H1-B makes it very hard for people to leave a job and go to another one. That is a lot of what keeps wages down since companies can bring in workers and treat them very badly and unless that person can find another company willing to do quite a lot of paperwork very quickly and take over their visa they will get thrown out. As a result they put up with a lot of abuse.
I want people to have a regular work visa where they are free to work at any company and move around as the market changes.
I do want to figure out some way to close the loopholes that companies abuse and require they hire american's first. However there are many engineering and scientific fields that are not related to computer science that really do have shortages and it is very hard to bring anyone in since normally all the H1-B vanish in a few hours since computer companies take them all for nearly slave labor.
We are probably the only first world country that makes it hard for highly skilled people to come in. If you have an actual engineering degree (chemical, mechanical, aerospace etc) that is basically free admittance to canada or any EU country.
I even know of PhD researchers where they are one of only two people in the world doing research into an area of biotech that US companies care about a LOT and neither of them live in the USA. If we could make it easier to get in for people like that it would help us a great deal.
Social security is not a Ponzi scheme and they planned for this LONG ago. People contributed a lot more than necessary to build up a fund to make sure social security stayed solvent and based on their predictions it worked.
The problem social security has is other parts of the government took the money and replaced it with IOUs.
Social security is not broke, it was robbed and it now broke as a result. I hope the cost of those wars we got with the money was worth it.
Racism DID NOT end in Germany. They just stopped talking about it publicaly. Sure the law says that a business can't discriminate based on your race but they actually do. One of the students in my class went back home to India after being accepted in a masters program here in Germany since he found several landlords that told him they did not rent to people from India.
Europe is too much of a monoculture to see much outward racism but it still exists and it is pretty vile since it is not talked about. Laws against racism seem to be almost never actually enforced at least in Germany. It was just recently a German professor told an Indian male student that she did not accept male students from India because of their rape culture and her university DEFENDED her. She is facing no sanctions of any kind and other professors in Germany have stood up and said they do the same thing. That is truly evil.
The USA is having a hard time trying to deal with racism but it actually trying to deal with it and the road is going to be bumpy and violent but I think it will work out in the end and meanwhile Europe will just quietly keep it and hide it.
I want Visas available for all the jobs we need doing. Right now we can't get american's to pick food and until we have robots doing it we need people to do it. We should have a visa just for this purpose and have people get it legally. They should come here legally, work here legally and NOT be exploited by farmers, factories etc.
On the other end we need to make it vastly simpler to bring in very highly skilled people from other countries. I am not talking about the H1-B crap that is abused and just for getting cheap programmers pretty much. I am talking about people with masters or PhDs from highly respected universities in biotech, nanotech, material science etc. People that we honestly don't have enough of and bringing the best over won't actually have any impact on americans being employed.
There are some fields where that are only a few thousand qualified people on earth to do certain high tech jobs and we could employ ALL of them with barely a dent in the demand.
Anything where safety or lives matter does not operate this way.
Right now I am back in school again working towards a PhD but I have worked with a biotech company and I have NEVER seen behavior even approaching this. If engineers where treated this way they would make mistakes and for many drugs you would not know about it until people started dieing. Then the FDA would investigate and find out why mistakes where made and the company would be SCREWED.
I can't imagine people doing this kind of working environment for drug development, building design, airplanes, materials etc.
Basically Amazon can only do this because what they do truly doesn't matter on a life critical kind of scale and they can afford to burn people out because there are so many to replace them. In many engineering fields unemployment is 1%. You can't burn through people because there is nobody to replace them with.
I think the point was that the real world equivalent of the digital search would not be allowed. It would be considered a vast overstepping of bounds to search 381 houses and do it in such a way that the people that live there did not know that the police broke in and searched it.
I am not saying that real world warrants should be held to the same absurd standards as digital ones. I am saying it should be the other way around.
Digital warrants should be held to the same standard as real world ones. You should need all the same legal standards for each person you want to do a search on and each place you want to search. If searching hundreds of homes is not viable in the real world you should not be giving warrants for that in the digital world just because it is easier.
Terrorism is so rare that it should be handled as an exceptional event within the law and require a justification every time. The information should also be made public after a set period of time to prevent abuse. However, right now the police seem to see a lot of people as terrorists for things that don't involve terrorism at all.
The only party served the warrant is judged to have no standing to contest it and the party that the warrant is about is never informed about the warrant.
It should be completely unconstitutional but in the end the world runs by might makes right and the constitution is just a piece of paper they pay lip service to.
Judges will not support the average person over their government and corporate interests.
Secret search warrants should not be allowed but I don't see any actual way to stop them. After the Citizen's United ruling any candidate that tries to run on the basis of trying to clean this kind of stuff up is going to get stomped by the other side since the other side will have nearly unlimited funds.
In the end money decides politics and politics are explicitly for sale to the highest bidder now. The supreme court even declared it is not bribery and we all know that it is. The system is corrupt from top to bottom and baked in. European countries are not any better with that either.
Sometimes you look both ways and it is clear and while crossing the street someone still zooms through on a left turn and nearly hits you.
I have nearly been hit a few times while crossing the street by careless drivers that drove through an intersection FAR too fast. This is all while paying attention to my surroundings.
For a child they are smaller and even more likely to get hit.
I can't wait for the day when humans are no longer permitted to drive.
The Top500 is not relevant to desktop or laptop performance.
I love using linux for all my HPC stuff but on a desktop or worse a laptop it can be a major pain in the ass. Linux is really tuned for a server and not as a desktop. Even with an SSD and all fully supported hardware on a laptop linux just doesn't run as well. It can use things like optimus to switch between integrated gpu and dedicated gpu but it is clunky and buggy compared to windows. The interface does not run as smoothly and the fonts don't render as well.
Only part of the problem is that consumer hardware is designed for windows, the other part of the problem is that linux still does not take the desktop seriously after all of these years. The entire experience is still pretty glitchy and I have used linux as a desktop for over 15 years now. Windows has improved enormously and it is harder and harder justifying using linux as an end user machine.
Self driving cars are getting much better very quickly. A few too many of these protests is going to be remembered when it is time to deploy self driving cars.
The worst one is all the train strikes in Germany and other places in europe. Their jobs can be completely automated right now. The technology to do it has existed for more than a decade. If they keep striking the way they have been people are going to get fed up and instead of giving in they will replace the entire lot of them with self driving trains.
If you are enough of a nuisance the public will react to make the problem go away. It just may not react in the best interest of those causing the nuisance.
With the type of work I have been doing additional storage is not a problem however resizing is expensive. I create all my vectors at their required size in advance in almost all cases. I think I only have a few cases where I have to dynamically expand a vector since there was no way to know the size ahead of time.
I agree though that you could screw up pretty badly if you just create it at size 0 and then keep building it up to millions of elements. That would be horribly slow compared to the rest of the code.
The great thing is that vectors are guaranteed to be contiguous in memory and that means you can hand them to BLAS routines.
CUDA and opencl are great for certain types of problems. If you don't have a problem that works well on GPUs then they are pretty horrible.
For the kinds of HPC work I have been doing I get a nearly linear speedup up to 128 cpus with appropriate use of openmp.
OpenMP is a standard and supported by all modern compilers. It works extremely well and gets rid of all the boilerplate code you would normally need with threads and gives extremely good scaling on high performance systems.
I may hate seeing it written that way also but that is also the current most common way to write it and that is what HR systems and their computer screening systems except. You are writing a resume for an HR person usually and if you want it t be seen by someone more important it has to get past them first. That means doing stuff that HR people understand.
There are many fights to take on in this world and others that are just not worth the effort to fight since the costs are so high compared to the benefits and this is one of those fights.
There are many things you can use to improve your c++ code like std::vector. With that you store data contiguously in memory but you also don't have any manual memory management. No new, no delete, no malloc, no free.
For my high performance work I tend to use std::vector, BLAS and LAPACK and my programs usually have no manual memory management of any kind in them. Valgrind shows no memory leaks and the programs are very easy to read and work with.
If you want to do high performance c++ then learn OpenMP and MPI. If you want to do threading just use OpenMP since that makes it VASTLY easier to get threading correct. Add tasks with OpenMP along with their dependencies and you end up with a nice cross platform and very high performance code base if you have done your job correctly. If you need to scale to multiple nodes then use MPI between nodes.
Earth is a horrible place. It is infested by humans!
Have you seen how stupid humans are? World wide people prefer the lies they tell themselves and the lies of their culture to actually looking at scientific evidence. Humans are also very poor at dealing with any threat that it nos immediate to them and so all kinds of things we deal with poorly.
Face it humans are really not very nice to be around and earth is not exactly a good place.
Of course I also agree completely that many that don't want to be traced are drawn to crypto currencies. It was an inevitable given the nature of the currency and even if the currency itself is neutral and there are many good uses for it also the negative uses will always overwhelm the neutral and good uses of crypt currency.
Journals should be highly interested in posting failures. We can all learn about an approach that did not work. Failure tends to be replicated a lot and it is wasting a lot of time and money.
Knowing that an approach does not work would save a lot of time. It would also help to know if a certain experimental setup did not work and that a different setup should be tried.
For some reason we tend to only think that positive results matter. Negative results are just as valuable. If you do a really well done 10 year study and find no connection then we learn a lot.
In many aspects of our society winning is all that matters and that has spilled over into our science funding.
If we started to truly value negative results we would progress much faster scientifically and we would also have much better science quality. The current system favors making very safe bets that are basically impossible to be wrong on and then have others make another tiny step from that one.
Even the USA would split apart without these kinds of transfer payments. Most of the states in the south receive more in federal money than they pay in taxes. Actually for most of the USA you can separate red vs blue states based on if they are net positive or net negative on tax paid vs federal dollars coming back. There are states upset about this but it does stabilize the country.
I would love to see a party that was fiscally conservative, basically stayed out of all these wars and peacekeeping missions, did more negotiations for foreign policy and basically left people choose their own social lives. I am sick and tired of all the anti-woman and anti-gay stuff I see coming out of politicians.
Gay people should be allowed to get married just because of equal protection under the law, end the discussion and move on.
Women should be allowed to have abortions because I don't have the right to impose my morality on other people. It doesn't matter if I think abortion is right or wrong it is not my place to make that decision and I wish we had politicians that would take that viewpoint. Just make it a non-issue and focus on economic issues.
I want a real focus on infrastructure, fixing roads, bridges, power etc since bad infrastructure costs our economy a pretty vast amount of money. I want a real focus on modern education for degrees our economy needs.
I also want actual immigration reform. If we really do need migrant workers to pick food then make a special visa for that. Saying it is illegal and then bringing them in anyways is not helpful.
Mostly I want skilled immigration reform. I want the H1B visa program ended since it ends up being more like indentured servitude and has far too many loopholes. Instead I want to see skilled labor able to easily get into the country on a regular visa like any other first world country. There are people I know with PhDs in VERY rare fields and they can't get into the USA. They would help our economy a lot and would not be taking a job from a qualified US citizen. Heck there are some fields where a skillset is so rare we have hundreds of job openings and tens of candidates on earth. Let them all in!
My view on guns is lets worry about more important issues and once we fix infrastructure, education, the economy etc lets see if guns still matter.
As for the stupid censorship that some politicians push and all the stuff they want to control to protect the children... screw them.
Religious views do not give you the right to put millions of others at risk. Viruses mutate and that is inevitable. A vaccine is also not 100% effective in many people it just gives them a kind of limited immunity. We don't have treatments for many of the things we have vaccines for. If measles mutates it will kill millions of people and there is no guarantee how long it would take us to make a new vaccine.
In the end I don't care what your religion is I care if you are putting others at risk. Refusing to vaccinate is putting others at risk. You may not want to accept the biology on that or believe that your deity will never let that happen but most of the rest of the human race has accepted this and if you want to live with them you have to accept it also. If you don't want to live under our understanding of biology and vaccines then you can have religious freedom by yourself away from all other human contact.
Viruses don't care about your religion. Their mutation rate does not care what deity you believe in. It is too dangerous for society to allow humans to play incubators for the measles. It will eventually mutate and bypass the current vaccine. If it does many millions will die until we figure out a way to make a new vaccine.
The ONLY way to prevent this is to make sure there are not enough hosts for the virus to survive.
Your religious freedoms don't allow endangering everyone else around you. We also have people that have religious views on human sacrifice and we don't allow that either.
There are limits to religious freedom and this has to be one of those limits. A legitimate medical reason should be the ONLY way to get exempted from a vaccine unless you want to go live as a hermit and never encounter humans again.
It doesn't matter if you think this is a good idea or a bad idea since as a society we have no choice but to accept it and figure out how to best integrate it into our society. 3D printers exist now and they will continue to get better. They can print things like weapons just as they can engines, food or any number of other things. What can be printed is going to continue to advance fairly rapidly. In the end how to 3D print something is just a file and there is no way to control files.
The music industry has tried to stop music sharing and the movie industry has tried to stop moving sharing and we all now how effective that way.
We can choose to bury our heads in the sand and not see that our technology has advanced to the point where it has destabilized certain aspects of our society or we can try to figure out a new stability point.
As I said I think the pricing was massively off. Steam should have had the standard 30%, 10% for Bethesda for tool development, documentation etc and 60% for the mod author.
However the basic idea is a good one. Donation just means free. So many say this stuff should all just be donation but people don't donate EVER pretty much. No matter how good something is they don't donate.
It would have been nice to see what mod developers would have done if they where being paid enough to do full time mod development and gained several years of experience.
It just seems that ideas today must work on day 1 perfectly and must not upset a few people because otherwise they cry like babies on social media until whatever upset them is taken down. It is highly destructive behavior and it currently carries no consequences of any kind. You can help ruin someones life, cause large economic damage and there is zero responsibility and it is considered completely okay until it happens to you. Heck we have people that still consider SWATing a joke.
Overall the idea was good and sure the first implementation had problems but pretty much all new systems have that. However, it seems that most would rather jump on a hate bandwagon and destroy something instead of actually giving constructive criticism to fix it.
Bethesda put money into making tools for modders. If this has worked then Bethesda would have had justifiable resources to put back into better modding tools, documentation, examples etc.
Modders don't do all the work by themselves. They build on top of many others work.
I don't know what a fair contribution would be for each party but the idea of being able to charge for mods is a good one. The donation system clearly does not work and so many that are in favor of it NEVER donate. It is just seen as free.
Maybe in a few years we would have ended up with modders as a full time job for some of our favorite games and they would keep putting out real content that we could all enjoy. However, humans people never waited to see for anything. It was different and therefore bad and that means it has to go.
People say they want new ideas but they really don't and this whole social media thing is getting way out of hand. We have these hate bandwagons that state and it is too easy for everyone to jump on board without thinking. The ideas just spread all over the internet as all people have to do is copy and image and say they are part of the hate.
It is going to take a long while before we figure out a way to deal with this but these hate bandwagons are just getting so tiring.
Slashdot Mirror
H1-B makes it very hard for people to leave a job and go to another one. That is a lot of what keeps wages down since companies can bring in workers and treat them very badly and unless that person can find another company willing to do quite a lot of paperwork very quickly and take over their visa they will get thrown out. As a result they put up with a lot of abuse.
I want people to have a regular work visa where they are free to work at any company and move around as the market changes.
I do want to figure out some way to close the loopholes that companies abuse and require they hire american's first. However there are many engineering and scientific fields that are not related to computer science that really do have shortages and it is very hard to bring anyone in since normally all the H1-B vanish in a few hours since computer companies take them all for nearly slave labor.
We are probably the only first world country that makes it hard for highly skilled people to come in. If you have an actual engineering degree (chemical, mechanical, aerospace etc) that is basically free admittance to canada or any EU country.
I even know of PhD researchers where they are one of only two people in the world doing research into an area of biotech that US companies care about a LOT and neither of them live in the USA. If we could make it easier to get in for people like that it would help us a great deal.
Social security is not a Ponzi scheme and they planned for this LONG ago. People contributed a lot more than necessary to build up a fund to make sure social security stayed solvent and based on their predictions it worked.
The problem social security has is other parts of the government took the money and replaced it with IOUs.
Social security is not broke, it was robbed and it now broke as a result. I hope the cost of those wars we got with the money was worth it.
Racism DID NOT end in Germany. They just stopped talking about it publicaly. Sure the law says that a business can't discriminate based on your race but they actually do. One of the students in my class went back home to India after being accepted in a masters program here in Germany since he found several landlords that told him they did not rent to people from India.
Europe is too much of a monoculture to see much outward racism but it still exists and it is pretty vile since it is not talked about. Laws against racism seem to be almost never actually enforced at least in Germany. It was just recently a German professor told an Indian male student that she did not accept male students from India because of their rape culture and her university DEFENDED her. She is facing no sanctions of any kind and other professors in Germany have stood up and said they do the same thing. That is truly evil.
The USA is having a hard time trying to deal with racism but it actually trying to deal with it and the road is going to be bumpy and violent but I think it will work out in the end and meanwhile Europe will just quietly keep it and hide it.
What I would like to see is neither option.
I want Visas available for all the jobs we need doing. Right now we can't get american's to pick food and until we have robots doing it we need people to do it. We should have a visa just for this purpose and have people get it legally. They should come here legally, work here legally and NOT be exploited by farmers, factories etc.
On the other end we need to make it vastly simpler to bring in very highly skilled people from other countries. I am not talking about the H1-B crap that is abused and just for getting cheap programmers pretty much. I am talking about people with masters or PhDs from highly respected universities in biotech, nanotech, material science etc. People that we honestly don't have enough of and bringing the best over won't actually have any impact on americans being employed.
There are some fields where that are only a few thousand qualified people on earth to do certain high tech jobs and we could employ ALL of them with barely a dent in the demand.
Anything where safety or lives matter does not operate this way.
Right now I am back in school again working towards a PhD but I have worked with a biotech company and I have NEVER seen behavior even approaching this. If engineers where treated this way they would make mistakes and for many drugs you would not know about it until people started dieing. Then the FDA would investigate and find out why mistakes where made and the company would be SCREWED.
I can't imagine people doing this kind of working environment for drug development, building design, airplanes, materials etc.
Basically Amazon can only do this because what they do truly doesn't matter on a life critical kind of scale and they can afford to burn people out because there are so many to replace them. In many engineering fields unemployment is 1%. You can't burn through people because there is nobody to replace them with.
I think the point was that the real world equivalent of the digital search would not be allowed. It would be considered a vast overstepping of bounds to search 381 houses and do it in such a way that the people that live there did not know that the police broke in and searched it.
I am not saying that real world warrants should be held to the same absurd standards as digital ones. I am saying it should be the other way around.
Digital warrants should be held to the same standard as real world ones. You should need all the same legal standards for each person you want to do a search on and each place you want to search. If searching hundreds of homes is not viable in the real world you should not be giving warrants for that in the digital world just because it is easier.
Terrorism is so rare that it should be handled as an exceptional event within the law and require a justification every time. The information should also be made public after a set period of time to prevent abuse. However, right now the police seem to see a lot of people as terrorists for things that don't involve terrorism at all.
That is the fundamental problem.
The only party served the warrant is judged to have no standing to contest it and the party that the warrant is about is never informed about the warrant.
It should be completely unconstitutional but in the end the world runs by might makes right and the constitution is just a piece of paper they pay lip service to.
Judges will not support the average person over their government and corporate interests.
Secret search warrants should not be allowed but I don't see any actual way to stop them. After the Citizen's United ruling any candidate that tries to run on the basis of trying to clean this kind of stuff up is going to get stomped by the other side since the other side will have nearly unlimited funds.
In the end money decides politics and politics are explicitly for sale to the highest bidder now. The supreme court even declared it is not bribery and we all know that it is. The system is corrupt from top to bottom and baked in. European countries are not any better with that either.
Sometimes you look both ways and it is clear and while crossing the street someone still zooms through on a left turn and nearly hits you.
I have nearly been hit a few times while crossing the street by careless drivers that drove through an intersection FAR too fast. This is all while paying attention to my surroundings.
For a child they are smaller and even more likely to get hit.
I can't wait for the day when humans are no longer permitted to drive.
He was making fun of MongoDB.
It is a classic video.
The Top500 is not relevant to desktop or laptop performance.
I love using linux for all my HPC stuff but on a desktop or worse a laptop it can be a major pain in the ass. Linux is really tuned for a server and not as a desktop. Even with an SSD and all fully supported hardware on a laptop linux just doesn't run as well. It can use things like optimus to switch between integrated gpu and dedicated gpu but it is clunky and buggy compared to windows. The interface does not run as smoothly and the fonts don't render as well.
Only part of the problem is that consumer hardware is designed for windows, the other part of the problem is that linux still does not take the desktop seriously after all of these years. The entire experience is still pretty glitchy and I have used linux as a desktop for over 15 years now. Windows has improved enormously and it is harder and harder justifying using linux as an end user machine.
This could also end up backfiring spectacularly.
Self driving cars are getting much better very quickly. A few too many of these protests is going to be remembered when it is time to deploy self driving cars.
The worst one is all the train strikes in Germany and other places in europe. Their jobs can be completely automated right now. The technology to do it has existed for more than a decade. If they keep striking the way they have been people are going to get fed up and instead of giving in they will replace the entire lot of them with self driving trains.
If you are enough of a nuisance the public will react to make the problem go away. It just may not react in the best interest of those causing the nuisance.
With the type of work I have been doing additional storage is not a problem however resizing is expensive. I create all my vectors at their required size in advance in almost all cases. I think I only have a few cases where I have to dynamically expand a vector since there was no way to know the size ahead of time.
I agree though that you could screw up pretty badly if you just create it at size 0 and then keep building it up to millions of elements. That would be horribly slow compared to the rest of the code.
The great thing is that vectors are guaranteed to be contiguous in memory and that means you can hand them to BLAS routines.
CUDA and opencl are great for certain types of problems. If you don't have a problem that works well on GPUs then they are pretty horrible.
For the kinds of HPC work I have been doing I get a nearly linear speedup up to 128 cpus with appropriate use of openmp.
OpenMP is a standard and supported by all modern compilers. It works extremely well and gets rid of all the boilerplate code you would normally need with threads and gives extremely good scaling on high performance systems.
I may hate seeing it written that way also but that is also the current most common way to write it and that is what HR systems and their computer screening systems except. You are writing a resume for an HR person usually and if you want it t be seen by someone more important it has to get past them first. That means doing stuff that HR people understand.
There are many fights to take on in this world and others that are just not worth the effort to fight since the costs are so high compared to the benefits and this is one of those fights.
There are many things you can use to improve your c++ code like std::vector. With that you store data contiguously in memory but you also don't have any manual memory management. No new, no delete, no malloc, no free.
For my high performance work I tend to use std::vector, BLAS and LAPACK and my programs usually have no manual memory management of any kind in them. Valgrind shows no memory leaks and the programs are very easy to read and work with.
If you want to do high performance c++ then learn OpenMP and MPI. If you want to do threading just use OpenMP since that makes it VASTLY easier to get threading correct. Add tasks with OpenMP along with their dependencies and you end up with a nice cross platform and very high performance code base if you have done your job correctly. If you need to scale to multiple nodes then use MPI between nodes.
Earth is a horrible place. It is infested by humans!
Have you seen how stupid humans are?
World wide people prefer the lies they tell themselves and the lies of their culture to actually looking at scientific evidence. Humans are also very poor at dealing with any threat that it nos immediate to them and so all kinds of things we deal with poorly.
Face it humans are really not very nice to be around and earth is not exactly a good place.
Of course I also agree completely that many that don't want to be traced are drawn to crypto currencies. It was an inevitable given the nature of the currency and even if the currency itself is neutral and there are many good uses for it also the negative uses will always overwhelm the neutral and good uses of crypt currency.
Journals should be highly interested in posting failures. We can all learn about an approach that did not work. Failure tends to be replicated a lot and it is wasting a lot of time and money.
Knowing that an approach does not work would save a lot of time. It would also help to know if a certain experimental setup did not work and that a different setup should be tried.
I think the problem with this is our society.
For some reason we tend to only think that positive results matter. Negative results are just as valuable. If you do a really well done 10 year study and find no connection then we learn a lot.
In many aspects of our society winning is all that matters and that has spilled over into our science funding.
If we started to truly value negative results we would progress much faster scientifically and we would also have much better science quality. The current system favors making very safe bets that are basically impossible to be wrong on and then have others make another tiny step from that one.
Even the USA would split apart without these kinds of transfer payments. Most of the states in the south receive more in federal money than they pay in taxes. Actually for most of the USA you can separate red vs blue states based on if they are net positive or net negative on tax paid vs federal dollars coming back. There are states upset about this but it does stabilize the country.
I would love to see a party that was fiscally conservative, basically stayed out of all these wars and peacekeeping missions, did more negotiations for foreign policy and basically left people choose their own social lives. I am sick and tired of all the anti-woman and anti-gay stuff I see coming out of politicians.
Gay people should be allowed to get married just because of equal protection under the law, end the discussion and move on.
Women should be allowed to have abortions because I don't have the right to impose my morality on other people. It doesn't matter if I think abortion is right or wrong it is not my place to make that decision and I wish we had politicians that would take that viewpoint. Just make it a non-issue and focus on economic issues.
I want a real focus on infrastructure, fixing roads, bridges, power etc since bad infrastructure costs our economy a pretty vast amount of money. I want a real focus on modern education for degrees our economy needs.
I also want actual immigration reform. If we really do need migrant workers to pick food then make a special visa for that. Saying it is illegal and then bringing them in anyways is not helpful.
Mostly I want skilled immigration reform. I want the H1B visa program ended since it ends up being more like indentured servitude and has far too many loopholes. Instead I want to see skilled labor able to easily get into the country on a regular visa like any other first world country. There are people I know with PhDs in VERY rare fields and they can't get into the USA. They would help our economy a lot and would not be taking a job from a qualified US citizen. Heck there are some fields where a skillset is so rare we have hundreds of job openings and tens of candidates on earth. Let them all in!
My view on guns is lets worry about more important issues and once we fix infrastructure, education, the economy etc lets see if guns still matter.
As for the stupid censorship that some politicians push and all the stuff they want to control to protect the children ... screw them.
Religious views do not give you the right to put millions of others at risk. Viruses mutate and that is inevitable. A vaccine is also not 100% effective in many people it just gives them a kind of limited immunity. We don't have treatments for many of the things we have vaccines for. If measles mutates it will kill millions of people and there is no guarantee how long it would take us to make a new vaccine.
In the end I don't care what your religion is I care if you are putting others at risk. Refusing to vaccinate is putting others at risk. You may not want to accept the biology on that or believe that your deity will never let that happen but most of the rest of the human race has accepted this and if you want to live with them you have to accept it also. If you don't want to live under our understanding of biology and vaccines then you can have religious freedom by yourself away from all other human contact.
Viruses don't care about your religion. Their mutation rate does not care what deity you believe in. It is too dangerous for society to allow humans to play incubators for the measles. It will eventually mutate and bypass the current vaccine. If it does many millions will die until we figure out a way to make a new vaccine.
The ONLY way to prevent this is to make sure there are not enough hosts for the virus to survive.
Your religious freedoms don't allow endangering everyone else around you. We also have people that have religious views on human sacrifice and we don't allow that either.
There are limits to religious freedom and this has to be one of those limits. A legitimate medical reason should be the ONLY way to get exempted from a vaccine unless you want to go live as a hermit and never encounter humans again.
It doesn't matter if you think this is a good idea or a bad idea since as a society we have no choice but to accept it and figure out how to best integrate it into our society. 3D printers exist now and they will continue to get better. They can print things like weapons just as they can engines, food or any number of other things. What can be printed is going to continue to advance fairly rapidly. In the end how to 3D print something is just a file and there is no way to control files.
The music industry has tried to stop music sharing and the movie industry has tried to stop moving sharing and we all now how effective that way.
We can choose to bury our heads in the sand and not see that our technology has advanced to the point where it has destabilized certain aspects of our society or we can try to figure out a new stability point.
As I said I think the pricing was massively off. Steam should have had the standard 30%, 10% for Bethesda for tool development, documentation etc and 60% for the mod author.
However the basic idea is a good one. Donation just means free. So many say this stuff should all just be donation but people don't donate EVER pretty much. No matter how good something is they don't donate.
It would have been nice to see what mod developers would have done if they where being paid enough to do full time mod development and gained several years of experience.
It just seems that ideas today must work on day 1 perfectly and must not upset a few people because otherwise they cry like babies on social media until whatever upset them is taken down. It is highly destructive behavior and it currently carries no consequences of any kind. You can help ruin someones life, cause large economic damage and there is zero responsibility and it is considered completely okay until it happens to you. Heck we have people that still consider SWATing a joke.
Overall the idea was good and sure the first implementation had problems but pretty much all new systems have that. However, it seems that most would rather jump on a hate bandwagon and destroy something instead of actually giving constructive criticism to fix it.
Bethesda put money into making tools for modders. If this has worked then Bethesda would have had justifiable resources to put back into better modding tools, documentation, examples etc.
Modders don't do all the work by themselves. They build on top of many others work.
I don't know what a fair contribution would be for each party but the idea of being able to charge for mods is a good one. The donation system clearly does not work and so many that are in favor of it NEVER donate. It is just seen as free.
Maybe in a few years we would have ended up with modders as a full time job for some of our favorite games and they would keep putting out real content that we could all enjoy. However, humans people never waited to see for anything. It was different and therefore bad and that means it has to go.
People say they want new ideas but they really don't and this whole social media thing is getting way out of hand. We have these hate bandwagons that state and it is too easy for everyone to jump on board without thinking. The ideas just spread all over the internet as all people have to do is copy and image and say they are part of the hate.
It is going to take a long while before we figure out a way to deal with this but these hate bandwagons are just getting so tiring.