A car travelling at 90 mph is moving about 4 cm/millisecond. So going from 200 fps to 2000 fps is going from 20 cm to 2 cm per cycle. What's the use of recognizing a car every two centimeters? For a jogger at 9 mph it's down from 2 cm to 2 mm. It's neat and all but I don't see how that necessary to react in the time frames a car needs to react. Even if it takes 3-4 frames for the car to get a motion vector 0.2 seconds is still way quicker than a human and 0.02 seconds doesn't bring that much.
One of the points of a properly constituted "basic income" scheme is that the income is supposed to be unconditional, exactly to remove such perverse incentives.
If you make money then you pay income taxes also after UBI, what they label it doesn't matter so I don't see the problem. A 50% income tax is not a perverse incentive. A perverse incentive is if by working more you could end up earning less because you get bumped to a different tax bracket, lose eligibility for various programs or the ability to go back on benefits if your income falls again. This could for example be that you earn more but lose subsidized housing, food stamps, tuition waivers, medicare etc. or that a short burst of work make you lose disability benefits, unemployment benefits that you don't automatically regain afterwards. Arguably if your own expenses for transport, child care etc. exceed your income that too could be a perverse incentive. But as long as you're making any money at all it's incentive and not disincentive to work.
This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.
There'll always be an endless demand for things we could want done, but it does not mean there'll be an endless supply of capable workers. I know people who are on mental disability today who'd be working 100 years ago doing "Take ax. Chop wood." kinds of work. And there's far more who can't even make it through high school without dropping out, who could be a burger flipper or taxi driver but hardly a doctor or engineer no matter how many scholarships and free tutoring you give. They're not bad people, many are honest hard working men and women but they're not made for complex abstract problem solving. Unfortunately their kind of jobs are rapidly being automated and the halo jobs they create are usually advanced development/maintenance/repair work. And we're trying to automate that too.
They are more profitable now because they turned the screws tighter on their existing customers. They think their customers can never leave, but it fact it just takes time to leave.
People have been saying that since you joined/. so maybe on a geological timescale. On a human timescale they'll be dancing on our graves, not the other way around...
Ideally, backups should be stored offline (precisely to prevent ransomware from encrypting it) and off-site (in case the building burns down). Backing up your files to an always-accessible hard drive on a nearby system isn't much better than copying them to a second hard drive on the same computer.
Well it can at least be done smarter with the backup system having read permission to the main system but otherwise be an isolated system. Of course that's no silver bullet either if they compromise the admin and grab both logins or it's an admin gone rogue, but that's how you usually do live backup which is then shuffled to tape. Putting it all in the same domain is just a bad design no matter how you look at it.
Mine hasn't. You see, in Windows 7, you can choose which updates you install...
Only if you've stopped installing updates entirely or been exceptionally diligent. If you've installed any of the rollup patches available through Windows Update since October 2016 you got it all. Even the one that says security is actually security for this month plus both security and non-security patches from previous months if you read the fine print, you're just one month behind on the spyware. The only way to get security-only patches on a home version version of Windows is to download them from WSUS via a third-party tool and install them manually, one per month. Note that these are not cumulative so if you need to reinstall you need all of them.
It's not a matter of 'stupid' so much as it is a matter of 'no experience with these things'. Some of them are stupid, however, because they were raised with so many modern conveniences that they didn't have to learn to take care of themselves as much with their own two hands and their own brain.
I have absolutely zero experience preserving food outside of a refrigerator except when we go camping or something but then it's eaten in a day or two. Always had one, I'm assuming I'll always have one. Would probably end up eating canned food, biscuits and pasta after everything in the fridge spoiled. I vaguely know that food can be pickled, cured, dried, smoked, fermented etc. but frankly I got no clue. Also I have no idea how to mend clothes or anything like that, it probably seemed like a useful skill 50 or 100 years ago but today I'll head down to the store to buy another pack of socks when they wear out. You're just complaining about the things the next generation think is useless from your generation...
Honestly I've felt much less captive since I got a smartphone. The people who go as a crowd chit-chat. The singles check their phones. The good part is that it means 99% are there on time, if it really started on a minute's notice I know people would be pushing it right down to the wire with some arriving late ruining the first five minutes.
Because it can't be easily duplicated. Everyone knows about MoviePass. It has enormous name recognition. "JlvPass" has none.
But the cinema goers do know the cinema they're going to, they've gone there before MoviePass. They're still going there with MoviePass. They know the selection of movies, screens, sound, seating, location, parking, concessions, pretty much the entire business proposition. And the cinema got the best possible advertising space possible in-house and can give it exclusive perks they wouldn't give anyone else. Granted, it's always possible that some other company external to the cinema business will think they can turn an audience into profit but I'd be very worried that the cinema chains roll their own and price MoviePass out of the market. And even if they're big I doubt they got much leverage, most people want to go to the local cinema so if they stop working with a chain I think most subscribers would rather leave than go to the other cinema across town to save a buck or two.
Open source software zealots have been hoping for an "opening" for years. I guess this will be it. Question is: Do they have anything that comes close to what Microsoft has created over the decades? I doubt!!
This would be like the fourth opening or something because WinME was a facepalm, so was Vista, Win8 and Win10. At no point did the YotLD happen and I except Gnome/KDE to be too busy with their own turf war this time too. The question for me is whether Apple or Google will throw a monkey wrench in Microsoft's plans by making a real effort at conquering the desktop. In Apple's case I think that'd mean an Apple ARM chip + iOS in a laptop form factor and in Google's case an Android-like assault on the desktop with their partners. Right now they're coasting, Apple has their Macs but they're mostly halo products for iDevice users that want to stay in the Apple-sphere and Google has their Chromebooks that are very niche, in general Windows is pretty much unthreatened. I mean the mobile market is nearing saturation, gotta keep that growth going...
When automating the question that should be asked is: Can a machine outperform a human
Sorry, but that's stupid. Consider an industrial robot, who cares if it's 1/10th the speed if it costs 1/100th as much? Just set up ten of them and do round-robin. Obviously you should quantify other benefits and drawbacks too, but the simplest way is to convert everything to dollars. Because that's most like what you'll be "producing" in the end, is my business making more or less money with automation. Now it is a problem that computers are dumb and that we don't understand the full complexity of dealing with every error condition leading to results like this but it's not because we picked the wrong metric. It's because our estimates sucked ass.
so the place that holds all the money can't make money... or is it another growth projection bullshit
Oh they're making money alright, but it's all in cost cutting. There's only so much you can do about interest rates and such because of market conditions, but cutting salary is a big deal. And honestly most people like online banking, so many that it's become a run on branch offices. Here in Norway 91% of the adult population (16-79) now use online banking, it's literally as common as having an email address which is also at 91%. I just checked at my bank, 300 employees to 380000 customers. That's well over 1000 customers/employee, when you consider all the non-customer facing work you need to do then probably many thousands per head. Unless you've got millions of dollars to throw around they literally don't have time to care about you. You get the online interface, the absolute minimum of customer support they can get away with but the profit is in all the people you have no contact with. Ever. And to be honest, the feeling is mutual - if there's a way to do it myself, I'd generally prefer that...
Please give us some concrete examples where you think OSS is lacking in features, performance, stability and usability and a host of other metrics.
You do realize that this entire story is about a feature Chrome already got active by default and Firefox barely is on the drawing board right? And it'll probably go like this project from 2010:
Electrolysis is the working name of a Mozilla project which goal is to re-arch good old single-process Firefox into a multi-process one. The idea's been around for some time now, all the more so since competitors like Google and Microsoft have released multi-process versions of their browsers!
They finally caught up to Chrome.... in 2017. I'm not saying it's a fair fight, but sometimes OSS is waaaaay behind the times. I was going to use GIMP as another example, but it looks like in 2.10 they finally got 10+ bit support done. That only took 18 years from conception. But don't worry, I'm sure they'll catch up to Photoshop any day now...
SW Freedom makes [mediocre OSS] better than [market leading proprietary product]
Thanks RMS, we've heard that a few times. Unfortunately in the real world users also care about features, performance, stability, usability and a host of other metrics. I liked your promotion video though.
That fundamental issues won't be changed in the next ten years, if ever.
Meltdown is a fairly simple hardware fix that AMD had already done right, don't speculate with memory that belongs to a different process. Intel fucked up big there but once the fix is in it's not likely to resurface. The Spectre class of exploits is tough but it's fairly trivially solved through software design - don't put secrets in the same process space as untrusted code like say Javascript you download online and there'll be nothing to steal even if you find a new side effect. That's the direction Chrome is going with Site Isolation and is pretty much a blanket protection for web browsing. It's still a big deal for cloud services etc. but if you'd rather be safe than sorry then run your own dedicated servers with just your code. Which is probably a good idea for all sorts of reasons if it's that sensitive.
This is the part many don't like. Today, many of these benefits are dependent on your income and thus how much you pay into the system. (...) Same thing - no pay, but you have UBI at the bottom.
Well, the theory is that almost everybody is sustained through some sort of program, so UBI is simpler and cheaper because you'd kill off everything else. In that case, you should have money to put into a nest egg or additional insurance to restore your past coverage. It's probably not bad for people who need those programs a few years out of many decades of adulthood. The real losers would be those with severe physical or mental handicaps that can't just be motivated to get a job and will be stuck on UBI most of their life.
No rational person would choose to be a government slave. There are not enough rational persons to make this a worthwhile argument.
No rational person would choose a subsistence living, it's extremely harsh to provide everything on your own and pretty much any modern day man massively cheats by buying tools, medicine and other things made by advanced civilization. So you have to deal with either private companies or the public government, neither is really all that voluntary if there's no real competition. Good competition is not the default, there's a massive number of natural reasons for that like economics of scale and a host of nasty business tactics to thwart real competition. In fact without any laws to the contrary they'd all organize like cartels and fuck you over ten times worse than today. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary some people still act like unfettered capitalism would be rainbows and unicorns.
The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable.
I'll just stop your rant there. For all of time we've been taking care of non-working people like the young, old, sick and handicapped both temporarily and permanently. It's not sustainable that nobody works but it's also not necessary that everybody works all the time. And the basic necessities of life like farming are quite easily automated, keeping people fed and clothed is easier and easier. Now poor people are not getting richer because the wages are equally depressed but the burden to society to say provide food for everyone is shrinking. Even with more people on food stamps if you graph food stamps as a percent of GDP it's less and less. With automated cars and tractors, increases in self-diagnostics, self-maintenance and self-repair that trend is likely to continue.
Yep, pretty sure youâ(TM)re required by law if the customer insists. Did get that once in London, I needed reciept for travel expense reimbursement. But 99% wouldnâ(TM)t care for a sandwich...
Germany could have cashed out Greeceâ(TM)s entire debt just like that. If the EU started the printing press theyâ(TM)d effectively make rich countries and wealthy people pay with only marginal inflation. They just didnâ(TM)t want to do that because itâ(TM)d be a terrible precedent for the future, spend money on credit like crazy and your rich uncle will bail you out. If the dominos had really started falling we would have seen a real intervention. But not until the PIGS were begging on their knees, not whining about austerity measures.
Please take the time to research how money works and that using credit or debit cards only at the very least gives government and the banks all the power over the money. When this happens, banks now can charge a 10% transaction fee and there is nothing you can do about it.
I live in Norway where VAT is like 25% and while it's been bumped up a few percent it's been 20%+ since it was all cash. So if "they" wanted an extra 10% they could do it right now. And if you were really losing money on having it in the bank like -10% interest rate it'd be just like 1930s hyperinflation in Germany - spend it when you get it before it becomes worthless. The greatest problem in the US is that you have super-mighty credit card companies that have made people think it's "free" to skim 2-3% off every transaction or even that they magically make money through baked-in services and kickbacks.
Here in Norway we have a no-frills national debit card system called BankAxept, the cost is $18/month + $0.03 per transaction. Actually it's $0.015/transaction if you're a huge company doing 50+ million transactions/year. That's roughly the price you should be paying if the US went a little socialist and made "digital money". In fact, they could probably fund the whole thing by redirecting the budget for printing/minting/disposing cash because it's not completely free once you want a physical representation.
We're already cashless-ish here in Norway, it's 97% card transactions, 3% cash withdrawals. And most of the regular costs items like rent, utilities, subscriptions etc. go via direct deposit so the white economy is 99%+ cashless. We also have services that provide free person-to-person transactions, many people literally don't use cash at all. The blocker here is that the law says you must take cash, if they could just stop accepting cash I think many would and if Internet is down BankAxept has a backup system with signature and ID. And if you don't got electricity most would simply close, unless it's a real emergency in which case I think grocery stores would take IOUs.
The downside is more that absolutely everything would be tracked. Want to buy some kind of product or service that isn't legal? There'll be a record of that. Don't want your wife to know you have a mistress or was at the bar? Well better not let her see the bank statement then because it's all there. Don't forget that sex toy store and the gay bar. A bunch of people from CSRs to DBAs at the bank will know. And people like to poke into other people's business, we just had a police officer fired here because he was doing non-work related searches with his Tinder date. And that's before the Gestapo gets involved...
There's a reason there is a saying "follow the money", whatever else is going on that's not on the record somebody, somewhere is looking to make money. So if you got a complete record of all the money, well that's a ridiculous amount of power. I mean you could try using proxies like a bottle of scotch but that really only works if it's more or less passed around, it's not like the one person with a pallet of scotch can easily convert that to legitimate money. Well maybe by selling to a bar, but then the bar would have to explain how they managed to sell far more scotch than they officially bought. Because you know, no cash.
And they do indeed get shit done, the problem is that they are stickler for rules, and many people dislike that and feel it is a waste of time.
Rules as such are okay, the problem is when you've painted yourself into a corner nobody's the slightest bit flexible or helpful on how to get out of there. It could be because you've missed or misunderstood something, didn't understand the dependencies or somehow did it wrong. In other countries I've had some success with "Well maybe this wasn't the right way but this is where I am now so what can I do from here?" and get a useful answer. Germans like to reply "You should have..." and okay, I should have. But that doesn't help me right now...
Well itâ(TM)s the supreme law of the land so if they can come up with a constitutional reason they can certainly try. Whether the court will hear it is another matter.
If you heard noises and went to investigate gun in hand Iâ(TM)d agree. Wake up in the middle of the night to a stranger in your own bedroom? Unless you shot him square in the back fleeing I donâ(TM)t think any jury would convict for shooting first and asking questions later.
Slashdot Mirror
A car travelling at 90 mph is moving about 4 cm/millisecond. So going from 200 fps to 2000 fps is going from 20 cm to 2 cm per cycle. What's the use of recognizing a car every two centimeters? For a jogger at 9 mph it's down from 2 cm to 2 mm. It's neat and all but I don't see how that necessary to react in the time frames a car needs to react. Even if it takes 3-4 frames for the car to get a motion vector 0.2 seconds is still way quicker than a human and 0.02 seconds doesn't bring that much.
One of the points of a properly constituted "basic income" scheme is that the income is supposed to be unconditional, exactly to remove such perverse incentives.
If you make money then you pay income taxes also after UBI, what they label it doesn't matter so I don't see the problem. A 50% income tax is not a perverse incentive. A perverse incentive is if by working more you could end up earning less because you get bumped to a different tax bracket, lose eligibility for various programs or the ability to go back on benefits if your income falls again. This could for example be that you earn more but lose subsidized housing, food stamps, tuition waivers, medicare etc. or that a short burst of work make you lose disability benefits, unemployment benefits that you don't automatically regain afterwards. Arguably if your own expenses for transport, child care etc. exceed your income that too could be a perverse incentive. But as long as you're making any money at all it's incentive and not disincentive to work.
This idea that we're heading towards a society where people won't need to work, or where jobs won't exist, is as old as society itself. There is no free ride. There never was, there never will be. The labor market is ever evolving and ever present.
There'll always be an endless demand for things we could want done, but it does not mean there'll be an endless supply of capable workers. I know people who are on mental disability today who'd be working 100 years ago doing "Take ax. Chop wood." kinds of work. And there's far more who can't even make it through high school without dropping out, who could be a burger flipper or taxi driver but hardly a doctor or engineer no matter how many scholarships and free tutoring you give. They're not bad people, many are honest hard working men and women but they're not made for complex abstract problem solving. Unfortunately their kind of jobs are rapidly being automated and the halo jobs they create are usually advanced development/maintenance/repair work. And we're trying to automate that too.
They are more profitable now because they turned the screws tighter on their existing customers. They think their customers can never leave, but it fact it just takes time to leave.
People have been saying that since you joined /. so maybe on a geological timescale. On a human timescale they'll be dancing on our graves, not the other way around...
Ideally, backups should be stored offline (precisely to prevent ransomware from encrypting it) and off-site (in case the building burns down). Backing up your files to an always-accessible hard drive on a nearby system isn't much better than copying them to a second hard drive on the same computer.
Well it can at least be done smarter with the backup system having read permission to the main system but otherwise be an isolated system. Of course that's no silver bullet either if they compromise the admin and grab both logins or it's an admin gone rogue, but that's how you usually do live backup which is then shuffled to tape. Putting it all in the same domain is just a bad design no matter how you look at it.
Mine hasn't. You see, in Windows 7, you can choose which updates you install...
Only if you've stopped installing updates entirely or been exceptionally diligent. If you've installed any of the rollup patches available through Windows Update since October 2016 you got it all. Even the one that says security is actually security for this month plus both security and non-security patches from previous months if you read the fine print, you're just one month behind on the spyware. The only way to get security-only patches on a home version version of Windows is to download them from WSUS via a third-party tool and install them manually, one per month. Note that these are not cumulative so if you need to reinstall you need all of them.
It's not a matter of 'stupid' so much as it is a matter of 'no experience with these things'. Some of them are stupid, however, because they were raised with so many modern conveniences that they didn't have to learn to take care of themselves as much with their own two hands and their own brain.
I have absolutely zero experience preserving food outside of a refrigerator except when we go camping or something but then it's eaten in a day or two. Always had one, I'm assuming I'll always have one. Would probably end up eating canned food, biscuits and pasta after everything in the fridge spoiled. I vaguely know that food can be pickled, cured, dried, smoked, fermented etc. but frankly I got no clue. Also I have no idea how to mend clothes or anything like that, it probably seemed like a useful skill 50 or 100 years ago but today I'll head down to the store to buy another pack of socks when they wear out. You're just complaining about the things the next generation think is useless from your generation...
Honestly I've felt much less captive since I got a smartphone. The people who go as a crowd chit-chat. The singles check their phones. The good part is that it means 99% are there on time, if it really started on a minute's notice I know people would be pushing it right down to the wire with some arriving late ruining the first five minutes.
Because it can't be easily duplicated. Everyone knows about MoviePass. It has enormous name recognition. "JlvPass" has none.
But the cinema goers do know the cinema they're going to, they've gone there before MoviePass. They're still going there with MoviePass. They know the selection of movies, screens, sound, seating, location, parking, concessions, pretty much the entire business proposition. And the cinema got the best possible advertising space possible in-house and can give it exclusive perks they wouldn't give anyone else. Granted, it's always possible that some other company external to the cinema business will think they can turn an audience into profit but I'd be very worried that the cinema chains roll their own and price MoviePass out of the market. And even if they're big I doubt they got much leverage, most people want to go to the local cinema so if they stop working with a chain I think most subscribers would rather leave than go to the other cinema across town to save a buck or two.
Open source software zealots have been hoping for an "opening" for years. I guess this will be it. Question is: Do they have anything that comes close to what Microsoft has created over the decades? I doubt!!
This would be like the fourth opening or something because WinME was a facepalm, so was Vista, Win8 and Win10. At no point did the YotLD happen and I except Gnome/KDE to be too busy with their own turf war this time too. The question for me is whether Apple or Google will throw a monkey wrench in Microsoft's plans by making a real effort at conquering the desktop. In Apple's case I think that'd mean an Apple ARM chip + iOS in a laptop form factor and in Google's case an Android-like assault on the desktop with their partners. Right now they're coasting, Apple has their Macs but they're mostly halo products for iDevice users that want to stay in the Apple-sphere and Google has their Chromebooks that are very niche, in general Windows is pretty much unthreatened. I mean the mobile market is nearing saturation, gotta keep that growth going...
When automating the question that should be asked is: Can a machine outperform a human
Sorry, but that's stupid. Consider an industrial robot, who cares if it's 1/10th the speed if it costs 1/100th as much? Just set up ten of them and do round-robin. Obviously you should quantify other benefits and drawbacks too, but the simplest way is to convert everything to dollars. Because that's most like what you'll be "producing" in the end, is my business making more or less money with automation. Now it is a problem that computers are dumb and that we don't understand the full complexity of dealing with every error condition leading to results like this but it's not because we picked the wrong metric. It's because our estimates sucked ass.
so the place that holds all the money can't make money... or is it another growth projection bullshit
Oh they're making money alright, but it's all in cost cutting. There's only so much you can do about interest rates and such because of market conditions, but cutting salary is a big deal. And honestly most people like online banking, so many that it's become a run on branch offices. Here in Norway 91% of the adult population (16-79) now use online banking, it's literally as common as having an email address which is also at 91%. I just checked at my bank, 300 employees to 380000 customers. That's well over 1000 customers/employee, when you consider all the non-customer facing work you need to do then probably many thousands per head. Unless you've got millions of dollars to throw around they literally don't have time to care about you. You get the online interface, the absolute minimum of customer support they can get away with but the profit is in all the people you have no contact with. Ever. And to be honest, the feeling is mutual - if there's a way to do it myself, I'd generally prefer that...
Please give us some concrete examples where you think OSS is lacking in features, performance, stability and usability and a host of other metrics.
You do realize that this entire story is about a feature Chrome already got active by default and Firefox barely is on the drawing board right? And it'll probably go like this project from 2010:
Electrolysis is the working name of a Mozilla project which goal is to re-arch good old single-process Firefox into a multi-process one. The idea's been around for some time now, all the more so since competitors like Google and Microsoft have released multi-process versions of their browsers!
They finally caught up to Chrome.... in 2017. I'm not saying it's a fair fight, but sometimes OSS is waaaaay behind the times. I was going to use GIMP as another example, but it looks like in 2.10 they finally got 10+ bit support done. That only took 18 years from conception. But don't worry, I'm sure they'll catch up to Photoshop any day now...
SW Freedom makes [mediocre OSS] better than [market leading proprietary product]
Thanks RMS, we've heard that a few times. Unfortunately in the real world users also care about features, performance, stability, usability and a host of other metrics. I liked your promotion video though.
That fundamental issues won't be changed in the next ten years, if ever.
Meltdown is a fairly simple hardware fix that AMD had already done right, don't speculate with memory that belongs to a different process. Intel fucked up big there but once the fix is in it's not likely to resurface. The Spectre class of exploits is tough but it's fairly trivially solved through software design - don't put secrets in the same process space as untrusted code like say Javascript you download online and there'll be nothing to steal even if you find a new side effect. That's the direction Chrome is going with Site Isolation and is pretty much a blanket protection for web browsing. It's still a big deal for cloud services etc. but if you'd rather be safe than sorry then run your own dedicated servers with just your code. Which is probably a good idea for all sorts of reasons if it's that sensitive.
This is the part many don't like. Today, many of these benefits are dependent on your income and thus how much you pay into the system. (...) Same thing - no pay, but you have UBI at the bottom.
Well, the theory is that almost everybody is sustained through some sort of program, so UBI is simpler and cheaper because you'd kill off everything else. In that case, you should have money to put into a nest egg or additional insurance to restore your past coverage. It's probably not bad for people who need those programs a few years out of many decades of adulthood. The real losers would be those with severe physical or mental handicaps that can't just be motivated to get a job and will be stuck on UBI most of their life.
No rational person would choose to be a government slave.
There are not enough rational persons to make this a worthwhile argument.
No rational person would choose a subsistence living, it's extremely harsh to provide everything on your own and pretty much any modern day man massively cheats by buying tools, medicine and other things made by advanced civilization. So you have to deal with either private companies or the public government, neither is really all that voluntary if there's no real competition. Good competition is not the default, there's a massive number of natural reasons for that like economics of scale and a host of nasty business tactics to thwart real competition. In fact without any laws to the contrary they'd all organize like cartels and fuck you over ten times worse than today. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary some people still act like unfettered capitalism would be rainbows and unicorns.
The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable.
I'll just stop your rant there. For all of time we've been taking care of non-working people like the young, old, sick and handicapped both temporarily and permanently. It's not sustainable that nobody works but it's also not necessary that everybody works all the time. And the basic necessities of life like farming are quite easily automated, keeping people fed and clothed is easier and easier. Now poor people are not getting richer because the wages are equally depressed but the burden to society to say provide food for everyone is shrinking. Even with more people on food stamps if you graph food stamps as a percent of GDP it's less and less. With automated cars and tractors, increases in self-diagnostics, self-maintenance and self-repair that trend is likely to continue.
Yep, pretty sure youâ(TM)re required by law if the customer insists. Did get that once in London, I needed reciept for travel expense reimbursement. But 99% wouldnâ(TM)t care for a sandwich...
Germany could have cashed out Greeceâ(TM)s entire debt just like that. If the EU started the printing press theyâ(TM)d effectively make rich countries and wealthy people pay with only marginal inflation. They just didnâ(TM)t want to do that because itâ(TM)d be a terrible precedent for the future, spend money on credit like crazy and your rich uncle will bail you out. If the dominos had really started falling we would have seen a real intervention. But not until the PIGS were begging on their knees, not whining about austerity measures.
Please take the time to research how money works and that using credit or debit cards only at the very least gives government and the banks all the power over the money. When this happens, banks now can charge a 10% transaction fee and there is nothing you can do about it.
I live in Norway where VAT is like 25% and while it's been bumped up a few percent it's been 20%+ since it was all cash. So if "they" wanted an extra 10% they could do it right now. And if you were really losing money on having it in the bank like -10% interest rate it'd be just like 1930s hyperinflation in Germany - spend it when you get it before it becomes worthless. The greatest problem in the US is that you have super-mighty credit card companies that have made people think it's "free" to skim 2-3% off every transaction or even that they magically make money through baked-in services and kickbacks.
Here in Norway we have a no-frills national debit card system called BankAxept, the cost is $18/month + $0.03 per transaction. Actually it's $0.015/transaction if you're a huge company doing 50+ million transactions/year. That's roughly the price you should be paying if the US went a little socialist and made "digital money". In fact, they could probably fund the whole thing by redirecting the budget for printing/minting/disposing cash because it's not completely free once you want a physical representation.
We're already cashless-ish here in Norway, it's 97% card transactions, 3% cash withdrawals. And most of the regular costs items like rent, utilities, subscriptions etc. go via direct deposit so the white economy is 99%+ cashless. We also have services that provide free person-to-person transactions, many people literally don't use cash at all. The blocker here is that the law says you must take cash, if they could just stop accepting cash I think many would and if Internet is down BankAxept has a backup system with signature and ID. And if you don't got electricity most would simply close, unless it's a real emergency in which case I think grocery stores would take IOUs.
The downside is more that absolutely everything would be tracked. Want to buy some kind of product or service that isn't legal? There'll be a record of that. Don't want your wife to know you have a mistress or was at the bar? Well better not let her see the bank statement then because it's all there. Don't forget that sex toy store and the gay bar. A bunch of people from CSRs to DBAs at the bank will know. And people like to poke into other people's business, we just had a police officer fired here because he was doing non-work related searches with his Tinder date. And that's before the Gestapo gets involved...
There's a reason there is a saying "follow the money", whatever else is going on that's not on the record somebody, somewhere is looking to make money. So if you got a complete record of all the money, well that's a ridiculous amount of power. I mean you could try using proxies like a bottle of scotch but that really only works if it's more or less passed around, it's not like the one person with a pallet of scotch can easily convert that to legitimate money. Well maybe by selling to a bar, but then the bar would have to explain how they managed to sell far more scotch than they officially bought. Because you know, no cash.
And they do indeed get shit done, the problem is that they are stickler for rules, and many people dislike that and feel it is a waste of time.
Rules as such are okay, the problem is when you've painted yourself into a corner nobody's the slightest bit flexible or helpful on how to get out of there. It could be because you've missed or misunderstood something, didn't understand the dependencies or somehow did it wrong. In other countries I've had some success with "Well maybe this wasn't the right way but this is where I am now so what can I do from here?" and get a useful answer. Germans like to reply "You should have..." and okay, I should have. But that doesn't help me right now...
Well itâ(TM)s the supreme law of the land so if they can come up with a constitutional reason they can certainly try. Whether the court will hear it is another matter.
Youâ(TM)re expecting rational thinking in the middle of a highly irrational plan. Thatâ(TM)s not a very likely combination.
If you heard noises and went to investigate gun in hand Iâ(TM)d agree. Wake up in the middle of the night to a stranger in your own bedroom? Unless you shot him square in the back fleeing I donâ(TM)t think any jury would convict for shooting first and asking questions later.