carpeting the land with skyscraper apartment buildings to house all these people would just alleviate one pressure point in a dysfunctional system
Skyscraper apartment buildings don't "carpet" the land, exactly the opposite. The current strategy results in carpeting the land with low-density housing for a hundred miles in every (non-ocean) direction. Skyscraper apartment buildings are far better. They're by far the lowest-footprint, least-impactful way for humans to live.
I think that sort of living sucks, myself, but there are a lot of people who like it.
Is there any actual reason Sheila James needs to be in SF proper to operate her email inbox in 2017?
Sure, telecommuting is also a good option. I do it myself -- and love it because it allows me to live where I want, surrounded by lots of space. But most people don't like telecommuting. Yeah, companies should allow more of their employees to choose to work remotely, where it works, but that's orthogonal to the question of housing demand in SF.
FWIW, I work for Google and interview software engineering candidates. I have never, ever been told to go easier on diversity candidates, or indeed anything other than to apply the same rigorous standard to all.
Perhaps the filtering is happening before they reach you for an interview?
The candidates I interview are overwhelmingly male and white or asian.
It all stems back to the fiction that the former Confederate states were allowed to propagate, that somehow the formation of the Confederacy wasn't about preservation of slavery, that somehow it was some great campaign for liberty.
That's the cover story.
In reality, all of those statues were put up during the Jim Crow era, and were part of a deliberate effort to make sure that blacks never forgot who the boss was. Other elements of the effort included segregation, regular lynchings, and use of the criminal justice system to recreate the system of black slavery, only at lower cost and with less regard for black lives, because they were now an operational expense not a self-replicating capital investment.
I recommend Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon, to learn about this incredibly nasty and hypocritical part of American history that has been effectively excised (not accidentally!) from American education.
For better or worse he's going to be President of the United States for the next three years and a couple months.
Maybe, maybe not. He's rapidly losing the support of Republicans in the House and Senate, and he really, really needs that support. The House has the power to impeach and the Senate has the power to remove him from office after the House impeaches. You know the Democrats would love to do both of those things (even knowing that Mike Pence is ready to step in), so Trump really needs to keep the Republicans on his side.
And then there's Mueller's investigation. Were a smoking gun proving Trump intentionally colluded to throw the election to have been found a few months ago, Trump might have survived it simply because the Senate would have refused to give him the boot. That is no longer true. He's become enough of an embarrassment to the GOP that if Mueller finds something even moderately bad, the Reps will kick him to the curb. And as time goes on, the Republicans are getting more and more fed up with him. A few more months of the current trends and they're going to be right there with the Democrats, looking for a reason to boot him, or worse.
At this point, I give Trump even odds of completing his first term, but that's only if he gets rid of Bannon, and starts accepting advice in the fairly near future. If he doesn't, the odds tilt heavily toward not making it four years.
I don't think he'll actually get the boot, mind you, he'll resign first. He never actually intended to be president and the job is nothing like what he thought it would be, so he might not even wait to be impeached, but instead resign in a fit of rage, blaming the media, Congress, disloyal staff and everyon else for his failure to accomplish anything of note. He may do it in the hopes that it will stop the Mueller investigation, but I strongly doubt that it would. I have no idea if Pence would pardon him if anything criminal came to light. Wouldn't shock me if Trump doesn't have any idea what Pence would do, either.
Bottom line, Trump had better figure out how to act like a president if he wants to be president for another three years and five months. And he'd really better step up his game if he wants another term. Either that or attempt to pull a Nicolas Maduro, but I don't think that would succeed in the US.
Did you miss the entire argument you are replying to? The argument was that the current low wages are not sufficient to meet the "I need to eat" criteria. Thus that is no longer an argument for low wages.
Low > 0. It's hard to eat on low; it's impossible to eat on 0.
Not as duh as you think it is.
Just a few years ago Germany had no minimum wage at all. No jobs were lost since it was introduced even though many conservative politicians and heads of German industry prophesied doom and destruction.
It depends where you set the minimum wage. At one extreme, if you set it below what the lowest-paid workers are already making, then it clearly costs no one their job. At the other extreme, if you set it ridiculously high, it will drive massive automation, outsourcing and anything else that can be done to reduce labor costs... or it will drive companies out of business entirely, or out of the affected jurisdiction, at least.
In between is, in between. Economists have studied this question a lot, and the common view is that many economies have some amount of "slack" in their wage structures, and minimum wage hikes that just take up that slack don't generate increased unemployment, though they make other structural changes in the economy, such as excluding certain classes of very low-value workers (disabled, mentally handicapped, etc.) from being able to work at all, because their labor is simply no longer worth what it costs (Aside, my Downs' Syndrome aunt went through cycles of this over decades; she worked part time for a few years, then the minimum wage was raised and she became unemployable, then inflation pushed the real minimum wage down far enough she could work, repeat).
But... the amount of slack that is available is dependent on many factors, and one of them is the state of automation. As automation becomes capable of potentially taking over more and more tasks, the cost of automating a task falls and the benefit of automating it rises. The stituation we're in right now is that the cost of automating many jobs is still high, but falling. At the point where the cost of human labor exceeds the cost of machine labor by a margin large enough to cover the transition costs, the human will lose.
Arbitrarily increasing the cost of human labor will cause that line to be crossed sooner, for more people. The faster we cross that line, the more people we're going to have struggling to find a new place in a changed world. Automation is good; it makes all humanity richer, on average. But it's better if it comes a little slower, to give people more time to adapt.
Why do those advocating the $15 hamburger wage not see this ?
Because you're making a detached economic argument in favor of business interests, and they're making a "I need enough food to survive" argument in favor of community interests and human rights.
But the "I need to eat" argument favors keeping wages low to slow the progress of automation.
If you can speak coherently, listen to directions, and show up on time, you'll have no problem holding down a job in this economy.
Well, I'm not sure that's true everywhere. Detroit, for example, still has an 8% unemployment rate (even though that's a 16-year low). But I think it is true most everywhere, and if you live somewhere that it's not, you should seriously consider moving. Granted that moving is difficult when you're broke, but it can be done.
It's not necessarily a good thing from all perspectives though as it's one more thing that can fail and something that makes the vehicles even more expensive.
I'm not so sure about the "more expensive" part. Cameras are more complex than mirrors, but they require a lot less material and all of the complexity in their construction is completely automated, plus small cameras are used in many other things, so auto manufacturers can probably use off-the-shelf parts rather than something custom, and they almost certainly don't need to make and stock different cameras for every car in their lineup, like they do mirrors. It's entirely likely that cameras are less expensive than mirrors plus housings. Or if they aren't now, they will be.
Yes, it's "another thing to go wrong"... but I've broken more mirrors than cameras, and either way you have to replace it. I think that's a non-factor.
And then you have to consider all of the things cameras can do that mirrors can't. Route the video signal through some image processing and the system can highlight pedestrians or issue active warnings rather than just passively relaying information. They can be combined with other sorts of sensors, like radar or lidar, to provide more information. They also don't need a big wind-sail of a housing, so they can significantly improve aerodynamics.
It would surprise me if the relation was anything else than social. The same social groups that drink energy drinks also use more drugs.
Could be social, or it could be biological, or some of both. Either way, it seems likely that this correlation is caused by a third factor.
That said, energy drinks are a bad idea. They knock your system around pretty hard with a massive shot of caffeine plus a big jolt of sugar... and lots of them have several other mind-altering ingredients, all relatively mild in small doses, and therefore unregulated, but energy drinks use a lot of them. A handful of teens have actually been killed by caffeine overdoses, which are pretty easy to achieve with energy drinks.
If there is a hard reason for this, my first guess would be to look at the income.
That seems unlikely. At least in my anecdotal experience, I don't see any correlation between income and energy drink use.
Yeah, yeah, all the comments about yet another chat app, and how Google has 20 of them...
Allo is actually pretty nice, with the integrated assistant and all. My kids are all using it, but the mobile-only aspect killed me. I'm old, and I hate typing on a mobile keyboard, plus I spend a big chunk of my waking hours in front of a real keyboard. I like being able to use my phone when I'm away from the computer, but it's so much better to have a real keyboard, where I can type 100 wpm, rather than 2.
This will make it a lot easier for me to chat with my kids, and I may even start using it with other people.
Okay, on that one you're being ridiculous.Circumcision is a debatable practice (though I'm circumcised, as are most American men, and I don't consider myself "mutilated"), but in this case it's being done for a very positive reason, which is that it's known to reduce the transmission of AIDS. The Gates Foundation provided support to a UN organization focused specifically on saving lives. That's making the world better, even if it does (theoretically) reduce a little sexual pleasure.
* intellectual property laws: some vague stuff for example here; there's so many hits for their relations to "intellectual property" that it's hard to tell the whaff away. I can't search tonight, lemme find better citations later.
Yes but to the average dipshit on the street who can't do the math his idea will seem awesome.
I can do the math, and it seems awesome to me. My wife and I go on a date every week, and we go to a movie 75% of the time, so we see roughly 36 movies per year in theaters. $120 / 36 = $3.33 per movie. Not bad at all.
According to this calculator http://money.cnn.com/calculato... I'd have to make 250% of what I currently do if I wanted to live in Silicon Valley.
Same here. Per that calculator I'd have to make 252% of my current income to live in Sunnyvale, and that's an underestimate, because I live in a low-cost, rural area of my state and I had to pick a more expensive region. I'd estimate that cost of living is about 20% lower where I actually live than the location I selected.
He still controls all of that money, but now he doesn't have to pay taxes on it.
He didn't pay any taxes on it before. You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains. Now, he's made it so that he'll never realize any gains on that stock, and so that he can't spend it on himself, but only on charitable efforts. By any reasonable definition of the word, that is "giving it away". The most you can argue is that until the Gates Foundation (assuming that's where it went) spends it on fighting malaria or whatnot, it hasn't actually been given away yet. But he's moved it to where it can only be given away, so that's a distinction without a difference.
Not that he doesn't still have more money than he could ever possibly spend on himself anyway. This gift will have no impact on his personal life.
Some of these wages you describe may be livable when you're young, but the wage growth is very slow in some of the jobs that you mention.
All of them top out at around $70K, sure, but that's actually a very livable income in my area. It's even possible to raise a family on a single income at that level. If both parents work it's quite easy to achieve a joint income of >$100K, which is reasonably comfortable.
Education -- which can be obtained without debt, the way I did it, my wife did it and my sons are doing it -- increases the earning potential substantially, of course. But tradesmen do okay.
Oh, I thing the GP is wrong. Trump is using his Twitter account as an official communications mechanism, in fact arguably it's the official White House communication channel, given the number of times Trump has used it to overrule his official press secretary in official white house press conferences. I also think Trump is an incompetent, narcissistic blowhard. With small hands.
But your style of response is increasingly common, on both sides of the aisle. Unthinking, unreasoning, reflexive bile directed against anyone you believe disagrees with you. There can be no reasoned debate, which means there is absolutely no possibility of identifying common ground or working towards agreement, or even compromise. You and your kind are a serious threat to democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's the first rated dictatorship?
Clearly, North Korea. No other dictatorship has the kind of iron grip that NK's does.
carpeting the land with skyscraper apartment buildings to house all these people would just alleviate one pressure point in a dysfunctional system
Skyscraper apartment buildings don't "carpet" the land, exactly the opposite. The current strategy results in carpeting the land with low-density housing for a hundred miles in every (non-ocean) direction. Skyscraper apartment buildings are far better. They're by far the lowest-footprint, least-impactful way for humans to live.
I think that sort of living sucks, myself, but there are a lot of people who like it.
Is there any actual reason Sheila James needs to be in SF proper to operate her email inbox in 2017?
Sure, telecommuting is also a good option. I do it myself -- and love it because it allows me to live where I want, surrounded by lots of space. But most people don't like telecommuting. Yeah, companies should allow more of their employees to choose to work remotely, where it works, but that's orthogonal to the question of housing demand in SF.
FWIW, I work for Google and interview software engineering candidates. I have never, ever been told to go easier on diversity candidates, or indeed anything other than to apply the same rigorous standard to all.
Perhaps the filtering is happening before they reach you for an interview?
The candidates I interview are overwhelmingly male and white or asian.
It all stems back to the fiction that the former Confederate states were allowed to propagate, that somehow the formation of the Confederacy wasn't about preservation of slavery, that somehow it was some great campaign for liberty.
That's the cover story.
In reality, all of those statues were put up during the Jim Crow era, and were part of a deliberate effort to make sure that blacks never forgot who the boss was. Other elements of the effort included segregation, regular lynchings, and use of the criminal justice system to recreate the system of black slavery, only at lower cost and with less regard for black lives, because they were now an operational expense not a self-replicating capital investment.
I recommend Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon, to learn about this incredibly nasty and hypocritical part of American history that has been effectively excised (not accidentally!) from American education.
For better or worse he's going to be President of the United States for the next three years and a couple months.
Maybe, maybe not. He's rapidly losing the support of Republicans in the House and Senate, and he really, really needs that support. The House has the power to impeach and the Senate has the power to remove him from office after the House impeaches. You know the Democrats would love to do both of those things (even knowing that Mike Pence is ready to step in), so Trump really needs to keep the Republicans on his side.
And then there's Mueller's investigation. Were a smoking gun proving Trump intentionally colluded to throw the election to have been found a few months ago, Trump might have survived it simply because the Senate would have refused to give him the boot. That is no longer true. He's become enough of an embarrassment to the GOP that if Mueller finds something even moderately bad, the Reps will kick him to the curb. And as time goes on, the Republicans are getting more and more fed up with him. A few more months of the current trends and they're going to be right there with the Democrats, looking for a reason to boot him, or worse.
At this point, I give Trump even odds of completing his first term, but that's only if he gets rid of Bannon, and starts accepting advice in the fairly near future. If he doesn't, the odds tilt heavily toward not making it four years.
I don't think he'll actually get the boot, mind you, he'll resign first. He never actually intended to be president and the job is nothing like what he thought it would be, so he might not even wait to be impeached, but instead resign in a fit of rage, blaming the media, Congress, disloyal staff and everyon else for his failure to accomplish anything of note. He may do it in the hopes that it will stop the Mueller investigation, but I strongly doubt that it would. I have no idea if Pence would pardon him if anything criminal came to light. Wouldn't shock me if Trump doesn't have any idea what Pence would do, either.
Bottom line, Trump had better figure out how to act like a president if he wants to be president for another three years and five months. And he'd really better step up his game if he wants another term. Either that or attempt to pull a Nicolas Maduro, but I don't think that would succeed in the US.
Did you miss the entire argument you are replying to? The argument was that the current low wages are not sufficient to meet the "I need to eat" criteria. Thus that is no longer an argument for low wages.
Low > 0. It's hard to eat on low; it's impossible to eat on 0.
If automation was already on the cusp of automating jobs at minimum wage, then those jobs would have been automated soon, anyways.
Sure, in a few years those jobs are gone regardless and the people in them will be trying to figure out what to do.
Do you want to accelerate that process? Or keep it slow, to give us some hope of managing it?
Not as duh as you think it is. Just a few years ago Germany had no minimum wage at all. No jobs were lost since it was introduced even though many conservative politicians and heads of German industry prophesied doom and destruction.
It depends where you set the minimum wage. At one extreme, if you set it below what the lowest-paid workers are already making, then it clearly costs no one their job. At the other extreme, if you set it ridiculously high, it will drive massive automation, outsourcing and anything else that can be done to reduce labor costs... or it will drive companies out of business entirely, or out of the affected jurisdiction, at least.
In between is, in between. Economists have studied this question a lot, and the common view is that many economies have some amount of "slack" in their wage structures, and minimum wage hikes that just take up that slack don't generate increased unemployment, though they make other structural changes in the economy, such as excluding certain classes of very low-value workers (disabled, mentally handicapped, etc.) from being able to work at all, because their labor is simply no longer worth what it costs (Aside, my Downs' Syndrome aunt went through cycles of this over decades; she worked part time for a few years, then the minimum wage was raised and she became unemployable, then inflation pushed the real minimum wage down far enough she could work, repeat).
But... the amount of slack that is available is dependent on many factors, and one of them is the state of automation. As automation becomes capable of potentially taking over more and more tasks, the cost of automating a task falls and the benefit of automating it rises. The stituation we're in right now is that the cost of automating many jobs is still high, but falling. At the point where the cost of human labor exceeds the cost of machine labor by a margin large enough to cover the transition costs, the human will lose.
Arbitrarily increasing the cost of human labor will cause that line to be crossed sooner, for more people. The faster we cross that line, the more people we're going to have struggling to find a new place in a changed world. Automation is good; it makes all humanity richer, on average. But it's better if it comes a little slower, to give people more time to adapt.
Why do those advocating the $15 hamburger wage not see this ?
Because you're making a detached economic argument in favor of business interests, and they're making a "I need enough food to survive" argument in favor of community interests and human rights.
But the "I need to eat" argument favors keeping wages low to slow the progress of automation.
I don't think you read the entire article. It makes many valid points besides "these types of wood float".
If you can speak coherently, listen to directions, and show up on time, you'll have no problem holding down a job in this economy.
Well, I'm not sure that's true everywhere. Detroit, for example, still has an 8% unemployment rate (even though that's a 16-year low). But I think it is true most everywhere, and if you live somewhere that it's not, you should seriously consider moving. Granted that moving is difficult when you're broke, but it can be done.
I have a bluetooth keyboard that I could use, if I wanted to do that. But I don't want an extra keyboard on my desk. I have one already.
It's not necessarily a good thing from all perspectives though as it's one more thing that can fail and something that makes the vehicles even more expensive.
I'm not so sure about the "more expensive" part. Cameras are more complex than mirrors, but they require a lot less material and all of the complexity in their construction is completely automated, plus small cameras are used in many other things, so auto manufacturers can probably use off-the-shelf parts rather than something custom, and they almost certainly don't need to make and stock different cameras for every car in their lineup, like they do mirrors. It's entirely likely that cameras are less expensive than mirrors plus housings. Or if they aren't now, they will be.
Yes, it's "another thing to go wrong"... but I've broken more mirrors than cameras, and either way you have to replace it. I think that's a non-factor.
And then you have to consider all of the things cameras can do that mirrors can't. Route the video signal through some image processing and the system can highlight pedestrians or issue active warnings rather than just passively relaying information. They can be combined with other sorts of sensors, like radar or lidar, to provide more information. They also don't need a big wind-sail of a housing, so they can significantly improve aerodynamics.
It would surprise me if the relation was anything else than social. The same social groups that drink energy drinks also use more drugs.
Could be social, or it could be biological, or some of both. Either way, it seems likely that this correlation is caused by a third factor.
That said, energy drinks are a bad idea. They knock your system around pretty hard with a massive shot of caffeine plus a big jolt of sugar... and lots of them have several other mind-altering ingredients, all relatively mild in small doses, and therefore unregulated, but energy drinks use a lot of them. A handful of teens have actually been killed by caffeine overdoses, which are pretty easy to achieve with energy drinks.
If there is a hard reason for this, my first guess would be to look at the income.
That seems unlikely. At least in my anecdotal experience, I don't see any correlation between income and energy drink use.
Yeah, yeah, all the comments about yet another chat app, and how Google has 20 of them...
Allo is actually pretty nice, with the integrated assistant and all. My kids are all using it, but the mobile-only aspect killed me. I'm old, and I hate typing on a mobile keyboard, plus I spend a big chunk of my waking hours in front of a real keyboard. I like being able to use my phone when I'm away from the computer, but it's so much better to have a real keyboard, where I can type 100 wpm, rather than 2.
This will make it a lot easier for me to chat with my kids, and I may even start using it with other people.
What was your LDAP?
Citations?
* male genital mutilation
Okay, on that one you're being ridiculous.Circumcision is a debatable practice (though I'm circumcised, as are most American men, and I don't consider myself "mutilated"), but in this case it's being done for a very positive reason, which is that it's known to reduce the transmission of AIDS. The Gates Foundation provided support to a UN organization focused specifically on saving lives. That's making the world better, even if it does (theoretically) reduce a little sexual pleasure.
* intellectual property laws: some vague stuff for example here; there's so many hits for their relations to "intellectual property" that it's hard to tell the whaff away. I can't search tonight, lemme find better citations later.
Agreed, that's a poor citation.
... to kick out all teenagers and people with small kids?
Go during school hours.
Yes but to the average dipshit on the street who can't do the math his idea will seem awesome.
I can do the math, and it seems awesome to me. My wife and I go on a date every week, and we go to a movie 75% of the time, so we see roughly 36 movies per year in theaters. $120 / 36 = $3.33 per movie. Not bad at all.
Until it goes belly up, anyway.
According to this calculator http://money.cnn.com/calculato... I'd have to make 250% of what I currently do if I wanted to live in Silicon Valley.
Same here. Per that calculator I'd have to make 252% of my current income to live in Sunnyvale, and that's an underestimate, because I live in a low-cost, rural area of my state and I had to pick a more expensive region. I'd estimate that cost of living is about 20% lower where I actually live than the location I selected.
Northern Utah. The unemployment rate is poised to drop below 3% in the next month or two.
Citations?
He still controls all of that money, but now he doesn't have to pay taxes on it.
He didn't pay any taxes on it before. You don't pay taxes on unrealized gains. Now, he's made it so that he'll never realize any gains on that stock, and so that he can't spend it on himself, but only on charitable efforts. By any reasonable definition of the word, that is "giving it away". The most you can argue is that until the Gates Foundation (assuming that's where it went) spends it on fighting malaria or whatnot, it hasn't actually been given away yet. But he's moved it to where it can only be given away, so that's a distinction without a difference.
Not that he doesn't still have more money than he could ever possibly spend on himself anyway. This gift will have no impact on his personal life.
Some of these wages you describe may be livable when you're young, but the wage growth is very slow in some of the jobs that you mention.
All of them top out at around $70K, sure, but that's actually a very livable income in my area. It's even possible to raise a family on a single income at that level. If both parents work it's quite easy to achieve a joint income of >$100K, which is reasonably comfortable.
Education -- which can be obtained without debt, the way I did it, my wife did it and my sons are doing it -- increases the earning potential substantially, of course. But tradesmen do okay.
Fuck you, lap dog apologist
You, sir, are the problem.
Oh, I thing the GP is wrong. Trump is using his Twitter account as an official communications mechanism, in fact arguably it's the official White House communication channel, given the number of times Trump has used it to overrule his official press secretary in official white house press conferences. I also think Trump is an incompetent, narcissistic blowhard. With small hands.
But your style of response is increasingly common, on both sides of the aisle. Unthinking, unreasoning, reflexive bile directed against anyone you believe disagrees with you. There can be no reasoned debate, which means there is absolutely no possibility of identifying common ground or working towards agreement, or even compromise. You and your kind are a serious threat to democracy.