The problems I can see with living in Utah are 1) the air pollution in SLC is reportedly awful, the worst in the nation in fact, 2) if you're a single guy, there's probably no single women there who aren't religious (and most likely Mormon, even worse), and 3) the local culture is probably rather conservative. There is some really amazing outdoor stuff in Utah, but that's all in *southern* Utah, which is not a close drive from the SLC area. Utah is a huge state, like most western states, but all the population is in the north.
So I don't really see how that's a better quality-of-life than Silicon Valley:
pollution: advantage SV
singles scene: both bad (but at least what few single women exist in SV are probably not religious or Mormon)
outdoor stuff: a long drive from either place
local politics: advantage SV (not great, but at least not LDS-dominated)
local culture: advantage SV (again, not dominated by conservative religious nuts; I'll take annoying Fedora-wearing hipsters over religious loons any day)
housing costs: advantage SLC
Sorry, but there's a lot more to life than housing cost. If you want cheap housing, I can find you lots of places across the country, particularly in the rural Midwest, where housing is dirt cheap. There's no work and almost no local economy and very few people, but hey! housing is cheap!
No, they haven't. That's like saying that we've figured out how to make mass and velocity coexist. It doesn't even make sense.
There is no similarity whatsoever between Sweden and North Korea, therefore the word "socialism" cannot be used to describe them both. Either what the Scandinavian countries practice is not "socialism", or what the USSR and NK practice(d) is not, or better yet the word should just be retired.
There's already public bathrooms that are cleaned automatically.
Before too long, a fast-food restaurant will have two employees and that's it. Their job will be to just make sure the machines are running correctly, handle any odd situations (like drunk customers), and keep each other from falling asleep (that's why they need two).
I wish they'd do it at the nicer sit-down restaurants too. The server is easily the worst part of the whole experience, unless she happens to be especially cute. They take too long to get to your table, they don't take down the order correctly, they forget to present you with options, they take forever to bring you the check, etc. A machine would be far more preferable.
Panera Bread is doing this to great effect these days. The corporate (non-franchise) locations all have tablet kiosk computers where you can place your order, and it works FAR better than going to the human. You can bring up your past orders (if you swipe your MyPanera card first) and just re-order one of those, you can easily build your order with all kinds of customizations (they have dozens of kinds of bread for instance), all things you cannot do with a human because with a human, you're limited to talking, instead of being able to visually see many options on a screen. The human never tells you that you have the option to have more or less salt/pepper or more or less lettuce on your sandwich, but the machine does, for instance. So, with the kiosk, I get my order exactly the way I want it, and much faster than standing in line and waiting for some slow teenager to punch it in for me.
I'm not at all a fan of Mr. Moneybags replacing all his workers with computers & robots, keeping all the profits, and putting them in offshore accounts until he can repatriate the money at a meager 7.5% tax. I'm also not a fan of Mr. Moneybags not paying American workers anymore who are unemployed and unable to buy pretzels at Mr. Moneybags's pretzel shop, drying up the American economy.
I am. I think he's doing exactly the right thing. His machines will do a much better job than humans and will do it more efficiently. And if more and more places like that results in the economy completely collapsing and turning into a civil war that makes Syria look like small potatoes, then that's what we deserve for doing such a poor job in electing our government. We need more automation, and to keep our economy strong we need a universal basic income and universal healthcare so that everyone shares in the fruits of the labor of automation. But if we're not going to demand that because we're too stupid, then we deserve destruction due to civil war.
It depends on how much you earn in your regular job. UBI will most likely result in higher taxes, as it redistributes wealth from the upper to the lower classes. If you're already lower-class, then yes, you'll probably come out ahead. If you're middle class, it'll probably be a wash, or maybe a net negative (depending on how "middle" you are). If you have a decent middle-class job, most likely that extra UBI will be offset by the increased taxes that are taken out of your paycheck to pay for it, so you're not going to have a bunch of extra money to spend on fancy restaurants and travel and overpriced local merchants. This doesn't mean we shouldn't do it; we absolutely should, but don't get any crazy ideas about how much extra spending money you're going to have. It has to come from somewhere, and that's going to be a combination of redirecting existing expenditures for welfare programs (and their associated, bloated overhead) and higher taxes. Hopefully, it can be implemented by just taxing the upper-middle and upper classes more, leaving everyone else with more spending money because, as you say, that will spread the wealth around a lot more.
Why do people try to claim that countries like Finland are not capitalist? Nokia is not a "socialist" company, it's a product of capitalism. Countries like Finland are democratic capitalist countries with strong welfare states. Honestly, we should just retire the "socialist" term because it doesn't make sense and no one can agree about what it really means. It's just as bad as "fascism", another term no one can agree on the definition for.
There is no country on Earth where you will not meet with violence if you refuse to allow the police to arrest you. They might not shoot you right away, but they will use some kind of force, and they will use as much force as is necessary to make you comply. Force = violence.
Capitalist transactions only work because of the threat of violence. Otherwise, what's to stop me from just promising to give you money (or some other item in trade) for your item, and then taking the item and refusing to hand over the money? Social systems like this only work because there's a governmental system that ends up resulting in violent force if you don't play by the rules. Otherwise you'd have anarchy.
It's weird how libertarians are so dense that they can't understand this. They're a lot like the ultra-naÃve loony-left people who think that everyone is just going to behave and play nice because it's human nature, if only you just reason with them and plead with them. It's not.
Actually, the guy has a bit of a point. We're getting screwed over by government-sanctioned monopolies because we voters are not holding our elected officials accountable and getting them to pass laws properly regulating these monopolies or getting them to use any of the laws already in place to regulate them.
"Please!" is right: Yahoo actually has negative value. Alibaba is the only part of the company that actually has real value, more in fact that the total value of Yahoo!, and once that spins off, the rest of it will be less that worthless: they'd have to somehow pay another company to take them over.
BTW in many government facilities you can't bring in personal computing devices (including your phone0 so you use your government e-mail for this kind of communication or you use a webmail provider.
Or, they can use this old-fashioned thing called a "telephone" (I mean the government-provided landline desk phone that every government office worker has).
And if they want to send a grocery list, they can just send that by text as usual, and then give their spouse a phone call at work to tell them they've sent a text. When the government worker leaves the secure space and grabs their phone before leaving, the text will be waiting for them. Government workers don't have to leave their phones at home; I don't know where you got that idea. They just can't bring them into secure spaces. In practice, they usually end up going outside on breaks and checking their phones then.
No, the problem here was that the user had admin rights. That should never happen. If some software requires admin rights to work, then you need different software. There is never any good reason for a non-admin user to have admin rights on a locked-down machine. The only users who should ever have admin rights are developers, but those machines should not be the same machines they access the internet with.
If you trust Yahoo more than government email servers, you've clearly had your head in the sand. At least government email accounts require two-factor authentication; I've never seen any webmail service like that. You've also clearly never worked in government. It's not the workers that are the problem (some are though), it's Congress. Congress micro-manages everything in federal agencies and does a terrible job of it; that's why we get all these horrible policies and broken organizations.
I disagree. "Harmful" URLs should not be a problem for government computers, and if they are, that's the government's fault for having a shitty IT infrastructure.
Hint: a URL can only be "harmful" if you're running Windows.
KDE. The basic UI hasn't changed significantly since the 1.0 days. They also believe in having different UIs for different devices (they have a netbook-optimized WM which probably isn't used that much these days, and also one for smartphone-sized devices).
Personally, I love it. I don't actually use it, because it's a piece of trash, but I love watching it make other people miserable while they suffer with it, but steadfastly refuse to abandon it like some kind of sadomasochistic ritual, and instead whine endlessly. Of course, they'll spout all kinds of excuses and rationalizations about why they can't possibly stop using Windows, but after year after year of MS making Windows more and more user-hostile, at this point I have zero sympathy left and now I just laugh at them and their self-induced torture. I greatly look forward to what new "treats" Microsoft has in store for its users.
I don't get any junk mail at all from the RNC (or the DNC for that matter). You must have gotten on their mailing list somehow.
However, even though both parties are very similar in many ways, they are beholden to different industries. The Republicans are in bed with the fossil fuel industry, for instance. Meanwhile, the Democrats are in bed with the media industries (MPAA/RIAA) as well as the payday-loan industry.
It's honestly really disgusting that the party that claims to be in favor of helping poor people is so happy to work for an industry that brazenly preys upon those poor people with usurious interest rates and fees. It doesn't help that Hillary is also sold out to private prison corporations, yet another industry that preys upon poor people by profiting off their incarceration for BS "crimes" (like drug possession) and which lobbies heavily for stronger laws to keep more people in prison.
There's nothing silly about wanting automatic machines to reduce human labor more than they already have. Just because they don't have a single machine to both wash and dry clothes now doesn't mean we shouldn't ever expect this.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because in civilized countries, the people trust the police.
No, it's not. You're thinking of measles. Almost no one gets smallpox vaccinations any more, because it's been declared extinct.
Measles is the one that's coming back now because of the idiot anti-vaxxers.
The problems I can see with living in Utah are 1) the air pollution in SLC is reportedly awful, the worst in the nation in fact, 2) if you're a single guy, there's probably no single women there who aren't religious (and most likely Mormon, even worse), and 3) the local culture is probably rather conservative. There is some really amazing outdoor stuff in Utah, but that's all in *southern* Utah, which is not a close drive from the SLC area. Utah is a huge state, like most western states, but all the population is in the north.
So I don't really see how that's a better quality-of-life than Silicon Valley:
pollution: advantage SV
singles scene: both bad (but at least what few single women exist in SV are probably not religious or Mormon)
outdoor stuff: a long drive from either place
local politics: advantage SV (not great, but at least not LDS-dominated)
local culture: advantage SV (again, not dominated by conservative religious nuts; I'll take annoying Fedora-wearing hipsters over religious loons any day)
housing costs: advantage SLC
Sorry, but there's a lot more to life than housing cost. If you want cheap housing, I can find you lots of places across the country, particularly in the rural Midwest, where housing is dirt cheap. There's no work and almost no local economy and very few people, but hey! housing is cheap!
No, they haven't. That's like saying that we've figured out how to make mass and velocity coexist. It doesn't even make sense.
There is no similarity whatsoever between Sweden and North Korea, therefore the word "socialism" cannot be used to describe them both. Either what the Scandinavian countries practice is not "socialism", or what the USSR and NK practice(d) is not, or better yet the word should just be retired.
There's already public bathrooms that are cleaned automatically.
Before too long, a fast-food restaurant will have two employees and that's it. Their job will be to just make sure the machines are running correctly, handle any odd situations (like drunk customers), and keep each other from falling asleep (that's why they need two).
I wish they'd do it at the nicer sit-down restaurants too. The server is easily the worst part of the whole experience, unless she happens to be especially cute. They take too long to get to your table, they don't take down the order correctly, they forget to present you with options, they take forever to bring you the check, etc. A machine would be far more preferable.
Panera Bread is doing this to great effect these days. The corporate (non-franchise) locations all have tablet kiosk computers where you can place your order, and it works FAR better than going to the human. You can bring up your past orders (if you swipe your MyPanera card first) and just re-order one of those, you can easily build your order with all kinds of customizations (they have dozens of kinds of bread for instance), all things you cannot do with a human because with a human, you're limited to talking, instead of being able to visually see many options on a screen. The human never tells you that you have the option to have more or less salt/pepper or more or less lettuce on your sandwich, but the machine does, for instance. So, with the kiosk, I get my order exactly the way I want it, and much faster than standing in line and waiting for some slow teenager to punch it in for me.
I'm not at all a fan of Mr. Moneybags replacing all his workers with computers & robots, keeping all the profits, and putting them in offshore accounts until he can repatriate the money at a meager 7.5% tax. I'm also not a fan of Mr. Moneybags not paying American workers anymore who are unemployed and unable to buy pretzels at Mr. Moneybags's pretzel shop, drying up the American economy.
I am. I think he's doing exactly the right thing. His machines will do a much better job than humans and will do it more efficiently. And if more and more places like that results in the economy completely collapsing and turning into a civil war that makes Syria look like small potatoes, then that's what we deserve for doing such a poor job in electing our government. We need more automation, and to keep our economy strong we need a universal basic income and universal healthcare so that everyone shares in the fruits of the labor of automation. But if we're not going to demand that because we're too stupid, then we deserve destruction due to civil war.
It depends on how much you earn in your regular job. UBI will most likely result in higher taxes, as it redistributes wealth from the upper to the lower classes. If you're already lower-class, then yes, you'll probably come out ahead. If you're middle class, it'll probably be a wash, or maybe a net negative (depending on how "middle" you are). If you have a decent middle-class job, most likely that extra UBI will be offset by the increased taxes that are taken out of your paycheck to pay for it, so you're not going to have a bunch of extra money to spend on fancy restaurants and travel and overpriced local merchants. This doesn't mean we shouldn't do it; we absolutely should, but don't get any crazy ideas about how much extra spending money you're going to have. It has to come from somewhere, and that's going to be a combination of redirecting existing expenditures for welfare programs (and their associated, bloated overhead) and higher taxes. Hopefully, it can be implemented by just taxing the upper-middle and upper classes more, leaving everyone else with more spending money because, as you say, that will spread the wealth around a lot more.
Why do people try to claim that countries like Finland are not capitalist? Nokia is not a "socialist" company, it's a product of capitalism. Countries like Finland are democratic capitalist countries with strong welfare states. Honestly, we should just retire the "socialist" term because it doesn't make sense and no one can agree about what it really means. It's just as bad as "fascism", another term no one can agree on the definition for.
There is no country on Earth where you will not meet with violence if you refuse to allow the police to arrest you. They might not shoot you right away, but they will use some kind of force, and they will use as much force as is necessary to make you comply. Force = violence.
Capitalist transactions only work because of the threat of violence. Otherwise, what's to stop me from just promising to give you money (or some other item in trade) for your item, and then taking the item and refusing to hand over the money? Social systems like this only work because there's a governmental system that ends up resulting in violent force if you don't play by the rules. Otherwise you'd have anarchy.
It's weird how libertarians are so dense that they can't understand this. They're a lot like the ultra-naÃve loony-left people who think that everyone is just going to behave and play nice because it's human nature, if only you just reason with them and plead with them. It's not.
Actually, the guy has a bit of a point. We're getting screwed over by government-sanctioned monopolies because we voters are not holding our elected officials accountable and getting them to pass laws properly regulating these monopolies or getting them to use any of the laws already in place to regulate them.
Yet another reason why you should never use ISP-provided email. It's always shit.
"Please!" is right: Yahoo actually has negative value. Alibaba is the only part of the company that actually has real value, more in fact that the total value of Yahoo!, and once that spins off, the rest of it will be less that worthless: they'd have to somehow pay another company to take them over.
BTW in many government facilities you can't bring in personal computing devices (including your phone0 so you use your government e-mail for this kind of communication or you use a webmail provider.
Or, they can use this old-fashioned thing called a "telephone" (I mean the government-provided landline desk phone that every government office worker has).
And if they want to send a grocery list, they can just send that by text as usual, and then give their spouse a phone call at work to tell them they've sent a text. When the government worker leaves the secure space and grabs their phone before leaving, the text will be waiting for them. Government workers don't have to leave their phones at home; I don't know where you got that idea. They just can't bring them into secure spaces. In practice, they usually end up going outside on breaks and checking their phones then.
No, the problem here was that the user had admin rights. That should never happen. If some software requires admin rights to work, then you need different software. There is never any good reason for a non-admin user to have admin rights on a locked-down machine. The only users who should ever have admin rights are developers, but those machines should not be the same machines they access the internet with.
If you trust Yahoo more than government email servers, you've clearly had your head in the sand. At least government email accounts require two-factor authentication; I've never seen any webmail service like that. You've also clearly never worked in government. It's not the workers that are the problem (some are though), it's Congress. Congress micro-manages everything in federal agencies and does a terrible job of it; that's why we get all these horrible policies and broken organizations.
Last I heard, Powell used an AOL account.
I disagree. "Harmful" URLs should not be a problem for government computers, and if they are, that's the government's fault for having a shitty IT infrastructure.
Hint: a URL can only be "harmful" if you're running Windows.
KDE. The basic UI hasn't changed significantly since the 1.0 days. They also believe in having different UIs for different devices (they have a netbook-optimized WM which probably isn't used that much these days, and also one for smartphone-sized devices).
Sounds like fun, until some driver comes around a corner in your lane and rips your leg off.
If you hate it so much, stop using it.
Personally, I love it. I don't actually use it, because it's a piece of trash, but I love watching it make other people miserable while they suffer with it, but steadfastly refuse to abandon it like some kind of sadomasochistic ritual, and instead whine endlessly. Of course, they'll spout all kinds of excuses and rationalizations about why they can't possibly stop using Windows, but after year after year of MS making Windows more and more user-hostile, at this point I have zero sympathy left and now I just laugh at them and their self-induced torture. I greatly look forward to what new "treats" Microsoft has in store for its users.
I don't get any junk mail at all from the RNC (or the DNC for that matter). You must have gotten on their mailing list somehow.
However, even though both parties are very similar in many ways, they are beholden to different industries. The Republicans are in bed with the fossil fuel industry, for instance. Meanwhile, the Democrats are in bed with the media industries (MPAA/RIAA) as well as the payday-loan industry.
It's honestly really disgusting that the party that claims to be in favor of helping poor people is so happy to work for an industry that brazenly preys upon those poor people with usurious interest rates and fees. It doesn't help that Hillary is also sold out to private prison corporations, yet another industry that preys upon poor people by profiting off their incarceration for BS "crimes" (like drug possession) and which lobbies heavily for stronger laws to keep more people in prison.
There's nothing silly about wanting automatic machines to reduce human labor more than they already have. Just because they don't have a single machine to both wash and dry clothes now doesn't mean we shouldn't ever expect this.
Tell that to the OP, I only quoted that.