You're going to have a hard time putting together an outfit that looks as good as your bog standard suit.,
That's a wager I'd be happy to take and I'd probably win. Furthermore it is circumstance dependent. Suits are appropriate clothing for a fairly narrow range of circumstances. Outside of those circumstance and you look silly or pretentious.
Ten seconds of thought and you're all but guaranteed to be the best-looking guy in the room, and that matters.
I have news for you. If you are ugly, a suit isn't going to fix that.
And seriously why would you not want to look like hot shit in a sharp suit??
Because I am comfortable with how I look without one. I own several tailored suits and I wear them at appropriate times. But I really don't care a fig whether anyone except my wife thinks I'm attractive or not.
That is a matter of opinion. While that might be the consensus it is not a universally held opinion. And in my opinion they often look quite silly. An attractive person will look attractive in casual or formal clothes. An unattractive person will be made at most marginally better looking with nice clothes but it is demonstrably true that not everyone looks good in a suit no matter how well it is tailored. 20 seconds on google images will reveal lots of ugly people in nice fitting suits.
I don't understand the nerd hatred of suits and ties at all.
Partly because a lot of suits and all ties are uncomfortable. (a good suit is comfortable but usually expensive) Worse a tie is a completely useless piece of clothing worn just because people expect it. It is purely decorative and does not even look very good for that purpose. Partly because circumstances that dictate wearing a suit tend to come with a lot of fussy social conventions that frequently make little sense. Partly because suits and ties are costumes without any fun clearly attached. Partly because suits and ties are expensive. Partly because nerds tend to value how people act more than how they look.
...has described the "tossing" of the fork from hand to hand as the proper form.
This is my problem with a lot of so called "rules" of etiquette, it's entirely arbitrary and typically just one person's overly judgmental opinion. While I have no desire to offend anyone (most of the time) the notion that holding your knife and fork together or switching hands could possibly have a right or wrong answer is absurd. The point is simply not to gross anyone out with your eating habits and possibly give the impression one is attempting to be social.
Keeping your knife in the right and and the fork in the left is ok too, but that supposedly gives the impression that you are in a hurry...
See, I would think that the actual rate at which you shovel food into your mouth would be a more useful measure. I could make an equally valid (and just as absurd) argument that the noise from constantly switching eating implements is disruptive and distracting. If someone is reading that much into how you manage your tableware then they are being rude and judgmental and I doubt I'd care to dine with such a person.
We know all km-sized asteroids including their trajectories for centuries...
Really? NASA disagrees with you and I tend to take their word for it over yours. We've discovered hundreds of kilometer sized near Earth asteroids in just the last decade.
All asteroids large enough to make this work are known and known not to collide with earth.
All presently known asteroids large enough...
Fixed that for you. We find things in space all the time that we weren't aware of before. You are claiming we know of every body that could possibly threaten us when we cannot possibly be certain of that.
No, running the cable to your house is not the "expensive bit" - it is a big up-front cost, which is amortized over the life of the service. Actually providing the service, running the head-end units, the data centers, etc. is the expensive part. Trenching coax to your basement isn't the most "expensive bit."
I'm a cost accountant in my professional life and there is lots of data available that you should consider. While the ISP may recoup the cost over the life of the service it is extremely expensive to deploy copper/fiber. The specifics vary but wiring up a subdivision has costs that easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars. When Verizon did their FiOS rollout they spent something like $23 billion to hook up 19 million homes. Their cost is claimed to be around around $1410 per home. Per Verizon about $760 of that cost was getting the fiber to the house and about $650 was the routers and other gear needed to run the service. Bear in mind as well that Verizon already has the easements, poles and infrastructure needed to make a rollout like this happen. But the actual costs are effectively higher because Verizon only has about 4 million FiOS customers so that $23 billion results in a cost around $6000 per customer, more than half of which in physically getting the wire to the customer. So yeah, "trenching coax" actually is the most expensive part.
Most of the costs for these services are up front fixed costs. Operating a gigabit network doesn't cost appreciably more than a 100mbps network once installed. So once the investment is made the only question really is how long is their breakeven horizon. At $200/month, the ISP would break even in 30 months on a $6000 hookup. At $100/month it would take 60 months. It is just a profit calculation. They offer tiered service because some people are willing to pay more than others. Clearly the hockey stick on willingness to pay is somewhere below $200 for internet service for many people.
You won't pay $200 for 100Mb/sec service, would you pay $200/mo for 1 Gb/sec service?
No, I probably wouldn't because it is a luxury, not a necessity. I could afford it I suppose and I'd think about it, but the ROI simply isn't there to justify the expense. If they get it down to $100 per month I'd probably get it.
Correct. But this makes it worse for them inthat they will be increasingly targeted by NPEs who don't want to take the risk of going to court with one of the big players.
Unlikely. The reason they don't usually go after the small companies is because they are small, i.e. they have no money. There is little point in spending much money trying to extort a tiny settlement out of a company that the NPE may very well bankrupt in the process. If I'm a small company I would basically say "bring it on". They'll spend more money on lawyers than they would win in a settlement and even if they did win they probably would get nothing because the company would declare bankruptcy.
"We just don't see the need of delivering that to consumers."' The article goes on to quote her: '...residential customers have thus far shown little interest in TWC's top internet tiers. "A very small fraction of our customer base" ultimately choose those options.'"
Translation: "We have a near monopoly and don't want to spend the money to do the upgrade because we don't have to"
I pay for 50Mb/s access and my ISP offers 100Mb/s. Why don't I pick 100Mb/s? Because it costs $200/month versus the $80/month I'm already paying. Huge diminishing returns. The expensive bit is running the cable to my house. After any arguments against offering the fastest possible speed for a reasonable price are pretty weak.
It seems bitcoins would be the easiest (and cheapest) way to transfer money to and from places without much financial infrastructure.
To send dollars via bitcoin the dollars have to already exist on both sides of the transaction. As such the financial infrastructure already exists making your argument moot. Furthermore I defy you to give an example of some place where it would be meaningfully easier to do a bitcoin transaction with dollar conversions on both ends than to use existing infrastructure. I can do a wire transfer pretty much anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes and there are services like Western Union that can turn it into cash if needed. Bitcoins certainly aren't easier and once you factor in all the costs and risks it's very debatable whether bitcoin is cheaper.
Bitcoin aims to offer a better way to transfer wealth than we had today.
It may aim to offer a "better" way to transfer wealth but it fails miserably. I can easily exchange dollars for any currency or good available today. I cannot say the same about Bitcoin. Bitcoin carries huge unnecessary risks, is accepted by virtually no one except for drug deals and other illicit transactions, has huge volatility with the attendant exchange rate risk, and has all the trappings of a Ponzi scheme. it doesn't even really avoid transaction costs once you factor in all the externalities. Frankly you'd have to be either a degenerate gambler or a naive fool to put any money into bitcoin. The fact that a few people have used it successfully doesn't make it a good idea.
Oh, and I also don't have massive college debt to repay, because most people I've encountered that speak of how awesome of a degree they have are usually the most incompetent.
Being insecure has nothing to do with having a degree. Yes there are lots of incompetent people with college degrees. There also are arguably an even higher percentage who lack a degree. The data speaks for itself. There are a LOT of jobs you simply cannot get without a degree. It is easily demonstrated that the average earnings of someone with a college degree is somewhere between 20%-40% higher than the average earnings of someone who doesn't have a degree. That doesn't mean that someone without a degree can't do just fine or that having one is a guarantee of success. It merely means that overall the odds are better with one than without.
Does that count for "showing them how it's done" ?
Sounds like you're doing ok for yourself. What annoys me are arrogant people who mistakenly think that because they succeeded without a college degree that they are somehow smarter than those who went to college.
Don't be too snide. A lot of people are graduating college these days with enough debt to equate to a house, but without the house.
Correct, they have an education which unless you waste it is much more valuable than a house. Just because something isn't tangible doesn't mean it isn't valuable.
Racking up $200,000 in debt for a philosophy degree probably is a bad investment unless you can parlay that into a high paying job of some sort. Some people can, many cannot. (If parents are paying then by all means have at it - any degree has at least some value) There also is always the option of going to a state school as well. You can get an excellent college education at a state school for generally reasonable amounts of money.
In the past 9 years, 100% of people I've hired were undegreed. These were the people I wanted, because they specifically weren't indoctrinated into the college mentality. I want self-starters, people I can later on invite to become a business partner.
Being a self starter has nothing to do with whether or not you went to college. Having a college degree isn't the only thing that matters but it can be a very useful indicator of what the person standing in front of me is capable of. I have several college degrees including masters in both engineering and business. I've started 5 businesses, am a certified accountant, run a manufacturing company and am on the board of a non-profit. My wife has a doctorate and does even better than I do. If you think our college degrees have held either of us back in any way you are delusional.
I also don't want political correctness, feminism or any of the other progressive mindsets in any of my businesses.
So you want to hire people who have no respect for others? Nice. I'll be sure to avoid you and the people you hire.
I'd love to see a job search website that focuses on people bright enough to skip 4 years of college and just hit the employment roles.
Good luck with that. You know a lot of engineers or doctors who picked up their profession "on the streets"? I guarantee you don't know anyone in accounting (not bookkeeping - real accounting) that does not have a college degree. Same for scientists.
Wow, $20 an hour. Impressive. [/sarcasm] That's about what, $40,000 per year if you work full time? The average starting salary for an engineering graduate in 2011 was around $61,000
I'll skip the indoctrination and keep earning double what these college kids get.
You make barely more than an engineering intern gets while still in school. You're really showing them how it's done.
This one uses examples from the industrial revolution that are not applicable anymore because the rate of automation is far faster (and accelerating), meaning that the economy doesn't have enough time to rellocate workers to other basic tasks before they are automated as well.
And your evidence for this is where exactly? Exactly how are you measuring "rate of automation"? (and no a book by Ray Kurzweil or Vernor Vinge is not evidence of anything) Even accounting for the recent economic problems employment rates are well within the range of normal and there is no evidence I am aware of that indicates any unusual difficulty in reallocating labor.
In fact, the way things are going, non educated people will have a hard time competing with machines in any basic job.
Decisions to automate are economic decisions largely based on volume and value. They are rarely technological decisions. Professionally I'm an accountant who specializes in cost accounting. There are a huge number of jobs that are not particularly easy to automate. I run a manufacturing business. We have some automation, some skilled labor and some unskilled labor. There is NO technology that can economically automate much of what we do economically. Technologically it is possible but not economically. Our customers buy relatively small numbers of parts and some buy relatively complicated parts. Even if labor were free you could not make a profit on the work we do with automation. The up front cost is too high and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There will be marginal improvements but I don't see any technology that will allow many types of products to be economically automated.
This time is the singularity. It is not just better tools that are removing jobs, it is artificial intelligence, of the non strong variety (for now). What is left for the workers to compete?
Ahh, I get it. You think the so-called singularity is a real thing. It's an interesting theory I'll admit but it also is an excellent example of the dangers of believing too deeply in unbounded extrapolation. I can extrapolate all sorts of doomsday scenarios based on available information.
But it is also true that they will use their collective power to try to stop technology if they see it as threating their position, so it is quite likely they will lobby for regulations using scare tactics.
If you can show that something is medically beneficial, you'll have doctors pushing for it. Much of my wife's job could someday be replaced with molecular diagnostic tests and she would be the first person to tell you they should use them. Never forget that most doctors didn't go into medicine for the money. I have never met one who wouldn't recommend using a test or procedure with demonstrably better outcomes even if it hurts them economically. Most of them actually care about their patients and are not the sort of amoral people you portray.
If they are so concerned with healthcare costs, then why is the exploding number of non-medical administrative personnel ever mentioned?
It gets mentioned a lot. Seriously. I'm married to a doctor and everyone involved is very, very, very well aware of the problem. That does not mean it is a simple problem to fix however. Electronic medical records will help a lot in the long run but getting the vast amount of very complicated paperwork and related processes automated is no trivial feat.
there is a huge number of high end administration that don't do squat and make huge salaries.
Not in medical office administration there isn't. Medical office workers get paid quite poorly for the most part.
Same thing goes for surgeons, but a robot has two qualities that your run of the mill surgeon doesn't: It is consistent in its results (you can end up in the hands of a drunken surgeon, someone who just lost a familiar, or it just happens to have a bad day), and it is cheaper (in the long run).
Robotic surgery doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It isn't an autonomous robot doing the procedure. It is a doctor doing the procedure using robotic technology to enhance and assist. It improves capabilities for minimally invasive surgery and remote surgery but it is not what you are describing.
Automation is coming to all other aspects of life, shedding jobs at its wake. I don't see why doctors need to be protected from that, as long as automation brings some benefits to society.
Common misconception. Automation does not "shed jobs", it simply pushes the jobs elsewhere. We automated farming and that freed the labor force to work in manufacturing and services and we all have benefited greatly from that shift. Manufacturing is now being increasingly automated for many things freeing labor for more valuable tasks. A lot of work is not value added. A lot of my work is as an accountant. Theoretically I could keep the books by hand like they did before computers with large staff but that adds no economic value to what we do, just cost. Better to use Quickbooks and automate and apply that labor more productively elsewhere. The purpose of jobs is not to provide a paycheck. The purpose of jobs is to do economically useful work. If a machine can do the work more economically that labor needs to be applied elsewhere.
Doctors don't need to be protected from automation any more than anyone else. If anything they welcome the productivity improvements automation can provide, particularly on the administrative side of things. But it's pretty hard to automate a checkup or removing an appendix. We give them a lot of training because those skills are not presently replaceable with any technology we possess. Perhaps that will change someday but it won't be anytime soon.
The court ruling said that it's like having a lock on your house to show that it's private property.
Which is nonsensical reasoning because it is private property regardless of whether a lock is engaged or not. My cell phone has the ability to be locked whether I choose to use it or not and it is my property whether I choose to secure it or not.
A lock or password shows that you don't want strangers to get in there without your permission.
It should be the default assumption that permission is not granted. I can always acknowledge after the fact that I'm fine with someone entering my house or snooping on my cell phone but just because I forget to lock my house one day doesn't mean I'm ok with the police coming in and having a look around. I freely acknowledge that not securing your property might be a bad idea for reasons that are obvious but lack of a lock or password is not an invitation or permission for anyone to go looking around just because they can.
When you dont use a computer. That happens. And the fact that you are happy with a 2007 dell means you really dont use your computer.
Curious theory. The fact that I run a multi-million dollar company heavily using a half dozen computers between 6-9 years old must really mess with your world view. We run ERP , product test, shipping, time card management, several databases, some very large spreadsheets, CAD and quite a bit more but according to you we must not actually be using the computers for anything. Would a faster computer be nice? Sure but the marginal improvement would be well into diminishing returns.
I wear the letters off of a keyboard in 12 months.
So stop buying crappy keyboards. I have keyboards have have been used for over 20 years without a fleck of paint missing.
Some of us actually use their computers as tools to make money, others look at them as toys for fun.
Some of us actually try to get a decent ROI on our machines and realize that lots of actual work doesn't require the latest and greatest. I run a manufacturing company and if you don't think we don't use our computers I think you don't really understand what that means in the real world.
I have never had a laptop hard drive last more than two years, and only had one last more than eighteen months.
Then I would have to wonder what the heck you are doing to the hard drives. I'm not sure I've ever had one last less than that long in a laptop. I've had laptop hard drives last for 7 years and were still going strong when I stopped using the machine. In fact I usually have some other component die long before the hard drive does. I have several hard drives that work just fine from laptops with burned out system boards, defective keyboards, borked video and other problems.
Some people are quite hard on their equipment, perhaps you are one of these? I've often been astonished how carelessly some people treat their equipment and then expect it to work.
When was the last time it was "ok" to have to reboot your phone.
I have an iPhone and I probably reboot it roughly once a month due to various minor problems. It's never "ok" but I have yet to use any smartphone from any maker (including Samsung, Nokia and others) I haven't had to periodically reboot. They are computers that happen to be able to make calls. They're pretty good overall but hardly bulletproof.
Microsoft makes neat toys and cheap PC software - but reliable and "applicance-like" in a way that a Mac or DVD player or a toaster is - they are not.
Well I have a Mac (a recent vintage Mac Mini with an SSD and Core i7) and an iPhone and I have several Windows PCs (two from Acer one from Dell) running XP and Windows 7. My Windows PCs crash and/or need rebooting significantly less often than my Apple products. I like Apple products fine and like the interfaces better than most Windows products but the Apple products I own don't even begin to approach "appliance like" in reliability. They're solid but not bulletproof.
Furthermore I have a Windows 2003 server sitting 3 feet from me as I type this and the only time I've ever had to reboot it was for an occasional upgrade and for power outages. I haven't had a crash of any sort in over 4 years. I cannot say the same about any of my desktop machines from Apple or any PC vendor.
It's kind of like why nobody buys the Chevy Volt - it's a $40k Chevy econobox. Chevy != high tech quality, that's what Toyota is for.
I've driven a Volt and a Prius both enough to have a well formed opinion on each. I live near and work with engineers from GM who test the Volt at GM's Proving Grounds so they've shown me the car. My sister had a Prius until recently and I drove it a fair bit too. While it is true that the money went into the power train rather than the interior, the fit and finish on the Volt is generally better than a Prius and the power train in the Volt is definitely better for most people. The price of the most similar plug in Prius is about the same (close to $40K) and the Volt is MUCH nicer to drive. I'd argue that it's power train is better technology than anything Toyota currently offers. If you have a choice the Volt is the better car between the two especially if you drive in sloppy weather or actually want to enjoy driving.
Visa could choose to not do business with blacks if they choose to?
Not on the basis of their race in the United States and quite a few other countries. Doing would (rightly) risk federal/state prosecution and very likely civil lawsuits as well.
If you say no, where is the line drawn
Easy question. You cannot discriminate against people based on a number of protected classes including age, sex, marital status, religion, national origin, familial status, disability, veteran status and genetic information. Generally speaking any other form of financial discrimination may be fair game legally speaking. (Morally is another issue)
In context to your quotes by the measure of a CEO its share value, Ballmer is doing an awful lot better than Cook
Have you actually looked at the stocks? Apple has gone from $7.50 in 2003 to over $464 at the time I write this. Microsoft's stock over the same period is essentially unchanged. It was around $25 in 2003 and still is. Cook has been in charge for roughly one year and the stock had a huge run up during that time but is now basically back to where it was when he started as CEO.
Frankly Tim Cook hasn't been on the job long enough to really tell how he is doing. We'll have a better idea in another year. Balmer has a long track record at this point and the price of MSFT has gone nowhere during his tenure. Why MSFT shareholders aren't calling for his head is something that eludes me.
John Broder works for the New York Times. They don't lie.
While the NYT might have a well deserved reputation for quality reporting, it does not follow that employees of that organization never lie or that they never get the facts wrong. I've personally had a reporter from a regional paper do a hatchet job on me when I was a high school athlete based on some joking comments I made. If you think reporters (including those at the NYT) do not approach stories with biases you are being very naive.
Who do you trust more, a legitimate journalist or a corporate CEO?
False dilemma. I trust data. If the journalist can back up his reporting with data and a logical narrative then I will believe him. If he cannot then I will not. Right now we have quite a lot of data on the side of Tesla and rather little from the journalist aside from his narrative. Reporters are not to be trusted any more than anyone else and there are countless examples of reporters tinkering with the "facts" in pursuit of a good story. They provide information but you have to decide if the information is credible.
Linux, bittorrent, tcp/ip, html are just a few examples that have nothing to do with corporations in their inception.
Inception != Success. And do not underestimate the contributions of big corporations to open source. The original premise is not without merit. Big corporations have been instrumental in the success of most if not all major open source projects. The only way you can claim that big companies have nothing to do with these technologies is if you are willfully blind to the facts. Just because the big companies are not always the ones that start these projects doesn't mean they aren't important to the success of the projects.
Linux was started as a project by one guy but have no illusions that it would have gotten where it is without the help of big corporations and the talent they possess. Need proof? How about pretty much every major tech company including Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Novell, Microsoft (yes Microsoft), Texas Instruments, AMD, Oracle, Nokia, Google, Samsung, and a whole bunch more having made significant contributions to the linux source code.
HTML was started at CERN which is a pretty big organization (effectively a non-profit company) and would not have gotten to where it is without the help of countless companies. TCP/IP was heavily influenced by Xerox PARC as well as IBM, AT&T and DEC not to mention DARPA. AT&T developed the TCP/IP stack for unix and put it into the public domain.
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You're going to have a hard time putting together an outfit that looks as good as your bog standard suit.,
That's a wager I'd be happy to take and I'd probably win. Furthermore it is circumstance dependent. Suits are appropriate clothing for a fairly narrow range of circumstances. Outside of those circumstance and you look silly or pretentious.
Ten seconds of thought and you're all but guaranteed to be the best-looking guy in the room, and that matters.
I have news for you. If you are ugly, a suit isn't going to fix that.
And seriously why would you not want to look like hot shit in a sharp suit??
Because I am comfortable with how I look without one. I own several tailored suits and I wear them at appropriate times. But I really don't care a fig whether anyone except my wife thinks I'm attractive or not.
Everyone looks good in a suit that fits.
That is a matter of opinion. While that might be the consensus it is not a universally held opinion. And in my opinion they often look quite silly. An attractive person will look attractive in casual or formal clothes. An unattractive person will be made at most marginally better looking with nice clothes but it is demonstrably true that not everyone looks good in a suit no matter how well it is tailored. 20 seconds on google images will reveal lots of ugly people in nice fitting suits.
I don't understand the nerd hatred of suits and ties at all.
Partly because a lot of suits and all ties are uncomfortable. (a good suit is comfortable but usually expensive) Worse a tie is a completely useless piece of clothing worn just because people expect it. It is purely decorative and does not even look very good for that purpose. Partly because circumstances that dictate wearing a suit tend to come with a lot of fussy social conventions that frequently make little sense. Partly because suits and ties are costumes without any fun clearly attached. Partly because suits and ties are expensive. Partly because nerds tend to value how people act more than how they look.
...has described the "tossing" of the fork from hand to hand as the proper form.
This is my problem with a lot of so called "rules" of etiquette, it's entirely arbitrary and typically just one person's overly judgmental opinion. While I have no desire to offend anyone (most of the time) the notion that holding your knife and fork together or switching hands could possibly have a right or wrong answer is absurd. The point is simply not to gross anyone out with your eating habits and possibly give the impression one is attempting to be social.
Keeping your knife in the right and and the fork in the left is ok too, but that supposedly gives the impression that you are in a hurry...
See, I would think that the actual rate at which you shovel food into your mouth would be a more useful measure. I could make an equally valid (and just as absurd) argument that the noise from constantly switching eating implements is disruptive and distracting. If someone is reading that much into how you manage your tableware then they are being rude and judgmental and I doubt I'd care to dine with such a person.
We know all km-sized asteroids including their trajectories for centuries...
Really? NASA disagrees with you and I tend to take their word for it over yours. We've discovered hundreds of kilometer sized near Earth asteroids in just the last decade.
All asteroids large enough to make this work are known and known not to collide with earth.
All presently known asteroids large enough...
Fixed that for you. We find things in space all the time that we weren't aware of before. You are claiming we know of every body that could possibly threaten us when we cannot possibly be certain of that.
No, running the cable to your house is not the "expensive bit" - it is a big up-front cost, which is amortized over the life of the service. Actually providing the service, running the head-end units, the data centers, etc. is the expensive part. Trenching coax to your basement isn't the most "expensive bit."
I'm a cost accountant in my professional life and there is lots of data available that you should consider. While the ISP may recoup the cost over the life of the service it is extremely expensive to deploy copper/fiber. The specifics vary but wiring up a subdivision has costs that easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars. When Verizon did their FiOS rollout they spent something like $23 billion to hook up 19 million homes. Their cost is claimed to be around around $1410 per home. Per Verizon about $760 of that cost was getting the fiber to the house and about $650 was the routers and other gear needed to run the service. Bear in mind as well that Verizon already has the easements, poles and infrastructure needed to make a rollout like this happen. But the actual costs are effectively higher because Verizon only has about 4 million FiOS customers so that $23 billion results in a cost around $6000 per customer, more than half of which in physically getting the wire to the customer. So yeah, "trenching coax" actually is the most expensive part.
Most of the costs for these services are up front fixed costs. Operating a gigabit network doesn't cost appreciably more than a 100mbps network once installed. So once the investment is made the only question really is how long is their breakeven horizon. At $200/month, the ISP would break even in 30 months on a $6000 hookup. At $100/month it would take 60 months. It is just a profit calculation. They offer tiered service because some people are willing to pay more than others. Clearly the hockey stick on willingness to pay is somewhere below $200 for internet service for many people.
You won't pay $200 for 100Mb/sec service, would you pay $200/mo for 1 Gb/sec service?
No, I probably wouldn't because it is a luxury, not a necessity. I could afford it I suppose and I'd think about it, but the ROI simply isn't there to justify the expense. If they get it down to $100 per month I'd probably get it.
Correct. But this makes it worse for them inthat they will be increasingly targeted by NPEs who don't want to take the risk of going to court with one of the big players.
Unlikely. The reason they don't usually go after the small companies is because they are small, i.e. they have no money. There is little point in spending much money trying to extort a tiny settlement out of a company that the NPE may very well bankrupt in the process. If I'm a small company I would basically say "bring it on". They'll spend more money on lawyers than they would win in a settlement and even if they did win they probably would get nothing because the company would declare bankruptcy.
"We just don't see the need of delivering that to consumers."' The article goes on to quote her: '...residential customers have thus far shown little interest in TWC's top internet tiers. "A very small fraction of our customer base" ultimately choose those options.'"
Translation: "We have a near monopoly and don't want to spend the money to do the upgrade because we don't have to"
I pay for 50Mb/s access and my ISP offers 100Mb/s. Why don't I pick 100Mb/s? Because it costs $200/month versus the $80/month I'm already paying. Huge diminishing returns. The expensive bit is running the cable to my house. After any arguments against offering the fastest possible speed for a reasonable price are pretty weak.
It seems bitcoins would be the easiest (and cheapest) way to transfer money to and from places without much financial infrastructure.
To send dollars via bitcoin the dollars have to already exist on both sides of the transaction. As such the financial infrastructure already exists making your argument moot. Furthermore I defy you to give an example of some place where it would be meaningfully easier to do a bitcoin transaction with dollar conversions on both ends than to use existing infrastructure. I can do a wire transfer pretty much anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes and there are services like Western Union that can turn it into cash if needed. Bitcoins certainly aren't easier and once you factor in all the costs and risks it's very debatable whether bitcoin is cheaper.
Bitcoin aims to offer a better way to transfer wealth than we had today.
It may aim to offer a "better" way to transfer wealth but it fails miserably. I can easily exchange dollars for any currency or good available today. I cannot say the same about Bitcoin. Bitcoin carries huge unnecessary risks, is accepted by virtually no one except for drug deals and other illicit transactions, has huge volatility with the attendant exchange rate risk, and has all the trappings of a Ponzi scheme. it doesn't even really avoid transaction costs once you factor in all the externalities. Frankly you'd have to be either a degenerate gambler or a naive fool to put any money into bitcoin. The fact that a few people have used it successfully doesn't make it a good idea.
I don't have a college degree and get $55/hr.
Nicely done. I hope you can continue to do well.
Oh, and I also don't have massive college debt to repay, because most people I've encountered that speak of how awesome of a degree they have are usually the most incompetent.
Being insecure has nothing to do with having a degree. Yes there are lots of incompetent people with college degrees. There also are arguably an even higher percentage who lack a degree. The data speaks for itself. There are a LOT of jobs you simply cannot get without a degree. It is easily demonstrated that the average earnings of someone with a college degree is somewhere between 20%-40% higher than the average earnings of someone who doesn't have a degree. That doesn't mean that someone without a degree can't do just fine or that having one is a guarantee of success. It merely means that overall the odds are better with one than without.
Does that count for "showing them how it's done" ?
Sounds like you're doing ok for yourself. What annoys me are arrogant people who mistakenly think that because they succeeded without a college degree that they are somehow smarter than those who went to college.
Don't be too snide. A lot of people are graduating college these days with enough debt to equate to a house, but without the house.
Correct, they have an education which unless you waste it is much more valuable than a house. Just because something isn't tangible doesn't mean it isn't valuable.
Racking up $200,000 in debt for a philosophy degree probably is a bad investment unless you can parlay that into a high paying job of some sort. Some people can, many cannot. (If parents are paying then by all means have at it - any degree has at least some value) There also is always the option of going to a state school as well. You can get an excellent college education at a state school for generally reasonable amounts of money.
In the past 9 years, 100% of people I've hired were undegreed. These were the people I wanted, because they specifically weren't indoctrinated into the college mentality. I want self-starters, people I can later on invite to become a business partner.
Being a self starter has nothing to do with whether or not you went to college. Having a college degree isn't the only thing that matters but it can be a very useful indicator of what the person standing in front of me is capable of. I have several college degrees including masters in both engineering and business. I've started 5 businesses, am a certified accountant, run a manufacturing company and am on the board of a non-profit. My wife has a doctorate and does even better than I do. If you think our college degrees have held either of us back in any way you are delusional.
I also don't want political correctness, feminism or any of the other progressive mindsets in any of my businesses.
So you want to hire people who have no respect for others? Nice. I'll be sure to avoid you and the people you hire.
I'd love to see a job search website that focuses on people bright enough to skip 4 years of college and just hit the employment roles.
Good luck with that. You know a lot of engineers or doctors who picked up their profession "on the streets"? I guarantee you don't know anyone in accounting (not bookkeeping - real accounting) that does not have a college degree. Same for scientists.
I have no degree and get $20 an hour.
Wow, $20 an hour. Impressive. [/sarcasm] That's about what, $40,000 per year if you work full time? The average starting salary for an engineering graduate in 2011 was around $61,000
I'll skip the indoctrination and keep earning double what these college kids get.
You make barely more than an engineering intern gets while still in school. You're really showing them how it's done.
This one uses examples from the industrial revolution that are not applicable anymore because the rate of automation is far faster (and accelerating), meaning that the economy doesn't have enough time to rellocate workers to other basic tasks before they are automated as well.
And your evidence for this is where exactly? Exactly how are you measuring "rate of automation"? (and no a book by Ray Kurzweil or Vernor Vinge is not evidence of anything) Even accounting for the recent economic problems employment rates are well within the range of normal and there is no evidence I am aware of that indicates any unusual difficulty in reallocating labor.
In fact, the way things are going, non educated people will have a hard time competing with machines in any basic job.
Decisions to automate are economic decisions largely based on volume and value. They are rarely technological decisions. Professionally I'm an accountant who specializes in cost accounting. There are a huge number of jobs that are not particularly easy to automate. I run a manufacturing business. We have some automation, some skilled labor and some unskilled labor. There is NO technology that can economically automate much of what we do economically. Technologically it is possible but not economically. Our customers buy relatively small numbers of parts and some buy relatively complicated parts. Even if labor were free you could not make a profit on the work we do with automation. The up front cost is too high and will remain so for the foreseeable future. There will be marginal improvements but I don't see any technology that will allow many types of products to be economically automated.
This time is the singularity. It is not just better tools that are removing jobs, it is artificial intelligence, of the non strong variety (for now). What is left for the workers to compete?
Ahh, I get it. You think the so-called singularity is a real thing. It's an interesting theory I'll admit but it also is an excellent example of the dangers of believing too deeply in unbounded extrapolation. I can extrapolate all sorts of doomsday scenarios based on available information.
But it is also true that they will use their collective power to try to stop technology if they see it as threating their position, so it is quite likely they will lobby for regulations using scare tactics.
If you can show that something is medically beneficial, you'll have doctors pushing for it. Much of my wife's job could someday be replaced with molecular diagnostic tests and she would be the first person to tell you they should use them. Never forget that most doctors didn't go into medicine for the money. I have never met one who wouldn't recommend using a test or procedure with demonstrably better outcomes even if it hurts them economically. Most of them actually care about their patients and are not the sort of amoral people you portray.
If they are so concerned with healthcare costs, then why is the exploding number of non-medical administrative personnel ever mentioned?
It gets mentioned a lot. Seriously. I'm married to a doctor and everyone involved is very, very, very well aware of the problem. That does not mean it is a simple problem to fix however. Electronic medical records will help a lot in the long run but getting the vast amount of very complicated paperwork and related processes automated is no trivial feat.
there is a huge number of high end administration that don't do squat and make huge salaries.
Not in medical office administration there isn't. Medical office workers get paid quite poorly for the most part.
Same thing goes for surgeons, but a robot has two qualities that your run of the mill surgeon doesn't: It is consistent in its results (you can end up in the hands of a drunken surgeon, someone who just lost a familiar, or it just happens to have a bad day), and it is cheaper (in the long run).
Robotic surgery doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. It isn't an autonomous robot doing the procedure. It is a doctor doing the procedure using robotic technology to enhance and assist. It improves capabilities for minimally invasive surgery and remote surgery but it is not what you are describing.
Automation is coming to all other aspects of life, shedding jobs at its wake. I don't see why doctors need to be protected from that, as long as automation brings some benefits to society.
Common misconception. Automation does not "shed jobs", it simply pushes the jobs elsewhere. We automated farming and that freed the labor force to work in manufacturing and services and we all have benefited greatly from that shift. Manufacturing is now being increasingly automated for many things freeing labor for more valuable tasks. A lot of work is not value added. A lot of my work is as an accountant. Theoretically I could keep the books by hand like they did before computers with large staff but that adds no economic value to what we do, just cost. Better to use Quickbooks and automate and apply that labor more productively elsewhere. The purpose of jobs is not to provide a paycheck. The purpose of jobs is to do economically useful work. If a machine can do the work more economically that labor needs to be applied elsewhere.
Doctors don't need to be protected from automation any more than anyone else. If anything they welcome the productivity improvements automation can provide, particularly on the administrative side of things. But it's pretty hard to automate a checkup or removing an appendix. We give them a lot of training because those skills are not presently replaceable with any technology we possess. Perhaps that will change someday but it won't be anytime soon.
The court ruling said that it's like having a lock on your house to show that it's private property.
Which is nonsensical reasoning because it is private property regardless of whether a lock is engaged or not. My cell phone has the ability to be locked whether I choose to use it or not and it is my property whether I choose to secure it or not.
A lock or password shows that you don't want strangers to get in there without your permission.
It should be the default assumption that permission is not granted. I can always acknowledge after the fact that I'm fine with someone entering my house or snooping on my cell phone but just because I forget to lock my house one day doesn't mean I'm ok with the police coming in and having a look around. I freely acknowledge that not securing your property might be a bad idea for reasons that are obvious but lack of a lock or password is not an invitation or permission for anyone to go looking around just because they can.
When you dont use a computer. That happens. And the fact that you are happy with a 2007 dell means you really dont use your computer.
Curious theory. The fact that I run a multi-million dollar company heavily using a half dozen computers between 6-9 years old must really mess with your world view. We run ERP , product test, shipping, time card management, several databases, some very large spreadsheets, CAD and quite a bit more but according to you we must not actually be using the computers for anything. Would a faster computer be nice? Sure but the marginal improvement would be well into diminishing returns.
I wear the letters off of a keyboard in 12 months.
So stop buying crappy keyboards. I have keyboards have have been used for over 20 years without a fleck of paint missing.
Some of us actually use their computers as tools to make money, others look at them as toys for fun.
Some of us actually try to get a decent ROI on our machines and realize that lots of actual work doesn't require the latest and greatest. I run a manufacturing company and if you don't think we don't use our computers I think you don't really understand what that means in the real world.
I have never had a laptop hard drive last more than two years, and only had one last more than eighteen months.
Then I would have to wonder what the heck you are doing to the hard drives. I'm not sure I've ever had one last less than that long in a laptop. I've had laptop hard drives last for 7 years and were still going strong when I stopped using the machine. In fact I usually have some other component die long before the hard drive does. I have several hard drives that work just fine from laptops with burned out system boards, defective keyboards, borked video and other problems.
Some people are quite hard on their equipment, perhaps you are one of these? I've often been astonished how carelessly some people treat their equipment and then expect it to work.
When was the last time it was "ok" to have to reboot your phone.
I have an iPhone and I probably reboot it roughly once a month due to various minor problems. It's never "ok" but I have yet to use any smartphone from any maker (including Samsung, Nokia and others) I haven't had to periodically reboot. They are computers that happen to be able to make calls. They're pretty good overall but hardly bulletproof.
Microsoft makes neat toys and cheap PC software - but reliable and "applicance-like" in a way that a Mac or DVD player or a toaster is - they are not.
Well I have a Mac (a recent vintage Mac Mini with an SSD and Core i7) and an iPhone and I have several Windows PCs (two from Acer one from Dell) running XP and Windows 7. My Windows PCs crash and/or need rebooting significantly less often than my Apple products. I like Apple products fine and like the interfaces better than most Windows products but the Apple products I own don't even begin to approach "appliance like" in reliability. They're solid but not bulletproof.
Furthermore I have a Windows 2003 server sitting 3 feet from me as I type this and the only time I've ever had to reboot it was for an occasional upgrade and for power outages. I haven't had a crash of any sort in over 4 years. I cannot say the same about any of my desktop machines from Apple or any PC vendor.
It's kind of like why nobody buys the Chevy Volt - it's a $40k Chevy econobox. Chevy != high tech quality, that's what Toyota is for.
I've driven a Volt and a Prius both enough to have a well formed opinion on each. I live near and work with engineers from GM who test the Volt at GM's Proving Grounds so they've shown me the car. My sister had a Prius until recently and I drove it a fair bit too. While it is true that the money went into the power train rather than the interior, the fit and finish on the Volt is generally better than a Prius and the power train in the Volt is definitely better for most people. The price of the most similar plug in Prius is about the same (close to $40K) and the Volt is MUCH nicer to drive. I'd argue that it's power train is better technology than anything Toyota currently offers. If you have a choice the Volt is the better car between the two especially if you drive in sloppy weather or actually want to enjoy driving.
Visa could choose to not do business with blacks if they choose to?
Not on the basis of their race in the United States and quite a few other countries. Doing would (rightly) risk federal/state prosecution and very likely civil lawsuits as well.
If you say no, where is the line drawn
Easy question. You cannot discriminate against people based on a number of protected classes including age, sex, marital status, religion, national origin, familial status, disability, veteran status and genetic information. Generally speaking any other form of financial discrimination may be fair game legally speaking. (Morally is another issue)
In context to your quotes by the measure of a CEO its share value, Ballmer is doing an awful lot better than Cook
Have you actually looked at the stocks? Apple has gone from $7.50 in 2003 to over $464 at the time I write this. Microsoft's stock over the same period is essentially unchanged. It was around $25 in 2003 and still is. Cook has been in charge for roughly one year and the stock had a huge run up during that time but is now basically back to where it was when he started as CEO.
Frankly Tim Cook hasn't been on the job long enough to really tell how he is doing. We'll have a better idea in another year. Balmer has a long track record at this point and the price of MSFT has gone nowhere during his tenure. Why MSFT shareholders aren't calling for his head is something that eludes me.
John Broder works for the New York Times. They don't lie.
While the NYT might have a well deserved reputation for quality reporting, it does not follow that employees of that organization never lie or that they never get the facts wrong. I've personally had a reporter from a regional paper do a hatchet job on me when I was a high school athlete based on some joking comments I made. If you think reporters (including those at the NYT) do not approach stories with biases you are being very naive.
Who do you trust more, a legitimate journalist or a corporate CEO?
False dilemma. I trust data. If the journalist can back up his reporting with data and a logical narrative then I will believe him. If he cannot then I will not. Right now we have quite a lot of data on the side of Tesla and rather little from the journalist aside from his narrative. Reporters are not to be trusted any more than anyone else and there are countless examples of reporters tinkering with the "facts" in pursuit of a good story. They provide information but you have to decide if the information is credible.
Linux, bittorrent, tcp/ip, html are just a few examples that have nothing to do with corporations in their inception.
Inception != Success. And do not underestimate the contributions of big corporations to open source. The original premise is not without merit. Big corporations have been instrumental in the success of most if not all major open source projects. The only way you can claim that big companies have nothing to do with these technologies is if you are willfully blind to the facts. Just because the big companies are not always the ones that start these projects doesn't mean they aren't important to the success of the projects.
Linux was started as a project by one guy but have no illusions that it would have gotten where it is without the help of big corporations and the talent they possess. Need proof? How about pretty much every major tech company including Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Novell, Microsoft (yes Microsoft), Texas Instruments, AMD, Oracle, Nokia, Google, Samsung, and a whole bunch more having made significant contributions to the linux source code.
HTML was started at CERN which is a pretty big organization (effectively a non-profit company) and would not have gotten to where it is without the help of countless companies. TCP/IP was heavily influenced by Xerox PARC as well as IBM, AT&T and DEC not to mention DARPA. AT&T developed the TCP/IP stack for unix and put it into the public domain.