"You don't get that with rigid labor markets" Let's try something more flexible like outsourcing the management. No golden parachutes for fuckups.
Define fuckup.
From the shareholder standpoint a fuckup is someone who does not maximize 'shareholder value' by any means necessary including but not limited to firing every employee just because they cost more.
"Dropbox has cancelled its free shuttle in San Francisco, its gym washing service, pushed back dinner time by an hour and curtailed the number of guests to five per month (previously it was unlimited)."
I wonder how much cost cutting there has been for executive pay and perks.
Except that a store doesn't know all the tax laws in a state by virtue of having several stores in that state. Sales taxes can vary across non-obvious boundaries. The Target near Snelling and Highway 36 needs to know the tax laws that apply to that specific location, which may or may not be the state tax and nothing more. If all sales tax was uniform across a state, it wouldn't be much of a problem. (There would still be questions on what tax category different things belong to in different states.)
In a time where every detail of life is stored in databases I find it very difficult to believe that tracking tax laws is either impossible or impractical.
If no one is providing this information today then at the worst it seems like a business opportunity to provide such as a service.
as the relationship between the information processing rate (bit/s) of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass).
At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
Actually, depending on your windows update settings, windows 10 can fully automatically install without any user intervention, and in fact does so. What happens though is it upgrades you're machine to 10, boots to it, and then shows you an EULA, which if you decline, then it downgrades back to 7.
This is really not a nice thing to do to your customers, and even automatically uninstalls software that it deems incompatible with 10.
Where in the word "Microsoft" do you see the word "nice" ?
They're a soulless corporation that doesn't give a shit if their users are actually happy so long as the users are locked into the ecosystem (or too lazy / stupid to break out of it).
Gee whiz, I'm so glad our lords and masters at the federal government have decided to allow us the privilege.
Y'know I'm so glad to live in the land of the free where we need the permission of the federal government to so much as flush our toilets, buy light bulbs, and fly drones that we paid for with our own money.
You could buy a big old airplane too but you'd still need to get it maintained according to regulations and have a license to fly it and I want it that way because I don't want just anyone who can afford to buy something to be able to crash it into my house because they have no clue of what they're doing.
If you've got a large brick and mortar store somewhere, you can have someone keep track of the taxes for that specific location. This scales well, because it's a relatively small fixed cost for each location. You don't have to know things like tax zone boundaries, because sales tax is calculated at the store and ignores where the customer's from. Your store can keep track of all the odd categories, tax holidays, etc. that apply to that one specific location.
Calculating the sales tax owed at a customer location is a far harder problem. It requires determining the tax zone and knowing all of the oddities of all the sales tax laws all over the country.
You're missing my point.
Stores like Target and Walmart, Shop-Rite whatever are in every state in the country. They know every tax law that they need to know, presumably.
A company like Amazon will have no problem having this knowledge.
Granted it would kill smaller businesses or force them to go through a clearinghouse like Amazon marketplace which is not a good thing.
If only we had some kind of calculating device that could reference a table of tax rates updated on a regular basis...
If that's all it took...
Let's say you are shipping a fluorescent yellow vest from California to Minnesota. In Minnesota, clothing is not taxable, but safety equipment is. Do you collect tax on it? Does their state consider it clothing or safety equipment? Add a pair of reading glasses to their order. Minnesota taxes general merchandise at one rate, while medical devices are taxed at a much lower rate. Which rate do you choose? Or are glasses considered clothing, because you wear them? What about a boxed set of grill accessories that includes a fork, a spatula, an apron, and an oven mitt?
Now ship a swimsuit to Pennsylvania. Clothing is taxable there, but sporting goods are not. Is swimwear taxable there? How does your cart service even know if it's a swimsuit when your online site only knows the product as Item#123456?
Next, ship a bicycle fender to a Houston, Texas, address. The law says you pay a higher tax rate if there is a public bus stop on your block. What tax rate do you charge?
Ship another fender to a Colorado address. They not only have sales taxes, but they have fees on some items, because some politician vowed not to raise taxes, but made no such promises about fees. Do you collect those fees on a fender? Do you charge sales taxes on those fees?
Do you charge tax on the shipping? That depends on whether you are shipping as a service to the customer (services are taxable in some states), or if you're shipping it because you don't stock the product in their state (a business expense.). Do you charge shipping taxes at the rate of the point of origin, or at the rate of the destination? To which state do you send the money?
In all these states, anyone doing business in their borders has to answer these questions because it's their law. Do I have to know every law in every town in America?
The states are a mess of thousands of such stupid and incompatible laws, each passed on behalf of some corrupt politician's crony. Never think it's easy just because it seems like simple math.
In each of those states there are businesses already selling the products (and services) in question and they manage to figure out what to charge how much tax on.
Presumably Target and Walmart are in every state and yet they manage to figure out what to charge tax on and at what percentage.
Of course Amazon (and us as buyers) have no interest in collecting or paying sales tax so we find reasons against but really, there is no good reason against.
Regardless of how self serving or fraudulent you may think she is, the odds of Hilary accidentally plunging the whole planet into world War three due to ineptitude seems significantly lower than with Trump.
The great majority (if not all) of wars was caused by self-serving leaders, and never by incompetence. Psychopatic minds only interested in their own benefit, financial and political, have been the motive force behind practically all wars in recorded history.
What part of Trump's personality do you believe doesn't fit your description?
What's a "calorie poor country"? Anyways, if the vague meaning of your statement is that " the rich is fat", sorry, you're just wrong. The US is fat, not all the wealthy nations. Norway has a far higher per-capita GDP than the US, a better and fairer wealth distribution, and a far lower obesity rate.
A calorie poor country is where there isn't enough food for everyone which makes food - or calories - equivalent to wealth.
Examples include much of Asia and Africa where if you are not wealthy then you cannot eat enough to get fat.
Wealthy nations are, by definition, not calorie poor.
Honestly any business using the "cloud" is utterly insane. Quit being cheapskates and buy servers and software, hire an IT person at high 5 figures and take it out of the CEO's pay.
Honestly you have to be insane to trust all your businesses secrets to a freaking cloud service.
As the free market will adjust by lower prices which in turn mean more people can now spend money on more products and it will equalize again as long as we do not do anything about it like government interference.
Also, the world population is increasing at an alarming rate! As poorer countries prosper these new kids will turn into adults and buy more products fullfilling the demand again. Globalization is doing amazing things in China and it is now starting to return the favor of money flowing in the other direction
...and these people will buy products with what money?
The whole point of the article is that the number of jobs is shrinking.
No jobs = no money unless there is welfare / basic living allowance.
Third world countries where there is neither welfare nor basic living allowance and it doesn't matter how cheap things are...no job = no money = starving on the street.
At this point, why rely on visual cues outside of the phone at all? If they're looking at the phone and have location enabled, on-screen notifications could tell them when the light is green. This avoids them having to notice the periphery at all, which is less likely if they're into a particularly intense sexting session or game of Farmville.
Maybe because network / cpu delay would = a dead user ?
I sure as hell wouldn't take the risk of writing / publishing / backing such an app.
If everyone had an extra $1000 a month to spend, I could see prices simply increasing in proportion. For example, housing, which in the US is mostly bought and sold in a competitive market. If you and I have an extra $10,000 to bid on a house, guess what? The price of the house simply goes up, absorbing the UBI and negating its utility everywhere else. So housing becomes more expensive for a person with no other income, reducing the benefit of the UBI for food and other necessities.
For every person who needs that house today in order to live in the city and make a living, another person will no longer need to live in the city to make a living and will go live in the middle of a forest (or whatever) adjusting prices in the city back downwards.
Austerity didn't get them into trouble. Spending like there was no limit got them into trouble. Apparently the solution when you've got too much debt is to spend more!
Half right.
Overspending got them into trouble.
Too great a degree of austerity choked their economy even further.
Austerity is a great idea but as with all great ideas, timing is key.
I am guilty of ageism: I prefer to work with older people.
:) Me too...
I'm 40, I recently interviewed for a video/sound editor position and the under 25 crowd is indeed willing to work for cheap, but for heaven's sake, can one of them please show up with a tie on?
The 40 year olds who show up for an interview? Suits and ties.
No, the position will never require you wear a suit or tie, you can come to work in t-shirts and jeans if you want, but the suit says "I'm here because I want the job and I'm serious about that".
----
15 years ago I was interviewing for my first flying job, it was a $16/hr no-benefits part time position. I showed up in a suit and tie. One of the pilots there (wearing jeans and a t-shirt) joked, "what's with the monkey suit", to which I replied, "I want the job, this says that from the minute I walk in the door".
I got the job, never wore a suit there of course, but even during the interview I was asked about that, same answer. Did it make a difference? I have no idea, but it didn't hurt.
Whereas if you show up in a suit and tie for an interview in some other vertical (ISPs come to mind) you may fail on that same (somewhat stupid IMHO) basis.
It is important to understand the corporate culture wherever you're trying to get into.
but the place where it needs to be discussed - the national stage of public opinion, perhaps prompted by news coverage (crickets chirping sound heard) - it is NOT discussed. its swept under the rug.
I'm in the bay area, I'm over 50 and I've been a sw/hw guy since my teens. I'm currently out of work, looking, and its been dead for months, for me, so far. this is typical and usual, sad to say, and I have a little more time left before I'm empty and near bankruptcy again. yet again. I don't know if I'll ever see reliable employment in tech ever again.
I have tons of experience and a great resume. but I'm older, white, male, independant and aware of management's BS; and I guess ALL of that is out of favor for hiring prospects.
I really wish this was made more visible to non-geeks. taking to geeks is not useful, about this, as we all know about it already.
Why haven't you started a company? Certainly you seem to have everything required. Find a way to make it happen. Assuming you can't get finance, start with one customer and find another and then find more.
Slashdot Mirror
"You don't get that with rigid labor markets"
Let's try something more flexible like outsourcing the management.
No golden parachutes for fuckups.
Define fuckup.
From the shareholder standpoint a fuckup is someone who does not maximize 'shareholder value' by any means necessary including but not limited to firing every employee just because they cost more.
It always amazes me how profoundly bad very smart people can be at basic statistics. Granted it's usually not intuitive but it can be learned.
Probably...
"no one in the gubmint got their hands dirty supplying oil but they take the lion's share"
How much does it cost to subsidize the entire road infrastructure of the country?
"Dropbox has cancelled its free shuttle in San Francisco, its gym washing service, pushed back dinner time by an hour and curtailed the number of guests to five per month (previously it was unlimited)."
I wonder how much cost cutting there has been for executive pay and perks.
Except that a store doesn't know all the tax laws in a state by virtue of having several stores in that state. Sales taxes can vary across non-obvious boundaries. The Target near Snelling and Highway 36 needs to know the tax laws that apply to that specific location, which may or may not be the state tax and nothing more. If all sales tax was uniform across a state, it wouldn't be much of a problem. (There would still be questions on what tax category different things belong to in different states.)
In a time where every detail of life is stored in databases I find it very difficult to believe that tracking tax laws is either impossible or impractical.
If no one is providing this information today then at the worst it seems like a business opportunity to provide such as a service.
Check out xenopsychology by Robert Freitas (a real phd scientist) and also the concept of Sentience quotient defined s
as the relationship between the information processing rate (bit/s) of each individual processing unit (neuron), the weight/size of a single unit and the total number of processing units (expressed as mass).
At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach in our "communication" with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?
Why are you destroying your planet?
Actually, depending on your windows update settings, windows 10 can fully automatically install without any user intervention, and in fact does so. What happens though is it upgrades you're machine to 10, boots to it, and then shows you an EULA, which if you decline, then it downgrades back to 7.
This is really not a nice thing to do to your customers, and even automatically uninstalls software that it deems incompatible with 10.
Where in the word "Microsoft" do you see the word "nice" ?
They're a soulless corporation that doesn't give a shit if their users are actually happy so long as the users are locked into the ecosystem (or too lazy / stupid to break out of it).
Gee whiz, I'm so glad our lords and masters at the federal government have decided to allow us the privilege.
Y'know I'm so glad to live in the land of the free where we need the permission of the federal government to so much as flush our toilets, buy light bulbs, and fly drones that we paid for with our own money.
You could buy a big old airplane too but you'd still need to get it maintained according to regulations and have a license to fly it and I want it that way because I don't want just anyone who can afford to buy something to be able to crash it into my house because they have no clue of what they're doing.
If you've got a large brick and mortar store somewhere, you can have someone keep track of the taxes for that specific location. This scales well, because it's a relatively small fixed cost for each location. You don't have to know things like tax zone boundaries, because sales tax is calculated at the store and ignores where the customer's from. Your store can keep track of all the odd categories, tax holidays, etc. that apply to that one specific location.
Calculating the sales tax owed at a customer location is a far harder problem. It requires determining the tax zone and knowing all of the oddities of all the sales tax laws all over the country.
You're missing my point.
Stores like Target and Walmart, Shop-Rite whatever are in every state in the country. They know every tax law that they need to know, presumably.
A company like Amazon will have no problem having this knowledge.
Granted it would kill smaller businesses or force them to go through a clearinghouse like Amazon marketplace which is not a good thing.
If only we had some kind of calculating device that could reference a table of tax rates updated on a regular basis...
If that's all it took...
Let's say you are shipping a fluorescent yellow vest from California to Minnesota. In Minnesota, clothing is not taxable, but safety equipment is. Do you collect tax on it? Does their state consider it clothing or safety equipment? Add a pair of reading glasses to their order. Minnesota taxes general merchandise at one rate, while medical devices are taxed at a much lower rate. Which rate do you choose? Or are glasses considered clothing, because you wear them? What about a boxed set of grill accessories that includes a fork, a spatula, an apron, and an oven mitt?
Now ship a swimsuit to Pennsylvania. Clothing is taxable there, but sporting goods are not. Is swimwear taxable there? How does your cart service even know if it's a swimsuit when your online site only knows the product as Item#123456?
Next, ship a bicycle fender to a Houston, Texas, address. The law says you pay a higher tax rate if there is a public bus stop on your block. What tax rate do you charge?
Ship another fender to a Colorado address. They not only have sales taxes, but they have fees on some items, because some politician vowed not to raise taxes, but made no such promises about fees. Do you collect those fees on a fender? Do you charge sales taxes on those fees?
Do you charge tax on the shipping? That depends on whether you are shipping as a service to the customer (services are taxable in some states), or if you're shipping it because you don't stock the product in their state (a business expense.). Do you charge shipping taxes at the rate of the point of origin, or at the rate of the destination? To which state do you send the money?
In all these states, anyone doing business in their borders has to answer these questions because it's their law. Do I have to know every law in every town in America?
The states are a mess of thousands of such stupid and incompatible laws, each passed on behalf of some corrupt politician's crony. Never think it's easy just because it seems like simple math.
In each of those states there are businesses already selling the products (and services) in question and they manage to figure out what to charge how much tax on.
Presumably Target and Walmart are in every state and yet they manage to figure out what to charge tax on and at what percentage.
Of course Amazon (and us as buyers) have no interest in collecting or paying sales tax so we find reasons against but really, there is no good reason against.
Regardless of how self serving or fraudulent you may think she is, the odds of Hilary accidentally plunging the whole planet into world War three due to ineptitude seems significantly lower than with Trump.
The great majority (if not all) of wars was caused by self-serving leaders, and never by incompetence. Psychopatic minds only interested in their own benefit, financial and political, have been the motive force behind practically all wars in recorded history.
What part of Trump's personality do you believe doesn't fit your description?
What's a "calorie poor country"? Anyways, if the vague meaning of your statement is that " the rich is fat", sorry, you're just wrong. The US is fat, not all the wealthy nations. Norway has a far higher per-capita GDP than the US, a better and fairer wealth distribution, and a far lower obesity rate.
A calorie poor country is where there isn't enough food for everyone which makes food - or calories - equivalent to wealth.
Examples include much of Asia and Africa where if you are not wealthy then you cannot eat enough to get fat.
Wealthy nations are, by definition, not calorie poor.
Calorie poor countries tend to have relatively wealthy people who are overweight because they can be and poor people can't be.
Honestly any business using the "cloud" is utterly insane. Quit being cheapskates and buy servers and software, hire an IT person at high 5 figures and take it out of the CEO's pay.
Honestly you have to be insane to trust all your businesses secrets to a freaking cloud service.
Thus the rise of the 'hybrid cloud'.
As the free market will adjust by lower prices which in turn mean more people can now spend money on more products and it will equalize again as long as we do not do anything about it like government interference.
Also, the world population is increasing at an alarming rate! As poorer countries prosper these new kids will turn into adults and buy more products fullfilling the demand again. Globalization is doing amazing things in China and it is now starting to return the favor of money flowing in the other direction
...and these people will buy products with what money?
The whole point of the article is that the number of jobs is shrinking.
No jobs = no money unless there is welfare / basic living allowance.
Third world countries where there is neither welfare nor basic living allowance and it doesn't matter how cheap things are...no job = no money = starving on the street.
I would like to say that I believe that just giving a BLI is only part of a solution.
Education should be free up to whatever level someone wants to be educated - including university at any level, for any degree.
Will most degrees be useless?
Yes. So what.
It's better than having a bunch of ignorant people living on the BLI that aren't improving themselves in some way or another.
Given that Brussels, where the EU bigheads find themselves fairly often, is in Belgium this would appear to include them as well.
Wonder how long it'll be before the EU puts pressure on BE to actually make safe (however that needs to be done) the reactors in question.
Around where I live, $50K, including said overtime, is damn near poverty.
So...middle class.
Isn't everyone here a tech worker? Does anyone here actually make under 50k?
I employ people who make under 50k...
At this point, why rely on visual cues outside of the phone at all? If they're looking at the phone and have location enabled, on-screen notifications could tell them when the light is green. This avoids them having to notice the periphery at all, which is less likely if they're into a particularly intense sexting session or game of Farmville.
Maybe because network / cpu delay would = a dead user ?
I sure as hell wouldn't take the risk of writing / publishing / backing such an app.
If everyone had an extra $1000 a month to spend, I could see prices simply increasing in proportion. For example, housing, which in the US is mostly bought and sold in a competitive market. If you and I have an extra $10,000 to bid on a house, guess what? The price of the house simply goes up, absorbing the UBI and negating its utility everywhere else. So housing becomes more expensive for a person with no other income, reducing the benefit of the UBI for food and other necessities.
For every person who needs that house today in order to live in the city and make a living, another person will no longer need to live in the city to make a living and will go live in the middle of a forest (or whatever) adjusting prices in the city back downwards.
Greece's former finance minister probably has as much credibility in financial matters as Steve Jobs had on cancer treatment.
Which is like saying that Franklin D. Roosevelt has as much credit as George Dubbya.
Austerity didn't get them into trouble. Spending like there was no limit got them into trouble. Apparently the solution when you've got too much debt is to spend more!
Half right.
Overspending got them into trouble.
Too great a degree of austerity choked their economy even further.
Austerity is a great idea but as with all great ideas, timing is key.
I am guilty of ageism: I prefer to work with older people.
:) Me too...
I'm 40, I recently interviewed for a video/sound editor position and the under 25 crowd is indeed willing to work for cheap, but for heaven's sake, can one of them please show up with a tie on?
The 40 year olds who show up for an interview? Suits and ties.
No, the position will never require you wear a suit or tie, you can come to work in t-shirts and jeans if you want, but the suit says "I'm here because I want the job and I'm serious about that".
----
15 years ago I was interviewing for my first flying job, it was a $16/hr no-benefits part time position. I showed up in a suit and tie. One of the pilots there (wearing jeans and a t-shirt) joked, "what's with the monkey suit", to which I replied, "I want the job, this says that from the minute I walk in the door".
I got the job, never wore a suit there of course, but even during the interview I was asked about that, same answer. Did it make a difference? I have no idea, but it didn't hurt.
Whereas if you show up in a suit and tie for an interview in some other vertical (ISPs come to mind) you may fail on that same (somewhat stupid IMHO) basis.
It is important to understand the corporate culture wherever you're trying to get into.
we all KNOW this is a problem.
we all know h1b is a problem.
but the place where it needs to be discussed - the national stage of public opinion, perhaps prompted by news coverage (crickets chirping sound heard) - it is NOT discussed. its swept under the rug.
I'm in the bay area, I'm over 50 and I've been a sw/hw guy since my teens. I'm currently out of work, looking, and its been dead for months, for me, so far. this is typical and usual, sad to say, and I have a little more time left before I'm empty and near bankruptcy again. yet again. I don't know if I'll ever see reliable employment in tech ever again.
I have tons of experience and a great resume. but I'm older, white, male, independant and aware of management's BS; and I guess ALL of that is out of favor for hiring prospects.
I really wish this was made more visible to non-geeks. taking to geeks is not useful, about this, as we all know about it already.
Why haven't you started a company? Certainly you seem to have everything required. Find a way to make it happen. Assuming you can't get finance, start with one customer and find another and then find more.
I've done it. You can do it.