The regular folks don't see any of that money and until recently, the government wasn't even spending any of it. The vast majority of what they take in for any given year ends up getting banked away into an investment fund (earning even more money) and as a result they've got a considerable nest egg.
That's very much not true, up until recently the oil income was greater than the deficit meaning we were both saving compound interest and adding fresh money but without any oil income we'd have a big deficit. Last year we had 183 bNOK in net oil income, 214 bNOK in return on our oil fund and had a 255 bNOK deficit without the oil. So the result is our fund grew by 140 bNOK, but almost 20% of our 1253 bNOK budget came from oil. If the oil industry completely shut down today we'd already be losing money despite the nest egg. And they do expect the workforce to non-workforce balance to get worse...
It's still only preorders. Top selling cars in Norway 2018:
1. Nissan Leaf 8.3% 2. Volkswagen Golf 6.7% 3. BMW i3 3.8% 4. Tesla Model X 3.4% 5. Mitsubishi Outlander 2.9% 6. Toyota Yaris 2.6% 7. Volvo XC60 2.5% 8. Tesla Model S 2.5% 9. Toyota Rav4 2.5% 10. Renault Zoe 2.1%
They don't break the Golf down between the regular one and e-Golf, but that and the Leaf are the big commuter cars. The Leaf starts at $32k, the iPace will start at $68k so for a very different market. Other than that I fully agree it's only because of government sponsorship. But hey, we're voting in "green" politicians (it's either blue-green or red-green, at the moment blue-green) so we get what we vote for. Though it should also be said we have lots of hydro and wind power - not so much solar - so it makes sense to use electricity at home and export the oil and gas. That way we can pretend to be environmentally friendly, as long as the emissions happen somewhere else.
What we really need is for the major webmail platforms to implement GPG in a way that is basically transparent to users. Doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing and off those of us who do want perfection the opportunity to use a really secure dedicated client.
How would that give any meaning? Like they create a GPG key for every user@gmail.com, you query gmail.com for it and encrypt to that key and gmail gives the user the encrypted message and the key to unlock it. If you talk to a fake gmail.com to find the key the content is compromised. If the account in compromised, so's the key. If gmail itself is compromised, it has the key and can simply decrypt it themselves. The only way it's secure is if you contact the correct gmail.com and neither the server nor account is compromised. Which is exactly like plain text mail, so what you suggest is nothing but security theater.
I think that's a bit exaggerated, there's always new hardware and software standards like for example 10 years ago NVMe didn't exist. Sure, to the user it might look "the same" except much faster but a lot is changed under the hood. Same with new USB standards, WiFi standards and so on. I wouldn't mind Win10 if there was an off switch for most the features, the actual core is improved since Win7/8. It's everything else they do for business reasons that makes me dislike it.
No, the problem is all the people who seem to think "GNOME or KDE?" is the blocker rather than this. If you're a gamer Linux is fairly useless when it comes to AAA games. Heavy productivity suites like everything from Adobe equally so. And a lot of the very light users would probably be better off with a Chromebook. Yes, you could say that LibreOffice is close enough to MS Office, GIMP is close enough to Photoshop, there are fun independent games on Steam and so on... but it's not the same. Or you have some funny driver issue because your laptop never officially supported Linux, I mean there's a reason there's dedicated shops and models for that. As long as your "desktop paradigm" is not entirely dysfunctional, it's not the problem.
Which has been enough to throw $30M at Pocket, fund rust, multiple poorly thought through attempts at entering the mobile/IOT/operating system space, attempt a single login system, but not enough to fund Thunderbird development.
Sadly here they had the right idea, just a shitty execution. Here's a long recount from one Mozilla engineer about Firefox OS, it'll just snip the relevant bits:
Everyone basically agreed that we couldn't compete with the likes of Android and iOS on their own terms. We couldn't catch up with Google on Android features and we could never out-Apple Apple on design. Mozilla was used to punching above its weight and had taken on titans before and won, but we wouldn't win if we played by their rules - we had to play by our own rules.
The way I remember it is that there were basically two schools of thought about how to differentiate Firefox OS.
The Web is the Platform Connecting the Next Billion
Connecting the next billion is "let's create something cheaper than the cheapest product on the market today" as a niche player with no experience in hardware. Yeah that didn't work. And the first one was basically an aversion to packaged software, I mean seriously:
Another serious problem was the lack of a key app, Whatsapp, which was essential for many of these markets. We failed to convince WhatsApp to make a web version, or even let us write one for them
I think they gave up way too easily not beating Android at their own game, because "everyone else" who offered any service competing with a g-service would be on their side. WhatsApp would gladly have replaced AOSP Google Hangouts. OpenStreetMap would gladly replace Google Maps. Every other email provider would help stop GMail. Dropbox or OwnCloud would help stop GDrive and so on and so forth. Their idea that "web apps are the future" drove away all the people who thought the current model was just fine, except Google is monopolizing it. Early Firefox got a lot of free help not because it was necessarily better than MSIE (as everything was built for MSIE), but to simply have an alternative like when clones took down the IBM PC.
Space is big but it's more complicated than that. One kilometer between satellites is only a little over 0.1 seconds in the direction they travel since LEO is ~7.8 km/s. You also can't just lay them in parallel like lanes on a freeway, the orbits looks like a sinusoidal so the orbits intersect and get squished together at maximum inclination. Finally any satellites you're discarding must pass through the other orbital layers despite orbits intersection as you can't keep the exact same orbit from a different altitude. You can see a simulation with the orbital planes here. A few back-of-the-napkin estimates suggest to me that to keep all satellites an an offset and at >1 second from each other you'll probably not want more than ~1000 in a LEO orbital plane. That would put the total at something more like half a million. There is currently about 500 operating LEO satellites...
Yes. If someone can afford a $100+ monthly cable bill, or $150+ cable+internet bill, they can afford a $50 monthly cell phone payment along with a $50-$100 cellular plan. Having cable is not like housing or food, it is a luxury item. So everyone you can afford $2000 per year to spend on cable can afford to spend $2000 on any luxury purchase.
Well technically a lot of people could afford a lot of things if they put all their disposable income towards it. And I'll admit, some people do if they have particular hobbies/interests/obsessions. But statistically people are a lot closer to a proportional increase, like if you double their income from $30k to $60k or $60k to $120k they'll not spend it on one thing. They'll get better food and clothes and house and car and so on and so forth. It's highly unlikely someone will cancel their cable bill and go for a $500/head meal at a three star Michelin restaurant, for example. If you can pull up one counter-example where that's some foodie's life dream it's still an anecdote.
Where am I going with this? That it's much more likely that the person who bought a $1000 phone over a $300 phone also bought a $100k car over a $30k car. Yes, in theory it could be the guy who was considering a $31k car but deciding to spent just $30k on the car and $1k on the phone instead. It's not a very intellectually honest discussion though, unless you're explicitly talking about very rare exceptions and not market conditions in general. Of course you might argue that through functionality, quality, performance or being a status symbol it's a thing people would spend disproportionally more money on but it still wouldn't be close to 100%.
Apples approach is to maximize profit, not market share, if they can do both great, but they will error on the side of profit.
They'll certainly error on the side of profit margin, but that's not what brought Apple to be one of the world's most profitable companies. The iPod/iPhone/iPad was by no means cheap, but it could sell to a normal middle class market like BMW to use a car analogy. Now I feel like Apple is retreating back into Ferrari market, sure there has been and will be a market for luxury sports cars but it's not huge. That Apple is taking away the low-end options like the SE and the small Mini is a clear sign they were cannibalizing the market as people look for cheaper ways to stay in/get in the Apple ecosystem. So they raise the bar and say you must be this rich to buy Apple, it can work as long as people are tied up in iTunes purchases and iCloud and whatnot... but if they make the switch it's bye-bye Apple.
They can survive some skew in that the people with the most money to buy phones are also those who spend the most money buying apps, but 9 out of 10 times the mainstream end up crushing niche applications. Think like the workstation market, mainframe market or what Blackberry was like. What I don't like is that it's Google taking over, our lead data miner. Even with Microsoft trying to be a mini-Google they're nothing to the Big Daddy of tracking. But I think Apple will find that as they're retreating back into the high end, they'll find it terribly hard to stop when they want to stop.
Also children. It's perfectly reasonable for a child to go to a store or a hairdresser on their own.
Here in Norway you can get an "allowance card" for ages 10-12 (debit card, no online shopping, very small limits, no cash withdrawal) and "youth card" for ages 13-17 (debit card, online shopping, reduced limits). Neither allows for offline charges or has any credit as under 18yo can't incur debt. A significant portion of adults simply don't use cash at all, neither does their kids. It's all just numbers on a screen.
The only way to go cashless is by charging up front, before any goods or services are rendered. I.e. They can refuse the business of anyone who will pay with cash, but they canâ(TM)t refuse to accept cash for any business already done. Thatâ(TM)s why a place like Starbucks can legally go cashless, and also why a typical sit-down restaurant canâ(TM)t or wonâ(TM)t.
They could relatively easily do that with a $1 pre-authorization hold before you get service, that's how gas stations do it when you use the card first and pump gas afterwards. Sure it would be a change of custom but I'm sure they could spin it as a positive, everyone else ends up paying for those who bail on the bill.
In Norway, you have a right to pay cash in all cases, unless this necessitate over 30 units of money (bills/coins). So you can demand to pay cash at restaurants, but not ridiculous things like a big bag of low-denomination coins.
Your information is in practice outdated because they changed the law so that they can offer you a fee-less alternative in which case the only place they must accept cash is the corporate HQ. What it in practice means is that many places like doctor's offices and hotels that have your name registered have gone cashless, if you try to pay in cash you get a paper bill instead. If you pay it from your own bank account that's usually free, but then it's in practice an electronically tracked payment anyway. If you pay it in cash at the bank they charge ridiculous fees and obviously going across the country to pay cash in the one place they're legally required to accept it is unworkable.
Stores don't do this yet because the time they'd spend writing up the bill, but in practice it's permission to end all anonymous transactions because they will check your ID to know who to send the collection agency after if you don't pay. Because it's basically just hassle to get the paper bill and go home to fill inn all the details and it doesn't give you anything many of the hold-outs will get plastic. I doubt it's very long until the law is changed again and they can simply refuse customers who won't/can't pay by card, as long as there's no debt incurred. There are many businesses that only marginally deal in cash that have said they'd like to quit, so I expect the snowball to roll pretty quick.
It depends on what you think UBI is, whether it's a Wall-E style leisure cruise or a system where you unconditionally get the absolute basics but the vast majority of the population work for more. The first is obviously a pipe dream generations away as vast amounts of work can't be automated in the foreseeable future, but a few set it up as a straw man only to cut it down to show UBI is impossible. As for the latter you can define the basics to be anywhere from the conditions of a third world refugee camp to non-fancy first world living. That's going to have huge effect on both the income and expense side of the equation.
I mean we've pretty much done this already with world hunger, outright starvation and famine now only happen in active conflict zones where we're unable to provide humanitarian relief. That wasn't the case 30 years ago, then you had people starving to death for no other reason than being poor. As long as you're aiming for a sack of rice and not a moving target it's pretty easy to see that automation can catch up to the point where we're just handing it out regardless of whether you're earned it. If you move the goal posts to say that it means more than mere survival but also no stunted growth, vitamin deficiencies or other malnutrition that's a different and harder goal. Particularly relative measures or appeals to what is normal are forever moving goal posts.
I'd say a good starting point for a UBI discussion would be something like a high functioning WoW addict. And by high functioning I mean that he maintains normal hygiene and such but has essentially no social expenses and cares very little about location. While sharing bathroom/kitchen facilities with others may be acceptable for a while I think since we're talking permanent residence for an adult I'd say a tiny studio apartment is where I'll draw a somewhat arbitrary line. Let's assume maintenance is part of the deal, you get a basic TV, computer and smartphone with basic Internet service. You get enough to buy the basics for food, clothes and hygiene. You have access to healthcare and dental care. I'll throw in a local public transportation pass so you're not totally stuck.
Apart from that, nothing. You want entertainment? Watch YouTube. Play Fortnite. Take a walk in the park. Hit Tinder, hopefully your date likes homemade mac & cheese. No coffee shops, no restaurants, no pubs, no cinema, no concerts, no trips or hotels, no hobbies or interests with more than negligible cost. I think that's a fairly non-moving target, we've automated parts (food and clothes production), we're working on many others (transport, stores, construction) but will probably be stuck with some manual labor (maintenance, healthcare, dental care). It really depends on how many would want that, it sounds very minimalist but if you could NOT spend 40 hours a week scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers is it worth it? If 5% quit, we'll manage. If 50% quit, it doesn't work.
Instead of being separate businesses (which still allows for sweetheart deals), why not just have legally enforced content neutrality.
Eh? What does that mean, does Netflix have to offer an OS/2 and BeOS version of their client? Does Apple have to make Apple Music work on Android? I really don't see how it would be functionally possible to require all content to be playable on every device/OS. And as far as I know Apple is charging Netflix the same they'd charge any Netflix-like competitor, neutrality just means it's the same terms for everyone.
Well what you say it looks like is also roughly what it was meant to be. It was meant to be a concept/model OS, like what if we could start over and forget all the baggage we already have. Sometimes you manage to come up with really bright ideas when you start with blank sheets. If the new OS is so great you want it to take over you make some kind of legacy/compatilibility mode for the old, but more likely it'll be something like concept cars... some of the ideas will make it into production models. And some will be more like okay it was an interesting concept but let's pass on that for now.
The Kurds are in deep economic trouble because they're practically under an embargo both from the central government in Baghdad as well as from Turkey, with Syria and Iran being absolutely no help. They do try to run a welfare state that they can't really afford, but the rest is you smoking crack. Capitalism is very much alive and well in Kurdistan.
Turkey is becoming another Islamic theocracy under Erdogan, the territory is strategically important but as allies they're in the "they're bastards, but they're our bastards" category. They're pissed off about the West and EU and is looking east to Russia for more dictator-friendly regimes. The Iraqi government can barely keep the country together, if it hadn't been for foreign military support and the Peshmerga most the country would be lost to IS.
They do seem to be one of the territories with a history of female genital mutilation though, I'll give you that. But hey they have women in the armed forces, this is not "stay at home and pop out babies in a burka"-Islam. The problem is that the creation of any Kurdistan - even just the independence of the Iraqi region - would set off a helluva chain reaction nobody wants to see where leads. But I think they've earned it.
Um... my kid's in college right now for Nursing. (...) You're gonna top out around $50k/yr, which is where my kid _starts_. Over 40-60 years of work that will add up fast.
Well, you also have to remember that those who go straight to work have already been paid for several years before she gets her first paycheck and if that had been a loan she'd also be paying interest eating away at the higher pay and making the same money in fewer years puts you in a higher tax bracket. Sure, higher education pays off eventually but the break-even period is often considerable and so many families can't really afford to look that far ahead. I'm closing in on 40 now and it's really the 20 years ahead of me that makes the big difference in lifetime pay, not the last 20 years. Plus in a desk job it's usually a lot more feasible to work longer should I want/need that.
I'm curious to see you picking nursing and teaching as examples though. Here in Norway they're the worst if you're looking to max your income, in fact they're struggling to match those who only finish high school because the career path sucks while even being a retail clerk you can graduate up to store manager and such. Medicine, economics, engineering and law bring in the big bucks, trade skills pay noticeably above average while soft sciences go in a big lump around the center - they don't seem to lose anything by taking an education but they're not really earning anything either. And by medicine I mean doctors, they do get paid very well. Everyone else in healthcare, not so much.
Those are token forces. Unless the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian armies are able to deal with massive armour and airborne invasions and delay the Russians for a significant amount of time while NATO forces deploy to the theatre the Russians can overrun those countries in hours and judging from what I've seen in terms of training of Baltic forces by NATO that seems to be the strategy.
They're token forces in military terms, but not in political terms. Pretty much all the front line troops are there to escalate it to a proper war and invoke Article 5, there's no country in Europe that can defeat Russia alone. And while the US might drag their feet on becoming involved in another overseas war no country in Europe is going to let Russia go on a Hitler-like series of annexations. They can take the Baltics, but then WW3 has begun.
The industry is sorely missing a desktop-friendly GUI standard for productivity/CRUD applications. HTML/JS/CSS has sucked for that.
You already have Qt and Python, as long as Microsoft is pushing C#, Apple is doing Swift and Google Java-ish I don't see how you'd get more unified. I suspect the future for that kind of apps is Electron or something like it. I don't know what it's like to work with but the results like Discord and Visual Studio Code are pretty good. Remember Javascript won over ActiveX, Java applets and Flash so it's not going anywhere. The native platforms are backed by billion dollar companies. What's left for middleware nobody really wants to pay for? The Qt Company had 37 million Euro in sales last year and most of that is professional consulting where they develop custom solutions, the commercial value of just the framework is much less. Like Microsoft/Apple/Google could buy it with loose pocket change but nobody wants it. It needs something to piggyback on...
This happens all the time. You just don't hear about it.
No it doesn't. That they compromise individual accounts, sure. That they compromise the bank itself via phishing or hacking yes. But those attacks pretty much never go through the front door, like you go to their public web server and run an exploit.
When I need information it's now one-stop shopping in Estonia. All the people's information in one convenient place. No muss, no fuss, Hack once and live a lifetime.
Actually the reason identity theft is such a big deal in the US is because having the information is generally sufficient. If I doxed myself here in Norway you could certainly do a lot of annoying things, but you'd find that for anything of real importance you'd either have to use an electronic signature or show up in person. Just having my person number (DOB + sex marker + unique counter), name, address etc. doesn't really get you very far. And while all my data is connected through the same unique identifier they're still kept by many different branches of government, you might say one common login gives access to everything but what happens in other nations? Surely there must be some level of standardization that DOB + SSN + whatever = ID. Unless you're going for the "the only way to win is not to play" solution by physically standing in line at a government office for everything.
Imagine a country with a population less than the city of Philadelphia being taken down when nothing works because somehow, mysteriously, large amounts of data are lost or corrupted.
Nobody's back end system is paper based anymore. Sure you might say that by exposing it over the Internet you're adding additional threats but the real high level hacks are often still an inside job or targeting the employees. We've had online banking here now for a couple decades, I've still not heard of anyone hacking their way to the core bank systems through the client, it's such an obvious way into the system that the protocol is completely locked down. It could make denial-of-service easier, but you still have to consider a power failure or an idiot with a backhoe and work on contingencies anyway. And don't forget how much else depends on the Internet these days, if it stops tons of B2C and B2B solutions won't work. It's not just the government's problem.
Or, he spent his own time and money to do something that he thought was important, but nobody else with money thought was important enough to do or pay someone to do. Nobody owes you a job, and certainly nobody owes you a free 3D digitized map of anywhere on the face of the earth you desire. Stop whining on an anonymous internet discussion and go do something half as inspirational as this.
Well I do think it's relevant to discuss how much you're doing a public service and how much really just paying the piper.
In some environments, agents become stuck looking for patterns in random data
Everything from astrology to lucky socks are humans looking for patterns that aren't there. The problem is more that they need human concepts to see normal patterns, like if you see a key it's probably for a locked chest or a locked door. We're not just randomly trying to use any object A on any object B.
Whale hunting was one of a victims we let the PETA go nuts over so they'd leave your average steak and fish-eater alone. No inhumane methods, sure. No endangered species, that too. But beyond that, it's a carcass. You don't have to have a moral reason to have your pet euthanized, but somehow you're supposed to need a moral reason to kill a wild animal or even one bred in captivity. Food is in, sports is out, everything in between... I'm actually amazed how easily we gave up furs. I mean humans have dressed in furs for thousands of years, it's a natural part of all cultures in colder climates. But somehow they managed to paint a picture of the wearers as Cruella de Vil-type evildoers who want a coat made of puppies. I really hope they lose the war on meat, which now seems to be their next target. If you want sustainable start giving out contraceptives and condoms so maybe a one billion of us can live like kings instead of ten billion like serfs.
Slashdot Mirror
The regular folks don't see any of that money and until recently, the government wasn't even spending any of it. The vast majority of what they take in for any given year ends up getting banked away into an investment fund (earning even more money) and as a result they've got a considerable nest egg.
That's very much not true, up until recently the oil income was greater than the deficit meaning we were both saving compound interest and adding fresh money but without any oil income we'd have a big deficit. Last year we had 183 bNOK in net oil income, 214 bNOK in return on our oil fund and had a 255 bNOK deficit without the oil. So the result is our fund grew by 140 bNOK, but almost 20% of our 1253 bNOK budget came from oil. If the oil industry completely shut down today we'd already be losing money despite the nest egg. And they do expect the workforce to non-workforce balance to get worse...
The fastest selling EV there is the Jaguar iPace.
It's still only preorders. Top selling cars in Norway 2018:
1. Nissan Leaf 8.3%
2. Volkswagen Golf 6.7%
3. BMW i3 3.8%
4. Tesla Model X 3.4%
5. Mitsubishi Outlander 2.9%
6. Toyota Yaris 2.6%
7. Volvo XC60 2.5%
8. Tesla Model S 2.5%
9. Toyota Rav4 2.5%
10. Renault Zoe 2.1%
They don't break the Golf down between the regular one and e-Golf, but that and the Leaf are the big commuter cars. The Leaf starts at $32k, the iPace will start at $68k so for a very different market. Other than that I fully agree it's only because of government sponsorship. But hey, we're voting in "green" politicians (it's either blue-green or red-green, at the moment blue-green) so we get what we vote for. Though it should also be said we have lots of hydro and wind power - not so much solar - so it makes sense to use electricity at home and export the oil and gas. That way we can pretend to be environmentally friendly, as long as the emissions happen somewhere else.
What we really need is for the major webmail platforms to implement GPG in a way that is basically transparent to users. Doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing and off those of us who do want perfection the opportunity to use a really secure dedicated client.
How would that give any meaning? Like they create a GPG key for every user@gmail.com, you query gmail.com for it and encrypt to that key and gmail gives the user the encrypted message and the key to unlock it. If you talk to a fake gmail.com to find the key the content is compromised. If the account in compromised, so's the key. If gmail itself is compromised, it has the key and can simply decrypt it themselves. The only way it's secure is if you contact the correct gmail.com and neither the server nor account is compromised. Which is exactly like plain text mail, so what you suggest is nothing but security theater.
I think that's a bit exaggerated, there's always new hardware and software standards like for example 10 years ago NVMe didn't exist. Sure, to the user it might look "the same" except much faster but a lot is changed under the hood. Same with new USB standards, WiFi standards and so on. I wouldn't mind Win10 if there was an off switch for most the features, the actual core is improved since Win7/8. It's everything else they do for business reasons that makes me dislike it.
No, the problem is all the people who seem to think "GNOME or KDE?" is the blocker rather than this. If you're a gamer Linux is fairly useless when it comes to AAA games. Heavy productivity suites like everything from Adobe equally so. And a lot of the very light users would probably be better off with a Chromebook. Yes, you could say that LibreOffice is close enough to MS Office, GIMP is close enough to Photoshop, there are fun independent games on Steam and so on... but it's not the same. Or you have some funny driver issue because your laptop never officially supported Linux, I mean there's a reason there's dedicated shops and models for that. As long as your "desktop paradigm" is not entirely dysfunctional, it's not the problem.
Which has been enough to throw $30M at Pocket, fund rust, multiple poorly thought through attempts at entering the mobile/IOT/operating system space, attempt a single login system, but not enough to fund Thunderbird development.
Sadly here they had the right idea, just a shitty execution. Here's a long recount from one Mozilla engineer about Firefox OS, it'll just snip the relevant bits:
Everyone basically agreed that we couldn't compete with the likes of Android and iOS on their own terms. We couldn't catch up with Google on Android features and we could never out-Apple Apple on design. Mozilla was used to punching above its weight and had taken on titans before and won, but we wouldn't win if we played by their rules - we had to play by our own rules.
The way I remember it is that there were basically two schools of thought about how to differentiate Firefox OS.
The Web is the Platform
Connecting the Next Billion
Connecting the next billion is "let's create something cheaper than the cheapest product on the market today" as a niche player with no experience in hardware. Yeah that didn't work. And the first one was basically an aversion to packaged software, I mean seriously:
Another serious problem was the lack of a key app, Whatsapp, which was essential for many of these markets. We failed to convince WhatsApp to make a web version, or even let us write one for them
I think they gave up way too easily not beating Android at their own game, because "everyone else" who offered any service competing with a g-service would be on their side. WhatsApp would gladly have replaced AOSP Google Hangouts. OpenStreetMap would gladly replace Google Maps. Every other email provider would help stop GMail. Dropbox or OwnCloud would help stop GDrive and so on and so forth. Their idea that "web apps are the future" drove away all the people who thought the current model was just fine, except Google is monopolizing it. Early Firefox got a lot of free help not because it was necessarily better than MSIE (as everything was built for MSIE), but to simply have an alternative like when clones took down the IBM PC.
Space is big but it's more complicated than that. One kilometer between satellites is only a little over 0.1 seconds in the direction they travel since LEO is ~7.8 km/s. You also can't just lay them in parallel like lanes on a freeway, the orbits looks like a sinusoidal so the orbits intersect and get squished together at maximum inclination. Finally any satellites you're discarding must pass through the other orbital layers despite orbits intersection as you can't keep the exact same orbit from a different altitude. You can see a simulation with the orbital planes here. A few back-of-the-napkin estimates suggest to me that to keep all satellites an an offset and at >1 second from each other you'll probably not want more than ~1000 in a LEO orbital plane. That would put the total at something more like half a million. There is currently about 500 operating LEO satellites...
Yes. If someone can afford a $100+ monthly cable bill, or $150+ cable+internet bill, they can afford a $50 monthly cell phone payment along with a $50-$100 cellular plan. Having cable is not like housing or food, it is a luxury item. So everyone you can afford $2000 per year to spend on cable can afford to spend $2000 on any luxury purchase.
Well technically a lot of people could afford a lot of things if they put all their disposable income towards it. And I'll admit, some people do if they have particular hobbies/interests/obsessions. But statistically people are a lot closer to a proportional increase, like if you double their income from $30k to $60k or $60k to $120k they'll not spend it on one thing. They'll get better food and clothes and house and car and so on and so forth. It's highly unlikely someone will cancel their cable bill and go for a $500/head meal at a three star Michelin restaurant, for example. If you can pull up one counter-example where that's some foodie's life dream it's still an anecdote.
Where am I going with this? That it's much more likely that the person who bought a $1000 phone over a $300 phone also bought a $100k car over a $30k car. Yes, in theory it could be the guy who was considering a $31k car but deciding to spent just $30k on the car and $1k on the phone instead. It's not a very intellectually honest discussion though, unless you're explicitly talking about very rare exceptions and not market conditions in general. Of course you might argue that through functionality, quality, performance or being a status symbol it's a thing people would spend disproportionally more money on but it still wouldn't be close to 100%.
Apples approach is to maximize profit, not market share, if they can do both great, but they will error on the side of profit.
They'll certainly error on the side of profit margin, but that's not what brought Apple to be one of the world's most profitable companies. The iPod/iPhone/iPad was by no means cheap, but it could sell to a normal middle class market like BMW to use a car analogy. Now I feel like Apple is retreating back into Ferrari market, sure there has been and will be a market for luxury sports cars but it's not huge. That Apple is taking away the low-end options like the SE and the small Mini is a clear sign they were cannibalizing the market as people look for cheaper ways to stay in/get in the Apple ecosystem. So they raise the bar and say you must be this rich to buy Apple, it can work as long as people are tied up in iTunes purchases and iCloud and whatnot... but if they make the switch it's bye-bye Apple.
They can survive some skew in that the people with the most money to buy phones are also those who spend the most money buying apps, but 9 out of 10 times the mainstream end up crushing niche applications. Think like the workstation market, mainframe market or what Blackberry was like. What I don't like is that it's Google taking over, our lead data miner. Even with Microsoft trying to be a mini-Google they're nothing to the Big Daddy of tracking. But I think Apple will find that as they're retreating back into the high end, they'll find it terribly hard to stop when they want to stop.
Also children. It's perfectly reasonable for a child to go to a store or a hairdresser on their own.
Here in Norway you can get an "allowance card" for ages 10-12 (debit card, no online shopping, very small limits, no cash withdrawal) and "youth card" for ages 13-17 (debit card, online shopping, reduced limits). Neither allows for offline charges or has any credit as under 18yo can't incur debt. A significant portion of adults simply don't use cash at all, neither does their kids. It's all just numbers on a screen.
The only way to go cashless is by charging up front, before any goods or services are rendered. I.e. They can refuse the business of anyone who will pay with cash, but they canâ(TM)t refuse to accept cash for any business already done. Thatâ(TM)s why a place like Starbucks can legally go cashless, and also why a typical sit-down restaurant canâ(TM)t or wonâ(TM)t.
They could relatively easily do that with a $1 pre-authorization hold before you get service, that's how gas stations do it when you use the card first and pump gas afterwards. Sure it would be a change of custom but I'm sure they could spin it as a positive, everyone else ends up paying for those who bail on the bill.
In Norway, you have a right to pay cash in all cases, unless this necessitate over 30 units of money (bills/coins). So you can demand to pay cash at restaurants, but not ridiculous things like a big bag of low-denomination coins.
Your information is in practice outdated because they changed the law so that they can offer you a fee-less alternative in which case the only place they must accept cash is the corporate HQ. What it in practice means is that many places like doctor's offices and hotels that have your name registered have gone cashless, if you try to pay in cash you get a paper bill instead. If you pay it from your own bank account that's usually free, but then it's in practice an electronically tracked payment anyway. If you pay it in cash at the bank they charge ridiculous fees and obviously going across the country to pay cash in the one place they're legally required to accept it is unworkable.
Stores don't do this yet because the time they'd spend writing up the bill, but in practice it's permission to end all anonymous transactions because they will check your ID to know who to send the collection agency after if you don't pay. Because it's basically just hassle to get the paper bill and go home to fill inn all the details and it doesn't give you anything many of the hold-outs will get plastic. I doubt it's very long until the law is changed again and they can simply refuse customers who won't/can't pay by card, as long as there's no debt incurred. There are many businesses that only marginally deal in cash that have said they'd like to quit, so I expect the snowball to roll pretty quick.
It depends on what you think UBI is, whether it's a Wall-E style leisure cruise or a system where you unconditionally get the absolute basics but the vast majority of the population work for more. The first is obviously a pipe dream generations away as vast amounts of work can't be automated in the foreseeable future, but a few set it up as a straw man only to cut it down to show UBI is impossible. As for the latter you can define the basics to be anywhere from the conditions of a third world refugee camp to non-fancy first world living. That's going to have huge effect on both the income and expense side of the equation.
I mean we've pretty much done this already with world hunger, outright starvation and famine now only happen in active conflict zones where we're unable to provide humanitarian relief. That wasn't the case 30 years ago, then you had people starving to death for no other reason than being poor. As long as you're aiming for a sack of rice and not a moving target it's pretty easy to see that automation can catch up to the point where we're just handing it out regardless of whether you're earned it. If you move the goal posts to say that it means more than mere survival but also no stunted growth, vitamin deficiencies or other malnutrition that's a different and harder goal. Particularly relative measures or appeals to what is normal are forever moving goal posts.
I'd say a good starting point for a UBI discussion would be something like a high functioning WoW addict. And by high functioning I mean that he maintains normal hygiene and such but has essentially no social expenses and cares very little about location. While sharing bathroom/kitchen facilities with others may be acceptable for a while I think since we're talking permanent residence for an adult I'd say a tiny studio apartment is where I'll draw a somewhat arbitrary line. Let's assume maintenance is part of the deal, you get a basic TV, computer and smartphone with basic Internet service. You get enough to buy the basics for food, clothes and hygiene. You have access to healthcare and dental care. I'll throw in a local public transportation pass so you're not totally stuck.
Apart from that, nothing. You want entertainment? Watch YouTube. Play Fortnite. Take a walk in the park. Hit Tinder, hopefully your date likes homemade mac & cheese. No coffee shops, no restaurants, no pubs, no cinema, no concerts, no trips or hotels, no hobbies or interests with more than negligible cost. I think that's a fairly non-moving target, we've automated parts (food and clothes production), we're working on many others (transport, stores, construction) but will probably be stuck with some manual labor (maintenance, healthcare, dental care). It really depends on how many would want that, it sounds very minimalist but if you could NOT spend 40 hours a week scrubbing toilets or flipping burgers is it worth it? If 5% quit, we'll manage. If 50% quit, it doesn't work.
Instead of being separate businesses (which still allows for sweetheart deals), why not just have legally enforced content neutrality.
Eh? What does that mean, does Netflix have to offer an OS/2 and BeOS version of their client? Does Apple have to make Apple Music work on Android? I really don't see how it would be functionally possible to require all content to be playable on every device/OS. And as far as I know Apple is charging Netflix the same they'd charge any Netflix-like competitor, neutrality just means it's the same terms for everyone.
Well what you say it looks like is also roughly what it was meant to be. It was meant to be a concept/model OS, like what if we could start over and forget all the baggage we already have. Sometimes you manage to come up with really bright ideas when you start with blank sheets. If the new OS is so great you want it to take over you make some kind of legacy/compatilibility mode for the old, but more likely it'll be something like concept cars... some of the ideas will make it into production models. And some will be more like okay it was an interesting concept but let's pass on that for now.
The Kurds are in deep economic trouble because they're practically under an embargo both from the central government in Baghdad as well as from Turkey, with Syria and Iran being absolutely no help. They do try to run a welfare state that they can't really afford, but the rest is you smoking crack. Capitalism is very much alive and well in Kurdistan.
Turkey is becoming another Islamic theocracy under Erdogan, the territory is strategically important but as allies they're in the "they're bastards, but they're our bastards" category. They're pissed off about the West and EU and is looking east to Russia for more dictator-friendly regimes. The Iraqi government can barely keep the country together, if it hadn't been for foreign military support and the Peshmerga most the country would be lost to IS.
They do seem to be one of the territories with a history of female genital mutilation though, I'll give you that. But hey they have women in the armed forces, this is not "stay at home and pop out babies in a burka"-Islam. The problem is that the creation of any Kurdistan - even just the independence of the Iraqi region - would set off a helluva chain reaction nobody wants to see where leads. But I think they've earned it.
Um... my kid's in college right now for Nursing. (...) You're gonna top out around $50k/yr, which is where my kid _starts_. Over 40-60 years of work that will add up fast.
Well, you also have to remember that those who go straight to work have already been paid for several years before she gets her first paycheck and if that had been a loan she'd also be paying interest eating away at the higher pay and making the same money in fewer years puts you in a higher tax bracket. Sure, higher education pays off eventually but the break-even period is often considerable and so many families can't really afford to look that far ahead. I'm closing in on 40 now and it's really the 20 years ahead of me that makes the big difference in lifetime pay, not the last 20 years. Plus in a desk job it's usually a lot more feasible to work longer should I want/need that.
I'm curious to see you picking nursing and teaching as examples though. Here in Norway they're the worst if you're looking to max your income, in fact they're struggling to match those who only finish high school because the career path sucks while even being a retail clerk you can graduate up to store manager and such. Medicine, economics, engineering and law bring in the big bucks, trade skills pay noticeably above average while soft sciences go in a big lump around the center - they don't seem to lose anything by taking an education but they're not really earning anything either. And by medicine I mean doctors, they do get paid very well. Everyone else in healthcare, not so much.
Those are token forces. Unless the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian armies are able to deal with massive armour and airborne invasions and delay the Russians for a significant amount of time while NATO forces deploy to the theatre the Russians can overrun those countries in hours and judging from what I've seen in terms of training of Baltic forces by NATO that seems to be the strategy.
They're token forces in military terms, but not in political terms. Pretty much all the front line troops are there to escalate it to a proper war and invoke Article 5, there's no country in Europe that can defeat Russia alone. And while the US might drag their feet on becoming involved in another overseas war no country in Europe is going to let Russia go on a Hitler-like series of annexations. They can take the Baltics, but then WW3 has begun.
The industry is sorely missing a desktop-friendly GUI standard for productivity/CRUD applications. HTML/JS/CSS has sucked for that.
You already have Qt and Python, as long as Microsoft is pushing C#, Apple is doing Swift and Google Java-ish I don't see how you'd get more unified. I suspect the future for that kind of apps is Electron or something like it. I don't know what it's like to work with but the results like Discord and Visual Studio Code are pretty good. Remember Javascript won over ActiveX, Java applets and Flash so it's not going anywhere. The native platforms are backed by billion dollar companies. What's left for middleware nobody really wants to pay for? The Qt Company had 37 million Euro in sales last year and most of that is professional consulting where they develop custom solutions, the commercial value of just the framework is much less. Like Microsoft/Apple/Google could buy it with loose pocket change but nobody wants it. It needs something to piggyback on...
This happens all the time. You just don't hear about it.
No it doesn't. That they compromise individual accounts, sure. That they compromise the bank itself via phishing or hacking yes. But those attacks pretty much never go through the front door, like you go to their public web server and run an exploit.
When I need information it's now one-stop shopping in Estonia. All the people's information in one convenient place. No muss, no fuss, Hack once and live a lifetime.
Actually the reason identity theft is such a big deal in the US is because having the information is generally sufficient. If I doxed myself here in Norway you could certainly do a lot of annoying things, but you'd find that for anything of real importance you'd either have to use an electronic signature or show up in person. Just having my person number (DOB + sex marker + unique counter), name, address etc. doesn't really get you very far. And while all my data is connected through the same unique identifier they're still kept by many different branches of government, you might say one common login gives access to everything but what happens in other nations? Surely there must be some level of standardization that DOB + SSN + whatever = ID. Unless you're going for the "the only way to win is not to play" solution by physically standing in line at a government office for everything.
Imagine a country with a population less than the city of Philadelphia being taken down when nothing works because somehow, mysteriously, large amounts of data are lost or corrupted.
Nobody's back end system is paper based anymore. Sure you might say that by exposing it over the Internet you're adding additional threats but the real high level hacks are often still an inside job or targeting the employees. We've had online banking here now for a couple decades, I've still not heard of anyone hacking their way to the core bank systems through the client, it's such an obvious way into the system that the protocol is completely locked down. It could make denial-of-service easier, but you still have to consider a power failure or an idiot with a backhoe and work on contingencies anyway. And don't forget how much else depends on the Internet these days, if it stops tons of B2C and B2B solutions won't work. It's not just the government's problem.
I really can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me. If whaling is so useless and unnecessary, why hasn't it stopped on its own?
Or, he spent his own time and money to do something that he thought was important, but nobody else with money thought was important enough to do or pay someone to do. Nobody owes you a job, and certainly nobody owes you a free 3D digitized map of anywhere on the face of the earth you desire. Stop whining on an anonymous internet discussion and go do something half as inspirational as this.
Well I do think it's relevant to discuss how much you're doing a public service and how much really just paying the piper.
In some environments, agents become stuck looking for patterns in random data
Everything from astrology to lucky socks are humans looking for patterns that aren't there. The problem is more that they need human concepts to see normal patterns, like if you see a key it's probably for a locked chest or a locked door. We're not just randomly trying to use any object A on any object B.
Whale hunting was one of a victims we let the PETA go nuts over so they'd leave your average steak and fish-eater alone. No inhumane methods, sure. No endangered species, that too. But beyond that, it's a carcass. You don't have to have a moral reason to have your pet euthanized, but somehow you're supposed to need a moral reason to kill a wild animal or even one bred in captivity. Food is in, sports is out, everything in between... I'm actually amazed how easily we gave up furs. I mean humans have dressed in furs for thousands of years, it's a natural part of all cultures in colder climates. But somehow they managed to paint a picture of the wearers as Cruella de Vil-type evildoers who want a coat made of puppies. I really hope they lose the war on meat, which now seems to be their next target. If you want sustainable start giving out contraceptives and condoms so maybe a one billion of us can live like kings instead of ten billion like serfs.