The article, like most, quotes the maximum anyone could ever get for violating a particular statute. Rarely does anyone get the maximum. The judge takes into account exactly what the person did, their record, etc. In most cases, the penalty is actually negotiated with the defendant via their attorney.
The crime he was charged with would be something like "intentionally destroying property greater than $10,000". That covers taking a baseball bat to your ex-boyfriend's car, destroying the school computers, intentionally driving a bulldozer through someone's house, and lots of other ways of destroying lots of things. The WORST possible cases of "intentionally destroying property valued *over* $10,000" could get 10 years, if the defendant told the judge "fuck you, I'll do it again when I get out".
You can reduce the judge's descretion by enacting a specific law against "destroying a schools computers" and another law against "destroying your neighbor's car" ans another against "destroying the judge's house", but I think we have enough laws already.
It occurs to me that the overall shape of the 100 meter International Space Station can be seen with binoculars, resting atop one's car.
At the same altitude, and ten times that distance, 1km, a shape could be visible to the naked eye. (Cubesats 1km apart, each holding a mylar sail). At 1km distance between, they'd orbit almost as if it was one object. In fact, they could be attached with mylar coated tethers.
At an altitude lower than IIS, they could be slightly closer together, or appear larger.
Email has from and to addresses, in the envelope as well as the headers. So it doesn't have the same issue in terms of fundamental logic. Emails from from some address, phone calls don't come from a "phone number" (DID). So that's a fundamental difference.
Note that like the phone system, email addresses can be something like customerservice@acme.com - a role or service, NOT a device, and certainly not a person.
So you can't identify a particular device as customerservice@acme.com, and similarly you can't say a certain phone is 979-580-6540.
On my phone, I can check three different email addresses. I can also check the same email from my laptop. So we recognize that an email address doesn't identify a device.
What some people don't realize is that my phone I'm typing on right now can be reached from three different numbers, and one of those numbers can also be answered from a different device. My phone isn't identified by a phone number any more than it's identified by an email address.
For PRACTICAL purposes, some of the same issues apply. An email from your bank doesn't necessarily come from the same place they answer emails. Consider password reset for the web site. The web server can send email, it can't receive email. So you can't verify the From by reversing the route.
Email has mechanisms such as SPF to verify the From address. Phone has no such mechanism and can't because fundamentally there is no from phone number. You'd need to switch the world 's 10 billion phones to a different protocol in order to introduce a "station from" or "service from" identifier.
What direct inward dial number would you prefer? Web servers don't take incoming phone calls, they take incoming web requests; they don't have DIDs, they have names like www27.1stbank.com
> so when someone calls a number they know which destination network to switch the call to
Yes, and TO is the operative word. A phone number is technically known as a DID number - Direct Inward Dial. A DID (phone number) indicates which service (not station aka phone) a call is being placed to. There is no such thing as a DOD, Direct Outward Dial number. Consider this very simple case:
You are logging in to your bank web site, Second National Bank.com. Your bank doesn't suck, so it has multifactor communication. The web server triggers a call to your registered phone number. The logical caller ID of the call would be the bank's customer service or security phone number, a number you can call back.
The call is coming from a server in one of four data centers the bank has, based on a web request. You're not going to have customer service reps in the datacenter. Customer service reps are in a different state, with a different regional phone company. The call is coming from the bank's rack in a Level 3 data center, or maybe their servers are in AWS. In any event, they aren't likely to be in the same place as the customer service department.
Customer service gets their phone service from Cincinnati Bell. The servers are in AWS Oregon and Virginia.
A call comes FROM a station, it doesn't come from a DID. The networks used to call into a company (Cincinnati Bell in this case) are very often not the networks they use for all of their communications. Even my three-person company had two separate service providers for DIDs (numbers) and bandwidth (used for outgoing calls).
You can create an Azure or Amazon bucket with any name you want, such as frog.denver, hfjskfhd.fjshdjd.hdhdjhs, or secure.microsoft.com. These are NOT DNS names. They're just arbitrary strings.
In the DNS, Microsoft has the DNS name pointed to Azure. Azure then has that name pointed to a bucket which just happens to have the same name. It could have any name. If Microsoft deletes the bucket (or other resource), anyone else can create one that happens to have the same name.
I don't like the term, but in government the term is cyber. Twenty years in information security here. I will never call it "cyber", unless I'm talking about something government related. The guy putting together a $450 million federal contract for infosec is doing a cyber contract.
-- Though I think it might be worth mentioning that recent study that suggests that resisting temptation is actually something that *everybody* sucks at - and the choices we commonly attribute to "willpower" seem to actually correlate not with resisting temptation, but avoiding it. --
I've read the same. I've seen the same principle in a different context. An alcoholic getting sober very often can't "not drink", they can "clean out the closet". Sitting around focusing on not drinking doesn't work. A study of four-year-olds found they had a lot of trouble not eating a cookie that was on the table, in order to get two cookies later. However, they had much less trouble going outside, away from the cookies, then returning to eat two cookies.
Because I discovered that most of the stupid I've done in my life comes down to immediate gratification vs longer term thinking, I've put some effort into teaching this idea to my four-year-old daughter. She's picked it up amazingly well. Heck, she's saving to go to Disneyland, while her classmates have trouble saving a cookie for after they finish their sandwich. This shows me that it CAN be taught. Which matches up with what we know about Asian and middle eastern cultures. So that just leaves the question of HOW to teach it.
> what that is in whatever particular circumstance they're in. There's also those in poverty who have a very hard time *affording* to do the smart thing.
I've been homeless, living under a tarp in a vancant lot. I was the envelope of the other homeless people, who "couldn't afford" a tarp, but could afford a case or two of beer every day. Absolutely a lot of broke people truly believe they can't afford the 24-pack of toilet paper, so they keep buying the 4-pack. They buy a 4-pack on toilet paper and a six pack of soda. For the same amount of money, they COULD buy the 79 cent two liter of generic soda and the bigger pack of toilet paper. The next week, they wouldn't need more toilet paper and could instead upgrade the small box of cereal to the economy box. I've walked a few of them through this process. The fact is, they can't afford to keep buying the 4-pack of toilet paper, buying six of those, instead of the much cheaper 24-pack. They can find $3 to buy the economy pack of something, which saves them $5, which they CAN use to do something else smart that saves $10. They just don't know.
These are the same broke people who can't afford an apartment, so they get a weekly motel for $300/week. That's the same price as a medium sized house where I live. When I was broke, I stayed for a year in a $250/month mobile home (less than the cost of rhe weekly motel the broke people are in), while saving for a house. They can do it, they don't know how. Education again. (Also long-term vs short-term again).
I think to some extent the same applies to truly dumb people. They can't figure out what's smart, but they can be told. (Education).
The only people I've come across who truly can't succeed are those who, for emotional reasons (pride) refuse to learn. They know everything and won't listen to anyone else. I could give them step-by-step directions on exactly how to do something I've done, hand them all the tools, and they'd refuse to do it, you insisting I don't know what I'm talking about, or that I could only do it because I'm male or Asian or white or rich or American or whatever they think I am. The exact same process that always works can't work for them because they're female / gay / black / young / old / whatever. I have no solution for those who refuse to learn. I can only show them that I was poor and old, yet the recipe still worked - because the recipe doesn't care who is following it.
I forgot to mention, I like your signature. It reminds me of an eponymous law I read the other day, which I don't remember exactly. Something like "there are always people who think just as well, but differently, than you".
Of course this conversation may end up taking a trip through Hauser's law.
Anyway, it sounds like you'd like to discuss low-IQ people? It seems to me, based on personal experience, conversations with people from other countries, and the data I've seen, that far more people have trouble because contemporary American culture emphasizes instant gratification, de-emphasizing planning ahead and long-term thinking. That's the change that made a radical difference in my life, and it's what people from other countries comment on. Americans suck at thinking past next week, they say. Apparently we do a terrible job of instilling delayed gratification in our kids. So we eat horrible junk food that tastes good but makes us feel yucky even a few hours later, and that extends to all of our life decisions.
To me, addressing long-term vs short-term thinking seems like it may be more fruitful, but if you'd prefer we can try to figure out how society should deal with low-IQ people.
Less than 2% of the population has an IQ of 80. Would you like to talk about average anything, or would you like to talk about people who severe mental disablilities?
It kinda sounds like you may be suggesting that we should all be treated like we have major mental disorders, with the elites in Washington managing our lives.
So would you like to talk about mentally disabled people, or would you like to talk about the average burger flipper (seventeen years old, anxious to see which colleges accept them), or would you like to talk about the permanent burger flipper (skips school, shows up to work stoned, etc because they habitually chooses immediate gratification over long-term good, where long-term is anything more than a week)?
You happen to have a link to that contract, since apparently you've read it?
It's not unusual for a government contract to pay $X / year for the thing, with any changes or modifications of any kind requiring approval by the city, which means approval by several departments. The government is responsible for some things, such as providing locations to install the equipment, one contractor installs the utility power for the devices and keeps that running, another does the networking, a third provides the devices and their firmware.
A fix that involves 15 minutes fixing the code can involve months of bureacracy and coordinating who does what. Then one of the people at the city quits their job and you mostly start over with a new person who doesn't know what's going on.
I mentioned: -- Wealth-building is no different. You can either complain that some people do smart things, or you can start doing smart things too. --
In my experience, getting rich has been way more fun than mental masturbation and complaining. The classic text on how to do so is "The Millionaire Next Door". A more up-to-date book that's similar is "Everyday Millionaires". If you don't want to spend $15 for the book, Chris Hogan's podcast is free and makes good listening while driving.
I've worked in companies that were 100% employee owned. It's up to you how much stock you own vs how much cash. The classic rule of thumb suggestion is at least 15% stock (meaning no more than 85% cash). Yes, those who choose a significant proportion of stock are far more likely to end up wealthy.
People who brush their teeth are far more likely to end up with nice teeth. Knowing that, you can either:
A) Complain about it and maybe seek to have the government forcibly remove their teeth B) Brush your teeth, so that you too have nice teeth
Most people choose B.
Wealth-building is no different. You can either complain that some people do smart things, or you can start doing smart things too.
> I will refer you to this fragment which argues against the notion that stock ownership is equivalent to democratic ownership of the means of production
I don't think it makes that argument. I think it distinguishes between ownership and management. It points out that while you can simply check a box labeled "401k" to become an owner, that doesn't make you a manager, or specifically, the CEO.
The implication seems to enjoy that everyone should be the CEO. I've been the CEO of multiple companies. That was a bad idea. I shouldn't be the CEO. I'm much better at information security than I am at corporate mergers.
Anyway, there's theory, what could work in your imagination, and there's practice - what actually does work in the real world. In the real world, over 90% of millionaires got their via 401k and IRA. Over 90% never made more than 100k in a year. Rather, they checked the box to invest 10-15% of their *pre-tax* pay, and their employer typically added another 7%. Then the magic of compound interest kicked in. That's how the vast majority of millionaires became millionaires. I want to be a millionaire, so I'm doing exactly what the millionaires did. I check the box.
Ray Morris CHOOSES which companies he owns, putting 15% of his pay (plus 50% employer match) into the companies he chooses. Google had been one good choice.
I've owned the company I work for before, including owning 100% of it. When the company didn't do well, I lost both my job and my investment. I won't make that mistake again. I now put my job and my ownership in two different baskets.
For a couple years, I was 100% owner (had all the stock) of a company I didn't work for, which in some ways competed with my employer. So I was happy if either company won.
> While worker co-ops exist on a small scale, they can't compete
True. They exist, and generally don't do well compared to companies where the techs are profesional techs and the CEOs are professional CEOs. Generally, someone educated and trained to do a CEO job isn't very good at configuring routers, and someone trained in configuring routers isn't very good at selecting which companies their company should buy, or which divisions should be spun off as separate companies.
Actually specialization, each us being good at our own jobs rather than everyone doing everything, is what separates us from animals and hunter-gatherer tribes. When the auto mechanics are trying to run the auto company, they have no idea what they are doing and can't compete.
Credit unions and mutual insurance companies are successful models where the CUSTOMERS own the company. It works because the assets of these companies are simple dollars.
> Socialism is "democratic ownership of the means of production".
Almost. American capitalism is:
Employees can decide to be part owner of the company the company they work for, or any other company. Management often encourages yyu to br part owner (employee stock ownership program), but they can't force you to. You can choose to take cash instead of ownership.
Your proposed form of socialism is the same except your are FORCED to have ownership rather than cash.
Generally, if you lose your job, you hope your investments (company ownership) did well, because you'll need the money. If your investments do poorly, hopefully your job is doing well. So having your ownership (stock) in the same company you work for is kinda stupid - you're putting all of your eggs in one basket. If the company doesn't do well, you're fucked. It's generally smarter to have ownership (stock) in companies totally unrelated to the one you work for. That way if your job doesn't do well because your company or I has a slump, you can fall back on your investments.
That's where your idea of socialism is different than most people's. Most people who want socialism don't want that particular type of stupid added in, where one company having problems means you lose everything. Instead, they force you to be part owner of EVERY company. Instead of choosing which companies you own (as a stockholder), or having the choice to stay out of ownership for a while and take the cash, you, via politicians, theoretically have stock in every company. I suspect most of them don't realize that would make them an owner of Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Chick-fil-A, and even "Neo Nazi Quarterly" or whatever it's called.
Electronics ARE cheap. In quanity, you can build a quality phone charger for maybe $2. You can build a crappy phone charger for 75 cents. Neither costs much to manufacture, crappy ones cost half as much to make.
You can pretty easily find sites and videos where people disassemble phone chargers and also test them. There definitely IS a difference between a high quality charger and a low quality charger. Ifixit and others have disassembled Apple chargers and found they are even better than "good" chargers from other major companies, including better safety like better thermal and current overload protections.
It terms of production costs, you could buy a good charger for $5, a very good one for $10. The problem is knowing which ones are good. Apple will charge you $30 and you know it's high quality. You can spend $15 elsewhere and maybe get good quality, maybe get crap.
My gut feeling is the same as yours - consumers should have the right to see information stored about them.
Understand, though, the score is not about you, in way. It's 100% per-transaction - does this attempt to use your credentials seem risky. I've computed these scores. The system I designed may have been the very first one to use typing cadence in a broadly deployed system.
Here are three of examples of a dozen data points, three location computations. Is this attempt coming from the same geographic area that the legitimate user is normally in? Is it humanly possible for them to have traveled from where they were last time to this location? (For example if you log in Miami at 10:00 AM, then at noon someone in China claims to be you, that's suspect.) Is the attempt coming from a high-fraud area, such as Russia or China?
I can show you your typing cadence data; it will be meaningless to you. An attempted TRANSACTION is more trustworthy is the typing matches your normal typing. there nothing about how trustworthy YOU are, it's whether the attempted transaction is suspect based on how well it matches whatever number of criteria.
If you've you've always used the latest Firefox from Linux and from Android (in Florida), then suddenly someone tries to use your card from and old version of IE on Windows 7 in Nigeria, that's suspect. Not because Linux is more trustworthy, but because it doesn't match how you, the legitimate user, normally does things.
Some systems even track types of things purchased - if you only ever use your card at Walmart and Chevron, with no purchases over $200, and never use it online, then a $1,500 TV purchase from BestBuy.com is out of the ordinary.
We combine all of the criteria to compute a score for the transaction. The BestBuy.com purchase may be approved if it's made from Firefox on Linux on Florida - perhaps only if you enter the CVV2 code (the four digits on the back of the card).
Are you purposely conflating things to try to mislead readers, or did you just have a brain fart?
There are millions of Chevys out there. A hundred times as many Chevrolet as Model 3, but that's not what we're talking about.
The top three American made plug-in cars are: Volt Model S Model 3
Worldwide, BMW produces thousands i8 cars each month, and all of these are a joke to BYD, who makes more electric vehicles than Chevy, Tesla, and BMW combined.
> remember there are more than plenty of ICE options still out there.
And if you want an American plug-in for under $35k, you can pick up a Volt today. As a bonus, it also has an engine you can choose to use instead of stopping to charge ten minutes before you reach your destination. Maybe that's why there are more Volts on the road than Model 3 or Model S. Ford has three plug-ins to choose from, including options under $35,000.
That's just American plug-ins. Last month, 100,000 plug-ins were made by Chinese companies. In the last three months, China has made more electric cars than Tesla has made in ten years. You've got the Nissan Leaf, Rimac produces the world's fastest production electric car, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I was speaking of PTSN, vs SIP.
The SMTP standard, RFC 5321, states that the sender initiates an email with the line:
MAIL FROM email@address
The email address used in MAIL FROM (the envelope) is specified as the route for errors to be returned.
Also RFC 2822 requires a From address in the message itself.
Sounds like you knew how to do the numbers and arrived at the same conclusion - a tiny one would be hard, but probably not impossible.
He didn't get 10 years.
The article, like most, quotes the maximum anyone could ever get for violating a particular statute. Rarely does anyone get the maximum. The judge takes into account exactly what the person did, their record, etc. In most cases, the penalty is actually negotiated with the defendant via their attorney.
The crime he was charged with would be something like "intentionally destroying property greater than $10,000". That covers taking a baseball bat to your ex-boyfriend's car, destroying the school computers, intentionally driving a bulldozer through someone's house, and lots of other ways of destroying lots of things. The WORST possible cases of "intentionally destroying property valued *over* $10,000" could get 10 years, if the defendant told the judge "fuck you, I'll do it again when I get out".
You can reduce the judge's descretion by enacting a specific law against "destroying a schools computers" and another law against "destroying your neighbor's car" ans another against "destroying the judge's house", but I think we have enough laws already.
It occurs to me that the overall shape of the 100 meter International Space Station can be seen with binoculars, resting atop one's car.
At the same altitude, and ten times that distance, 1km, a shape could be visible to the naked eye. (Cubesats 1km apart, each holding a mylar sail). At 1km distance between, they'd orbit almost as if it was one object. In fact, they could be attached with mylar coated tethers.
At an altitude lower than IIS, they could be slightly closer together, or appear larger.
Email has from and to addresses, in the envelope as well as the headers. So it doesn't have the same issue in terms of fundamental logic. Emails from from some address, phone calls don't come from a "phone number" (DID). So that's a fundamental difference.
Note that like the phone system, email addresses can be something like customerservice@acme.com - a role or service, NOT a device, and certainly not a person.
So you can't identify a particular device as customerservice@acme.com, and similarly you can't say a certain phone is 979-580-6540.
On my phone, I can check three different email addresses. I can also check the same email from my laptop. So we recognize that an email address doesn't identify a device.
What some people don't realize is that my phone I'm typing on right now can be reached from three different numbers, and one of those numbers can also be answered from a different device. My phone isn't identified by a phone number any more than it's identified by an email address.
For PRACTICAL purposes, some of the same issues apply. An email from your bank doesn't necessarily come from the same place they answer emails. Consider password reset for the web site. The web server can send email, it can't receive email. So you can't verify the From by reversing the route.
Email has mechanisms such as SPF to verify the From address. Phone has no such mechanism and can't because fundamentally there is no from phone number. You'd need to switch the world 's 10 billion phones to a different protocol in order to introduce a "station from" or "service from" identifier.
What direct inward dial number would you prefer?
Web servers don't take incoming phone calls, they take incoming web requests; they don't have DIDs, they have names like www27.1stbank.com
> so when someone calls a number they know which destination network to switch the call to
Yes, and TO is the operative word. A phone number is technically known as a DID number - Direct Inward Dial. A DID (phone number) indicates which service (not station aka phone) a call is being placed to. There is no such thing as a DOD, Direct Outward Dial number. Consider this very simple case:
You are logging in to your bank web site, Second National Bank.com. Your bank doesn't suck, so it has multifactor communication. The web server triggers a call to your registered phone number. The logical caller ID of the call would be the bank's customer service or security phone number, a number you can call back.
The call is coming from a server in one of four data centers the bank has, based on a web request. You're not going to have customer service reps in the datacenter. Customer service reps are in a different state, with a different regional phone company. The call is coming from the bank's rack in a Level 3 data center, or maybe their servers are in AWS. In any event, they aren't likely to be in the same place as the customer service department.
Customer service gets their phone service from Cincinnati Bell. The servers are in AWS Oregon and Virginia.
A call comes FROM a station, it doesn't come from a DID. The networks used to call into a company (Cincinnati Bell in this case) are very often not the networks they use for all of their communications. Even my three-person company had two separate service providers for DIDs (numbers) and bandwidth (used for outgoing calls).
No need to do anything with the DNS.
You can create an Azure or Amazon bucket with any name you want, such as frog.denver, hfjskfhd.fjshdjd.hdhdjhs, or secure.microsoft.com. These are NOT DNS names. They're just arbitrary strings.
In the DNS, Microsoft has the DNS name pointed to Azure.
Azure then has that name pointed to a bucket which just happens to have the same name. It could have any name. If Microsoft deletes the bucket (or other resource), anyone else can create one that happens to have the same name.
I don't like the term, but in government the term is cyber.
Twenty years in information security here. I will never call it "cyber", unless I'm talking about something government related. The guy putting together a $450 million federal contract for infosec is doing a cyber contract.
That should be:
I was the envy of the other homeless people
Not;
I was the envelope of the other homeless people
--
Though I think it might be worth mentioning that recent study that suggests that resisting temptation is actually something that *everybody* sucks at - and the choices we commonly attribute to "willpower" seem to actually correlate not with resisting temptation, but avoiding it.
--
I've read the same. I've seen the same principle in a different context. An alcoholic getting sober very often can't "not drink", they can "clean out the closet". Sitting around focusing on not drinking doesn't work. A study of four-year-olds found they had a lot of trouble not eating a cookie that was on the table, in order to get two cookies later. However, they had much less trouble going outside, away from the cookies, then returning to eat two cookies.
Because I discovered that most of the stupid I've done in my life comes down to immediate gratification vs longer term thinking, I've put some effort into teaching this idea to my four-year-old daughter. She's picked it up amazingly well. Heck, she's saving to go to Disneyland, while her classmates have trouble saving a cookie for after they finish their sandwich. This shows me that it CAN be taught. Which matches up with what we know about Asian and middle eastern cultures. So that just leaves the question of HOW to teach it.
> what that is in whatever particular circumstance they're in. There's also those in poverty who have a very hard time *affording* to do the smart thing.
I've been homeless, living under a tarp in a vancant lot. I was the envelope of the other homeless people, who "couldn't afford" a tarp, but could afford a case or two of beer every day. Absolutely a lot of broke people truly believe they can't afford the 24-pack of toilet paper, so they keep buying the 4-pack. They buy a 4-pack on toilet paper and a six pack of soda. For the same amount of money, they COULD buy the 79 cent two liter of generic soda and the bigger pack of toilet paper. The next week, they wouldn't need more toilet paper and could instead upgrade the small box of cereal to the economy box. I've walked a few of them through this process. The fact is, they can't afford to keep buying the 4-pack of toilet paper, buying six of those, instead of the much cheaper 24-pack. They can find $3 to buy the economy pack of something, which saves them $5, which they CAN use to do something else smart that saves $10. They just don't know.
These are the same broke people who can't afford an apartment, so they get a weekly motel for $300/week. That's the same price as a medium sized house where I live. When I was broke, I stayed for a year in a $250/month mobile home (less than the cost of rhe weekly motel the broke people are in), while saving for a house. They can do it, they don't know how. Education again. (Also long-term vs short-term again).
I think to some extent the same applies to truly dumb people. They can't figure out what's smart, but they can be told. (Education).
The only people I've come across who truly can't succeed are those who, for emotional reasons (pride) refuse to learn. They know everything and won't listen to anyone else. I could give them step-by-step directions on exactly how to do something I've done, hand them all the tools, and they'd refuse to do it, you insisting I don't know what I'm talking about, or that I could only do it because I'm male or Asian or white or rich or American or whatever they think I am. The exact same process that always works can't work for them because they're female / gay / black / young / old / whatever. I have no solution for those who refuse to learn. I can only show them that I was poor and old, yet the recipe still worked - because the recipe doesn't care who is following it.
I forgot to mention, I like your signature.
It reminds me of an eponymous law I read the other day, which I don't remember exactly. Something like "there are always people who think just as well, but differently, than you".
Of course this conversation may end up taking a trip through Hauser's law.
Anyway, it sounds like you'd like to discuss low-IQ people? It seems to me, based on personal experience, conversations with people from other countries, and the data I've seen, that far more people have trouble because contemporary American culture emphasizes instant gratification, de-emphasizing planning ahead and long-term thinking. That's the change that made a radical difference in my life, and it's what people from other countries comment on. Americans suck at thinking past next week, they say. Apparently we do a terrible job of instilling delayed gratification in our kids. So we eat horrible junk food that tastes good but makes us feel yucky even a few hours later, and that extends to all of our life decisions.
To me, addressing long-term vs short-term thinking seems like it may be more fruitful, but if you'd prefer we can try to figure out how society should deal with low-IQ people.
Less than 2% of the population has an IQ of 80. Would you like to talk about average anything, or would you like to talk about people who severe mental disablilities?
It kinda sounds like you may be suggesting that we should all be treated like we have major mental disorders, with the elites in Washington managing our lives.
So would you like to talk about mentally disabled people, or would you like to talk about the average burger flipper (seventeen years old, anxious to see which colleges accept them), or would you like to talk about the permanent burger flipper (skips school, shows up to work stoned, etc because they habitually chooses immediate gratification over long-term good, where long-term is anything more than a week)?
You happen to have a link to that contract, since apparently you've read it?
It's not unusual for a government contract to pay $X / year for the thing, with any changes or modifications of any kind requiring approval by the city, which means approval by several departments. The government is responsible for some things, such as providing locations to install the equipment, one contractor installs the utility power for the devices and keeps that running, another does the networking, a third provides the devices and their firmware.
A fix that involves 15 minutes fixing the code can involve months of bureacracy and coordinating who does what. Then one of the people at the city quits their job and you mostly start over with a new person who doesn't know what's going on.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
The list also made me think of Windows 3.1, and 1980s Mac.
Separate windows, putting mail in folders. Does it come with a Prodigy or AOL disc?
I mentioned:
--
Wealth-building is no different. You can either complain that some people do smart things, or you can start doing smart things too.
--
In my experience, getting rich has been way more fun than mental masturbation and complaining. The classic text on how to do so is "The Millionaire Next Door". A more up-to-date book that's similar is "Everyday Millionaires". If you don't want to spend $15 for the book, Chris Hogan's podcast is free and makes good listening while driving.
I've worked in companies that were 100% employee owned.
It's up to you how much stock you own vs how much cash. The classic rule of thumb suggestion is at least 15% stock (meaning no more than 85% cash). Yes, those who choose a significant proportion of stock are far more likely to end up wealthy.
People who brush their teeth are far more likely to end up with nice teeth. Knowing that, you can either:
A) Complain about it and maybe seek to have the government forcibly remove their teeth
B) Brush your teeth, so that you too have nice teeth
Most people choose B.
Wealth-building is no different. You can either complain that some people do smart things, or you can start doing smart things too.
> I will refer you to this fragment which argues against the notion that stock ownership is equivalent to democratic ownership of the means of production
I don't think it makes that argument. I think it distinguishes between ownership and management. It points out that while you can simply check a box labeled "401k" to become an owner, that doesn't make you a manager, or specifically, the CEO.
The implication seems to enjoy that everyone should be the CEO. I've been the CEO of multiple companies. That was a bad idea. I shouldn't be the CEO. I'm much better at information security than I am at corporate mergers.
Anyway, there's theory, what could work in your imagination, and there's practice - what actually does work in the real world. In the real world, over 90% of millionaires got their via 401k and IRA. Over 90% never made more than 100k in a year. Rather, they checked the box to invest 10-15% of their *pre-tax* pay, and their employer typically added another 7%. Then the magic of compound interest kicked in. That's how the vast majority of millionaires became millionaires. I want to be a millionaire, so I'm doing exactly what the millionaires did. I check the box.
Ray Morris CHOOSES which companies he owns, putting 15% of his pay (plus 50% employer match) into the companies he chooses. Google had been one good choice.
I've owned the company I work for before, including owning 100% of it. When the company didn't do well, I lost both my job and my investment. I won't make that mistake again. I now put my job and my ownership in two different baskets.
For a couple years, I was 100% owner (had all the stock) of a company I didn't work for, which in some ways competed with my employer. So I was happy if either company won.
> While worker co-ops exist on a small scale, they can't compete
True. They exist, and generally don't do well compared to companies where the techs are profesional techs and the CEOs are professional CEOs. Generally, someone educated and trained to do a CEO job isn't very good at configuring routers, and someone trained in configuring routers isn't very good at selecting which companies their company should buy, or which divisions should be spun off as separate companies.
Actually specialization, each us being good at our own jobs rather than everyone doing everything, is what separates us from animals and hunter-gatherer tribes. When the auto mechanics are trying to run the auto company, they have no idea what they are doing and can't compete.
Credit unions and mutual insurance companies are successful models where the CUSTOMERS own the company. It works because the assets of these companies are simple dollars.
> Socialism is "democratic ownership of the means of production".
Almost. American capitalism is:
Employees can decide to be part owner of the company the company they work for, or any other company. Management often encourages yyu to br part owner (employee stock ownership program), but they can't force you to. You can choose to take cash instead of ownership.
Your proposed form of socialism is the same except your are FORCED to have ownership rather than cash.
Generally, if you lose your job, you hope your investments (company ownership) did well, because you'll need the money. If your investments do poorly, hopefully your job is doing well. So having your ownership (stock) in the same company you work for is kinda stupid - you're putting all of your eggs in one basket. If the company doesn't do well, you're fucked. It's generally smarter to have ownership (stock) in companies totally unrelated to the one you work for. That way if your job doesn't do well because your company or I has a slump, you can fall back on your investments.
That's where your idea of socialism is different than most people's. Most people who want socialism don't want that particular type of stupid added in, where one company having problems means you lose everything. Instead, they force you to be part owner of EVERY company. Instead of choosing which companies you own (as a stockholder), or having the choice to stay out of ownership for a while and take the cash, you, via politicians, theoretically have stock in every company. I suspect most of them don't realize that would make them an owner of Ruger, Smith & Wesson, Chick-fil-A, and even "Neo Nazi Quarterly" or whatever it's called.
Electronics ARE cheap. In quanity, you can build a quality phone charger for maybe $2. You can build a crappy phone charger for 75 cents. Neither costs much to manufacture, crappy ones cost half as much to make.
You can pretty easily find sites and videos where people disassemble phone chargers and also test them. There definitely IS a difference between a high quality charger and a low quality charger. Ifixit and others have disassembled Apple chargers and found they are even better than "good" chargers from other major companies, including better safety like better thermal and current overload protections.
It terms of production costs, you could buy a good charger for $5, a very good one for $10. The problem is knowing which ones are good. Apple will charge you $30 and you know it's high quality. You can spend $15 elsewhere and maybe get good quality, maybe get crap.
My gut feeling is the same as yours - consumers should have the right to see information stored about them.
Understand, though, the score is not about you, in way. It's 100% per-transaction - does this attempt to use your credentials seem risky. I've computed these scores. The system I designed may have been the very first one to use typing cadence in a broadly deployed system.
Here are three of examples of a dozen data points, three location computations. Is this attempt coming from the same geographic area that the legitimate user is normally in? Is it humanly possible for them to have traveled from where they were last time to this location? (For example if you log in Miami at 10:00 AM, then at noon someone in China claims to be you, that's suspect.) Is the attempt coming from a high-fraud area, such as Russia or China?
I can show you your typing cadence data; it will be meaningless to you. An attempted TRANSACTION is more trustworthy is the typing matches your normal typing. there nothing about how trustworthy YOU are, it's whether the attempted transaction is suspect based on how well it matches whatever number of criteria.
If you've you've always used the latest Firefox from Linux and from Android (in Florida), then suddenly someone tries to use your card from and old version of IE on Windows 7 in Nigeria, that's suspect. Not because Linux is more trustworthy, but because it doesn't match how you, the legitimate user, normally does things.
Some systems even track types of things purchased - if you only ever use your card at Walmart and Chevron, with no purchases over $200, and never use it online, then a $1,500 TV purchase from BestBuy.com is out of the ordinary.
We combine all of the criteria to compute a score for the transaction. The BestBuy.com purchase may be approved if it's made from Firefox on Linux on Florida - perhaps only if you enter the CVV2 code (the four digits on the back of the card).
Are you purposely conflating things to try to mislead readers, or did you just have a brain fart?
There are millions of Chevys out there. A hundred times as many Chevrolet as Model 3, but that's not what we're talking about.
The top three American made plug-in cars are:
Volt
Model S
Model 3
Worldwide, BMW produces thousands i8 cars each month, and all of these are a joke to BYD, who makes more electric vehicles than Chevy, Tesla, and BMW combined.
> remember there are more than plenty of ICE options still out there.
And if you want an American plug-in for under $35k, you can pick up a Volt today. As a bonus, it also has an engine you can choose to use instead of stopping to charge ten minutes before you reach your destination. Maybe that's why there are more Volts on the road than Model 3 or Model S. Ford has three plug-ins to choose from, including options under $35,000.
That's just American plug-ins. Last month, 100,000 plug-ins were made by Chinese companies. In the last three months, China has made more electric cars than Tesla has made in ten years. You've got the Nissan Leaf, Rimac produces the world's fastest production electric car, etc.