Yes, and if one disk in an array fails, the likelihood that another disk in the same array will fail soon goes way up. That's because they many disk failures are related to environmental factors - power, air, particulate matter, etc.
Even, more, the process of rebuilding a degraded array is very intensive, touching every sector of every disk in the array, old and new. This means that if there are any latent failures that just haven't been noticed, the rebuild process will find them with very high probability. RAID is good, and useful, but as soon as there's a hint of a failure on any disk, you should replace it ASAP. This is also why I favor RAID modes that allow for more than one failed disk. That way if you have one failure and the rebuild triggers/uncovers another, you're not out of luck. I learned this the hard way.
This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.
Who's the "you" in this? Any computer system project that is sufficiently embedded in business process has failure modes so far outside the reach of anyone on the technical side that blaming technical people for it is incredibly myopic. They often end up failing even when the technology works right.
Yes, the "you" in my statement encompasses the relevant business organizations as well as technology. The entirety of the project, not just the technical people. This applies throughout the remainder of my post as well.
Don't forget, you also need to disable Verify Apps, the built-in malware scanner.
WHO THE FUCK FALLS FOR THIS SHIT?!?!
Hardly anyone, actually. Watch for the "State of Android Security" paper that should come out in the next few weeks for more detail, but the fact is that very, very few Android devices have any malware on them. Last year's numbers, IIRC, were on the order of 0.1% of devices, and that's with a pretty broad definition of "malware" ("Potentially Harmful Apps" is the term Google uses).
Full disclosure: I work for Google, on Android security, though on platform crypto features, not on anti-malware efforts.
Man, it has got to be great being at the top. Where you can fail and nobody will fire you for it. In the rest of the world, when you are associated with a failed project, that puts you first in line the next time layoffs come around.
This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.
But when you're breaking new ground, trying to do things that have never been done before, if your management expects success, they're idiots. I grant that lots of companies are led by idiots, but that doesn't make them any less wrong. Google is where it is precisely because its leadership understands that failure is always possible, and the more audacious the goals the more likely it is that you'll fail. When you're pushing the envelope, true failure isn't when the project stumbles and falls due to some major technological obstacle. It's when you fail because of something you really could have foreseen... or when you fail to learn from your failure.
Google has a culture of post mortem analyses to ensure that that last sort of failure doesn't happen. Whenever anything goes seriously wrong, a detailed analysis of what went wrong, and when, and why, is conducted. Not with the goal of identifying people to blame, but to determine what lessons can be learned and what can be done to ensure that failure doesn't happen again. For someone who grew up outside of the Google culture, it's pretty terrifying to go through your first post mortem, for something you built. It's hard not to be defensive. After a few times, though, you begin to internalize the fact that unless the cause was you just not doing your job, you have nothing to worry about and may well come out with kudos or even a bonus.
He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves.
I got into Google as a 42-year old graduate of a podunk little four-year state school that no one has heard of, with an unaccredited CS program. I can't comment on whether I'm like the typical Googler, because I'm not sure what that is. Aside from the well-publicized issues around gender and race, which exist across nearly all tech companies, it's a very diverse place (note that race and gender diversity are important, but they're far from the only forms of diversity). The "Stanford MSCS" is well-represented, of course, but I work with one engineer who has only an associate degree and another who got his GED at age 29 and never attended college at all.
He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.
Very true. All sorts of quirkiness is accepted and even embraced at Google. That's one of the things I most enjoy about working here.
If you want a better e-mail provider you'll have to pay for it.
Gmail is free, and has excellent security. Better than any paid service I've seen, actually.
As for 2FA there's no way I'm giving my phone number to $email_provider
So, don't use phone-based 2FA. Continuing with Gmail as an example, you can get 2FA via security key (a little USB stick), smartphone app, printed codes (pieces of paper you carry in your wallet), SMS or voice phone. Only the last two involve your phone number. Though I have to wonder... just what do you think $email_provider is going to do with your phone number anyway? And if you don't want them to have it, you'd better be sure you never e-mail it to anyone. Or include it in your sig.
And I have never thought yet about what happens if I lose a phone number tied to a password!
The typical smartphone is actually the worst possible case, because it's unlocked and has browsing history, e-mail, and very likely your 2FA as well. It may even contain passwords, stored by the browser or by a password keeper.
You really, really need to secure your phone with a good password, and configure it to lock aggressively.
(Full disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Gmail. I work on Android security, and I worry a lot about how valuable phones are becoming, and how insecurely most of them are configured.)
You don't seem to understand what money and debt are, or how they relate to production, so this isn't really a useful discussion. I'll just point out that how the larger house is financed doesn't change the fact that it requires greater productive capacity to create it.
evolution science makes up a minuscule part of the sciences but seems to cause a reaction way out of proportion to its practical significance
Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but evolution is definitely *not* a miniscule part of the sciences. David Deutsch makes a compelling argument that the same processes that underlie evolution are responsible for all observable knowledge creation -- including science itself. You should really read a more comprehensive treatment, because my attempt to summarize will certainly butcher it, but in a nutshell the idea is that all knowledge is created via processes of variation and selection. In the case of scientific thought, the process begins in the human mind, which comes up with various ideas for potential explanations and then subjects them to critical analysis, selecting against ideas that either don't fit observed facts or don't have elegance, explanatory reach or other useful qualities. After a hypothesis survives this internal gauntlet of selection pressure, it's exposed to criticism from other people, and from experimental testing. Scientific theories that are fit enough to survive go on to spread. Similar analysis shows that all memes behave similarly... as do all other forms of self-organizing knowledge which achieve "universality" (I won't even attempt to summarize the idea of universality).
Further, within the life sciences, evolution isn't a minor sub-topic, it pretty much drives everything. Effectively all our understanding of the physical structure and behavior of living creatures is understood within a framework of evolutionary ideas. Evolution is pervasive and incredibly powerful. It's arguably the single most powerful explanatory idea in all of science, and the most thoroughly validated.
Evolutionary ideas are also applied all over every other branch of science: psychology, behavioral science, computer science, economics... and even in physics and astrophysics. For an example of the application of evolutionary theory to astrophysics, consider cosmological descriptions of the formation of the universe, which postulate formation of many different constructs of energy/matter and analyze which we expect to survive and which will be annihilated, then compare the projected results of this variation-and-selection process against the observable universe.
Evolution isn't "miniscule". To a first approximation, evolution is science.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that the application of evolution to the creation of humans is a miniscule part of science, since that's the part that many religious people have a hard time with (personally, I don't see the problem. Why couldn't God use evolutionary processes? The great thing about variation-and-selection from a creator's perspective is it provides lots of ways to tweak outcomes). I suppose that is a miniscule part of science because the origin of humanity is a miniscule part of science.
I actually find it somewhat odd that so many people get hung up on the conflict between evolutionary speciation and religion, and not on cosmology and religion. The big bang seems much tougher to reconcile with Biblical creation.
I occasionally run into people who don't believe they need to be very careful with their e-mail security, because "it's only e-mail, it's not like my bank account or anything". But given that virtually every other online account you create uses e-mail to manage password reset, it is your bank account. And everything else.
Use a good password on your e-mail account, and enable two-factor authentication. If your e-mail provider doesn't offer 2FA, or offers a form of it that's too inconvenient to use, get a better e-mail provider. #emailmatters
According to your theories, life must have been amazingly better when the 72-hour week, with 6 12-hour days, was the norm. Feel free to work more for less.
Um, no, that doesn't follow. At all. In pre-industrial agrarian societies, such long, grinding work weeks were necessary for survival, at barely above a subsistence standard of living. Productivity increases both improved the standard of living and made it possible to work less. More recently, productivity increases have gone mostly to improving the standard of living rather than reducing work. Why? Good question. But that in no way implies that working 72-hour weeks today would reduce the standard of living to pre-industrial, agrarian levels, which seems to be the thrust of your argument.
I think this is just a case of specialists (epistemologists) defining a technical term (knowledge) in a way that is narrower and more precise than in general usage. And for some unknown reason "Dr. Spork" chooses to assume that an article written from outside the specialist field is using the specialist definition.
With all the productivity gains in the last 45 years, we should be down to a 16-hour work week if the increases were divided equitably between employers and employees.
Only if we were also to drop back to a 1970 standard of living. There's more than just inequality in play here; we've also moved the baseline up. Houses are larger and better, people drive better cars, people eat a wider variety of foods, have better clothing, travel more, etc., not to mention the massively-increased options we have for entertainment.
Among epistemologists the near-consensus is that belief is one of the necessary ingredients of knowledge.
Cite? I know lots of things I don't believe in. For example, I have quite a lot of knowledge about how magic works in various fictional systems. I find it much more likely that you're mischaracterizing the belief/knowledge of epistemologists than that they're really that stupid.
Rules exist for a reason. How many of those administrators are employed due to past fraud attempts?
Complex rules require complex and extensive administration. The point of UBI is that everyone gets it, so the only administration required is to make sure that the recipient is actually alive. That requires far fewer people. Not none, but far fewer.
t's a replacement for existing welfare programs. In this case, we also have to take into account how wasteful these public programs might be. Right now someone is dying because money they would have spent on health insurance was instead spent on excessive socialized defense.
Your example is of alleged waste in a non-welfare program, but waste in welfare programs is more on point. Many welfare programs spend almost as much money on paying people to administer the programs as they do on benefits. UBI eliminates nearly all of this overhead because the only requirement for getting paid is having a pulse (and, probably, being a citizen). That frees up a lot of money for benefits. Of course it also puts all of the government employees formerly needed to administer the complex programs out of work, but their jobs were just make-work anyway, they didn't actually produce anything.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The only way to know for sure is to discard anecdote-based assertions like yours and do the research.
However, I think research on this topic has to be done on a larger scale and a longer duration. A five-year study might tell you a few things but the participants are going to make their decisions around that five-year time horizon. Also, scattered individual participants will likely act differently than people would in a society where everyone understood that work was optional.
I know that some people will always work. Myself and my mom for example. My two sisters probably wouldn't. My ex wife, a childhood friend, and a few others I know all avoid work as much as possible.
Even if you're absolutely right that only a smallish percentage of people would choose to work, if projections that automation will make it unnecessary for most people to work are correct, isn't that exactly what we'll need? Figuring out what that percentage is and what the others will choose to do seems like really useful research.
Personally, I think that most people do enjoy working, as long as they're doing something they find challenging and useful. I think it's part of human nature that people want to be productive, if for no other reason than to gain the respect of others. I think most of the people who don't want to work now don't want to because they feel like society tries to force them to do it against their will, and only offers them boring, repetitive or unpleasant work. They get social affirmation from others who feel similarly put-upon. I don't know if that would be the case if no one had to work.
Also, it's worth considering that UBI can never provide more than the basics, by definition, because whatever level of income UBI provides will become the definition of "basic". It's likely that what's considered "basic" 50 years from now will seem luxurious by today's standards, but it will still be basic, and anyone who wants more will have to earn it, through work.
I think if I didn't need an income I'd still do exactly what I am doing today. I used to think that I'd leave the corporate world and write open source software in a less structured environment, but I think working for a large corporation (Google) provides me with leverage that I wouldn't have in another context, and thereby increases my ability to make contributions to the world. Also, although I presently need to work in order to live, my work provides me with a much higher standard of living than "basic", which I enjoy and would also be willing to work to receive.
False positives? You're saying that taxi drivers appear to have the fingerprints of convicted felons, but actually are not these people?
Fingerprint matching is inexact. If I took your prints and searched the nationwide fingerprint databases, I would get a few hundred matches. Human examination of these matches would exclude most of them, analysis of the metadata, comparing your life history against the lives of the matchees would likely exclude the rest (assuming one of them wasn't actually you). But not always. False positives definitely do happen.
That would overturn the criminal justice system as we know it....
Schools across the world teach typing, and require a certain speed for passing the course.
True today, not true in the 40s and 50s, when the women in the photos were in school. It really wasn't until the advent of computers that schools decided typing was a generally-useful skill. I took a required typing class in Junior High in the early 80s, but it had only been a few years since it became a general requirement.
I think the GP has a point, that keyboarding skills were primarily feminine in that era, and that was part of the reason that computer operator jobs were seen as feminine. It was primarily men who were designing the hardware, though.
Your analysis is mostly correct, but you're off by a decade or more. It all goes back to the 1940s and Rosie the Riveter.
No, he's right about the timing. Rosie was thrust into work out of patriotic necessity, because all of the men were off fighting. The fact that Rosie did an admirable job did open up lots of opportunities for women to work in the 50s and into the 60s, and it undoubtedly gave some women a taste for the empowerment of making their own money, but that doesn't change the fact that the social structure still expected women to be homemakers. Success for women was about being married to a successful man and keeping a nice house and raising good kids. Women who had to work were, by definition, not successful. Women beyond a certain age, at least. It was considered proper for young women to work for a few years before getting married and settling down, which reinforced the notion that working women belonged in clerical roles which were menial but "clean".
Coming from Europe myself, I am still scratching my head about what Americans call Liberal, Conservative and Socialist, three very different streams
You've discovered that these political labels don't have absolute meaning, but are applied differently in different polities. Americans likewise find European use of the labels quite confusing until they look past them at what the various parties actually believe. This doesn't mean one usage or another of the labels is wrong, just that it's different.
So the mere fact that they didn't wait quite long enough after the knock and announce to actually enter the home does not achieve grounds for excluding the evidence found, which evidence would have still been found had they waited two or three seconds longer.
That doesn't exactly meet the criteria of making peoples lives worse and not following the Constitution.
No? Consider: "We knocked... with the battering ram".
Note that this isn't a slippery slope argument, this is a direct application of the ruling. The only negative consequence we ever apply to police officers who violate due process requirements is that we exclude the evidence they collect, and anything derived from it ("fruit of the poisoned tree"). If we remove that consequence, then we have told the police that this due process requirement doesn't matter. That's not a good thing.
You've bought the whole corporate tax bit, hook, line and sinker. Corporate taxes are evil and should be abolished, not for the good of corporations, I don't care about them, but for the good of the people.
Corporations don't pay taxes. Ever. Corporations are people, and people pay taxes. Shareholders pay taxes, employees pay taxes, suppliers and customers pay taxes -- except when the suppliers and customers are corporations. Every penny of tax ostensibly paid by a corporation is funded either by higher prices to customers, lower payments to suppliers, lower wages to employees, or lower profits to shareholders. 100% of the tax burden is ultimately passed on to individuals.
Why, then, do governments want to tax corporations? Because although every penny of corporate tax comes from the pocket of some individual, it's very, very hard to figure out who, and even more importantly, it's tax revenue that voters don't know they're forking over.
Taxes are necessary, but voters should see what they're paying so they can evaluate whether or not they're getting good value for their money, or whether they should vote for alternative structures in which they purchase services from entities other than the government. Corporate taxation undermines that by hiding the taxes from the taxpayers. You can't tell, for example, that you paid a little more for your coffeemaker (above and beyond sales tax or VAT) so that the manufacturer of the coffeemaker, and all of the corporations in its supply chain, could pay their taxes. You can't tell that your paycheck is a little lower so that your employer can pay taxes. You can't tell that your rate of return on your retirement investments is a little lower so that the companies whose shares your hold can pay taxes.
Moreover, are corporate taxes progressive, regressive, or something in between? Again, it's very hard to know, and it's almost impossible for policymakers to allocate those taxes across the population in any sort of fair or effective way. Odds are, given who is in control of deciding how corporations set their prices, pay their employees, deliver dividends to their shareholders, etc., they're highly regressive.
Corporate taxes are just hidden, unmanageable taxes levied on voters, and as such they're wrong and should be abolished.
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Yes, and if one disk in an array fails, the likelihood that another disk in the same array will fail soon goes way up. That's because they many disk failures are related to environmental factors - power, air, particulate matter, etc.
Even, more, the process of rebuilding a degraded array is very intensive, touching every sector of every disk in the array, old and new. This means that if there are any latent failures that just haven't been noticed, the rebuild process will find them with very high probability. RAID is good, and useful, but as soon as there's a hint of a failure on any disk, you should replace it ASAP. This is also why I favor RAID modes that allow for more than one failed disk. That way if you have one failure and the rebuild triggers/uncovers another, you're not out of luck. I learned this the hard way.
This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.
Who's the "you" in this? Any computer system project that is sufficiently embedded in business process has failure modes so far outside the reach of anyone on the technical side that blaming technical people for it is incredibly myopic. They often end up failing even when the technology works right.
Yes, the "you" in my statement encompasses the relevant business organizations as well as technology. The entirety of the project, not just the technical people. This applies throughout the remainder of my post as well.
I am a Christian.
...
8. Sideload the APK.
Don't forget, you also need to disable Verify Apps, the built-in malware scanner.
WHO THE FUCK FALLS FOR THIS SHIT?!?!
Hardly anyone, actually. Watch for the "State of Android Security" paper that should come out in the next few weeks for more detail, but the fact is that very, very few Android devices have any malware on them. Last year's numbers, IIRC, were on the order of 0.1% of devices, and that's with a pretty broad definition of "malware" ("Potentially Harmful Apps" is the term Google uses).
Full disclosure: I work for Google, on Android security, though on platform crypto features, not on anti-malware efforts.
Man, it has got to be great being at the top. Where you can fail and nobody will fire you for it. In the rest of the world, when you are associated with a failed project, that puts you first in line the next time layoffs come around.
This depends on the nature of the project. If you're doing yet another ERP system integration, yes, you should succeed, and there should be negative consequences if you don't, because there is nothing new involved, just lots and lots of detail-oriented grunt work. It's hard, but good planning and careful attention to detail will get you to the end of the job, and if it doesn't, it's because you did a poor job, not because the job was not doable.
But when you're breaking new ground, trying to do things that have never been done before, if your management expects success, they're idiots. I grant that lots of companies are led by idiots, but that doesn't make them any less wrong. Google is where it is precisely because its leadership understands that failure is always possible, and the more audacious the goals the more likely it is that you'll fail. When you're pushing the envelope, true failure isn't when the project stumbles and falls due to some major technological obstacle. It's when you fail because of something you really could have foreseen... or when you fail to learn from your failure.
Google has a culture of post mortem analyses to ensure that that last sort of failure doesn't happen. Whenever anything goes seriously wrong, a detailed analysis of what went wrong, and when, and why, is conducted. Not with the goal of identifying people to blame, but to determine what lessons can be learned and what can be done to ensure that failure doesn't happen again. For someone who grew up outside of the Google culture, it's pretty terrifying to go through your first post mortem, for something you built. It's hard not to be defensive. After a few times, though, you begin to internalize the fact that unless the cause was you just not doing your job, you have nothing to worry about and may well come out with kudos or even a bonus.
He got into Google because Googlers distrust people who are not like themselves.
I got into Google as a 42-year old graduate of a podunk little four-year state school that no one has heard of, with an unaccredited CS program. I can't comment on whether I'm like the typical Googler, because I'm not sure what that is. Aside from the well-publicized issues around gender and race, which exist across nearly all tech companies, it's a very diverse place (note that race and gender diversity are important, but they're far from the only forms of diversity). The "Stanford MSCS" is well-represented, of course, but I work with one engineer who has only an associate degree and another who got his GED at age 29 and never attended college at all.
He even gets away with a stupid-ass name like "Astro" where in the rest of the world a name like that will get you swirlies.
Very true. All sorts of quirkiness is accepted and even embraced at Google. That's one of the things I most enjoy about working here.
If you want a better e-mail provider you'll have to pay for it.
Gmail is free, and has excellent security. Better than any paid service I've seen, actually.
As for 2FA there's no way I'm giving my phone number to $email_provider
So, don't use phone-based 2FA. Continuing with Gmail as an example, you can get 2FA via security key (a little USB stick), smartphone app, printed codes (pieces of paper you carry in your wallet), SMS or voice phone. Only the last two involve your phone number. Though I have to wonder... just what do you think $email_provider is going to do with your phone number anyway? And if you don't want them to have it, you'd better be sure you never e-mail it to anyone. Or include it in your sig.
And I have never thought yet about what happens if I lose a phone number tied to a password!
The typical smartphone is actually the worst possible case, because it's unlocked and has browsing history, e-mail, and very likely your 2FA as well. It may even contain passwords, stored by the browser or by a password keeper.
You really, really need to secure your phone with a good password, and configure it to lock aggressively.
(Full disclosure: I work for Google, but not on Gmail. I work on Android security, and I worry a lot about how valuable phones are becoming, and how insecurely most of them are configured.)
You don't seem to understand what money and debt are, or how they relate to production, so this isn't really a useful discussion. I'll just point out that how the larger house is financed doesn't change the fact that it requires greater productive capacity to create it.
evolution science makes up a minuscule part of the sciences but seems to cause a reaction way out of proportion to its practical significance
Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but evolution is definitely *not* a miniscule part of the sciences. David Deutsch makes a compelling argument that the same processes that underlie evolution are responsible for all observable knowledge creation -- including science itself. You should really read a more comprehensive treatment, because my attempt to summarize will certainly butcher it, but in a nutshell the idea is that all knowledge is created via processes of variation and selection. In the case of scientific thought, the process begins in the human mind, which comes up with various ideas for potential explanations and then subjects them to critical analysis, selecting against ideas that either don't fit observed facts or don't have elegance, explanatory reach or other useful qualities. After a hypothesis survives this internal gauntlet of selection pressure, it's exposed to criticism from other people, and from experimental testing. Scientific theories that are fit enough to survive go on to spread. Similar analysis shows that all memes behave similarly... as do all other forms of self-organizing knowledge which achieve "universality" (I won't even attempt to summarize the idea of universality).
Further, within the life sciences, evolution isn't a minor sub-topic, it pretty much drives everything. Effectively all our understanding of the physical structure and behavior of living creatures is understood within a framework of evolutionary ideas. Evolution is pervasive and incredibly powerful. It's arguably the single most powerful explanatory idea in all of science, and the most thoroughly validated.
Evolutionary ideas are also applied all over every other branch of science: psychology, behavioral science, computer science, economics... and even in physics and astrophysics. For an example of the application of evolutionary theory to astrophysics, consider cosmological descriptions of the formation of the universe, which postulate formation of many different constructs of energy/matter and analyze which we expect to survive and which will be annihilated, then compare the projected results of this variation-and-selection process against the observable universe.
Evolution isn't "miniscule". To a first approximation, evolution is science.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that the application of evolution to the creation of humans is a miniscule part of science, since that's the part that many religious people have a hard time with (personally, I don't see the problem. Why couldn't God use evolutionary processes? The great thing about variation-and-selection from a creator's perspective is it provides lots of ways to tweak outcomes). I suppose that is a miniscule part of science because the origin of humanity is a miniscule part of science.
I actually find it somewhat odd that so many people get hung up on the conflict between evolutionary speciation and religion, and not on cosmology and religion. The big bang seems much tougher to reconcile with Biblical creation.
I occasionally run into people who don't believe they need to be very careful with their e-mail security, because "it's only e-mail, it's not like my bank account or anything". But given that virtually every other online account you create uses e-mail to manage password reset, it is your bank account. And everything else.
Use a good password on your e-mail account, and enable two-factor authentication. If your e-mail provider doesn't offer 2FA, or offers a form of it that's too inconvenient to use, get a better e-mail provider. #emailmatters
And yet, in both I have knowledge.
According to your theories, life must have been amazingly better when the 72-hour week, with 6 12-hour days, was the norm. Feel free to work more for less.
Um, no, that doesn't follow. At all. In pre-industrial agrarian societies, such long, grinding work weeks were necessary for survival, at barely above a subsistence standard of living. Productivity increases both improved the standard of living and made it possible to work less. More recently, productivity increases have gone mostly to improving the standard of living rather than reducing work. Why? Good question. But that in no way implies that working 72-hour weeks today would reduce the standard of living to pre-industrial, agrarian levels, which seems to be the thrust of your argument.
I think this is just a case of specialists (epistemologists) defining a technical term (knowledge) in a way that is narrower and more precise than in general usage. And for some unknown reason "Dr. Spork" chooses to assume that an article written from outside the specialist field is using the specialist definition.
With all the productivity gains in the last 45 years, we should be down to a 16-hour work week if the increases were divided equitably between employers and employees.
Only if we were also to drop back to a 1970 standard of living. There's more than just inequality in play here; we've also moved the baseline up. Houses are larger and better, people drive better cars, people eat a wider variety of foods, have better clothing, travel more, etc., not to mention the massively-increased options we have for entertainment.
Among epistemologists the near-consensus is that belief is one of the necessary ingredients of knowledge.
Cite? I know lots of things I don't believe in. For example, I have quite a lot of knowledge about how magic works in various fictional systems. I find it much more likely that you're mischaracterizing the belief/knowledge of epistemologists than that they're really that stupid.
Rules exist for a reason. How many of those administrators are employed due to past fraud attempts?
Complex rules require complex and extensive administration. The point of UBI is that everyone gets it, so the only administration required is to make sure that the recipient is actually alive. That requires far fewer people. Not none, but far fewer.
t's a replacement for existing welfare programs. In this case, we also have to take into account how wasteful these public programs might be. Right now someone is dying because money they would have spent on health insurance was instead spent on excessive socialized defense.
Your example is of alleged waste in a non-welfare program, but waste in welfare programs is more on point. Many welfare programs spend almost as much money on paying people to administer the programs as they do on benefits. UBI eliminates nearly all of this overhead because the only requirement for getting paid is having a pulse (and, probably, being a citizen). That frees up a lot of money for benefits. Of course it also puts all of the government employees formerly needed to administer the complex programs out of work, but their jobs were just make-work anyway, they didn't actually produce anything.
money for nothing is a bad idea
Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The only way to know for sure is to discard anecdote-based assertions like yours and do the research.
However, I think research on this topic has to be done on a larger scale and a longer duration. A five-year study might tell you a few things but the participants are going to make their decisions around that five-year time horizon. Also, scattered individual participants will likely act differently than people would in a society where everyone understood that work was optional.
I know that some people will always work. Myself and my mom for example. My two sisters probably wouldn't. My ex wife, a childhood friend, and a few others I know all avoid work as much as possible.
Even if you're absolutely right that only a smallish percentage of people would choose to work, if projections that automation will make it unnecessary for most people to work are correct, isn't that exactly what we'll need? Figuring out what that percentage is and what the others will choose to do seems like really useful research.
Personally, I think that most people do enjoy working, as long as they're doing something they find challenging and useful. I think it's part of human nature that people want to be productive, if for no other reason than to gain the respect of others. I think most of the people who don't want to work now don't want to because they feel like society tries to force them to do it against their will, and only offers them boring, repetitive or unpleasant work. They get social affirmation from others who feel similarly put-upon. I don't know if that would be the case if no one had to work.
Also, it's worth considering that UBI can never provide more than the basics, by definition, because whatever level of income UBI provides will become the definition of "basic". It's likely that what's considered "basic" 50 years from now will seem luxurious by today's standards, but it will still be basic, and anyone who wants more will have to earn it, through work.
I think if I didn't need an income I'd still do exactly what I am doing today. I used to think that I'd leave the corporate world and write open source software in a less structured environment, but I think working for a large corporation (Google) provides me with leverage that I wouldn't have in another context, and thereby increases my ability to make contributions to the world. Also, although I presently need to work in order to live, my work provides me with a much higher standard of living than "basic", which I enjoy and would also be willing to work to receive.
False positives? You're saying that taxi drivers appear to have the fingerprints of convicted felons, but actually are not these people?
Fingerprint matching is inexact. If I took your prints and searched the nationwide fingerprint databases, I would get a few hundred matches. Human examination of these matches would exclude most of them, analysis of the metadata, comparing your life history against the lives of the matchees would likely exclude the rest (assuming one of them wasn't actually you). But not always. False positives definitely do happen.
That would overturn the criminal justice system as we know it....
The criminal justice system's over-reliance on fingerprint identification is a problem. http://www.livescience.com/934...
Schools across the world teach typing, and require a certain speed for passing the course.
True today, not true in the 40s and 50s, when the women in the photos were in school. It really wasn't until the advent of computers that schools decided typing was a generally-useful skill. I took a required typing class in Junior High in the early 80s, but it had only been a few years since it became a general requirement.
I think the GP has a point, that keyboarding skills were primarily feminine in that era, and that was part of the reason that computer operator jobs were seen as feminine. It was primarily men who were designing the hardware, though.
Your analysis is mostly correct, but you're off by a decade or more. It all goes back to the 1940s and Rosie the Riveter.
No, he's right about the timing. Rosie was thrust into work out of patriotic necessity, because all of the men were off fighting. The fact that Rosie did an admirable job did open up lots of opportunities for women to work in the 50s and into the 60s, and it undoubtedly gave some women a taste for the empowerment of making their own money, but that doesn't change the fact that the social structure still expected women to be homemakers. Success for women was about being married to a successful man and keeping a nice house and raising good kids. Women who had to work were, by definition, not successful. Women beyond a certain age, at least. It was considered proper for young women to work for a few years before getting married and settling down, which reinforced the notion that working women belonged in clerical roles which were menial but "clean".
R&D is an expense today, which is subtracted from revenue before determining taxable profit.
Coming from Europe myself, I am still scratching my head about what Americans call Liberal, Conservative and Socialist, three very different streams
You've discovered that these political labels don't have absolute meaning, but are applied differently in different polities. Americans likewise find European use of the labels quite confusing until they look past them at what the various parties actually believe. This doesn't mean one usage or another of the labels is wrong, just that it's different.
So the mere fact that they didn't wait quite long enough after the knock and announce to actually enter the home does not achieve grounds for excluding the evidence found, which evidence would have still been found had they waited two or three seconds longer. That doesn't exactly meet the criteria of making peoples lives worse and not following the Constitution.
No? Consider: "We knocked... with the battering ram".
Note that this isn't a slippery slope argument, this is a direct application of the ruling. The only negative consequence we ever apply to police officers who violate due process requirements is that we exclude the evidence they collect, and anything derived from it ("fruit of the poisoned tree"). If we remove that consequence, then we have told the police that this due process requirement doesn't matter. That's not a good thing.
when it involved guns he found the commerce clause meant something entirely different
Which case are you referring to here?
You've bought the whole corporate tax bit, hook, line and sinker. Corporate taxes are evil and should be abolished, not for the good of corporations, I don't care about them, but for the good of the people.
Corporations don't pay taxes. Ever. Corporations are people, and people pay taxes. Shareholders pay taxes, employees pay taxes, suppliers and customers pay taxes -- except when the suppliers and customers are corporations. Every penny of tax ostensibly paid by a corporation is funded either by higher prices to customers, lower payments to suppliers, lower wages to employees, or lower profits to shareholders. 100% of the tax burden is ultimately passed on to individuals.
Why, then, do governments want to tax corporations? Because although every penny of corporate tax comes from the pocket of some individual, it's very, very hard to figure out who, and even more importantly, it's tax revenue that voters don't know they're forking over.
Taxes are necessary, but voters should see what they're paying so they can evaluate whether or not they're getting good value for their money, or whether they should vote for alternative structures in which they purchase services from entities other than the government. Corporate taxation undermines that by hiding the taxes from the taxpayers. You can't tell, for example, that you paid a little more for your coffeemaker (above and beyond sales tax or VAT) so that the manufacturer of the coffeemaker, and all of the corporations in its supply chain, could pay their taxes. You can't tell that your paycheck is a little lower so that your employer can pay taxes. You can't tell that your rate of return on your retirement investments is a little lower so that the companies whose shares your hold can pay taxes.
Moreover, are corporate taxes progressive, regressive, or something in between? Again, it's very hard to know, and it's almost impossible for policymakers to allocate those taxes across the population in any sort of fair or effective way. Odds are, given who is in control of deciding how corporations set their prices, pay their employees, deliver dividends to their shareholders, etc., they're highly regressive.
Corporate taxes are just hidden, unmanageable taxes levied on voters, and as such they're wrong and should be abolished.