Well, if you have 99% of the population female and 1% male, unless they are monogamous, you can have 99% of the population procreating. It seems like a way to ensure lots of new baby turtles...
It would be interesting. Either they cut their EU operations or their US corporations, or go bankrupt from the fines from either of them.
Personally I'd split the company. One EU company serving EU customers, one US company serving US customers. The EU company falls under European law, the US company under US law.
True, but note that this factory might very well be able to run 24/7. Factories with large numbers of human workers tend to lie idle 10-12 hours a day, and I imagine that is even true in Bangladesh.
Had the same thing happen to me, except within the organisation. My boss didn't offer me a raise until I told him I was leaving him to another part of the organisation. I told him it was too late.
It seems to me the choice of examples is intended to show Facebook is racist. But in my opinion it fails to do so. Their rules may be stupid, but if applied consistently they are not racist.
Example: White men is protected, but Black Children is not. Ok. Question. Is Black men protected? I assume so, if I understand the Facebook rules correctly. Is White children protected? Again, if I understand the Facebook rules correctly, then the answer is no.
So what do we have: white children. Not protected. black children, not protected. white men: protected. black men: protected.
Then the sex discrimination that is implied: apparently female drivers is not protected, while white men is. Fine. But the question is: Is 'white females' protected? If I understand the rules correctly, yes it is. Is mMale drivers protected? If I understand the rules correctly, it isn't.
So what do we have: white males protected, as is white females (and consequently, also black females). female drivers not protected, male drivers not protected.
So based in the information I see, you cannot conclude that Facebook's rules are either racist or sexist. They are stupid as fuck, but not racist or sexist.
I do sentences only for important passwords. Something like: When I went to bed I saw 7 little orange elephants!
And I typically don't write those down, I just remember them (I just have 3 or 4 important passwords/phrases to remember, the rest is pretty much irrelevant)
If I have to change the important passwords, I change the number in there. Of when I have 2 numbers in there, I change one up by 1 and the other down by one.
I don't need a password manager. I have a little book in my home where I write down user names and passwords for all important websites I use. Try and hack that.
Fat chance anyone would ever break into my home and take it, so it's worth the risk to me.
This could be bad for US tech companies. As I understand it, this Act is important for the EU to allow US companies to store information for EU-customers on US servers. No privacy-protection could mean all that has to be moved to the EU.
Why would you want to secede? Far more productive to call for maximum state rights with a Republican president, House and Senate. Should be difficult for them to resist that, seeing how they have been champion for 'state rights' for so long, and if you defund the federal government to the point of it becoming non-functional, California gets nearly all the benefits of independence and little of the acrimony that a secession would cause.
Just ask for:
- end of federal medicare, medicaid, education.
- End of federal criminal law
- right for states to determine who gets to live there (Republican states want to ban muslim refugees from coming in, why not ride that wave and claim a right for every state to allow or disallow any immigrant for any reason.) You could call them the 'Right to Live here' states, like you have the 'right to work' states.
And of course, a corresponding drop in the federal tax rate if they don't have to fund all that stuff anymore.
Accomplish that, and California is as good as independent (just like all the other states), without any of the nasty talk about actual secession and civil war and stuff.
I read an interesting article about the possibility of just burying trees in huge amounts to capture carbon.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Might that not be more easily scaleable than carbon capture systems near powerplants?
I have no doubt that the EU will be hypocrits with regards to applying their own policies and their judgement of others. Hopefully the WTO will sort this out.
But still, IMO that is irrelevant for the Apple case. Just like in the US you can't complain that the government has no business prosecuting X because unrelated person or company Y in a different case got away with it too, or that it's ok if you bribe a US government official because the US government bribed government officials of other countries.
As for the proof something was available to some companies but not others, I think the European Commission will not find it too difficult to prove it. They can just subpoena all the tax rulings the Irish tax office has made in the past decade or so. They have made similar demands of many member states in the past. Example:
https://www.ft.com/content/6fc...
Perhaps I worded it not carefully enough. Ireland is free to set its tax rate as low as it wants. The complaint is not that the tax rate is too low, but that it did not correctly apply it to Apple, letting Apple pay much less taxes. Its almost the equivalent of setting a VAT rate for Apple Iphones of 5%, and setting it for Samsung at 25%. That is unfair.
If Ireland wanted so little corporate income tax from Apple, it had a very simple solution. Lower the statutory rate. If Ireland wants to set a statutory rate of 0.005%, the European Commission can do nothing. But if Ireland sets a rate of 12.5%, it should impose that rate on all companies, not just the small ones and letting Apple or other big companies off with a sweetheart deal.
It's very simple: If you want low taxes, lower the statutory rate. If you want high taxes, increase the statutory rate. Stop with all the bullshit special rules and special fiscal regimes for companies that try to find loopholes. Because this is what you get. And I applaud the European Commission for doing this, because even if they fail in this case, in the long run, the legal uncertainty they create helps combat this stupid practice by national governments and the companies that exploit them.
Apple may have followed the law, Ireland has not. Apple is not getting fined by the EU, Ireland is told it collected too few taxes, and they have to collect them after all. Its a matter of tax fairness. Countires cannot offer sweetheart deals to individual companies. The EU slapped the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg earlier, and now its Irelands turn. This cannot have come as a huge surprise to Apple, considering the precedents.
There is in principal no difference between this ruling and earlier rulings againt Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg. Its just bigger. And no, they were not dismissed.
In my opinion Ireland and Apple brought this on themselves. If Ireland wants Apple to pay only 0,05% in taxes, fine. All Ireland has to do is lower the statutory rate to that level. But you can't set a 12.5% rate and then give sweetheart deals to big multinationals. That is simply illegal in the EU. Setting a general rate of 0.05% is legal.
I am not a very security minded person. All I do is make it a sentence. A long sentence (as long as the system allows). With a number in it, so that if the system wants another bloody password, I just increase the number by 1.
For example: Little red robin likes to eat 27 pears now.
Works well enough for me, though maybe I just don't realize when my accounts get compromised.
What would prevent Amazon or Netflix from just approaching some YouTubers in these countries, offering them 100 euro for the worst and most crappy movies ever produced in French, German and all the other European languages, and putting these on their platform as the 'required local content quota fillers'. Hey, if 20% has to be European, nobody ever said it had to be the best European movies and shows...
I would be more than willing to produce Dutch content for Netflix, consisting of hourlong diatribes against ridiculous European regulations designed to protect crappy content from competition. Hell, I'd probably do it for free. My German is just good enough to even produce a rant in German, which could potentially be submitted under comedy, considering my mediocre german vocabulary and pronunciation skills.
If this continues, what I expect to see soon is encryption that decrypts in 2 different unencrypted versions, dependent on the decryption key used.
I can't imagine its that difficult. Make an encryption program that has the option of just normal encryption with 1 decryption key, but the added option of using a second decryption key, and a second set of files. For example: John Doe has 2 harddisks, each with 40 GB of information. One contains the blueprints of the F22 Raptor, the other the complete works from the Gutenberg Project, in 7 different languages. John Doe uses the encryption program to create a single encrypted file, size 80+ GB on a bigger harddisk. If John enters the password Gutenberg, the program decrypts the file into the Gutenberg library. If John enters the password Raptor, he gets the blueprints for the F22. Now law enforcement, if they find the file, not only have to force him to decrypt it, they have to prove there is a SECOND decryption key. If the program uses standard padding of the encrypted file with 100-200% of the original data, they could not even prove that there is a second decryption key just by looking at the size difference between the encrypted file and the Gutenberg library file.
I don't think that is possible. If you have a specific law and a general law that you broke with 1 single action, as far as I understand, you have to prosecute under the specific law, not the general one. VW lawyers would just tell the judge that there was a more specific law applicable here.
Except that by extending the duration of copyright to absurd lengths, it starts to invalidate the whole concept of copyright. If copyright was just 5 years, rights owners would have a much stronger moral case about doing something about infringement. I don't infringe copyrights anymore (did it when I was in university, but now I have too little time to watch TV anyway and more than enough money to pay for the few things I do still watch), but on a fundamental level I have zero respect for copyright, simply because how far it has strayed from its original, quite noble origins under the influence of money-grabbing companies and the politicians they have bought to do their bidding.
Now if copyright were 5 years long, I'd say that would be a reasonable amount of time that a creator can claim protection for its creation. 10 years? Bit long but acceptable. You could even cut copyright in two: commercial copyright and non-commercial copyright. Make non-commercial copyright last 10 years, make commercial copyright last 50 years. With the difference being that after 10 years people are allowed to copy your stuff, but not try to make money with it until commercial copyright ends.
But the current system? I'd rather see zero copyright than the idiocy we have today.
If its all negative, why not abolish the minimum wage?
Now to answer your question. Simply put, because there are trade-offs. Now we can argue until we are blue in the face at what level of minimum wage the outcome is best, but I think its safe to say that a level of $500 dollars an hour is sub-optimal. Also please note that even the most ardent unionist, at least as far as I know, ever argued for a $500 an hour minimum wage or even a $50 an hour minimum wage, so clearly they too are aware that there are trade-offs.
As an economist, I could not agree more. If the minimumwage is higher than the equilibrium price, that will cause unemployment.
However, have you considered the possibility that the equilibrium price rises if wages rise? If I have a shop in LA, yes I will have to pay a higher wage to the guy helping me stock the shelves. But if at the same time, the people who frequent my shop buy more stuff, I may still need him to prevent my customers from seeing empty shelves and moving to a competitor down the street. So in effect, raising the minimum wage has increased the equilibrium price of having a guy help me stock shelves as I stand to lose more if customers go elsewhere in that circumstance.
Now that still doesn't tell me whether THIS increase in the minimum wage increases unemployment or not. For example because what we also don't know is what the current equilibrium price is. You seem to assume that is lies somewhere near the current minimumwage. Why? If I look at profits for corporations, I might assume that the equilibrium wage is considerably higher than the current minimumwage.
What if the equilibrium price for most labor in LA is already 14 dollars an hour or more? And the fact that millions are paid less than 14 dollars an hour just means more money in the pocket for a few business owners 2000 miles away? In that case I would expect the increase of the minimumwage to have a beneficial effect on employment. After all, it would mean a huge increase in wages for many people who live and spend locally, at the detriment of some business-owners who may live thousands of miles away, and even if they live in the area certainly will not consume every bit of their earnings locally. The increase in wages could even very well push the equilibrium price to a level higher than 15$ an hour.
name the diseases after fictional characters?
Name diseases after Palpatine, Cartman, Wile E. Coyote etc. etc. Instantly recognizeable, no feelings get hurt. And personally I vote to rename Ebola to Nurgle's disease!
They can't judge the constitutionality of laws and treaties, but they are allowed to judge whether a law is against a treaty, which is what they did in this case. And treaties in the Netherlands are senior to laws.
I wasn't really referring to the detection thingy. I have no clue what we can or cannot detect.
Mirrors would be in the invasion scenario. Considering that if they wanna invade us, there is no need to be subtle, just efficient. After all, we can discuss for ages what their advantage would be technologically, but there is one advantage which is undeniable if they are hovering over us in big-ass ships, and that is that gravity is on their side. If they can destroy us without even setting foot on the planet or ever entering our atmosphere, our near complete inability to send anything into space would doom us from the start.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you have 99% of the population female and 1% male, unless they are monogamous, you can have 99% of the population procreating. It seems like a way to ensure lots of new baby turtles...
It would be interesting. Either they cut their EU operations or their US corporations, or go bankrupt from the fines from either of them. Personally I'd split the company. One EU company serving EU customers, one US company serving US customers. The EU company falls under European law, the US company under US law.
True, but note that this factory might very well be able to run 24/7. Factories with large numbers of human workers tend to lie idle 10-12 hours a day, and I imagine that is even true in Bangladesh.
Had the same thing happen to me, except within the organisation. My boss didn't offer me a raise until I told him I was leaving him to another part of the organisation. I told him it was too late.
It seems to me the choice of examples is intended to show Facebook is racist. But in my opinion it fails to do so. Their rules may be stupid, but if applied consistently they are not racist. Example: White men is protected, but Black Children is not. Ok. Question. Is Black men protected? I assume so, if I understand the Facebook rules correctly. Is White children protected? Again, if I understand the Facebook rules correctly, then the answer is no. So what do we have: white children. Not protected. black children, not protected. white men: protected. black men: protected. Then the sex discrimination that is implied: apparently female drivers is not protected, while white men is. Fine. But the question is: Is 'white females' protected? If I understand the rules correctly, yes it is. Is mMale drivers protected? If I understand the rules correctly, it isn't. So what do we have: white males protected, as is white females (and consequently, also black females). female drivers not protected, male drivers not protected. So based in the information I see, you cannot conclude that Facebook's rules are either racist or sexist. They are stupid as fuck, but not racist or sexist.
I do sentences only for important passwords. Something like: When I went to bed I saw 7 little orange elephants! And I typically don't write those down, I just remember them (I just have 3 or 4 important passwords/phrases to remember, the rest is pretty much irrelevant) If I have to change the important passwords, I change the number in there. Of when I have 2 numbers in there, I change one up by 1 and the other down by one.
I don't need a password manager. I have a little book in my home where I write down user names and passwords for all important websites I use. Try and hack that. Fat chance anyone would ever break into my home and take it, so it's worth the risk to me.
This could be bad for US tech companies. As I understand it, this Act is important for the EU to allow US companies to store information for EU-customers on US servers. No privacy-protection could mean all that has to be moved to the EU.
Why would you want to secede? Far more productive to call for maximum state rights with a Republican president, House and Senate. Should be difficult for them to resist that, seeing how they have been champion for 'state rights' for so long, and if you defund the federal government to the point of it becoming non-functional, California gets nearly all the benefits of independence and little of the acrimony that a secession would cause. Just ask for: - end of federal medicare, medicaid, education. - End of federal criminal law - right for states to determine who gets to live there (Republican states want to ban muslim refugees from coming in, why not ride that wave and claim a right for every state to allow or disallow any immigrant for any reason.) You could call them the 'Right to Live here' states, like you have the 'right to work' states. And of course, a corresponding drop in the federal tax rate if they don't have to fund all that stuff anymore. Accomplish that, and California is as good as independent (just like all the other states), without any of the nasty talk about actual secession and civil war and stuff.
I read an interesting article about the possibility of just burying trees in huge amounts to capture carbon. https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... Might that not be more easily scaleable than carbon capture systems near powerplants?
I have no doubt that the EU will be hypocrits with regards to applying their own policies and their judgement of others. Hopefully the WTO will sort this out. But still, IMO that is irrelevant for the Apple case. Just like in the US you can't complain that the government has no business prosecuting X because unrelated person or company Y in a different case got away with it too, or that it's ok if you bribe a US government official because the US government bribed government officials of other countries. As for the proof something was available to some companies but not others, I think the European Commission will not find it too difficult to prove it. They can just subpoena all the tax rulings the Irish tax office has made in the past decade or so. They have made similar demands of many member states in the past. Example: https://www.ft.com/content/6fc...
Perhaps I worded it not carefully enough. Ireland is free to set its tax rate as low as it wants. The complaint is not that the tax rate is too low, but that it did not correctly apply it to Apple, letting Apple pay much less taxes. Its almost the equivalent of setting a VAT rate for Apple Iphones of 5%, and setting it for Samsung at 25%. That is unfair. If Ireland wanted so little corporate income tax from Apple, it had a very simple solution. Lower the statutory rate. If Ireland wants to set a statutory rate of 0.005%, the European Commission can do nothing. But if Ireland sets a rate of 12.5%, it should impose that rate on all companies, not just the small ones and letting Apple or other big companies off with a sweetheart deal. It's very simple: If you want low taxes, lower the statutory rate. If you want high taxes, increase the statutory rate. Stop with all the bullshit special rules and special fiscal regimes for companies that try to find loopholes. Because this is what you get. And I applaud the European Commission for doing this, because even if they fail in this case, in the long run, the legal uncertainty they create helps combat this stupid practice by national governments and the companies that exploit them.
Apple may have followed the law, Ireland has not. Apple is not getting fined by the EU, Ireland is told it collected too few taxes, and they have to collect them after all. Its a matter of tax fairness. Countires cannot offer sweetheart deals to individual companies. The EU slapped the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg earlier, and now its Irelands turn. This cannot have come as a huge surprise to Apple, considering the precedents.
There is in principal no difference between this ruling and earlier rulings againt Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg. Its just bigger. And no, they were not dismissed. In my opinion Ireland and Apple brought this on themselves. If Ireland wants Apple to pay only 0,05% in taxes, fine. All Ireland has to do is lower the statutory rate to that level. But you can't set a 12.5% rate and then give sweetheart deals to big multinationals. That is simply illegal in the EU. Setting a general rate of 0.05% is legal.
I am not a very security minded person. All I do is make it a sentence. A long sentence (as long as the system allows). With a number in it, so that if the system wants another bloody password, I just increase the number by 1. For example: Little red robin likes to eat 27 pears now. Works well enough for me, though maybe I just don't realize when my accounts get compromised.
What would prevent Amazon or Netflix from just approaching some YouTubers in these countries, offering them 100 euro for the worst and most crappy movies ever produced in French, German and all the other European languages, and putting these on their platform as the 'required local content quota fillers'. Hey, if 20% has to be European, nobody ever said it had to be the best European movies and shows... I would be more than willing to produce Dutch content for Netflix, consisting of hourlong diatribes against ridiculous European regulations designed to protect crappy content from competition. Hell, I'd probably do it for free. My German is just good enough to even produce a rant in German, which could potentially be submitted under comedy, considering my mediocre german vocabulary and pronunciation skills.
If this continues, what I expect to see soon is encryption that decrypts in 2 different unencrypted versions, dependent on the decryption key used. I can't imagine its that difficult. Make an encryption program that has the option of just normal encryption with 1 decryption key, but the added option of using a second decryption key, and a second set of files. For example: John Doe has 2 harddisks, each with 40 GB of information. One contains the blueprints of the F22 Raptor, the other the complete works from the Gutenberg Project, in 7 different languages. John Doe uses the encryption program to create a single encrypted file, size 80+ GB on a bigger harddisk. If John enters the password Gutenberg, the program decrypts the file into the Gutenberg library. If John enters the password Raptor, he gets the blueprints for the F22. Now law enforcement, if they find the file, not only have to force him to decrypt it, they have to prove there is a SECOND decryption key. If the program uses standard padding of the encrypted file with 100-200% of the original data, they could not even prove that there is a second decryption key just by looking at the size difference between the encrypted file and the Gutenberg library file.
I don't think that is possible. If you have a specific law and a general law that you broke with 1 single action, as far as I understand, you have to prosecute under the specific law, not the general one. VW lawyers would just tell the judge that there was a more specific law applicable here.
Except that by extending the duration of copyright to absurd lengths, it starts to invalidate the whole concept of copyright. If copyright was just 5 years, rights owners would have a much stronger moral case about doing something about infringement. I don't infringe copyrights anymore (did it when I was in university, but now I have too little time to watch TV anyway and more than enough money to pay for the few things I do still watch), but on a fundamental level I have zero respect for copyright, simply because how far it has strayed from its original, quite noble origins under the influence of money-grabbing companies and the politicians they have bought to do their bidding. Now if copyright were 5 years long, I'd say that would be a reasonable amount of time that a creator can claim protection for its creation. 10 years? Bit long but acceptable. You could even cut copyright in two: commercial copyright and non-commercial copyright. Make non-commercial copyright last 10 years, make commercial copyright last 50 years. With the difference being that after 10 years people are allowed to copy your stuff, but not try to make money with it until commercial copyright ends. But the current system? I'd rather see zero copyright than the idiocy we have today.
If its all negative, why not abolish the minimum wage? Now to answer your question. Simply put, because there are trade-offs. Now we can argue until we are blue in the face at what level of minimum wage the outcome is best, but I think its safe to say that a level of $500 dollars an hour is sub-optimal. Also please note that even the most ardent unionist, at least as far as I know, ever argued for a $500 an hour minimum wage or even a $50 an hour minimum wage, so clearly they too are aware that there are trade-offs.
As an economist, I could not agree more. If the minimumwage is higher than the equilibrium price, that will cause unemployment. However, have you considered the possibility that the equilibrium price rises if wages rise? If I have a shop in LA, yes I will have to pay a higher wage to the guy helping me stock the shelves. But if at the same time, the people who frequent my shop buy more stuff, I may still need him to prevent my customers from seeing empty shelves and moving to a competitor down the street. So in effect, raising the minimum wage has increased the equilibrium price of having a guy help me stock shelves as I stand to lose more if customers go elsewhere in that circumstance. Now that still doesn't tell me whether THIS increase in the minimum wage increases unemployment or not. For example because what we also don't know is what the current equilibrium price is. You seem to assume that is lies somewhere near the current minimumwage. Why? If I look at profits for corporations, I might assume that the equilibrium wage is considerably higher than the current minimumwage. What if the equilibrium price for most labor in LA is already 14 dollars an hour or more? And the fact that millions are paid less than 14 dollars an hour just means more money in the pocket for a few business owners 2000 miles away? In that case I would expect the increase of the minimumwage to have a beneficial effect on employment. After all, it would mean a huge increase in wages for many people who live and spend locally, at the detriment of some business-owners who may live thousands of miles away, and even if they live in the area certainly will not consume every bit of their earnings locally. The increase in wages could even very well push the equilibrium price to a level higher than 15$ an hour.
name the diseases after fictional characters? Name diseases after Palpatine, Cartman, Wile E. Coyote etc. etc. Instantly recognizeable, no feelings get hurt. And personally I vote to rename Ebola to Nurgle's disease!
They can't judge the constitutionality of laws and treaties, but they are allowed to judge whether a law is against a treaty, which is what they did in this case. And treaties in the Netherlands are senior to laws.
Very old news. After all, isn't a landmine just an updated type of punji pit?
I wasn't really referring to the detection thingy. I have no clue what we can or cannot detect. Mirrors would be in the invasion scenario. Considering that if they wanna invade us, there is no need to be subtle, just efficient. After all, we can discuss for ages what their advantage would be technologically, but there is one advantage which is undeniable if they are hovering over us in big-ass ships, and that is that gravity is on their side. If they can destroy us without even setting foot on the planet or ever entering our atmosphere, our near complete inability to send anything into space would doom us from the start.