Dual incomes often are not rational: the household would be better off if one partner stayed at home taking care of domestic chores and children. In different words, you probably don't need dual incomes, and they may make you worse off.
"Ever since the middle of the 20th Century, the reduced work week has been a touted benefit of all the automation and technology advances. It hasn't happened yet"
It has happened: you need to earn very little money to live a 1950's lifestyle, with 1950's health care, housing, safety, transportation, etc. People simply want more than that.
"UBI is a good idea, but it won't get implemented in the US until the alternative is the majority of the population living in poverty"
Between welfare, social security, and EIC, we effectively already have UBI, it's simply a little messier than a true UBI. We may get a true UBI, but if we do, it would result in people getting less from the state, not more.
"channel selection, free video on demand offerings"
What do these have to do with being an ISP?
It's hardly surprising that cable providers rank lower than pure ISPs because there is a lot more potential for problems with cable other than actual internet service.
Tesla is doing the safest thing: they keep going in hopes that the driver will eventually respond, which is what happens with most forms of loss of consciousness other than death.
Once it runs out of juice, it will do the next reasonable thing, which is coast to a stop in its lane.
And if the driver loses consciousness with autopilot, the best thing is for it to keep going and hope that the driver recovers enough to do something sensible later; most common forms of loss of consciousness are temporary after all. The driver is still better of with autopilot as is than with nothing.
It doesn't know how to stop safely. All it can do is keep in lane and follow, which is a perfectly safe and reasonable thing for it to do.
And if the driver becomes incapacitated, it is perfectly reasonable for it to keep doing just that because anything else it is actually capable of doing would be worse.
If you have an incapacitating medical issue going fast without autopilot, you're going to crash badly anyway. Therefore, it's hard to derive an obligation for autopilot to deal with that situation any better than that. And since autopilot is just a good lane assist, it actually can't deal with it in any other way than staying in the lane anyway.
Scandinavian style government means massive tax raises on the middle class, and a massive loss of individual liberties, both of which American voters are unlikely to support. It means giving up sovereignty and attaching yourself to big neighbors that take care of your defense and foreign policy, not an option for the US. It means a massive exodus of entrepreneurs and the wealthy. There is also lots of reason to believe that it is just not sustainable, bring largely based on intergenerational transfers.
Scandinavia itself is more than enough reason not to adopt Scandinavian policies.
"The retirement fund would return to being a stash of gold bars under the floorboards."
Why would it have to be under the floorboards? The bank could pay you interest on your gold, in gold. Put in 1 ounce now, get back 1.07 ounces a year from now. Now you effectively have gold backed currency.
Of course, when you convert that gold, you temporarily have to use money. So let's say your one ounce is worth b$1000 at the beginning of the year and inflation is 50%. At the end of the year it's worth b$1605. So the 7% gold interest is the same as 60.5% b$ interest. The bank certainly can afford to pay that because it could simply use gold internally.
What makes that not work well isn't the level of inflation, it's that at big inflation rates, the future value of money becomes highly volatile and that inflation itself is hard to measure. The point is that the absolute level of inflation really doesn't matter. What matters is predictability of inflation; is simply happens that high inflation rates also usually mean high unpredictability in practice.
"but there's an enormous gap between having to pay modest taxes"
But Venezuela isn't failing because people pay modest taxes, it's failing because it is actually socialist, with all the secret police, violence, oppression, poverty, corruption and economic failure that go along with socialism.
Inflation could run at 50% a year without any problems, as long as it was a guaranteed and steady 50% a year; people would simply do the math to translate monetary amounts over time and write contracts accordingly.
The absolute level of inflation doesn't matter to the economy; what matters is unpredictable changes in the rate of inflation, either up or down.
Venezeula isn't shitty because they have universal healthcare,
That's correct. You can have universal healthcare without being as shitty as Venezuela. Just look at Switzerland. See, contrary to what you believe, universal healthcare can be provided in many ways other than through government programs or socialism.
[Venezuela is] shitty because they have a dictator, and with a dictator, you tend to not actually fall within the ideals of any popular economic model.
Venezuela is your typical socialist shithole, with the typical sequence of events that happen when socialists take power: dictatorships, economic collapse, violent oppression, secret police, refugees, etc.
That's the typical sequence of events because socialism is the political equivalent of young earth creationism and faith healing: it is an absurd, irrational set of beliefs that simply does not reflect reality and fails to deliver results.
This may sound good on the surface on it, but it may have unintended consequences.
For example, can you still offer unencrypted web sites at all under this regulation? If you can't, doesn't that mean that every web site may have to register with a certificate authority?
Conversely, in order to comply simultaneously with this regulation and hate speech and libel laws, wouldn't web sites have to require more identification and authentication?
And what's the need for such a regulation anyway? All governments need to do is not to refrain from making cryptography illegal. Mandating cryptography seems as much of an unwise overreach as prohibiting it.
Most savings are in the form of investments and real property and are simply not affected directly by inflation. They are only affected indirectly when government requires fiat currency as a means of exchange and inflation becomes large enough to make that difficult. It also becomes a problem when contracts are written using the assumption of a fixed rate of inflation or when institutions like banks get to set interest rates unilaterally and have near monopolies.
Overall, inflation is not a big deal per se. It's rapid, unexpected changes in inflation that cause problems.
Venezeula isn't shitty because they have universal healthcare, they are shitty because they have a dictator, and with a dictator, you tend to not actually fall within the ideals of any popular economic model.
Socialism is necessarily totalitarian and dictatorial. You simply cannot have a society that is both free and socialist. Socialists acknowledge that by calling it a "dictatorship of the proletariat."
The route to freedom under socialism is the elimination of everybody who doesn't behave according to socialist ideals: work camps, secret police, and massive indoctrination.
So stop lying and pretending that Venezuela is some kind of aberration. You are deplorable.
Clearly you don't understand the intent or purpose of copyright law if you think that it doesn't apply because of the technical details of how torrents are implemented.
However, European copyright holders prefer to bring lawsuits in the US, simply because it is the country where they can get the biggest copyright awards, so this rarely happens.
It's really fscking annoying that European corporations and governments massively lobby, pressure, and corrupt US politics and then on top of that Americans have to listen to anti American innuendo from people like you.
Slashdot Mirror
Dual incomes often are not rational: the household would be better off if one partner stayed at home taking care of domestic chores and children. In different words, you probably don't need dual incomes, and they may make you worse off.
"Ever since the middle of the 20th Century, the reduced work week has been a touted benefit of all the automation and technology advances. It hasn't happened yet"
It has happened: you need to earn very little money to live a 1950's lifestyle, with 1950's health care, housing, safety, transportation, etc. People simply want more than that.
"UBI is a good idea, but it won't get implemented in the US until the alternative is the majority of the population living in poverty"
Between welfare, social security, and EIC, we effectively already have UBI, it's simply a little messier than a true UBI. We may get a true UBI, but if we do, it would result in people getting less from the state, not more.
The European work week is all over the map. The US, on the other hand, is simply about OECD average, similar to Japan, Ireland, and Italy.
https://www.usnews.com/news/be...
And despite average working hours, US wages are among the top in the world.
But, hey, don't let facts rain on your anti American parade.
"channel selection, free video on demand offerings"
What do these have to do with being an ISP?
It's hardly surprising that cable providers rank lower than pure ISPs because there is a lot more potential for problems with cable other than actual internet service.
Yes, and Tesla is, in fact, blameless precisely because they give these warnings.
It can't pull over, it doesn't know how to.
Tesla is doing the safest thing: they keep going in hopes that the driver will eventually respond, which is what happens with most forms of loss of consciousness other than death.
Once it runs out of juice, it will do the next reasonable thing, which is coast to a stop in its lane.
Instead of the pearl clutching, how about you try to make some actual sound argument that driving with autopilot is more dangerous than without?
How about when people misuse a tool, we hold the people responsible, not the toolmaker?
It doesn't know how to pull over.
And if the driver loses consciousness with autopilot, the best thing is for it to keep going and hope that the driver recovers enough to do something sensible later; most common forms of loss of consciousness are temporary after all. The driver is still better of with autopilot as is than with nothing.
It doesn't know how to pull over. It can stay in lane and control speed, or it can disengage. Those are the options, pick one.
It doesn't know how to stop safely. All it can do is keep in lane and follow, which is a perfectly safe and reasonable thing for it to do.
And if the driver becomes incapacitated, it is perfectly reasonable for it to keep doing just that because anything else it is actually capable of doing would be worse.
It wouldn't be safer at all because autopilot doesn't seem to know how to pull over.
A driver asleep with this tech is a lot more likely to survive than a driver asleep without this tech.
If you have an incapacitating medical issue going fast without autopilot, you're going to crash badly anyway. Therefore, it's hard to derive an obligation for autopilot to deal with that situation any better than that. And since autopilot is just a good lane assist, it actually can't deal with it in any other way than staying in the lane anyway.
Scandinavian style government means massive tax raises on the middle class, and a massive loss of individual liberties, both of which American voters are unlikely to support. It means giving up sovereignty and attaching yourself to big neighbors that take care of your defense and foreign policy, not an option for the US. It means a massive exodus of entrepreneurs and the wealthy. There is also lots of reason to believe that it is just not sustainable, bring largely based on intergenerational transfers.
Scandinavia itself is more than enough reason not to adopt Scandinavian policies.
"The retirement fund would return to being a stash of gold bars under the floorboards."
Why would it have to be under the floorboards? The bank could pay you interest on your gold, in gold. Put in 1 ounce now, get back 1.07 ounces a year from now. Now you effectively have gold backed currency.
Of course, when you convert that gold, you temporarily have to use money. So let's say your one ounce is worth b$1000 at the beginning of the year and inflation is 50%. At the end of the year it's worth b$1605. So the 7% gold interest is the same as 60.5% b$ interest. The bank certainly can afford to pay that because it could simply use gold internally.
What makes that not work well isn't the level of inflation, it's that at big inflation rates, the future value of money becomes highly volatile and that inflation itself is hard to measure. The point is that the absolute level of inflation really doesn't matter. What matters is predictability of inflation; is simply happens that high inflation rates also usually mean high unpredictability in practice.
"but there's an enormous gap between having to pay modest taxes"
But Venezuela isn't failing because people pay modest taxes, it's failing because it is actually socialist, with all the secret police, violence, oppression, poverty, corruption and economic failure that go along with socialism.
Inflation could run at 50% a year without any problems, as long as it was a guaranteed and steady 50% a year; people would simply do the math to translate monetary amounts over time and write contracts accordingly.
The absolute level of inflation doesn't matter to the economy; what matters is unpredictable changes in the rate of inflation, either up or down.
You said:
That's correct. You can have universal healthcare without being as shitty as Venezuela. Just look at Switzerland. See, contrary to what you believe, universal healthcare can be provided in many ways other than through government programs or socialism.
Venezuela is your typical socialist shithole, with the typical sequence of events that happen when socialists take power: dictatorships, economic collapse, violent oppression, secret police, refugees, etc.
That's the typical sequence of events because socialism is the political equivalent of young earth creationism and faith healing: it is an absurd, irrational set of beliefs that simply does not reflect reality and fails to deliver results.
Sorry, typo.
This may sound good on the surface on it, but it may have unintended consequences.
For example, can you still offer unencrypted web sites at all under this regulation? If you can't, doesn't that mean that every web site may have to register with a certificate authority?
Conversely, in order to comply simultaneously with this regulation and hate speech and libel laws, wouldn't web sites have to require more identification and authentication?
And what's the need for such a regulation anyway? All governments need to do is not to refrain from making cryptography illegal. Mandating cryptography seems as much of an unwise overreach as prohibiting it.
Most savings are in the form of investments and real property and are simply not affected directly by inflation. They are only affected indirectly when government requires fiat currency as a means of exchange and inflation becomes large enough to make that difficult. It also becomes a problem when contracts are written using the assumption of a fixed rate of inflation or when institutions like banks get to set interest rates unilaterally and have near monopolies.
Overall, inflation is not a big deal per se. It's rapid, unexpected changes in inflation that cause problems.
Socialism is necessarily totalitarian and dictatorial. You simply cannot have a society that is both free and socialist. Socialists acknowledge that by calling it a "dictatorship of the proletariat."
The route to freedom under socialism is the elimination of everybody who doesn't behave according to socialist ideals: work camps, secret police, and massive indoctrination.
So stop lying and pretending that Venezuela is some kind of aberration. You are deplorable.
"nor is [Trump] surrounded by well-informed individuals on those subjects, nor does he spend his time aggregating information on those subjects"
That's your opinion, not a fact.
Furthermore, Trump is president, Cook is not. That means it is Trump's job to decide whether to spend time on the issues and who to consult.
Clearly you don't understand the intent or purpose of copyright law if you think that it doesn't apply because of the technical details of how torrents are implemented.
As far as the US is concerned, yes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
However, European copyright holders prefer to bring lawsuits in the US, simply because it is the country where they can get the biggest copyright awards, so this rarely happens.
It's really fscking annoying that European corporations and governments massively lobby, pressure, and corrupt US politics and then on top of that Americans have to listen to anti American innuendo from people like you.