I think your argument would work better if we're talking about life-saving drugs. Patenting a treatment that cures AIDS and not using it would definitely be morally wrong. But in this case, the driver would've probably found another way to distract themselves if they couldn't use video chat.
Besides, Apple can argue they have plans to incorporate this technology, but just haven't gotten around to it. Would they be at fault for not implementing it quickly? How quickly would they need to do it to be good enough in the eyes of the law?
Not to mention the current patent landscape makes it very hard to run a large business without a huge patent portfolio (Google tried this for a while before giving up and buying a bunch of Motorola patents), so companies have to patent every idea they have. It would be impossible for them to implement everything.
Requiring people to share everything they create is not workable in any world I want to live in.
I think it is reasonable to require them to share it with the government if they want to copyright it. Otherwise, they can either not share it with anyone, share it only with people they trust, or release it into the public domain.
The original intent of copyright is to promote the availability of creative works by allowing the creators to sell copies of the work for profit for a limited amount of time. The practically eternal copyright term notwithstanding, the public is expected, for the cost of enforcing copyright, be given the work once the term expires, to consume directly or to produce derivative works from. However, if copyright holders can withdraw the work before the term expires, for example, by using encryption, region lock and other technical means to remove the work from circulation, then it will never end up in public domain. This breaks the contract between creators and the public and promotes the existence of a rent-seeking class that doesn't produce new content, but profits from it nonetheless.
So by requiring them to share it with the government, we can guarantee that copyrighted works will eventually land in the public domain, and not simply disappear forever.
I think you've been drinking too much Ayn Rand Coolaid.
As people are freed from jobs that are highly repetitive, there are always more complex, less repetitive jobs out there because the consumer is always looking for the next big thing to improve their lives/increase their free time/reduce their work load.
And everyone has both the talent and the initial capital to create that next big thing?
Entire multi billion dollar industries have been created after the introduction of the ATM and will continue to be created.
Why does it matter if a dozen people made all of those billions?
If we get to a point where there are 10x more job seekers than jobs, then we can revisit the issue, but right now there are about 5.5 million job openings in the US...
And there are 7.4 million unemployed people, and that's not counting people who want full-time employment but only found part-time work.
The Obama economy was of his own making after the first 2 years due to the ACA and excessive regulation, and, like the Carter economy, it will be unleashed with the next administration.
people earning more than the minimum will see their income fall.
Why would that be the case? Enlighten me. Do you really think a minimum wage job is replacing a high skilled and high payed regular job?
2 reasons: First, not every immigrant is unskilled. Some of them will be competing for high-end jobs. Second, the labor market is not fully differentiated. A man working for minimum wage is not that much less capable from a man working for 12 Euros / hour. If there's a huge influx, businesses will be able to find someone willing do the 12 Euros / hour job for minimum wage. When all those people who used to earn 12 Euros / hour goes to look for work, businesses will happily accept the best of them for what should have been a 15 Euro / hour job, and pay them 12 Euros / hour instead. So on and so forth...
* I couldn't find exact data, but from what I did find, the minimum wage covers a bit more than 25% of the people, and significantly less than 50%.
By law perhaps. The rest is covered by trade unions and their agreements with companies/the industry.
In the long run, unions still have to respect market forces. At some point, they will have to negotiate wages with the company. They would have less leverage if the company can find a ton of non-unionized workers to replace them. Even if the unions somehow gets their way all the time, eventually someone will start a non-unionized company with all of the extra labor, and be more competitive than the unionized company, driving it out of business.
I don't live in Germany, but from what I can find online, they only have to wait 3 months until they get a limited work permit, and 15 months before a regular permit.
Germany has in most areas minimum wage laws.
The minimum wage is 1473 Euros a month, or 9.2 an hour. This does not cover a majority of the people*, and it's not so high that you'd live very comfortably earning just that.
So in a little over a year, you'll get a ton of competition for minimum wage jobs, and people earning more than the minimum will see their income fall. Unless you already earn minimum wage and you never want to change jobs, having so much competition is not going to be good for you economically.
* I couldn't find exact data, but from what I did find, the minimum wage covers a bit more than 25% of the people, and significantly less than 50%.
OTOH having foreign governments spreading propaganda and misinformation in your country is enough of a national security question that you can't just throw up your hands and do nothing.
How is it a national security issue? I hope you're not talking about the DNC and Clinton Foundation emails, because those are not propaganda and misinformation. Nobody even denied their authenticity.
And someone else could've also done the "right thing" without calling her opponents racists and neo-Nazis, or trying to silence them.
The choices are not just "kill the refugees" and "open border with Syria". With a bit of thought and rational policy making, she can save the refugees without endangering Germany or the EU. Her policy has every country in the EU struggling to support the influx, to the detriment of their own citizens. Brexit is the first, but if this keeps going, more will leave.
And you know what the worst part is? I don't think she's doing this just out of the goodness of her heart. She's doing it to provide cheap labor to her party's backers.
The point is that the majority of people still believe MSM is unbiased, and now they're going to believe everything not found in MSM is fake news. But the reality is that they're squarely in the pockets of Democrats, and they're just as ready to parrot any unsubstantiated piece of inflammatory turd as those fake news sites. Oh sure, they'll issue a correction later, after a day or two, when 98% of people had already saw and shared the wrong version. How many people do you think are sharing the correction?
Right now the entire MSM is harping about Russians hacking the election, one and half months after the election itself, with no evidence they did the hacking. But guess what? Even if the Russians hacked the DNC, even if they had dirt on the GOP and didn't release them, nobody can defend Clinton for being a corrupt, lying scumbag. Face it, Clinton lost the election. It sucks, but it's not a traumatic event. There's no need to go through the 5 stages of grief. Especially when you're the MSM and you're supposed to be unbiased. This is absolutely disgusting even to a liberal like me.
This "fake news" fine is going to be used for one thing and one thing only: censorship. Next time you hear about people being raped and killed in Germany, it'll be "disenfranchised youths" rather than Muslim terrorists posing as refugees. Oh, did they have Syrian passports? Got stamps from Turkey and Greece? No no no, those are fake news sites lying to you. The truth is, we need more cheap labor *ahem* refugees to work in our factories- I mean stop those neo-Nazis from destroying the country.
And if you think this is OK because it serves a liberal agenda, think again. Sooner or later, the party you don't like is going to be in charge and they'll turn the exact same weapon on you.
Eventually there will be no point printing out the skull. Just put on some VR goggles and manipulate a virtual skull. I mean, they need to have a 3D mesh of the skull to print it anyways.
I usually spend my morning organizing my thoughts, reading email and noting down what I need to do for the day. It makes it easier to prioritize my work and punt on things that aren't important. Once I see the list of what I need to do for the day, I feel like I'm back in control.
If the truth affects the election, then maybe the candidates should've been more candid in the first place. And by the way, this is what the media is supposed to be doing. Don't blame the Russians for your own ineptitude and corruption.
Basically anything non-conforming will be labeled "Fake News". The scary thing is, it's already happening, and everyone who voted for Clinton is happy to believe it, which is half the country.
Universal Basic Income will come sooner or later, peacefully or by revolution. In the US at least, welfare already costs enough that UBI would not that much more expensive. Plus, with UBI, people can still look for work without losing that income, which will be a boon to businesses that want cheap labor.
You know your own situation far better than a random stranger like me. Obviously, if you only make $36,000, it makes no sense to start living in East Palo Alto. It was a different story back in 2011, when the same home was sold for $250,000 and the interest was closer to 3%. If you're going to be saving for decades, then there's a chance the housing market will crash before you're done.
And with almost all of that as interest initially, it makes much more financial sense to keep renting the land my trailer is on for a sixth of that until I can put enough down that the interest portion of the subsequent mortgage is less than my rent.
Good point. The interest is no different from the rent you're paying now, it's money that goes to somebody else that you won't ever see again. But that interest does go down over time, whereas the price for renting the land is probably going to rise, even assuming there's no immigration, inflation by itself is sufficient to drive up the price.
Compare yourself to someone who'll be arriving in your area 10 years in the future, what advantage do you have over them? The only thing I can think of is that you can lock in the price of your housing at the current amount. Otherwise they'll be able to push you out of the area with their higher incomes.
... you end up in your early 70s just finishing paying off a house and now finally, in your 70s, able to put money toward something else like, say, the retirement you're already half a decade late to.
At that point, your house is your retirement savings. You can rent out the house and get a smaller apartment yourself, the difference being your retirement income, or alternatively, sell the house and move somewhere with 1/4 the cost.
And if I was happy living with strangers, I'd have continued to rent a bedroom in someone else's house for myself,... putting up with a bunch of other fuck heads I couldn't get rid of out of financial necessity.
There's a big difference though. If you own the house, you can kick out the shitty ones and replace them with better ones. And since they know you can kick them out, they'll try to behave when you're around.
Buying a house is cheaper than you think. I don't know your exact situation, but let's just say you're in East Palo Alto.
A 3 bed, 2 bath house in East Palo Alto is $3000 / month minimum to rent, with higher ones at $4000 / month. But it's only $650,000-$800,000 to buy. If you pay 20% down and the interest is 4%, the mortgage payment is only $2500-$3000 / month. Now if you're willing to squeeze a bit and rent out one room for $800 / month let's say, your own cost would only be $1700-2200, cheaper than renting even a 2 bedroom apartment.
Of course, this only makes sense if you really love the place and wants to live there for a long time, but that sounds like the case to me.
If they were renting, then they purchased a temporary right to live there. Even if the rent didn't go up, the owners have a right to kick them out and move in themselves. The only people who can claim a permanent right to live there are the Native Americans (who truly were there first).
What a terrible article. Sharing rooms does not make one homeless and East Palo Alto is not Palo Alto, it's two different cities with different demographics and different rules. A big chunk of East Palo Alto is under rent control, so those people will be paying rent that's far below market price for years to come. I wonder how many of them are sharing rooms because it's a good source of income and not because they can't afford it.
Like I said, terrorism works. And it works because people are not rational all the time. You think they can accept a tiny risk to themselves to save tens of thousands, but that's not how people work. They fundamentally see refugees as "not their people", and they're not willing to sacrifice any of "their people" to save them.
Take a look at the Paris attacks in late 2015. The media reports it was carried out by French and Belgian citizens, but if you look a bit deeper, you'll see they were accompanied by 2 "refugees", and were radicalized by people posing as refugees. All except one had traveled to a middle-eastern country prior to the attack, and some were known terrorists. But because of the refugee crisis, the police authorities didn't know when they returned across the border and never got a chance to arrest them. The problem had only gotten worse since then. The Belgian bombing was the same story, the Nice attack was a Tunisian radicalized by the internet and a Algerian neighbor, and the latest Berlin attack was another Tunisian who posing as a refugee.
Border control is not a binary choice. The more effort you put in, the fewer problems you will run into. Simply ignoring the problem is going to distance everyone from your cause. If they can't get the government to even try to address the problem, they will eventually put the nationalists in charge, the way Brexit did for the UK. I think you and I can both agree, that's not a good outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your argument would work better if we're talking about life-saving drugs. Patenting a treatment that cures AIDS and not using it would definitely be morally wrong. But in this case, the driver would've probably found another way to distract themselves if they couldn't use video chat.
Besides, Apple can argue they have plans to incorporate this technology, but just haven't gotten around to it. Would they be at fault for not implementing it quickly? How quickly would they need to do it to be good enough in the eyes of the law?
Not to mention the current patent landscape makes it very hard to run a large business without a huge patent portfolio (Google tried this for a while before giving up and buying a bunch of Motorola patents), so companies have to patent every idea they have. It would be impossible for them to implement everything.
Requiring people to share everything they create is not workable in any world I want to live in.
I think it is reasonable to require them to share it with the government if they want to copyright it. Otherwise, they can either not share it with anyone, share it only with people they trust, or release it into the public domain.
The original intent of copyright is to promote the availability of creative works by allowing the creators to sell copies of the work for profit for a limited amount of time. The practically eternal copyright term notwithstanding, the public is expected, for the cost of enforcing copyright, be given the work once the term expires, to consume directly or to produce derivative works from. However, if copyright holders can withdraw the work before the term expires, for example, by using encryption, region lock and other technical means to remove the work from circulation, then it will never end up in public domain. This breaks the contract between creators and the public and promotes the existence of a rent-seeking class that doesn't produce new content, but profits from it nonetheless.
So by requiring them to share it with the government, we can guarantee that copyrighted works will eventually land in the public domain, and not simply disappear forever.
As people are freed from jobs that are highly repetitive, there are always more complex, less repetitive jobs out there because the consumer is always looking for the next big thing to improve their lives/increase their free time/reduce their work load.
And everyone has both the talent and the initial capital to create that next big thing?
Entire multi billion dollar industries have been created after the introduction of the ATM and will continue to be created.
Why does it matter if a dozen people made all of those billions?
If we get to a point where there are 10x more job seekers than jobs, then we can revisit the issue, but right now there are about 5.5 million job openings in the US...
And there are 7.4 million unemployed people, and that's not counting people who want full-time employment but only found part-time work.
The Obama economy was of his own making after the first 2 years due to the ACA and excessive regulation, and, like the Carter economy, it will be unleashed with the next administration.
Yeah and Bush did a real great job...
The fanciest UIs — be they by open source or commercial projects — would just stupidly hang or otherwise behave erratically every once in a while.
Hardware-makers may be doing their jobs, but the software-engineers aren't doing theirs... Not well enough, anyway.
You can't prove that those issues aren't because the processor decided 1 + 1 = 3 for one particular instruction.
people earning more than the minimum will see their income fall. Why would that be the case? Enlighten me. Do you really think a minimum wage job is replacing a high skilled and high payed regular job?
2 reasons: First, not every immigrant is unskilled. Some of them will be competing for high-end jobs. Second, the labor market is not fully differentiated. A man working for minimum wage is not that much less capable from a man working for 12 Euros / hour. If there's a huge influx, businesses will be able to find someone willing do the 12 Euros / hour job for minimum wage. When all those people who used to earn 12 Euros / hour goes to look for work, businesses will happily accept the best of them for what should have been a 15 Euro / hour job, and pay them 12 Euros / hour instead. So on and so forth...
* I couldn't find exact data, but from what I did find, the minimum wage covers a bit more than 25% of the people, and significantly less than 50%. By law perhaps. The rest is covered by trade unions and their agreements with companies/the industry.
In the long run, unions still have to respect market forces. At some point, they will have to negotiate wages with the company. They would have less leverage if the company can find a ton of non-unionized workers to replace them. Even if the unions somehow gets their way all the time, eventually someone will start a non-unionized company with all of the extra labor, and be more competitive than the unionized company, driving it out of business.
To be clear, he beat out people looking up a porn site on Wikipedia.
I mean, Wikipedia is not exactly Google, you don't go there just to get to the site, and its history is not all that interesting either.
The immigrants have no work permit.
I don't live in Germany, but from what I can find online, they only have to wait 3 months until they get a limited work permit, and 15 months before a regular permit.
Germany has in most areas minimum wage laws.
The minimum wage is 1473 Euros a month, or 9.2 an hour. This does not cover a majority of the people*, and it's not so high that you'd live very comfortably earning just that.
So in a little over a year, you'll get a ton of competition for minimum wage jobs, and people earning more than the minimum will see their income fall. Unless you already earn minimum wage and you never want to change jobs, having so much competition is not going to be good for you economically.
* I couldn't find exact data, but from what I did find, the minimum wage covers a bit more than 25% of the people, and significantly less than 50%.
Oh please... The most popular language, English, uses invisible white spaces as syntax.
ReadafewsentenceswithoutitandI'llbetyoureyeswillstartbleeding.
OTOH having foreign governments spreading propaganda and misinformation in your country is enough of a national security question that you can't just throw up your hands and do nothing.
How is it a national security issue? I hope you're not talking about the DNC and Clinton Foundation emails, because those are not propaganda and misinformation. Nobody even denied their authenticity.
And someone else could've also done the "right thing" without calling her opponents racists and neo-Nazis, or trying to silence them.
The choices are not just "kill the refugees" and "open border with Syria". With a bit of thought and rational policy making, she can save the refugees without endangering Germany or the EU. Her policy has every country in the EU struggling to support the influx, to the detriment of their own citizens. Brexit is the first, but if this keeps going, more will leave.
And you know what the worst part is? I don't think she's doing this just out of the goodness of her heart. She's doing it to provide cheap labor to her party's backers.
The point is that the majority of people still believe MSM is unbiased, and now they're going to believe everything not found in MSM is fake news. But the reality is that they're squarely in the pockets of Democrats, and they're just as ready to parrot any unsubstantiated piece of inflammatory turd as those fake news sites. Oh sure, they'll issue a correction later, after a day or two, when 98% of people had already saw and shared the wrong version. How many people do you think are sharing the correction?
Right now the entire MSM is harping about Russians hacking the election, one and half months after the election itself, with no evidence they did the hacking. But guess what? Even if the Russians hacked the DNC, even if they had dirt on the GOP and didn't release them, nobody can defend Clinton for being a corrupt, lying scumbag. Face it, Clinton lost the election. It sucks, but it's not a traumatic event. There's no need to go through the 5 stages of grief. Especially when you're the MSM and you're supposed to be unbiased. This is absolutely disgusting even to a liberal like me.
This "fake news" fine is going to be used for one thing and one thing only: censorship. Next time you hear about people being raped and killed in Germany, it'll be "disenfranchised youths" rather than Muslim terrorists posing as refugees. Oh, did they have Syrian passports? Got stamps from Turkey and Greece? No no no, those are fake news sites lying to you. The truth is, we need more cheap labor *ahem* refugees to work in our factories- I mean stop those neo-Nazis from destroying the country.
And if you think this is OK because it serves a liberal agenda, think again. Sooner or later, the party you don't like is going to be in charge and they'll turn the exact same weapon on you.
Eventually there will be no point printing out the skull. Just put on some VR goggles and manipulate a virtual skull. I mean, they need to have a 3D mesh of the skull to print it anyways.
You joke, but China's pretty lax on the ethics of stem cell research too. I wouldn't be surprised if they were the first to figure this out.
I usually spend my morning organizing my thoughts, reading email and noting down what I need to do for the day. It makes it easier to prioritize my work and punt on things that aren't important. Once I see the list of what I need to do for the day, I feel like I'm back in control.
If the truth affects the election, then maybe the candidates should've been more candid in the first place. And by the way, this is what the media is supposed to be doing. Don't blame the Russians for your own ineptitude and corruption.
Basically anything non-conforming will be labeled "Fake News". The scary thing is, it's already happening, and everyone who voted for Clinton is happy to believe it, which is half the country.
Universal Basic Income will come sooner or later, peacefully or by revolution. In the US at least, welfare already costs enough that UBI would not that much more expensive. Plus, with UBI, people can still look for work without losing that income, which will be a boon to businesses that want cheap labor.
Rio Tinto is Australian, so I guess it's more like foreign trucks stealing foreign jobs.
And with almost all of that as interest initially, it makes much more financial sense to keep renting the land my trailer is on for a sixth of that until I can put enough down that the interest portion of the subsequent mortgage is less than my rent.
Good point. The interest is no different from the rent you're paying now, it's money that goes to somebody else that you won't ever see again. But that interest does go down over time, whereas the price for renting the land is probably going to rise, even assuming there's no immigration, inflation by itself is sufficient to drive up the price.
Compare yourself to someone who'll be arriving in your area 10 years in the future, what advantage do you have over them? The only thing I can think of is that you can lock in the price of your housing at the current amount. Otherwise they'll be able to push you out of the area with their higher incomes.
... you end up in your early 70s just finishing paying off a house and now finally, in your 70s, able to put money toward something else like, say, the retirement you're already half a decade late to.
At that point, your house is your retirement savings. You can rent out the house and get a smaller apartment yourself, the difference being your retirement income, or alternatively, sell the house and move somewhere with 1/4 the cost.
And if I was happy living with strangers, I'd have continued to rent a bedroom in someone else's house for myself, ... putting up with a bunch of other fuck heads I couldn't get rid of out of financial necessity.
There's a big difference though. If you own the house, you can kick out the shitty ones and replace them with better ones. And since they know you can kick them out, they'll try to behave when you're around.
Buying a house is cheaper than you think. I don't know your exact situation, but let's just say you're in East Palo Alto.
A 3 bed, 2 bath house in East Palo Alto is $3000 / month minimum to rent, with higher ones at $4000 / month. But it's only $650,000-$800,000 to buy. If you pay 20% down and the interest is 4%, the mortgage payment is only $2500-$3000 / month. Now if you're willing to squeeze a bit and rent out one room for $800 / month let's say, your own cost would only be $1700-2200, cheaper than renting even a 2 bedroom apartment.
Of course, this only makes sense if you really love the place and wants to live there for a long time, but that sounds like the case to me.
If they were renting, then they purchased a temporary right to live there. Even if the rent didn't go up, the owners have a right to kick them out and move in themselves. The only people who can claim a permanent right to live there are the Native Americans (who truly were there first).
Renting from whom? People who were there before them? That would make them not the first people there.
What a terrible article. Sharing rooms does not make one homeless and East Palo Alto is not Palo Alto, it's two different cities with different demographics and different rules. A big chunk of East Palo Alto is under rent control, so those people will be paying rent that's far below market price for years to come. I wonder how many of them are sharing rooms because it's a good source of income and not because they can't afford it.
No they weren't. If they were there first, they would've owned the houses they live in, and the rising property price would be a good thing.
Like I said, terrorism works. And it works because people are not rational all the time. You think they can accept a tiny risk to themselves to save tens of thousands, but that's not how people work. They fundamentally see refugees as "not their people", and they're not willing to sacrifice any of "their people" to save them.
Take a look at the Paris attacks in late 2015. The media reports it was carried out by French and Belgian citizens, but if you look a bit deeper, you'll see they were accompanied by 2 "refugees", and were radicalized by people posing as refugees. All except one had traveled to a middle-eastern country prior to the attack, and some were known terrorists. But because of the refugee crisis, the police authorities didn't know when they returned across the border and never got a chance to arrest them. The problem had only gotten worse since then. The Belgian bombing was the same story, the Nice attack was a Tunisian radicalized by the internet and a Algerian neighbor, and the latest Berlin attack was another Tunisian who posing as a refugee.
Border control is not a binary choice. The more effort you put in, the fewer problems you will run into. Simply ignoring the problem is going to distance everyone from your cause. If they can't get the government to even try to address the problem, they will eventually put the nationalists in charge, the way Brexit did for the UK. I think you and I can both agree, that's not a good outcome.