Now one problem I do see is that a bunch of people are going to whine that the BI isn't enough to pay for their Manhattan apartment, and that they don't want to move because their family is there or whatever, and a bunch of bleeding hearts are going to try to "fix" this somehow. That needs to be fought against. The system won't work if they try to do some BS like giving people in Manhattan some huge BI (too many people will just want to move where the BI is higher, and the cost will be unaffordable, plus it'd drive up rents even more, bringing demands for even-higher BI in high-rent districts).
This sounds nice on paper, except you still haven't dealt with the problem of those who feel they have the "right" to live there.
Sure I have: they don't have any such right. They have a guaranteed monthly income, and they can spend it how they like. If they can't afford the rent in Manhattan on that, then they'll have to move.
Remember also that New York was one of those states that wanted to justify having unemployment for longer than 99 weeks.
You don't need unemployment with BI, just like you don't need "disability", SNAP, etc. All these social programs are band-aid attempts to fix the problems caused by poverty. Eliminate poverty with a basic income and you don't need them any more.
That doesn't happen a lot today, so why would it happen under the new regime? People who cannot afford to live where they do now rarely just up and move; they prefer to sit and whine about how the cost of living is too high and there needs to be a higher minimum wage.
They can't afford to move now because they're wage slaves: they can't afford to lose their job because they're living paycheck-to-paycheck and have no money to do anything differently. Of course, you have no comprehension of this because you've never had to live it.
The guy who goes to work at Mickey D's to be able to afford better pot isn't creating incredible new products or wealth.
Nice strawman. It only takes a small minority of people creating hugely successful enterprises (like Harry Potter, written by a woman on welfare) to make the system work for everyone. And Mickey D's isn't going to need many workers in the future because their jobs are being automated, so how exactly do you propose to handle that?
And it isn't going to get rid of the rich people; they'll just stop working and take the free money.
Wow, you anti-BI people are an incredibly stupid lot. I'm sure rich people will be perfectly happy to live on $1k a month in a tiny apartment with roommates...
If you think it's "immoral" to keep people from starving in the streets, then you and I have nothing in common and nothing to talk about. And if you think BI has any resemblance to Soviet-style policies, you're just an idiot.
Supply and Demand: passing out lots of money out to everyone (IOW, increasing the supply of money) does nothing but increase the cost of goods.
A good chunk of the cost of BI is *already* being paid, in existing social programs (welfare, SNAP, WIC, "disability", etc.). BI replaces most or all of these programs, plus the *yuge* cost of administering them. With BI, we can lay off a very large number of Federal and state employees who do nothing but push paper around and make sure people aren't "cheating". The actual tax increases won't be that much, and they'll go on the high-income people, the 1%, maybe a financial transaction tax (a tax on stock trades), etc.
Also, if the government gives me $30,000/year but I have to work at some boring, back breaking job 40 hours/week to make $32,000/year then why the hell shouldn't I just sit home and play video games?
Because if you sit on your ass, you get only $30k (and that number is likely too high, it'll probably be more like $15k). You probably will get paid enough to eat at the grocery store and live in an apartment with roommates.
If you go do that boring full-time job for $32k, now you have $62k/year, or $47k using my number. So instead of not being able to afford eating out, going to the bar, having a nice car, having your own place to bring a date home to, etc., you can now afford all or at least more of those things. And then if that boring job turns out to be unbearable, you can quit and find a new one without losing everything.
Sounds good in theory, but maybe not in practice. BI would definitely be a great thing for people at the lowest income levels: minimum-wage workers and maybe up to $25k/year. But it's not going to be giving you a fat check to continue your upper-middle-class lifestyle while you try out a new business. The key word is "basic": it'll give you enough money to survive on, to buy some cheap food (e.g., grocery store food, not restaurants) and live in an apartment with roommates most likely. Perhaps $1000/month. Is that much going to pay for you to "take your ideas to market" given that you "cannot afford a single idea that fails to sell"? Somehow I doubt it. If you've worked your way into a middle-class or higher lifestyle where you need a bare minimum of $3k/month just to pay for your housing, food, and transportation (let's neglect healthcare since a proposed BI system includes universal healthcare), then BI isn't going to save you, you're still going to be $2k/month short which will come from your savings. If you live someplace expensive like SV, then $3k/month is probably way too low a figure.
Now, $1k/month might be enough for you to quit your SV job, trade your BMW in for a 2005 Honda, sell all your furniture on Craigslist, and use your Honda to move what little's left to Wyoming so you can work on your ideas without having to burn your savings. However, if you live in SV, don't you have enough money saved to do that anyway? Doing that for 2 years would only cost $24k; a large amount of savings for some guy making $40k at some regular job, but that's nothing to someone working a 6-figure job in SV.
BI is not really all that helpful to people making a lot of money; it's really for the lower classes, to improve their lives and improve our society. It could help any one of you if you fall on bad times (how many tech workers lost their job in 2000 or 2008 and had long break in employment then?), it could help if you're not paid SV wages and want to try your own business, it'll certainly reduce property crimes, and I think it'll probably have a lot of other positive effects too, such as lowering housing costs (due to people not *needing* to work to support themselves; they'll just move someplace cheaper if they get sick of high rents).
Oh please, this isn't that hard. The Basic Income is simple: everyone gets the same amount, period. (As I understand it; if I'm wrong, someone please correct me, but I don't think I am.) You don't get more money for living in NYC than in Bumfuck, Idaho. So if that basic monthly paycheck (which isn't going to be a whole lot by NYC standards) isn't enough for you, then you need to pack up and move somewhere cheaper. But guess what? Now that you have a guaranteed basic monthly income, you have money to move, and you don't have to worry about losing your job and not having a source of income, so you can afford to abandon the high-price city and move someplace cheaper and see if it works out for you. If it doesn't work out and there's no jobs there or you just plain hate it, no problem, you still have that basic income, so you can pack up and move again. Moving isn't that expensive when you don't have a lot of stuff anyway, the problem is the danger of losing your job and that paycheck, and not finding a new one in the new location. BI solves that.
Now, with that out of the way, real estate prices are pretty simple: leave them to market forces (to an extent). If a city makes itself so expensive that all the janitors and cooks and meter maids can't afford to live and work there, oh well! They'll have to figure out a solution on their own, such as building some lower-income housing, or they can just suffer the consequences.
In fact, this will probably be a really GOOD thing for getting rents lower: with the lowest-income people no longer required to work for a living, and only working because they want more money so they can buy iPhones or whatever (BI isn't going to provide them enough money for any luxury, just the basics), they're not going to put up with shitty jobs in high-rent cities any more, a bunch of them are going to move out to cheaper places. It'll be better for them to move to the middle of nowhere, collect their BI check, and smoke pot or watch TV or maybe start a small business than to hang around some ultra-high-rent city like NYC working their ass off just to pay the rent (or commuting for hours every day to live someplace more affordable) because the BI isn't close to sufficient to pay the rent there. This will force rents to come down in those cities, one way or another.
So, for your SanFran example, the city will basically implode, which is a good thing. Usually, things need to completely fall apart before people will fix them.
And THAT is why the right to choice in how subscribers access programming must be required by regulations instead of relying on the kindness of pay-TV providers.
I don't see why. If you don't like the (crappy) terms or requirements for viewing some programming, you don't have to subscribe to it. You don't *need* to watch cable TV, so if it's too expensive or too much of a PITA because you have to use special equipment, then don't. It's not like internet service, which is a communications service which has become basically a necessity for modern life. You're not going to have problems getting a decent job because you didn't watch some football game live.
Oh please. Chinese companies like Huawei have been found to spy on customers for the benefit of the Chinese government.
Moreover, Opera is a closed-source browser, so there's no telling what's in there. At least with Firefox and Chromium (not Chrome), they're open source so the likelihood that they're spying on you is much lower: it'd be too easy for someone to just browse the code and see it (and at least on Linux versions, it's built from source by the distro, not by Mozilla/Google).
I use Gmail and Google calendar in Firefox and it works just fine. Google Maps is really slow these days though; I'll have to try that in Chromium to see if it's different.
Anyway, my understanding is that Chromium's every-tab-is-a-separate-process is less memory-efficient than Firefox's single-process model, so if you have a lot of tabs open and/or value memory efficiency, Firefox is the way to go.
Diesel is about thirty percent cheaper than petrol
No, it's not. It's more expensive. Gasoline is about $2.80 at the gas station 2 miles from me, while diesel at the same station is about $3.00. It's like this everywhere in the country.
Additionally, a diesel engine lasts longer and needs less maintenance.
Bullshit. Gas engines are lasting 200k miles these days easily. No one is getting rid of their cars because of the engines any more, they get rid of them because they get old and ratty and the interiors fall apart; new cars do better in crash tests, get better fuel economy and power (both!), and have nicer electronics so they can play music on their phones or from the internet etc. Modern gas engines don't need any significant maintenance until 100k. Your argument hasn't been true for ages. It was true in the 1980s.
And NOx is a major component of smog; ultra-fine particulates are not. That's why Europe's cities have so many smog problems, while American cities are actually much cleaner.
Well crap, that makes my Trump vs. Hillary decision a bit harder. I'm leaning more towards just writing in Bernie.
I really wonder why he changed his position here. Trump has been playing to nationalist and populist sentiments. Being pro-H1B doesn't help there at all, it's actually the reverse. It's only tech companies that are in favor of this, not anyone in Trump's base. Traditional Republicans are pro-H1B because they're pro-big-business, but Trump has not been like that. So what's his motivation here? Today's news of 11,000 layoffs at Intel with the intention of replacing them with H1Bs is going to add more fuel to the fire.
That's questionable. First off, only the lower-level managers are usually former engineers; in lots of engineering companies, the top management is not composed of former engineers at all, they frequently come from other backgrounds. And secondly, if someone stops doing engineering and just does management, personally I would not call him an "engineer" any more, just as I don't consider myself a "bagger" even though I used to bag groceries in high school many years ago.
I get all three: I have a gasoline-powered car. (Gasoline engines usually make more power than diesel ones BTW, just less low-end torque. You never said anything about torque, just HP.)
Honestly, they should just give up on diesel-powered cars altogether. It's really not that great a fuel for that application because of the NOx emissions, and the high cost of the engines, plus the higher cost of the fuel itself. Gasoline is a better fuel for now, until we can get moved to more hybrids, and then finally all-electric.
Have you tried using a VPN? Netflix is big enough that the MAFIAA bullied them into blocking VPN traffic, but would various Japanese sellers even bother?
Interestingly, her real name is Cheryl; Gates is her middle name. There's some story behind why she dropped the first name for her stage name, but I can't seem to find it now.
You have to understand that roughly half the American population *is* batshit crazy. That's why they vote Republican. There has to be someone seriously wrong with you mentally if you really care about what two people do in their bedroom and want to legislate against it. And a large chunk of the remainder isn't much better, since they vote for obviously corrupt Democrats like Hillary.
I can easily make an argument about sending funds to Isis: what if that's the person's name? There are women out there who are named Isis, it's the name of an Egyptian goddess.
Yeah, this really doesn't make much sense for that reason. What they need instead is a thin pad (like a cloth or blanket) which you can discreetly hide underneath the existing mattress.
Is that $770M the price tag for everything the ATCs were asking for, including everything on their wish list, or is that the price tag for what would have been a reasonable compromise that they probably would have agreed to? Unions (or any side in a negotiation really) always ask for the Moon and then compromise for less.
While this is mostly correct, I have to question your conclusion about the company trying to re-make itself through bankruptcy. At the end of the day, a company's business which relies on IT operations actually happening needs IT workers to get those operations to happen. If all the workers are dumped through the bankruptcy-and-reemerging-with-a-new-name process, where are they going to get these workers? Hiring back the old ones who just unionized? Or just magically hiring a new bunch, or just outsourcing it all?
As I said before, these workers have institutional knowledge of how that particular company works. You can't just dump an entire IT department and replace it overnight with a brand-new IT department: every company's IT operations are different, and it would take quite a while for the new team to figure out how to get things working again. The new team would even have trouble just logging in to get started, since the old team would be gone and certainly won't be giving up their passwords; the top management probably has the main administrator passwords, but that's about it. At best, even with a highly competent replacement IT team (hahaha), they're still looking at a significant disruption to their business.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
Now one problem I do see is that a bunch of people are going to whine that the BI isn't enough to pay for their Manhattan apartment, and that they don't want to move because their family is there or whatever, and a bunch of bleeding hearts are going to try to "fix" this somehow. That needs to be fought against. The system won't work if they try to do some BS like giving people in Manhattan some huge BI (too many people will just want to move where the BI is higher, and the cost will be unaffordable, plus it'd drive up rents even more, bringing demands for even-higher BI in high-rent districts).
This sounds nice on paper, except you still haven't dealt with the problem of those who feel they have the "right" to live there.
Sure I have: they don't have any such right. They have a guaranteed monthly income, and they can spend it how they like. If they can't afford the rent in Manhattan on that, then they'll have to move.
Remember also that New York was one of those states that wanted to justify having unemployment for longer than 99 weeks.
You don't need unemployment with BI, just like you don't need "disability", SNAP, etc. All these social programs are band-aid attempts to fix the problems caused by poverty. Eliminate poverty with a basic income and you don't need them any more.
That doesn't happen a lot today, so why would it happen under the new regime? People who cannot afford to live where they do now rarely just up and move; they prefer to sit and whine about how the cost of living is too high and there needs to be a higher minimum wage.
They can't afford to move now because they're wage slaves: they can't afford to lose their job because they're living paycheck-to-paycheck and have no money to do anything differently. Of course, you have no comprehension of this because you've never had to live it.
The guy who goes to work at Mickey D's to be able to afford better pot isn't creating incredible new products or wealth.
Nice strawman. It only takes a small minority of people creating hugely successful enterprises (like Harry Potter, written by a woman on welfare) to make the system work for everyone. And Mickey D's isn't going to need many workers in the future because their jobs are being automated, so how exactly do you propose to handle that?
And it isn't going to get rid of the rich people; they'll just stop working and take the free money.
Wow, you anti-BI people are an incredibly stupid lot. I'm sure rich people will be perfectly happy to live on $1k a month in a tiny apartment with roommates...
If you think it's "immoral" to keep people from starving in the streets, then you and I have nothing in common and nothing to talk about. And if you think BI has any resemblance to Soviet-style policies, you're just an idiot.
There is no incentive to do anything other than the minimum because they'll still get paid.
Why bother inventing something when you'll still get paid for not inventing?
Wow, this is some incredibly, incredibly stupid thinking here. Are you really that dumb? What are you doing on this site?
Most people will do more than the minimum because it will give them more money. If you can't understand that, I can't help you.
-1 Stupid
Supply and Demand: passing out lots of money out to everyone (IOW, increasing the supply of money) does nothing but increase the cost of goods.
A good chunk of the cost of BI is *already* being paid, in existing social programs (welfare, SNAP, WIC, "disability", etc.). BI replaces most or all of these programs, plus the *yuge* cost of administering them. With BI, we can lay off a very large number of Federal and state employees who do nothing but push paper around and make sure people aren't "cheating". The actual tax increases won't be that much, and they'll go on the high-income people, the 1%, maybe a financial transaction tax (a tax on stock trades), etc.
Also, if the government gives me $30,000/year but I have to work at some boring, back breaking job 40 hours/week to make $32,000/year then why the hell shouldn't I just sit home and play video games?
Because if you sit on your ass, you get only $30k (and that number is likely too high, it'll probably be more like $15k). You probably will get paid enough to eat at the grocery store and live in an apartment with roommates.
If you go do that boring full-time job for $32k, now you have $62k/year, or $47k using my number. So instead of not being able to afford eating out, going to the bar, having a nice car, having your own place to bring a date home to, etc., you can now afford all or at least more of those things. And then if that boring job turns out to be unbearable, you can quit and find a new one without losing everything.
Sounds good in theory, but maybe not in practice. BI would definitely be a great thing for people at the lowest income levels: minimum-wage workers and maybe up to $25k/year. But it's not going to be giving you a fat check to continue your upper-middle-class lifestyle while you try out a new business. The key word is "basic": it'll give you enough money to survive on, to buy some cheap food (e.g., grocery store food, not restaurants) and live in an apartment with roommates most likely. Perhaps $1000/month. Is that much going to pay for you to "take your ideas to market" given that you "cannot afford a single idea that fails to sell"? Somehow I doubt it. If you've worked your way into a middle-class or higher lifestyle where you need a bare minimum of $3k/month just to pay for your housing, food, and transportation (let's neglect healthcare since a proposed BI system includes universal healthcare), then BI isn't going to save you, you're still going to be $2k/month short which will come from your savings. If you live someplace expensive like SV, then $3k/month is probably way too low a figure.
Now, $1k/month might be enough for you to quit your SV job, trade your BMW in for a 2005 Honda, sell all your furniture on Craigslist, and use your Honda to move what little's left to Wyoming so you can work on your ideas without having to burn your savings. However, if you live in SV, don't you have enough money saved to do that anyway? Doing that for 2 years would only cost $24k; a large amount of savings for some guy making $40k at some regular job, but that's nothing to someone working a 6-figure job in SV.
BI is not really all that helpful to people making a lot of money; it's really for the lower classes, to improve their lives and improve our society. It could help any one of you if you fall on bad times (how many tech workers lost their job in 2000 or 2008 and had long break in employment then?), it could help if you're not paid SV wages and want to try your own business, it'll certainly reduce property crimes, and I think it'll probably have a lot of other positive effects too, such as lowering housing costs (due to people not *needing* to work to support themselves; they'll just move someplace cheaper if they get sick of high rents).
Oh please, this isn't that hard. The Basic Income is simple: everyone gets the same amount, period. (As I understand it; if I'm wrong, someone please correct me, but I don't think I am.) You don't get more money for living in NYC than in Bumfuck, Idaho. So if that basic monthly paycheck (which isn't going to be a whole lot by NYC standards) isn't enough for you, then you need to pack up and move somewhere cheaper. But guess what? Now that you have a guaranteed basic monthly income, you have money to move, and you don't have to worry about losing your job and not having a source of income, so you can afford to abandon the high-price city and move someplace cheaper and see if it works out for you. If it doesn't work out and there's no jobs there or you just plain hate it, no problem, you still have that basic income, so you can pack up and move again. Moving isn't that expensive when you don't have a lot of stuff anyway, the problem is the danger of losing your job and that paycheck, and not finding a new one in the new location. BI solves that.
Now, with that out of the way, real estate prices are pretty simple: leave them to market forces (to an extent). If a city makes itself so expensive that all the janitors and cooks and meter maids can't afford to live and work there, oh well! They'll have to figure out a solution on their own, such as building some lower-income housing, or they can just suffer the consequences.
In fact, this will probably be a really GOOD thing for getting rents lower: with the lowest-income people no longer required to work for a living, and only working because they want more money so they can buy iPhones or whatever (BI isn't going to provide them enough money for any luxury, just the basics), they're not going to put up with shitty jobs in high-rent cities any more, a bunch of them are going to move out to cheaper places. It'll be better for them to move to the middle of nowhere, collect their BI check, and smoke pot or watch TV or maybe start a small business than to hang around some ultra-high-rent city like NYC working their ass off just to pay the rent (or commuting for hours every day to live someplace more affordable) because the BI isn't close to sufficient to pay the rent there. This will force rents to come down in those cities, one way or another.
So, for your SanFran example, the city will basically implode, which is a good thing. Usually, things need to completely fall apart before people will fix them.
And THAT is why the right to choice in how subscribers access programming must be required by regulations instead of relying on the kindness of pay-TV providers.
I don't see why. If you don't like the (crappy) terms or requirements for viewing some programming, you don't have to subscribe to it. You don't *need* to watch cable TV, so if it's too expensive or too much of a PITA because you have to use special equipment, then don't. It's not like internet service, which is a communications service which has become basically a necessity for modern life. You're not going to have problems getting a decent job because you didn't watch some football game live.
Since you're so against commercial VPNs, how exactly do you get on the internet without a commercial ISP?
And if you're in favor of free VPNs, how do you think they finance themselves without your money?
Oh please. Chinese companies like Huawei have been found to spy on customers for the benefit of the Chinese government.
Moreover, Opera is a closed-source browser, so there's no telling what's in there. At least with Firefox and Chromium (not Chrome), they're open source so the likelihood that they're spying on you is much lower: it'd be too easy for someone to just browse the code and see it (and at least on Linux versions, it's built from source by the distro, not by Mozilla/Google).
I use Gmail and Google calendar in Firefox and it works just fine. Google Maps is really slow these days though; I'll have to try that in Chromium to see if it's different.
Anyway, my understanding is that Chromium's every-tab-is-a-separate-process is less memory-efficient than Firefox's single-process model, so if you have a lot of tabs open and/or value memory efficiency, Firefox is the way to go.
Diesel is about thirty percent cheaper than petrol
No, it's not. It's more expensive. Gasoline is about $2.80 at the gas station 2 miles from me, while diesel at the same station is about $3.00. It's like this everywhere in the country.
Additionally, a diesel engine lasts longer and needs less maintenance.
Bullshit. Gas engines are lasting 200k miles these days easily. No one is getting rid of their cars because of the engines any more, they get rid of them because they get old and ratty and the interiors fall apart; new cars do better in crash tests, get better fuel economy and power (both!), and have nicer electronics so they can play music on their phones or from the internet etc. Modern gas engines don't need any significant maintenance until 100k. Your argument hasn't been true for ages. It was true in the 1980s.
And NOx is a major component of smog; ultra-fine particulates are not. That's why Europe's cities have so many smog problems, while American cities are actually much cleaner.
Well crap, that makes my Trump vs. Hillary decision a bit harder. I'm leaning more towards just writing in Bernie.
I really wonder why he changed his position here. Trump has been playing to nationalist and populist sentiments. Being pro-H1B doesn't help there at all, it's actually the reverse. It's only tech companies that are in favor of this, not anyone in Trump's base. Traditional Republicans are pro-H1B because they're pro-big-business, but Trump has not been like that. So what's his motivation here? Today's news of 11,000 layoffs at Intel with the intention of replacing them with H1Bs is going to add more fuel to the fire.
I seriously doubt that's the case in American companies, and I'm quite sure it's not the case in car companies.
That's questionable. First off, only the lower-level managers are usually former engineers; in lots of engineering companies, the top management is not composed of former engineers at all, they frequently come from other backgrounds. And secondly, if someone stops doing engineering and just does management, personally I would not call him an "engineer" any more, just as I don't consider myself a "bagger" even though I used to bag groceries in high school many years ago.
I get all three: I have a gasoline-powered car. (Gasoline engines usually make more power than diesel ones BTW, just less low-end torque. You never said anything about torque, just HP.)
Honestly, they should just give up on diesel-powered cars altogether. It's really not that great a fuel for that application because of the NOx emissions, and the high cost of the engines, plus the higher cost of the fuel itself. Gasoline is a better fuel for now, until we can get moved to more hybrids, and then finally all-electric.
Have you tried using a VPN? Netflix is big enough that the MAFIAA bullied them into blocking VPN traffic, but would various Japanese sellers even bother?
No, because my point was completely proven by so many responders in this thread.
Interestingly, her real name is Cheryl; Gates is her middle name. There's some story behind why she dropped the first name for her stage name, but I can't seem to find it now.
You have to understand that roughly half the American population *is* batshit crazy. That's why they vote Republican. There has to be someone seriously wrong with you mentally if you really care about what two people do in their bedroom and want to legislate against it. And a large chunk of the remainder isn't much better, since they vote for obviously corrupt Democrats like Hillary.
I can easily make an argument about sending funds to Isis: what if that's the person's name? There are women out there who are named Isis, it's the name of an Egyptian goddess.
Yeah, this really doesn't make much sense for that reason. What they need instead is a thin pad (like a cloth or blanket) which you can discreetly hide underneath the existing mattress.
Is that $770M the price tag for everything the ATCs were asking for, including everything on their wish list, or is that the price tag for what would have been a reasonable compromise that they probably would have agreed to? Unions (or any side in a negotiation really) always ask for the Moon and then compromise for less.
While this is mostly correct, I have to question your conclusion about the company trying to re-make itself through bankruptcy. At the end of the day, a company's business which relies on IT operations actually happening needs IT workers to get those operations to happen. If all the workers are dumped through the bankruptcy-and-reemerging-with-a-new-name process, where are they going to get these workers? Hiring back the old ones who just unionized? Or just magically hiring a new bunch, or just outsourcing it all?
As I said before, these workers have institutional knowledge of how that particular company works. You can't just dump an entire IT department and replace it overnight with a brand-new IT department: every company's IT operations are different, and it would take quite a while for the new team to figure out how to get things working again. The new team would even have trouble just logging in to get started, since the old team would be gone and certainly won't be giving up their passwords; the top management probably has the main administrator passwords, but that's about it. At best, even with a highly competent replacement IT team (hahaha), they're still looking at a significant disruption to their business.