The problem is that by taking things too personally, you can lose sight of empirical cause and effect, and end up overlooking slower, grander overall solutions by knocking yourself out trying to solve individual cases.
In this case, I still stand behind what I said. Right now, the WalMart system works because the people are getting just enough to get by, by virtue of public assistance taking up the slack. Life sucks, but it's still sustaining the workers enough that they aren't leaving. If Wal-Mart workers could not, by any means whatsoever (meaning no welfare taking up the slack), afford to support themselves on a Wal-Mart salary, in a market with any sort of job competition at all, it would be unsustainable for the employees, and therefore Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, the assistance means that these folks can get by and have just enough to stay on the treadmill, while Wal-Mart is reaping the benefits of being able to cheat people all around the line.
If assistance were not available, I don't think it would be as much a hardship for the workers, as a lack of opportunity for Wal-Mart to cheapskate. In order to keep workers they would have to cut into their margins and make up that slack. Although I do think that gov't help is a necessary part of an enlightened society, in that particular case, the government help is enabling the exploitation by, in effect, paying WM by proxy, allowing Wal-Mart to lower prices more to gain more marketshare, and perpetuate it's "just enough to get by" practices.
It wasn't so much that someone would notice, but that without public assistance, the system of exploitation would be that much less possible.
(I'm interested in this discussion if you'd like to keep it up, but I am going to be out of DSL for the next couple days, if you wonder why there's no reply.)
And then where would the minimum wage worker would be without the raise?
Quitting. Unionizing.
Okay, I'll grant that the Wal-Mart steamroller gives a decent counterpoint, but I think that if the gap got too wide (and the gov't didn't spackle over it with public assistance), even that would break.
Why should extremely gifted or the extremely lucky be the only ones to partake of what life has to offer?
If I'm not mistaken, it all started with uneven distribution of resources, and people having to compete in scarcity. Then, as the quality of living improved, the scarcity shifted to different items, along with (more abstractly) a "scarcity" of items that did not yet exist (research and striving for higher things and greater efficiencies).
(This is just me musing, not quoting anyone here)
Any system large enough to distribute resources to any significant mass of humanity, must become, to some extent, a personally-removed "economic" or "political" system. Case-by-case distinctions cannot be made-- any sizeable system must operate more like a "sorting machine". Resources are fed in, and a chugging ideological sorter chugs along (be it tooled for Capitalism, Socialism, whatever you like) and divvies out the resources according to the ideological mechanics of the society.
Judging a person's innate deficiencies of ability (disabled, underpriveledged, unnecessary) versus mutable deficiencies of character (lazy, contented, flighty) is not an easy task for the systemic machine. There's too much gray area. If the system allows too much leeway in the interest of protecting the unable, it ends up collapsing under the weight of the lazy who can game it to their advantage.
The system chosen in the US, for good or ill, is (some admittedly warped form of) capitalism. The capitalist sorting machine tends to err toward not distributing to those who do not produce wanted work. The resulting split of rich/poor, and the fact that everyone can't have a car, house, and cable, is not exploitation as much as the bias of the sorting system against people who cannot, for any type of reason, produce wanted work. The ultimate advantage to this system is that the way and motivation for the poorer to become the richer is to create wanted work, which fills holes of scarcity and produces a society that lacks less.
Sure, $5.15/hr sucks compared to $25.15, but $5.15 can still buy a roof and constant nutrition.
Every purchase with an "awards card" is tracked, and people are totally fine with this type of tracking.
Actually, I have a few of these and I don't really mind it. If, for some odd reason, I feel I need to duck incognito, I can just stop swiping the card (and pay cash). If a company wants to use my completely innocuous and consentually-given purchase info to give me advertisements that better pertain to my actual wants, and they wish to reward me to a degree I consider worthy for the privilege, what's the problem. It's a better deal for me than scattershot tree-wasting ad circulars and no freebies after every 5th swipe.
(Dear god... "the man" knows, in some deep database down in its mind, that I'm a fat-ass soda swiller. Hell, they could tell that by looking at my fat ass standing there with the "Ungainly-Huge Gulp")
If you have the restraint not to buy anything anyone hands you a 50%-off coupon for unless you really need/want it, these deals aren't all that bad.
must avoid starting a tangental flamewar... must avoid starting a tangental flamewar... must avoi... oh, screw it.
How come 30 million people have to try to live on $5.15 an hour?
Because 29,999,999 other people also have a similarily qualified skill/opportunity/motivation set and will work for $5.75/hr.
If a minimum wage exceeds the real value of a minimum-wage worker, especially in the case of a nationally-enforced minimum wage, you'd just be playing leapfrog with inflation that constantly creeps up to drive the real income of a minimum wage worker back down to what their work is actually worth to the market. That inflation would also have the effect of making everyone's savings worth less and less (not taking into account interest, which would mitigate the effect to some extent.)
This is not to say I'm for throwing out the minimum wage or other such "minimum" labor laws. If you cut out the floor, you end up screwing people over throughout the chain by allowing people willing to be underpaid to undercut, and thus lessen the value of trades and push out more qualified workers who actually wish to make a living. (Okay, so I do have somewhat of a protectionist streak to me as well.) Until some better structural solution (and don't give me any fulla'-holes 'isms) comes along, the only real solution is to keep the minimum wage at the realistic value of minimum wage work. At the moment, folks seem to think "$5.15".
(No, I'm not an economist, and yes, I welcome you to shoot these arguments full of holes, especially if you can provide links to informative material.)
Terrorists could be sitting next to you right now packed full of explosives waiting to blow away your god given freedom.
Just think. What if the terrorists become invisible? What if they already are? The scenario you point out might not be far from the truth. I'd better start waving my flag around and see if it hits any invisible terrorists.
My god. What if they're not even here? Those would be the worst, sneakiest terrorists of all!
You can get that as well using the shutdown command.
It's a handy one to know for when you want to SHUT the machine DOWN, come hell, high water (or more likely) stalling programs that won't die. If you're on a machine with no remote users, just put it on a very short delay and let 'er rip. It won't stall or ask you to End stalled tasks.
It's also useful for shutting down remote machines. (For both cases, see the/? help.) With a wake-on-lan activator (the only part not included with XP, I forget the particular one I use), Remote Desktop, and the shutdown command, I easily control my desktop file-serving machine from power-on to power-off, from the laptop in the other room.
I haven't looked into it (aside from R'ing TFA), but if they don't accept standard formats, that's just their niche decision, and it's just not the one for you. There are plenty (most, I think) of similar online small-run publishers that do accept common formats.
Although there's also the question of whether the device's useful life with outlast its physical life. Based on what you're saying, cold shutoff might still save more energy if switch failure (and required replacement) would have happened after the device had been discarded for other reasons. The increasing availability of resale/recycling facilities may mean mechanical components might break down before losing value, but (at least in commodity hardware) there's also the possibility that new, lower-energy systems may make it a lower-net-use to buy new machines than continuing to use old power-hogs.
Actually, that makes me wonder: For something like the "simple firewall" situation, is it more power-effective to build and deploy a new low-power device or to keep that old Pentium kicking?
For mine they didn't even have a writer. They just did it DMV-style: Hand me one off the top of the stack, then associate that number (pre-written to the card) with my account. Of course, the credit-compatible card came in the mail later, but at least this allowed me to use the ATM and access cash.
It's minimal security where only minimal security is needed. At banks, these are just on the outside set of doors, to protect the ATMs from people who abolutely, positively shouldn't be there. The inner set of doors to the bank proper, and the ATM itself, are well-secured to prevent theft and break-in. The front-door checks are just to discourage people sleeping in the booth and (I would imagine) to prevent or stall muggings at the ATM.
If it had to go over page content, you'd use a fuzzy black box on a layer undeneath the window, with an opacity value applied (a transparent PNG would work as well). For something over whitespace, just drop a shadow.
Although I still say that's more hackish than optimal.
Re:Experts should be optional
on
Dvorak Rants on CSS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So why even introduce content styling at all?
CSS, in past specs and in practically current implementations, is half-baked. There are enough layout controls in it to make a person want to do layout with it. There are, however, too few controls (and too many poorly implemented) to make CSS a robust and dependable layout tool. Why, Why, WHY should centering a DIV involve the process of moving it 50% of the way across the screen then pulling it back 1/2 its (specified) width? Even in the mythical correctly-working-browser that's too much of a hack to consider CSS complete.
The best I can figure is that nobody thought that CSS was going to be much more than a fonts-and-colors tool until it was too late.
As for "working correctly": This isn't the Web of the early 1990s. Tools, technology, and bandwidth have increased to the point where basic information presentation is so far "in-the-bag" capable, and so many different types of people have joined the fray, that information presentation has gone from being irrelevant, through being an afterthought, to being a legitimate consideration. "Looking nice" is a consideration of "working" on the modern Web.
In that case, tone down your subscription level, or don't think so hard about the money you're theoretically wasting when you hold onto or send back an unwatched disc. It's all about perspective.
First off, part of the whole concept of Netflix is the subscription model. You're paying for a timeframe in which to have discs, not a quantity of discs to have.
Also, (I'm pretty sure) the concept of "time-shifting" relates only to broadcast media, in which an open-ended, indescrete number of consumers is served by a time-dependent, streaming transmission. In the case of DVDs, the content is licensed as a single instance, in the form of (although not necessarily bound by) the physical media. Any copying or transfer is governed by the "one owner" principle. (The rightful owner can make as many copies (backups) as they want, but all copies from that original must be transferred when any one of them is.)
Of course, the advent of rental sparked enough outcry to get specialized legislation written, so your mileage can (and does) vary even more than that.
I doubt it would end up being a paid-site situation (from the consumer's end), but it will end up being a small-to-decent stream of revenue for the publishers as website-owners buy it, and a small-to-decent stream of revenue from exclusive access leading to advertising ability.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then... all we need is a few CSS'd DVDs from some offbeat unknown (and unconsulted) studio, and some lawyers.
The problem is that by taking things too personally, you can lose sight of empirical cause and effect, and end up overlooking slower, grander overall solutions by knocking yourself out trying to solve individual cases.
In this case, I still stand behind what I said. Right now, the WalMart system works because the people are getting just enough to get by, by virtue of public assistance taking up the slack. Life sucks, but it's still sustaining the workers enough that they aren't leaving. If Wal-Mart workers could not, by any means whatsoever (meaning no welfare taking up the slack), afford to support themselves on a Wal-Mart salary, in a market with any sort of job competition at all, it would be unsustainable for the employees, and therefore Wal-Mart. Unfortunately, the assistance means that these folks can get by and have just enough to stay on the treadmill, while Wal-Mart is reaping the benefits of being able to cheat people all around the line.
If assistance were not available, I don't think it would be as much a hardship for the workers, as a lack of opportunity for Wal-Mart to cheapskate. In order to keep workers they would have to cut into their margins and make up that slack. Although I do think that gov't help is a necessary part of an enlightened society, in that particular case, the government help is enabling the exploitation by, in effect, paying WM by proxy, allowing Wal-Mart to lower prices more to gain more marketshare, and perpetuate it's "just enough to get by" practices.
It wasn't so much that someone would notice, but that without public assistance, the system of exploitation would be that much less possible.
(I'm interested in this discussion if you'd like to keep it up, but I am going to be out of DSL for the next couple days, if you wonder why there's no reply.)
Ahh, I follow. Must've misread the original post.
That's just a phishing site. Just ask for their password.
And then where would the minimum wage worker would be without the raise?
Quitting. Unionizing.
Okay, I'll grant that the Wal-Mart steamroller gives a decent counterpoint, but I think that if the gap got too wide (and the gov't didn't spackle over it with public assistance), even that would break.
Why should extremely gifted or the extremely lucky be the only ones to partake of what life has to offer?
If I'm not mistaken, it all started with uneven distribution of resources, and people having to compete in scarcity. Then, as the quality of living improved, the scarcity shifted to different items, along with (more abstractly) a "scarcity" of items that did not yet exist (research and striving for higher things and greater efficiencies).
(This is just me musing, not quoting anyone here)
Any system large enough to distribute resources to any significant mass of humanity, must become, to some extent, a personally-removed "economic" or "political" system. Case-by-case distinctions cannot be made-- any sizeable system must operate more like a "sorting machine". Resources are fed in, and a chugging ideological sorter chugs along (be it tooled for Capitalism, Socialism, whatever you like) and divvies out the resources according to the ideological mechanics of the society.
Judging a person's innate deficiencies of ability (disabled, underpriveledged, unnecessary) versus mutable deficiencies of character (lazy, contented, flighty) is not an easy task for the systemic machine. There's too much gray area. If the system allows too much leeway in the interest of protecting the unable, it ends up collapsing under the weight of the lazy who can game it to their advantage.
The system chosen in the US, for good or ill, is (some admittedly warped form of) capitalism. The capitalist sorting machine tends to err toward not distributing to those who do not produce wanted work. The resulting split of rich/poor, and the fact that everyone can't have a car, house, and cable, is not exploitation as much as the bias of the sorting system against people who cannot, for any type of reason, produce wanted work. The ultimate advantage to this system is that the way and motivation for the poorer to become the richer is to create wanted work, which fills holes of scarcity and produces a society that lacks less.
Sure, $5.15/hr sucks compared to $25.15, but $5.15 can still buy a roof and constant nutrition.
Every purchase with an "awards card" is tracked, and people are totally fine with this type of tracking.
Actually, I have a few of these and I don't really mind it. If, for some odd reason, I feel I need to duck incognito, I can just stop swiping the card (and pay cash). If a company wants to use my completely innocuous and consentually-given purchase info to give me advertisements that better pertain to my actual wants, and they wish to reward me to a degree I consider worthy for the privilege, what's the problem. It's a better deal for me than scattershot tree-wasting ad circulars and no freebies after every 5th swipe.
(Dear god... "the man" knows, in some deep database down in its mind, that I'm a fat-ass soda swiller. Hell, they could tell that by looking at my fat ass standing there with the "Ungainly-Huge Gulp")
If you have the restraint not to buy anything anyone hands you a 50%-off coupon for unless you really need/want it, these deals aren't all that bad.
must avoid starting a tangental flamewar... must avoid starting a tangental flamewar... must avoi... oh, screw it.
How come 30 million people have to try to live on $5.15 an hour?
Because 29,999,999 other people also have a similarily qualified skill/opportunity/motivation set and will work for $5.75/hr.
If a minimum wage exceeds the real value of a minimum-wage worker, especially in the case of a nationally-enforced minimum wage, you'd just be playing leapfrog with inflation that constantly creeps up to drive the real income of a minimum wage worker back down to what their work is actually worth to the market. That inflation would also have the effect of making everyone's savings worth less and less (not taking into account interest, which would mitigate the effect to some extent.)
This is not to say I'm for throwing out the minimum wage or other such "minimum" labor laws. If you cut out the floor, you end up screwing people over throughout the chain by allowing people willing to be underpaid to undercut, and thus lessen the value of trades and push out more qualified workers who actually wish to make a living. (Okay, so I do have somewhat of a protectionist streak to me as well.) Until some better structural solution (and don't give me any fulla'-holes 'isms) comes along, the only real solution is to keep the minimum wage at the realistic value of minimum wage work. At the moment, folks seem to think "$5.15".
(No, I'm not an economist, and yes, I welcome you to shoot these arguments full of holes, especially if you can provide links to informative material.)
Wait... what were we talking about?
What, so you can't have two of 'em?
Only if the government's neck-deep in it too.
If the Liberals know, they can only use it against us.
Terrorists could be sitting next to you right now packed full of explosives waiting to blow away your god given freedom.
Just think. What if the terrorists become invisible? What if they already are? The scenario you point out might not be far from the truth. I'd better start waving my flag around and see if it hits any invisible terrorists.
My god. What if they're not even here? Those would be the worst, sneakiest terrorists of all!
You can get that as well using the shutdown command.
/? help.) With a wake-on-lan activator (the only part not included with XP, I forget the particular one I use), Remote Desktop, and the shutdown command, I easily control my desktop file-serving machine from power-on to power-off, from the laptop in the other room.
It's a handy one to know for when you want to SHUT the machine DOWN, come hell, high water (or more likely) stalling programs that won't die. If you're on a machine with no remote users, just put it on a very short delay and let 'er rip. It won't stall or ask you to End stalled tasks.
It's also useful for shutting down remote machines. (For both cases, see the
I haven't looked into it (aside from R'ing TFA), but if they don't accept standard formats, that's just their niche decision, and it's just not the one for you. There are plenty (most, I think) of similar online small-run publishers that do accept common formats.
Although there's also the question of whether the device's useful life with outlast its physical life. Based on what you're saying, cold shutoff might still save more energy if switch failure (and required replacement) would have happened after the device had been discarded for other reasons. The increasing availability of resale/recycling facilities may mean mechanical components might break down before losing value, but (at least in commodity hardware) there's also the possibility that new, lower-energy systems may make it a lower-net-use to buy new machines than continuing to use old power-hogs.
Actually, that makes me wonder: For something like the "simple firewall" situation, is it more power-effective to build and deploy a new low-power device or to keep that old Pentium kicking?
For mine they didn't even have a writer. They just did it DMV-style: Hand me one off the top of the stack, then associate that number (pre-written to the card) with my account. Of course, the credit-compatible card came in the mail later, but at least this allowed me to use the ATM and access cash.
It's minimal security where only minimal security is needed. At banks, these are just on the outside set of doors, to protect the ATMs from people who abolutely, positively shouldn't be there. The inner set of doors to the bank proper, and the ATM itself, are well-secured to prevent theft and break-in. The front-door checks are just to discourage people sleeping in the booth and (I would imagine) to prevent or stall muggings at the ATM.
If it had to go over page content, you'd use a fuzzy black box on a layer undeneath the window, with an opacity value applied (a transparent PNG would work as well). For something over whitespace, just drop a shadow.
Touche.
Although I still say that's more hackish than optimal.
So why even introduce content styling at all?
CSS, in past specs and in practically current implementations, is half-baked. There are enough layout controls in it to make a person want to do layout with it. There are, however, too few controls (and too many poorly implemented) to make CSS a robust and dependable layout tool. Why, Why, WHY should centering a DIV involve the process of moving it 50% of the way across the screen then pulling it back 1/2 its (specified) width? Even in the mythical correctly-working-browser that's too much of a hack to consider CSS complete.
The best I can figure is that nobody thought that CSS was going to be much more than a fonts-and-colors tool until it was too late.
As for "working correctly": This isn't the Web of the early 1990s. Tools, technology, and bandwidth have increased to the point where basic information presentation is so far "in-the-bag" capable, and so many different types of people have joined the fray, that information presentation has gone from being irrelevant, through being an afterthought, to being a legitimate consideration. "Looking nice" is a consideration of "working" on the modern Web.
This is a mere 7-minute drive.
So just drop it off at their door.
In that case, tone down your subscription level, or don't think so hard about the money you're theoretically wasting when you hold onto or send back an unwatched disc. It's all about perspective.
Doubtful.
First off, part of the whole concept of Netflix is the subscription model. You're paying for a timeframe in which to have discs, not a quantity of discs to have.
Also, (I'm pretty sure) the concept of "time-shifting" relates only to broadcast media, in which an open-ended, indescrete number of consumers is served by a time-dependent, streaming transmission. In the case of DVDs, the content is licensed as a single instance, in the form of (although not necessarily bound by) the physical media. Any copying or transfer is governed by the "one owner" principle. (The rightful owner can make as many copies (backups) as they want, but all copies from that original must be transferred when any one of them is.)
Of course, the advent of rental sparked enough outcry to get specialized legislation written, so your mileage can (and does) vary even more than that.
Given the pitiful electrical output of a human brain, good luck getting a signal to someone a good ways away.
Pringles-can hat?
I doubt it would end up being a paid-site situation (from the consumer's end), but it will end up being a small-to-decent stream of revenue for the publishers as website-owners buy it, and a small-to-decent stream of revenue from exclusive access leading to advertising ability.