Heh. Any commodity or currency's value is going to fluctuate based on supply and demand and various attempts to figure out how to create scarcity and drive up the price (e.g., 'corner the market').
Ultimately, what supports value is (and this makes me VERY uncomfortable) the public's faith in the durable exchange value of the commodity or currency. If lots of people believe that Bitcoin will be honored at face value when attempting to convert it into other currencies or commodities at the current publicly published rates, then it'll be stable. If people don't believe that you can slap down a couple of Bitcoins and get whatever (2*bc) value is in whatever currency they want or commodity they want to purchase, then it'll suffer reduction in value.
This is the value of things like the USD - enough people around the world have faith that the US will honor debt in dollars and that dollars will hold their value relative to other currencies. It's also why potential US defaults are looked on with horror by US bankers; it undermines the dollar, the durable, stable value of which represents the atomic unit of their success.
I would guess that they couldn't do it because his views indicate unwillingness to accept that his expressed views fall outside the company's expressed positions. His paper *does* advance the argument that diversity training, etc was essentially worthless because (in his view) biology is destiny. So he'd either have to back off that position and eat a lot of very public crow, or else Google would have to essentially state that they're willing to not enforce their diversity initiatives for talented engineers; neither of those are particularly likely outcomes.
Umm, $2MM doesn't go that far, really. That's not retirement-level don't-need-to-work money, and certainly not angel money except for *very* small businesses. Since a very high percentage of startups don't provide any ROI, it's possible to burn through $2MM *really* fast and end up broke.
The only people I'm aware of who have been able to not work after an IPO or inheritance generally have portfolio net work about $5MM, which, at worst-case investment (3% annual expectation) gens $150k in annual income. Since the US economy has been growing about 2.2% annually, 3% is a safe bet to count on worst-case scenarios and not expect market runups like we've had in the last several years. Yes, lots of people's portfolio have grown way more than that in the last four-plus years, but it makes sense to treat it as an outlier rather than a normal event.
Net-net, the ISPs are petrified of being placed into a class for service like the phone companies were. They want their balance sheets to stay not only green, but extremely so, and universal service and extending to low-margin areas doesn't help that goal.....
Most ISPs are doing a crap job with service as well - the speeds are slow as hell even in areas with competition. They're not investing in physical plant because what they provide now is 'good enough.' I've been elsewhere in the world and speeds are remarkably fast compared to the US....the technology was invented here, so why can't we use its full potential here? Is profit margin so important that you won't lower it a little to create a product that's X times more attractive to your customer base, and grow your base by doing so? Sounds like the ISPs are playing it safe beyond healthy levels.
The problem is that between now and the 2018 elections, internet users, including those who now nominally support NN repeal, may see changes by bad actors at ISPs which will cause them to reevaluate their position.
Yes, the various ISPs and telecoms have pledged not to engage in bad acts, but history suggests otherwise. If there's money to be made by changing revenue models in ways that incentivize users to spend more for certain types of access or access to certain websites, some ISP is going to do it - it's just human nature. It'll get publicized widely and cause a backlash which, whether or not the act is done by a single bad actor or multiple actors, will resonate with other users fearing such treatment. That'll get the regulatory rollback rolled back (gah, what a terrible wording, but I can't come up with anything better) no matter who wants it repealed. NO ONE wants bad publicity, and publicly listing bad acts done as the result of regulatory rollback is one of the surest ways in modern America to garner support for a regulatory regime.
Note: I support NN, and think that rolling it back is a bad idea.
Eh. Conservation falls on either side of the political spectrum, based on what's being conserved. If what's being conserved are social structures that help the well-off at the expense of the less-well-off, that's conservatism. If what's being conserved are social structures that help the less-well-off at the expense of the well-off, that's liberalism.
Since there are a lot more less-well-offs, I know where I stand from a do-the-most-good perspective. And I've come to favor that ever more as I've grown older and have seen people like me who haven't prospered as much as I have....success is not guaranteed even to people who do everything right. So I favor provision of services, a 'decency floor' if you will, because watching people fall through the cracks is hard.
Either way, though, I've determined that treating people with basic respect - which in this case equates to situationally appropriate etiquette - goes a long way. It's not that tricky, really. Sexism, racism, ageism etc are not isolated, IMHO - they are, ultimately, all facets of the same behavior, which is evaluating a person based on their morphology rather than their demonstrated abilities.
Not to put too fine a point on it, there are people who are brilliant in every group, and the exact opposite. To stay competitive, we as a country need to ID the brilliant ones irrespective of their morphology and leverage their brains. Forty years ago, John Brunner, in "The Shockwave Rider," realized this, and it is as true now as it was then.
“First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race."
After too many failed drip coffee makers, we quit buying them and bought a reasonably good metal-bodied one from a good cooking store, and it's worked well for a long time. The welds were not great (it's hollow-wall to keep things warmer), but some non-lead solder applied to weld pinholes after baking out the water has fixed that entirely. That and the electric kettle go in the car on driving vacations....it's pretty wonderful to be able to plug in the inverter, plug in the kettle, load up the FP, and voila, coffee!
Where I work, we've a wonderful selection of teas, including several excellent brands from the UK. Perfectly good tea, albeit tea made with crap Valley water.
I agree that McD's coffee has improved markedly in recent years. It's nice to be able to stop and grab what is at least a drinkable coffee without going miles off the throughway late at night. Dunkin' Donuts, however....that stuff is an elixir. The SO and yt drove from northern ME to SC fueled on DD coffee and the occasional burger.
"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
In 1927 in the court case of Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue a dissenting opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. that included this phrase.
There are people who grow up in places with completely underfunded schools and have the additional issues of dealing with institutional bias bc of your morphology - dark skin, female, disabled, etc - and live in places which are economically distressed bc the corporate entity that used to provide the jobs offshored to $elsewhere, then it's damned hard to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps.
Until we realize that we need to educate and enable every brain in this country and work together to leverage our capacity for imagining and realizing (e.g., monetizing) good things, we'll keep falling behind. We need every brain, irrespective of what the wrapper looks like.
I like the feature. It kinda makes sense.....I get that people with eating disorders and stuff can be hypersensitive to calorie counts and that it can cause them to engage in the behaviors that they're trying to avoid, but gah, still....it's a useful feature for those of us who try to walk as part of a fitness regimen and really need to track what our exercise buys us.
There are people who are disabled - CP, Parkinson's, the like - for whom voice-enabled applications are a boon.
It's not the applications which are problematical; it's the bad actors who define use cases which are explicitly designed to undermine privacy in the interests of either security or sales that make us suspicioua of the tech.
I think a future with voice rec is probably better than one without, but with caveats that the technology needs to be controlled, or at least, the results not admissible in court and the use of which automatically will automatically cause a case to be dismissed.
...and remove the current wage cap on SS and it'll be solvent indefinitely. This hasn't happened because there are congresscritters who would like to watch SS fail so they can privatize things for their financial donors.....
Umm, my stock portfolio grew a hell of a lot between 2009 and the present.....there has been economic expansion, but it's concentrated in some sectors (finance, tech, healthcare). leaving most others behind.
I agree - when a significant percentage of a given opulation is unemployable bc the jobs they previously held have been automated out of instance, **and there's no sector of employment opening up to replace the automated jobs**, then we have an issue.
There were industrial jobs awaiting those who had been displaced from farms. Right now, it looks as though there is no new business sector providing employment....that's the difference. IT isn't it - we all know people who are displaced workers who would be downright scary in IT work. So what do we do with those workers?
What do we do with people when there's no work for them?
Not going to be a rhetorical question for much longer. Driving, for example, is the single largest job category in North America....what happens when autonomous vehicles take over? Not going to be a market for that skill. Do we let those people starve? Think about it....lots of economic displacement is on the way.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. Any commodity or currency's value is going to fluctuate based on supply and demand and various attempts to figure out how to create scarcity and drive up the price (e.g., 'corner the market').
Ultimately, what supports value is (and this makes me VERY uncomfortable) the public's faith in the durable exchange value of the commodity or currency. If lots of people believe that Bitcoin will be honored at face value when attempting to convert it into other currencies or commodities at the current publicly published rates, then it'll be stable. If people don't believe that you can slap down a couple of Bitcoins and get whatever (2*bc) value is in whatever currency they want or commodity they want to purchase, then it'll suffer reduction in value.
This is the value of things like the USD - enough people around the world have faith that the US will honor debt in dollars and that dollars will hold their value relative to other currencies. It's also why potential US defaults are looked on with horror by US bankers; it undermines the dollar, the durable, stable value of which represents the atomic unit of their success.
I would guess that they couldn't do it because his views indicate unwillingness to accept that his expressed views fall outside the company's expressed positions. His paper *does* advance the argument that diversity training, etc was essentially worthless because (in his view) biology is destiny. So he'd either have to back off that position and eat a lot of very public crow, or else Google would have to essentially state that they're willing to not enforce their diversity initiatives for talented engineers; neither of those are particularly likely outcomes.
Umm, $2MM doesn't go that far, really. That's not retirement-level don't-need-to-work money, and certainly not angel money except for *very* small businesses. Since a very high percentage of startups don't provide any ROI, it's possible to burn through $2MM *really* fast and end up broke.
The only people I'm aware of who have been able to not work after an IPO or inheritance generally have portfolio net work about $5MM, which, at worst-case investment (3% annual expectation) gens $150k in annual income. Since the US economy has been growing about 2.2% annually, 3% is a safe bet to count on worst-case scenarios and not expect market runups like we've had in the last several years. Yes, lots of people's portfolio have grown way more than that in the last four-plus years, but it makes sense to treat it as an outlier rather than a normal event.
....and after this, the Southern Democrats left the Democratic Party and migrated to the GOP.
Lee Atwater on the Southern Strategy in 1981: https://www.thenation.com/arti...
Net-net, the ISPs are petrified of being placed into a class for service like the phone companies were. They want their balance sheets to stay not only green, but extremely so, and universal service and extending to low-margin areas doesn't help that goal.....
Most ISPs are doing a crap job with service as well - the speeds are slow as hell even in areas with competition. They're not investing in physical plant because what they provide now is 'good enough.' I've been elsewhere in the world and speeds are remarkably fast compared to the US....the technology was invented here, so why can't we use its full potential here? Is profit margin so important that you won't lower it a little to create a product that's X times more attractive to your customer base, and grow your base by doing so? Sounds like the ISPs are playing it safe beyond healthy levels.
The problem is that between now and the 2018 elections, internet users, including those who now nominally support NN repeal, may see changes by bad actors at ISPs which will cause them to reevaluate their position.
Yes, the various ISPs and telecoms have pledged not to engage in bad acts, but history suggests otherwise. If there's money to be made by changing revenue models in ways that incentivize users to spend more for certain types of access or access to certain websites, some ISP is going to do it - it's just human nature. It'll get publicized widely and cause a backlash which, whether or not the act is done by a single bad actor or multiple actors, will resonate with other users fearing such treatment. That'll get the regulatory rollback rolled back (gah, what a terrible wording, but I can't come up with anything better) no matter who wants it repealed. NO ONE wants bad publicity, and publicly listing bad acts done as the result of regulatory rollback is one of the surest ways in modern America to garner support for a regulatory regime.
Note: I support NN, and think that rolling it back is a bad idea.
Eh. Conservation falls on either side of the political spectrum, based on what's being conserved. If what's being conserved are social structures that help the well-off at the expense of the less-well-off, that's conservatism. If what's being conserved are social structures that help the less-well-off at the expense of the well-off, that's liberalism.
Since there are a lot more less-well-offs, I know where I stand from a do-the-most-good perspective. And I've come to favor that ever more as I've grown older and have seen people like me who haven't prospered as much as I have....success is not guaranteed even to people who do everything right. So I favor provision of services, a 'decency floor' if you will, because watching people fall through the cracks is hard.
Either way, though, I've determined that treating people with basic respect - which in this case equates to situationally appropriate etiquette - goes a long way. It's not that tricky, really. Sexism, racism, ageism etc are not isolated, IMHO - they are, ultimately, all facets of the same behavior, which is evaluating a person based on their morphology rather than their demonstrated abilities.
Not to put too fine a point on it, there are people who are brilliant in every group, and the exact opposite. To stay competitive, we as a country need to ID the brilliant ones irrespective of their morphology and leverage their brains. Forty years ago, John Brunner, in "The Shockwave Rider," realized this, and it is as true now as it was then.
“First we had the legs race. Then we had the arms race. Now we're going to have the brain race. And, if we're lucky, the final stage will be the human race."
This ^^
After too many failed drip coffee makers, we quit buying them and bought a reasonably good metal-bodied one from a good cooking store, and it's worked well for a long time. The welds were not great (it's hollow-wall to keep things warmer), but some non-lead solder applied to weld pinholes after baking out the water has fixed that entirely. That and the electric kettle go in the car on driving vacations....it's pretty wonderful to be able to plug in the inverter, plug in the kettle, load up the FP, and voila, coffee!
Where I work, we've a wonderful selection of teas, including several excellent brands from the UK. Perfectly good tea, albeit tea made with crap Valley water.
I agree that McD's coffee has improved markedly in recent years. It's nice to be able to stop and grab what is at least a drinkable coffee without going miles off the throughway late at night. Dunkin' Donuts, however....that stuff is an elixir. The SO and yt drove from northern ME to SC fueled on DD coffee and the occasional burger.
Agree entirely - we need to have production facilities in the US.
...oh.
I read a student essay where he talked about his need to use gundams when $intimate with his SO.
Let me tell ya, that was an image that took lotsa brain bleach to clear out.
+1
Nice to see you, Mr. Desiato.
Your bodyguard's a bit rude, innit?
Read Samuel Butler's EREHWON - I think you'll find it enlightening.
"Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
In 1927 in the court case of Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue a dissenting opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. that included this phrase.
https://www.nationalgeographic...
Umm, with the amount of ice that Antarctica is shedding, you might want to rethink that.
There are people who grow up in places with completely underfunded schools and have the additional issues of dealing with institutional bias bc of your morphology - dark skin, female, disabled, etc - and live in places which are economically distressed bc the corporate entity that used to provide the jobs offshored to $elsewhere, then it's damned hard to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps.
Until we realize that we need to educate and enable every brain in this country and work together to leverage our capacity for imagining and realizing (e.g., monetizing) good things, we'll keep falling behind. We need every brain, irrespective of what the wrapper looks like.
I like the feature. It kinda makes sense.....I get that people with eating disorders and stuff can be hypersensitive to calorie counts and that it can cause them to engage in the behaviors that they're trying to avoid, but gah, still....it's a useful feature for those of us who try to walk as part of a fitness regimen and really need to track what our exercise buys us.
Software is *never* complete. There's always one more thing to do....
There are people who are disabled - CP, Parkinson's, the like - for whom voice-enabled applications are a boon.
It's not the applications which are problematical; it's the bad actors who define use cases which are explicitly designed to undermine privacy in the interests of either security or sales that make us suspicioua of the tech.
I think a future with voice rec is probably better than one without, but with caveats that the technology needs to be controlled, or at least, the results not admissible in court and the use of which automatically will automatically cause a case to be dismissed.
...and remove the current wage cap on SS and it'll be solvent indefinitely.
This hasn't happened because there are congresscritters who would like to watch SS fail so they can privatize things for their financial donors.....
Umm, my stock portfolio grew a hell of a lot between 2009 and the present.....there has been economic expansion, but it's concentrated in some sectors (finance, tech, healthcare). leaving most others behind.
I agree - when a significant percentage of a given opulation is unemployable bc the jobs they previously held have been automated out of instance, **and there's no sector of employment opening up to replace the automated jobs**, then we have an issue.
There were industrial jobs awaiting those who had been displaced from farms. Right now, it looks as though there is no new business sector providing employment....that's the difference. IT isn't it - we all know people who are displaced workers who would be downright scary in IT work.
So what do we do with those workers?
What do we do with people when there's no work for them?
Not going to be a rhetorical question for much longer. Driving, for example, is the single largest job category in North America....what happens when autonomous vehicles take over? Not going to be a market for that skill. Do we let those people starve? Think about it....lots of economic displacement is on the way.