On the internet in the 2000-2010ish there was a type of geek I met online a lot. He thought he understood politics/economics/etc. very well. The key to everything was liberty. From privacy rights to taxation to affirmative action liberty was the answer. Government out! The fact that getting the government 100% out of privacy rights would inevitably lead to for-profit companies being 100% in? Woosh.
I haven't met that guy in a few years. The guy who is absolutely convinced we should adopt socialism and oppose neo-liberalism and corporatism just like Denmark/Canada/etc.? Meet that guy all the time.
For the record, if you go by the early-2000s definitions of all those terms Denmark/Canada/etc. are none of the things he thinks they are. And if you tell this guy that? Woosh.
From my point of view a huge part of their current problem is that they don't actually offer any products I want. My cell phone is not even Android and I'm content. My Mac is a tower. If they'd make a Mac Mini that was a little less "I'm thin pay extra" I might buy it, but they just do not offer hardware I want. And, as far as I can tell, it's because they are trying to turn all their hardware into iPhones. Beautiful industrial design, thin as possible, and let's call the hi-end of the mid-range the low-end.
If you add in the lack of attention to detail on some of their releases there's just no reason for me to send them money.
Most of mine also have other Youtube-related jobs. The extreme examples are Jenna Moreci and Scholagladiatora. Moreci is an author with multiple revenue streams telling other authors how to make it as an author, and also hawks her books when appropriate. Scholagladiatora runs a HEMA fencing club, sells antique swords through Easton Antique Arms, and got a job with an auction house selling old swords, and all of that is much easier now that he's got a Youtube channel that people who like old swords watch.
The pure Youtube guys tend to be doubling down on sponsored content, and/or cutting costs. Skalligrim is literally moving to Nova Scotia because he couldn't afford a house on Vancouver Island on an Adsense salary.
So it's a tough time to be a Youtuber, much less start a channel.
You get AdSense for no extra work, so once you hit the view-time/views metrics you get AdSense revenue. If you're getting enough viewership that you were able to go part-time at the real gig prior to AdPocalypse (which was all of last year), you set up a Patreon.
But, yeah, ever since those bastards in the ad industry decided to freak but that hey were paying Neo-Nazis it's been a lot harder to get started at a channel. Because the Neo-Nazi channels were starter channels, so the only possible response was to yank funding from starter channels.
Why are you assuming that any of the grades are inflated? It's entirely possible that the fixed professors grade lower because they are worse at teaching.
Let's say we have a class that has multiple sections taking the same tests. If your belief is that your student's abilities are fixed, and the first quiz has your kids doing worse then the growth-minded-guy teaching the other section, you are not likely to change your teaching style. It's not your fault your kids cannot comprehend your brilliance. OTOH if the growth guy's students lose he's likely to decide his job involves changing his teaching style to suit his students, and (assuming he's not a total incompetent) he's likely to improve his student's results. Statistically speaking, Growth Prof will end up with higher-graded students regardless of who actually does the damn grading.
Note that this will disproportionately help people getting low grades. The right teacher can turn a 50% student into a 75% student, but you cannot turn a 95% student into a 120% student. So if there's a correlation between under-represented minority status and low grades the better/Growth Professors will tend to improve their URM students more then their non-URM students.
Won't help most people who were dumb enough to run this program. You have to a) choose to pirate security software via bittorrent, b) not notice the version number is years out-of-date, and c) not realize the executable code in the files you downloaded are actually Windows code. Adding d) click the "run non-signed software" button is not gonna be terribly useful.
They forced Digital Research to change some elements of their interface, but did not drive them out of business. If you are familiar with MacOS and you see some screenshots of early versions of GEM you won't argue that Apple was wrong to sue those guys. They never sued GeoWorks.
They sued MS in '88. That was Windows 2.0, BTW, so it's not like it was a system anyone actually wanted. That suit dragged on until '97 when Jobs signed a deal with Gates. By '97 the Wintel monopoly was so well established that IBM's OS/2 Warp was an also-ran.
Xerox was very well-compensated for that in Apple stock options. If they'd just kept the roughly $1 Mil worth of stock they were given they'd have hundreds of millions.
Lisa was an Apple product. Jobs actually ran the team that designed it, and named it after his daughter (to be fair, he repeatedly denied that under oath, as part of his decade plus long quest to avoid child support). In January '84 the only GUIs actually on the market were Lisa, MacOS, and a remarkably craptacular version of Windows. GEMS was a year later, and never really became a thing in the US. Amiga came out a few months after that.
Assangniks are interesting types. Back in 2011, when they still liked Assange, the Guardian reported:
"They were coerced, either by physical force or they were trapped into a situation where they had no choice," Montgomery [lawyer for the Swedish prosecution Authority] said. "AA says in her case the prelude to the offence was Mr Assange ripping her clothes off, breaking her necklace, her trying to get dressed again and then letting him undress her." He then had sex with her after pinning her arms and trying to force her legs apart to insert his unprotected penis, which she did not want, she said."
Either the Swedes lied in an official Court filing, or they actually have sworn testimony from AA that he tried to force her legs apart. And yet pointing that out is "trolling" according to three of you.
And it's not like this particular fact should change your opinion on whether he should be in jail. The CIA is not gonna set up a honey rap with a fake rape charge that does not include some truly terrible allegations about their victim. If it's not a fake rape charge or orchestrated by the CIA then the allegations must be terrible or the Swedes would not have bothered pursing him as far as London.
According to various google searches there are 40 left. A non-zero number of those cannot be sent home because their government would kill them, Congress/Trump won't let them come to the mainland, and nobody else will take them. Many of the rest have actually been convicted.
As for the rest, you do realize that if you're shooting at us, and you're not covered by military law, we can actually execute you with no legal proceedings whatsoever? And that if they'd never shot at various Westerners it would be likely that some European Social Democratic government would take them in?
He has said the sex was consensual. She has said that he literally forced her legs apart. There are no countries where literally forcing a woman's legs apart to have sex with her is allowed. It is true that the alleged victims did not initially complain, but they say that was because they thought he'd get an STD test and apologize. After he failed to do either they complained, and when the first prosecutor dropped the case they spent their own money hiring a lawyer to appeal the decision.
In other words, this is a classic he-said-she-said, with the interesting wrinkle that there are two shes. It is not surprising that the accused and the alleged victim have different accounts of their encounter.
He had 2017 and 2018 to get the wall through the Congress elected in '16. He did not do that. In '18 there was another election, and as a consequence of that he has to get his program through a Democratic House. He could probably do that if he was willing to deficit-fund the wall, and come to some sort of comprehensive immigration deal.
That's the consequence of losing the House in November of 2018. He either has to adopt an immigration policy that's on the leftish side of moderate, he can burn up his beautiful wall plans, or he can go batshit. He has chosen batshit.
A lot of the people pushing this are academics and silicon valley guys. An academic's favorite phrase is "... but more research is needed..." and Silicon Valley guys are very used to testing their ideas before large-scale implementation. So the academics ate quite happy do run the study, and the SV guys are quite happy to support it, possibly even paying the UBIs.
At some point they'll figure out they have enough data, and start building a popular movement, but it will take awhile.
IMO a UBI is great idea. We really need some way for people who get screwed by automation to benefit from it, and taxing the profits to pay them is a very simple way to do that.
I got credit cards too. Mostly use them for things I was going to buy anyway.
I brought up that specific card because it works quite a bit like cash. If you need the discipline of knowing that you only have $40.24 left to spend, it texts you that number. It's also trivial to cancel it from your cell phone, and any H and R Block retail location can just hand you a new one.
That's the trap of using plastic (or worse, phones), in that it becomes too easy to blow through your budget. For me, it's often that I'll notice that I only have $20 left and decide that I don't need dessert, or something similar. Without cash, money stops feeling like a real thing to some people, they don't have an internal regulator that says "stop spending". I know people (usually in their twenties) who will spend all of their paycheck and not think that this is wrong in any way.
20-something kids will always be 20-something kids. They will always suck at money.
I hate cash. I've got something called an Emerald Card. It's a debit card. Every time you spend money you get a text with how much you have left. You can transfer money to it from your bank account at any time. This is a great regulator.
Actually, to quote the Federal reserve: "This statute means that all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise."
So, no, they do not have to accept cash. They probably don't argue with you, because they probably don't know the law, but if Starbucks wants to require you to py with a Credit Card Starbucks can require you to pay with a card.
It is if they accept cash. The Federal Reserve says: "all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise."
Let's propose a relatively modest UBI. $500 a month. $6k a year times 300 mil+ or so people is $1.8 Trillion+. US GDP is $19 Trillionish. So for taxes adding up to 10% of GDP, we could implement a UBI of more than $6k per year per person. That doesn't sound like a lot for the Silicon Valley types who tend to love the idea, so their proposals tend to be at in the $10k-$30k range, but $6k per person is actually a lot of money in a lot of the country. It's not gonna be literal-quit-you-job-and-work-on-your-music-forever-money, but it is enough so that families with kids don't feel a pinch when Mom goes to part-time. Just think about how this would revolutionize the life of a single mother from coal country. She gets two checks, one for her and one for the kid. $12k a year is not gonna be enough to raise a kid by yourself in coal country, but it's a good half-way there.
Inflation is not as big an issue as you'd think. The worth of a dollar is approximated by number of dollars in circulation/amount of economy produced. If you just add a bunch of dollars to the system without adding any stuff you're gonna make inflation go batshit. Which is why nobody except the Greens proposes that. If you pay by Federal debt it gets very tricky and hard to measure because every $1 you take out of the denominator by debt is put right back in the denominator by UBI checks. In theory it will probably increase inflation some by increasing the velocity of money. UBI check dollars get spent, which means they get counted in the numerator multiple times, whereas some of those $1 put into bonds would be saved somewhere if the Feds weren't borrowing them. OTOH, the increased expenditures by people (like our single mother from coal country) would inspire businesses to produce more stuff, which increases the denominator. So both numbers go up, but I suspect the top would go up more because that is a lot of money to take out of savings and put into spending. Tax-paid UBI should be less inflationary because a dollar not sent to the tax man probably has a velocity relatively close to the velocity of a dollar sent out in UBI.
But predicting this prior to doing the damn thing is pretty much impossible because there's so many variables. No pilot project will give you enough data to actually figure out how they all interact at this scale.
So let's say we figure out some mix of taxes that captures 10% of GDP, we put that into a fund that pays out monthly, we give the funders some guidelines so that the checks go up at a reasonable rate rather then skyrocketing when times are good and then crashing when a recession hits. If the economy doubles the checks will double. 10% is large enough that it makes a difference for people, but not so large that you'd have to fuck people over by tripling their taxes.. And then consider the long-term. In 35-50 years out economy doubles. That means the $500 month is now $1,000 even if the pols never decide to increase the tax. If they did decide to increase the tax in that time period we could have literal-quit-you-job-and-work-on-your-music-forever-money you see in Star Trek.
Partly it's that the people pushing it have no experience dealing with legislators.
Right now you don't actually need data on how it works. How people act when they have money is one of the most basic problems in economics. It's pretty well explored. We have a fairly good idea of what would happen if the government started cutting everyone a $500-$1k check every month. How that would change if literally everyone in a country the size of the US got the exact same check from the government? That's not a question that can be solved without actually implementing a UBI in the actual US. "Let's have a pilot program and gather more data" is actually a polite way to say fuck off.
What you need at this point is a political coalition behind a fairly specific version of the UBI. That means you have to set an actual income level, some actual ideas on how to pay for it, an office in every County of Iowa advocating for the damn thing, an official position on whether/which/etc. non-citizens get it, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
On the internet in the 2000-2010ish there was a type of geek I met online a lot. He thought he understood politics/economics/etc. very well. The key to everything was liberty. From privacy rights to taxation to affirmative action liberty was the answer. Government out! The fact that getting the government 100% out of privacy rights would inevitably lead to for-profit companies being 100% in? Woosh.
I haven't met that guy in a few years. The guy who is absolutely convinced we should adopt socialism and oppose neo-liberalism and corporatism just like Denmark/Canada/etc.? Meet that guy all the time.
For the record, if you go by the early-2000s definitions of all those terms Denmark/Canada/etc. are none of the things he thinks they are. And if you tell this guy that? Woosh.
From my point of view a huge part of their current problem is that they don't actually offer any products I want. My cell phone is not even Android and I'm content. My Mac is a tower. If they'd make a Mac Mini that was a little less "I'm thin pay extra" I might buy it, but they just do not offer hardware I want. And, as far as I can tell, it's because they are trying to turn all their hardware into iPhones. Beautiful industrial design, thin as possible, and let's call the hi-end of the mid-range the low-end.
If you add in the lack of attention to detail on some of their releases there's just no reason for me to send them money.
Thus SubscribeStar.
Most of mine also have other Youtube-related jobs. The extreme examples are Jenna Moreci and Scholagladiatora. Moreci is an author with multiple revenue streams telling other authors how to make it as an author, and also hawks her books when appropriate. Scholagladiatora runs a HEMA fencing club, sells antique swords through Easton Antique Arms, and got a job with an auction house selling old swords, and all of that is much easier now that he's got a Youtube channel that people who like old swords watch.
The pure Youtube guys tend to be doubling down on sponsored content, and/or cutting costs. Skalligrim is literally moving to Nova Scotia because he couldn't afford a house on Vancouver Island on an Adsense salary.
So it's a tough time to be a Youtuber, much less start a channel.
You get AdSense for no extra work, so once you hit the view-time/views metrics you get AdSense revenue. If you're getting enough viewership that you were able to go part-time at the real gig prior to AdPocalypse (which was all of last year), you set up a Patreon.
But, yeah, ever since those bastards in the ad industry decided to freak but that hey were paying Neo-Nazis it's been a lot harder to get started at a channel. Because the Neo-Nazi channels were starter channels, so the only possible response was to yank funding from starter channels.
Most of mine already have a Patreon. That and sponsored videos seem to be most of their revenue.
Nobody depends on AdSense revenue since at least the Adpocylypse.
Why are you assuming that any of the grades are inflated? It's entirely possible that the fixed professors grade lower because they are worse at teaching.
Let's say we have a class that has multiple sections taking the same tests. If your belief is that your student's abilities are fixed, and the first quiz has your kids doing worse then the growth-minded-guy teaching the other section, you are not likely to change your teaching style. It's not your fault your kids cannot comprehend your brilliance. OTOH if the growth guy's students lose he's likely to decide his job involves changing his teaching style to suit his students, and (assuming he's not a total incompetent) he's likely to improve his student's results. Statistically speaking, Growth Prof will end up with higher-graded students regardless of who actually does the damn grading.
Note that this will disproportionately help people getting low grades. The right teacher can turn a 50% student into a 75% student, but you cannot turn a 95% student into a 120% student. So if there's a correlation between under-represented minority status and low grades the better/Growth Professors will tend to improve their URM students more then their non-URM students.
Won't help most people who were dumb enough to run this program. You have to a) choose to pirate security software via bittorrent, b) not notice the version number is years out-of-date, and c) not realize the executable code in the files you downloaded are actually Windows code. Adding d) click the "run non-signed software" button is not gonna be terribly useful.
Are you a teacher?
If yes, please tell me which school district gives you a class size small enough that you can actually pull that shit off in a non-AP class.
And how do you grade 150 of those and stay within budget?
In most Universities you use free labor from grad students, but that sort of cheat is not available to ordinary High Schools.
They forced Digital Research to change some elements of their interface, but did not drive them out of business. If you are familiar with MacOS and you see some screenshots of early versions of GEM you won't argue that Apple was wrong to sue those guys. They never sued GeoWorks.
They sued MS in '88. That was Windows 2.0, BTW, so it's not like it was a system anyone actually wanted. That suit dragged on until '97 when Jobs signed a deal with Gates. By '97 the Wintel monopoly was so well established that IBM's OS/2 Warp was an also-ran.
You first.
Xerox was very well-compensated for that in Apple stock options. If they'd just kept the roughly $1 Mil worth of stock they were given they'd have hundreds of millions.
Keep in mind that they got quite a few shares of Apple out of that tour.
In hindsight the foolish bit isn't that they let the tour happen, it's that they sold out right after Apple's IPO for something $10 mil.
Uhh...
Lisa was an Apple product. Jobs actually ran the team that designed it, and named it after his daughter (to be fair, he repeatedly denied that under oath, as part of his decade plus long quest to avoid child support). In January '84 the only GUIs actually on the market were Lisa, MacOS, and a remarkably craptacular version of Windows. GEMS was a year later, and never really became a thing in the US. Amiga came out a few months after that.
Assangniks are interesting types. Back in 2011, when they still liked Assange, the Guardian reported:
"They were coerced, either by physical force or they were trapped into a situation where they had no choice," Montgomery [lawyer for the Swedish prosecution Authority] said. "AA says in her case the prelude to the offence was Mr Assange ripping her clothes off, breaking her necklace, her trying to get dressed again and then letting him undress her." He then had sex with her after pinning her arms and trying to force her legs apart to insert his unprotected penis, which she did not want, she said."
Either the Swedes lied in an official Court filing, or they actually have sworn testimony from AA that he tried to force her legs apart. And yet pointing that out is "trolling" according to three of you.
And it's not like this particular fact should change your opinion on whether he should be in jail. The CIA is not gonna set up a honey rap with a fake rape charge that does not include some truly terrible allegations about their victim. If it's not a fake rape charge or orchestrated by the CIA then the allegations must be terrible or the Swedes would not have bothered pursing him as far as London.
Assangniks are interesting types. According to the Guardian in 2011, AKA back when they liked Assange:
Montgomery
According to various google searches there are 40 left. A non-zero number of those cannot be sent home because their government would kill them, Congress/Trump won't let them come to the mainland, and nobody else will take them. Many of the rest have actually been convicted.
As for the rest, you do realize that if you're shooting at us, and you're not covered by military law, we can actually execute you with no legal proceedings whatsoever? And that if they'd never shot at various Westerners it would be likely that some European Social Democratic government would take them in?
He has said the sex was consensual. She has said that he literally forced her legs apart. There are no countries where literally forcing a woman's legs apart to have sex with her is allowed. It is true that the alleged victims did not initially complain, but they say that was because they thought he'd get an STD test and apologize. After he failed to do either they complained, and when the first prosecutor dropped the case they spent their own money hiring a lawyer to appeal the decision.
In other words, this is a classic he-said-she-said, with the interesting wrinkle that there are two shes. It is not surprising that the accused and the alleged victim have different accounts of their encounter.
He had 2017 and 2018 to get the wall through the Congress elected in '16. He did not do that. In '18 there was another election, and as a consequence of that he has to get his program through a Democratic House. He could probably do that if he was willing to deficit-fund the wall, and come to some sort of comprehensive immigration deal.
That's the consequence of losing the House in November of 2018. He either has to adopt an immigration policy that's on the leftish side of moderate, he can burn up his beautiful wall plans, or he can go batshit. He has chosen batshit.
You don't reward batshit.
A lot of the people pushing this are academics and silicon valley guys. An academic's favorite phrase is "... but more research is needed ..." and Silicon Valley guys are very used to testing their ideas before large-scale implementation. So the academics ate quite happy do run the study, and the SV guys are quite happy to support it, possibly even paying the UBIs.
At some point they'll figure out they have enough data, and start building a popular movement, but it will take awhile.
IMO a UBI is great idea. We really need some way for people who get screwed by automation to benefit from it, and taxing the profits to pay them is a very simple way to do that.
I got credit cards too. Mostly use them for things I was going to buy anyway.
I brought up that specific card because it works quite a bit like cash. If you need the discipline of knowing that you only have $40.24 left to spend, it texts you that number. It's also trivial to cancel it from your cell phone, and any H and R Block retail location can just hand you a new one.
That's the trap of using plastic (or worse, phones), in that it becomes too easy to blow through your budget. For me, it's often that I'll notice that I only have $20 left and decide that I don't need dessert, or something similar. Without cash, money stops feeling like a real thing to some people, they don't have an internal regulator that says "stop spending". I know people (usually in their twenties) who will spend all of their paycheck and not think that this is wrong in any way.
20-something kids will always be 20-something kids. They will always suck at money.
I hate cash. I've got something called an Emerald Card. It's a debit card. Every time you spend money you get a text with how much you have left. You can transfer money to it from your bank account at any time. This is a great regulator.
Actually, to quote the Federal reserve:
"This statute means that all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise."
So, no, they do not have to accept cash. They probably don't argue with you, because they probably don't know the law, but if Starbucks wants to require you to py with a Credit Card Starbucks can require you to pay with a card.
It is if they accept cash. The Federal Reserve says:
"all United States money as identified above is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept currency or coins as payment for goods or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether to accept cash unless there is a state law which says otherwise."
Let's propose a relatively modest UBI. $500 a month. $6k a year times 300 mil+ or so people is $1.8 Trillion+. US GDP is $19 Trillionish. So for taxes adding up to 10% of GDP, we could implement a UBI of more than $6k per year per person. That doesn't sound like a lot for the Silicon Valley types who tend to love the idea, so their proposals tend to be at in the $10k-$30k range, but $6k per person is actually a lot of money in a lot of the country. It's not gonna be literal-quit-you-job-and-work-on-your-music-forever-money, but it is enough so that families with kids don't feel a pinch when Mom goes to part-time. Just think about how this would revolutionize the life of a single mother from coal country. She gets two checks, one for her and one for the kid. $12k a year is not gonna be enough to raise a kid by yourself in coal country, but it's a good half-way there.
Inflation is not as big an issue as you'd think. The worth of a dollar is approximated by number of dollars in circulation/amount of economy produced. If you just add a bunch of dollars to the system without adding any stuff you're gonna make inflation go batshit. Which is why nobody except the Greens proposes that. If you pay by Federal debt it gets very tricky and hard to measure because every $1 you take out of the denominator by debt is put right back in the denominator by UBI checks. In theory it will probably increase inflation some by increasing the velocity of money. UBI check dollars get spent, which means they get counted in the numerator multiple times, whereas some of those $1 put into bonds would be saved somewhere if the Feds weren't borrowing them. OTOH, the increased expenditures by people (like our single mother from coal country) would inspire businesses to produce more stuff, which increases the denominator. So both numbers go up, but I suspect the top would go up more because that is a lot of money to take out of savings and put into spending. Tax-paid UBI should be less inflationary because a dollar not sent to the tax man probably has a velocity relatively close to the velocity of a dollar sent out in UBI.
But predicting this prior to doing the damn thing is pretty much impossible because there's so many variables. No pilot project will give you enough data to actually figure out how they all interact at this scale.
So let's say we figure out some mix of taxes that captures 10% of GDP, we put that into a fund that pays out monthly, we give the funders some guidelines so that the checks go up at a reasonable rate rather then skyrocketing when times are good and then crashing when a recession hits. If the economy doubles the checks will double. 10% is large enough that it makes a difference for people, but not so large that you'd have to fuck people over by tripling their taxes.. And then consider the long-term. In 35-50 years out economy doubles. That means the $500 month is now $1,000 even if the pols never decide to increase the tax. If they did decide to increase the tax in that time period we could have literal-quit-you-job-and-work-on-your-music-forever-money you see in Star Trek.
Partly it's that the people pushing it have no experience dealing with legislators.
Right now you don't actually need data on how it works. How people act when they have money is one of the most basic problems in economics. It's pretty well explored. We have a fairly good idea of what would happen if the government started cutting everyone a $500-$1k check every month. How that would change if literally everyone in a country the size of the US got the exact same check from the government? That's not a question that can be solved without actually implementing a UBI in the actual US. "Let's have a pilot program and gather more data" is actually a polite way to say fuck off.
What you need at this point is a political coalition behind a fairly specific version of the UBI. That means you have to set an actual income level, some actual ideas on how to pay for it, an office in every County of Iowa advocating for the damn thing, an official position on whether/which/etc. non-citizens get it, etc.