That seems unlikely. The amount of stuff you can carry is far more dependent on the volume and strength of the container than it is on the material.
If a specific paper bag can carry less or more than a specific plastic bag, that is due to the relative volume and strength of those bags rather than the material.
The strength may be dependent on the material, but only relative to a chosen thickness. The volume is entirely independent of the choice of material. Don't attribute the volume of a specific bag to some inate property of the material.
And if all those things become commonplace, then the rich won't want them. Once you have everything you could possibly dream of, you start dreaming of more.
Whether that's going historical with dozens of household servants at each of your many estates, or futuristic with employing researchers and engineers to create newer and more exotic technologies that the commoners can't afford, one way or another the ultra rich will seek ways to distinguish themselves from the merely affluent.
And if those things don't become commonplace, if they remain the domain of the ultra rich, then that leaves lots of room for the merely well-to-do to employ human household staff.
If the poorest of the poor has a dishwasher, clotheswasher, roomba, etc, then are they really poor? And if they don't, then there's room for an economy where the really poor provide services to the somewhat poor, who provide services to the not-really-poor-but-not-really-rich-either.
By all means, fight against theft and deceit with all your strength. But don't get worked up over the fact that there exist people who take for granted more than you'll ever have. That has been the case for many thousands of years and it's not going to ever stop being the case.
If "the rich" totally decouple from the "the poor" then there will simply be two decoupled economic systems. It's certainly possible that a police state government could oppress the poor and obstruct them from conducting economic transactions among themselves, but that's a reason for political activism to fight against oppressive govenment, not an justification for abandoning property rights.
You are correct that value is subjective and relative. The difference between a job and a hobby lies purely in whether someone else will pay you to do it. You only have value TO SOMEONE ELSE if you can do something THEY want.
Everyone has value to themself (except in cases of severe mental disorder) so that's not really an interesting topic. The question is, are there people who are utterly and entirely incapable of doing anything that is of any value to anyone else?
I do community theatre. People buy tickets, so it has value. But the total dollar amount of all tickets sold for all shows in a year is less than what I make working in tech for a year. A lot less. And those shows are not my work alone, they're the work of tens, maybe hundreds or people. So it's a hobby.
If "the rich" take all "the money" and go off and disconnect entirely from "the poor", will the poor just sit in the dirt, incapable of doing anything that even another poor person wants done? If yes, then they are without value as far as everyone else judges it. But if they can do anything that ANYONE else values, even if that someone else doesn't have "money", then some sort of exchange can be done. And whatever tokens or markers are used, even if it's just handwritten IOUs will for practical purposes become money.
It's not a problem if the 1% take all "the money" because the 99% can just keep doing things of value. Creation of a new set of tokens to represent value is not a big challenge. The problem is when 90% or maybe even just 80% produce and have everything they could possibly want and then 10% or 20% are incapable of doing ANYTHING that even other people as poor as themselves want done.
Whatever you're using ftp for should definitely have been retired about a decade ago, but does sshfs not work on a mac? My laptop runs Linux and I mostly use scp from the command line, but do on occasion use sshfs if I feel like I absolutely must use a file browser. Why would you want to use a different file browser for remote files than you do for local files?
I use sshfs on my laptop, on my servers, on raspberry pi, on my OpenWRT routers. It's basically just sftp under the hood so it would be bizarre if it doesn't work on a mac.
No, she didn't say the working class are deplorables. She said half of Trump's supporters are deplorables. And she's been proven right. They continue to support him
Wait, you're telling me that insulting people didn't cause them to join your side?
I think Trump is an idiot, but if you think calling people "deplorable" is a viable strategy for converting them to your point of view then you're dumber than he is. Of course trump's supporters haven't abandoned him to join up with the people who expressed contempt for them.
Ok, so if Sunday is no good, what day is recommended? I usually roast chicken on a Saturday and freeze enough for a month or so. Does this mean I'm safe, since the article specified sunday?
Last week I roasted chicken on a tuesday. It would be interesting to know if it's just sunday that needs to be avoided or the entire weekend.
Or was the article written by a moron? It seems likely, but I hate to assume such things.
Are there ever any youtube comments of any value? I've never seen one.
I have to be honest and say that I don't often read youtube comments. But I have read them on rare occasions and always regretted wasting my time.
YouTube is a great resource. I especially appreciate the technology conferences like PyCons and college level math and physics classes, but I've never seen any indication that the youtube comments feature has any value at all.
Do you really believe that driving 1.5 hours is common?
I took a road trip in 2006, but that was over 12 years ago. I haven't driven more than 70 miles in any single day since then. Certainly there are people who commute thousands of miles a day and bring hundreds of people with them, but their vehicle of choice is usually made by Boeing or Airbus, not Ford or Toyota. It would be silly for Tesla to consider that a design target.
If you need to travel 1.5 hours per day in frigid weather then by all means select a suitable vehicle, but if you think you're typical or average then you clearly have a very loose grip on reality.
Why don't you try that and let us know how it turns out. Tell them "I'll pay you in 14 days" and then walk right out the door ignoring their protest.
It's one thing if you talked to the manager/owner in advance and agreed to setup an account, but if you just walk out the door without paying when payment is expected they would be perfectly justified in calling the cops or doing whatever they normally do when someone refuses to pay.
How about trying it at a clothing store? Put on an expensive coat, say "I'll pay you in two weeks" and walk straight out the door. Let us know whether you get off without a shoplifting arrest.
In legal terms payment could even be net 90 days if that's what you've negotiated with your suppliers, but the key word is NEGOTIATE, not simply unilaterally declaring "I'll pay you later" for goods or services where the standard practice is to pay at the time of purchase.
Any seller is well within their rights to decline to agree to net 14 day terms. There is no law anywhere that requires any seller to hand over goods or services 14 days before receiving payment.
If I owe you $5 I can't just pull out a $100 and demand that you hand me $95 cash. And I can't claim that because I offered you the $100 bill and you declined that now I don't owe you anything. And if I stuff the 100 in your pocket and you say "hey, you only owe me 5" that does NOT mean you've accepted a $95 debt from me. It means I've given you a $95 gift unless you specifically agree that you're accepting a debt. I can't FORCE a debt on you that you don't agree to.
You owe what you owe. It's one thing if you pay exactly what you owe in legal tender or pay extra and tell me "keep the change", but you don't go beyond paying your debt to force ME to hand YOU cash I don't have and don't want to handle.
And if they have a sign up that says "payment is expected at the time services are rendered" then it would be perfectly reasonable for them to call the cops if you try to walk out without paying just because they didn't have any cash to give you change.
That's fair, but they're under no obligation to give you change.
If you owe 30 and all you've got is some 20s, you either give them two 20s or you've failed to pay your debt. But you can't impose a 10 dollar debt on them by giving them 40 that they didn't ask for. If you owe 30 and all you've got is 40, that's your problem, not theirs.
"For all debts, public and private" doesn't impose any obligation on them to have any bills or coins on hand.
It also doesn't require that every receptionist be authorized to accept cash. It's perfectly fine for the receptionist to tell you "I'm not authorized to accept cash, I'll call the owner for you, please wait over there" and proceed to swipe the credit cards of the people behind you while you wait 15+ minutes for the owner to be available to settle your debt. After all, you don't owe a debt to the receptionist who handles credit card payments, you owe a debt to the business. The business may have to accept cash for a debt, but that doesn't mean you can just hand cash to any random employee that the business owner has not chosen to entrust with the authority to handle cash.
Right here is the fatal flaw of all UBI, "think" and "should".
The Alaska fund is the only system that actually makes any kind of sense. It takes a specific source of money and divides it among a specific group of recipients. It may not completely eliminate all possible forms of corruption, but if you can have a reasonably unambiguous definition of what constitutes the source and what determines who is "eligible" then it's just a matter of arithmetic which is objective and doesn't lead to giving away money you don't have.
Most UBI plans set the payout at whatever the most vocal proponents "think" or "feel" is "fair" or "enough" and the amounts can be all over the place. You can bet that anyone who has been living off of UBI is going to "think" it "should" be more if there's an election coming up where one of the candidates is proposing a UBI increase and the other is not.
If UBI were ever truly universal then you'd have nearly 100% of voters in favor of UBI increases. The only people opposed would be the ones with enough knowledge of economics and corruption to make a guess at who is going to be robbed in order to cover each subsequent UBI increase.
Here's a proposal to provide UI (that may or may not meet a randomly chosen subjective definition of "basic") and fight CO2 emmissions. Set a high tax on all petroleum products and accumulate it all in a single account. On April 15th the IRS divides the total amount in the account by the total number of personal (not business) tax returns filed and credits an equal share to everybody who filed on time. The account is now empty and starts refilling for next year. Nobody gets any say in what the payout "should" be, it's simply whatever was in the account, divided evenly by the total number of recipients.
If some people use less and others use more then the benefits accrue to those who used less. If everyone uses less the payout goes down but so do CO2 emmissions, so everyone benefits.
If you want, you could do the same with tobacco, with speeding ticket fines, and anything else where the government is collecting money to punish an unwanted behavior. As long as the source of revenue is unambiguously defined and the payout is strictly the total in the pot divided by the number of recipients it might work out ok.
But if you make the source unbounded and the payout subject only to what people "think" they "should" get, then the democratic form of government will lead to inevitable collapse of the system.
I've worked for AT&T since 1996 and it is very much the same company. Certainly things have been changed, but I'm very different at age 45 than I was at age 22.
Perhaps you'd argue that the 1996 me and the 2018 me are two different people. But if you're willing to accept that I'm one person who has grown older, then I assure you that AT&T is still AT&T.
I don't agree with every decision AT&T makes, but there were a whole lot of good people in the 1996 AT&T and when we merged with SBC a whole lot of good people joined us. With more than 250K employees there must be some bad apples, and we're not afraid to play rough in competition, but the vast majority of AT&T people are good people who are dedicated and generous.
Some people have retired after 30, 40, and even 50 years with us and maybe when we youngsters (at age 45 I'm a youngster here) retire the legacy of Bell Labs will be forgotten, but it hasn't been forgotten yet.
Seems weird to use the word "should" for something we did 10-20 years ago, or maybe more than that. I guess the people who don't care didn't, but if they don't care then they don't matter. Do we really need the world to be a cult where everyone has to do everything that everybody else does?
Of course, a bunch of personal websites aren't the same thing as Facebook, but I don't expect facts to derail a rant.
America uses metric. I'm drinking a 500ml bottle of soda right now in America. I'd be hard pressed to find anything in my kitchen that doesn't have metric units on it.
Granted, some of the containers have a decimal in the metric measurement. Is that the definition of "not using metric" if the thing is marked with both an integer number of imperial units and a decimal number of metric units?
We do use 20 feet and 40 feet as the standard lengths of our intermodal shipping containers and 8x4 feet as the standard dimensions of our plywood, so if having a decimal in the metric measurement means its "not metric" then those aren't. I'm curious, what size do metric countries use? I imagine there must be some significant cost overhead to international trade between the US and countries that use metric sized shipping containers and building materials.
BTW, if you measure temperature in anything other than Kelvin, don't even bother talking to me. Seriously, what's so special about the freezing point of water? It gets colder than that around here frequently. If you haven't figured out that zero means none, as in no molecular motion at all, then you're probably not worth talking to.
And don't even get me started on the morons who use the nonsensical 60-60-24-7 system of units or the cognitive disonance in anybody who says a kilogram is a base unit but a kilometer is 1000 times a base unit.
Some of his engineers do amazing stuff. Musk is just a figurehead.
Do you seriously think this bunch of engineers got together and organized Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company and they let Musk figurehead all three? Who are these miracle workers? I assume you must know at least a few of their names.
Or are they entirely separate groups of engineers doing amazing stuff and Musk is just the world's luckiest man to have coincidentally been made figurehead of multiple groups of amazing engineers when most people can't even manage to get themselves made figurehead of one amazing group.
Obviously Musk isn't a one man show, but it's absurd to suggest he just wandered in off the street and found himself inexplicably in charge of multiple groundbreaking companies. Certainly some people do have a fabulous opportunity drop in their lap with no idea of how it happened, the claim that "it's a fluke" starts to grow implausible.
Honestly, if you've got to your Junior year in high school and still hate public speaking then you're going to hate it for life.
Just one data point to the contrary, I hated speech class in high school though I don't remember if I took it junior or senior year. I definitely didn't want to be up in front of the class talking about anything. Now I enjoy speaking at conferences, provided that the topic is in my area of interest and expertise.
I would say that I started enjoying public speaking sometime after college.
So let's suppose you give everyone 10k and some tiny percentage of the population, let's say 0.01%, uses it to buy a car and some booze then totals the car and cripples themself. Do you just say "tough luck, you used up your UBI; no ambulance or hospital treatment for you, either crawl home or die there in the street"
It's easy to claim that UBI will cost less than the sum total of current services, but are have you really thought about what it looks like face to face when even a small percentage of the population fails to do proper financial management of their UBI payments? Some form of support will be needed for some percentage of the population after their UBI is wasted because you simply can't guarantee that 100% will frugally budget their UBI.
As an alternative to UBI I could see funding government run dormitories with cafeteria and medical clinic facilities. If the government guaranteed that no matter how broke you are you can always get a bed in a climate controlled room, at least a couple meals a day and at least a nurse to look at you and decide whether you need a doctor's attention, then I see no reason to hand you cash for nothing.
I'm not sure I'd advocate eliminating all social programs even then, but if enough dorm/cafe/clinic facilities were built to ensure that there's always a vacant bed and food available to anyone who asks for it (no proof of need required, no max limit on how long you use it) then I'd say that probably not much more is required.
Can you provide some statistics? This claim seems implausible. What sort of definition are you using for "very bad"?
I'm not sure having to say "oops, our mistake, sorry" with the "sorry" part being possibly optional counts as "very bad". And that only happens if the victim does in fact hire a lawyer rather than just rolling over. I also wouldn't count sending a member of your full time, salaried legal team to court "very bad", especially if you only have to do it for a fraction of your false claims.
In what percentage of false claims of copyright infringement would you say that the perpetrator suffers significant, behavior changing impact and the victim receives sufficient compensation to make the expense and hassle of fighting it a windfall profit, not just a mere sigh of relief at not getting crushed?
For the average content creator without a legal team, getting a false claim that the content you created infringes on some legal behemoth's copyright must be pretty terrifying. I bet there are lots of artists and musicians who don't even know where to start looking to hire a lawyer, even if they have the cash on hand to do so. Running up a credit card bill to pay for legal representation and hoping that you might eventually win the case (in a few months or years) and then be able to sue for legal costs (but perhaps not credit card interest on those legal costs) sounds pretty terrifying for the stereotypical "starving artist". I bet just rolling over and letting them take down your original content is a very attractive option that isn't "very bad" at all for whoever filed the fraudulent claim of copyright violation.
If you think traffic deaths are unpreventable then you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Traffic deaths are exactly as preventable as hurricane deaths. That is to say, 100% preventable if you take extreme, unrealistic and oppressive steps to override all other concerns; mostly preventable if people just exercise caution, preplanning and don't behave like idiots (but of course some percentage WILL behave like idiots if someone else doesn't take authoritarian steps to deprive them of the ability to make dumb decisions).
Some people will die as a consequence of not adequately anticipating the stupidity of other people, some people will die due to their own stupidity, and some people will die due to the fact that they made the reasonable choice to not go to the extremes necessary to guarantee 100% safety. Because the extremes necessary to absolutely guarantee 0% risks are unreasonably extreme and the percentage chance of being one of the unlucky ones is so low, it's reasonable to say that on a planet with the population of Earth a lot of people are going to die every single day and there just aren't enough minutes in the day to feel bad about every single person who came up on the unlucky side of long shot odds.
An AVERAGE salary of 108k/yr for recent graduates is shit money? What, pray tell, are you comparing it to?
The article was not clear on whether 108 is the arithmetic mean or the median,but it clearly is not the upper bound. It's also not entirely clear who is included in the sample pool, but given the repeated mention of graduates I'd guess that they're probably not including people with 30-40 years experience in the average.
I'll save you the trouble of reading the article by pointing out that it does list other areas with higher salaries but penalizes them for higher unemployment. Actuarial comes out on top because IF you pass the tests then you've got a pretty high probability of having a solid, but not rockstar income. And as a bonus you'll know how to calculate and correctly understand that probability.
To be fair, they didn't list the average salary of people who attempted to become actuaries but utterly failed every exam they attempted. If your skill set is "fake it till you make it" or just plain "fake it" then actuary is not going to be a viable career path for you.
Feel free to put together your own report ranking college degrees in order of "making the lives of humanity happier" but that's simply not the ranking order used by this report.
The vast majority of insurance is voluntary and that's a good thing. All insurance is fundamentally gambling but there are definitely cases where a high probability or certainty of a known cost is better than a low probability of a potentially much higher cost. This is mostly true when the higher cost is devastating or entirely out of reach.
Actuaries are simply gamblers who are smart enough to accurately calculate the odds. If you can find a sucker to bet against, by all means gamble with a sucker, but the actuary is more likely to stay in business long term.
And if you don't want to gamble at all, you'll still have to contend with the uncertainty of the universe, but nobody is forcing you to lay cash on the "child fell down a well" scenario. However if you are doing stuff with a potential to cause serious harm (operating heavy machinery, practicing medecine, etc) you can expect to be forced to carry enough insurance to pay for your mistakes even if you swear that you'll never make a mistake. The rest of the world simply isn't willing to take your word on your own assessment of your own perfection.
I clearly remember my mom telling me this multiple times in the early 90s. I wonder if the Internet boom made this false for a while or if this "new" report is just stating that something that's been true for twenty-plus years is still true.
My mom had no connection with the insurance industry, it was just commonly known career advice that if you were good at math then passing the series of actuarial exams was a sure route to a good paying job.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems unlikely. The amount of stuff you can carry is far more dependent on the volume and strength of the container than it is on the material.
If a specific paper bag can carry less or more than a specific plastic bag, that is due to the relative volume and strength of those bags rather than the material.
The strength may be dependent on the material, but only relative to a chosen thickness. The volume is entirely independent of the choice of material. Don't attribute the volume of a specific bag to some inate property of the material.
And if all those things become commonplace, then the rich won't want them. Once you have everything you could possibly dream of, you start dreaming of more.
Whether that's going historical with dozens of household servants at each of your many estates, or futuristic with employing researchers and engineers to create newer and more exotic technologies that the commoners can't afford, one way or another the ultra rich will seek ways to distinguish themselves from the merely affluent.
And if those things don't become commonplace, if they remain the domain of the ultra rich, then that leaves lots of room for the merely well-to-do to employ human household staff.
If the poorest of the poor has a dishwasher, clotheswasher, roomba, etc, then are they really poor? And if they don't, then there's room for an economy where the really poor provide services to the somewhat poor, who provide services to the not-really-poor-but-not-really-rich-either.
By all means, fight against theft and deceit with all your strength. But don't get worked up over the fact that there exist people who take for granted more than you'll ever have. That has been the case for many thousands of years and it's not going to ever stop being the case.
If "the rich" totally decouple from the "the poor" then there will simply be two decoupled economic systems. It's certainly possible that a police state government could oppress the poor and obstruct them from conducting economic transactions among themselves, but that's a reason for political activism to fight against oppressive govenment, not an justification for abandoning property rights.
You are correct that value is subjective and relative. The difference between a job and a hobby lies purely in whether someone else will pay you to do it. You only have value TO SOMEONE ELSE if you can do something THEY want.
Everyone has value to themself (except in cases of severe mental disorder) so that's not really an interesting topic. The question is, are there people who are utterly and entirely incapable of doing anything that is of any value to anyone else ?
I do community theatre. People buy tickets, so it has value. But the total dollar amount of all tickets sold for all shows in a year is less than what I make working in tech for a year. A lot less. And those shows are not my work alone, they're the work of tens, maybe hundreds or people. So it's a hobby.
If "the rich" take all "the money" and go off and disconnect entirely from "the poor", will the poor just sit in the dirt, incapable of doing anything that even another poor person wants done? If yes, then they are without value as far as everyone else judges it. But if they can do anything that ANYONE else values, even if that someone else doesn't have "money", then some sort of exchange can be done. And whatever tokens or markers are used, even if it's just handwritten IOUs will for practical purposes become money.
It's not a problem if the 1% take all "the money" because the 99% can just keep doing things of value. Creation of a new set of tokens to represent value is not a big challenge. The problem is when 90% or maybe even just 80% produce and have everything they could possibly want and then 10% or 20% are incapable of doing ANYTHING that even other people as poor as themselves want done.
Whatever you're using ftp for should definitely have been retired about a decade ago, but does sshfs not work on a mac? My laptop runs Linux and I mostly use scp from the command line, but do on occasion use sshfs if I feel like I absolutely must use a file browser. Why would you want to use a different file browser for remote files than you do for local files?
I use sshfs on my laptop, on my servers, on raspberry pi, on my OpenWRT routers. It's basically just sftp under the hood so it would be bizarre if it doesn't work on a mac.
No, she didn't say the working class are deplorables. She said half of Trump's supporters are deplorables. And she's been proven right. They continue to support him
Wait, you're telling me that insulting people didn't cause them to join your side?
I think Trump is an idiot, but if you think calling people "deplorable" is a viable strategy for converting them to your point of view then you're dumber than he is. Of course trump's supporters haven't abandoned him to join up with the people who expressed contempt for them.
Ok, so if Sunday is no good, what day is recommended? I usually roast chicken on a Saturday and freeze enough for a month or so. Does this mean I'm safe, since the article specified sunday?
Last week I roasted chicken on a tuesday. It would be interesting to know if it's just sunday that needs to be avoided or the entire weekend.
Or was the article written by a moron? It seems likely, but I hate to assume such things.
Are there ever any youtube comments of any value? I've never seen one.
I have to be honest and say that I don't often read youtube comments. But I have read them on rare occasions and always regretted wasting my time.
YouTube is a great resource. I especially appreciate the technology conferences like PyCons and college level math and physics classes, but I've never seen any indication that the youtube comments feature has any value at all.
Do you really believe that driving 1.5 hours is common?
I took a road trip in 2006, but that was over 12 years ago. I haven't driven more than 70 miles in any single day since then. Certainly there are people who commute thousands of miles a day and bring hundreds of people with them, but their vehicle of choice is usually made by Boeing or Airbus, not Ford or Toyota. It would be silly for Tesla to consider that a design target.
If you need to travel 1.5 hours per day in frigid weather then by all means select a suitable vehicle, but if you think you're typical or average then you clearly have a very loose grip on reality.
Who told you this?
Hopefully you're smart enough to not take the word of random Internet posters as fact. If not, consider this a learning opportunity.
That would likely happen anyway if I lived or worked in your neighborhood. Fortunately I don't. People don't behave that way here.
Why don't you try that and let us know how it turns out. Tell them "I'll pay you in 14 days" and then walk right out the door ignoring their protest.
It's one thing if you talked to the manager/owner in advance and agreed to setup an account, but if you just walk out the door without paying when payment is expected they would be perfectly justified in calling the cops or doing whatever they normally do when someone refuses to pay.
How about trying it at a clothing store? Put on an expensive coat, say "I'll pay you in two weeks" and walk straight out the door. Let us know whether you get off without a shoplifting arrest.
In legal terms payment could even be net 90 days if that's what you've negotiated with your suppliers, but the key word is NEGOTIATE, not simply unilaterally declaring "I'll pay you later" for goods or services where the standard practice is to pay at the time of purchase.
Any seller is well within their rights to decline to agree to net 14 day terms. There is no law anywhere that requires any seller to hand over goods or services 14 days before receiving payment.
If I owe you $5 I can't just pull out a $100 and demand that you hand me $95 cash. And I can't claim that because I offered you the $100 bill and you declined that now I don't owe you anything. And if I stuff the 100 in your pocket and you say "hey, you only owe me 5" that does NOT mean you've accepted a $95 debt from me. It means I've given you a $95 gift unless you specifically agree that you're accepting a debt. I can't FORCE a debt on you that you don't agree to.
You owe what you owe. It's one thing if you pay exactly what you owe in legal tender or pay extra and tell me "keep the change", but you don't go beyond paying your debt to force ME to hand YOU cash I don't have and don't want to handle.
And if they have a sign up that says "payment is expected at the time services are rendered" then it would be perfectly reasonable for them to call the cops if you try to walk out without paying just because they didn't have any cash to give you change.
That's fair, but they're under no obligation to give you change.
If you owe 30 and all you've got is some 20s, you either give them two 20s or you've failed to pay your debt. But you can't impose a 10 dollar debt on them by giving them 40 that they didn't ask for. If you owe 30 and all you've got is 40, that's your problem, not theirs.
"For all debts, public and private" doesn't impose any obligation on them to have any bills or coins on hand.
It also doesn't require that every receptionist be authorized to accept cash. It's perfectly fine for the receptionist to tell you "I'm not authorized to accept cash, I'll call the owner for you, please wait over there" and proceed to swipe the credit cards of the people behind you while you wait 15+ minutes for the owner to be available to settle your debt. After all, you don't owe a debt to the receptionist who handles credit card payments, you owe a debt to the business. The business may have to accept cash for a debt, but that doesn't mean you can just hand cash to any random employee that the business owner has not chosen to entrust with the authority to handle cash.
what even I think a UBI should pay out
Right here is the fatal flaw of all UBI, "think" and "should".
The Alaska fund is the only system that actually makes any kind of sense. It takes a specific source of money and divides it among a specific group of recipients. It may not completely eliminate all possible forms of corruption, but if you can have a reasonably unambiguous definition of what constitutes the source and what determines who is "eligible" then it's just a matter of arithmetic which is objective and doesn't lead to giving away money you don't have.
Most UBI plans set the payout at whatever the most vocal proponents "think" or "feel" is "fair" or "enough" and the amounts can be all over the place. You can bet that anyone who has been living off of UBI is going to "think" it "should" be more if there's an election coming up where one of the candidates is proposing a UBI increase and the other is not.
If UBI were ever truly universal then you'd have nearly 100% of voters in favor of UBI increases. The only people opposed would be the ones with enough knowledge of economics and corruption to make a guess at who is going to be robbed in order to cover each subsequent UBI increase.
Here's a proposal to provide UI (that may or may not meet a randomly chosen subjective definition of "basic") and fight CO2 emmissions. Set a high tax on all petroleum products and accumulate it all in a single account. On April 15th the IRS divides the total amount in the account by the total number of personal (not business) tax returns filed and credits an equal share to everybody who filed on time. The account is now empty and starts refilling for next year. Nobody gets any say in what the payout "should" be, it's simply whatever was in the account, divided evenly by the total number of recipients.
If some people use less and others use more then the benefits accrue to those who used less. If everyone uses less the payout goes down but so do CO2 emmissions, so everyone benefits.
If you want, you could do the same with tobacco, with speeding ticket fines, and anything else where the government is collecting money to punish an unwanted behavior. As long as the source of revenue is unambiguously defined and the payout is strictly the total in the pot divided by the number of recipients it might work out ok.
But if you make the source unbounded and the payout subject only to what people "think" they "should" get, then the democratic form of government will lead to inevitable collapse of the system.
I've worked for AT&T since 1996 and it is very much the same company. Certainly things have been changed, but I'm very different at age 45 than I was at age 22.
Perhaps you'd argue that the 1996 me and the 2018 me are two different people. But if you're willing to accept that I'm one person who has grown older, then I assure you that AT&T is still AT&T.
I don't agree with every decision AT&T makes, but there were a whole lot of good people in the 1996 AT&T and when we merged with SBC a whole lot of good people joined us. With more than 250K employees there must be some bad apples, and we're not afraid to play rough in competition, but the vast majority of AT&T people are good people who are dedicated and generous.
Some people have retired after 30, 40, and even 50 years with us and maybe when we youngsters (at age 45 I'm a youngster here) retire the legacy of Bell Labs will be forgotten, but it hasn't been forgotten yet.
Seems weird to use the word "should" for something we did 10-20 years ago, or maybe more than that. I guess the people who don't care didn't, but if they don't care then they don't matter. Do we really need the world to be a cult where everyone has to do everything that everybody else does?
Of course, a bunch of personal websites aren't the same thing as Facebook, but I don't expect facts to derail a rant.
America uses metric. I'm drinking a 500ml bottle of soda right now in America. I'd be hard pressed to find anything in my kitchen that doesn't have metric units on it.
Granted, some of the containers have a decimal in the metric measurement. Is that the definition of "not using metric" if the thing is marked with both an integer number of imperial units and a decimal number of metric units?
We do use 20 feet and 40 feet as the standard lengths of our intermodal shipping containers and 8x4 feet as the standard dimensions of our plywood, so if having a decimal in the metric measurement means its "not metric" then those aren't. I'm curious, what size do metric countries use? I imagine there must be some significant cost overhead to international trade between the US and countries that use metric sized shipping containers and building materials.
BTW, if you measure temperature in anything other than Kelvin, don't even bother talking to me. Seriously, what's so special about the freezing point of water? It gets colder than that around here frequently. If you haven't figured out that zero means none, as in no molecular motion at all, then you're probably not worth talking to.
And don't even get me started on the morons who use the nonsensical 60-60-24-7 system of units or the cognitive disonance in anybody who says a kilogram is a base unit but a kilometer is 1000 times a base unit.
Some of his engineers do amazing stuff. Musk is just a figurehead.
Do you seriously think this bunch of engineers got together and organized Tesla, SpaceX and The Boring Company and they let Musk figurehead all three? Who are these miracle workers? I assume you must know at least a few of their names.
Or are they entirely separate groups of engineers doing amazing stuff and Musk is just the world's luckiest man to have coincidentally been made figurehead of multiple groups of amazing engineers when most people can't even manage to get themselves made figurehead of one amazing group.
Obviously Musk isn't a one man show, but it's absurd to suggest he just wandered in off the street and found himself inexplicably in charge of multiple groundbreaking companies. Certainly some people do have a fabulous opportunity drop in their lap with no idea of how it happened, the claim that "it's a fluke" starts to grow implausible.
Honestly, if you've got to your Junior year in high school and still hate public speaking then you're going to hate it for life.
Just one data point to the contrary, I hated speech class in high school though I don't remember if I took it junior or senior year. I definitely didn't want to be up in front of the class talking about anything. Now I enjoy speaking at conferences, provided that the topic is in my area of interest and expertise.
I would say that I started enjoying public speaking sometime after college.
So let's suppose you give everyone 10k and some tiny percentage of the population, let's say 0.01%, uses it to buy a car and some booze then totals the car and cripples themself. Do you just say "tough luck, you used up your UBI; no ambulance or hospital treatment for you, either crawl home or die there in the street"
It's easy to claim that UBI will cost less than the sum total of current services, but are have you really thought about what it looks like face to face when even a small percentage of the population fails to do proper financial management of their UBI payments? Some form of support will be needed for some percentage of the population after their UBI is wasted because you simply can't guarantee that 100% will frugally budget their UBI.
As an alternative to UBI I could see funding government run dormitories with cafeteria and medical clinic facilities. If the government guaranteed that no matter how broke you are you can always get a bed in a climate controlled room, at least a couple meals a day and at least a nurse to look at you and decide whether you need a doctor's attention, then I see no reason to hand you cash for nothing.
I'm not sure I'd advocate eliminating all social programs even then, but if enough dorm/cafe/clinic facilities were built to ensure that there's always a vacant bed and food available to anyone who asks for it (no proof of need required, no max limit on how long you use it) then I'd say that probably not much more is required.
that usually ends up very bad for the sue("er"?)
Can you provide some statistics? This claim seems implausible. What sort of definition are you using for "very bad"?
I'm not sure having to say "oops, our mistake, sorry" with the "sorry" part being possibly optional counts as "very bad". And that only happens if the victim does in fact hire a lawyer rather than just rolling over. I also wouldn't count sending a member of your full time, salaried legal team to court "very bad", especially if you only have to do it for a fraction of your false claims.
In what percentage of false claims of copyright infringement would you say that the perpetrator suffers significant, behavior changing impact and the victim receives sufficient compensation to make the expense and hassle of fighting it a windfall profit, not just a mere sigh of relief at not getting crushed?
For the average content creator without a legal team, getting a false claim that the content you created infringes on some legal behemoth's copyright must be pretty terrifying. I bet there are lots of artists and musicians who don't even know where to start looking to hire a lawyer, even if they have the cash on hand to do so. Running up a credit card bill to pay for legal representation and hoping that you might eventually win the case (in a few months or years) and then be able to sue for legal costs (but perhaps not credit card interest on those legal costs) sounds pretty terrifying for the stereotypical "starving artist". I bet just rolling over and letting them take down your original content is a very attractive option that isn't "very bad" at all for whoever filed the fraudulent claim of copyright violation.
unpreventable traffic deaths
If you think traffic deaths are unpreventable then you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Traffic deaths are exactly as preventable as hurricane deaths. That is to say, 100% preventable if you take extreme, unrealistic and oppressive steps to override all other concerns; mostly preventable if people just exercise caution, preplanning and don't behave like idiots (but of course some percentage WILL behave like idiots if someone else doesn't take authoritarian steps to deprive them of the ability to make dumb decisions).
Some people will die as a consequence of not adequately anticipating the stupidity of other people, some people will die due to their own stupidity, and some people will die due to the fact that they made the reasonable choice to not go to the extremes necessary to guarantee 100% safety. Because the extremes necessary to absolutely guarantee 0% risks are unreasonably extreme and the percentage chance of being one of the unlucky ones is so low, it's reasonable to say that on a planet with the population of Earth a lot of people are going to die every single day and there just aren't enough minutes in the day to feel bad about every single person who came up on the unlucky side of long shot odds.
108k/yr is also shit money.
An AVERAGE salary of 108k/yr for recent graduates is shit money? What, pray tell, are you comparing it to?
The article was not clear on whether 108 is the arithmetic mean or the median,but it clearly is not the upper bound. It's also not entirely clear who is included in the sample pool, but given the repeated mention of graduates I'd guess that they're probably not including people with 30-40 years experience in the average.
I'll save you the trouble of reading the article by pointing out that it does list other areas with higher salaries but penalizes them for higher unemployment. Actuarial comes out on top because IF you pass the tests then you've got a pretty high probability of having a solid, but not rockstar income. And as a bonus you'll know how to calculate and correctly understand that probability.
To be fair, they didn't list the average salary of people who attempted to become actuaries but utterly failed every exam they attempted. If your skill set is "fake it till you make it" or just plain "fake it" then actuary is not going to be a viable career path for you.
Feel free to put together your own report ranking college degrees in order of "making the lives of humanity happier" but that's simply not the ranking order used by this report.
The vast majority of insurance is voluntary and that's a good thing. All insurance is fundamentally gambling but there are definitely cases where a high probability or certainty of a known cost is better than a low probability of a potentially much higher cost. This is mostly true when the higher cost is devastating or entirely out of reach.
Actuaries are simply gamblers who are smart enough to accurately calculate the odds. If you can find a sucker to bet against, by all means gamble with a sucker, but the actuary is more likely to stay in business long term.
And if you don't want to gamble at all, you'll still have to contend with the uncertainty of the universe, but nobody is forcing you to lay cash on the "child fell down a well" scenario. However if you are doing stuff with a potential to cause serious harm (operating heavy machinery, practicing medecine, etc) you can expect to be forced to carry enough insurance to pay for your mistakes even if you swear that you'll never make a mistake. The rest of the world simply isn't willing to take your word on your own assessment of your own perfection.
I clearly remember my mom telling me this multiple times in the early 90s. I wonder if the Internet boom made this false for a while or if this "new" report is just stating that something that's been true for twenty-plus years is still true.
My mom had no connection with the insurance industry, it was just commonly known career advice that if you were good at math then passing the series of actuarial exams was a sure route to a good paying job.