I'm personally a tad skeptical on the technology. I really like the concept, but as anybody who works in technology well knows, bad people like to do bad things with it. That said, I would like to see what can be done about people sending false V2V data to other cars, for example to do things like induce traffic to move aside for themselves, or even deliberately cause accidents.
while they refuse to acknowledge the many lives lost and money spent on mistakes that had to be made by those that they despise- Governments.
For rockets? Wrong! Those lives lost were deliberate. The first rockets capable of putting objects in space had already existed by 1944, a whole 13 years before Sputnik, and they were built by Nazi Germany as a way to bomb other European cities. The US (via Wernher von Braun and others who deliberately surrendered to the US) and the USSR (via kidnapping many German scientists and capturing a V-2 rocket manufacturing plant) only refined them afterwards.
They are not attempting to go all Jules Verne by shooting Astronauts into Space by Cannon, because that was sorted out long as being, at the least, noisy and uncomfortable. They are not trying to fly Biplanes to the Moon. They are just appropriating all that knowledge for themselves and claiming it as their own, because they are the fittest.
Oh boy...you're in for a history lesson. The father of modern rocketry, Robert Goddard, was using his own private funds to develop the first liquid rockets (with many costly mistakes along the way,) and he was the one who proved that it was possible to reach outer space with rocketry. While he later received grants from a few non-profit entities (one in particular being the Smithsonian Institute) to further develop it merely for the curiosity of it, he ultimately profited off of selling his knowledge to the US Army.
No matter how you try to spin this, that is as common a case as any of man being an entrepreneur.
While I'm sure that will anger your monkey brain and you'll start saying "but but...NASA!", there's more to that as well. Much of the technology used for putting a man in space, and the moon landing, was made possible by technologies previously developed in the private sector. The most important technology by far was the integrated circuit, which was made practical by 3 US companies in 1958, and again was an entrepreneurial effort.
Capitalism is doing its thing again, only this time it is making spaceflight far more practical by bringing the costs way down...all with the intent of driving a profit. SpaceX may or may not make it that long; who knows, but it's unlikely that governments will take its place if it should fall any time soon. Governments aren't going to be the entities pushing for space tourism, or mining extraterrestrial objects for materials (like say...nickel...) especially when they have practically unlimited funds to acquire resources for their own projects that only a handful of people ever get to use due to the high cost involved, so they don't worry about discarding expensive rockets after just one use as opposed to recycling them.
And this time, you have at least three major entrepreneurs making efforts towards this end. So much for your (rather brain dead) cannibalism theory. It's actually rather funny watching heads explode in subreddits and internet forums dedicated to socialism and communism over this topic, many of them are left with no choice at all but to admit that SpaceX is already doing rather impressive things that no governments had ever even imagined doing.
Nobody says capitalism is perfect. In fact, it's analogous to democracy: Many problems, but the best system we've ever come up with. Unless you have a better idea (communism and socialism have been soundly proven to be big giant flops) then what the hell are you ranting about? Let's see if you can come up with a better idea than democracy too while you're at it.
Put on your scientist hat on and look at history like actual scientists and historians have done. The profession consensus is that the link between capitalism and success outside of the expansion of capitalism, i.e. technological or social progress, is a correlation, not a causation.
Where the fuck are you getting this from? Some communist blog/forum? Newsflash: Capitalism has allowed technology to scale at an exponential rate due to private citizens investing massive amounts of money toward that end; this is not a coincidence. Hell, the Soviet Union, for all of the resources it had at its disposal to improve its military technology, was still using vacuum tubes in its fighter jets when the US had moved to integrated circuits long before. The same integrated circuits that were made practical for mass production in 1958 by three US companies, and that now power most of the technology we enjoy today.
Here's a bit of data that should drive the point home, especially when correlated with countries that have come from some other system to capitalism.
Take a look at China for example; the government began adopting capitalist practices around 1980, and not long after that (roughly 1988,) you see their bubble quickly heading in the direction of higher average purchasing power (shown in that chart as income.) Granted, China had an enormous pile of untapped labor, that doesn't erase the fact that prior to these changes, such labor couldn't have ever been tapped because nobody could invest into the needed infrastructure (not even the government could.)
Hans Rosling (scientist, by the way) explains this data rather well:
By the way, until he died, he dedicated his career to educating academics, and to a lesser extent, people like you:
rather than generating data, Rosling has spent the past two decades communicating data gathered by others. He relays facts that he thinks many academics have been too slow to appreciate and argues that researchers are ignorant about the state of health and wealth around the world. That’s dangerous. “Campuses are full of siloed people who do advocacy about things they don’t understand,” he says.
Communists/socialists here on slashdot always like to slam capitalism as if there's a much better way to go, but we've honestly been there and tried those, and they're all crap. They don't understand, at all, that the world is doing nothing but improving, as the data there very clearly shows. And contrary to popular belief, "megacorps" (as they're often described here, as if this is a cyberpunk novel) are a lot less powerful than they were in ages past. The first publicly traded corporation to exist the Dutch East India Company, at its peak had a net worth of $7 trillion in today's dollars back in 1675. Let that sink in for a minute. They also had the power to raise armies, declare war, jail and execute people who didn't pay their bills, and they had the largest monopoly the world has ever seen. As time has gone on, we've seen this power continually decrease, whereas right now the biggest companies have no martial powers at all, and the number of monopolies that exist is getting smaller and smaller, and the ones that remain have very tiny impact compared to the ones that existed in the past.
While I'm sure the Nordic model works quite well for them, it's unlikely to do the same here. This mainly has to do with enormous cultural differences between us and them; namely we have a mentality of abusing welfare benefits to an extreme. (Case in point, look at the percentage of the population on disability 50 years ago vs today...there's no other reason why there are twice as many now than in the past, especially given newer technology has made it even easier for disabilities to be cured or for people to be able to work around their disabilities, and that it's now illegal for employers to discriminate based on disability.)
Another example of cultural problems in the US: Many countries have very liberal gun laws, (Canada, Switzerland, and some Nordic countries) and they don't have nearly the problems we do. This mainly comes from the "gangsta" culture where too many teenagers fantasize about growing up to be a drug dealer, a pimp, a musician, or an athlete, and nothing else, but all two often the later two just turn into something close to the first two. Hell, until 2010, Swiss citizens were required by law to own a fully automatic rifle; after 2010 it just became optional, but either way they can own better firearms than Americans are allowed, meanwhile they are among the lowest in the world when it comes to violent crime.
Oh cool, so they bought a lot of the low frequency spectrum to make that possible at the last big spectrum auction?
Even when they buy new spectrum, it's really just a marketing ploy to keep customer defections down. Do they use this spectrum? Yep, but their standards for a market launch are much lower than other carriers, just like their standards for everything else. Normally carriers deploy the new equipment in a given market and have what's called a soft launch (i.e. it's not announced to the public) where they have spotty coverage, but the service can be used if somebody happens to be there with a compatible phone. When it's a hard launch, they have the spotty areas mostly ironed out and announce to the public that they officially provide coverage in this area for the new spectrum.
Doing it this way makes sense, but Sprint isn't in the business of making sense, rather Sprint is in the business of pretending to give you wireless service. Sprint's hard launch is the same as what other carriers call a soft launch, and what happens is they leave "islands" of coverage and broad swaths of areas in that market without coverage at all. But because you at least get *some* coverage in between (even if it's only 2g) then Sprint calls it a job well done.
Meh, I wouldn't worry about antifa. They're all just a bunch of pimply pasty little pussies that act tough when they're in big numbers, but if they find themselves facing a real threat (the police aren't, btw, and antifa knows it,) they run and hide. Videos of this happening are all over youtube -- antifa keeps shouting about how cops are evil, they then block the wrong person from walking to work who beats the fuck out of one of them, and all of a sudden they start cowering and asking why the police aren't there to protect them.
IMO the real threats to democracy right now are social media (in the form of echo chambers) and far left universities that are actively working towards limiting free speech (Evergreen State, for example.)
And honestly, I think groups like antifa and the alt-right are way overblown by the media. Think the killer bees scare, the anthrax scare, the satanism scare of the 80's, and the myth that kids have been poisoned by Halloween candy that keeps coming around every year, even though there's no actual evidence that this has happened.
I mean fuck, the alt-right wouldn't even have an identity if it weren't for the media constantly shouting its name at the rooftops every fucking night. Seriously, the term was coined in 2010, and nobody had any idea who the fuck they were until the media started using them as their latest clickbait headline a year ago.
Actually strike what I said in that previous reply...Sprint has been saying that big upgrades are right around the corner, usually placing 3-6 month timespans, for the past 12 years. They have a tower upgrade map that always shows these short timespans, ranging anywhere from a month or a year, where they say the tower is being upgraded. Meanwhile, that entire time, the service kept getting worse and worse.
Seriously, this is nothing new with Sprint. I was with them for a very long time before I got tired of their shit, especially when they blatantly lied to me saying that my dropped call rate was 0%, and during that same call I got dropped, the rep actually called me back, I said WTF, and she said "I don't know what that was."
Sprint has been all about increasing ARPU and decreasing churn, but not overall subscribers or network quality for many years now. At least, that's what they've had on their financial statements.
When you read between the lines, what this means is that they're doing whatever they can to nickel and dime customers, scale back discounts, etc.
Did you ever use wimax? I did, and it fucking sucked. I had their service beginning in 2003 and ended it in 2013 because the quality of service kept declining. Hell, I was on the phone with Sprint support telling them that I'm always getting dropped calls, and they told me that my dropped call rate was zero percent...but then the call dropped right afterwards. I had to use the forced roaming trick to get them to drop my contract, then I switched to TMobile... Massive difference in call quality and speed, and this was before they even did the uncarrier thing and became disruptive. T-Mobiles hspa+ was so much better than Sprint's wimax in terms of speed, and it didn't drain my battery while using it.
And how many of these people live in areas with a very high cost of living? Minimum wage in New York City or San Francisco is going to do that, but minimum wage in Memphis, Tennessee is quite sustainable. You may not afford expensive vacations, but you can certainly situate yourself so that you're never really concerned about money (find a studio apartment, or live with roommates - very cheap rent.)
Another reason people might live paycheck to paycheck is because they're big borrowers living beyond their means. You don't HAVE to have lots of credit card debt, car payments, big mortgage, etc. Save cash for a sub $3,000 used car, for example. I make a very good income, but I've never spent more than $8,000 on a car, and I don't feel the urge to.
Most people don't live paycheck to paycheck because they have to, it's because they've chosen to buy things or do things (or have kids) that they can't afford.
That isn't far from the reality today. As insane as it sounds, if you fuck your wife with your dick and she gets pregnant, you can legally claim "Well, I was actually biologically a female the entire time!" even if you look and talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger, sport a beard, and have made no attempt to even look female, because identity is now legally considered to be fluid in most cases.
This is called identity politics. You're just a consciousness, and your intelligence and identity has nothing to do with your biology, genealogy, etc. The fact that your genetics and biology directly influence how you think, act, talk, behave, look, etc, this has nothing to do with your identity.
This is why I am now a dragon IRL, and you will refer to me as one and treat me as one or else I will call the PC gestapo.
Seeing how weeds are apparently adapting, in this case, I would rather compare the use of genetic engineering (targeting selective pesticide resistance) to the abuse of antibiotics. It may provide the intended results in the short term, but long-term systematic (and excessive) use seems to result in the much accelerated apparition of stronger pests, creating risks that may be very substantial and yet have generally not been assessed beforehand.
Superweeds are super only in their ability to resist one or more specific herbicides. Aside from that, there is nothing that separates them from any other weed found in a farmer’s field, and they are not linked specifically to GMOs or to glyphosate.
The entire point of using robots is because they're cheaper than humans in the long run.
Have you ever worked retail before? I have, and cycle counts are really shitty, tedious work. I would have loved if that job was automated, and it wouldn't have reduced the number of people employed at the store because they still needed the same number of people manning the sales floor. If you were there doing cycle counts, then you were also available to help customers, but even if you weren't doing cycle counts, then you were still helping customers.
Alternative to cycle counts was running pull lists...again really shitty, tedious work.
they can only work eight hours a day.
Eliminating cycle counts would hardly make a dent in this.
Yeah, that's what people with zero understanding of running a business say. Most executives I've run across are easily worth more than what they're paid, and very few aren't. Just as a case in point:
The AFL-CIO thinks it's terrible that John Legere makes 533 times more than the line workers. But here's why he gets paid what he gets paid: He turned that carrier around from hemorrhaging customers to being the fastest growing carrier within three years, overtaking Sprint as the #3 carrier in the process.
Besides that, because of him, my phone bill has seen both a 50% reduction in cost and a massive increase in quality of service. The same can be said of non T-Mobile customers. When Verizon started losing subscribers for the first time in over a decade and kept doing so for several quarters, they abandoned their line of "customers don't want unlimited data" to offering unlimited data.
AFL-CIO is welcome to suck my balls. And the CWA union can suck my balls as well. It's because of them that Centurylink's employees are lazy as fuck and have made phone service here really turn to shit. I kid you not, Centurylink's employees, as per union rules, are required to bring a lawn chair and an umbrella to their work sites.
I personally have avoided working for unionized companies not only because I would have yet another boss to answer to, but I really don't want to have money taken out of my paycheck to fatten up some mafia boss that ultimately doesn't do anything for me other than pretend he's looking out for my best interests. (Not to mention union executives everywhere make well over 6 figures...tell me...why am I supposed to hate the CEO's pay, but not theirs?)
You mean Ted Kennedy? Actually he didn't burn the car, he just left it under water while somebody was drowning in it, and then walked to his party still drunk while pretending that nothing happened.
That is completely false. Diagnostic codes and treatment codes are universal across the whole industry in the US. This serves multiple purposes, especially in terms of determining what is FDA approved, tracking health statistics (for example, the number of heart attacks in a year) and determining what Medicare is going to pay for covered members' needs. Hospitals, treatment providers, and insurance companies stick to these numbers for billing purposes as well.
DRM tends to make the pirated versions better to play than the legitimate ones. I used to download 'no CD' cracks for games I'd bought as it made it easier for me to play them.
That should quite well return after a long period of taking a while to push out cracks. The reason Denuvo lasted as long as it did was because there were no good 64-bit debuggers that had workarounds for anti-debugging code when it came out. Denuvo mainly works by obfuscating the crap out of code that is essential to the DRM it protects so that it's hard to reverse-engineer, but at the same time that code isn't sensitive to performance degradation. One of the favorites among crackers is OllyDbg, which still has no 64-bit version, but some other debuggers do now.
Some new really good debuggers have come around, so it's not surprising that it's getting easier to crack denuvo.
Personally, I've stopped cracking games from steam as I've found the DRM to be unnoticeable. The games just work everywhere I want to use them, unlike say movie DRM or ebook DRM. The only exception is when you had to buy a new game when it first came out in order to get all of its content. I honestly hate buying brand new games from most developers because they are all full of bugs, and I just end up waiting a long time for patches to come out to play them anyways. Skyrim is a great example of this because its UI was utterly useless at the start due to consolitis, though fortunately it didn't have any locked content because Bethesda aren't assholes like EA.
Nope. Not as long as we have really good and really bad schools.
You mean like the really bad school I went to that I got bullied so much that I barely graduated? Those kinds of bad schools? For comparison, I thought college was incredibly easy compared to high school, and I graduated summa cum laude with a perfect 4.0. And when I started college, some of my classes were high school level.
Saying that bad schools hold people back is just an excuse, like Morgan Freeman said.
No; people work for money in all sorts of systems, including Communism. Capitalism is about capital, which means resources capitalists can invest to make more money.
You're trying to explain this to me but you have no idea what the words you're saying even mean. Communism by definition means no money at all. In socialism you pretend to work and they pretend to pay you, and you have no choice but to work under penalties ranging from jail to death (and socialist governments always wonder why people want to leave.) Capitalism means free markets, free markets mean prices are governed by the forces of supply and demand.
Really? I start talking about general fuzzy categorization without saying anything about disparate treatment, and I sound like a fascist?
Yes, you do, but like the above, you don't seem to know what fascism means either, thus you're unable to recognize when you sound like one.
Do you really believe that the value of work to people in general is strictly based on what gets paid for it, and that that's really obvious?
I don't just believe it, it's a fact. Have you ever tried to sell a house or a car, or maybe something with an otherwise high market value? You can talk all day about what it's worth, but in the end, it's only worth what somebody will pay for it, just like how money is only worth whatever you think its worth. Labor is no exception. As with all things, labor is governed by the forces of supply and demand, and supply and demand vary by industry and by region (with the exception of minimum wage, which 90% of economists will tell you doesn't do what it's intended to do in the long run, and in fact in the long run the problems it creates feed back into itself so that we have to keep increasing it much faster than the rate of inflation. If minimum wage strictly followed the rate of inflation since it was first started, minimum wage would be $4.25 an hour today. It also discourages saving and encourages debt.)
Let's take IT for example; helpdesk people are easy to find because their work isn't hard to do at all and requires practically no education, which means the supply of helpdesk people is high relative to the demand. Datacenter architects are much harder to come by, and require much more training and experience, which means the supply is low while the demand for building datacenters is high. Guess which one's work is more valuable?
I'm sketching out a problem, you say, based on your ideology, that it isn't a problem, and I'm the fascist? Fascinating.
Ideology doesn't enter in to this. My statements are based purely on how followers of these economic systems seem to view them. That said, let's ask an actual fascist:
Unfortunately, Fascism has an undeserved bad reputation. Regardless of this reputation, Fascism is a very sensible economic and social ideology. There are a few different "flavors" of Fascism, but basically they all come down to the following.
First and foremost, Fascism is an economic system in which a nation's government plays a central role in monitoring all banking, trade, production, and labor activity which takes place within the nation. Such monitoring is done for the sole purpose of safeguarding & advancing the nation and its people. Under Fascism, the government will not approve of any business activity unless that business has a positive impact on the nation as a whol
Hey, you're the one who compared Myers-Briggs to sun signs.
No I didn't, where the hell are you getting this from?
and telling you I'm a definite I on the first letter tells you more about me than an astrologer could tell you accurately given my time, date, and place of birth.
Astrology is useless, as I said, so why are you comparing the two? Meyers-Briggs is also useless. You're comparing nothing to nothing, it's like arguing that a tree runs faster than a bush.
but it's still a significant piece of knowledge about someone's personality.
No, it's really not. Whether somebody is an introvert just gives you an idea of whether they prefer more time alone or more time with other people. Some of the most outgoing, outspoken people you can ever meet are introverts, just as many extroverts are shy and reserved. There's really nothing you can gain from this knowledge. There are personality traits that have a practical value for psychologists to help somebody who has a disorder, but this isn't one of them. No personality traits are good predictors of things like what kind of job somebody should have, what kind of crowd they should hang with, what kind of person they should be intimate with, etc.
Beating something totally worthless like astrology is beating nothing at all, so that statement has no meaning. And no, that E doesn't tell you much of anything. Why do you need a personality test to tell you whether your extroverted or introverted? Furthermore, what good does it do you? People try to use these personality tests to e.g. match people to jobs or dates, but they're useless for both of those purposes. What's really telling is that most people don't even score the same twice when they take these tests.
It's worse than that, he's been fooled twice: IQ tests are basically worthless, and he was most likely ripped off when he took it. Many businesses (Mensa for example) issue tests that are designed to make you think that you're more intelligent than most people. Why? Because they con people with more ego than brains by asking for things like membership dues (Mensa's in particular are very high while offering no actual value,) have you buy into a "Who's Who" scam, entrance into expensive (and worthless) diploma mills, etc.
Chances are, he's just your average sucker with a giant ego.
I think the biggest irony for Microsoft is that Windows Phone is both the finest OS they've ever produced
Depends on how you define "finest", but for me that would be user experience (aka UX.) I think Windows 7 was therefore the finest OS they produced. Ranked as follows: 7 > 10 > Vista > XP > 8 > Phone > Mobile. (Yes, Vista had some technical issues when it first launched, but I'm only going based on the latest version, which had most of that ironed out. Windows 7, which seems to be the most popular, is basically Vista SP3.)
If you define it as features, then it would go 10 > 8 > 7 > Vista > XP > Phone > Mobile
and also their biggest failure.
Failure should be defined as the least number of people who adopted the OS, and not least profit. That would definitely be Windows 8, but phone is not far behind it. Note that I am not including pre-Windows 2000 versions of Windows in all of the above, as 2000 was when Microsoft first got their act together.
If Windows Phone hadn't spurned phone makers like Samsung by buying Nokia, it might have been a very different story for Windows Phone.
No, that's not what alienated phone makers, nor was alienating phone makers why the OS failed. That was one of many things they did wrong. I explain this in detail here:
As for Nokia...Microsoft had no choice but to buy Nokia -- they actually didn't want to buy it, even Ballmer didn't want to buy it, but Nokia deliberately forced Microsoft's hand to buy out their handset division for way more than it was worth. There's a guy who's job it is to understand the smartphone industry inside and out, and he explains it in detail. I'll link it when I find it later.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm personally a tad skeptical on the technology. I really like the concept, but as anybody who works in technology well knows, bad people like to do bad things with it. That said, I would like to see what can be done about people sending false V2V data to other cars, for example to do things like induce traffic to move aside for themselves, or even deliberately cause accidents.
while they refuse to acknowledge the many lives lost and money spent on mistakes that had to be made by those that they despise- Governments.
For rockets? Wrong! Those lives lost were deliberate. The first rockets capable of putting objects in space had already existed by 1944, a whole 13 years before Sputnik, and they were built by Nazi Germany as a way to bomb other European cities. The US (via Wernher von Braun and others who deliberately surrendered to the US) and the USSR (via kidnapping many German scientists and capturing a V-2 rocket manufacturing plant) only refined them afterwards.
They are not attempting to go all Jules Verne by shooting Astronauts into Space by Cannon, because that was sorted out long as being, at the least, noisy and uncomfortable. They are not trying to fly Biplanes to the Moon. They are just appropriating all that knowledge for themselves and claiming it as their own, because they are the fittest.
Oh boy...you're in for a history lesson. The father of modern rocketry, Robert Goddard, was using his own private funds to develop the first liquid rockets (with many costly mistakes along the way,) and he was the one who proved that it was possible to reach outer space with rocketry. While he later received grants from a few non-profit entities (one in particular being the Smithsonian Institute) to further develop it merely for the curiosity of it, he ultimately profited off of selling his knowledge to the US Army.
No matter how you try to spin this, that is as common a case as any of man being an entrepreneur.
While I'm sure that will anger your monkey brain and you'll start saying "but but...NASA!", there's more to that as well. Much of the technology used for putting a man in space, and the moon landing, was made possible by technologies previously developed in the private sector. The most important technology by far was the integrated circuit, which was made practical by 3 US companies in 1958, and again was an entrepreneurial effort.
Capitalism is doing its thing again, only this time it is making spaceflight far more practical by bringing the costs way down...all with the intent of driving a profit. SpaceX may or may not make it that long; who knows, but it's unlikely that governments will take its place if it should fall any time soon. Governments aren't going to be the entities pushing for space tourism, or mining extraterrestrial objects for materials (like say...nickel...) especially when they have practically unlimited funds to acquire resources for their own projects that only a handful of people ever get to use due to the high cost involved, so they don't worry about discarding expensive rockets after just one use as opposed to recycling them.
And this time, you have at least three major entrepreneurs making efforts towards this end. So much for your (rather brain dead) cannibalism theory. It's actually rather funny watching heads explode in subreddits and internet forums dedicated to socialism and communism over this topic, many of them are left with no choice at all but to admit that SpaceX is already doing rather impressive things that no governments had ever even imagined doing.
Nothing but extinction is perhaps inaccurate. It has brought us many things, and it will also bring us extinction.
And how did you draw that conclusion? We've only seen capitalism do the exact opposite:
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...
https://www.gapminder.org/tool...
Nobody says capitalism is perfect. In fact, it's analogous to democracy: Many problems, but the best system we've ever come up with. Unless you have a better idea (communism and socialism have been soundly proven to be big giant flops) then what the hell are you ranting about? Let's see if you can come up with a better idea than democracy too while you're at it.
Put on your scientist hat on and look at history like actual scientists and historians have done. The profession consensus is that the link between capitalism and success outside of the expansion of capitalism, i.e. technological or social progress, is a correlation, not a causation.
Where the fuck are you getting this from? Some communist blog/forum? Newsflash: Capitalism has allowed technology to scale at an exponential rate due to private citizens investing massive amounts of money toward that end; this is not a coincidence. Hell, the Soviet Union, for all of the resources it had at its disposal to improve its military technology, was still using vacuum tubes in its fighter jets when the US had moved to integrated circuits long before. The same integrated circuits that were made practical for mass production in 1958 by three US companies, and that now power most of the technology we enjoy today.
Here's a bit of data that should drive the point home, especially when correlated with countries that have come from some other system to capitalism.
https://www.gapminder.org/tool...
Take a look at China for example; the government began adopting capitalist practices around 1980, and not long after that (roughly 1988,) you see their bubble quickly heading in the direction of higher average purchasing power (shown in that chart as income.) Granted, China had an enormous pile of untapped labor, that doesn't erase the fact that prior to these changes, such labor couldn't have ever been tapped because nobody could invest into the needed infrastructure (not even the government could.)
Hans Rosling (scientist, by the way) explains this data rather well:
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...
And chances are, you score worse than the monkeys in this test:
https://www.ted.com/talks/hans...
By the way, until he died, he dedicated his career to educating academics, and to a lesser extent, people like you:
rather than generating data, Rosling has spent the past two decades communicating data gathered by others. He relays facts that he thinks many academics have been too slow to appreciate and argues that researchers are ignorant about the state of health and wealth around the world. That’s dangerous. “Campuses are full of siloed people who do advocacy about things they don’t understand,” he says.
http://www.nature.com/news/thr...
Communists/socialists here on slashdot always like to slam capitalism as if there's a much better way to go, but we've honestly been there and tried those, and they're all crap. They don't understand, at all, that the world is doing nothing but improving, as the data there very clearly shows. And contrary to popular belief, "megacorps" (as they're often described here, as if this is a cyberpunk novel) are a lot less powerful than they were in ages past. The first publicly traded corporation to exist the Dutch East India Company, at its peak had a net worth of $7 trillion in today's dollars back in 1675. Let that sink in for a minute. They also had the power to raise armies, declare war, jail and execute people who didn't pay their bills, and they had the largest monopoly the world has ever seen. As time has gone on, we've seen this power continually decrease, whereas right now the biggest companies have no martial powers at all, and the number of monopolies that exist is getting smaller and smaller, and the ones that remain have very tiny impact compared to the ones that existed in the past.
While I'm sure the Nordic model works quite well for them, it's unlikely to do the same here. This mainly has to do with enormous cultural differences between us and them; namely we have a mentality of abusing welfare benefits to an extreme. (Case in point, look at the percentage of the population on disability 50 years ago vs today...there's no other reason why there are twice as many now than in the past, especially given newer technology has made it even easier for disabilities to be cured or for people to be able to work around their disabilities, and that it's now illegal for employers to discriminate based on disability.)
Another example of cultural problems in the US: Many countries have very liberal gun laws, (Canada, Switzerland, and some Nordic countries) and they don't have nearly the problems we do. This mainly comes from the "gangsta" culture where too many teenagers fantasize about growing up to be a drug dealer, a pimp, a musician, or an athlete, and nothing else, but all two often the later two just turn into something close to the first two. Hell, until 2010, Swiss citizens were required by law to own a fully automatic rifle; after 2010 it just became optional, but either way they can own better firearms than Americans are allowed, meanwhile they are among the lowest in the world when it comes to violent crime.
Oh cool, so they bought a lot of the low frequency spectrum to make that possible at the last big spectrum auction?
Even when they buy new spectrum, it's really just a marketing ploy to keep customer defections down. Do they use this spectrum? Yep, but their standards for a market launch are much lower than other carriers, just like their standards for everything else. Normally carriers deploy the new equipment in a given market and have what's called a soft launch (i.e. it's not announced to the public) where they have spotty coverage, but the service can be used if somebody happens to be there with a compatible phone. When it's a hard launch, they have the spotty areas mostly ironed out and announce to the public that they officially provide coverage in this area for the new spectrum.
Doing it this way makes sense, but Sprint isn't in the business of making sense, rather Sprint is in the business of pretending to give you wireless service. Sprint's hard launch is the same as what other carriers call a soft launch, and what happens is they leave "islands" of coverage and broad swaths of areas in that market without coverage at all. But because you at least get *some* coverage in between (even if it's only 2g) then Sprint calls it a job well done.
Meh, I wouldn't worry about antifa. They're all just a bunch of pimply pasty little pussies that act tough when they're in big numbers, but if they find themselves facing a real threat (the police aren't, btw, and antifa knows it,) they run and hide. Videos of this happening are all over youtube -- antifa keeps shouting about how cops are evil, they then block the wrong person from walking to work who beats the fuck out of one of them, and all of a sudden they start cowering and asking why the police aren't there to protect them.
IMO the real threats to democracy right now are social media (in the form of echo chambers) and far left universities that are actively working towards limiting free speech (Evergreen State, for example.)
http://www.newsweek.com/social...
http://bigthink.com/21st-centu...
And honestly, I think groups like antifa and the alt-right are way overblown by the media. Think the killer bees scare, the anthrax scare, the satanism scare of the 80's, and the myth that kids have been poisoned by Halloween candy that keeps coming around every year, even though there's no actual evidence that this has happened.
I mean fuck, the alt-right wouldn't even have an identity if it weren't for the media constantly shouting its name at the rooftops every fucking night. Seriously, the term was coined in 2010, and nobody had any idea who the fuck they were until the media started using them as their latest clickbait headline a year ago.
Actually strike what I said in that previous reply...Sprint has been saying that big upgrades are right around the corner, usually placing 3-6 month timespans, for the past 12 years. They have a tower upgrade map that always shows these short timespans, ranging anywhere from a month or a year, where they say the tower is being upgraded. Meanwhile, that entire time, the service kept getting worse and worse.
Oh and: https://www.cnet.com/news/spri...
It's well past that two years, and two years before that, Sprint said "pardon our dust":
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/21/...
Seriously, this is nothing new with Sprint. I was with them for a very long time before I got tired of their shit, especially when they blatantly lied to me saying that my dropped call rate was 0%, and during that same call I got dropped, the rep actually called me back, I said WTF, and she said "I don't know what that was."
They've been saying that for about 5 years now.
Sprint has been all about increasing ARPU and decreasing churn, but not overall subscribers or network quality for many years now. At least, that's what they've had on their financial statements.
When you read between the lines, what this means is that they're doing whatever they can to nickel and dime customers, scale back discounts, etc.
Did you ever use wimax? I did, and it fucking sucked. I had their service beginning in 2003 and ended it in 2013 because the quality of service kept declining. Hell, I was on the phone with Sprint support telling them that I'm always getting dropped calls, and they told me that my dropped call rate was zero percent...but then the call dropped right afterwards. I had to use the forced roaming trick to get them to drop my contract, then I switched to TMobile... Massive difference in call quality and speed, and this was before they even did the uncarrier thing and became disruptive. T-Mobiles hspa+ was so much better than Sprint's wimax in terms of speed, and it didn't drain my battery while using it.
And how many of these people live in areas with a very high cost of living? Minimum wage in New York City or San Francisco is going to do that, but minimum wage in Memphis, Tennessee is quite sustainable. You may not afford expensive vacations, but you can certainly situate yourself so that you're never really concerned about money (find a studio apartment, or live with roommates - very cheap rent.)
Another reason people might live paycheck to paycheck is because they're big borrowers living beyond their means. You don't HAVE to have lots of credit card debt, car payments, big mortgage, etc. Save cash for a sub $3,000 used car, for example. I make a very good income, but I've never spent more than $8,000 on a car, and I don't feel the urge to.
Most people don't live paycheck to paycheck because they have to, it's because they've chosen to buy things or do things (or have kids) that they can't afford.
That isn't far from the reality today. As insane as it sounds, if you fuck your wife with your dick and she gets pregnant, you can legally claim "Well, I was actually biologically a female the entire time!" even if you look and talk like Arnold Schwarzenegger, sport a beard, and have made no attempt to even look female, because identity is now legally considered to be fluid in most cases.
This is called identity politics. You're just a consciousness, and your intelligence and identity has nothing to do with your biology, genealogy, etc. The fact that your genetics and biology directly influence how you think, act, talk, behave, look, etc, this has nothing to do with your identity.
This is why I am now a dragon IRL, and you will refer to me as one and treat me as one or else I will call the PC gestapo.
Seeing how weeds are apparently adapting, in this case, I would rather compare the use of genetic engineering (targeting selective pesticide resistance) to the abuse of antibiotics. It may provide the intended results in the short term, but long-term systematic (and excessive) use seems to result in the much accelerated apparition of stronger pests, creating risks that may be very substantial and yet have generally not been assessed beforehand.
False.
https://gmo.geneticliteracypro...
Superweeds are super only in their ability to resist one or more specific herbicides. Aside from that, there is nothing that separates them from any other weed found in a farmer’s field, and they are not linked specifically to GMOs or to glyphosate.
The entire point of using robots is because they're cheaper than humans in the long run.
Have you ever worked retail before? I have, and cycle counts are really shitty, tedious work. I would have loved if that job was automated, and it wouldn't have reduced the number of people employed at the store because they still needed the same number of people manning the sales floor. If you were there doing cycle counts, then you were also available to help customers, but even if you weren't doing cycle counts, then you were still helping customers.
Alternative to cycle counts was running pull lists...again really shitty, tedious work.
they can only work eight hours a day.
Eliminating cycle counts would hardly make a dent in this.
Yeah, that's what people with zero understanding of running a business say. Most executives I've run across are easily worth more than what they're paid, and very few aren't. Just as a case in point:
https://aflcio.org/paywatch/TM...
The AFL-CIO thinks it's terrible that John Legere makes 533 times more than the line workers. But here's why he gets paid what he gets paid: He turned that carrier around from hemorrhaging customers to being the fastest growing carrier within three years, overtaking Sprint as the #3 carrier in the process.
Besides that, because of him, my phone bill has seen both a 50% reduction in cost and a massive increase in quality of service. The same can be said of non T-Mobile customers. When Verizon started losing subscribers for the first time in over a decade and kept doing so for several quarters, they abandoned their line of "customers don't want unlimited data" to offering unlimited data.
AFL-CIO is welcome to suck my balls. And the CWA union can suck my balls as well. It's because of them that Centurylink's employees are lazy as fuck and have made phone service here really turn to shit. I kid you not, Centurylink's employees, as per union rules, are required to bring a lawn chair and an umbrella to their work sites.
I personally have avoided working for unionized companies not only because I would have yet another boss to answer to, but I really don't want to have money taken out of my paycheck to fatten up some mafia boss that ultimately doesn't do anything for me other than pretend he's looking out for my best interests. (Not to mention union executives everywhere make well over 6 figures...tell me...why am I supposed to hate the CEO's pay, but not theirs?)
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-n...
http://nlpc.org/2016/02/01/top...
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And who issues the tough sentence for movie piracy? Hint: it's not the corporation.
You mean Ted Kennedy? Actually he didn't burn the car, he just left it under water while somebody was drowning in it, and then walked to his party still drunk while pretending that nothing happened.
That is completely false. Diagnostic codes and treatment codes are universal across the whole industry in the US. This serves multiple purposes, especially in terms of determining what is FDA approved, tracking health statistics (for example, the number of heart attacks in a year) and determining what Medicare is going to pay for covered members' needs. Hospitals, treatment providers, and insurance companies stick to these numbers for billing purposes as well.
DRM tends to make the pirated versions better to play than the legitimate ones. I used to download 'no CD' cracks for games I'd bought as it made it easier for me to play them.
That should quite well return after a long period of taking a while to push out cracks. The reason Denuvo lasted as long as it did was because there were no good 64-bit debuggers that had workarounds for anti-debugging code when it came out. Denuvo mainly works by obfuscating the crap out of code that is essential to the DRM it protects so that it's hard to reverse-engineer, but at the same time that code isn't sensitive to performance degradation. One of the favorites among crackers is OllyDbg, which still has no 64-bit version, but some other debuggers do now.
Some new really good debuggers have come around, so it's not surprising that it's getting easier to crack denuvo.
Personally, I've stopped cracking games from steam as I've found the DRM to be unnoticeable. The games just work everywhere I want to use them, unlike say movie DRM or ebook DRM. The only exception is when you had to buy a new game when it first came out in order to get all of its content. I honestly hate buying brand new games from most developers because they are all full of bugs, and I just end up waiting a long time for patches to come out to play them anyways. Skyrim is a great example of this because its UI was utterly useless at the start due to consolitis, though fortunately it didn't have any locked content because Bethesda aren't assholes like EA.
Nope. Not as long as we have really good and really bad schools.
You mean like the really bad school I went to that I got bullied so much that I barely graduated? Those kinds of bad schools? For comparison, I thought college was incredibly easy compared to high school, and I graduated summa cum laude with a perfect 4.0. And when I started college, some of my classes were high school level.
Saying that bad schools hold people back is just an excuse, like Morgan Freeman said.
No; people work for money in all sorts of systems, including Communism. Capitalism is about capital, which means resources capitalists can invest to make more money.
You're trying to explain this to me but you have no idea what the words you're saying even mean. Communism by definition means no money at all. In socialism you pretend to work and they pretend to pay you, and you have no choice but to work under penalties ranging from jail to death (and socialist governments always wonder why people want to leave.) Capitalism means free markets, free markets mean prices are governed by the forces of supply and demand.
Really? I start talking about general fuzzy categorization without saying anything about disparate treatment, and I sound like a fascist?
Yes, you do, but like the above, you don't seem to know what fascism means either, thus you're unable to recognize when you sound like one.
Do you really believe that the value of work to people in general is strictly based on what gets paid for it, and that that's really obvious?
I don't just believe it, it's a fact. Have you ever tried to sell a house or a car, or maybe something with an otherwise high market value? You can talk all day about what it's worth, but in the end, it's only worth what somebody will pay for it, just like how money is only worth whatever you think its worth. Labor is no exception. As with all things, labor is governed by the forces of supply and demand, and supply and demand vary by industry and by region (with the exception of minimum wage, which 90% of economists will tell you doesn't do what it's intended to do in the long run, and in fact in the long run the problems it creates feed back into itself so that we have to keep increasing it much faster than the rate of inflation. If minimum wage strictly followed the rate of inflation since it was first started, minimum wage would be $4.25 an hour today. It also discourages saving and encourages debt.)
Let's take IT for example; helpdesk people are easy to find because their work isn't hard to do at all and requires practically no education, which means the supply of helpdesk people is high relative to the demand. Datacenter architects are much harder to come by, and require much more training and experience, which means the supply is low while the demand for building datacenters is high. Guess which one's work is more valuable?
I'm sketching out a problem, you say, based on your ideology, that it isn't a problem, and I'm the fascist? Fascinating.
Ideology doesn't enter in to this. My statements are based purely on how followers of these economic systems seem to view them. That said, let's ask an actual fascist:
Unfortunately, Fascism has an undeserved bad reputation. Regardless of this reputation, Fascism is a very sensible economic and social ideology. There are a few different "flavors" of Fascism, but basically they all come down to the following.
First and foremost, Fascism is an economic system in which a nation's government plays a central role in monitoring all banking, trade, production, and labor activity which takes place within the nation. Such monitoring is done for the sole purpose of safeguarding & advancing the nation and its people. Under Fascism, the government will not approve of any business activity unless that business has a positive impact on the nation as a whol
Hey, you're the one who compared Myers-Briggs to sun signs.
No I didn't, where the hell are you getting this from?
and telling you I'm a definite I on the first letter tells you more about me than an astrologer could tell you accurately given my time, date, and place of birth.
Astrology is useless, as I said, so why are you comparing the two? Meyers-Briggs is also useless. You're comparing nothing to nothing, it's like arguing that a tree runs faster than a bush.
but it's still a significant piece of knowledge about someone's personality.
No, it's really not. Whether somebody is an introvert just gives you an idea of whether they prefer more time alone or more time with other people. Some of the most outgoing, outspoken people you can ever meet are introverts, just as many extroverts are shy and reserved. There's really nothing you can gain from this knowledge. There are personality traits that have a practical value for psychologists to help somebody who has a disorder, but this isn't one of them. No personality traits are good predictors of things like what kind of job somebody should have, what kind of crowd they should hang with, what kind of person they should be intimate with, etc.
Beating something totally worthless like astrology is beating nothing at all, so that statement has no meaning. And no, that E doesn't tell you much of anything. Why do you need a personality test to tell you whether your extroverted or introverted? Furthermore, what good does it do you? People try to use these personality tests to e.g. match people to jobs or dates, but they're useless for both of those purposes. What's really telling is that most people don't even score the same twice when they take these tests.
Anybody want to guess what my letters are?
PITA
It's worse than that, he's been fooled twice: IQ tests are basically worthless, and he was most likely ripped off when he took it. Many businesses (Mensa for example) issue tests that are designed to make you think that you're more intelligent than most people. Why? Because they con people with more ego than brains by asking for things like membership dues (Mensa's in particular are very high while offering no actual value,) have you buy into a "Who's Who" scam, entrance into expensive (and worthless) diploma mills, etc.
Chances are, he's just your average sucker with a giant ego.
I think the biggest irony for Microsoft is that Windows Phone is both the finest OS they've ever produced
Depends on how you define "finest", but for me that would be user experience (aka UX.) I think Windows 7 was therefore the finest OS they produced. Ranked as follows: 7 > 10 > Vista > XP > 8 > Phone > Mobile. (Yes, Vista had some technical issues when it first launched, but I'm only going based on the latest version, which had most of that ironed out. Windows 7, which seems to be the most popular, is basically Vista SP3.)
If you define it as features, then it would go 10 > 8 > 7 > Vista > XP > Phone > Mobile
and also their biggest failure.
Failure should be defined as the least number of people who adopted the OS, and not least profit. That would definitely be Windows 8, but phone is not far behind it. Note that I am not including pre-Windows 2000 versions of Windows in all of the above, as 2000 was when Microsoft first got their act together.
If Windows Phone hadn't spurned phone makers like Samsung by buying Nokia, it might have been a very different story for Windows Phone.
No, that's not what alienated phone makers, nor was alienating phone makers why the OS failed. That was one of many things they did wrong. I explain this in detail here:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
As for Nokia...Microsoft had no choice but to buy Nokia -- they actually didn't want to buy it, even Ballmer didn't want to buy it, but Nokia deliberately forced Microsoft's hand to buy out their handset division for way more than it was worth. There's a guy who's job it is to understand the smartphone industry inside and out, and he explains it in detail. I'll link it when I find it later.