First, pensions. The number I gave you is a full pension, not everyone gets one and many elderly women would have to live of the pension of their (possibly dearly departed) husband. See here [onprvp.fgov.be] for details. So the 1100 euro is for two people and it is an AVERAGE.
Two people could get as much as 1400 EUR in 2016 via the IGO. If we're talking about a single person, the number is 1050 EUR. Yes, their own means would be subtracted, but that's how limited socialism works. Only people who need it get subsidies. http://www.onprvp.fgov.be/NL/p... http://www.vief.be/inkomensgar...
Second, health costs. A healthy pensioner will have plenty with that 100 euro a month. Sadly, old age does not always mean good health.
That is what health insurance is for. I'd be highly surprised if old people in Belgium are going broke due to the way the Belgian health care system works. As far as I know, the variable health costs mainly concern over the counter medicine (i.e. non-prescribed) and a (yearly) capped deductible.
200 EUR a month for water, heating, electricity, internet and a mobile subscription
Third, living costs, check this [numbeo.com]. Especially electricity, water, internet and phone costs.
Numbeo says 130 + 40 for utilities + internet (in a 85m^2 apartment). That leaves 30 EUR for a mobile subscription. Seems my estimate was pretty accurate.
Fourth rental prices, seriously, 400 euro does not get you much. [...] Sure you'll have a roof over your head.
I've already shown that 400 EUR a month gets you plenty. No, it is not luxurious. We're talking minimum living standards guaranteed by the Belgian state here. You can bet your bottom that the elderly people in 90% of the rest of the world have it worse. Be grateful for that instead of spouting bullshit like this on Slashdot: "If you know that renting small apartment of decent quality (you know, no mold and stuff) starts at around 700 euro".
Let's stick to the point: "If you know that renting small apartment of decent quality (you know, no mold and stuff) starts at around 700 euro" I've shown that you can get a decent quality apartment for 400 EUR a month in Belgium. That means that, given the 1100 EUR you quoted, there is 700 EUR left a month. 300 EUR a month for food (I'm being fairly generous here). 200 EUR a month for water, heating, electricity, internet and a mobile subscription. 100 EUR a month for health insurance. That leaves 1200 EUR/year for bigger expenditures (household appliances, electronics), travel and leisure.
It still takes a fair bit of budgeting, but it is far from poverty.
If you know that renting small apartment of decent quality (you know, no mold and stuff) starts at around 700 euro
Total bullshit.
I just randomly clicked through a Belgian apartment rental website and found this: http://immo.vlan.be/nl/Detail/... That is 90m^2 of apartment with a 20m^2 roof terrace and classy looking interior for 525 EUR/month.
he didn't do a thing when Assad crossed his "red line"
Bullshit. He was blocked by Congress:
"So when the president stepped into the sunny Rose Garden that Saturday morning, he announced that he had made two decisions: first, that the U.S. should act against Syria, and second, that he would seek explicit authorization from Congress to do so. [...] Despite the administration’s strong advocacy and support from a small minority of hawkish politicians, Congress and the American people proved strongly opposed to the use of force." ( http://www.politico.com/magazi... )
To be fair, most people don't understand file extensions
There is no cure for stupid. I do agree with you that Microsoft has exacerbated it starting with Windows 95 by hiding the file system as much as possible, though.
and they are a shitty way of determining the content of the file.
Extensions are a great way to quickly denote the type of a file. They are portable across all file systems and platforms, short and recognizable by convention, and for the most common files generally unique enough. The fact that 'gif' and 'mp3' are commodity terms nowadays speaks to the power of file extensions.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying they are perfect. But they are actually pretty damn effective.
I'm doing a Ryzen build next month and even though the 1700 is the best bang for the buck, I'm actually contemplating buying the 1800X just because I want to support AMD. (Note: not a fanboy, current system runs on an i7 860)
This is the same feeling I had when I bought the Blackberry Priv as soon as I could get my hands on it. Saving physical keyboards on phones was the driving force there.
But should we also be supporting people who are certainly capable of working, yet choose not to?
Yes. The alternative is worse, plain and simple. The universe is not inherently fair and as such we must choose between suboptimal solutions. Ask yourself what's worse: paying higher taxes or having more crime in your society? (Debt and poverty destroy your ability for rational thinking and lead to crime.)
Give them a central kitchen, let them have food and shelter, and no more. If they want any luxury beyond this, let them go out and work for it, like the rest of us.
That is in essence the idea of UBI. It is meant to be a subsistence income. Any luxuries still require acquiring resources beyond the UBI. By the way: a smartphone and a computer are not luxuries, nor are they expensive compared to food, shelter and clothing.
It's not exactly the same, but there are pizzas with crusts that are made out of vegetable (crumbs) for ~50%. I know that actually sounds terrible, but those pizzas taste surprisingly like normal pizza. And I don't mean that as in 'these vegan fake meat sausages taste like normal sausages' (they don't, stop saying that, they taste like rubber).
For instance, why would the carriers want to adopt this, when they're making huge profits off of SMS messages now?
Where I live, only old people and certain services still send SMS messages. Everybody else uses Whatsapp and/or Facebook messenger.
A significant number of carriers have signed on to the RCS thing. Optimistically speaking, they might want to adopt RCS as it is a good service for their customers. Realistically speaking they might want to adopt it to sell the communication data of their users.
I'll be honest with you: I'm not holding my breath, but it could happen. Stranger things have.
RCS could actually be a standard which unifies the fragmented communication scene and could be supported by many commercial entities and easily usable by everybody: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm not sure it actually will gain popularity (Apple doesn't seem to want to join in on the fun and encryption for text messages doesn't seem to be part of the standard), but it might.
IIRC, the issue was that it did not provide a usable interface to use the RSS feeds without auto-downloading.
I dislike auto-downloading, because I like to make varying choices about which release of an episode I'd like to see. Some releases have incorrect framerates or are otherwise of low quality, but if that release is the only one available when I want to watch the episode, then so be it. I really don't want to battle with programming an auto-downloader when eyeballing the right choice out of maybe 6 options for an episode costs me 5 seconds.
I also don't really want to download all of the options, and not just because it is unnecessary downloading. I'm all for giving back (my target-ratio is 25), but I really dislike supporting low-quality releases (as they tend to take up a significant share of the peers who don't care about quality, of which there are many). My upstream bandwidth should generally go to good releases.
In general though, I found the qBittorrent interface to be just too limited for my taste. Given some time I could probably enumerate all the little things I miss in the interface compared to Tixati (sequential downloading and fine-grained priority controls spring to mind). I'm going to check qBittorrent out in a couple of months again anyway. You could install Tixati and click around in it to make the comparison yourself.
why anyone is still using uTorrent when qBittorrent is so much better.
Because it isn't, last time I checked.
I install qBittorrent about once every six months, then uninstall it again because it just doesn't do what I want it to do (specifically in terms of the interface and its handling of RSS feeds). I actually kept it installed for a while before what.cd died, specifically because it was whitelisted there.
Tixati however has proven to be the client for me as it is very much power-user oriented, GUI-wise not Spartan but also not bloated (comparable to foobar2000 in my opinion). The only big downside is that it is not open source, which is why I keep an eye on qBittorrent. Tixati has a terrible quite oldfashioned website, but it is worth checking out: https://www.tixati.com/discove...
The paper ( http://journals.plos.org/ploso... ) specifically mentions that their method allows for GPGPU processing due to parallel block evaluation instead of 'sliding window' evaluation of the image: "Unlike the sliding-window method, which scans an image in a sequential manner, parallel window-searching divides the input image into several blocks and simultaneously performs classification on one block using each GPU core."
This is a step forward in commodification of self-driving car technology.
1) feasts were ways to use up overharvest that could not be properly stored for the winters
Bullshit (if you believe no king of old ever had a feast out of decadence, you are a fool) and even if true it would be besides the point. The point was about plentifulness. In addition one could make a point of the quality of the food, which for a king would be very good, even by today's standards. Haute cuisine cooking is not high-tech stuff. The ingredients are still key.
2) before central heating and insulation, the castles were drafty buildings that needed fireplaces in every inhabited room during much of the year
The servants deal with the wood and the fireplaces. Problem solved.
3) handmade furniture was the only kind at the time, mass production was an odd dream of a few
Yep, and you can bet your bottom that the king had the nicest handmade furniture in the realm.
4) armies were expenses, not luxuries
Yeah, tell that to the peasants who were executed without a fair trial. Even now, in the US, poor people are easily fucked over by the law.
5) the farmland is delegated to the Midwest states, and the produce available everywhere
Which poor people can't afford. They are mostly stuck with cheap and terrible fast'food'. Also, the point was about owning land and having control over it.
6) who needs 10 horses when even a cheap car can match 50?
People who like to go horseback riding, play polo, hunt on horseback, tame horses, have horse races, or like dressage (you'll notice a trend of amusement and required amount of wealth here).
7) if you want the idealized pleasure of a hunt, Sony can help. If you want meat, check the market
Missed the point again. This again revolves around owning resources.
8) the old ships weren't as fancy as you imagine
Yeah, you could probably buy one of those for 10 bucks nowadays. Who the hell wants a sailing ship anyway?
9) ok, yeah the jewelry is hard to match as gold and silver reserves haven't grown that much. But the quality is better if you do get some modern bling
Your arguments get progressively weaker. This one is just laughable. In essence you are saying "modern poor people live more comfortable than the kings of old because even though the kings had massive amounts expensive jewelry, modern jewelry is slightly nicer if a poor person would have the funds to buy them."
If the modern poor live more comfortably than the kings of old
They don't, though.
Sure, there are a number of aspects of life in which great progress has been made (sanitation, health care, means of communication), but the modern poor still do not have servants, regular feasts with more food and wine than their (many) guests could eat, castles with countless rooms filled with handmade furniture, armies, larges swaths of farmland, stables full of horses, vast private hunting grounds, sailing ships or rooms filled with handmade fine clothing and jewelry.
Would you honestly choose living like a modern poor person in some shitty housing project or trailer park over living like a king of old in a castle with servants? I highly doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
First, pensions. The number I gave you is a full pension, not everyone gets one and many elderly women would have to live of the pension of their (possibly dearly departed) husband. See here [onprvp.fgov.be] for details. So the 1100 euro is for two people and it is an AVERAGE.
Two people could get as much as 1400 EUR in 2016 via the IGO. If we're talking about a single person, the number is 1050 EUR.
Yes, their own means would be subtracted, but that's how limited socialism works. Only people who need it get subsidies.
http://www.onprvp.fgov.be/NL/p...
http://www.vief.be/inkomensgar...
Second, health costs. A healthy pensioner will have plenty with that 100 euro a month. Sadly, old age does not always mean good health.
That is what health insurance is for. I'd be highly surprised if old people in Belgium are going broke due to the way the Belgian health care system works. As far as I know, the variable health costs mainly concern over the counter medicine (i.e. non-prescribed) and a (yearly) capped deductible.
200 EUR a month for water, heating, electricity, internet and a mobile subscription
Third, living costs, check this [numbeo.com]. Especially electricity, water, internet and phone costs.
Numbeo says 130 + 40 for utilities + internet (in a 85m^2 apartment). That leaves 30 EUR for a mobile subscription. Seems my estimate was pretty accurate.
Fourth rental prices, seriously, 400 euro does not get you much. [...] Sure you'll have a roof over your head.
I've already shown that 400 EUR a month gets you plenty. No, it is not luxurious. We're talking minimum living standards guaranteed by the Belgian state here. You can bet your bottom that the elderly people in 90% of the rest of the world have it worse. Be grateful for that instead of spouting bullshit like this on Slashdot: "If you know that renting small apartment of decent quality (you know, no mold and stuff) starts at around 700 euro".
Gegroet.
What? I never said I did.
Let's stick to the point:
"If you know that renting small apartment of decent quality (you know, no mold and stuff) starts at around 700 euro"
I've shown that you can get a decent quality apartment for 400 EUR a month in Belgium. That means that, given the 1100 EUR you quoted, there is 700 EUR left a month.
300 EUR a month for food (I'm being fairly generous here). 200 EUR a month for water, heating, electricity, internet and a mobile subscription. 100 EUR a month for health insurance. That leaves 1200 EUR/year for bigger expenditures (household appliances, electronics), travel and leisure.
It still takes a fair bit of budgeting, but it is far from poverty.
Also: if you're on a pension, you don't need to live near work opportunities. That is kind of an essential aspect of being retired.
Total bullshit again. Accept reality, for fuck's sake.
http://immo.vlan.be/nl/Zoek/AL...
+1 Destroyed political strawman shoehorned in.
If you know that renting small apartment of decent quality (you know, no mold and stuff) starts at around 700 euro
Total bullshit.
I just randomly clicked through a Belgian apartment rental website and found this:
http://immo.vlan.be/nl/Detail/...
That is 90m^2 of apartment with a 20m^2 roof terrace and classy looking interior for 525 EUR/month.
In that town, 700 EUR / month is pretty highend stuff:
http://immo.vlan.be/nl/Zoek/Ap...
Robots are about to beat us (and all animals) at hand-eye coordination. Our set of unmatched skills is dwindling every day.
he didn't do a thing when Assad crossed his "red line"
Bullshit. He was blocked by Congress:
"So when the president stepped into the sunny Rose Garden that Saturday morning, he announced that he had made two decisions: first, that the U.S. should act against Syria, and second, that he would seek explicit authorization from Congress to do so.
[...]
Despite the administration’s strong advocacy and support from a small minority of hawkish politicians, Congress and the American people proved strongly opposed to the use of force."
( http://www.politico.com/magazi... )
It was already a terrible, terrible clickbait headline.
Spurious correlation abuse of the worst kind.
To be fair, most people don't understand file extensions
There is no cure for stupid. I do agree with you that Microsoft has exacerbated it starting with Windows 95 by hiding the file system as much as possible, though.
and they are a shitty way of determining the content of the file.
Extensions are a great way to quickly denote the type of a file. They are portable across all file systems and platforms, short and recognizable by convention, and for the most common files generally unique enough. The fact that 'gif' and 'mp3' are commodity terms nowadays speaks to the power of file extensions.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not saying they are perfect. But they are actually pretty damn effective.
I was never happier to pay top dollar for a CPU.
I'm doing a Ryzen build next month and even though the 1700 is the best bang for the buck, I'm actually contemplating buying the 1800X just because I want to support AMD. (Note: not a fanboy, current system runs on an i7 860)
This is the same feeling I had when I bought the Blackberry Priv as soon as I could get my hands on it. Saving physical keyboards on phones was the driving force there.
But should we also be supporting people who are certainly capable of working, yet choose not to?
Yes. The alternative is worse, plain and simple. The universe is not inherently fair and as such we must choose between suboptimal solutions. Ask yourself what's worse: paying higher taxes or having more crime in your society? (Debt and poverty destroy your ability for rational thinking and lead to crime.)
Give them a central kitchen, let them have food and shelter, and no more. If they want any luxury beyond this, let them go out and work for it, like the rest of us.
That is in essence the idea of UBI. It is meant to be a subsistence income. Any luxuries still require acquiring resources beyond the UBI. By the way: a smartphone and a computer are not luxuries, nor are they expensive compared to food, shelter and clothing.
It's not exactly the same, but there are pizzas with crusts that are made out of vegetable (crumbs) for ~50%. I know that actually sounds terrible, but those pizzas taste surprisingly like normal pizza. And I don't mean that as in 'these vegan fake meat sausages taste like normal sausages' (they don't, stop saying that, they taste like rubber).
These guys make them in the Netherlands: http://magioni.com/en/products...
For instance, why would the carriers want to adopt this, when they're making huge profits off of SMS messages now?
Where I live, only old people and certain services still send SMS messages. Everybody else uses Whatsapp and/or Facebook messenger.
A significant number of carriers have signed on to the RCS thing. Optimistically speaking, they might want to adopt RCS as it is a good service for their customers. Realistically speaking they might want to adopt it to sell the communication data of their users.
I'll be honest with you: I'm not holding my breath, but it could happen. Stranger things have.
Slack; I don't even know what the last one is
It is mainly a poorly programmed webbased IRC interface wrapped in a desktop Chromium package that hogs memory like there is no tomorrow.
It has some redeeming qualities (syntax highlighting for code snippets), but in general you're not missing out on much.
RCS could actually be a standard which unifies the fragmented communication scene and could be supported by many commercial entities and easily usable by everybody:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I'm not sure it actually will gain popularity (Apple doesn't seem to want to join in on the fun and encryption for text messages doesn't seem to be part of the standard), but it might.
IIRC, the issue was that it did not provide a usable interface to use the RSS feeds without auto-downloading.
I dislike auto-downloading, because I like to make varying choices about which release of an episode I'd like to see. Some releases have incorrect framerates or are otherwise of low quality, but if that release is the only one available when I want to watch the episode, then so be it. I really don't want to battle with programming an auto-downloader when eyeballing the right choice out of maybe 6 options for an episode costs me 5 seconds.
I also don't really want to download all of the options, and not just because it is unnecessary downloading. I'm all for giving back (my target-ratio is 25), but I really dislike supporting low-quality releases (as they tend to take up a significant share of the peers who don't care about quality, of which there are many). My upstream bandwidth should generally go to good releases.
In general though, I found the qBittorrent interface to be just too limited for my taste. Given some time I could probably enumerate all the little things I miss in the interface compared to Tixati (sequential downloading and fine-grained priority controls spring to mind). I'm going to check qBittorrent out in a couple of months again anyway. You could install Tixati and click around in it to make the comparison yourself.
why anyone is still using uTorrent when qBittorrent is so much better.
Because it isn't, last time I checked.
I install qBittorrent about once every six months, then uninstall it again because it just doesn't do what I want it to do (specifically in terms of the interface and its handling of RSS feeds). I actually kept it installed for a while before what.cd died, specifically because it was whitelisted there.
Tixati however has proven to be the client for me as it is very much power-user oriented, GUI-wise not Spartan but also not bloated (comparable to foobar2000 in my opinion). The only big downside is that it is not open source, which is why I keep an eye on qBittorrent.
Tixati has a terrible quite oldfashioned website, but it is worth checking out: https://www.tixati.com/discove...
"US Top Court"
Because "supreme" just doesn't quite cut it.
You are correct; it's worded terribly.
The paper ( http://journals.plos.org/ploso... ) specifically mentions that their method allows for GPGPU processing due to parallel block evaluation instead of 'sliding window' evaluation of the image:
"Unlike the sliding-window method, which scans an image in a sequential manner, parallel window-searching divides the input image into several blocks and simultaneously performs classification on one block using each GPU core."
This is a step forward in commodification of self-driving car technology.
1) feasts were ways to use up overharvest that could not be properly stored for the winters
Bullshit (if you believe no king of old ever had a feast out of decadence, you are a fool) and even if true it would be besides the point. The point was about plentifulness. In addition one could make a point of the quality of the food, which for a king would be very good, even by today's standards. Haute cuisine cooking is not high-tech stuff. The ingredients are still key.
2) before central heating and insulation, the castles were drafty buildings that needed fireplaces in every inhabited room during much of the year
The servants deal with the wood and the fireplaces. Problem solved.
3) handmade furniture was the only kind at the time, mass production was an odd dream of a few
Yep, and you can bet your bottom that the king had the nicest handmade furniture in the realm.
4) armies were expenses, not luxuries
Yeah, tell that to the peasants who were executed without a fair trial. Even now, in the US, poor people are easily fucked over by the law.
5) the farmland is delegated to the Midwest states, and the produce available everywhere
Which poor people can't afford. They are mostly stuck with cheap and terrible fast'food'.
Also, the point was about owning land and having control over it.
6) who needs 10 horses when even a cheap car can match 50?
People who like to go horseback riding, play polo, hunt on horseback, tame horses, have horse races, or like dressage (you'll notice a trend of amusement and required amount of wealth here).
7) if you want the idealized pleasure of a hunt, Sony can help. If you want meat, check the market
Missed the point again. This again revolves around owning resources.
8) the old ships weren't as fancy as you imagine
Yeah, you could probably buy one of those for 10 bucks nowadays. Who the hell wants a sailing ship anyway?
9) ok, yeah the jewelry is hard to match as gold and silver reserves haven't grown that much. But the quality is better if you do get some modern bling
Your arguments get progressively weaker. This one is just laughable. In essence you are saying "modern poor people live more comfortable than the kings of old because even though the kings had massive amounts expensive jewelry, modern jewelry is slightly nicer if a poor person would have the funds to buy them."
If the modern poor live more comfortably than the kings of old
They don't, though.
Sure, there are a number of aspects of life in which great progress has been made (sanitation, health care, means of communication), but the modern poor still do not have servants, regular feasts with more food and wine than their (many) guests could eat, castles with countless rooms filled with handmade furniture, armies, larges swaths of farmland, stables full of horses, vast private hunting grounds, sailing ships or rooms filled with handmade fine clothing and jewelry.
Would you honestly choose living like a modern poor person in some shitty housing project or trailer park over living like a king of old in a castle with servants? I highly doubt it.
the technology has yet to be named
In the light of recent app naming schemes, I propose:
- Jizzr
- MyLoad
- Cumcountify
i can spot sarcasm better than most. His joke was hardly obvious.
"It's a Chinese hoax."
AFAIK, Trump does not have a /. account.
Whoosh.