
Lost in these models are the inevitable cost increases that happen over time. Increased consulting management fees required from the inevitable management maze that gets created, adding in additional outsourcing bodies, often higher rate bodies with more skills when the cheap bodies aren't good enough, longer implementation cycles caused by the transient nature of outsourced workers who lack institutional knowledge and organizational buy-in.
Then you get the service reductions, either because the outsourced staff aren't as good, deliberate service reductions as organization management attempts to contain spiraling costs, or service underdelivery by outsourcers working under fixed price contracts who face pressure from the outsourcing company who want to retain their own profit margins.
I would argue that the basic economics of outsourcing don't make sense. The macro economy of an organization has a kind of invisible hand effect that sets the cost of IT services at a given service level. The idea that it's possible to deliver the same services at a lower cost while extracting a profit for the outsourcing provider without a loss in service delivery is like believing in free energy.
Organizations that decide to fix their IT environments with outsourcing are basically admitting a failure of management, either the inability to manage their IT department or their entire organization. Sure, some IT departments are broken, but who's fault is it they got that way? Almost never the line level IT worker or even first tier of management.
In many of those cases, Apple went from their proprietary solution to something more open. AppleTalk ran over LocalTalk--Apple's proprietary networking (which was basically twisted pair). Another company--I don't remember their name--came alone and just used cheaper wires (PhoneNet). Apple developed EtherTalk--AppleTalk over Ethernet--before going to TCP/IP.
Farallon developed PhoneNet which ran LocalTalk over telephone patch cords via dongle connected to the serial port. They even made a LocalTalk/Ethernert bridge device to allow internetworking as was as the StarController hub-like connector for non-daisy chain setups.
I'm not sure Apple's transition from LocalTalk to Ethernet was driven by a desire to adopt a more open technology than it was to escape a clearly dead end solution that was non-scalable, limited to RS-422 speeds and often daisy chained.
Apple were also at the time actually interested in business computing markets as well as larger educational institutions and LocalTalk was a monster pain in the ass due to scaling problems. The switch to LocalTalk-over-Ethernet aka EtherTalk was pretty much mandatory for Mac networking in any large topology or internetwork.
Regardless of EtherTalk's use of a standard layer 2 transport, it was still highly proprietary. And you could also argue that they hung onto it for too long, way past the point at which TCP/IP was the obvious future. Transport performance with AppleTalk was god-awful and when AppleShare/IP finally began emerging it was obvious how much faster it was than AppleShare on EtherTalk.
If large batteries become cheap enough and powerful enough to make sense in houses, I wouldn't be surprised to see a building code change that requires them to be encased in some kind of fire-resistant box and/or have a thermal switch that shuts them off in the event of a fire.
I can only imagine that there is some kind of crypto signing taking place, what I can't figure out is how they manage to keep a lid on forgeries and keep the chip in the cable so dirt cheap that Amazon can sell licensed cables for $8.
I'd wager Apple wanted a chip capable of significant processing power able to fully encrypt the handshake but that vendors pushed back against a $10 component for just charging cable authentication and they were stuck with a dumber chip which could have some data sniffed.
What I don't understand is why the Chinese haven't used their usual trick, funneling the day-shift product to the greymarket on the night shift, putting legitimate vendor chips into greymarket products. If Apple were to grenade these, they grenade a bunch of legitimate products, too.
A zillion years ago, some person had attributes that made them a better hunter. They brought home the best meat and their children ate better, so they got to breed with better mates. These hunting abilities overlapped with fighting abilities, so not only could they get better food, they could neutralize local rivals or lead the fighting against the tribe on the other side of the river.
These people became clan, then tribal leaders. Eventually more formalized class systems enforced these breeding systems and became the aristocracy, which had elaborate rules about who could marry whom.
I'd guess that most of the genetic advantages fell away early on and that later "good breeding" was less about genetics and more about access to high-quality foods during pregnancy and youth which contributed to better development. Later on it was probably even less about nutrition and more about access to material resources, like better weapons, armor or education.
What's funny about the genetic aspect of "good breeding" is that I have a client that is a high-end country club, and in the summer when the pool is open, nearly everyone has a perfect body. What's genetic and what's not, I don't know, but it's hard to escape the feeling that there's not some kind of selection process there.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but why provide lightning based earbuds instead of a lightning to 3.5mm adapter?
I'm guessing that an adapter is electrically identical except it has a 3.5mm jack instead of actual tiny speakers.
I would think it would be cheaper to provide an adapter, but maybe I should dial up my cynicism and presume that an adapter sends the message "keep using your existing headphones" and lightning earbuds says "buy new headphones, your old ones are obsolete."
It starts to make me wonder if even a $39.95 Apple 3.5mm adapter will even be allowed to be sold with the idea that either consumers will have the choice of: just OK existing Bluetooth audio, Apple "enhanced" wireless for higher fidelity or direct lightning. Apple only misses a cut on the first one, but the tradeoff is whether standard BT audio is good enough.
I don't know if this is how it works or not, but I seem to remember that lightning connectors used some kind of chip which handshakes with the phone using Apple-provided signed key.
Knockoff vendor manages to sniff licensed cable and phone handshake, steals the keys used in the exchange and puts them in their cable. Cable then "works" at the time of manufacture. Apple lightning licensing enforcement buys knockoff products, checks keys used, and revokes "stolen" vendor keys and knockoff cable stops working.
Ordinarily this would be a problem if the licensed product was only issued a single key. But maybe Apple issues 10 keys to each licensed product and the handshake protocol involves the chip providing keys to the phone until a "good" key is found.
This way the licensed product keeps working because it has a set of backup keys and the odds of them all being used by knockoff vendors are low as the secondary keys aren't provided in the handshake unless the previous ones are rejected during handshake.
Even if all of a vendor's issued keys for a product are used in knockoffs, maybe Apple agrees not to revoke the last product key with the idea that it will take so long to reach this point that it won't matter. Maybe vendors are required to refresh their chip and keys every N units or N months so that a good, unrevoked key is very hard to find and Apple could revoke the last vendor key for a product after N years with the idea that by then the majority of legitimate cables will be worn out or no longer in use.
I just made all this up off the top of my head, so don't kill me over the lack of feasibility or holes, but it does conceptually at least seem to provide a process by which Apple could enforce lightning product licensing yet still account for knockoff cables which seem to work. My wife has a knockoff cable that worked fine for a few months and then quit working. She was using it on her bedside stand with a quality charger, so wear and tear wasn't an issue but both her iPhone and iPad still work fine with licensed cables.
I'd be surprised if a UBI that is a flat check sent to everyone would be economically viable; from what I've read, a negative income tax scheme almost seems necessary for financial viability and to cut somewhat the inflationary pressure of just adding $x to everyone's income.
As much as I would rather just force corporations and the extremely rich to disgorge profits above whatever number is necessary to reinvest in the business, I think it's less simple than that.
The other problem I don't know how you deal with is what prevents a UBI from simply raising the price of everything by the amount of UBI everyone gets? How do you guarantee food, shelter and clothing will be always available at UBI income rates without price controls?
They always feed the rumor mill as it serves as free publicity to drum up interest in what isn't very interesting anymore.
The NY Times even reported on the iPhone 7 rumors, saying that the rumor mongering was stronger this time around than it has been and that's evidence that the brand hasn't lost that much cache.
You might even argue that the whole headphone jack removal was deliberate false information to gin up hype about the phone release. Better to have people arguing about the potential of you doing something unpopular than to not have people arguing about you at all.
IMHO, Apple has reached the limit of peak cycling for their phones. There's almost no incremental improvement they can deliver that means much anymore. They need either a quantum leap in design that limits on existing materials, manufacturing or power consumption can't deliver or need to start figuring out how to expand the walled garden of the phone as a functional platform instead of just seeing it as a version churn annuity.
I think another and potentially larger payoff from a mostly exemption-free draft is that it puts all kinds of people together to achieve a common purpose, cutting across class and ethnic lines.
When the rich kid from the suburbs, the blue collar kid from some small town, the kid from the barrio and the kid from the ghetto and others are forced to work together I think it radically reshapes their attitudes about people they never interact with. "There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless. And my orders are to weed out all non-hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved Corps. Do you maggots understand that?"
I think school desegregation was supposed to have this side effect, too, but it ended up worse as affluent people moved to economically and geographically isolated suburbs, resulting in not only ethnic sorting but ethnic sorting with a class hierarchy, too.
I was kind of wondering if that was part of the training protocol.
Ideally they would have a collection of actual child porn storage devices minimally handled by third parties during evidence collection. It wouldn't surprise me at all if these had some unique scent profile identifiable to dogs, possibly due to either semen from masturbation or from arousal pheromones accumulated during repeat handling while sexually stimulated.
A scent cocktail comprised of bodily fluids, pheromones and electronics might actually be more useful than just electronics themselves, at least if you were specifically targeting child porn.
My guess, though, is that cops probably see some broader utility in finding portable electronic media generally, and dogs trained for this could be used in tax investigations or other types of things where hidden information is involved but sexuality isn't. I mean, "think of the children" is the excuse, rousting anybody is the real rationale.
UBI may render a de jure minimum wage obsolete enough to eliminate it, but there would still be a de facto minimum wage necessary to attract labor to work at any job, since thanks to UBI "work" would be unnecessary for basic subsistence. If you posit a progressive negative income tax associated with UBI -- as earned income increases, UBI declines, a wage floor similar to a minimum wage would exist probably just below the threshold at which UBI payments start to decrease.
Illegal immigrants would be willing to below this wage floor, reducing the incentive for employers to attract UBI recipients into jobs. It would also reduce the incentive for employers to raise working standards to accommodate the intangible and external costs to UBI recipients.
I think the overall negative bottom line here is that with a pool of labor willing to work below a wage floor associated with UBI, you undermine the incentives for UBI recipients to work by reducing the number of jobs that are good enough and pay enough to be worth working at.
IMHO, any long-term UBI scheme *must* have sufficient labor incentive to work in order to maintain the labor productivity and economic growth necessary for UBI to remain economically viable. I'd also wager there's a social rationale -- admittedly paternalistic -- to maintain some kind of work-like activity structure for the majority of the population to constrain what I would call the "idle hands are the Devil's workshop" effect. People don't do well with no life purpose, and the majority of people tend to engage in socially corrosive behaviors without something to base their life around, and I think it would be worse for UBI recipients whose UBI would only really cover food and shelter and not provide the resources for hobbies or other ways of using time in a less destructive manner.
In my mind, the value of UBI isn't just in reducing benefits costs or the reduction in poverty, but as a catalyst to improve the work by reducing its coercive nature and eliminating the kinds of perverse incentives that keep people from living productive lives.
Illegal immigrants? This is certainly a problem that needs addressing, but it's not going to be some sort of drain on an UBI system. In fact, it might help with that issue: Illegal immigrants are unlikely to apply because it significantly increases the chances of being discovered and deported, and without minimum wage in place it becomes far harder for them to survive so they have less incentive to come over.
The risk posed by illegal immigrants isn't about them receiving it, but their presence generally warps the labor market in ways that's not good for UBI or any minimum wage scheme, since they will work for less than minimum wage and in worse working conditions due to their illegal status.
I generally think there's enough wealth generated by the US economy that a UBI or any other democratic socialist set of policies could work. The Scandahoovians have mostly made it work, but it seems existentially dependent on a self-contained and homogeneous population with low rates of immigration, and I think a UBI works about the same. Start tipping the demographic balance towards low income immigrants even a little and I think it becomes much harder to maintain from an economic potential since it takes these immigrants at least 2 generations to achieve levels of economic productivity necessary to balance out UBI costs.
I support UBI in principal, but I'm not sure it would work without far stricter immigration controls than we in the US seem to be able to agree on, especially with a non-trivial amount of the population apparently supportive of open border policies via issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants or sanctuary city policies.
But they don't work. They've got executive officers who are supposed to be overseen by the board sitting on them, they're loaded with fluffy famous people and back-scratching officers from other companies. Their elections are farces, controlled by ridiculous bylaws that make Soviet elections look like legitimate democracy. On paper they represent shareholders, in reality they are marionettes of management.
And at the end of it, how often are they actually engaged in the company's business? Close enough to never to be indistinguishable from never.
I think the best basic income schemes have a negative progressive income tax basis to them. You lose the basic income as your regular income increases and at some level of earned income you don't get any basic income.
This provides a work incentive, since even the lowest form of work produces income gains over basic.
I think low wage employers would end up really hating basic income because while they might not be forced to pay more, they would probably have to improve their working conditions and employee treatment. I think what discourages a lot of impoverished people from working isn't the nature of the work itself, it's the nature of the management combined with the low pay. Unrealistic labor goals, bad shifts, intrusive and arbitrary policies, and so on.
There's a bunch of blue collar jobs I'd do, even for less money, but I just couldn't tolerate the way blue collar employees get treated. High school was less confrontational and paternalistic.
I think there are serious obstacles to any kind of basic income scheme. For one, I think employers generally fear any world where unemployment isn't an existential threat for employees -- I think it radically reshapes the balance of power. Immigration is a real problem -- how do you contain a basic income system to the basic margins of your economy?
Traditional corporations have a board (which is elected by shareholders, at least nominally) and then executive officers who are actually supposed to run the company. I don't know anything about business organization theory, but I'm guessing that in some pure sense corporations are already technically structured around the idea of some kind of democratic management.
I think the problem is that in so many corporations, the board is relatively weak and not very involved in much oversight. They also tend to have at least one executive officer on the board, which IMHO corrupts the oversight role of the board. There's also the question of board member elections -- are they a real thing, or is their election some kind of structured rubber stamp where they get elected by default? The end result is they are marionettes controlled by the executive officers, barring some big-name investor buying a significant percentage of the stock and demanding seats on the board.
I think a more democratic management of corporations would be possible, but I think it would take a careful structuring. You would still need some level of technical leadership, people who can intelligently manage the business of the company where technical information makes sense -- finance, taxation, HR, and these people should probably be hired the usual way.
But instead of these people making all of the decisions, I think there's probably room for an elected, board-like entity that they report to that could be elected by the entire workforce who could set some kind of affirmative company policies, directions, and so on, as well as review and overrule senior management decisions. Some kind of hybrid between what a board is supposed to be doing now, but with more involvement in day-day operations. It would also be critical that this oversight board be elected *from* the rank and file *by* the rank and file, with membership apportioned among the business units. Senior management would be exempt from membership or voting and with risk of termination for any interference with board elections or decisions.
I don't know what it would do for the company's business success, but it would probably result in a company that's better to work for, with saner executive pay and saner general management policies.