Ok, so, how am I going to be able to transport my boat...drop it in the lake, park with the trailer, so that I can pull my boat out at the launch and drive it back home and park it?
What do I use to haul my stuff to the camp site and set up? Usually camping is a bit remote, so you need your vehicle WITH you there.....
In that case you rent the vehicle for the week (or whatever). Or maybe this will be one of the exceptional cases that encourages personal ownership. I own a pickup truck for exactly the purposes you mention, and I've debated whether I actually use it enough to justify owning it. It might be more cost-effective to just rent a truck when I need it. Well, this summer I'm hoping to go to the lake two or three days per week, hauling the boat back and forth each time, and if I do that then owning will clearly be better than renting... unless I rented a slip on the water and just left the boat there. That's expensive, but less than my monthly truck payment.
I think this is already getting close to optimized and isn't going to change much. I already get almost everything delivered to my door by a company that goes so far as to map its routes so there are fewer left turns to save fuel. Somebody still has to get out of the truck and deliver it to my porch.
Maybe. I envision future UPS trucks as mobile delivery-drone base stations. There may be a person in the truck sorting packages and managing the drones while the truck drives the route, launching and recovering drones while in motion. I think one large truck could replace several of the size currently used.
Obviously you'd have to choose a depth limit that balances space utilization with access efficiency. But it would still be dramatically more space-efficient than current parking lots.
Even better is if most of those cars are automated taxis, which only park because current demand is low enough that it's not cost-effective for them to be on the road. When demand picks up more cars need to be sent out... but it doesn't matter which ones, so you don't have to retrieve the one in the bottom of the stack.
I think automated cars change the road dynamics enough to make that unclear. As traffic gets heavy, humans have to slow down because they need time and distance for their reactions. But if automated-only lanes are created, the computerized cars not only have reaction times two or three orders of magnitude faster than humans, but they can also coordinate via radio. That means that they can reduce following distances to near zero and increase speeds, which means that throughput for a given amount of road space increases dramatically.
No. One engine vs many. Less friction. Etc. Rail is still better.
If energy consumption is the only consideration, sure. But rail travel is inconvenient in important ways. You have to travel on the train's schedule and you have to use other modes of transportation to/from the rail station.
I can see self-driving cars killing commuter rail. Lots of rail commuters are presently accepting longer commute times in exchange for being able to read, work, sleep or whatever else on their way. Self-driving cars would allow them to do that and have the shorter commute times, and door to door service. Assuming traffic doesn't increase so much that congestion makes driving slower. Given fully-automated vehicles, though, it seems perfectly reasonable to have some automated-only lanes which reduce following distances to almost nothing and increase speeds to 100+mph. As traffic gets heavier human drivers slow down for safety, but automated systems don't necessarily need to do that. Increasing speeds increases throughput and allows a given amount of road to move more vehicles per unit of time.
Plus there are almost certainly a number of factors which will be utterly obvious in hindsight, but we don't see now. Tough to call.
Autonomous cars will 'rest' in off-street buffer lots and maintenance warehouses, and it will be No Parking forever citywide.
Yeah, because everyone who drives will be perfectly happy waiting half an hour for their car to return from "resting" before they can do something somewhere else.
No, there will never be "no parking citywide", because too many people need to park where they go. Not just delivery people who park while delivering things, but handicapped people.
As long as the car parks close enough that it can get to you within a few minutes, what's the problem? And if you're not going to be there that long, just have the car drop you off and circle the block.
As for handicapped people; there's no need for the *car* to park to help them. Indeed, they're best served by being delivered right to the doorstep. Same for deliveries, unless substantial unloading time is required, in which case the delivery vehicle will need a loading dock or other unloading zone, same as now. But that's loading/unloading, not parking.
This is a huge problem in North America; so many layers of laws and regulations and by-laws no one knows what the law is, not Joe public, not the cops, not the courts.
I'm assuming this is by design. When things are so complicated that it takes a lawyer many billable hours to figure out where you can legally park, it stacks the odds heavily in the citys favor and turns anything they want into an easy revenue stream.
I think Hanlon's Razor favors a different explanation, namely that the people who make the laws don't really understand them either. They make changes in a reactive manner when they see something that's a problem or doesn't make sense, and they apply a minimal patch to the law (avoiding refactoring) that appears to resolve the problem they're trying to address, in their jurisdiction. They also don't coordinate with higher or lower jurisdictions, and indeed don't necessarily even pay any attention to what those other jurisdictions are doing.
That sort of a process creates spaghetti law, just the way doing the same thing in software creates spaghetti code. Without careful attention to modularization, separation of concerns, without a willingness to refactor when necessary, and without extensive tests to validate that changes don't cause regressions, what you get is a mess.
Yes, that happens. Note that in this case, though, we aren't talking about illegally-obtained evidence, we're talking about legally-obtained evidence that can't stand up in court. So they don't need careful parallel construction to avoid "fruit of the poisoned tree" issues. If asked what put them on the track of the evidence that can be used in court, they can happily point to the decrypted data.
Where this creates real risks is if they claim to have gotten a lead from decrypted data in order to start a parallel construction as an alternative to evidence that was obtained illegally. For example, suppose the cops entered the suspect's house without a warrant and found an e-mail on his computer which led them to damning evidence which they could only have found with access to his e-mail. They can't use that evidence in court because the defense attorney would ask them how they obtained the e-mail. But assuming they had some other basis for arresting the suspect and taking his phone, they can simply claim that they got the e-mail from there, even if they didn't actually decrypt the phone at all. Unless the defense has some evidence that they're lying about having gotten the information from the phone, he has no way to argue that the damning evidence is fruit of the poisoned tree, so the judge will refuse to exclude it.
What makes you think an autonomous taxi will be any more convenient then a real taxi today?
It won't be so much that it's more convenient as that it will be much cheaper. The most expensive part of a taxi service is the drivers (well, once you remove silly regulatory obstacles like medallions). Being much cheaper will make cabs much more widely used, and for longer journeys. Being more widely-used will mean there are many more of them... which actually *does* increase convenience since it will take less time to get one to come pick you up.
As a result, automated taxi's will cost roughly the same.
You're wrong, but there's not much point in arguing about it. Time will prove me right.
It doesn't matter how much safer they are. If people can't afford them they won't buy them.
Self-driving cars will end car ownership in many areas, and reduce it everywhere. The problem with personally-owned vehicles is that they represent a large chunk of cash which is sitting completely idle most of the time. In urban and suburban areas, you could replace all of the existing cars with perhaps 25% as many self-driving cars operating in a smartphone-hailed automated taxi system. Maybe even fewer than that if people are willing to adjust their workday to spread out "rush hour", or to accept riding with others.
Even for families who aren't willing or able for whatever reason to give up their own cars completely, self-driving cars will offer the option of reducing the number of cars they own. A self-driving car that can operate empty can take one person to work then return home for another in many cases. It may well be more cost-effective to own one autonomous vehicle than two "dumb" ones, even if the autonomous vehicle is significantly more expensive. This is especially true when you factor in the availability of automated taxis to cover occasional multi-vehicle needs, and integrate them with electronic calendaring systems.
For example, I work from home and my wife is a stay-at-home mom, yet we still have two cars because there are inevitably times when we both need to go different places at the same time. We live in a rural area, far enough away that I wouldn't want to count on automated taxis entirely, but I could absolutely see scaling back to owning only a single vehicle and making sure that I always schedule things on my calendar so my phone knows to call an autocab 20 minutes before I have to leave[*]. Further, right now we actually have four vehicles, because two adult sons need to get to work and to school. All of those "regularly scheduled" trips could be replaced with autocabs, and since the one son works only 10 minutes from home, a self-driving car could easily take him to work and return home, then go back to pick him up.
No, in the self-driving car era, I think owning an automobile yourself will become a luxury that most people don't see a reason to bother with. Autonomous taxis will be far cheaper, and while they'll be slightly less convenient in some ways -- you may have to wait a few minutes for a car before you can leave -- they'll also be more convenient in others -- no need to worry about parking.
[*] Scheduling things on my phone wouldn't even be a change. I already always do that so that Google Now can remind me when I need to leave. It already factors current and predicted traffic conditions into its travel time estimates. It would require only a very small change to factor in time to call an autocab and time for it to travel to me.
It occurs to me that I could have given a pithier answer to your direct question. How's this:
Corporations consider taxes just another cost of doing business, but one that is a large and complex distraction from their core business expertise. It requires them to build up big tax-management and tax-mitigation organizations, and often to do silly things, to no beneficial effect. It doesn't actually *hurt* them, because all of their competitors have to do the same thing, but all of them have to "keep up with the Joneses" in terms of their tax planning and execution, lest failing to do it well hurt them as compared with competitors who do it better.
You're not subsidizing them. Whatever taxes corporations pay ultimately get paid by you and other individual taxpayers. The only difference is that if the tax is paid by a corporation the taxpayers can't as easily see that it came out of their pockets. Corporate taxation is just a way to hide the tax bill from the people who pay it.
So why do corporations lobby so hard to prevent effective corporate taxation?
The reason corporate taxes are bad, in a global sense, is they hide the tax bill from the taxpayers. That's a problem with the relationship between taxpaying voters and their government. Taxpayers should care because they need to know what they're paying. Governments care because -- in many cases -- they don't want taxpayers to know what they're paying, because the taxpayers might object and register their objections in their votes.
Corporations don't care about this issue of government/taxpayer transparency at all, for or against.
What they do care about is that when they have to pay the taxes, they have to figure out where they're going to get that money, and in order to be competitive they have to figure out how to ensure that are as tax-efficient as possible... because just like any other part of the competitive equation, paying too much in taxes puts them at a disadvantage compared to their competitors, lowering their value to their shareholders and the market as a whole, and making it hard for them to attract capital when they need it. So, corporate taxes create a need for corporations to build a whole infrastructure to handle taxation, to figure out how much they have to pay and to search for ways they can legally avoid paying as much tax as possible. For global corporations, this is hugely complex and they employ lots and lots of people who do nothing but handle tax issues.
So, if you're interested in assuring the welfare of tax laywers and accountants, then corporate taxes are a good thing because they ensure that corporations hire and pay a lot of those people. Similarly, if you're interested in aiding bureaucrats at being able to extract money from taxpayers in ways that are not directly accountable to the voters, they're good for that, too.
But if you believe in governmental transparency and avoiding needless and wasteful bureaucracy (in corporations as well as in government), then corporate taxes are a bad thing. Also, if you are a progressive who would like to make sure that the right people are footing the tax bill, then corporate taxes are a bad thing.
That's some seriously defective thinking. It's very easy to prove that WEP is insecure. No one has been able to demonstrate that cell phone RF creates cancer.
It's not that simple. WHen corporations are squirreling tens of billions offshore that money is *never* taxed.
The only reason they're leaving it offshore is because a bunch of it will get taken if they try to bring it home. Eliminate the corporate income taxes and they'll bring the money back and use it where it will do the economy some good... and in the process, get taxed.
Wasn't "PC" an abbreviation of "Paper Cassette"? I remember seeing the word "Error" on the display, but "PC" only appeared in relation to the paper tray/cassette.
Could be. I'm sure I recall seeing the "Problem Code" expansion in the manual, but that was a long time ago.
Or, in the future, sell it to the Russian mob for big bucks and retire.
Someone good at writing Russian gangster dialog should write that scene. It would include the Russian mobster trying to figure out why Levin thinks he'd care about hacking Lee Country elections.
You're not subsidizing them. Whatever taxes corporations pay ultimately get paid by you and other individual taxpayers. The only difference is that if the tax is paid by a corporation the taxpayers can't as easily see that it came out of their pockets. Corporate taxation is just a way to hide the tax bill from the people who pay it. As a side effect, routing those tax payments through corporations also takes control over what segment of the population pays the taxes out of the hands of lawmakers and puts it into the hands of corporate leaders, since they're the ones that pick whether the cash needed to pay taxes comes from consumers, in the form of higher prices, employees, in the form of lower wages, suppliers, in the form of lower prices, or investors, in the form of reduced dividends or growth.
It's a message familiar to many European HP printer owners of a certain age.
If a document formatted for US Letter paper was sent to an HP printer loaded only with ISO A4, that message would appear and the printer would refuse to print.
As long as you're explaining the joke, you may as well do a complete job.
"PC" was an abbreviation for "Problem Code". "LOAD LETTER" meant just what it says: A request to load "letter" sized (8.5" x 11") paper. This could be because the loaded paper wasn't the right size, or it could be because the paper tray was empty.
And the fact that "dinner" is considered a perk demonstrates why anyone with a life outside of work should never, ever consider working for a startup.
Bah.
You're assuming that the offer of dinner tells you something about required work hours. It tells you nothing about that. It may be that employees are required to work long hours and company-provided breakfast and dinner are indicators that employees should be at work before breakfast and not leave until after dinner. Or it may legitimately be a perk, a company-provided convenience for employees who are working late because they don't come into the office until 11 AM or because they actually choose to work long hours because they're excited about their projects and enjoy what they're doing.
The existence or absence of perks like meals doesn't inherently mean anything about expected work hours. If you want to find out what expected work hours are, you have to ask people who work there.
it seems to me this announcement also did double duty as a passive-aggressive method of informing Dropbox's workers they'll be expected to work an additional hour each day, going forward.
I think it's far more likely that the change is intended to dissuade employees from grabbing a free meal on their way out the door, to reserve the perk for the people who are legitimately working later and save money on food.
Slashdot Mirror
To be clear, your fear isn't Uber, then, it's any service where someone else drives you?
Hmmm.
Ok, so, how am I going to be able to transport my boat...drop it in the lake, park with the trailer, so that I can pull my boat out at the launch and drive it back home and park it?
What do I use to haul my stuff to the camp site and set up? Usually camping is a bit remote, so you need your vehicle WITH you there.....
In that case you rent the vehicle for the week (or whatever). Or maybe this will be one of the exceptional cases that encourages personal ownership. I own a pickup truck for exactly the purposes you mention, and I've debated whether I actually use it enough to justify owning it. It might be more cost-effective to just rent a truck when I need it. Well, this summer I'm hoping to go to the lake two or three days per week, hauling the boat back and forth each time, and if I do that then owning will clearly be better than renting... unless I rented a slip on the water and just left the boat there. That's expensive, but less than my monthly truck payment.
I think this is already getting close to optimized and isn't going to change much. I already get almost everything delivered to my door by a company that goes so far as to map its routes so there are fewer left turns to save fuel. Somebody still has to get out of the truck and deliver it to my porch.
Maybe. I envision future UPS trucks as mobile delivery-drone base stations. There may be a person in the truck sorting packages and managing the drones while the truck drives the route, launching and recovering drones while in motion. I think one large truck could replace several of the size currently used.
The only statistic I have is one more mass shooter then taxis have had, in 1/10 the length of the industry.
Here's what a 30-second Google search turned up on murderous cab drivers.
http://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/west-phoenix/pd-man-shot-at-west-phoenix-gas-station
http://www.wsvn.com/story/28813868/taxi-driver-charged-in-miami-shooting
https://www.policeone.com/investigations/articles/6134656-Motive-unknown-for-cab-driver-who-shot-cop-in-head/
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2015/07/cab_driver_tells_police_he_sho.html
Obviously you'd have to choose a depth limit that balances space utilization with access efficiency. But it would still be dramatically more space-efficient than current parking lots.
Even better is if most of those cars are automated taxis, which only park because current demand is low enough that it's not cost-effective for them to be on the road. When demand picks up more cars need to be sent out... but it doesn't matter which ones, so you don't have to retrieve the one in the bottom of the stack.
I think automated cars change the road dynamics enough to make that unclear. As traffic gets heavy, humans have to slow down because they need time and distance for their reactions. But if automated-only lanes are created, the computerized cars not only have reaction times two or three orders of magnitude faster than humans, but they can also coordinate via radio. That means that they can reduce following distances to near zero and increase speeds, which means that throughput for a given amount of road space increases dramatically.
Hyperloop?
No. One engine vs many. Less friction. Etc. Rail is still better.
If energy consumption is the only consideration, sure. But rail travel is inconvenient in important ways. You have to travel on the train's schedule and you have to use other modes of transportation to/from the rail station.
I can see self-driving cars killing commuter rail. Lots of rail commuters are presently accepting longer commute times in exchange for being able to read, work, sleep or whatever else on their way. Self-driving cars would allow them to do that and have the shorter commute times, and door to door service. Assuming traffic doesn't increase so much that congestion makes driving slower. Given fully-automated vehicles, though, it seems perfectly reasonable to have some automated-only lanes which reduce following distances to almost nothing and increase speeds to 100+mph. As traffic gets heavier human drivers slow down for safety, but automated systems don't necessarily need to do that. Increasing speeds increases throughput and allows a given amount of road to move more vehicles per unit of time.
Plus there are almost certainly a number of factors which will be utterly obvious in hindsight, but we don't see now. Tough to call.
Autonomous cars will 'rest' in off-street buffer lots and maintenance warehouses, and it will be No Parking forever citywide.
Yeah, because everyone who drives will be perfectly happy waiting half an hour for their car to return from "resting" before they can do something somewhere else.
No, there will never be "no parking citywide", because too many people need to park where they go. Not just delivery people who park while delivering things, but handicapped people.
As long as the car parks close enough that it can get to you within a few minutes, what's the problem? And if you're not going to be there that long, just have the car drop you off and circle the block.
As for handicapped people; there's no need for the *car* to park to help them. Indeed, they're best served by being delivered right to the doorstep. Same for deliveries, unless substantial unloading time is required, in which case the delivery vehicle will need a loading dock or other unloading zone, same as now. But that's loading/unloading, not parking.
This is a huge problem in North America; so many layers of laws and regulations and by-laws no one knows what the law is, not Joe public, not the cops, not the courts.
I'm assuming this is by design. When things are so complicated that it takes a lawyer many billable hours to figure out where you can legally park, it stacks the odds heavily in the citys favor and turns anything they want into an easy revenue stream.
I think Hanlon's Razor favors a different explanation, namely that the people who make the laws don't really understand them either. They make changes in a reactive manner when they see something that's a problem or doesn't make sense, and they apply a minimal patch to the law (avoiding refactoring) that appears to resolve the problem they're trying to address, in their jurisdiction. They also don't coordinate with higher or lower jurisdictions, and indeed don't necessarily even pay any attention to what those other jurisdictions are doing.
That sort of a process creates spaghetti law, just the way doing the same thing in software creates spaghetti code. Without careful attention to modularization, separation of concerns, without a willingness to refactor when necessary, and without extensive tests to validate that changes don't cause regressions, what you get is a mess.
That's why they use the illegally obtained evidence to make up a different story. They even helpfully tell local police departments to do it.
Yes, that happens. Note that in this case, though, we aren't talking about illegally-obtained evidence, we're talking about legally-obtained evidence that can't stand up in court. So they don't need careful parallel construction to avoid "fruit of the poisoned tree" issues. If asked what put them on the track of the evidence that can be used in court, they can happily point to the decrypted data.
Where this creates real risks is if they claim to have gotten a lead from decrypted data in order to start a parallel construction as an alternative to evidence that was obtained illegally. For example, suppose the cops entered the suspect's house without a warrant and found an e-mail on his computer which led them to damning evidence which they could only have found with access to his e-mail. They can't use that evidence in court because the defense attorney would ask them how they obtained the e-mail. But assuming they had some other basis for arresting the suspect and taking his phone, they can simply claim that they got the e-mail from there, even if they didn't actually decrypt the phone at all. Unless the defense has some evidence that they're lying about having gotten the information from the phone, he has no way to argue that the damning evidence is fruit of the poisoned tree, so the judge will refuse to exclude it.
What makes you think an autonomous taxi will be any more convenient then a real taxi today?
It won't be so much that it's more convenient as that it will be much cheaper. The most expensive part of a taxi service is the drivers (well, once you remove silly regulatory obstacles like medallions). Being much cheaper will make cabs much more widely used, and for longer journeys. Being more widely-used will mean there are many more of them... which actually *does* increase convenience since it will take less time to get one to come pick you up.
As a result, automated taxi's will cost roughly the same.
You're wrong, but there's not much point in arguing about it. Time will prove me right.
It doesn't matter how much safer they are. If people can't afford them they won't buy them.
Self-driving cars will end car ownership in many areas, and reduce it everywhere. The problem with personally-owned vehicles is that they represent a large chunk of cash which is sitting completely idle most of the time. In urban and suburban areas, you could replace all of the existing cars with perhaps 25% as many self-driving cars operating in a smartphone-hailed automated taxi system. Maybe even fewer than that if people are willing to adjust their workday to spread out "rush hour", or to accept riding with others.
Even for families who aren't willing or able for whatever reason to give up their own cars completely, self-driving cars will offer the option of reducing the number of cars they own. A self-driving car that can operate empty can take one person to work then return home for another in many cases. It may well be more cost-effective to own one autonomous vehicle than two "dumb" ones, even if the autonomous vehicle is significantly more expensive. This is especially true when you factor in the availability of automated taxis to cover occasional multi-vehicle needs, and integrate them with electronic calendaring systems.
For example, I work from home and my wife is a stay-at-home mom, yet we still have two cars because there are inevitably times when we both need to go different places at the same time. We live in a rural area, far enough away that I wouldn't want to count on automated taxis entirely, but I could absolutely see scaling back to owning only a single vehicle and making sure that I always schedule things on my calendar so my phone knows to call an autocab 20 minutes before I have to leave[*]. Further, right now we actually have four vehicles, because two adult sons need to get to work and to school. All of those "regularly scheduled" trips could be replaced with autocabs, and since the one son works only 10 minutes from home, a self-driving car could easily take him to work and return home, then go back to pick him up.
No, in the self-driving car era, I think owning an automobile yourself will become a luxury that most people don't see a reason to bother with. Autonomous taxis will be far cheaper, and while they'll be slightly less convenient in some ways -- you may have to wait a few minutes for a car before you can leave -- they'll also be more convenient in others -- no need to worry about parking.
[*] Scheduling things on my phone wouldn't even be a change. I already always do that so that Google Now can remind me when I need to leave. It already factors current and predicted traffic conditions into its travel time estimates. It would require only a very small change to factor in time to call an autocab and time for it to travel to me.
Thank you. So why do you disagree with the conclusions?
It occurs to me that I could have given a pithier answer to your direct question. How's this:
Corporations consider taxes just another cost of doing business, but one that is a large and complex distraction from their core business expertise. It requires them to build up big tax-management and tax-mitigation organizations, and often to do silly things, to no beneficial effect. It doesn't actually *hurt* them, because all of their competitors have to do the same thing, but all of them have to "keep up with the Joneses" in terms of their tax planning and execution, lest failing to do it well hurt them as compared with competitors who do it better.
You're not subsidizing them. Whatever taxes corporations pay ultimately get paid by you and other individual taxpayers. The only difference is that if the tax is paid by a corporation the taxpayers can't as easily see that it came out of their pockets. Corporate taxation is just a way to hide the tax bill from the people who pay it.
So why do corporations lobby so hard to prevent effective corporate taxation?
The reason corporate taxes are bad, in a global sense, is they hide the tax bill from the taxpayers. That's a problem with the relationship between taxpaying voters and their government. Taxpayers should care because they need to know what they're paying. Governments care because -- in many cases -- they don't want taxpayers to know what they're paying, because the taxpayers might object and register their objections in their votes.
Corporations don't care about this issue of government/taxpayer transparency at all, for or against.
What they do care about is that when they have to pay the taxes, they have to figure out where they're going to get that money, and in order to be competitive they have to figure out how to ensure that are as tax-efficient as possible... because just like any other part of the competitive equation, paying too much in taxes puts them at a disadvantage compared to their competitors, lowering their value to their shareholders and the market as a whole, and making it hard for them to attract capital when they need it. So, corporate taxes create a need for corporations to build a whole infrastructure to handle taxation, to figure out how much they have to pay and to search for ways they can legally avoid paying as much tax as possible. For global corporations, this is hugely complex and they employ lots and lots of people who do nothing but handle tax issues.
So, if you're interested in assuring the welfare of tax laywers and accountants, then corporate taxes are a good thing because they ensure that corporations hire and pay a lot of those people. Similarly, if you're interested in aiding bureaucrats at being able to extract money from taxpayers in ways that are not directly accountable to the voters, they're good for that, too.
But if you believe in governmental transparency and avoiding needless and wasteful bureaucracy (in corporations as well as in government), then corporate taxes are a bad thing. Also, if you are a progressive who would like to make sure that the right people are footing the tax bill, then corporate taxes are a bad thing.
That's some seriously defective thinking. It's very easy to prove that WEP is insecure. No one has been able to demonstrate that cell phone RF creates cancer.
It's not that simple. WHen corporations are squirreling tens of billions offshore that money is *never* taxed.
The only reason they're leaving it offshore is because a bunch of it will get taken if they try to bring it home. Eliminate the corporate income taxes and they'll bring the money back and use it where it will do the economy some good... and in the process, get taxed.
Wasn't "PC" an abbreviation of "Paper Cassette"? I remember seeing the word "Error" on the display, but "PC" only appeared in relation to the paper tray/cassette.
Could be. I'm sure I recall seeing the "Problem Code" expansion in the manual, but that was a long time ago.
Or, in the future, sell it to the Russian mob for big bucks and retire.
Someone good at writing Russian gangster dialog should write that scene. It would include the Russian mobster trying to figure out why Levin thinks he'd care about hacking Lee Country elections.
Why is my tax paying lower-class ass subsidizing these corporate welfare queens ?? Great research site BTW...
You're not subsidizing them. Whatever taxes corporations pay ultimately get paid by you and other individual taxpayers. The only difference is that if the tax is paid by a corporation the taxpayers can't as easily see that it came out of their pockets. Corporate taxation is just a way to hide the tax bill from the people who pay it. As a side effect, routing those tax payments through corporations also takes control over what segment of the population pays the taxes out of the hands of lawmakers and puts it into the hands of corporate leaders, since they're the ones that pick whether the cash needed to pay taxes comes from consumers, in the form of higher prices, employees, in the form of lower wages, suppliers, in the form of lower prices, or investors, in the form of reduced dividends or growth.
So... the difference between avoidance and evasion is just the difference between legal and illegal.
That's a rather large difference.
It's a message familiar to many European HP printer owners of a certain age.
If a document formatted for US Letter paper was sent to an HP printer loaded only with ISO A4, that message would appear and the printer would refuse to print.
As long as you're explaining the joke, you may as well do a complete job.
"PC" was an abbreviation for "Problem Code". "LOAD LETTER" meant just what it says: A request to load "letter" sized (8.5" x 11") paper. This could be because the loaded paper wasn't the right size, or it could be because the paper tray was empty.
And the fact that "dinner" is considered a perk demonstrates why anyone with a life outside of work should never, ever consider working for a startup.
Bah.
You're assuming that the offer of dinner tells you something about required work hours. It tells you nothing about that. It may be that employees are required to work long hours and company-provided breakfast and dinner are indicators that employees should be at work before breakfast and not leave until after dinner. Or it may legitimately be a perk, a company-provided convenience for employees who are working late because they don't come into the office until 11 AM or because they actually choose to work long hours because they're excited about their projects and enjoy what they're doing.
The existence or absence of perks like meals doesn't inherently mean anything about expected work hours. If you want to find out what expected work hours are, you have to ask people who work there.
it seems to me this announcement also did double duty as a passive-aggressive method of informing Dropbox's workers they'll be expected to work an additional hour each day, going forward.
I think it's far more likely that the change is intended to dissuade employees from grabbing a free meal on their way out the door, to reserve the perk for the people who are legitimately working later and save money on food.
Sorry, I didn't know I'd give away company secrets, I thought that's common knowledge by now.
What are you talking about?