Or, to put it another way, I know that many poor farmers in my family tree had ten to twelve children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that was before childcare, college, anything resembling healthcare or free lunches even existed. They got no handouts, and they were poor, and they bred. Demographics are not a result of economic changes but of a change in social values. Women's rights and the decline of religion are probably more important than the cost of college.
That's because back in the 18th or 19th century children were a profit center. Need more workers in 5 years? Get busy now, and soon you'll have little hands helping you gather eggs and feed the pigs.
Today through most of the world children are cost centers: they cost money to take care of them, but they don't add to the bottom line.
That may sound crude, but it's a big reason why people are having fewer children. Throw in educational levels and reproductive choice--and it's only natural birth rates would drop.
I don't think, however, that we'll reach zero. If you consider children from an economics perspective, at some point we'll reach a stabile population equilibrium--where the population has gotten low enough the cost of having children will decline below the social and biological benefit (beyond 'cost' and 'profit' centers) to have children.
My guess is that stable point may be a fraction of what we have now. More than a billion, but less than 6 billion.
Uh, hang on a cotton-pickin' second. Isn't WhatsApp supposed to have "end to end encryption?" Didn't they like publish a whole paper describing how their end-to-end encryption made it impossible for third parties to know the content that was being sent? Wasn't it supposed to be impossible for anyone, including WhatsApp themselves, to know the content being transmitted on their system?
Doesn't end-to-end encryption, where "even WhatsApp" can't see the contents of the messages, sorta preclude the use of moderators to moderate content? That is, if WhatsApp can't see the messages, they can't moderate the messages, right?
So, um, am I wrong in thinking that WhatsApp's claim to being able to moderate messages and claims that messages cannot be read by WhatsApp are sort of incompatible? Unless WhatsApp's supposed "end-to-end encryption" is more of a bullshit marketing ploy rather than a description of the actual algorithms in play here...
So it seems to me that getting rid of the term "slavery" does not actually help the problem; it simply sweeps the problem under the rug, so those of us prone to "fainting couches" no longer have to look at the problem or think about the problem.
Does this deliberate ignorance make us better as a people?
Further, when the day does come when human slavery no longer exists, when it is a faint memory and the only places its talked about are in history books and in computer science classes--does this make computer scientists insensitive people? Or does this give us the ability to finally redefine the terms from one of the horrors of human slavery and into a technical term? Meaning does this make computer scientists bad people? Or are they reclaiming two words for a higher purpose?
I think this whole process of throwing otherwise useful terms down the memory hole distasteful, because it inadvertently sweeps serious, real, and pressing problems under the rug. I would rather reframe the problem of human slavery than ignore it.
Remember the original promise of the Apple App Store was that they'd host your software, provide you a landing site, handle credit card transactions, handle application installation and security, handle anti-piracy by signing downloaded software, and handle advertising and app discovery.
And that last part--advertising and app discovery--is a pretty big damned deal.
Drop that--and it's only worth perhaps a 10% tax. (Remember, credit card transactions charge around 3%ish, which means Apple is collecting the other 7% for hosting, providing a landing page, and application installation--all items which were hard to do a decade ago, but which today all have very cheap off-the-shelf alternatives.)
I think part of the problem is that, back in the day, it didn't seem all that unreasonable to pay Apple a 30% tax on the software you distributed. After all, they would host your app, provide a landing page, handle credit card transactions, handle the electronic distribution, and there were so few apps on the App store discovery was a snap. Because there were so few apps on the App store, it seemed reasonable to spend part of that 30% on a form of "advertising": after all, even something as stupid as a "fart" app that charged 99 cents could make its developer a millionaire.
Apple's gone through a number of redesigns of their App Store, and all have made discovery worse, not better. There are no "related applications", no systematic way for people to browse applications. Worse, on Mobile we lost the ability to browse applications for our phones on a desktop system; instead, we're left shopping for apps on what? A 5 inch screen that only shows you three apps at a time, max?
And it seems Apple's response to all of this is "get bent." Advertising, in other words, is the developer's responsibility. All Apple does--unless you're one of the lucky hand-picked few--is process credit card transactions and handle distribution. And we must now build our own landing pages, engage in SEO, and do the other advertising stuff ourselves--on the 70% left over from Apple.
Well, hell's bells; this doesn't seem like a toll worth 30% of each transaction. This feels like it's worth 10%--because Apple is not standing in as a publisher (who often takes a greater percentage of your income but also provides advertising for your product); they're basically a warehouse full of stuff. They are just doing fulfillment.
And heck, Amazon only charges about 15% of the product's price on average to handle fulfillment--and Amazon has to stock a warehouse full of crap and hire people to stuff boxes to fulfill your product. Apple simply hosts a bunch of bits on a server somewhere.
The two changes made immediately after 9/11 which had the biggest effect on airline safety was...
I did NOT assert that airline travel was safer after 9/11 than before. Only that these two changes (cockpit doors, passenger response to hijackings) were the biggest changes made. And the rest (TSA, "enhanced screening", etc., etc., etc.) has been a waste of money.
You seem to be arguing with stuff I have not said: specifically, you seem to be demanding I answer a question about guns I never raised, and now you're quoting broken links. I mean, have at--but it seems to me to be a waste of time.
You did not mention guns, but it was also one of the things that changed.
You wrote:
With MA270 in mind I have to question your assertion that bringing guns on an airplane has increased security.
It--along with your blockquote "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries." makes me think there may be a problem with your client or a problem with what you are seeing on Slahshdot--because it appears to me you are responding to someone else or are only peripherally responding to my own comments.
Have you ever considered that corporations have "enslaved" people with the full cooperation of the government?
I mean, how many mandates passed by the government only work if you're a full-time employee of some corporation? What about the mandate for employers to provide health care to full-time employees? The mandates for employers to provide worker's compensation? In-kind contributions to their retirement (in the form of Social Security)? Pre-pay their taxes? Provide family and medical leave?
All things that our government has sought for corporations to provide--things that are only provided to individuals if they are employees.
Think about it--and I'm being quite serious here--how much of this sounds like the old Feudal system of Noblesse oblige, but instead of peasants being cared for by their manor lords, it's employees being cared for by their corporations at the directive of the government?
And worse, how much does all of this absolutely fucking fails if you're self-employed, a member of the "gig" economy, under-employed or unemployed? Have you priced health care insurance on the exchanges? Medicare works, medicaid works (sorta), employer-provided health care works--but God help you if you're self-employed, because private insurance does not work. (For example, my wife and I pay nearly $1,300/month for insurance off the exchange. A two-person corporation would only pay $650/month total ($325 employer contribution, $325 employee contribution, broken down into 2 payments per employee of $82 per bi-monthly paycheck) for group insurance for similar coverage.)
Does this sound like an accident to you?
Or does it sound like those in Washington D.C. govern the United States as if we are all wards of our employers--and if we are unemployed or poor, we then become wards of the State?
With MA270 in mind I have to question your assertion that bringing guns on an airplane has increased security.
Where did I use the word "gun?"
And I'm well aware of plane hijackings before 2001. I know of people who got to spend a sunny afternoon couped up in an airplane on the tarmac in Cuba, due to defectors hijacking an airplane bound for Florida and rerouting it to Cuba.
Prior to 2001, airline passengers were told that during a hijacking, do not resist the hijackers, as the worse that will happen is that you'll waste a day in Cuba.
September 11, 2001 changed all that.
And now passengers are told during a hijacking to fight for their lives. It's how Richard Reid was stopped...
Your argument essentially is an argument for taking away individual freedom.
I mean, consider the statistic that only 39% of Americans can handle a $1k hit right now. By your implication, this suggests that 61% of all Americans lack the sufficient wherewithal to be making their own financial decisions.
And if they can't make their own decisions for themselves, who make it for them? The State?
Ultimately I find arguments like your an aesthetic one, because often, when you explore the boundaries you find arguments like "he shouldn't eat at McDonalds because those are empty calories" or "she shouldn't spend her time out partying because she isn't spending enough time making home-cooked meals."
And down that rabbit hole is authoritarianism--one where only 39% of Americans are trusted with their own money.
As I noted elsewhere, we're already there today; it's just the debate spans across multiple different programs and ranges from a debate on "welfare reform" to "tax reform" to "child support" to debate on a "living wage," with all sides making a pitch for their own favorite program.
UBI recipients will inevitably mismanage their funds and safety nets will have to be reestablished to cover medical and other needs.
Certainly UBI cannot replace medical aid (Medicaid), since the cost of health care for someone on dialysis (for example) far exceeds what any but the wealthiest individuals could pay out of pocket. (As I recall, the cost of dialysis out of pocket is in the low six figures annually.)
But this hits on a core philosophical difference about the poor and about people in general: are people too God-damned stupid to manage their own affairs, and thus must have their affairs managed for them?
It's not to deny the fact that there are demonstrably people out there who lack the logical or social skills necessary to function in our current society. And certainly we need to have social workers out there who can help them.
But when you make the de-facto assumption that all poor people are stupid and require their lives to be managed by those of us who are "better" than them--you walk right into an aesthetic argument. (At what point does your inferiority require us to treat you as a ward of the state? Does being poor mean you must be a de-facto ward of the state? What's the threshold? Is it abject poverty? Is it just being lower-middle class? Do we by default assume you're making poor decisions because you're barely scratching out a living? Do we pass judgement because in our opinion you drink too much for your socio-economic class? Drink too many empty calories in the form of fast food soft drinks? Eat too often at McDonalds? Should you become a "de-facto" ward of the state because you live in the wrong area? And I'm not being snarky; I've heard each of these given as a reason why those "less than us" need to make "better decisions", or who should have their rights limited.)
Worse, you walk head-first into an authoritarian argument: if "those people" can't "make the right decisions" that are made by "their betters"--how far away are you from simply taking away all of their decisions?
As a Native American I've seen these arguments play out over history on the reservations.
They never end well.
So your statement "UBI recipients will inevitably mismanage their funds and safety nets" strikes me as overly authoritarian. And distasteful.
Me, I'd rather just hire a bunch of social workers (and we may not need to hire any more since we have a lot of them already), and task them with the job of helping people who seek help, or who are referred to them by police officers, with making better decisions. Kinda like what we do today, but without the "nanny state" authoritarian bullshit.
Remember: from where you stand, unless you're Warren Buffet, there are people at a higher socio-economic level than you looking down at you as part of the hoi-polloi--part of the unwashed masses, an uncouth individual who can't seem to manage your life to the level they can.
You're joking that a UBI replaces everything, right?
I'm not. That was the original idea, floated by the likes of Milton Friedman and others. And his reasoning was not about redistribution or about "fairness" or about providing a better welfare program to the poor. It was about eliminating the arbitrariness of the existing federally- and state-administered programs by replacing the existing complex welfare and tax deduction systems with a simple payment scheme.
You think fraud goes away like magic?
Of course not. There will be plenty of people who try to continue to collect a deceased loved-one's UBI, for example.
But the fewer rules and the fewer decisions that have to be administered, the fewer decision makers and administrators are required to police the system. And when the only rule for collecting a UBI is "are you alive?", it makes administration and policing far easier than, for example, the current system which may require an investigator to determine your salary, if you were paid under the table, if the child you declared as a dependent actually lives with you at least 181 days out of the year, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
We're already there today; it's just the debate spans across multiple different programs and ranges from a debate on "welfare reform" to "tax reform" to "child support" to debate on a "living wage," with all sides making a pitch for their own favorite program.
The one nice thing, I guess, about concentrating all of this into a single simple system is that it would crystalize the debate over wealth redistribution into a debate over the two aspects of the UBI system: the marginal rates of the tax tables and the size of the UBI payout itself.
The number of bureaucrats you need to administer a system is in proportion to the complexity of that system, not the size. The idea of UBI (as it was originally conceived) was to reduce or eliminate nearly all the decision making (and thus, complexity) inherent in the original welfare system by replacing it with something much simpler--and inherently much more fair, as simplicity strips arbitrariness from a system.
The two changes made immediately after 9/11 which had the biggest effect on airline safety was (a) hardened cockpit doors, and (b) changing airline passenger awareness on how to respond to a terrorist--from one of being a passive passenger during a hijacking to actively resisting the terrorist.
All the rest has been a waste of money, time and effort with "security theater" as the government plays cops and robbers on the taxpayer dime.
As originally conceived by Milton Friedman, UBI (or rather, a "negative tax") would replace all other programs--welfare programs, middle class tax deductions, Social Security, etc., etc., etc.
And the point was not to add a new, generous welfare payment. The point was to replace the existing welfare system with a new universal system which requires almost no administrative overhead. The program would be paid in part from the existing welfare system (which is scrapped), from increased tax receipts (from middle-class and upper-class tax deductions which are eliminated), and from the salary of the old welfare program (whose salaries you no longer have to pay).
Ultimately a UBI may not necessarily pay a "living wage", depending on where you live. (But then, already in San Francisco, making less than $100k/year is considered the poverty line for subsidized housing. So "living wage" isn't a constant anyway.) In fact, for the poorest, the idea was that UBI--as originally conceived--would pay out about as much as welfare does.
But it does make welfare "more fair" in the sense that you get to keep your UBI even if you are an upper-middle class individual. (Of course at that point the UBI replaces that mortgage tax deduction, the deduction for your kids, and other middle-class tax deductions. So for someone in the middle-class with a mortgage and a couple of kids, UBI should be a wash.)
And that implies that if you do go out and get a 'gig' job, you get to keep your UBI. Which--oddly enough--incentivizes the poor to work as it eliminates the extremely high implicit marginal tax rate the poor suffer from which cause the poor to be "taxed" at a 140% marginal tax rate in some cases. (My wife used to work for a dialysis center that treated the poor--and she knew several folks on welfare who could not afford to work, because the only jobs they could get would put them into that 140% implicit marginal tax rate--meaning for every dollar they could make, they'd lose about a buck-fourty in benefits.)
The funny of it is, if you add up how much we pay administering the current welfare system--the thousands and thousands of bureaucrats who administer things like Electronic Benefit Transfer cards, who determine what items you are allowed to buy, who determine if you qualify, who police the system--we could provide a reasonably generous UBI to everyone with nearly no administrative overhead.
Remember: a proper UBI replaces EVERYTHING, including tax deductions normally enjoyed by higher-income individuals, such as tax deductions for children (as children also receive a UBI), mortgage tax deductions, tax deductions for retirement savings, tax credits for paying for college. The idea is to eliminate the unfairness that is intrinsically tied into all of these separate programs, each which have their own target audiences, administrative bureaucracies and qualifications.
The UBI would also replace Social Security--both the OSADI and SSI disability funds.
Imagine how much smaller the administrative state becomes when your tax return is essentially four lines: A: gross income, B: tax (from tax tables), C: UBI D: Tax owed (or refund due).
This is why I don't think we will ever have a proper UBI. Because there are just too many people--both working for the government, and private companies (like Intuit, who constantly lobby against simplifying the tax code) whose jobs rely on the massive administration of hundreds of government programs which would all be wiped off the map by a properly designed UBI.
Tthat's part of the problem: we pay nearly as much in administrative overhead administering the current welfare state and the current tax code as we do paying out benefits. If you consider those bureaucrats as beneficiaries of the welfare state, that's a lot of jobs which would be wiped off the map. And they make a very powerful lobbying group--which is why in government corners, "UBI" is always reframed as yet another program for them to administer, rather than a new program that would cost them their job.
I looked at using OpenStreetMaps as a data source for drawing hiking maps throughout the United States. OpenStreetMaps has some fairly good hiking trail data.
But I ran into two problems. First, address data for the United States in OpenStreetMaps is virtually non-existent. It appears OpenStreetMaps is concentrating on providing a specific address for specific buildings--which makes sense in countries which do not do sequential street addresses. But in the United States you can also extrapolate the street address on most streets through a linear interpolation of the address at the start and end of a street segment. This interpolation data--present in the Tiger Line census data that is the source of a lot of the streets in OpenStreetMaps for the United States--does not appear to be present after the import. This means that attempting to type in a street address in OpenStreetMaps usually fails for a US address.
The second problem is that it appears navigational information--information which would help construct navigation data (such as knowing which streets are one way) seems to be missing as well.
If I had a wishlist for improving OpenStreetMap data, it'd be these two things. Without them, and anyone serious about constructing a US map application with navigation will wind up having to license map data from a Tele Atlas (now owned by TomTom) or a NAVTEQ (now owned by Nokia as "Here").
And because both are "B2B", good luck if you're just some random hacker looking to build an interesting and specialized mapping product.
The problem right now with solar and wind (especially wind, apparently) is that, because they are not constant or reliable, you wind up with "hot standby" power generators, generators which are consuming fuel to keep a boiler hot enough so that when you have to instantly turn on a turbine, you can (without waiting for the boiler to heat up, a process which can take hours).
This means that solar and wind right now are not "green"; behind every field of solar cells or every expanse of wind turbines is a (often coal-powered) power plant on "hot standby," wasting energy.
For solar and wind to become truly "green"--setting aside the resources used to build the solar and wind turbines to begin with--you must do one or both of two things. First, you can accept "rolling brownouts"; simply accept the fact that voltages are not constant. But this means redesigning all of the equipment which uses electricity to deal with rolling brownouts: with dips in voltage and current. And that is extremely wasteful, though for some equipment (like laptops with built-in batteries) I think you can redesign the power adapter to deal with it.
Or you can build massive energy storage. As in "capable of powering the entire grid from battery backup for hours at a time" energy storage, not the couple of seconds most battery backup systems now on the grid.
And that requires thinking about more than just stringing together a bunch of batteries together.
'Cause Cessna 172's are as common as fleas on a dog. Though any single prop manually controlled aircraft that one would train in (Pipers Archers, DA-20's, whatever) will do in a pinch: anything where you can feel the bite of the air on the yoke and feel the pitch of the aircraft on the rudder.
This is a gross oversimplification of what happened.
Well, of course it was a gross oversimplification; I summed up a chain of events and circumstances and training and inputs and actions that can trace their roots back minutes, and even hours, back before the actual crash took place, into two pithy sentences.
But at the bottom of the stack, the airplane hit the water in a nose-up stall, having held the nose-up stall for several minutes as the plane descended from 30,000 feet to sea level. The plane hit the water in a nose-up stall because the co-pilot was pulling up on the yoke--countermanding the inputs from the pilot, without indicating who was in charge of the airplane. And the airplane maintained a nose-up stall through several minutes because the co-pilot was putting the wrong inputs on the controls, in almost complete contradiction to all the training he received--since there are no slow-speed aircraft attitudes where recovery is achieved by pulling the nose up. Zero. None. The only time you pull the yoke back to recover the aircraft is either (a) if you have an indication that you are going too fast, or (b) you're panicked and are trying to gain altitude. If you have the yoke up and the altimeter is unwinding, the hardest god damned thing in the world to do is the thing that will save your life, the thing the pilot of that aircraft was trying to do but the thing the co-pilot refused to try, is to push the nose down.
Now how we got to here--that's important. And probably more important than the co-pilot making a rookie mistake--because if we stop with "the co-pilot is an idiot", rather than trying to determine if there is something more we can do to assure greater safety in commercial flight, we've basically thrown up our hands and said "sometimes people die."
And that is unacceptable.
(Frankly, by the way, I wish more organizations or corporations thought like the FAA--which, when faced with pilot error, tries to understand why there was pilot error. They try to figure out if it was information overload or improper inputs or inattentiveness or improper training. They try to figure out how we can make flying safe, even with imperfect pilots and imperfect equipment.)
Now, I had a CFI who once told me that the people he hated the most to give checkrides to were commercial pilots. Because none of these guys have really had to do any real stick-and-rudder work since they first started working for the large commercial airlines. One of the scariest thing he's ever done is to give a particular older pilot--retiring from the airlines and who bought his own little 4 seater prop airplane to continue to tool around in the air--a quick refresher in stalls. Because this guy seemed hell bent on doing exactly the wrong thing when the airplane started to buffet in that prelude to a stall, once nearly putting the aircraft into a fatal spin because he simply didn't know how to use the rudder.
It's why my wish is for all commercial pilots to spend some time each month in a Cessna 172, practicing things like power-on and power-off stalls.
Because I honestly and sincerely think if that co-pilot had recent experience with stalls, rather than (as is typical for a lot of those bus drivers) not having done stall work or rudder work for perhaps a decade or more, the 216 people who died aboard Air France 447 would be alive today.
How the hell is that different from most company's mandates that pilots require 3 hand flown landings per month?
The point of my recommendation is to connect the pilot back to all of the stick and rudder skills, including proficiency in handling stalls as well as smooth stick and rudder operations. The corporate landing mandate can be handled by taking over on the final approach, but I want the guy to be able to hand fly the airplane and demonstrate proficiency in stick and rudder skill (including shit you don't want to do with passengers, such as side slips and power-on and power-off stalls).
Remember, the guy who managed to put down the Gimli Glider (Air Canada Flight 143) happened to also be an experienced glider pilot, so by accident he happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because back in the 18th or 19th century children were a profit center. Need more workers in 5 years? Get busy now, and soon you'll have little hands helping you gather eggs and feed the pigs.
Today through most of the world children are cost centers: they cost money to take care of them, but they don't add to the bottom line.
That may sound crude, but it's a big reason why people are having fewer children. Throw in educational levels and reproductive choice--and it's only natural birth rates would drop.
I don't think, however, that we'll reach zero. If you consider children from an economics perspective, at some point we'll reach a stabile population equilibrium--where the population has gotten low enough the cost of having children will decline below the social and biological benefit (beyond 'cost' and 'profit' centers) to have children.
My guess is that stable point may be a fraction of what we have now. More than a billion, but less than 6 billion.
Uh, hang on a cotton-pickin' second. Isn't WhatsApp supposed to have "end to end encryption?" Didn't they like publish a whole paper describing how their end-to-end encryption made it impossible for third parties to know the content that was being sent? Wasn't it supposed to be impossible for anyone, including WhatsApp themselves, to know the content being transmitted on their system?
Doesn't end-to-end encryption, where "even WhatsApp" can't see the contents of the messages, sorta preclude the use of moderators to moderate content? That is, if WhatsApp can't see the messages, they can't moderate the messages, right?
So, um, am I wrong in thinking that WhatsApp's claim to being able to moderate messages and claims that messages cannot be read by WhatsApp are sort of incompatible? Unless WhatsApp's supposed "end-to-end encryption" is more of a bullshit marketing ploy rather than a description of the actual algorithms in play here...
Human slavery is still alive and well today. At present, around the world, some estimate there are nearly 46 million people living in slavery.
So it seems to me that getting rid of the term "slavery" does not actually help the problem; it simply sweeps the problem under the rug, so those of us prone to "fainting couches" no longer have to look at the problem or think about the problem.
Does this deliberate ignorance make us better as a people?
Further, when the day does come when human slavery no longer exists, when it is a faint memory and the only places its talked about are in history books and in computer science classes--does this make computer scientists insensitive people? Or does this give us the ability to finally redefine the terms from one of the horrors of human slavery and into a technical term? Meaning does this make computer scientists bad people? Or are they reclaiming two words for a higher purpose?
I think this whole process of throwing otherwise useful terms down the memory hole distasteful, because it inadvertently sweeps serious, real, and pressing problems under the rug. I would rather reframe the problem of human slavery than ignore it.
Remember the original promise of the Apple App Store was that they'd host your software, provide you a landing site, handle credit card transactions, handle application installation and security, handle anti-piracy by signing downloaded software, and handle advertising and app discovery.
And that last part--advertising and app discovery--is a pretty big damned deal.
Drop that--and it's only worth perhaps a 10% tax. (Remember, credit card transactions charge around 3%ish, which means Apple is collecting the other 7% for hosting, providing a landing page, and application installation--all items which were hard to do a decade ago, but which today all have very cheap off-the-shelf alternatives.)
I think part of the problem is that, back in the day, it didn't seem all that unreasonable to pay Apple a 30% tax on the software you distributed. After all, they would host your app, provide a landing page, handle credit card transactions, handle the electronic distribution, and there were so few apps on the App store discovery was a snap. Because there were so few apps on the App store, it seemed reasonable to spend part of that 30% on a form of "advertising": after all, even something as stupid as a "fart" app that charged 99 cents could make its developer a millionaire.
Apple's gone through a number of redesigns of their App Store, and all have made discovery worse, not better. There are no "related applications", no systematic way for people to browse applications. Worse, on Mobile we lost the ability to browse applications for our phones on a desktop system; instead, we're left shopping for apps on what? A 5 inch screen that only shows you three apps at a time, max?
And it seems Apple's response to all of this is "get bent." Advertising, in other words, is the developer's responsibility. All Apple does--unless you're one of the lucky hand-picked few--is process credit card transactions and handle distribution. And we must now build our own landing pages, engage in SEO, and do the other advertising stuff ourselves--on the 70% left over from Apple.
Well, hell's bells; this doesn't seem like a toll worth 30% of each transaction. This feels like it's worth 10%--because Apple is not standing in as a publisher (who often takes a greater percentage of your income but also provides advertising for your product); they're basically a warehouse full of stuff. They are just doing fulfillment.
And heck, Amazon only charges about 15% of the product's price on average to handle fulfillment--and Amazon has to stock a warehouse full of crap and hire people to stuff boxes to fulfill your product. Apple simply hosts a bunch of bits on a server somewhere.
Really?
Darn. Sullenly kicks can with a clock hot-glued to the side.
What I wrote was:
I did NOT assert that airline travel was safer after 9/11 than before. Only that these two changes (cockpit doors, passenger response to hijackings) were the biggest changes made. And the rest (TSA, "enhanced screening", etc., etc., etc.) has been a waste of money.
You seem to be arguing with stuff I have not said: specifically, you seem to be demanding I answer a question about guns I never raised, and now you're quoting broken links. I mean, have at--but it seems to me to be a waste of time.
You wrote:
It--along with your blockquote "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries." makes me think there may be a problem with your client or a problem with what you are seeing on Slahshdot--because it appears to me you are responding to someone else or are only peripherally responding to my own comments.
Have you ever considered that corporations have "enslaved" people with the full cooperation of the government?
I mean, how many mandates passed by the government only work if you're a full-time employee of some corporation? What about the mandate for employers to provide health care to full-time employees? The mandates for employers to provide worker's compensation? In-kind contributions to their retirement (in the form of Social Security)? Pre-pay their taxes? Provide family and medical leave?
All things that our government has sought for corporations to provide--things that are only provided to individuals if they are employees.
Think about it--and I'm being quite serious here--how much of this sounds like the old Feudal system of Noblesse oblige, but instead of peasants being cared for by their manor lords, it's employees being cared for by their corporations at the directive of the government?
And worse, how much does all of this absolutely fucking fails if you're self-employed, a member of the "gig" economy, under-employed or unemployed? Have you priced health care insurance on the exchanges? Medicare works, medicaid works (sorta), employer-provided health care works--but God help you if you're self-employed, because private insurance does not work. (For example, my wife and I pay nearly $1,300/month for insurance off the exchange. A two-person corporation would only pay $650/month total ($325 employer contribution, $325 employee contribution, broken down into 2 payments per employee of $82 per bi-monthly paycheck) for group insurance for similar coverage.)
Does this sound like an accident to you?
Or does it sound like those in Washington D.C. govern the United States as if we are all wards of our employers--and if we are unemployed or poor, we then become wards of the State?
Nope. It's why I have zero hope any of this will come to pass. Frankly, I have more hope that I'll win over $100 million in the lottery.
And I don't play the lottery.
Where did I use the word "gun?"
And I'm well aware of plane hijackings before 2001. I know of people who got to spend a sunny afternoon couped up in an airplane on the tarmac in Cuba, due to defectors hijacking an airplane bound for Florida and rerouting it to Cuba.
Prior to 2001, airline passengers were told that during a hijacking, do not resist the hijackers, as the worse that will happen is that you'll waste a day in Cuba.
September 11, 2001 changed all that.
And now passengers are told during a hijacking to fight for their lives. It's how Richard Reid was stopped...
I did elsewhere by noting we cannot do away with social workers and we certainly need more PSAs revolving around the proper management of money.
That argument is not mine. In point of fact, that argument was Obama's.
Your argument essentially is an argument for taking away individual freedom.
I mean, consider the statistic that only 39% of Americans can handle a $1k hit right now. By your implication, this suggests that 61% of all Americans lack the sufficient wherewithal to be making their own financial decisions.
And if they can't make their own decisions for themselves, who make it for them? The State?
Ultimately I find arguments like your an aesthetic one, because often, when you explore the boundaries you find arguments like "he shouldn't eat at McDonalds because those are empty calories" or "she shouldn't spend her time out partying because she isn't spending enough time making home-cooked meals."
And down that rabbit hole is authoritarianism--one where only 39% of Americans are trusted with their own money.
As I noted elsewhere, we're already there today; it's just the debate spans across multiple different programs and ranges from a debate on "welfare reform" to "tax reform" to "child support" to debate on a "living wage," with all sides making a pitch for their own favorite program.
Certainly UBI cannot replace medical aid (Medicaid), since the cost of health care for someone on dialysis (for example) far exceeds what any but the wealthiest individuals could pay out of pocket. (As I recall, the cost of dialysis out of pocket is in the low six figures annually.)
But this hits on a core philosophical difference about the poor and about people in general: are people too God-damned stupid to manage their own affairs, and thus must have their affairs managed for them?
It's not to deny the fact that there are demonstrably people out there who lack the logical or social skills necessary to function in our current society. And certainly we need to have social workers out there who can help them.
But when you make the de-facto assumption that all poor people are stupid and require their lives to be managed by those of us who are "better" than them--you walk right into an aesthetic argument. (At what point does your inferiority require us to treat you as a ward of the state? Does being poor mean you must be a de-facto ward of the state? What's the threshold? Is it abject poverty? Is it just being lower-middle class? Do we by default assume you're making poor decisions because you're barely scratching out a living? Do we pass judgement because in our opinion you drink too much for your socio-economic class? Drink too many empty calories in the form of fast food soft drinks? Eat too often at McDonalds? Should you become a "de-facto" ward of the state because you live in the wrong area? And I'm not being snarky; I've heard each of these given as a reason why those "less than us" need to make "better decisions", or who should have their rights limited.)
Worse, you walk head-first into an authoritarian argument: if "those people" can't "make the right decisions" that are made by "their betters"--how far away are you from simply taking away all of their decisions?
As a Native American I've seen these arguments play out over history on the reservations.
They never end well.
So your statement "UBI recipients will inevitably mismanage their funds and safety nets" strikes me as overly authoritarian. And distasteful.
Me, I'd rather just hire a bunch of social workers (and we may not need to hire any more since we have a lot of them already), and task them with the job of helping people who seek help, or who are referred to them by police officers, with making better decisions. Kinda like what we do today, but without the "nanny state" authoritarian bullshit.
Remember: from where you stand, unless you're Warren Buffet, there are people at a higher socio-economic level than you looking down at you as part of the hoi-polloi--part of the unwashed masses, an uncouth individual who can't seem to manage your life to the level they can.
I'm not. That was the original idea, floated by the likes of Milton Friedman and others. And his reasoning was not about redistribution or about "fairness" or about providing a better welfare program to the poor. It was about eliminating the arbitrariness of the existing federally- and state-administered programs by replacing the existing complex welfare and tax deduction systems with a simple payment scheme.
Of course not. There will be plenty of people who try to continue to collect a deceased loved-one's UBI, for example.
But the fewer rules and the fewer decisions that have to be administered, the fewer decision makers and administrators are required to police the system. And when the only rule for collecting a UBI is "are you alive?", it makes administration and policing far easier than, for example, the current system which may require an investigator to determine your salary, if you were paid under the table, if the child you declared as a dependent actually lives with you at least 181 days out of the year, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
We're already there today; it's just the debate spans across multiple different programs and ranges from a debate on "welfare reform" to "tax reform" to "child support" to debate on a "living wage," with all sides making a pitch for their own favorite program.
The one nice thing, I guess, about concentrating all of this into a single simple system is that it would crystalize the debate over wealth redistribution into a debate over the two aspects of the UBI system: the marginal rates of the tax tables and the size of the UBI payout itself.
The number of bureaucrats you need to administer a system is in proportion to the complexity of that system, not the size. The idea of UBI (as it was originally conceived) was to reduce or eliminate nearly all the decision making (and thus, complexity) inherent in the original welfare system by replacing it with something much simpler--and inherently much more fair, as simplicity strips arbitrariness from a system.
Exactly.
The two changes made immediately after 9/11 which had the biggest effect on airline safety was (a) hardened cockpit doors, and (b) changing airline passenger awareness on how to respond to a terrorist--from one of being a passive passenger during a hijacking to actively resisting the terrorist.
All the rest has been a waste of money, time and effort with "security theater" as the government plays cops and robbers on the taxpayer dime.
As originally conceived by Milton Friedman, UBI (or rather, a "negative tax") would replace all other programs--welfare programs, middle class tax deductions, Social Security, etc., etc., etc.
And the point was not to add a new, generous welfare payment. The point was to replace the existing welfare system with a new universal system which requires almost no administrative overhead. The program would be paid in part from the existing welfare system (which is scrapped), from increased tax receipts (from middle-class and upper-class tax deductions which are eliminated), and from the salary of the old welfare program (whose salaries you no longer have to pay).
Ultimately a UBI may not necessarily pay a "living wage", depending on where you live. (But then, already in San Francisco, making less than $100k/year is considered the poverty line for subsidized housing. So "living wage" isn't a constant anyway.) In fact, for the poorest, the idea was that UBI--as originally conceived--would pay out about as much as welfare does.
But it does make welfare "more fair" in the sense that you get to keep your UBI even if you are an upper-middle class individual. (Of course at that point the UBI replaces that mortgage tax deduction, the deduction for your kids, and other middle-class tax deductions. So for someone in the middle-class with a mortgage and a couple of kids, UBI should be a wash.)
And that implies that if you do go out and get a 'gig' job, you get to keep your UBI. Which--oddly enough--incentivizes the poor to work as it eliminates the extremely high implicit marginal tax rate the poor suffer from which cause the poor to be "taxed" at a 140% marginal tax rate in some cases. (My wife used to work for a dialysis center that treated the poor--and she knew several folks on welfare who could not afford to work, because the only jobs they could get would put them into that 140% implicit marginal tax rate--meaning for every dollar they could make, they'd lose about a buck-fourty in benefits.)
The funny of it is, if you add up how much we pay administering the current welfare system--the thousands and thousands of bureaucrats who administer things like Electronic Benefit Transfer cards, who determine what items you are allowed to buy, who determine if you qualify, who police the system--we could provide a reasonably generous UBI to everyone with nearly no administrative overhead.
Remember: a proper UBI replaces EVERYTHING, including tax deductions normally enjoyed by higher-income individuals, such as tax deductions for children (as children also receive a UBI), mortgage tax deductions, tax deductions for retirement savings, tax credits for paying for college. The idea is to eliminate the unfairness that is intrinsically tied into all of these separate programs, each which have their own target audiences, administrative bureaucracies and qualifications.
The UBI would also replace Social Security--both the OSADI and SSI disability funds.
Imagine how much smaller the administrative state becomes when your tax return is essentially four lines: A: gross income, B: tax (from tax tables), C: UBI D: Tax owed (or refund due).
This is why I don't think we will ever have a proper UBI. Because there are just too many people--both working for the government, and private companies (like Intuit, who constantly lobby against simplifying the tax code) whose jobs rely on the massive administration of hundreds of government programs which would all be wiped off the map by a properly designed UBI.
Tthat's part of the problem: we pay nearly as much in administrative overhead administering the current welfare state and the current tax code as we do paying out benefits. If you consider those bureaucrats as beneficiaries of the welfare state, that's a lot of jobs which would be wiped off the map. And they make a very powerful lobbying group--which is why in government corners, "UBI" is always reframed as yet another program for them to administer, rather than a new program that would cost them their job.
I looked at using OpenStreetMaps as a data source for drawing hiking maps throughout the United States. OpenStreetMaps has some fairly good hiking trail data.
But I ran into two problems. First, address data for the United States in OpenStreetMaps is virtually non-existent. It appears OpenStreetMaps is concentrating on providing a specific address for specific buildings--which makes sense in countries which do not do sequential street addresses. But in the United States you can also extrapolate the street address on most streets through a linear interpolation of the address at the start and end of a street segment. This interpolation data--present in the Tiger Line census data that is the source of a lot of the streets in OpenStreetMaps for the United States--does not appear to be present after the import. This means that attempting to type in a street address in OpenStreetMaps usually fails for a US address.
The second problem is that it appears navigational information--information which would help construct navigation data (such as knowing which streets are one way) seems to be missing as well.
If I had a wishlist for improving OpenStreetMap data, it'd be these two things. Without them, and anyone serious about constructing a US map application with navigation will wind up having to license map data from a Tele Atlas (now owned by TomTom) or a NAVTEQ (now owned by Nokia as "Here").
And because both are "B2B", good luck if you're just some random hacker looking to build an interesting and specialized mapping product.
The problem right now with solar and wind (especially wind, apparently) is that, because they are not constant or reliable, you wind up with "hot standby" power generators, generators which are consuming fuel to keep a boiler hot enough so that when you have to instantly turn on a turbine, you can (without waiting for the boiler to heat up, a process which can take hours).
This means that solar and wind right now are not "green"; behind every field of solar cells or every expanse of wind turbines is a (often coal-powered) power plant on "hot standby," wasting energy.
For solar and wind to become truly "green"--setting aside the resources used to build the solar and wind turbines to begin with--you must do one or both of two things. First, you can accept "rolling brownouts"; simply accept the fact that voltages are not constant. But this means redesigning all of the equipment which uses electricity to deal with rolling brownouts: with dips in voltage and current. And that is extremely wasteful, though for some equipment (like laptops with built-in batteries) I think you can redesign the power adapter to deal with it.
Or you can build massive energy storage. As in "capable of powering the entire grid from battery backup for hours at a time" energy storage, not the couple of seconds most battery backup systems now on the grid.
And that requires thinking about more than just stringing together a bunch of batteries together.
'Cause Cessna 172's are as common as fleas on a dog. Though any single prop manually controlled aircraft that one would train in (Pipers Archers, DA-20's, whatever) will do in a pinch: anything where you can feel the bite of the air on the yoke and feel the pitch of the aircraft on the rudder.
Well, of course it was a gross oversimplification; I summed up a chain of events and circumstances and training and inputs and actions that can trace their roots back minutes, and even hours, back before the actual crash took place, into two pithy sentences.
But at the bottom of the stack, the airplane hit the water in a nose-up stall, having held the nose-up stall for several minutes as the plane descended from 30,000 feet to sea level. The plane hit the water in a nose-up stall because the co-pilot was pulling up on the yoke--countermanding the inputs from the pilot, without indicating who was in charge of the airplane. And the airplane maintained a nose-up stall through several minutes because the co-pilot was putting the wrong inputs on the controls, in almost complete contradiction to all the training he received--since there are no slow-speed aircraft attitudes where recovery is achieved by pulling the nose up. Zero. None. The only time you pull the yoke back to recover the aircraft is either (a) if you have an indication that you are going too fast, or (b) you're panicked and are trying to gain altitude. If you have the yoke up and the altimeter is unwinding, the hardest god damned thing in the world to do is the thing that will save your life, the thing the pilot of that aircraft was trying to do but the thing the co-pilot refused to try, is to push the nose down.
Now how we got to here--that's important. And probably more important than the co-pilot making a rookie mistake--because if we stop with "the co-pilot is an idiot", rather than trying to determine if there is something more we can do to assure greater safety in commercial flight, we've basically thrown up our hands and said "sometimes people die."
And that is unacceptable.
(Frankly, by the way, I wish more organizations or corporations thought like the FAA--which, when faced with pilot error, tries to understand why there was pilot error. They try to figure out if it was information overload or improper inputs or inattentiveness or improper training. They try to figure out how we can make flying safe, even with imperfect pilots and imperfect equipment.)
Now, I had a CFI who once told me that the people he hated the most to give checkrides to were commercial pilots. Because none of these guys have really had to do any real stick-and-rudder work since they first started working for the large commercial airlines. One of the scariest thing he's ever done is to give a particular older pilot--retiring from the airlines and who bought his own little 4 seater prop airplane to continue to tool around in the air--a quick refresher in stalls. Because this guy seemed hell bent on doing exactly the wrong thing when the airplane started to buffet in that prelude to a stall, once nearly putting the aircraft into a fatal spin because he simply didn't know how to use the rudder.
It's why my wish is for all commercial pilots to spend some time each month in a Cessna 172, practicing things like power-on and power-off stalls.
Because I honestly and sincerely think if that co-pilot had recent experience with stalls, rather than (as is typical for a lot of those bus drivers) not having done stall work or rudder work for perhaps a decade or more, the 216 people who died aboard Air France 447 would be alive today.
The point of my recommendation is to connect the pilot back to all of the stick and rudder skills, including proficiency in handling stalls as well as smooth stick and rudder operations. The corporate landing mandate can be handled by taking over on the final approach, but I want the guy to be able to hand fly the airplane and demonstrate proficiency in stick and rudder skill (including shit you don't want to do with passengers, such as side slips and power-on and power-off stalls).
Remember, the guy who managed to put down the Gimli Glider (Air Canada Flight 143) happened to also be an experienced glider pilot, so by accident he happened to be in the right place at the right time.
I don't like luck.