How many jobs will be lost for every dollar the minimum wage increases? What, you think increasing the wage paid to stock boys in grocery stores won't reduce the number of clerks on the payroll?
No, it wont, that is not how hourly jobs work. You cant just cut jobs and still get the same amount of work done with hourly jobs. So, one of two things will happen. First, the employer will take a reduction in profit. Second, the employer will raise prices for product, increasing the cost to the general public, and driving inflation. As long as the minimum wage keeps up with inflation, then this is not a bad thing. Inflation is effectively a flat tax, and with a minimum wage in place, the bottom is automatically exempted from it.
1) You're clearly not used to being frugal in your spending for food. You can pretty comfortably survive at under $150/mo. for food (I just noticed another responder to you says they're at $100/mo. comfortably). You can eat out for lunch and dinner pretty regularly for under $300/mo. if you're careful with where you go and what you purchase. I know, because I've done both of those within the last few years.
I live in a place where food is hideously expensive. I don't really know why, but even the milk costs >$4 per gallon. The lowest grade of hamburger is $3.99 per pound. Pasta runs about $1.60 a small box. My parents live about an hour away and everything costs half as much out there. I'm stuck a lot closer to the city though.
2) Minimum wage jobs are not the end goal. They are a way stay afloat while you find something better. That might just be a better position at the store (in this case, maybe a Genius?) or it might be investing in an education. In my case, I did it to get through grad school. Now I have an awesome job with great benefits.
No, minimum wage was created so that society did not need to actively support the bottom social class all the time. When it was first created, it worked ok. Now, it has failed to keep up with cost of living and as such is too low. Much too low.
You should have read the column for "after 3% inflation". Then its at 1,100 / month, less than what he earned with working. And for the record, the calculator showed 750k with a 5% ROI. That's relatively high risk investment, and you wont get that much over the life of the person because at some point in 40 years, the market will tank and he will be unemployed and the investment rate will go negative. In short you read the results wrong, and made some majorly impractical assumptions. I hope you dont fail as utterly with your own retirement planning.
Look at his budget and then read through the line items. Hes talking about feeding a family of $450 / month. Where I live, Ramen, Chef-boy-are-dee, and Penut Butter and Jelly Sandwhiches run me that much for just me. Insurance $600 for car + home? My insurance is $1000 just for the house. Taxes, 0.6%? WTF, my home taxes are 3% and climbing, and anyone who thinks renters dont pay property taxes is just foolish. Health care $100 / month? My employer pays 80%, and my 20% for a family of four is $300 / month. Gas 316? for the year? Thats, what, all of ten gallons a year. Must be nice to live within biking distance of work, but all of that housing where i live is out of my price range by a wide margin.
So in short, he's living in an area with less than half the average cost of living, and saying that anyone can live on $30k? Fuck you Asshole.
Where I live, the cheapest living accommodations are $300 / month, and you don't go outside after dark. That gets you a bed in a room with a roommate, and you're sharing a four bedroom apt with 6 other people in the other three rooms. Your portion of the utilities is $100 / month in the winter and $50 in the summer. Food for one person will run you $450 / month, and public transport is $75 / month (lousy subsidies).
Now, $1100 every two weeks is not $11/hr, its $14 / hr. $11/ hr is $900. Take out 17% taxes + soc sec + every other thing, and you get $1500 / month total.
So yes, if you're willing to live in the worst slum, never own a car, never have any privacy or a family, never spend money on a social life, and commute 2 hours a day for an 8 hour shift (if you're lucky enough to get 8 hours, most service jobs are "part time" only to ensure employers don't have to provide full benefits.), you can put away about $500 / month. At that rate, when you are ready to retire, you will have about 250k in savings and no pension, very little if any social security income, and you'll have to hoard that $250k to pay for living in that same slum you have been in for the last 40 years.
Yay American dream.
Minimum wage in this country needs to go up a lot, and millionaires need to return to the days when they were expected to pay 75%+ of their income in taxes to support the society that has made them rich in the first place.
I admit, I'm a bit of an Apple hater sometimes. It's their attitude, towards thinking they own basic concepts, but I digress. I did a quick check to see what competing retailers are paying.
Not in New York City they're not, and that is what the New York Times is talking about. Yes, Much of the country starts people at ~$9 / hr, but in NYC, $9 / hr is starvation wage. $12 / hr will pay for food and possibly rent, but thats about it. Glassdoor uses the nationwide numbers, and the number of retails sales people in rural areas far outweighs the numbers in the major metropolitan areas. That is why the major met areas pay more, because each individual sales person does more volume by virtue of being in a target rich environment.
If Surface is a success it will jumpstart the entire Windows ecosystem and check the growth of the iPad. This will only help the OEMs in the end. If it's not a success then it's not a threat to OEMs.
Yes it is. The windows tablet ecosystem on ARM will hasten the demise of the desktop ecosystem. The OEMs could find themselves Kodak'd with no access to either iOS or Surface, and being stuck with Android. If this sucker is successful, then Apple and MS will quickly wipe the Desktop relevance off the table, and leave the OEMs without a chair when the music stops. The OEMs now have a very strong incentive to hate MS, which is why MS kept it a secret from them as long as it could.
ARM is alien space for MS?
Someone should have told the CE division about this long ago.
Having used windows CE, I have to say that ARM remains foreign turf for MS. Every winCE device I have ever used has been a flaky POS, and these are supposed to be industrial equipment. It's like being back in the bad old days of win9x and the blue screen of death.
That may change, but it's not looking that way right now. This is Apple creating a great product but not listening to potential customers and taking it to the next level. This thing is going to fly off shelves if they can keep the buzz going (and that's a big IF).
What Buzz?
The only reference I have heard to anything about it has been here on Slashdot. If it hadn't been for that, I never would have known about it. The latest iDoohickey (tm) however somehow manages to find its way into conversation where I work (Lets just say that my company is in an industry that the computer revolution almost missed).
no, this is just intellectual dishonesty, sophistry, or you're just stupid
Personal attacks aside that was the exact point fo the article you apparently didn't read.
all i can say about drug use with certainty is this: as soon as someone says the answer is simple, and that simple answer is complete legalization or complete prohibition, you are dealing with a fucking moron who doesn't understand drugs
Actually the answer is simple. Unless it can be demonstrated beyond a doubt that something the government does improves society, then the government should not be doing it.
Our war on drugs can at best be called a draw. As a consequence of the quagmire that it is, the government should get the hell out of it. Now if someone comes up with a program that can be demonstrated to help drug addicts become productive members of society and that program puts more back into society than it costs, then I'm all for it, but prohibition is not the answer it was supposed to be, so it should be ended.
Right. This republican attitude might work in certain circles of callous and selfish, but those actualy interested in a better society, anyone with a heart and a brain, will try to our darnedest to make sure tea party douchebags like yourself dont get to make policy decisions.
Its not a republican attitude or a tea party attitude. It is the only logical result of enlightenment. Before you start getting truly preachy, stop and ponder: Darwin always wins. In the battle that is evolution, you might win a few skirmishes, but evolution always takes the grand prize. Just because humans claim its noble to protect the weak, doesn't make it any less futile. In the long run, its self destructive. Better to just let the weak take them selves out now, and the let our collective children sleep a little easier not having the burden of carrying the weak.
The human organism has a circumstance where the "useless cells" are no longer actively destroyed by the organism. This circumstance is called cancer, and it will kill the organism.
Make it illegal to sell drugs without declaring the exact compounds and forbid driving or operating dangerous machinery under the influence of any drug.
What about Prozac? What about caffeine, or sugar for that matter. These are all psychoactive chemicals, and quantifying the difference between them and... say cocaine... is extremely subjective.
Even if this case turns out to be a false alarm, allowing a nation that you repeatedly refer to as a 'near-peer competitor' to build parts of your high-tech weaponry is idiotic.
Maybe, maybe not
If they build a large amount of your parts in general, then it could be great insurance. Free trade prevents wars. What country is going to declare war on their best customer? Is winning a war worth economic collapse? Without the USA buying all their Chinese what-nots, China falls into a massive economic meltdown. The Chinese leadership are largely scientists and engineers, not moron politicians like the US. They have a great deal more common sense than our leadership does. They are not going to provoke a war that puts them back in the stone age unless they have no other viable course of action. China will not openly attack the US any more than the US will openly attack China. Everything else is called war-games for a reason.
However the fear of a chip being remotely shutdown, possible damaged, is quite plausible and a far more practical method of attack.
It really isn't that much more plausible than a remote back door. That would imply an illicit connection, which is pretty unlikely given the complexity of any kind of remote communication. The best they could hope for would be a specific internal state triggering a shutdown of some kind, but even that would be unlikely to pass through quality assurance undetected. It would be too easy for some situation in qual to accidentally trigger the shutdown and result in someone digging into the shutdown to find out why it happened.
The entire idea of a manufacturer being able to insert useful functionality into a large scale design of a single component that must work in conjunction with an entire system is absurd. It would be prohibitively difficult for the designer to insert that kind of remote access. It is pointless to consider the problem from a component level. The only place any kind of meaningful espionage tools can be developed is at the system level, and even there it is simply more effective to do it at the software level.
The problems he solved are not NP. They are essentially calculus, but they are both very nasty calc problems, and the traditional way to solve calc problems is using newton approximations until the answer is close enough to what you want. An analytical / precise way to solve these problems is extremely useful to the physics folks, as the solution will probably also lead to better models of particle motion.
The issue with the electronic wiper control wasn't that the big players developed a version of their own, they literally started making direct copies of his design and tried to claim they owed him nothing. Its one thing to make Exact copies, and its another to duplicate design effort. Our current patent law punishes both when copyright would only punish the former and not the latter. The first is obviously unethical and should be punished, the second is fair game and should be respected. Now if the auto makers had hired a couple of electrical engineers and paid them to create such a device, then they would have been in the clear, but they took the slimy route...
Why are these elderly incompetents allowed to make decisions on things they know nothing about?
Because we keep on buying into the democratic system that gives them power. Its only marginally better than anarchy, in-so-far-as anarchy will usually degrade into some form of crappy government anyway. People feel this overwhelming need to have their neighbors controlled (at gunpoint inf necessary). Democracy is no different.
Why should a program expressed in VHDL and uploaded to an FPGA be worthy of patent protection, whilst the same algorithm implemented in C and running on a CPU isn't? Why should engineers in every industry have to worry about patents, but software engineers be excused?
The right answer is: neither engineer needs patent protection to make viable, marketable products, and thus neither should have it.
Being intelligent and doing creative work is not an indicator that something is wrong.
It is when the end result is this kind of worthless crap. Designing something on this scale is not the work of one guy in his basement, no matter how, otherwise, unemployed he might be. I would think very poorly of a single person who claimed to have designed an aircraft carrier in his spare time, and that project is two orders of magnitude less complicated and expensive. This is a half baked idea from someone who has watched too much sci-fi, and thinks that something like this really is viable. He is actually going to make the situation worse because this kind of thing gives engineers a bad name. Most reasonable engineers just rolled their eyes when they saw the headline. I agree with the GP, this guy needs to get laid, because its obvious he needs a new hobby.
I know women that only fuck tall guys, sports stars, or cops. If women would make a rule to only fuck smart guys, maybe there would be less neanderthal bravado.
Only if that sort of thing is patrilineal. If not then your whole theory goes up in smoke. Sounds to me more like self-serving wishful thinking than inspired world planning. Maybe you should try harder to improve your own interactions with people (read: women) and worry less about how other people interact with each other.
As a last note, truly smart people have no problem getting laid because they have the power to control their interactions with the world around them to make up for any short comings. If they apply the intellect they have to the problem at hand, it becomes fairly easy to solve the problem. The only people who have trouble in that arena are the people who are not nearly as intelligent as they imagine themselves to be...
you know i seem to remember another point when we sent out explores to to a new world without the guaranty of profit or of returns in the investors lifetime we later called it the Americas.
The people paying for those expeditions were royalty. That meant they had pretty much unlimited income and only competed with other royalty for prestige. Finding things and controlling things is pretty much the only way for people in that position to gain prestige. Money is a non-issue for that level of person.
Awesome! My new band is called the Beatles and I am going to start hiring Chinese musicians to record all of their material....oh fuck that. I'll just print a bunch of their CDs from the masters I have and start selling those!
You'll have just as much trouble selling them for profit as the legal copyright holder is having. The price point is still too high. The copyright holders can cut 90% of their costs by stopping the insane marketing they currently use. That level of cost could only be justified when the margins were better. Short answer, You'll be hard pressed to make money selling content. It's too cheap to make and distribute, and our world would have to get a whole lot stupider for us not to take advantage of that. You might make a reasonable argument for increasing funding for the arts through government, but guaranteeing an artificial shortage of supply for the benefit of a few is not the way to go.
As a side note, the Beatles music is ancient. There is no valid reason in the world (even under copyright) that these works shouldn't be public domain by now.
Slashdot Mirror
How many jobs will be lost for every dollar the minimum wage increases? What, you think increasing the wage paid to stock boys in grocery stores won't reduce the number of clerks on the payroll?
No, it wont, that is not how hourly jobs work. You cant just cut jobs and still get the same amount of work done with hourly jobs. So, one of two things will happen. First, the employer will take a reduction in profit. Second, the employer will raise prices for product, increasing the cost to the general public, and driving inflation. As long as the minimum wage keeps up with inflation, then this is not a bad thing. Inflation is effectively a flat tax, and with a minimum wage in place, the bottom is automatically exempted from it.
-=Geoskd
1) You're clearly not used to being frugal in your spending for food. You can pretty comfortably survive at under $150/mo. for food (I just noticed another responder to you says they're at $100/mo. comfortably). You can eat out for lunch and dinner pretty regularly for under $300/mo. if you're careful with where you go and what you purchase. I know, because I've done both of those within the last few years.
I live in a place where food is hideously expensive. I don't really know why, but even the milk costs >$4 per gallon. The lowest grade of hamburger is $3.99 per pound. Pasta runs about $1.60 a small box. My parents live about an hour away and everything costs half as much out there. I'm stuck a lot closer to the city though.
2) Minimum wage jobs are not the end goal. They are a way stay afloat while you find something better. That might just be a better position at the store (in this case, maybe a Genius?) or it might be investing in an education. In my case, I did it to get through grad school. Now I have an awesome job with great benefits.
No, minimum wage was created so that society did not need to actively support the bottom social class all the time. When it was first created, it worked ok. Now, it has failed to keep up with cost of living and as such is too low. Much too low.
-=Geoskd
Where did the idea EVER come from that you were supposed to get a job/situation like the one you describe and stay that way your entire life?
because ~75% of jobs in the US are service sector jobs like the ones we have been discussing.
How do you get a better job when all the other jobs around you are pretty much the same as the one you have?
-=Geoskd
You should have read the column for "after 3% inflation". Then its at 1,100 / month, less than what he earned with working. And for the record, the calculator showed 750k with a 5% ROI. That's relatively high risk investment, and you wont get that much over the life of the person because at some point in 40 years, the market will tank and he will be unemployed and the investment rate will go negative. In short you read the results wrong, and made some majorly impractical assumptions. I hope you dont fail as utterly with your own retirement planning.
-=Geoskd
You know that prison guards in California can make over 100k a year.
And yet the guy in Kansas has a better standard of living because it is a lot cheaper to live in Kansas than California
-=Geoskd
Here is a man that raises his family of four on 27K/year: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/06/01/raising-a-family-on-under-2000-per-year/.
Look at his budget and then read through the line items. Hes talking about feeding a family of $450 / month. Where I live, Ramen, Chef-boy-are-dee, and Penut Butter and Jelly Sandwhiches run me that much for just me. Insurance $600 for car + home? My insurance is $1000 just for the house. Taxes, 0.6%? WTF, my home taxes are 3% and climbing, and anyone who thinks renters dont pay property taxes is just foolish. Health care $100 / month? My employer pays 80%, and my 20% for a family of four is $300 / month. Gas 316? for the year? Thats, what, all of ten gallons a year. Must be nice to live within biking distance of work, but all of that housing where i live is out of my price range by a wide margin.
So in short, he's living in an area with less than half the average cost of living, and saying that anyone can live on $30k? Fuck you Asshole.
-=Geoskd
Where I live, the cheapest living accommodations are $300 / month, and you don't go outside after dark. That gets you a bed in a room with a roommate, and you're sharing a four bedroom apt with 6 other people in the other three rooms. Your portion of the utilities is $100 / month in the winter and $50 in the summer. Food for one person will run you $450 / month, and public transport is $75 / month (lousy subsidies).
Now, $1100 every two weeks is not $11/hr, its $14 / hr. $11/ hr is $900. Take out 17% taxes + soc sec + every other thing, and you get $1500 / month total.
So yes, if you're willing to live in the worst slum, never own a car, never have any privacy or a family, never spend money on a social life, and commute 2 hours a day for an 8 hour shift (if you're lucky enough to get 8 hours, most service jobs are "part time" only to ensure employers don't have to provide full benefits.), you can put away about $500 / month. At that rate, when you are ready to retire, you will have about 250k in savings and no pension, very little if any social security income, and you'll have to hoard that $250k to pay for living in that same slum you have been in for the last 40 years.
Yay American dream.
Minimum wage in this country needs to go up a lot, and millionaires need to return to the days when they were expected to pay 75%+ of their income in taxes to support the society that has made them rich in the first place.
-=Geoskd
I admit, I'm a bit of an Apple hater sometimes. It's their attitude, towards thinking they own basic concepts, but I digress. I did a quick check to see what competing retailers are paying.
Best Buy sales associate $9.70: http://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Best-Buy-Hourly-Pay-E97.htm Fry's Electronics sales associate $9.19: http://www.glassdoor.com/Hourly-Pay/Fry-s-Electronics-Hourly-Pay-E3186.htm
Not in New York City they're not, and that is what the New York Times is talking about. Yes, Much of the country starts people at ~$9 / hr, but in NYC, $9 / hr is starvation wage. $12 / hr will pay for food and possibly rent, but thats about it. Glassdoor uses the nationwide numbers, and the number of retails sales people in rural areas far outweighs the numbers in the major metropolitan areas. That is why the major met areas pay more, because each individual sales person does more volume by virtue of being in a target rich environment.
-=Geoskd
If Surface is a success it will jumpstart the entire Windows ecosystem and check the growth of the iPad. This will only help the OEMs in the end. If it's not a success then it's not a threat to OEMs.
Yes it is. The windows tablet ecosystem on ARM will hasten the demise of the desktop ecosystem. The OEMs could find themselves Kodak'd with no access to either iOS or Surface, and being stuck with Android. If this sucker is successful, then Apple and MS will quickly wipe the Desktop relevance off the table, and leave the OEMs without a chair when the music stops. The OEMs now have a very strong incentive to hate MS, which is why MS kept it a secret from them as long as it could.
-=Geoskd
ARM is alien space for MS? Someone should have told the CE division about this long ago.
Having used windows CE, I have to say that ARM remains foreign turf for MS. Every winCE device I have ever used has been a flaky POS, and these are supposed to be industrial equipment. It's like being back in the bad old days of win9x and the blue screen of death.
-=Geoskd
That may change, but it's not looking that way right now. This is Apple creating a great product but not listening to potential customers and taking it to the next level. This thing is going to fly off shelves if they can keep the buzz going (and that's a big IF).
What Buzz?
The only reference I have heard to anything about it has been here on Slashdot. If it hadn't been for that, I never would have known about it. The latest iDoohickey (tm) however somehow manages to find its way into conversation where I work (Lets just say that my company is in an industry that the computer revolution almost missed).
-=Geoskd
Sugar is indirectly psychoactive, at best. The pharmacology is far from subjective.
Sugar is psychoactive. So right there, we have a disagreement as to the effect of a simple, everyday, legal drug. It is highly subjective.
-=Geoskd
no, this is just intellectual dishonesty, sophistry, or you're just stupid
Personal attacks aside that was the exact point fo the article you apparently didn't read.
all i can say about drug use with certainty is this: as soon as someone says the answer is simple, and that simple answer is complete legalization or complete prohibition, you are dealing with a fucking moron who doesn't understand drugs
Actually the answer is simple. Unless it can be demonstrated beyond a doubt that something the government does improves society, then the government should not be doing it.
Our war on drugs can at best be called a draw. As a consequence of the quagmire that it is, the government should get the hell out of it. Now if someone comes up with a program that can be demonstrated to help drug addicts become productive members of society and that program puts more back into society than it costs, then I'm all for it, but prohibition is not the answer it was supposed to be, so it should be ended.
-=Geoskd
Right. This republican attitude might work in certain circles of callous and selfish, but those actualy interested in a better society, anyone with a heart and a brain, will try to our darnedest to make sure tea party douchebags like yourself dont get to make policy decisions.
Its not a republican attitude or a tea party attitude. It is the only logical result of enlightenment. Before you start getting truly preachy, stop and ponder: Darwin always wins. In the battle that is evolution, you might win a few skirmishes, but evolution always takes the grand prize. Just because humans claim its noble to protect the weak, doesn't make it any less futile. In the long run, its self destructive. Better to just let the weak take them selves out now, and the let our collective children sleep a little easier not having the burden of carrying the weak.
The human organism has a circumstance where the "useless cells" are no longer actively destroyed by the organism. This circumstance is called cancer, and it will kill the organism.
-=Geoskd
Make it illegal to sell drugs without declaring the exact compounds and forbid driving or operating dangerous machinery under the influence of any drug.
What about Prozac? What about caffeine, or sugar for that matter. These are all psychoactive chemicals, and quantifying the difference between them and ... say cocaine... is extremely subjective.
-=Geoskd
Even if this case turns out to be a false alarm, allowing a nation that you repeatedly refer to as a 'near-peer competitor' to build parts of your high-tech weaponry is idiotic.
Maybe, maybe not
If they build a large amount of your parts in general, then it could be great insurance. Free trade prevents wars. What country is going to declare war on their best customer? Is winning a war worth economic collapse? Without the USA buying all their Chinese what-nots, China falls into a massive economic meltdown. The Chinese leadership are largely scientists and engineers, not moron politicians like the US. They have a great deal more common sense than our leadership does. They are not going to provoke a war that puts them back in the stone age unless they have no other viable course of action. China will not openly attack the US any more than the US will openly attack China. Everything else is called war-games for a reason.
-=Geoskd
However the fear of a chip being remotely shutdown, possible damaged, is quite plausible and a far more practical method of attack.
It really isn't that much more plausible than a remote back door. That would imply an illicit connection, which is pretty unlikely given the complexity of any kind of remote communication. The best they could hope for would be a specific internal state triggering a shutdown of some kind, but even that would be unlikely to pass through quality assurance undetected. It would be too easy for some situation in qual to accidentally trigger the shutdown and result in someone digging into the shutdown to find out why it happened.
The entire idea of a manufacturer being able to insert useful functionality into a large scale design of a single component that must work in conjunction with an entire system is absurd. It would be prohibitively difficult for the designer to insert that kind of remote access. It is pointless to consider the problem from a component level. The only place any kind of meaningful espionage tools can be developed is at the system level, and even there it is simply more effective to do it at the software level.
-=Geoskd
The problems he solved are not NP. They are essentially calculus, but they are both very nasty calc problems, and the traditional way to solve calc problems is using newton approximations until the answer is close enough to what you want. An analytical / precise way to solve these problems is extremely useful to the physics folks, as the solution will probably also lead to better models of particle motion.
-=Geoskd
The issue with the electronic wiper control wasn't that the big players developed a version of their own, they literally started making direct copies of his design and tried to claim they owed him nothing. Its one thing to make Exact copies, and its another to duplicate design effort. Our current patent law punishes both when copyright would only punish the former and not the latter. The first is obviously unethical and should be punished, the second is fair game and should be respected. Now if the auto makers had hired a couple of electrical engineers and paid them to create such a device, then they would have been in the clear, but they took the slimy route...
-=Geoskd
So if company 10 spent $100 million developing this invention, why is it wrong for them to charge companies 1-9 a license for using their invention?
Because companies 1 - 9 spent that same $ 100 million. Company 10 was just a little faster...
-=Geoskd
Why are these elderly incompetents allowed to make decisions on things they know nothing about?
Because we keep on buying into the democratic system that gives them power. Its only marginally better than anarchy, in-so-far-as anarchy will usually degrade into some form of crappy government anyway. People feel this overwhelming need to have their neighbors controlled (at gunpoint inf necessary). Democracy is no different.
-=Geoskd
Why should a program expressed in VHDL and uploaded to an FPGA be worthy of patent protection, whilst the same algorithm implemented in C and running on a CPU isn't? Why should engineers in every industry have to worry about patents, but software engineers be excused?
The right answer is: neither engineer needs patent protection to make viable, marketable products, and thus neither should have it.
-=Geoskd
Being intelligent and doing creative work is not an indicator that something is wrong.
It is when the end result is this kind of worthless crap. Designing something on this scale is not the work of one guy in his basement, no matter how, otherwise, unemployed he might be. I would think very poorly of a single person who claimed to have designed an aircraft carrier in his spare time, and that project is two orders of magnitude less complicated and expensive. This is a half baked idea from someone who has watched too much sci-fi, and thinks that something like this really is viable. He is actually going to make the situation worse because this kind of thing gives engineers a bad name. Most reasonable engineers just rolled their eyes when they saw the headline. I agree with the GP, this guy needs to get laid, because its obvious he needs a new hobby.
I know women that only fuck tall guys, sports stars, or cops. If women would make a rule to only fuck smart guys, maybe there would be less neanderthal bravado.
Only if that sort of thing is patrilineal. If not then your whole theory goes up in smoke. Sounds to me more like self-serving wishful thinking than inspired world planning. Maybe you should try harder to improve your own interactions with people (read: women) and worry less about how other people interact with each other.
As a last note, truly smart people have no problem getting laid because they have the power to control their interactions with the world around them to make up for any short comings. If they apply the intellect they have to the problem at hand, it becomes fairly easy to solve the problem. The only people who have trouble in that arena are the people who are not nearly as intelligent as they imagine themselves to be...
-=Geoskd
you know i seem to remember another point when we sent out explores to to a new world without the guaranty of profit or of returns in the investors lifetime we later called it the Americas.
The people paying for those expeditions were royalty. That meant they had pretty much unlimited income and only competed with other royalty for prestige. Finding things and controlling things is pretty much the only way for people in that position to gain prestige. Money is a non-issue for that level of person.
-=Geoskd
Awesome! My new band is called the Beatles and I am going to start hiring Chinese musicians to record all of their material....oh fuck that. I'll just print a bunch of their CDs from the masters I have and start selling those!
You'll have just as much trouble selling them for profit as the legal copyright holder is having. The price point is still too high. The copyright holders can cut 90% of their costs by stopping the insane marketing they currently use. That level of cost could only be justified when the margins were better. Short answer, You'll be hard pressed to make money selling content. It's too cheap to make and distribute, and our world would have to get a whole lot stupider for us not to take advantage of that. You might make a reasonable argument for increasing funding for the arts through government, but guaranteeing an artificial shortage of supply for the benefit of a few is not the way to go.
As a side note, the Beatles music is ancient. There is no valid reason in the world (even under copyright) that these works shouldn't be public domain by now.
-=Geoskd