>> while a link to thr actual facts gets modded down because it doesn't fit the narrative.
> If I post something a bit contentious, my emails show me that it gets a lot of Plus and minus votes. And some have ended up in the basement. So what? People don't have to agree with me.
Facts like I'm talking about aren't an opinion to agree with or disagree with. Someone will say 'Obama never said anything like that" and it'll be voted up. If you post "yes, Obama did say that, here's the link", with a link to the person saying it, it'll get voted down.
Obama did in fact say this about fixing Social Security : "What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further. We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else's."
You can't disagree that he said that, those are his words. You can watch the video if you're unaware that he said it, but it's not an opinion thing, it's a fact. He did say it.
I agree, Slashdot's mod system is better than most.
Perhaps it would be helpful to have a "-1 I disagree" or "-1 fuck this guy", along with "+1 I believe this too" that are decoys - they don't actually do anything. Lol
> It may work out well, if most of the community is sensible and there's impartial moderators that do their job. But I've seen the opposite happen often enough, where dissenting opinions which are factually more correct than the simplistic bullshit get 'downvoted into oblivion' while the simplistic bullshit stays on top (using standard sorting).
That's a problem on Slashdot. Somebody will post "the boss / execs will never go to jail!" and that's instantly plus five. I point out that the boss was arrested a few months ago and is looking at ten to twenty years, and provide a link, that gets modded to -1.
Very often what's modded up the most is the opposite of the plain facts, while a link to thr actual facts gets modded down because it doesn't fit the narrative.
You can call up an ISP today and get a firm fixed price. They know how much it cost them to install fiber per mile in a given area. The problem is, in some areas a mile of fiber will serve 5,000 households, in some areas it'll serve one.
In the areas we're talking about, that price is $10,000 / house or more because installing fiber is expensive.
Wireless is a half solution (probably the best we have) because of a fundamental physics problem. High frequency signals don't penetrate walls (or rain or fog), low frequency signals have low data rates.
Any kids who spwns much time around me end up knowing how an engine works, because I show them any chance I get.
Showing them the internal workings of a CPU is a bit more difficult. My four-year-old will have some understanding within the next few years, somehow. She already understands wireless internet uses radio waves from the towers she sees, or our home router / AP. She understands that her iPad can't do video in the car because we're too far from the router and the radio waves can't reach. She can't SEE the radio waves, though, and that limits understanding.
Someone mentioned twenty-somethings who can't change a tire. My four-year-old changes the tires on her Lightening McQueen toy, using a little plastic lug wrench. I've made sure she's paying attention whenever I help someone change a tire.
Organic produce found in grocery stores does in fact have three to four times as much pesticide as standard produce.
If they are "trying to avoid using pesticides", they are failing horribly.
Organic has nothing whatever to do with monoculture or balance. Have a look at any actual commercial organic farming operation. It's just as monoculture as the one next door that uses more effective pest control. The happy farmer is just a commercial.
"Organic" means exactly one thing on a food label - Uses dangerous toxins similar to those produced by certain plants and fungi, as opposed modern insecticide control methods that aren't toxic to mammals.
Here's another spoiler - Hidden Valley Ranch is made in a factory too. There is no happy smiley place where kids love broccoli. That only exists in the commercial.
Spoiler three:
Beyonce isn't making your $85 lipstick. It comes from China, after being made in the same factory as the Walmart lipstick. Once again, Beyonce is just in the commercial.
That would make no sense because organic produce has three to four times as much pesticide. Rather than modern insecticide that targets the problem insects, organic produce uses general toxins such as that produced by Deadly Nightshade. Since the organic toxin isn't targeting the relevant insects specifically, much more of it has to be used to be effective, and it's far more dangerous to humans.
You mostly have it right, you just switched two things. Regular food is protected from commercially relevant pests by *insecticides* targeted very specifically to those particular insects, such that a very small amount does the job. Organic produce is treated with toxins such as extract of Deadly Nightshade, which is a general toxin rather than than an insecticide. Because it's not targeted to specific insects, Deadly Nightshade and the other organic toxins are far more dangerous to humans and have to be used in far greater amounts in order to be effective.
Same here. Except you don't need "a language I made up", practically any other programming language maintains backward compatibility.
With Python, when it says "requires Python 2.6â, it means EXACTLY 2.6, not "at least 2.6". Python 2.7 won't work because they completely break compatibility even in point releases. I can't think of any other language that does that.
I have stuff written in C, Perl, shell, even Javascript fifteen years ago that still runs just fine. Other languages ADD capabilities instead of randomly redefining basic things every year or two.
You're right that direct labor costs are about 25%-30%. Food costs are also about 25%-30%, paying ng for things like hamburger buns and lettuce.
Who do you think makes hamburger buns, low-wage workers, or guys in suits? Who harvests, sorts and packs lettuce? People working close to minimum wage, or people making $125,000?
What do you think happens to the cost of making hamburger buns, tomatoes, and cups when minimum wage goes up 15%?
> And if the price rise had little to do with the min wage increase, they why bring it up?
The minimum wage increase directly caused 30%-50% of the price increase through increased costs. There's the increased cost of paying their own employees, plus the price of hamburger buns, lettuce, cups etc, all made by low-wage employees, went up.
> they all increased their price by the exact same amount on the very same day? That seems wildly implausible.
Mainly it was scheduled for when their costs went up. Also, like airlines, the big chains tend to act in sync because of competition. Dairy Queen and Sonic in Texas are fun to watch - whenever one starts building a new store, the other starts building one across the street even before the location is open.
Costs change all the time. For example, the price of tomatos changes weekly. Fast food places don't change their prices daily by 1% or 2%. Instead, every couple years they change prices. The minimum wage hike was significant enough that it forced a price reset. That reset included othet actual or expected cost increases.
I'm "assuming" (knowing) that everybody buys some things produced in part by lower-wage jobs, such as groceries.
If increasing minimum wage was always beneficial, we'd just set it to $5,000 / and we'd all be fabulously wealthy.
Think about that for a minute. Why don't we just set minimum wage to $5,000 / hour?
Of course calling minimum-wage productivity "5,000" doesn't do anything whatsoever to increase the amount of stuff available to anyone, it only sets the value of the dollar, extremely low. Other countries have tried that and utterly destroyed their economy, forcing them to throw away their old currency and create a new one.
So we know that increasing nominal minimum wage doesn't always increase real wages or help anyone. In fact, it can be extremely destructive. That's why it's not $5,000/hour - because that would be very destructive.
That leaves open two questions: Can a minimum wage EVER be helpful?
If so, how can we determine the optimum minimum requirement under a given set of circumstances?
I had an experience which perfectly illustrates the issue GP is talking about. Twenty-five years ago I was working in fast food. I was making about 2x minimum wage. Minimum wage was increased by 15%.
On the day that minimum wage went up 15%, all of the fast food restaurants increased prices by 25%. That meant that the employees making minimum wage, the newest ones and the ones who were often stoned at work, got more *dollars* in their paycheck, but that paycheck could buy *fewer* burgers. The measure reduced their ability to buy, at least for products produced by near minimum-wage labor.
For employees who were making more, either because they'd been there longer or they did a good job, the effect was even more pronounced. We only got a 10% raise. Against a 25% increase in what it would cost us to buy a burger. Store managers probably got no raise at all, they only saw their expenses increase. So while the intent was to *help* teenagers and others just starting out, working at minimum wage, it may not have helped at all.
I have another question about the minimum wage in Seattle. Here in Dallas, gas stations and fast food joints are starting people at about $12/hour. Legal minimum wage is $7.25. Since approximately nobody works for minimum wage, increasing it to $10/hour would have little effect, if any. It would only change the pay rate for a very small percentage of people who are paid to be present at a place without doing any actual work. People who do work already make more than that. What was the going rate for fast food workers in Seattle before they set minimum wage at 11.50/13.50? If they were already being paid $15, I'd expect there to be very little effect.
As the summary says, that might be the best treatment. One reason NOT to do that is that the flu virus changes every year, becoming reistant to the anti-bodies that worked against last year's flu. If you routinely give both drugs, it's likely the fluvirus will adapt to be resistant to both. In some ways, it's better to keep one in reserve as a "secret weapon" that the virus doesn't know about, and only pull it out when needed. "When needed" might be vulnerable people (old, babies, aids patients) and/or when Tamiflu isn't working.
China started privatizing businesses in 1978, starting with small businesses This continued through the 1980s and large concerns were privatized 1990s in order to try to be able to compete the United States economically (and not starve).
By one measure, China is now only "65% Communist", while the US has increased to 48%. (Putting both firmly in the socialist range).
> If you supply tech that makes it easier to got to war, you become complicit.
You're about three million years too late if you're trying to prevent people from starting wars because they don't have the tech.
The tech can help decide a) who wins the war and b) how many causalities there are.
Have you ever studied World War II at all? You've heard of WWII, right? World War 2 was a turning point, because up until then the basic approach to warfare was you'd kill all the guys in the other country. There was a significant amount of that still in World War II, but a new idea was also introduced - using technology to win a war without killing everyone in the opposing country.
Nowadays, we have things like the Gulf War, which was one without killing more than 0.01% of the losing country - by using technology to remove their ability to fight, without killing them.
There has more or less always been a war going on as long as there have been humans. Have you taken World History? Did you notice the history of the world needsis basically a series of wars - 99% of those without Microsoft?
Youn have carpet bombing war, precision warfare, cyberwar - we technologists can perhaps influence that a bit, but there was war long before there computers and they'll be war long after computers are gone.
Like anything else, pesticides are developed and impeoved over time. New types of pesticides are more effective per gram, meaning less pesticide is needed. They are also more targeted to the problematic insects, and therefore safer for mammals.
"Organic" means they use the older, more dangerous pesticides, which are used in far greater amounts. An extract from Deadly Nightshade is one example of an organic pesticide. Another popular organic pesticide is produced by a deadly fungus - toxic to humans as well as insects. (Organic means, in this context, a toxin similar to one which could be produced by a plant, animal, fungus, or bacteria).
It's irrational to eat more dangerous food, and pay more for it.
> mame rom set + CHD > Just say get the roms but do not say where to get them??
"Don't say where to get them" isn't going to help you. If you tell people to use your DRM-breaking tool to do unlawful things, you're probably breaking the law by distributing the tool for that purpose.
Re-loading factory firmware unto legitimate factory devices seems a fairly small niche. You'd need to show that it's a "substantial non-infringing use" vs the infringing use.
Normally, the specifications for how the software should behave wouldn't specify that it should be buggy.
A notable exception is several software products were designed to be compatible with / emulate Internet Explorer, specifically including emulating some of its more important bugs.
There may be decisions made in which the designers chose something they thought was good. You think it's bad, so you call it a bug. "Fixing" (changing) that probably wouldn't be restoring it to its original specification, though if there is a written standard such as http it could be argued that the standard is rhe specification for how an http client or server should behave.
Courts rule in the specific facts of individual cases, and we can only predict what the ruling might be. Having said that:
If you distribute it for that legitimate, lawful purpose, and all of your messaging (marketing etc) points to a lawful purpose, you'd probably be fine.
On the other hand, if you have a web site where you advertise "steal Hollywood movies", your internal emails talk about paying people to use the tool for unlawful purposes, you make millions of dollars from people using it unlawfully, and you get a custom license plate that says "guilty", you're probably going to have a bad time in court.
In Pac-Man, you die by touching ghosts. The one thing you want to NOT do, in a regular game of Pac-Man, is touch ghosts. As long as you don't touch any ghosts, you keep getting points.
That's the most basic understanding of the game you can have, what my four-year-old daughter would figure out in five minutes. That's also what the AI figured out.
*More advanced* players can learn the *exception* to the above simple rule. The *exception* is:
Only if you've eaten a Power Pellet in the last few seconds, touching ghosts becomes good.
It doesn't need to "learn not touching ghosts even though (in rare situations) it results in a higher score". It only needs to be too stupid to recognize the unusual conditions under which ghosts, which normally kill you, can instead raise your score. It uses the simple rule "don't touch ghosts, they kill you". Instead of the more complex "don't touch ghosts unless with the last 300 milliseconds...".
Slashdot Mirror
>> while a link to thr actual facts gets modded down because it doesn't fit the narrative.
> If I post something a bit contentious, my emails show me that it gets a lot of Plus and minus votes. And some have ended up in the basement. So what? People don't have to agree with me.
Facts like I'm talking about aren't an opinion to agree with or disagree with.
Someone will say 'Obama never said anything like that" and it'll be voted up.
If you post "yes, Obama did say that, here's the link", with a link to the person saying it, it'll get voted down.
Obama did in fact say this about fixing Social Security :
"What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further. We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else's."
You can't disagree that he said that, those are his words. You can watch the video if you're unaware that he said it, but it's not an opinion thing, it's a fact. He did say it.
I agree, Slashdot's mod system is better than most.
Perhaps it would be helpful to have a "-1 I disagree" or "-1 fuck this guy", along with "+1 I believe this too" that are decoys - they don't actually do anything. Lol
> It may work out well, if most of the community is sensible and there's impartial moderators that do their job. But I've seen the opposite happen often enough, where dissenting opinions which are factually more correct than the simplistic bullshit get 'downvoted into oblivion' while the simplistic bullshit stays on top (using standard sorting).
That's a problem on Slashdot.
Somebody will post "the boss / execs will never go to jail!" and that's instantly plus five. I point out that the boss was arrested a few months ago and is looking at ten to twenty years, and provide a link, that gets modded to -1.
Very often what's modded up the most is the opposite of the plain facts, while a link to thr actual facts gets modded down because it doesn't fit the narrative.
You can call up an ISP today and get a firm fixed price.
They know how much it cost them to install fiber per mile in a given area. The problem is, in some areas a mile of fiber will serve 5,000 households, in some areas it'll serve one.
In the areas we're talking about, that price is $10,000 / house or more because installing fiber is expensive.
Wireless is a half solution (probably the best we have) because of a fundamental physics problem. High frequency signals don't penetrate walls (or rain or fog), low frequency signals have low data rates.
> I can see it being in IBM's best interests to keep the RedHat model alive, maintaining a first class distribution and selling support to fund it.
Well yes, it would be in IBM's best interest to not destroy companies they buy. If they weren't stupid, they wouldn't do that.
Unfortunately history shows IBM does wreck companies that they buy.
Any kids who spwns much time around me end up knowing how an engine works, because I show them any chance I get.
Showing them the internal workings of a CPU is a bit more difficult. My four-year-old will have some understanding within the next few years, somehow. She already understands wireless internet uses radio waves from the towers she sees, or our home router / AP. She understands that her iPad can't do video in the car because we're too far from the router and the radio waves can't reach. She can't SEE the radio waves, though, and that limits understanding.
Someone mentioned twenty-somethings who can't change a tire. My four-year-old changes the tires on her Lightening McQueen toy, using a little plastic lug wrench. I've made sure she's paying attention whenever I help someone change a tire.
Spoiler alert:
Organic produce found in grocery stores does in fact have three to four times as much pesticide as standard produce.
If they are "trying to avoid using pesticides", they are failing horribly.
Organic has nothing whatever to do with monoculture or balance. Have a look at any actual commercial organic farming operation. It's just as monoculture as the one next door that uses more effective pest control. The happy farmer is just a commercial.
"Organic" means exactly one thing on a food label -
Uses dangerous toxins similar to those produced by certain plants and fungi, as opposed modern insecticide control methods that aren't toxic to mammals.
Here's another spoiler -
Hidden Valley Ranch is made in a factory too. There is no happy smiley place where kids love broccoli. That only exists in the commercial.
Spoiler three:
Beyonce isn't making your $85 lipstick. It comes from China, after being made in the same factory as the Walmart lipstick. Once again, Beyonce is just in the commercial.
That would make no sense because organic produce has three to four times as much pesticide. Rather than modern insecticide that targets the problem insects, organic produce uses general toxins such as that produced by Deadly Nightshade. Since the organic toxin isn't targeting the relevant insects specifically, much more of it has to be used to be effective, and it's far more dangerous to humans.
You mostly have it right, you just switched two things.
Regular food is protected from commercially relevant pests by *insecticides* targeted very specifically to those particular insects, such that a very small amount does the job. Organic produce is treated with toxins such as extract of Deadly Nightshade, which is a general toxin rather than than an insecticide. Because it's not targeted to specific insects, Deadly Nightshade and the other organic toxins are far more dangerous to humans and have to be used in far greater amounts in order to be effective.
Why are you looking at national average grocery prices to see the effects of a minimum wage increase in one state on fast food prices on that state?
That seems about as relevant as looking at the average NFL score.
Same here. Except you don't need "a language I made up", practically any other programming language maintains backward compatibility.
With Python, when it says "requires Python 2.6â, it means EXACTLY 2.6, not "at least 2.6". Python 2.7 won't work because they completely break compatibility even in point releases. I can't think of any other language that does that.
I have stuff written in C, Perl, shell, even Javascript fifteen years ago that still runs just fine. Other languages ADD capabilities instead of randomly redefining basic things every year or two.
You're right that direct labor costs are about 25%-30%.
Food costs are also about 25%-30%, paying ng for things like hamburger buns and lettuce.
Who do you think makes hamburger buns, low-wage workers, or guys in suits? Who harvests, sorts and packs lettuce? People working close to minimum wage, or people making $125,000?
What do you think happens to the cost of making hamburger buns, tomatoes, and cups when minimum wage goes up 15%?
> And if the price rise had little to do with the min wage increase, they why bring it up?
The minimum wage increase directly caused 30%-50% of the price increase through increased costs. There's the increased cost of paying their own employees, plus the price of hamburger buns, lettuce, cups etc, all made by low-wage employees, went up.
> they all increased their price by the exact same amount on the very same day? That seems wildly implausible.
Mainly it was scheduled for when their costs went up. Also, like airlines, the big chains tend to act in sync because of competition. Dairy Queen and Sonic in Texas are fun to watch - whenever one starts building a new store, the other starts building one across the street even before the location is open.
Costs change all the time. For example, the price of tomatos changes weekly. Fast food places don't change their prices daily by 1% or 2%. Instead, every couple years they change prices. The minimum wage hike was significant enough that it forced a price reset. That reset included othet actual or expected cost increases.
I'm "assuming" (knowing) that everybody buys some things produced in part by lower-wage jobs, such as groceries.
If increasing minimum wage was always beneficial, we'd just set it to $5,000 / and we'd all be fabulously wealthy.
Think about that for a minute. Why don't we just set minimum wage to $5,000 / hour?
Of course calling minimum-wage productivity "5,000" doesn't do anything whatsoever to increase the amount of stuff available to anyone, it only sets the value of the dollar, extremely low. Other countries have tried that and utterly destroyed their economy, forcing them to throw away their old currency and create a new one.
So we know that increasing nominal minimum wage doesn't always increase real wages or help anyone. In fact, it can be extremely destructive. That's why it's not $5,000/hour - because that would be very destructive.
That leaves open two questions:
Can a minimum wage EVER be helpful?
If so, how can we determine the optimum minimum requirement under a given set of circumstances?
I had an experience which perfectly illustrates the issue GP is talking about. Twenty-five years ago I was working in fast food. I was making about 2x minimum wage. Minimum wage was increased by 15%.
On the day that minimum wage went up 15%, all of the fast food restaurants increased prices by 25%. That meant that the employees making minimum wage, the newest ones and the ones who were often stoned at work, got more *dollars* in their paycheck, but that paycheck could buy *fewer* burgers. The measure reduced their ability to buy, at least for products produced by near minimum-wage labor.
For employees who were making more, either because they'd been there longer or they did a good job, the effect was even more pronounced. We only got a 10% raise. Against a 25% increase in what it would cost us to buy a burger. Store managers probably got no raise at all, they only saw their expenses increase. So while the intent was to *help* teenagers and others just starting out, working at minimum wage, it may not have helped at all.
I have another question about the minimum wage in Seattle. Here in Dallas, gas stations and fast food joints are starting people at about $12/hour. Legal minimum wage is $7.25. Since approximately nobody works for minimum wage, increasing it to $10/hour would have little effect, if any. It would only change the pay rate for a very small percentage of people who are paid to be present at a place without doing any actual work. People who do work already make more than that. What was the going rate for fast food workers in Seattle before they set minimum wage at 11.50/13.50? If they were already being paid $15, I'd expect there to be very little effect.
As the summary says, that might be the best treatment. One reason NOT to do that is that the flu virus changes every year, becoming reistant to the anti-bodies that worked against last year's flu. If you routinely give both drugs, it's likely the fluvirus will adapt to be resistant to both. In some ways, it's better to keep one in reserve as a "secret weapon" that the virus doesn't know about, and only pull it out when needed. "When needed" might be vulnerable people (old, babies, aids patients) and/or when Tamiflu isn't working.
China started privatizing businesses in 1978, starting with small businesses This continued through the 1980s and large concerns were privatized 1990s in order to try to be able to compete the United States economically (and not starve).
By one measure, China is now only "65% Communist", while the US has increased to 48%. (Putting both firmly in the socialist range).
> If you supply tech that makes it easier to got to war, you become complicit.
You're about three million years too late if you're trying to prevent people from starting wars because they don't have the tech.
The tech can help decide a) who wins the war and b) how many causalities there are.
Have you ever studied World War II at all? You've heard of WWII, right? World War 2 was a turning point, because up until then the basic approach to warfare was you'd kill all the guys in the other country. There was a significant amount of that still in World War II, but a new idea was also introduced - using technology to win a war without killing everyone in the opposing country.
Nowadays, we have things like the Gulf War, which was one without killing more than 0.01% of the losing country - by using technology to remove their ability to fight, without killing them.
There has more or less always been a war going on as long as there have been humans. Have you taken World History? Did you notice the history of the world needsis basically a series of wars - 99% of those without Microsoft?
Youn have carpet bombing war, precision warfare, cyberwar - we technologists can perhaps influence that a bit, but there was war long before there computers and they'll be war long after computers are gone.
Like anything else, pesticides are developed and impeoved over time. New types of pesticides are more effective per gram, meaning less pesticide is needed. They are also more targeted to the problematic insects, and therefore safer for mammals.
"Organic" means they use the older, more dangerous pesticides, which are used in far greater amounts. An extract from Deadly Nightshade is one example of an organic pesticide. Another popular organic pesticide is produced by a deadly fungus - toxic to humans as well as insects. (Organic means, in this context, a toxin similar to one which could be produced by a plant, animal, fungus, or bacteria).
It's irrational to eat more dangerous food, and pay more for it.
> I also drive an F250 Super Duty King Ranch ... YMMV
Your Mileage May Vary indeed.
It may vary between 10 mpg and 16 mpg.
> mame rom set + CHD
> Just say get the roms but do not say where to get them??
"Don't say where to get them" isn't going to help you.
If you tell people to use your DRM-breaking tool to do unlawful things, you're probably breaking the law by distributing the tool for that purpose.
Re-loading factory firmware unto legitimate factory devices seems a fairly small niche. You'd need to show that it's a "substantial non-infringing use" vs the infringing use.
Normally, the specifications for how the software should behave wouldn't specify that it should be buggy.
A notable exception is several software products were designed to be compatible with / emulate Internet Explorer, specifically including emulating some of its more important bugs.
There may be decisions made in which the designers chose something they thought was good. You think it's bad, so you call it a bug. "Fixing" (changing) that probably wouldn't be restoring it to its original specification, though if there is a written standard such as http it could be argued that the standard is rhe specification for how an http client or server should behave.
Courts rule in the specific facts of individual cases, and we can only predict what the ruling might be. Having said that:
If you distribute it for that legitimate, lawful purpose, and all of your messaging (marketing etc) points to a lawful purpose, you'd probably be fine.
On the other hand, if you have a web site where you advertise "steal Hollywood movies", your internal emails talk about paying people to use the tool for unlawful purposes, you make millions of dollars from people using it unlawfully, and you get a custom license plate that says "guilty", you're probably going to have a bad time in court.
In Pac-Man, you die by touching ghosts. The one thing you want to NOT do, in a regular game of Pac-Man, is touch ghosts. As long as you don't touch any ghosts, you keep getting points.
That's the most basic understanding of the game you can have, what my four-year-old daughter would figure out in five minutes. That's also what the AI figured out.
*More advanced* players can learn the *exception* to the above simple rule. The *exception* is:
Only if you've eaten a Power Pellet in the last few seconds, touching ghosts becomes good.
It doesn't need to "learn not touching ghosts even though (in rare situations) it results in a higher score". It only needs to be too stupid to recognize the unusual conditions under which ghosts, which normally kill you, can instead raise your score. It uses the simple rule "don't touch ghosts, they kill you". Instead of the more complex "don't touch ghosts unless with the last 300 milliseconds ...".