Unfortunately, it's our only option currently. No matter how many of us see a better way.
But it's actually a worse way. Raising minimum wages damages the economic prospects of lower-income citizens in the present economic and technological context. It's not enough to have good intentions, you also have to do things that help rather than hurt.
Most people are not addicted to credit cards. Most people are just trying to make the bills from month to month.
Living paycheck to paycheck has little to do with income and a lot to do with spending. I know people making $200K per year and living paycheck to paycheck. I know people making $30K per year who have healthy savings.
You don't, you make sure they pay into the tax structure so their is a safety net for employees.
Good luck with that. Raising the minimum wage is relatively easy, politically. A significant expansion of the welfare state, not so much.
Let me reify my original statement a bit: High minimum wages without also establishing a comprehensive safety net is a bad idea. And, actually, if you establish a comprehensive safety net then minimum wages become unnecessary and can be abolished entirely. Employers will just be unable to find anyone to work for low wages because relying on the safety net will be a better choice. Or, if the safety net is income-indexed, or unrelated to income (basic income), then people might be willing to accept low wages because they're incremental on top of an already-livable safety net.
The short answer is "Taxes". The long answer is "Regulations to ensure worker safety, a reasonable minimum wage, and a robust safety net that includes healthcare. This way nobody is shut out of the economy and we can all prosper."
But how do you force employers to continue employing people when it's cheaper to use automation?
No, there are three choices:
1> Robust employment with automation
Jobs that pay well enough people can afford to buy things. Automation that benefits owners, employees and consumers.
I'm not a pro photo guy, but I have used darktable and found it useful. Whether or not it is useful to you is obviously your call. I invested time into learning open source equivalents years ago knowing that software and licenses change to much for the average consumer to find proprietary software financially worthwhile.
Another commercial option is Aftershot Pro. I started using it primarily because it's cross-platform (including Linux), before Darktable was available, and I've never regretted the money I spent on it.
That depends on whose pain you are worried about. Business owners or the poor who's wages have been depressed (stolen) for decades.
Which is worse, low wages or no job? Unless you think you're going to somehow force businesses to employ people, or somehow stop automation from being built, that's the choice.
Everyone stopped making giant nukes because they're pointless. It's better in pretty much every way to scatter lots of little ones than detonate one big one.
But scattering lots of little ones pretty much has to be done from the air, which exposes them to counterfire. Attacking from under water is very stealthy, but you can only hit the coastline. If you want to do damage further inland, you either need to get the bomb(s) further inland... or use a much bigger bomb.
You seem to think this situation was avoidable. It was not. The higher minimum wage only made it happen faster.
Absolutely... and speed of change is exactly what we don't want. It takes time for people to adapt. Automation is going to displace a lot of people, so it's important that the changeover happen as slowly as possible, to minimize the pain. High minimum wages are a bad idea.
The only thing insane about it is that people still defend capitalism as if it worked. In our current system, there is nothing more sensible than the high rents and property values of SF.
It's not capitalism that has produced the insane housing prices in SF, it's government regulation. If the city were to open the floodgates on development, housing prices would come down. Even though San Francisco has a hard limit on available ground, there's still lots of room for building up. Big sections of row houses would be replaced with high-rise apartment buildings. Double or triple the housing available and demand would no longer so far outstrip supply and prices would fall.
And it's not just SF regulation that's causing the problem. All of the "little communities" in the valley refuse to allow any high density housing to be built. A lot of those tech employees in SF would choose to live close to work if prices there were much lower. But city councils are controlled by long-time residents who really enjoy the fact that the home they bought for a song in the 1970s is now worth millions. The vast majority of their net worth is tied up in the value of their 1400 ft^2 house on a postage stamp lot, and they're as aware as anyone that allowing capitalism to operate normally would replace many of their neighborhoods of quaint little single-level, single-family homes with high-density housing in a hurry... and cause prices of the rest to tumble rapidly. Oh, they'd still be worth 2-3x what the same house should cost, but not the 10-15x it is now.
I could dig in and explain in more detail why you're wrong, but I'm not interested in educating assholes. I ignored your first few jibes, but I'm done now. You can feel free to think what you like about me -- you will anyway. And Google has nothing to do with my posts on/., except to officially discourage me from making them (but not enough to actually tell me that I must stop).
You're trolling but this is fun, and I'm waiting for a build to finish, so I'll bite.
My flyover state has fresh air,.., lots of great skiing, hiking,
Just stop right there you heathen. No flyover state has great skiing, or even good skiing. Everyone knows that Colorado and Utah have the best skiing in the US. California has pretty decent skiing. Washington also has okay skiing. Name one other state besides Colorado or Utah that has great skiing and I'll call you a liar.
It's not "wicked". It's "unrelated to common good". Unrelated as unit vectors in a million-dimiension space.
There is "common good" and there is a "private good" or "group good". The fundamental hypothesis of libertarians and brain-dead Aynrandianistas is that somehow magically a combination of "group goods" leads to "common good".
It's an oversimplification to say that common goods and private/group goods are orthogonal. In fact, the group good of shareholders in a corporation is most often best served by the corporation making and selling something that lots of people want at a price that is both acceptable to people and profitable. The fact that lots of people are willing to exchange their hard-earned cash for the good is strong evident that it is a common good.
Of course, it's also an error to say that common goods and private/group goods are identical. The tragedy of the commons is the best counterexample, but there are other ways in which the goods diverge. Still, they are more often aligned than not, and the primary regulatory goal of government should be to internalize the externalities that represent the divergence.
Corporations are required by law to make money. Share holders can exact retribution if they don't..
Impressive. Not many people can pack so much factual error into so few words.
First error is that corporations are required by law to make money. They are not. They are required to fulfill the aims laid out in their corporate charter, IPO statements and other promises to shareholders. There are, in fact, several corporations in existence (mostly "activist" investment funds) whose explicit goals are social or environmental in nature. Their share holders could exact retribution for making money the wrong way, or, if their goals turn out to be incompatible with making money, for making it at all. Google is an interesting case here, because its IPO documents say quite a bit about social responsibility as part of the justification for the distinction between the common and preferred stock issuance that allowed Google's founders to retain voting control (if Page, Brin and Schmidt vote together, they outvote all the rest of the shareholders put together).
Second error is that shareholders exact retribution if corporations fail to pursue their stated goals. In theory you're actually correct here. In practice, can you find a single example of share holders doing this that wasn't due to simple malfeasance?
Third is the implicit assumption that focusing on making money always leads to negative decisions. In fact, more often than not it's exactly the opposite because the very best way to make lots of money is to make and sell something people want at a price they want to pay for it. In other words, provide a public good. Where focus on profits often does lead to evil decisions is when companies' products are not doing well in the marketplace, so execs become desperate to squeeze a little more wherever they can. Companies that are awash in money and growing rapidly rarely have any need to do this.
Shouldn't be a problem as long as doctors present the results properly. They should report that the test indicates a possibility of cancer, and that the next steps are to do more testing, not make out your will. I don't know what the incidence of cancer is in the general population, but if it's significantly lower than 1% and the false positive probability is uncorrelated with other risk factors, then it's most likely that the test is wrong... but the probability that it's correct is high enough to warrant more focused testing.
My biggest concern is the cost. $500 isn't cheap enough to make it a routine, every-year test, unless there are significant risk factors in personal and family history. Get it down to $50, though, and it would be worth doing for every patient over 40, every year. And although it would turn up a lot of false positives, it would also catch a lot of cancers very, very early, making survival rates higher and costs lower.
Fortunately, there are still countries where not having to pay an additional $50 for a set of proprietary headphones is important, and phones focused on developing markets can be (relatively) easily used and imported to the US..
Unless they drop CDs entirely, they're just wasting their efforts. Attempting to plug the analog hole, while shipping easily ripped digital media? Makes no sense.
Moreover, until we get digital audio inputs wired into our brains the analog hole is forever un-pluggable.
If a phone is thinner than 3.5mm, it's difficult to hold anyway.
According to hardware designers I've talked to, the thickness of the 3.5mm plug isn't the issue. The problem is its volume and placement. It consumes 240 mm^3 on an outer edge, on one end of the phone, which is incredibly valuable real estate in a modern phone, because that's pretty much where the antennas have to be -- and phones have a lot of antennas, because they have a lot of radios (e.g. LTE requires 8 radios, and most phones support 5+ bands, plus Wifi, bluetooth, GPSr and NFC). It's also where speakers have to be, and they also require some depth, so significant volume. And where the charging/data port has to be.
So from their perspective, being able to shift audio output functions to the data port and wireless frees up important volume and makes it easier to fit ever more stuff into an ever-smaller space (yes, phone thickness does come into play here).
What's the obsession with making phones paper-thin at the expense of durability and utility anyway?
Dunno. But it's undeniably what consumers want. Thick phones don't sell. Maybe it's not what you want, but the market focuses on volume.
Good economy, good jobs, art, restaurants, beach, good transit system, best tacos in the world, fog, not one but two of the best bridges in the country, bison, Hunky Jesus, BYOBW, a little public nudity now and again, music scene, comedy scene, donut scene... I could go on.
All better things that what you hay-bailn', pickup drivin' yahoos in the flyover states consider culture.
You're trolling but this is fun, and I'm waiting for a build to finish, so I'll bite.
My flyover state has fresh air, incredible scenery, lots of great skiing, hiking, rock climbing, fishing, hunting... and open space, not crammed cheek by jowl full of people. Plus low cost of living and a sense of community that is all but impossible to find in SF. So, different strokes, I guess. I can't figure out why anyone would want to live in a big city. It's fun to visit now and again, especially for the art (great restaurants I can get closer to home).
Oh, and a rusty old pickup has a much better route schedule than the best public transit system ever created. It goes exactly where you want to go, exactly when you want to go, and can carry a lot of stuff. Not only does it not require rails, in a pinch it doesn't even need a road.
The
site developer "chose give your password to his site to an tracking
company" , which was given to the site developer by the browser. The
user did not give the password to the site developer via the browser.
By "site developer" I mean the author of the site the user visited. So, yes, the user did give the password to the site developer; the user has to do that to log in.
It is extremely dishonest of you to mention " tracking company ".
Huh? I'm beginning to think you don't understand the issue that you cited.
Let me be very clear, with an example. Let's use slashdot. Suppose that slashdot made an agreement with one of the tracking services, say AdThink, that has been found to be exploiting this "vulnerability". AdThink gives some value to slashdot, and slashdot includes AdThink's content and supporting JavaScript in the content delivered on the slashdot home page.
Now, you, the user, have your browser remember your slashdot login. The browser watches for username/password forms from the slashdot.org domain, and when it sees some, it fills them in with your values. It does not click "Submit" for you, you have to do that yourself. AdThink wants your slashdot login information, so in the content that it gives to the slashdot devs to inject in to the home page, it includes a hidden form which has a username and password field. Note that developers who build the slashdot site not only allowed this, they actively worked to serve up AdThink's malicious code. AdThink also includes a bit of Javascript that detects when data is entered on the hidden form and submits it. Because all of the Javascript and hidden content was served from slashdot.org, the same-domain policy doesn't prevent any of this, even though the target of the form is an AdThink server, not a slashdot.org server.
The key point here is that it's slashdot who provided all of the malicious HTML and JS to your browser. Your browser has no reason to distrust this content any more than the password entry form that you type stuff into yourself.
Make sense?
With that understanding, it should also be clear that AdThink doesn't even need password auto-filling to do this. They could also inject some Javascript that hooks in the the events that are generated when you manually type in your username and password, and it could generate a call back to the AdThink server providing your data then, too.
I hope Google does do some pull requests, so this goes into Debian, and perhaps filters to Ubuntu. Done right, their changes can have a major positive effect on the entire Linux ecosystem.
They'd have to be crazy not to upstream their changes. Otherwise they'd end up with an endlessly growing pile of patches to integrate and test, every time an upstream package changes. That would quickly become unmanageable.
Anthropogenic magnetic pole shifting is a hoax! The poles have always been where they are, and the Fake Liberal Media just wants you to believe that they're moving to advance their left-wing agenda!
Darn right! And if you don't believe it, the proof is that the so-called movement is ALWAYS TO THE LEFT!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, it's our only option currently. No matter how many of us see a better way.
But it's actually a worse way. Raising minimum wages damages the economic prospects of lower-income citizens in the present economic and technological context. It's not enough to have good intentions, you also have to do things that help rather than hurt.
Most people are not addicted to credit cards. Most people are just trying to make the bills from month to month.
Living paycheck to paycheck has little to do with income and a lot to do with spending. I know people making $200K per year and living paycheck to paycheck. I know people making $30K per year who have healthy savings.
You don't, you make sure they pay into the tax structure so their is a safety net for employees.
Good luck with that. Raising the minimum wage is relatively easy, politically. A significant expansion of the welfare state, not so much.
Let me reify my original statement a bit: High minimum wages without also establishing a comprehensive safety net is a bad idea. And, actually, if you establish a comprehensive safety net then minimum wages become unnecessary and can be abolished entirely. Employers will just be unable to find anyone to work for low wages because relying on the safety net will be a better choice. Or, if the safety net is income-indexed, or unrelated to income (basic income), then people might be willing to accept low wages because they're incremental on top of an already-livable safety net.
Bottom line: High minimum wages are a bad idea.
The short answer is "Taxes". The long answer is "Regulations to ensure worker safety, a reasonable minimum wage, and a robust safety net that includes healthcare. This way nobody is shut out of the economy and we can all prosper."
But how do you force employers to continue employing people when it's cheaper to use automation?
No, there are three choices: 1> Robust employment with automation Jobs that pay well enough people can afford to buy things. Automation that benefits owners, employees and consumers.
How do you make this happen?
I'm not a pro photo guy, but I have used darktable and found it useful. Whether or not it is useful to you is obviously your call. I invested time into learning open source equivalents years ago knowing that software and licenses change to much for the average consumer to find proprietary software financially worthwhile.
Another commercial option is Aftershot Pro. I started using it primarily because it's cross-platform (including Linux), before Darktable was available, and I've never regretted the money I spent on it.
hundreds of orders of magnitude
I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.
That depends on whose pain you are worried about. Business owners or the poor who's wages have been depressed (stolen) for decades.
Which is worse, low wages or no job? Unless you think you're going to somehow force businesses to employ people, or somehow stop automation from being built, that's the choice.
Everyone stopped making giant nukes because they're pointless. It's better in pretty much every way to scatter lots of little ones than detonate one big one.
But scattering lots of little ones pretty much has to be done from the air, which exposes them to counterfire. Attacking from under water is very stealthy, but you can only hit the coastline. If you want to do damage further inland, you either need to get the bomb(s) further inland... or use a much bigger bomb.
You seem to think this situation was avoidable. It was not. The higher minimum wage only made it happen faster.
Absolutely... and speed of change is exactly what we don't want. It takes time for people to adapt. Automation is going to displace a lot of people, so it's important that the changeover happen as slowly as possible, to minimize the pain. High minimum wages are a bad idea.
The only thing insane about it is that people still defend capitalism as if it worked. In our current system, there is nothing more sensible than the high rents and property values of SF.
It's not capitalism that has produced the insane housing prices in SF, it's government regulation. If the city were to open the floodgates on development, housing prices would come down. Even though San Francisco has a hard limit on available ground, there's still lots of room for building up. Big sections of row houses would be replaced with high-rise apartment buildings. Double or triple the housing available and demand would no longer so far outstrip supply and prices would fall.
And it's not just SF regulation that's causing the problem. All of the "little communities" in the valley refuse to allow any high density housing to be built. A lot of those tech employees in SF would choose to live close to work if prices there were much lower. But city councils are controlled by long-time residents who really enjoy the fact that the home they bought for a song in the 1970s is now worth millions. The vast majority of their net worth is tied up in the value of their 1400 ft^2 house on a postage stamp lot, and they're as aware as anyone that allowing capitalism to operate normally would replace many of their neighborhoods of quaint little single-level, single-family homes with high-density housing in a hurry... and cause prices of the rest to tumble rapidly. Oh, they'd still be worth 2-3x what the same house should cost, but not the 10-15x it is now.
Oh, I agree! But coastals like those in SF usually consider anything more than 50 miles from one coast or the other as "flyover".
I could dig in and explain in more detail why you're wrong, but I'm not interested in educating assholes. I ignored your first few jibes, but I'm done now. You can feel free to think what you like about me -- you will anyway. And Google has nothing to do with my posts on /., except to officially discourage me from making them (but not enough to actually tell me that I must stop).
You're trolling but this is fun, and I'm waiting for a build to finish, so I'll bite.
My flyover state has fresh air, .., lots of great skiing, hiking,
Just stop right there you heathen. No flyover state has great skiing, or even good skiing. Everyone knows that Colorado and Utah have the best skiing in the US. California has pretty decent skiing. Washington also has okay skiing. Name one other state besides Colorado or Utah that has great skiing and I'll call you a liar.
I live in Utah :-)
It's not "wicked". It's "unrelated to common good". Unrelated as unit vectors in a million-dimiension space.
There is "common good" and there is a "private good" or "group good". The fundamental hypothesis of libertarians and brain-dead Aynrandianistas is that somehow magically a combination of "group goods" leads to "common good".
It's an oversimplification to say that common goods and private/group goods are orthogonal. In fact, the group good of shareholders in a corporation is most often best served by the corporation making and selling something that lots of people want at a price that is both acceptable to people and profitable. The fact that lots of people are willing to exchange their hard-earned cash for the good is strong evident that it is a common good.
Of course, it's also an error to say that common goods and private/group goods are identical. The tragedy of the commons is the best counterexample, but there are other ways in which the goods diverge. Still, they are more often aligned than not, and the primary regulatory goal of government should be to internalize the externalities that represent the divergence.
Corporations are required by law to make money. Share holders can exact retribution if they don't..
Impressive. Not many people can pack so much factual error into so few words.
First error is that corporations are required by law to make money. They are not. They are required to fulfill the aims laid out in their corporate charter, IPO statements and other promises to shareholders. There are, in fact, several corporations in existence (mostly "activist" investment funds) whose explicit goals are social or environmental in nature. Their share holders could exact retribution for making money the wrong way, or, if their goals turn out to be incompatible with making money, for making it at all. Google is an interesting case here, because its IPO documents say quite a bit about social responsibility as part of the justification for the distinction between the common and preferred stock issuance that allowed Google's founders to retain voting control (if Page, Brin and Schmidt vote together, they outvote all the rest of the shareholders put together).
Second error is that shareholders exact retribution if corporations fail to pursue their stated goals. In theory you're actually correct here. In practice, can you find a single example of share holders doing this that wasn't due to simple malfeasance?
Third is the implicit assumption that focusing on making money always leads to negative decisions. In fact, more often than not it's exactly the opposite because the very best way to make lots of money is to make and sell something people want at a price they want to pay for it. In other words, provide a public good. Where focus on profits often does lead to evil decisions is when companies' products are not doing well in the marketplace, so execs become desperate to squeeze a little more wherever they can. Companies that are awash in money and growing rapidly rarely have any need to do this.
Shouldn't be a problem as long as doctors present the results properly. They should report that the test indicates a possibility of cancer, and that the next steps are to do more testing, not make out your will. I don't know what the incidence of cancer is in the general population, but if it's significantly lower than 1% and the false positive probability is uncorrelated with other risk factors, then it's most likely that the test is wrong... but the probability that it's correct is high enough to warrant more focused testing.
My biggest concern is the cost. $500 isn't cheap enough to make it a routine, every-year test, unless there are significant risk factors in personal and family history. Get it down to $50, though, and it would be worth doing for every patient over 40, every year. And although it would turn up a lot of false positives, it would also catch a lot of cancers very, very early, making survival rates higher and costs lower.
Fortunately, there are still countries where not having to pay an additional $50 for a set of proprietary headphones is important, and phones focused on developing markets can be (relatively) easily used and imported to the US..
USB-C and Bluetooth are not proprietary.
It lacks a very important feature: vendor lock-in.
So does USB-C audio. And Bluetooth.
Unless they drop CDs entirely, they're just wasting their efforts. Attempting to plug the analog hole, while shipping easily ripped digital media? Makes no sense.
Moreover, until we get digital audio inputs wired into our brains the analog hole is forever un-pluggable.
If a phone is thinner than 3.5mm, it's difficult to hold anyway.
According to hardware designers I've talked to, the thickness of the 3.5mm plug isn't the issue. The problem is its volume and placement. It consumes 240 mm^3 on an outer edge, on one end of the phone, which is incredibly valuable real estate in a modern phone, because that's pretty much where the antennas have to be -- and phones have a lot of antennas, because they have a lot of radios (e.g. LTE requires 8 radios, and most phones support 5+ bands, plus Wifi, bluetooth, GPSr and NFC). It's also where speakers have to be, and they also require some depth, so significant volume. And where the charging/data port has to be.
So from their perspective, being able to shift audio output functions to the data port and wireless frees up important volume and makes it easier to fit ever more stuff into an ever-smaller space (yes, phone thickness does come into play here).
What's the obsession with making phones paper-thin at the expense of durability and utility anyway?
Dunno. But it's undeniably what consumers want. Thick phones don't sell. Maybe it's not what you want, but the market focuses on volume.
Good economy, good jobs, art, restaurants, beach, good transit system, best tacos in the world, fog, not one but two of the best bridges in the country, bison, Hunky Jesus, BYOBW, a little public nudity now and again, music scene, comedy scene, donut scene ... I could go on.
All better things that what you hay-bailn', pickup drivin' yahoos in the flyover states consider culture.
You're trolling but this is fun, and I'm waiting for a build to finish, so I'll bite.
My flyover state has fresh air, incredible scenery, lots of great skiing, hiking, rock climbing, fishing, hunting... and open space, not crammed cheek by jowl full of people. Plus low cost of living and a sense of community that is all but impossible to find in SF. So, different strokes, I guess. I can't figure out why anyone would want to live in a big city. It's fun to visit now and again, especially for the art (great restaurants I can get closer to home).
Oh, and a rusty old pickup has a much better route schedule than the best public transit system ever created. It goes exactly where you want to go, exactly when you want to go, and can carry a lot of stuff. Not only does it not require rails, in a pinch it doesn't even need a road.
The site developer "chose give your password to his site to an tracking company" , which was given to the site developer by the browser. The user did not give the password to the site developer via the browser.
By "site developer" I mean the author of the site the user visited. So, yes, the user did give the password to the site developer; the user has to do that to log in.
It is extremely dishonest of you to mention " tracking company ".
Huh? I'm beginning to think you don't understand the issue that you cited.
Let me be very clear, with an example. Let's use slashdot. Suppose that slashdot made an agreement with one of the tracking services, say AdThink, that has been found to be exploiting this "vulnerability". AdThink gives some value to slashdot, and slashdot includes AdThink's content and supporting JavaScript in the content delivered on the slashdot home page.
Now, you, the user, have your browser remember your slashdot login. The browser watches for username/password forms from the slashdot.org domain, and when it sees some, it fills them in with your values. It does not click "Submit" for you, you have to do that yourself. AdThink wants your slashdot login information, so in the content that it gives to the slashdot devs to inject in to the home page, it includes a hidden form which has a username and password field. Note that developers who build the slashdot site not only allowed this, they actively worked to serve up AdThink's malicious code. AdThink also includes a bit of Javascript that detects when data is entered on the hidden form and submits it. Because all of the Javascript and hidden content was served from slashdot.org, the same-domain policy doesn't prevent any of this, even though the target of the form is an AdThink server, not a slashdot.org server.
The key point here is that it's slashdot who provided all of the malicious HTML and JS to your browser. Your browser has no reason to distrust this content any more than the password entry form that you type stuff into yourself.
Make sense?
With that understanding, it should also be clear that AdThink doesn't even need password auto-filling to do this. They could also inject some Javascript that hooks in the the events that are generated when you manually type in your username and password, and it could generate a call back to the AdThink server providing your data then, too.
I hope Google does do some pull requests, so this goes into Debian, and perhaps filters to Ubuntu. Done right, their changes can have a major positive effect on the entire Linux ecosystem.
They'd have to be crazy not to upstream their changes. Otherwise they'd end up with an endlessly growing pile of patches to integrate and test, every time an upstream package changes. That would quickly become unmanageable.
Anthropogenic magnetic pole shifting is a hoax! The poles have always been where they are, and the Fake Liberal Media just wants you to believe that they're moving to advance their left-wing agenda!
Darn right! And if you don't believe it, the proof is that the so-called movement is ALWAYS TO THE LEFT!!!