There is, in fact, no such thing as a perfectly informed rational customer, there never has been and there never will be. Those two "simplifying" assumptions are typical of the fundamental defects that render economics almost worthless in its present form. Of course economists like simplifying assumptions, because otherwise their field would be far too complicated to make any sense out of. Unfortunately the assumptions mean that the resulting rules and laws apply only in an abstract world which hardly bears any resemblance to the real world we live in.
It's a simplification like a CPU taking one instruction after another, you don't start them off on a superpipelined hyperthreaded prefetching NUMA heterogeneous cluster and try to explain that.
1. "Perfectly informed"
Marketing theory has a ton of information on imperfect information, including perceived quality, substitution variables, effects of brand and reputation, behavior under uncertainty, unbalanced information like switching costs, speed of adoption from trendsetters to followers to holdouts and so on. It just so happens that in most cases it is not all that relevant to the topic because your competitor probably has an equivalent marketing department that do exactly the same.
2. "Rational customers"
Even within the context of rational customers you can have wildly "irrational" utility functions, it does not involve sane priorities only that people would behave optimally to meet their goals. Like people that "penny-wise and pound-foolish" and there's theory on when and why that happens. But ordinarily it's just noise, you both lose and get some and in the total market it's usually an insignificant effect and one you can't really change much either.
No, it was not covered in Business 101. But there are actually advanced classes there too, where they investigate all these simplifying constraints. And sure if you apply assumptions where they're not valid you end up with a spherical cow, but economics is certainly not the only such subject. In fact, much of it is quite sane except for the stock market which is about outguessing everyone else and is more of a group psychology game. Actually running a business and making money that way is quite a bit more down to earth than that. And then there's macro economics, which is economics mixed with politics. Ick.
Uh huh. And the main drive is still called C: because A: and B: were floppy drives once. Some things aren't worth changing, simply because it'd break lots of existing code for no particular reason. For example I think the Linux (POSIX?) file system was written before they invented autocomplete, it's all TLAs like/var/usr/bin/lib/wtf. But I care roughly as much as that drives in Windows start on C:, which is to say very very little.
You get bullied less if you stand up to the bullies from the start.
As a general rule that's fine but it depends on how rational the bully is in his victim selection process, how publicly he was stood up, how vindictive he is, how far he's willing to go and a host of other factors. If you run into the full psycho/ragetard that's going to haunt you for years it'll easily backfire like "Did that little twerp just [act of defiance]? I'm going to fucking destroy him. I'm going to make his every day a living hell." Because of that I have a feeling that advice is the least helpful when it's most needed.
It's a "common wisdom" because most bullies are just jerks who'll move along to the next easy mark, so it has worked for most people. In fact, it's so common I think you can assume everyone with a serious bullying problem has already tried that several times in several ways. Like going to the doctor and he tells you to rest and drink lots of water, it's probably good advice in general but when you got cancer and need chemo therapy or surgery no amount of water will do the trick.
I think it's easier to have been IBM than it is to be Intel. IBM used to deliver the whole package, hardware & software & applications & consulting so they just loosened up a bit. Intel on the other hand doesn't have any other business than hardware that I know of. Really anything that doesn't comply with x86_64 or ARM is dead in the water. Show me the benchmars...
My first impression is that this does not look like a good day for Microsoft. Is this back to Windows RT? That worked so well last time.
Well it war terms, D-day is cancelled as Intel won't be invading the mobile space. That doesn't mean ARM is about to invade the desktop/workstation/server market. That said, WinTel's grip on the customer is certainly weakening. but the mobile/tablet apps are still often seen as second fiddle to the "real" apps. That might change though, maybe not today or tomorrow but in a year or five things could look very different.
Services include poor jobs - cleaning, blue collar jobs - installing, good blue collar jobs - repair, and white collar jobs - inventing.
Repair is a good job? I've only seen decline as mass production and miniaturization has turned everything from clothes to household gadgets to computers and cell phones turn into things you throw away when they break. Only fixed installations and big ticket items tend to get repaired. And while a few older items were built like a tank a lot of the industrial work and QC also used to be manual and not very consistent, sure the cheapest plastic crap is still flimsy but if you go back to the store and swap for another one it'll be just like the first one. So either you have something that works or you want something else entirely not to have it repaired. And it's something of a negative feedback loop, with so few repairs the volume of parts, availability of tools and skills and so you rather make your product cheaper and harder to repair.
This despite Tesla's insistence that people must still stay at the wheel and drive; the technology has advanced enough that people get a false sense of confidence to push the limits even if the technology is not truly ready for it. That's the point that the Volvo engineer is making.
There's no force in existence that can stop idiots from being idiots. When you consider the number of Teslas on the road and how many of them use autopilot and somehow not get into these accidents I'm inclined to believe that the idiots you see on YouTube are the kind of people who should never be behind the wheel of any vehicle ever. And in that sense, sure level 4 would be great. But I'm not sure level 3 is worse than level 0 or whatever you call ordinary cars with these guys behind the wheel.
The investigators know that trick. It's older than you.
Still in this case it would be perfectly sufficient. If he had a device that would wipe the key after X days of not logging in, which would prominently declare that the contents have been wiped, he could no longer be held indefinitly in contempt. They'd have to either let him go or charge him with obstruction of justice.
The Falcon Heavy hasn't flown, he's never been beyond LEO
Who is "he"? As far as I know Musk hasn't been in space at all, I don't know if Dragon has ever been outside LEO but SpaceX have delivered several satellites to GEO and one to L1, so certainly the rockets can reach Mars. And he hasn't landed a Dragon propulsively, but a huge shell of a rocket with wind or waves to deal with actually seems harder than Mars, except you don't get a paved landing pad. Isn't that more similar to what NASA did in the 60s than what SpaceX did just recently? That said I do expect a few impact craters on Mars before they get it right....
Look it's really as simple as this, the reasons Netflix don't get global rights will be the same for any similar legal service. And since they're not going the Pirate Bay route, all they could effectively do is talk down their own service and stock price. Don't expect KFC to speak ill of fried chicken.
Capitalism is not the answer to everything. Socialism is not the answer to everything. There are dysfunctional markets. There are dysfunctional public services. A perfect system is just as unlikely to exist as a perfect diet, it's going to be better in some ways and worse in others. Capitalism works great when there's a reasonable number of suppliers and customers with low switching costs and equivalent bargaining power. Very often the latter is not the case, it's a billion dollar company again you with entirely different resources and needs, the insurance company doesn't need you but you need insurance. One premise that most economic theory makes is that companies are suicidal. If two companies are competing, they'll lower prices and steal customers back and forth until prices are as low as they can be.
If you take that one step up and say "you know this'll hurt both my and your profits, we'll have to answer and it'll all be for naught in the end" then no. They're not going to rock the boat until someone that's not in on this silent understanding tries to take those profits away. That is why you often have industry standard terms, laws and technical restrictions that are very much in the customer's disfavor. Also there's a vast difference between having a public service and public employees, you can very well have garbage disposal as a public service and yet hire the people and the trucks.
Quick - someone say how Apple is missing... and how that makes it CLEAR that Apple is producing a self-driving car!
Too early. If Apple were to make a car they'd probably license a road-approved system of sensors and AI and focus on selling you a new non-driving experience. That's the point to release a game changer, today's cars are built around driving. The first generation of self-driving cars will probably be built around the same design, just with the technical bits tacked on. Would you really give a hoot about engine and transmission if you were in the back seat of a limo? No. So you wouldn't in a self-driving car either. I'm quite sure the metrics you value will be almost completely different to today. Except the getting you from A to B part, but then most cars manage that just fine.
This is almost _never_ the case. It's usually a sign of extensively overdesigning the solution, insisting that the single tool solve _all_ the problems. I've seen it happen repeatedly, with email systems, QA tools, clustering projects, and even physical architectures. By the time the decision is made and implemented, the problem will have changed and it will no longer be the perfect solution. And the investment in hacks to work with the old infrastructure will be so large that it creates _another_ round of evaluation to move off the old systems, which have to be maintained in place during the switchover. I've seen this type of over-extended planning, repeatedly, and it's painful.
Yeah. However I've also seen projects fail because they didn't do enough planning, particularly: a) What is the critical functionality that absolutely must be in place before the old system can be shut down? and b) Does the new system have limitations that mean you're eventually halfway down an implementation project hit a brick wall?
For example, there's nothing like half an accounting system. Either it works to do your accounting or it doesn't. If you get caught up in all the "nice to have" improvements, you very often end up with dealbreaker shortcomings very late. It's easy enough if everything is your own code, but if you rely on third party solutions and libraries like you often do that's a real concern. Sometimes you really need a bit of prototyping to see if it really covers all the bases.
A lot of the people we admire today for their contributions to art, literature, science, exploration and a dozen other things did not have day jobs that were of any benefit to society. A lot of them were wealthy landlords who were into science because they were curious and had nothing else to do. And if we have one Newton for every one thousand people hanging around doing useless shit, as a species we would profit massively.
I'm sure you were trying to make a point, but Newton is a terrible example. Their family was not rich and he was almost forced into farming, but the school master persuaded the mother to let him finish. He entered Trinity College as a subsizar, essentially a servant for other students and the college in return for free education. He became a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. And that's essentially the modern model, all the people who do "useless shit" provide services and pay taxes so people can study and get scholarships, become professors, get research grants in organized academia rather than rich bored kids. For that you'd have to go back to the 15th century and Leonardo da Vinci, when there wasn't much organized science at all.
Part of my job is processing data that among other things is used for research, so I enable science. What enables my job? Well the people at the grocery store where I buy food and the farmer that produced it, the car manufacturer and gas stations so I get to work, the electricity company that keeps my fridge and the computers at work running, the plumber and water company that make sure I got running hot and cold water and sewage and so on and so forth all the way back to the people who mined the ore that was melted to a steel beam so it could be used in building my house. I think you vastly underestimate how it all comes together so a person like Stephan Hawking can become a modern day Newton. Sure, we are replacing it with automation but by itself turning a working man into a free spirit might not be a net gain for society.
The idea of a basic income is not directly related to the ownership of the means of production, so cannot be labelled with any of these terms. The reason I feel BI is fair and equitable is that the existence of "society" and the notion of "property" rely on relinquishing certain natural rights. Without society, I would be allowed to hunt, fish or gather wherever I wanted to.
If by natural rights you mean as found in nature, you'd find most animals are far more possessive of their territory and companions and far more likely to resort to acts of aggression and violence including lethal force than humans. It's all might make right and if you can take it and keep it then it's yours. It works both ways, sure you can't take other people's property but they can't take yours. And it's the little guy who needs protection, the rich and powerful protected themselves just fine long before society got involved.
You are taking a culture that is living like its 1216 and trying to accept them into 2016 and its never gonna work, all you will get is more terror attacks. Oh and don't bother with the tired "the majority is peaceful" because a silent majority DOES NOT MATTER. The Germans were mostly peaceful, the NSDAP killed 60 million plus. The majority of Russians are really nice, the USSR still racked up nearly 100 million dead. North Korea, Cambodia, we have literally thousands of years of history showing that the majority DOES NOT MATTER if they are not willing to put their asses on the line and actively turn on a dangerous minority.
The silently majority is still more likely to silently side with those that don't give them grief. After WWI the Germans were treated like shit, long before NSDAP and Hitler. The economy was in ruins by war debts, one side promised to bring them to a new glorious future and the other still saw no other choice but to take the piss. And the Russian tzar they had before communism, well he wasn't exactly a man of the people either. No, I don't think the silenty majority of muslims will stop the fucked up radicals. But if it ends up being a choice between being a maltreated, distrusted and unwelcome element of western society and a kinda-accepted follower of Allah it become a bit of a walkover.
The whole idea that people are inherently lazy and won't work without being forced to always puzzled me. Most of the people I know want to do something productive, but more often than not it's either not something they can get enough income from quickly enough to be able to drop their day job and start doing it full-time or it's not something they can get enough income from to keep the bills paid. Give them a guaranteed basic income and they won't sit around doing nothing, they'll start doing what they want to do (instead of the day job they have to have because it pays the bills).
Look, I have interests and hobbies and shit that I like to do so I wouldn't just sit on my ass. But would any of that have any payback to society? No, or if it did it'd at least be coincidental. And I wouldn't do any of the boring parts. And not on the days I don't feel like it. And I wouldn't really give a shit about anyone else's requirements, deadlines or whatever. It'd be what I feel like doing how I feel like doing it when I feel like doing it. I don't think "herding cats" would even begin to cover it.
I like to productive within the context of the work and the hours I put in anyway, no I'm not slacking or shirking as much as I could have. If it's my job to create something I take pride in the quality of my work and I do try to create solutions that'll work for real people in real life, not just the requirements. But I don't think you should underestimate the pay check as the overall framework for why I'm there and why I'm working on it at all. Or to put it another way, if I won' $100 million no matter how much I like my colleagues and the work is nice, I'd quit.
The other part is that there's shitty work that needs doing, if a sewage pipe burst I'm sure fixing it is not going to be at the top of anyone's list. So if you're paying everyone enough that they don't have to take the job, you have to pay them enough that they want to take the job. That'll drive wages up that'll drive prices up which means the "living wage" from basic income won't be enough. And then you're just right back where you started, if you raise basic income the shitty jobs won't get done again.
Or is it the most unintentionally hilarious thing I've read so far today? Sometimes the line is very blurred.
I went with hilarious. Boy you need a lot of hubris to make that kind of statement, try making say a 14nm CPU or Boeing 747 from Wikipedia and see how far you get...
And there's also the question if they got better, would we really need it and use them for more? For example you can now get 64GB DDR4 (4x16GB) for mainstream desktops for $239, but is there any normal use case? Even with all the bells and whistles I'm struggling to hit 10GB (of 16 total), so it's like sure I could but why. I think it might be more that, the smartphone you have already have "enough" to do what most people want so even if you could make a smartphone with desktop-class performance it wouldn't really have much more it could do.
If you don't intend to replace them, why bother with standardized sizes? Design one to perfectly fit your phone/tablet/laptop and glue it stuck, really if batteries didn't lose capacity and fail after a few years it wouldn't be an issue.
If it was forever ever, then maybe... but mostly you're just a bit ahead of the curve, sure being fifty and in the shape of a thirty year old is nice. But in ten years you'll be sixty and struggling to keep up with a forty year old. By seventy most really start to feel their age, it's way different than fifty. And very few eighty year olds can keep up with a sixty year old. By ninety most are dead, while seventy year olds are mostly still alive and kicking. It's not like being in good shape actually slows down aging, any more than putting on makeup. Sure you're in much better shape than your peers, but you age a year every year like the rest of us.
which includes not worrying about things you can't change
Or find religion. If there's no way to know if it'll rain or not and your crops will wither and you'll starve to death, make up a rain god that you can do a rain dance to. Why do you think pretty much all major religions have a concept of afterlife, reincarnation or such? Because "no, you just die" sucks. People want to believe that life is longer and fairer and with more reason than reality and scientific rationality tends to lose simply because the alternative feels so much better.
This just proves Breivik's point that Norway is too left-wing. I'd love to live in a utopian society where we can be just nice to everybody, where everybody's needs are covered and punishment is unnecessary. But in the real world, there will always be nihilists like this guy who ruin it for the rest.
In an average year, Norway (population ~5 million) has an average of about ~30 murders, mostly knife stabbing and mostly acquaintances, (ex-)partners or family and an average of about ~1.1 victim/incident. Even though a few murders happen with guns, mass murders are pretty much non-existent. He single-handedly tripled the murder rate in Norway that year from 35 other victims to 112 total.
As far as Norway is concerned, Breivik was a black swan event, in a place absolutely nobody saw as a target. That someone was going for maximum body count instead of some form of extortion and negotiation came as surprising as the crashing planes on 9/11. He's so far off the charts left or right makes no difference, the US had the Unabomber - is the US socialist? They're in that 0,000001% that are just homicidal and wacko.
As for this case, we're not putting him in isolation because we're trying to punish him extra. We don't really know what do with him because we know there are many inmates that'd like to kill him. And he's so "above and beyond" anyone else we got in our prisons - even convicted murderers in general aren't likely to reoffend for the reasons outlined above, while Breivik still hopes to lead some kind of revolution. He's unique and not in a good way.
And it seems it's inconsequential to them as well. And from that we can extrapolate and say that those users, that were willing to pay but now are probably going to get the content by illegal means, doesn't really matter. It's a win-win-win scenario!
It's the traditional TV networks that care. They're the ones saying "exclusive rights in Kerbeckistan" is no good if the ratings are poor because people see it on Netflix over VPN. Just like the cinema business refuse to show movies that air at the same time, they won't give people cheap watercooler talk. If you want to be "in" on recent movies and not hear spoilers, it's in theaters and only in theaters now.
Of course one alternative is to go all Netflix, but 76% still pay for traditional cable or satellite service. So they're the ones cracking the whip at the content companies who again knocks Netflix on the head and say "ey, we like selling it to both of you so you two behave". Not much doubt on where it's going though, streaming services are in massive growth so maybe in a decade or two it's a different world. But today they can still bully Netflix into blocking VPNs.
Slashdot Mirror
There is, in fact, no such thing as a perfectly informed rational customer, there never has been and there never will be. Those two "simplifying" assumptions are typical of the fundamental defects that render economics almost worthless in its present form. Of course economists like simplifying assumptions, because otherwise their field would be far too complicated to make any sense out of. Unfortunately the assumptions mean that the resulting rules and laws apply only in an abstract world which hardly bears any resemblance to the real world we live in.
It's a simplification like a CPU taking one instruction after another, you don't start them off on a superpipelined hyperthreaded prefetching NUMA heterogeneous cluster and try to explain that.
1. "Perfectly informed"
Marketing theory has a ton of information on imperfect information, including perceived quality, substitution variables, effects of brand and reputation, behavior under uncertainty, unbalanced information like switching costs, speed of adoption from trendsetters to followers to holdouts and so on. It just so happens that in most cases it is not all that relevant to the topic because your competitor probably has an equivalent marketing department that do exactly the same.
2. "Rational customers"
Even within the context of rational customers you can have wildly "irrational" utility functions, it does not involve sane priorities only that people would behave optimally to meet their goals. Like people that "penny-wise and pound-foolish" and there's theory on when and why that happens. But ordinarily it's just noise, you both lose and get some and in the total market it's usually an insignificant effect and one you can't really change much either.
No, it was not covered in Business 101. But there are actually advanced classes there too, where they investigate all these simplifying constraints. And sure if you apply assumptions where they're not valid you end up with a spherical cow, but economics is certainly not the only such subject. In fact, much of it is quite sane except for the stock market which is about outguessing everyone else and is more of a group psychology game. Actually running a business and making money that way is quite a bit more down to earth than that. And then there's macro economics, which is economics mixed with politics. Ick.
Uh huh. And the main drive is still called C: because A: and B: were floppy drives once. Some things aren't worth changing, simply because it'd break lots of existing code for no particular reason. For example I think the Linux (POSIX?) file system was written before they invented autocomplete, it's all TLAs like /var/usr/bin/lib/wtf. But I care roughly as much as that drives in Windows start on C:, which is to say very very little.
You get bullied less if you stand up to the bullies from the start.
As a general rule that's fine but it depends on how rational the bully is in his victim selection process, how publicly he was stood up, how vindictive he is, how far he's willing to go and a host of other factors. If you run into the full psycho/ragetard that's going to haunt you for years it'll easily backfire like "Did that little twerp just [act of defiance]? I'm going to fucking destroy him. I'm going to make his every day a living hell." Because of that I have a feeling that advice is the least helpful when it's most needed.
It's a "common wisdom" because most bullies are just jerks who'll move along to the next easy mark, so it has worked for most people. In fact, it's so common I think you can assume everyone with a serious bullying problem has already tried that several times in several ways. Like going to the doctor and he tells you to rest and drink lots of water, it's probably good advice in general but when you got cancer and need chemo therapy or surgery no amount of water will do the trick.
I think it's easier to have been IBM than it is to be Intel. IBM used to deliver the whole package, hardware & software & applications & consulting so they just loosened up a bit. Intel on the other hand doesn't have any other business than hardware that I know of. Really anything that doesn't comply with x86_64 or ARM is dead in the water. Show me the benchmars...
My first impression is that this does not look like a good day for Microsoft. Is this back to Windows RT? That worked so well last time.
Well it war terms, D-day is cancelled as Intel won't be invading the mobile space. That doesn't mean ARM is about to invade the desktop/workstation/server market. That said, WinTel's grip on the customer is certainly weakening. but the mobile/tablet apps are still often seen as second fiddle to the "real" apps. That might change though, maybe not today or tomorrow but in a year or five things could look very different.
Services include poor jobs - cleaning, blue collar jobs - installing, good blue collar jobs - repair, and white collar jobs - inventing.
Repair is a good job? I've only seen decline as mass production and miniaturization has turned everything from clothes to household gadgets to computers and cell phones turn into things you throw away when they break. Only fixed installations and big ticket items tend to get repaired. And while a few older items were built like a tank a lot of the industrial work and QC also used to be manual and not very consistent, sure the cheapest plastic crap is still flimsy but if you go back to the store and swap for another one it'll be just like the first one. So either you have something that works or you want something else entirely not to have it repaired. And it's something of a negative feedback loop, with so few repairs the volume of parts, availability of tools and skills and so you rather make your product cheaper and harder to repair.
This despite Tesla's insistence that people must still stay at the wheel and drive; the technology has advanced enough that people get a false sense of confidence to push the limits even if the technology is not truly ready for it. That's the point that the Volvo engineer is making.
There's no force in existence that can stop idiots from being idiots. When you consider the number of Teslas on the road and how many of them use autopilot and somehow not get into these accidents I'm inclined to believe that the idiots you see on YouTube are the kind of people who should never be behind the wheel of any vehicle ever. And in that sense, sure level 4 would be great. But I'm not sure level 3 is worse than level 0 or whatever you call ordinary cars with these guys behind the wheel.
The investigators know that trick. It's older than you.
Still in this case it would be perfectly sufficient. If he had a device that would wipe the key after X days of not logging in, which would prominently declare that the contents have been wiped, he could no longer be held indefinitly in contempt. They'd have to either let him go or charge him with obstruction of justice.
The Falcon Heavy hasn't flown, he's never been beyond LEO
Who is "he"? As far as I know Musk hasn't been in space at all, I don't know if Dragon has ever been outside LEO but SpaceX have delivered several satellites to GEO and one to L1, so certainly the rockets can reach Mars. And he hasn't landed a Dragon propulsively, but a huge shell of a rocket with wind or waves to deal with actually seems harder than Mars, except you don't get a paved landing pad. Isn't that more similar to what NASA did in the 60s than what SpaceX did just recently? That said I do expect a few impact craters on Mars before they get it right....
Look it's really as simple as this, the reasons Netflix don't get global rights will be the same for any similar legal service. And since they're not going the Pirate Bay route, all they could effectively do is talk down their own service and stock price. Don't expect KFC to speak ill of fried chicken.
Capitalism is not the answer to everything. Socialism is not the answer to everything. There are dysfunctional markets. There are dysfunctional public services. A perfect system is just as unlikely to exist as a perfect diet, it's going to be better in some ways and worse in others. Capitalism works great when there's a reasonable number of suppliers and customers with low switching costs and equivalent bargaining power. Very often the latter is not the case, it's a billion dollar company again you with entirely different resources and needs, the insurance company doesn't need you but you need insurance. One premise that most economic theory makes is that companies are suicidal. If two companies are competing, they'll lower prices and steal customers back and forth until prices are as low as they can be.
If you take that one step up and say "you know this'll hurt both my and your profits, we'll have to answer and it'll all be for naught in the end" then no. They're not going to rock the boat until someone that's not in on this silent understanding tries to take those profits away. That is why you often have industry standard terms, laws and technical restrictions that are very much in the customer's disfavor. Also there's a vast difference between having a public service and public employees, you can very well have garbage disposal as a public service and yet hire the people and the trucks.
Quick - someone say how Apple is missing ... and how that makes it CLEAR that Apple is producing a self-driving car!
Too early. If Apple were to make a car they'd probably license a road-approved system of sensors and AI and focus on selling you a new non-driving experience. That's the point to release a game changer, today's cars are built around driving. The first generation of self-driving cars will probably be built around the same design, just with the technical bits tacked on. Would you really give a hoot about engine and transmission if you were in the back seat of a limo? No. So you wouldn't in a self-driving car either. I'm quite sure the metrics you value will be almost completely different to today. Except the getting you from A to B part, but then most cars manage that just fine.
This is almost _never_ the case. It's usually a sign of extensively overdesigning the solution, insisting that the single tool solve _all_ the problems. I've seen it happen repeatedly, with email systems, QA tools, clustering projects, and even physical architectures. By the time the decision is made and implemented, the problem will have changed and it will no longer be the perfect solution. And the investment in hacks to work with the old infrastructure will be so large that it creates _another_ round of evaluation to move off the old systems, which have to be maintained in place during the switchover. I've seen this type of over-extended planning, repeatedly, and it's painful.
Yeah. However I've also seen projects fail because they didn't do enough planning, particularly:
a) What is the critical functionality that absolutely must be in place before the old system can be shut down?
and
b) Does the new system have limitations that mean you're eventually halfway down an implementation project hit a brick wall?
For example, there's nothing like half an accounting system. Either it works to do your accounting or it doesn't. If you get caught up in all the "nice to have" improvements, you very often end up with dealbreaker shortcomings very late. It's easy enough if everything is your own code, but if you rely on third party solutions and libraries like you often do that's a real concern. Sometimes you really need a bit of prototyping to see if it really covers all the bases.
A lot of the people we admire today for their contributions to art, literature, science, exploration and a dozen other things did not have day jobs that were of any benefit to society. A lot of them were wealthy landlords who were into science because they were curious and had nothing else to do. And if we have one Newton for every one thousand people hanging around doing useless shit, as a species we would profit massively.
I'm sure you were trying to make a point, but Newton is a terrible example. Their family was not rich and he was almost forced into farming, but the school master persuaded the mother to let him finish. He entered Trinity College as a subsizar, essentially a servant for other students and the college in return for free education. He became a fellow of Trinity College and the second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. And that's essentially the modern model, all the people who do "useless shit" provide services and pay taxes so people can study and get scholarships, become professors, get research grants in organized academia rather than rich bored kids. For that you'd have to go back to the 15th century and Leonardo da Vinci, when there wasn't much organized science at all.
Part of my job is processing data that among other things is used for research, so I enable science. What enables my job? Well the people at the grocery store where I buy food and the farmer that produced it, the car manufacturer and gas stations so I get to work, the electricity company that keeps my fridge and the computers at work running, the plumber and water company that make sure I got running hot and cold water and sewage and so on and so forth all the way back to the people who mined the ore that was melted to a steel beam so it could be used in building my house. I think you vastly underestimate how it all comes together so a person like Stephan Hawking can become a modern day Newton. Sure, we are replacing it with automation but by itself turning a working man into a free spirit might not be a net gain for society.
The idea of a basic income is not directly related to the ownership of the means of production, so cannot be labelled with any of these terms. The reason I feel BI is fair and equitable is that the existence of "society" and the notion of "property" rely on relinquishing certain natural rights. Without society, I would be allowed to hunt, fish or gather wherever I wanted to.
If by natural rights you mean as found in nature, you'd find most animals are far more possessive of their territory and companions and far more likely to resort to acts of aggression and violence including lethal force than humans. It's all might make right and if you can take it and keep it then it's yours. It works both ways, sure you can't take other people's property but they can't take yours. And it's the little guy who needs protection, the rich and powerful protected themselves just fine long before society got involved.
You are taking a culture that is living like its 1216 and trying to accept them into 2016 and its never gonna work, all you will get is more terror attacks. Oh and don't bother with the tired "the majority is peaceful" because a silent majority DOES NOT MATTER. The Germans were mostly peaceful, the NSDAP killed 60 million plus. The majority of Russians are really nice, the USSR still racked up nearly 100 million dead. North Korea, Cambodia, we have literally thousands of years of history showing that the majority DOES NOT MATTER if they are not willing to put their asses on the line and actively turn on a dangerous minority.
The silently majority is still more likely to silently side with those that don't give them grief. After WWI the Germans were treated like shit, long before NSDAP and Hitler. The economy was in ruins by war debts, one side promised to bring them to a new glorious future and the other still saw no other choice but to take the piss. And the Russian tzar they had before communism, well he wasn't exactly a man of the people either. No, I don't think the silenty majority of muslims will stop the fucked up radicals. But if it ends up being a choice between being a maltreated, distrusted and unwelcome element of western society and a kinda-accepted follower of Allah it become a bit of a walkover.
The whole idea that people are inherently lazy and won't work without being forced to always puzzled me. Most of the people I know want to do something productive, but more often than not it's either not something they can get enough income from quickly enough to be able to drop their day job and start doing it full-time or it's not something they can get enough income from to keep the bills paid. Give them a guaranteed basic income and they won't sit around doing nothing, they'll start doing what they want to do (instead of the day job they have to have because it pays the bills).
Look, I have interests and hobbies and shit that I like to do so I wouldn't just sit on my ass. But would any of that have any payback to society? No, or if it did it'd at least be coincidental. And I wouldn't do any of the boring parts. And not on the days I don't feel like it. And I wouldn't really give a shit about anyone else's requirements, deadlines or whatever. It'd be what I feel like doing how I feel like doing it when I feel like doing it. I don't think "herding cats" would even begin to cover it.
I like to productive within the context of the work and the hours I put in anyway, no I'm not slacking or shirking as much as I could have. If it's my job to create something I take pride in the quality of my work and I do try to create solutions that'll work for real people in real life, not just the requirements. But I don't think you should underestimate the pay check as the overall framework for why I'm there and why I'm working on it at all. Or to put it another way, if I won' $100 million no matter how much I like my colleagues and the work is nice, I'd quit.
The other part is that there's shitty work that needs doing, if a sewage pipe burst I'm sure fixing it is not going to be at the top of anyone's list. So if you're paying everyone enough that they don't have to take the job, you have to pay them enough that they want to take the job. That'll drive wages up that'll drive prices up which means the "living wage" from basic income won't be enough. And then you're just right back where you started, if you raise basic income the shitty jobs won't get done again.
Or is it the most unintentionally hilarious thing I've read so far today? Sometimes the line is very blurred.
I went with hilarious. Boy you need a lot of hubris to make that kind of statement, try making say a 14nm CPU or Boeing 747 from Wikipedia and see how far you get...
And there's also the question if they got better, would we really need it and use them for more? For example you can now get 64GB DDR4 (4x16GB) for mainstream desktops for $239, but is there any normal use case? Even with all the bells and whistles I'm struggling to hit 10GB (of 16 total), so it's like sure I could but why. I think it might be more that, the smartphone you have already have "enough" to do what most people want so even if you could make a smartphone with desktop-class performance it wouldn't really have much more it could do.
"Religion is opium for everybody"
Not me, my mind is a temple. Uh, an ateist temple. Wait, what?
If you don't intend to replace them, why bother with standardized sizes? Design one to perfectly fit your phone/tablet/laptop and glue it stuck, really if batteries didn't lose capacity and fail after a few years it wouldn't be an issue.
If it was forever ever, then maybe... but mostly you're just a bit ahead of the curve, sure being fifty and in the shape of a thirty year old is nice. But in ten years you'll be sixty and struggling to keep up with a forty year old. By seventy most really start to feel their age, it's way different than fifty. And very few eighty year olds can keep up with a sixty year old. By ninety most are dead, while seventy year olds are mostly still alive and kicking. It's not like being in good shape actually slows down aging, any more than putting on makeup. Sure you're in much better shape than your peers, but you age a year every year like the rest of us.
which includes not worrying about things you can't change
Or find religion. If there's no way to know if it'll rain or not and your crops will wither and you'll starve to death, make up a rain god that you can do a rain dance to. Why do you think pretty much all major religions have a concept of afterlife, reincarnation or such? Because "no, you just die" sucks. People want to believe that life is longer and fairer and with more reason than reality and scientific rationality tends to lose simply because the alternative feels so much better.
This just proves Breivik's point that Norway is too left-wing. I'd love to live in a utopian society where we can be just nice to everybody, where everybody's needs are covered and punishment is unnecessary. But in the real world, there will always be nihilists like this guy who ruin it for the rest.
In an average year, Norway (population ~5 million) has an average of about ~30 murders, mostly knife stabbing and mostly acquaintances, (ex-)partners or family and an average of about ~1.1 victim/incident. Even though a few murders happen with guns, mass murders are pretty much non-existent. He single-handedly tripled the murder rate in Norway that year from 35 other victims to 112 total.
As far as Norway is concerned, Breivik was a black swan event, in a place absolutely nobody saw as a target. That someone was going for maximum body count instead of some form of extortion and negotiation came as surprising as the crashing planes on 9/11. He's so far off the charts left or right makes no difference, the US had the Unabomber - is the US socialist? They're in that 0,000001% that are just homicidal and wacko.
As for this case, we're not putting him in isolation because we're trying to punish him extra. We don't really know what do with him because we know there are many inmates that'd like to kill him. And he's so "above and beyond" anyone else we got in our prisons - even convicted murderers in general aren't likely to reoffend for the reasons outlined above, while Breivik still hopes to lead some kind of revolution. He's unique and not in a good way.
And it seems it's inconsequential to them as well. And from that we can extrapolate and say that those users, that were willing to pay but now are probably going to get the content by illegal means, doesn't really matter. It's a win-win-win scenario!
It's the traditional TV networks that care. They're the ones saying "exclusive rights in Kerbeckistan" is no good if the ratings are poor because people see it on Netflix over VPN. Just like the cinema business refuse to show movies that air at the same time, they won't give people cheap watercooler talk. If you want to be "in" on recent movies and not hear spoilers, it's in theaters and only in theaters now.
Of course one alternative is to go all Netflix, but 76% still pay for traditional cable or satellite service. So they're the ones cracking the whip at the content companies who again knocks Netflix on the head and say "ey, we like selling it to both of you so you two behave". Not much doubt on where it's going though, streaming services are in massive growth so maybe in a decade or two it's a different world. But today they can still bully Netflix into blocking VPNs.