With dollars, you can stuff them in your mattress for a year and when you come back they'll purchase about the same amount. That's a good thing. You shouldn't have to take a risk just to store value. A currency that does its job ought to suck as a high-yield investment.
Maybe now we can get cryptocurrencies back to their best use, which is purchasing drugs on the dark web.
Here's the value of Windows: When something breaks, you can blame it on those dumbasses at Microsoft and no one will hold you responsible because you're just using the same platform that 95 percent of the world uses. When something breaks in Linux, it's all your fault because you took a chance on a screwball operating system to save a few euros.
Back when IBM ruled the industry they had a slogan: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." Well that's been the case with Microsoft since the '90s.
FedEx and UPS often just handle the long-haul portion of a shipment and rely on the USPS for delivery from a USPS distribution center to a customer. If the USPS goes away. FedEx and UPS will not take its place. We'll all just be stuck with very expensive, not very convenient shipping.
This idea that learning to code is analogous to learning a natural language is a stupid one, usually promulgated by red-state xenophobes who really just want to cut funding for foreign language instruction, and send everyone to YouTube for a free Intro to Java tutorial and pretend it's just as good.
Biosphere. God, what a metaphor! In other words, a self-contained inhabitable zone shielded from the harsh environment of--gasp--Seattle.
The whole point of locating in a city is to be part of the city. Let your employees meet for lunch at a local restaurant that hasn't been hand-picked by Amazon's Director of Restaurant Planning. Use the transportation system that the locals use, improving it for everyone in the process. Go to a public park to chill out, rather than a private park reserved for Amazon employees.
This kind of office park is all over Silicon Valley. To someone who's never worked in this environment, it sounds like a huge perk. But having worked in an environment like this, I'd rather just work in Seattle, not in a biosphere surrounded by Seattle.
A factory operating 24/7 on a massive scale with the goal of producing as quickly as possible is a lot different from a single McDonald's franchise.
Let me give an example. I've had the most brain-dead job imaginable: Palletizing (stacking boxes on pallets) in a factory. We had robots to do that for the high-volume jobs. But for the smaller runs it was more cost effective to bring in a couple temps at $12 an hour than it would have been to build another robot.
McDonald's is already very efficient. Most of the prep work is done, in advance, in a factory using robots. Preparing it for the customers requires relatively few employees operating well beneath capacity in order to serve the food as fresh from the grill as possible.
I'm not sure what the point is, staying open 24/7 near Union Square. It's very busy during the day, but most of the late-night activity takes place in other parts of town. Is the market so saturated that their next target demographic is homeless people?
When it was on, every woman and gay man with a blog seemingly had to share their opinion of the latest episode of Sex and the City. As a straight man, I was inclined to let them have their fun. I'm a modern guy. The world does not revolve around my interests.
Then I went to Chevy's on a weeknight, and there were like 20 squealing, tipsy-on-one-margarita ladies having a "Sex and the City" party, and I was like, ENOUGH! This show sucks! Years of overexposure had finally made me revert to the sexist troglodyte I had been repressing for all this time.
Compare to Blue Mountain State. It gets, maybe 1/1000th the media coverage as Sex and the City. I'm it's target audience apparently, yet I'm barely aware it exists.
He suggests dropping Algebra II as a requirement. The first two statistics courses I took in college had only Algebra I as a prerequisite. This wasn't "statistics for poets," either, they were the same courses taken by math majors.
Here's what I suspect. San Francisco has a lot of pedestrians for an American city, but it's still proportionally lower than Barcelona. Barcelona has a lower proportion of automobile traffic and a higher proportion of pedestrian traffic. Thus, more vehicle-pedestrian accidents in San Francisco.
I mean, 30 years ago, whenst last I drove through the downtown of actual SF, there was a 5-lane honking freeway slicing thru the heart of it.
If you mean the Embarcadero Freeway, they tore that down after the Loma Prieta earthquake in '89. (And there was much rejoicing. Visit the rejuvenated Ferry Building and there are markers where the supports for the freeway once stood, and plaques gloating over its demise. The Embarcadero Freeway was widely despised.)
Park Presidio Drive is technically part of US Highway 1, but is more like an urban boulevard for the part that is within city limits. There is no longer any freeway through San Francisco.
The car's clean enough not to make the person driving it sick. If everyone drove cars that cheated on emission standards, then sure, pollution would be a lot worse. But as a percentage of cars on the road, this model is a drop in the ocean. The more serious issue if you own this car is that it could cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to make it street legal in California. If it can be made street legal at all.
PS, It has long been my opinion that Google wants its customers to have gigabit fiber, but they would rather some other company provide it. The purpose of Google Fiber is to goad Comcast and TWC into doing it. Like any for-profit enterprise, Google doesn't want to be in the business of providing universal access to high quality Internet. That's providing a commodity, and Google wants high profit margins.
On the bright-side, they're well aware of TWC's and Comcast's vaporware ploys and are unlikely to be deterred by that.
Which brings me to my point: If this rollout by Comcast is true, is someone finally getting out IN FRONT of Google Fiber, not just being a reactionary twit?
VAPORWARE (n) - A product that does not yet exist, but is sure to blow any competing products out of the water. Promoted by market-dominating companies to forestall potential competitors.
Do you know what else doesn't need to park? A normal taxi. A bus or a subway car. The extent that suburban Americans will go to avoid taking public transit is nothing short of amazing. Yes, let's spend trillions to develop a network of driverless cars so suburbanites can enjoy city life without coming into contact with any of the city's grubby inhabitants.
"Why does anyone need to live near a city? Why can't everyone just work at one of the copious professional jobs that allow you to telecommute from rural West Virginia?"
And about, oh, at least half of the global population isn't well suited for creative jobs since they are (by definition) below average intelligence.
I wouldn't equate falling below the 50th percentile in IQ with inability to do anything but the most menial work. First, because I don't think intelligence should be defined that narrowly, and second, because it's fucking insulting. The vast majority of workers displaced by technology are not incapable of doing other work. They just lost a game of musical chairs, and there are huge obstacles for anyone trying to get back in the game.
The Amazon store certainly makes it easy to buy an ebook, and it has an advantage in that it's built into the Kindle. However, it is certainly possible to get ebooks from other sources. What is stopping the publishers from simply refusing to sell through Amazon? It's not *that* hard to install a book from somewhere other than Amazon on a Kindle. I mean, things are tough all over for mid-list authors, and have been for a long time. But if George RR Martin were to sell his next book exclusively through his web site, I'm sure his fans would jump through whatever minor hoops they needed to to get his book.
This will be approved when the powder has a weight, volume, and alcohol content comparable to the liquid forms currently on the market. Which kind of defeats the purpose.
On a tangent, there is no technical reason for rubbing alcohol to be made of isopropyl alcohol (not fit for human consumption), rather than ethanol (basically the same thing as vodka.) There is no technical reason that vodka should cost so much more than rubbing alcohol. This is all due to government regulation. Powdered alcohol will not be allowed to fit through the cracks.
To add to my previous comment re: raising the average, the liberal arts, and democracy: Korea, Taiwan, Singapore. These are all nominally democracies, but they are also much more authoritarian than the western democracies. And that is what a concentration of resources at the top of the academic pyramid facilitates. Authoritarians need a small coterie of highly trained people to manage their societies. They don't need the masses that think they have a place in governance. It isn't surprising that America's business elites find this authoritarian model appealing--American businesses are not democracies. But if I were to find myself anywhere in the bottom 90 percent of society (Come to think of it, that is where I find myself!) I'd much rather live in, say, Denmark, than Taiwan. Maybe that is where we should look for models: the egalitarian West, rather than the authoritarian East.
In many fields, we already have more PhDs than we know what to do with. There aren't enough university positions for all of them. Their salaries end up not being commensurate with all those years spent in school, and they live miserable frustrating lives trying to raise funding for their research.
On the other hand, in the USA the public debate still revolves around things like supply-side economics, climate change, and what God thinks about abortion. Issues that are settled among educated people who aren't demagoguing an issue for personal gain.
I would posit that we are already doing enough for the gifted in our society. What we really need to do is *raise the average*. If that means we end up with plumbers who speak three languages and have a B.S. in chemistry, so be it. We are better off as a society when the average person is equipped with the skillset of a university graduate. If you look at the Nordic countries, they're pretty much already there, and better for it.
This was the reason people like Thomas Jefferson supported public education. Not as job training, but as a prerequisite of citizenship. For democracy to succeed, the average person must possess the "ars liberalis"--the liberal arts--literally, the arts and skills of being a free person.
I'm sure that Google, with the tens of billions of dollars it has invested in the infrastructure necessary to catalog all the information on Earth, is shaking in its boots. Some 19 year old is building a data center in his dorm room RIGHT NOW...
from what I read in the article, it sounds pretty dumb and insulting.
Jesus Christ, do we really need a class to teach kids that there are negative ramifications to overdrawing your checking account? We need to understand WHY people overdraw their checking accounts. People gots no money! People gots no jobs! They need to pay bills! They calculate that $200 in overdraft fees might not be as bad as being evicted for nonpayment of rent. So they suck it up.
These are hard times for the middle class and... working class? (Does that even still exist?) These "financial literacy" initiatives are all about blaming the victims of impossible financial circumstances for their hardships.
Slashdot Mirror
With dollars, you can stuff them in your mattress for a year and when you come back they'll purchase about the same amount. That's a good thing. You shouldn't have to take a risk just to store value. A currency that does its job ought to suck as a high-yield investment.
Maybe now we can get cryptocurrencies back to their best use, which is purchasing drugs on the dark web.
Here's the value of Windows: When something breaks, you can blame it on those dumbasses at Microsoft and no one will hold you responsible because you're just using the same platform that 95 percent of the world uses. When something breaks in Linux, it's all your fault because you took a chance on a screwball operating system to save a few euros.
Back when IBM ruled the industry they had a slogan: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." Well that's been the case with Microsoft since the '90s.
FedEx and UPS often just handle the long-haul portion of a shipment and rely on the USPS for delivery from a USPS distribution center to a customer. If the USPS goes away. FedEx and UPS will not take its place. We'll all just be stuck with very expensive, not very convenient shipping.
This idea that learning to code is analogous to learning a natural language is a stupid one, usually promulgated by red-state xenophobes who really just want to cut funding for foreign language instruction, and send everyone to YouTube for a free Intro to Java tutorial and pretend it's just as good.
Seriously. It's bullshit. Just stop. Please.
Biosphere. God, what a metaphor! In other words, a self-contained inhabitable zone shielded from the harsh environment of--gasp--Seattle.
The whole point of locating in a city is to be part of the city. Let your employees meet for lunch at a local restaurant that hasn't been hand-picked by Amazon's Director of Restaurant Planning. Use the transportation system that the locals use, improving it for everyone in the process. Go to a public park to chill out, rather than a private park reserved for Amazon employees.
This kind of office park is all over Silicon Valley. To someone who's never worked in this environment, it sounds like a huge perk. But having worked in an environment like this, I'd rather just work in Seattle, not in a biosphere surrounded by Seattle.
A factory operating 24/7 on a massive scale with the goal of producing as quickly as possible is a lot different from a single McDonald's franchise.
Let me give an example. I've had the most brain-dead job imaginable: Palletizing (stacking boxes on pallets) in a factory. We had robots to do that for the high-volume jobs. But for the smaller runs it was more cost effective to bring in a couple temps at $12 an hour than it would have been to build another robot.
McDonald's is already very efficient. Most of the prep work is done, in advance, in a factory using robots. Preparing it for the customers requires relatively few employees operating well beneath capacity in order to serve the food as fresh from the grill as possible.
I'm not sure what the point is, staying open 24/7 near Union Square. It's very busy during the day, but most of the late-night activity takes place in other parts of town. Is the market so saturated that their next target demographic is homeless people?
When it was on, every woman and gay man with a blog seemingly had to share their opinion of the latest episode of Sex and the City. As a straight man, I was inclined to let them have their fun. I'm a modern guy. The world does not revolve around my interests.
Then I went to Chevy's on a weeknight, and there were like 20 squealing, tipsy-on-one-margarita ladies having a "Sex and the City" party, and I was like, ENOUGH! This show sucks! Years of overexposure had finally made me revert to the sexist troglodyte I had been repressing for all this time.
Compare to Blue Mountain State. It gets, maybe 1/1000th the media coverage as Sex and the City. I'm it's target audience apparently, yet I'm barely aware it exists.
He suggests dropping Algebra II as a requirement. The first two statistics courses I took in college had only Algebra I as a prerequisite. This wasn't "statistics for poets," either, they were the same courses taken by math majors.
Here's what I suspect. San Francisco has a lot of pedestrians for an American city, but it's still proportionally lower than Barcelona. Barcelona has a lower proportion of automobile traffic and a higher proportion of pedestrian traffic. Thus, more vehicle-pedestrian accidents in San Francisco.
If you mean the Embarcadero Freeway, they tore that down after the Loma Prieta earthquake in '89. (And there was much rejoicing. Visit the rejuvenated Ferry Building and there are markers where the supports for the freeway once stood, and plaques gloating over its demise. The Embarcadero Freeway was widely despised.)
Park Presidio Drive is technically part of US Highway 1, but is more like an urban boulevard for the part that is within city limits. There is no longer any freeway through San Francisco.
The car's clean enough not to make the person driving it sick. If everyone drove cars that cheated on emission standards, then sure, pollution would be a lot worse. But as a percentage of cars on the road, this model is a drop in the ocean. The more serious issue if you own this car is that it could cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to make it street legal in California. If it can be made street legal at all.
PS, It has long been my opinion that Google wants its customers to have gigabit fiber, but they would rather some other company provide it. The purpose of Google Fiber is to goad Comcast and TWC into doing it. Like any for-profit enterprise, Google doesn't want to be in the business of providing universal access to high quality Internet. That's providing a commodity, and Google wants high profit margins.
On the bright-side, they're well aware of TWC's and Comcast's vaporware ploys and are unlikely to be deterred by that.
Which brings me to my point: If this rollout by Comcast is true, is someone finally getting out IN FRONT of Google Fiber, not just being a reactionary twit?
VAPORWARE (n) - A product that does not yet exist, but is sure to blow any competing products out of the water. Promoted by market-dominating companies to forestall potential competitors.
Do you know what else doesn't need to park? A normal taxi. A bus or a subway car. The extent that suburban Americans will go to avoid taking public transit is nothing short of amazing. Yes, let's spend trillions to develop a network of driverless cars so suburbanites can enjoy city life without coming into contact with any of the city's grubby inhabitants.
Threads like these always leave me flabbergasted at how people who have never lived in a big city just really, really don't get how cities work.
Two hosts makes for a less expensive show. And also, half as many myths makes for a less expensive show.
"Why does anyone need to live near a city? Why can't everyone just work at one of the copious professional jobs that allow you to telecommute from rural West Virginia?"
I had more to say, but I think I'm done here.
And about, oh, at least half of the global population isn't well suited for creative jobs since they are (by definition) below average intelligence.
I wouldn't equate falling below the 50th percentile in IQ with inability to do anything but the most menial work. First, because I don't think intelligence should be defined that narrowly, and second, because it's fucking insulting. The vast majority of workers displaced by technology are not incapable of doing other work. They just lost a game of musical chairs, and there are huge obstacles for anyone trying to get back in the game.
The Amazon store certainly makes it easy to buy an ebook, and it has an advantage in that it's built into the Kindle. However, it is certainly possible to get ebooks from other sources. What is stopping the publishers from simply refusing to sell through Amazon? It's not *that* hard to install a book from somewhere other than Amazon on a Kindle. I mean, things are tough all over for mid-list authors, and have been for a long time. But if George RR Martin were to sell his next book exclusively through his web site, I'm sure his fans would jump through whatever minor hoops they needed to to get his book.
This will be approved when the powder has a weight, volume, and alcohol content comparable to the liquid forms currently on the market. Which kind of defeats the purpose.
On a tangent, there is no technical reason for rubbing alcohol to be made of isopropyl alcohol (not fit for human consumption), rather than ethanol (basically the same thing as vodka.) There is no technical reason that vodka should cost so much more than rubbing alcohol. This is all due to government regulation. Powdered alcohol will not be allowed to fit through the cracks.
To add to my previous comment re: raising the average, the liberal arts, and democracy: Korea, Taiwan, Singapore. These are all nominally democracies, but they are also much more authoritarian than the western democracies. And that is what a concentration of resources at the top of the academic pyramid facilitates. Authoritarians need a small coterie of highly trained people to manage their societies. They don't need the masses that think they have a place in governance. It isn't surprising that America's business elites find this authoritarian model appealing--American businesses are not democracies. But if I were to find myself anywhere in the bottom 90 percent of society (Come to think of it, that is where I find myself!) I'd much rather live in, say, Denmark, than Taiwan. Maybe that is where we should look for models: the egalitarian West, rather than the authoritarian East.
Let me pose a counter argument.
In many fields, we already have more PhDs than we know what to do with. There aren't enough university positions for all of them. Their salaries end up not being commensurate with all those years spent in school, and they live miserable frustrating lives trying to raise funding for their research.
On the other hand, in the USA the public debate still revolves around things like supply-side economics, climate change, and what God thinks about abortion. Issues that are settled among educated people who aren't demagoguing an issue for personal gain.
I would posit that we are already doing enough for the gifted in our society. What we really need to do is *raise the average*. If that means we end up with plumbers who speak three languages and have a B.S. in chemistry, so be it. We are better off as a society when the average person is equipped with the skillset of a university graduate. If you look at the Nordic countries, they're pretty much already there, and better for it.
This was the reason people like Thomas Jefferson supported public education. Not as job training, but as a prerequisite of citizenship. For democracy to succeed, the average person must possess the "ars liberalis"--the liberal arts--literally, the arts and skills of being a free person.
I'm sure that Google, with the tens of billions of dollars it has invested in the infrastructure necessary to catalog all the information on Earth, is shaking in its boots. Some 19 year old is building a data center in his dorm room RIGHT NOW...
from what I read in the article, it sounds pretty dumb and insulting.
Jesus Christ, do we really need a class to teach kids that there are negative ramifications to overdrawing your checking account? We need to understand WHY people overdraw their checking accounts. People gots no money! People gots no jobs! They need to pay bills! They calculate that $200 in overdraft fees might not be as bad as being evicted for nonpayment of rent. So they suck it up.
These are hard times for the middle class and... working class? (Does that even still exist?) These "financial literacy" initiatives are all about blaming the victims of impossible financial circumstances for their hardships.