That nuclear is safer and cheaper than solar therefore we should prefer nuclear to solar. Did you even read my post before you replied?
Look, I like nuclear power and think it will be an indispensable part of the energy mix going forward, I believe it's absolutely crucial to reducing carbon emissions and think that all those people who want all nuclear reactors decommissioned are dumb...but how ON EARTH can you say that nuclear is SAFER than solar???
You supplied some statistics about deaths per TWh - OK, but those DO NOT tell the full story. Whereas every existing nuclear reactor in operation is potentially a catastrophic accident waiting to happen, every solar installation is not. Will every solar panel become a potential radiation contamination hazard that can kill thousands/millions and make a huge area around it uninhabitable for the next couple of hundred/thousand years if left unattended or if something goes terribly wrong during operation? Of course it will not. What about nuclear reactors?
You have here made the fallacious "but car accidents kill more people than terrorists" argument. We have to consider the POTENTIAL risks, the WORST CASE scenario, not only the statistics so far. Just like car accidents don't bring down the WTC killing ten thousand people, solar panels don't have catastrophic reactor meltdowns.
And the stupefying thing is, he's still getting knived by the far right anyway. He gains nothing by continuing to inflict unpopular and authoritarian far right nonsense on the population.
I'm a bit perplexed by Australian politics...granted I live very far away and do not follow it closely, just whatever article pops up on the BBC now and then, so I my knowledge of the scene is minuscule at best. However it does seem there's a lot of party coups going on down under, prime ministers being toppled by their own parties instead of an election. Why does this happen? Has it always been a thing, or is it a recent occurrence?
In Canada, where we have a similar UK-derived political system, party leaders changing in between elections is relatively rare, and it usually happens when a long-standing leader is retiring or something like that.
Most politicians (in Western countries) are lawyers by training. Lawyers tend to think that 1) anything can be defined by a law or regulation; that 2) any law or regulation can be changed and that 3) you can argue your away around anything. Turnbull, by the way, was a barrister who had his own law firm. Hence such stupid comments. Lawyers who become politicians are even worse than the average lawyer, since the above three principles are magnified even more in politics - especially when you are the one with the power to define or change laws.
Wait, you're saying, but shouldn't accomplished professionals, be they lawyers or whatever, be smart? They may be smart but they also may be what the Germans call a fachidiot: great at their profession but completely oblivious to anything outside of it, and blinkered by their professional knowledge and outlook when looking at other fields. The "I've got a hammer so everything is a nail" type of approach. I'm the leader of the majority in Parliament, so I can define laws any way that I choose, objective reality be damned.
Very well put. I would just like to add that this is a natural result of technological advancement that makes paying viewers easy. When TV began, using a direct paying viewer model was almost impossible; so the indirect paying viewer (with advertisers being the intermediaries) became the norm. Now, technology makes the direct payment between TV viewer and TV content producer both easy and cheap.
Air-conditioned homes aren't that common outside the US.
Also, humongous homes aren't that common in many countries. There are countries which are quite wealthy, but where the average dwelling is very small (think Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong) or at least significantly smaller than in the US (think Europe). Americans have, on average, large homes where they can afford to dedicate one room to a home office. In many other countries this is not an option for most people - they just don't have the space.
Results that show working from home is great are usually a result of selection bias: currently, working from home is an *option* in *some* professions at *some* employers.
The default type of job is still the one that requires going to a workplace. Even where working from home is allowed or even encouraged, it is not required. Hence, most of the current work-at-home positions will be filled by people who prefer to work at home.
So, basically, If there are any local businesses which haven't already been destroyed by Safeway or Walmart or Target, Amazon Prime will finish them. Got it.
I doubt that Walmart or Target did any destroying of local businesses in remote max. 500 person towns in Alaska or Nunavut.
I'm thinking the big box retailers need a population of at least a few (tens of?) thousands in their catchment area to be viable.
In reality I do not want, nor do I ever seek social events of any kind, everything I want or need is in my house at my keyboard, with the exception of time. That I never have in the quantity I would like. If I accept such an invitation I'm almost certain to bail but felt like I had to accept due to some real or imagined pressure on me. I will never do the inviting, and if I do you can be sure I won't bail on YOU, that really is rude. I have had people arrange large get-togethers from diverse social groups who bail, leaving those groups confused and stuck with each other...that's just a dick move.
So essentially, you are an extremely anti-social person (you do not seek social events of any kind) who feels awkward while communicating with other people (you accept invitations to events because you feel some sort of pressure, and cannot say no to a person's face). That's fine, and actually I sympathize with your position, however you should realize you are in the minority and not exactly qualified to comment on the state of "in-person meat-space" relationships.
Also, why do we need to make plans to do anything these days? Why can't we just grab drinks whenever. Or go for a hike when the moment strikes us. Want to go fishing Saturday? call me before 10pm the night before, I really don't need a lot of notice to prepare. But if you want to set up a big fishing expedition 2 weeks in advance, well a lot can happen then. I can't say for certain how I will even feel 2 weeks from now.
See, this type of attitude is EXACTLY the problem. It shows you only care about YOUR time, not other people's time, only YOUR feelings and moods and not other people's feelings and moods. "I can't say for certain how I will even feel 2 weeks from now" is exactly the type of self-centred, selfish attitude that instant always-connected communication has allowed to proliferate.
Now, there have ALWAYS been people with attitudes such as yours - the attitudes are nothing new in themselves. However, as a previous poster (AC) indicated, in the past, when instant communication was not possible, people generally had to stick to plans made in advance, since just not showing up without telling someone is a major social no-no (it still IS today; we just have the ability to contact people and cancel on short notice almost universally now).
Here's what used to happen before: I want to see a friend. I phone his house until I catch him at home. It might take a few days to achieve this. Then I say - would you like to go for a drink? Yes? How about Wednesday? Wednesday at 9 pm works for you? OK, see you then. We meet Wed. at 9 pm.
Here's what happens today, with a lot of people (not everyone of course): Call the friend (it's Monday). He answers instantly of course. Hey dude what's up? - Not much, working and [blablabla]. - Wanna meet up one of these days? - Yeah, sure, when? - What about Wednesday night, is that good? - Yeah, that should work I think...but let's talk on Wed. morning to confirm, just in case. Call the guy on Wednesday morning? Dude, are we meeting up tonight as we planned? - Uh, yeah, sure, why not! - Is 9 pm good for you? - I think so, but let's talk in the afternoon, I'll call you around like 2-3 pm, to see for the time. Call in the afternoon: yeah, 8 or 9 pm should be good, but let's talk at like 6-7 just to reconfirm. Then around 8:30 I finally know I'll meet the guy at 9 pm.
Note that the above is the ideal scenario: no bailing. At any one point - including just 30 minutes before we are supposed to meet - the guy could bail with some excuse, just because he doesn't feel like going out or because he found something more interesting to do, or more frustratingly, because someone else who only works on "spur of the moment" type social planning called up him 2 hours before we were supposed to meet and said "hey man, let's meet NOW!" and off he went. This isn't just about being hung-up; it has a ripple effect on other people: if I'm perpetually waiting on Friend A to reconfirm our meeting until 15 minutes before the fact, I keep rejecting calls from Friends B, C, and D to meet up; I keep it "fluid" with them because A is "fluid" with me, and in the end I end up looking like an asshole. The end results is usually that you cut Friend A off eventually, unless he's really close and dear to you and you will bear this misbehaviour for those reasons.
Note that I am not at all against "spur of the moment" acting and "spontaneous" meet-ups, that's all great, but that doesn't work all the time. You can pretty much only be on a 100% "spontaneous" schedule if you're a teenager on summer break. Once you get adult responsibilities in your life, you realize you have to plan things.
The funny thing is that your average trader/fund manager/investor is in fact no more "special" than your average McDonald's worker...just vastly more paid. Most of them have just random performance, with no correlation year to year (even though they like to think differently), and most of those which are successful are successful because they are just plain lucky (and not particularly able). That's why using index funds is better than your average mutual fund, since most mutual funds do not outperform the market in the long run (even though they try). Of course, there are exceptions to this rule (Warren Buffet? 0.01% of day traders?), but they are few and far between.
Everyone else on Earth cheers as Wall Street replaced with algorithms capable of morality, compassion and empathy.
Morality, compassion and empathy not required - just algorithms that do the same thing they do...at least we'd eliminate all the smug suits feeling so superior and watch them live off the dole.
I haven't gone looking, but I'd be interested to see what happened to the economy of a 600+ year old steel town.
That's an interesting question, but not the central one here, looking at the big picture.
People in the West fret about machines taking their jobs...but it's not people in the West who are going to be most affected. Yes, there will be people who will be stuck "in between" - their jobs will be automated away, but they will be too old / not adept enough to retrain for a new job (or simply, no one will want to hire them even if they do, for whatever reason). Western countries are however rich enough to take care of those people - yes, relatively speaking, for them it will suck, going from a job to being on the dole until retirement, but this will be a small % of the population.
It's all the aspiring immigrants from poorer countries that will be screwed. Countries like Austria have been importing labour for the blue-collar jobs since the 1950s. Even as the post-war economic boom slowed down, they needed to continue due to dwindling fertility levels (avg. EU TFR 1.58 births/woman - below replacement). If these jobs are automated, it won't be the locals missing out - it will be the prospective immigrants. Western countries might just severely restrict immigration (and accept only small numbers of highly qualified individuals).
This is a problem, not directly for the West, but for the Third World. When the West "poaches" highly qualified people (engineers, scientists, doctors) from the Third World, this is usually great for the West and for those individuals, but terrible for the Third World (which is loosing its most qualified people, of whom it almost always has a shortage and pays a relative fortune to train). Remittances are the only way the Third World profits in that case, usually. However when the West takes in unqualified manual labourers, it's often a win-win-win situation: the West fills jobs it cannot fill with its local population; the immigrants get a higher standard of living; and the Third World replaces often unemployable people who are a social/political problem with money-sending expats. Those who remain there can even, in some cases, benefit from the reduction of the labour pool as wages go up.
Not to mention outsourcing, which is "immigrantless immigration" or "job emigration" - Western countries send over the jobs instead of bringing in people. So what happens when demand for such imported labour in the West disappears? What happens when Western multinationals realize it's cheaper to produce locally in automated 20-people factories than somewhere far away (where labour is cheap but from where transportation costs may be high)? Some (many?) Third World countries may become pressure cookers (some already are - they will get worse) of unemployed and underemployed people. What happens when tons of would-be immigrants come to borders of Western countries, and those countries turn them away since they the only thing they would do with 90% of them is put them on welfare? Now THAT'S going to be the problem, not unemployment in some town in Austria.
You should also read some of Kasparov's "geopolitical analysis". He's a Putin critic, so people give him the benefit of the doubt, but once you read it you realize he's crazy.
Maybe one day Kasparov will embrace natural intelligence and reject Fomenko.
Ditto. Kasparov was a great chess player but he's also nuts. A total crank. I don't anyone really wants Kasparov endorsing anything, except a book on chess.
I think the more realistic explanation is that it was ignored because it means the U.S. would have to knock-off (or obfuscate behind a third party for purposes of deniability, because lets face it we're not going to stop doing it) a lot of the stuff it's doing.
Exactly. Russia doesn't have the NSA, it doesn't have a direct point of access to the world's biggest Internet companies...Russia can't do 10% of what the US does in the "cyber sphere". The biggest cyber warfare nation on the Earth is the USA. They are ahead of everyone else combined by light years.
So of course Obama ignored it, Obama was a big fan of the NSA. As is the entire federal government. Any cyber treaty would severely limit what the US can do NOW, while only theoretically limiting what other countries MIGHT do.
I feel like the OS manufacturers (Apple and Google) are doing this on purpose to make people's phones obsolete - especially the lower end models.
Google force feeds you updates of their core apps (Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Play Store, Play Services) which originally were in the ROM (and therefore did not impact you storage) but then eat up your internal storage (these apps, of course, can't be moved to the SD card). Often, if you reject these updates, these apps will just stop working (esp. if you don't update Play Services).
It's like the manufacturers are saying - if you purchased a phone for less than US$200-250 (I'm talking about full price here, unlocked, no contract) then we're just not going to LET YOU to use it more than 2 years...we will bloat the software as to make your phone unusable. The increase on the app limit does the same thing.
If you buy the $600-900 phones, then you might be good for 4 years, 5 if you're lucky.
However, companies are actively pushing these things. I worked for a major (at the time) appliance manufacturer. Why would anyone want their stove, clothes washer, or refrigerator connected to the internet?
I don't know why exactly appliance manufacturers want their products to be connected. I really don't. However I do know that tech companies are pushing this because they see a market where they can achieve the exponential growth they had in their primary markets in the 90s and 2000s.
A year ago, I was at a meeting with a Qualcomm VP (or some high ranking title like that). He showed us their IoT presentation. It was scary. It consisted of an overenthusiastic guy exclaiming how soon, little sensors connected to the internet will be EVERYWHERE and that will be able to monitor EVERYTHING! As if this was a good thing...after seeing the rather pale expressions on our faces he said, "You guys seemed kind of scared, but, it's coming, so just get used to it." I asked my colleague when we're all moving to Madagascar.
It was quite clear from the presentation that Qualcomm no longer sees mobile as a large growth market - it's saturated - and IoT is a great area where their "patents and expertise can be leveraged" (or something like that). They are just pushing this down everyone's throat because they see a chance to sell gazillions of chips with their IP on it.
I don't FB, lost my unused pswd 5-6 yrs ago so I Email my friends. Often its "I spend most of my time on FB and don't remember to check - why aren't you on line"? Ughhhh. It *IS* a problem
This. The only reason I joined FB was because I started missing out on the parties and meets ups. Why didn't anyone call or e-mail me? Oh, there was a Facebook event. WTF is a Facebook event? I left a couple of years later when I gladly traded less party invites for more sanity and privacy.
Also, consider bars and clubs. They used to have websites. Now they have Facebook pages. If they still have websites, it's a single page with a logo, address, and a link to their Facebook page. If my girlfriend didn't have Facebook, I would be at a loss as to where to go out on the weekend, since all information is on Facebook.
I absolutely *HATE* the way the internet has gone backwards. Sometimes I feel we've essentially abandoned the Web. The Web is supposed to be this open thing where everyone has an address and it points to your website that anyone with an internet connection can easily reach. Yet we've closed it all off into walled gardens. First it was the social media platforms, and then mobile made things worse with the invention of apps. Social media on a PC is still accessed via the browser, so it leaves the Web open to you...on a phone, you rarely have the need to open the browser. Paradoxically, it feels a little bit like the pre-internet days when using these services. Facebook and Twitter are the modern AOL and CompuServe.
Part of what muddies the waters here is that Trump's narcissistic ego won't allow him to accept that he won the election despite losing the popular vote. In his fantasies he won by a landslide and received a huge mandate from the American populace.
He won 304:227 - that may not be a landslide but it's pretty convincing. He carried 10 more states than Clinton. It's only slightly less convincing than Obama's win over Romney. When we factor in the fact that everyone was convinced after the primaries that Hillary would mop up and defeat Trump with something like the most convincing electoral vote tally ever, Trump's victory might have very well felt like a landslide to him and his campaign, his ego and penchant for overstatements notwithstanding.
The popular vote is irrelevant. If the popular vote would've been the measure of victory, the campaigns would have looked and acted completely different. Trump might've won in that case too. He might've lost. We just don't know.
You're right, with 94% attendance in the NBA (as measured relative to capacity), there is little incentive to change. I doubt the figure is that high for the NHL though, on average. However, most of the money NBA teams make comes from TV rights and merchandising, not ticket sales. If there were, say 45 games per season instead of 82, each game would be worth more...also they could probably raise ticket prices and still keep the arenas packed.
The only way things will change is if attendance and/or TV viewership starts to drop significantly. The latter will be more of a factor, if it happens, I think.
The NBA, NHL, MLB etc. should adopt the NFL/UCL/EPL paradigm: less, but more meaningful, games. One or two games per week - but games that actually MATTER. Who's gonna watch 1 out of 82 (or whatever the number actually is these days) regular season games when that particular game might matter very little in the grand scheme of things? Once a playoff spot is assured, even the teams sit out their main stars...basically nothing matters until the playoffs.
That's why I stopped watching the NBA and the NHL. I don't have time for that - watching or catching up on 4-5 games per week. So you snooze over the regular season...then you start ignoring the first round of the playoffs...then everything.
Cap regular seasons off at 30 games. Make the playoffs best-of-three (except the finals, which can be best-of-five). Then it would be interesting, and followable for the casual fan.
Your delusion about rich people managing to avoid paying taxes doesn't hold up to reality. At all.
You are the one who is being deluded, I'm afraid, since your long-winded and rather pointless example makes one fatal error - it assumes that everybody making that sort of money will actually honestly declare all of their earnings. You missed the part where the money gets shuffled off to a tax haven. Or siphoned off through one of many industry- and occupation-specific loopholes that in exist in various tax codes. Not to mention using "regulatory arbitrage" (find a way to declare your income as the least-taxable item and/or to declare it in a jurisdiction that has the lowest tax rate).
We're talking about, for example, 18.5 trillion dollars hidden away in tax havens by wealthy individuals (not corporations hiding profits). We're talking about even Buffet, for whom we can I suppose presume that he is doing all things legally (i.e. not illegally hiding his wealth in Liechtenstein or the British Virgin Islands), saying that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
Yes, you indeed get to avoid paying taxes by being rich - if you want to, of course. There are tons of rich people who are perfectly honest. The bad apples however, are significant and a problem. You get to avoid it because you have the money to hire people that will squeeze every loophole in the tax code for you. You have the money to cover the transactional costs of setting up offshore tax shelters. And you have the money to buy political influence, making sure that you can get away with it all. In the end, all of this costs you less than paying the proper tax rate (otherwise you wouldn't do it all). Yes, that is how the world works, really.
(Not to mention that you just pulled some numbers out of a hat in your response, simply to make the numbers line up. Or that you think that for some reason, what happens in one case in the United States is somehow relevant for the entire Western world.)
Sales tax is great. It'll keep those poors where they belong.
All problems related to sales tax being regressive and thus unfair to the poor are solved by
1) Tax refunds. Sales tax credits exist in many countries and are paid out to poor folks - usually those too poor to pay any income tax, btw - to level out the "regressiveness".
2) Keeping the sales tax very low or non-existent on essential items (e.g. milk, bread).
Income taxes are bad because they make labour more expensive. Back in the 1950s, when automation was not as much of a thing and when it used mainly to get humans to work faster (not replace them), it didn't matter. No, I'm not one of the doomsayers who thinks jobs will disappear due to robots, this is vastly overstated. However, there is a lot of worker replacement going on that is purely for the savings, not to improve production (make it faster, more predictable, etc.). For example, what is the purpose of self-checkout kiosks at busy supermarkets or at IKEA? The average customer is faster checking his things out by himself? No, usually he's slower. Makes less mistakes? No, makes more mistakes. Often the attendants (who now cover three of four times as many cash registers as they used to) have to come in and help. The only reason they exist is so the company can hire less people.
Also, income taxes disproportionately burden the middle class. Rich people find ways of avoiding it (they are rich enough to hire expert accountants and lawyers). Poor people - the ones who benefit the most from redistributive government programs - don't pay a lot of it, or don't pay any at all. This opens up a great opportunity for the rich - to convince the middle class that ALL taxes are bad, since they just get taken from them and spent on those lazy poor no-gooders who just live on welfare and do nothing. Then the middle class votes for politicians advocating policies that reduce the tax burden middle class people slightly, but mostly benefit - the rich.
I'm not saying there should be zero income tax, but it should be lower.
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That nuclear is safer and cheaper than solar therefore we should prefer nuclear to solar. Did you even read my post before you replied?
Look, I like nuclear power and think it will be an indispensable part of the energy mix going forward, I believe it's absolutely crucial to reducing carbon emissions and think that all those people who want all nuclear reactors decommissioned are dumb...but how ON EARTH can you say that nuclear is SAFER than solar???
You supplied some statistics about deaths per TWh - OK, but those DO NOT tell the full story. Whereas every existing nuclear reactor in operation is potentially a catastrophic accident waiting to happen, every solar installation is not. Will every solar panel become a potential radiation contamination hazard that can kill thousands/millions and make a huge area around it uninhabitable for the next couple of hundred/thousand years if left unattended or if something goes terribly wrong during operation? Of course it will not. What about nuclear reactors?
You have here made the fallacious "but car accidents kill more people than terrorists" argument. We have to consider the POTENTIAL risks, the WORST CASE scenario, not only the statistics so far. Just like car accidents don't bring down the WTC killing ten thousand people, solar panels don't have catastrophic reactor meltdowns.
And the stupefying thing is, he's still getting knived by the far right anyway. He gains nothing by continuing to inflict unpopular and authoritarian far right nonsense on the population.
I'm a bit perplexed by Australian politics...granted I live very far away and do not follow it closely, just whatever article pops up on the BBC now and then, so I my knowledge of the scene is minuscule at best. However it does seem there's a lot of party coups going on down under, prime ministers being toppled by their own parties instead of an election. Why does this happen? Has it always been a thing, or is it a recent occurrence?
In Canada, where we have a similar UK-derived political system, party leaders changing in between elections is relatively rare, and it usually happens when a long-standing leader is retiring or something like that.
Can't take this anymore...
Most politicians (in Western countries) are lawyers by training. Lawyers tend to think that 1) anything can be defined by a law or regulation; that 2) any law or regulation can be changed and that 3) you can argue your away around anything. Turnbull, by the way, was a barrister who had his own law firm. Hence such stupid comments. Lawyers who become politicians are even worse than the average lawyer, since the above three principles are magnified even more in politics - especially when you are the one with the power to define or change laws.
Wait, you're saying, but shouldn't accomplished professionals, be they lawyers or whatever, be smart? They may be smart but they also may be what the Germans call a fachidiot: great at their profession but completely oblivious to anything outside of it, and blinkered by their professional knowledge and outlook when looking at other fields. The "I've got a hammer so everything is a nail" type of approach. I'm the leader of the majority in Parliament, so I can define laws any way that I choose, objective reality be damned.
Very well put. I would just like to add that this is a natural result of technological advancement that makes paying viewers easy. When TV began, using a direct paying viewer model was almost impossible; so the indirect paying viewer (with advertisers being the intermediaries) became the norm. Now, technology makes the direct payment between TV viewer and TV content producer both easy and cheap.
I was talking about towns up to 500 people max.
Air-conditioned homes aren't that common outside the US.
Also, humongous homes aren't that common in many countries. There are countries which are quite wealthy, but where the average dwelling is very small (think Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong) or at least significantly smaller than in the US (think Europe). Americans have, on average, large homes where they can afford to dedicate one room to a home office. In many other countries this is not an option for most people - they just don't have the space.
Results that show working from home is great are usually a result of selection bias: currently, working from home is an *option* in *some* professions at *some* employers.
The default type of job is still the one that requires going to a workplace. Even where working from home is allowed or even encouraged, it is not required. Hence, most of the current work-at-home positions will be filled by people who prefer to work at home.
So, basically, If there are any local businesses which haven't already been destroyed by Safeway or Walmart or Target, Amazon Prime will finish them. Got it.
I doubt that Walmart or Target did any destroying of local businesses in remote max. 500 person towns in Alaska or Nunavut.
I'm thinking the big box retailers need a population of at least a few (tens of?) thousands in their catchment area to be viable.
In reality I do not want, nor do I ever seek social events of any kind, everything I want or need is in my house at my keyboard, with the exception of time. That I never have in the quantity I would like. If I accept such an invitation I'm almost certain to bail but felt like I had to accept due to some real or imagined pressure on me. I will never do the inviting, and if I do you can be sure I won't bail on YOU, that really is rude. I have had people arrange large get-togethers from diverse social groups who bail, leaving those groups confused and stuck with each other...that's just a dick move.
So essentially, you are an extremely anti-social person (you do not seek social events of any kind) who feels awkward while communicating with other people (you accept invitations to events because you feel some sort of pressure, and cannot say no to a person's face). That's fine, and actually I sympathize with your position, however you should realize you are in the minority and not exactly qualified to comment on the state of "in-person meat-space" relationships.
Also, why do we need to make plans to do anything these days? Why can't we just grab drinks whenever. Or go for a hike when the moment strikes us. Want to go fishing Saturday? call me before 10pm the night before, I really don't need a lot of notice to prepare. But if you want to set up a big fishing expedition 2 weeks in advance, well a lot can happen then. I can't say for certain how I will even feel 2 weeks from now.
See, this type of attitude is EXACTLY the problem. It shows you only care about YOUR time, not other people's time, only YOUR feelings and moods and not other people's feelings and moods. "I can't say for certain how I will even feel 2 weeks from now" is exactly the type of self-centred, selfish attitude that instant always-connected communication has allowed to proliferate.
Now, there have ALWAYS been people with attitudes such as yours - the attitudes are nothing new in themselves. However, as a previous poster (AC) indicated, in the past, when instant communication was not possible, people generally had to stick to plans made in advance, since just not showing up without telling someone is a major social no-no (it still IS today; we just have the ability to contact people and cancel on short notice almost universally now).
Here's what used to happen before: I want to see a friend. I phone his house until I catch him at home. It might take a few days to achieve this. Then I say - would you like to go for a drink? Yes? How about Wednesday? Wednesday at 9 pm works for you? OK, see you then. We meet Wed. at 9 pm.
Here's what happens today, with a lot of people (not everyone of course): Call the friend (it's Monday). He answers instantly of course. Hey dude what's up? - Not much, working and [blablabla]. - Wanna meet up one of these days? - Yeah, sure, when? - What about Wednesday night, is that good? - Yeah, that should work I think...but let's talk on Wed. morning to confirm, just in case. Call the guy on Wednesday morning? Dude, are we meeting up tonight as we planned? - Uh, yeah, sure, why not! - Is 9 pm good for you? - I think so, but let's talk in the afternoon, I'll call you around like 2-3 pm, to see for the time. Call in the afternoon: yeah, 8 or 9 pm should be good, but let's talk at like 6-7 just to reconfirm. Then around 8:30 I finally know I'll meet the guy at 9 pm.
Note that the above is the ideal scenario: no bailing. At any one point - including just 30 minutes before we are supposed to meet - the guy could bail with some excuse, just because he doesn't feel like going out or because he found something more interesting to do, or more frustratingly, because someone else who only works on "spur of the moment" type social planning called up him 2 hours before we were supposed to meet and said "hey man, let's meet NOW!" and off he went. This isn't just about being hung-up; it has a ripple effect on other people: if I'm perpetually waiting on Friend A to reconfirm our meeting until 15 minutes before the fact, I keep rejecting calls from Friends B, C, and D to meet up; I keep it "fluid" with them because A is "fluid" with me, and in the end I end up looking like an asshole. The end results is usually that you cut Friend A off eventually, unless he's really close and dear to you and you will bear this misbehaviour for those reasons.
Note that I am not at all against "spur of the moment" acting and "spontaneous" meet-ups, that's all great, but that doesn't work all the time. You can pretty much only be on a 100% "spontaneous" schedule if you're a teenager on summer break. Once you get adult responsibilities in your life, you realize you have to plan things.
The funny thing is that your average trader/fund manager/investor is in fact no more "special" than your average McDonald's worker...just vastly more paid. Most of them have just random performance, with no correlation year to year (even though they like to think differently), and most of those which are successful are successful because they are just plain lucky (and not particularly able). That's why using index funds is better than your average mutual fund, since most mutual funds do not outperform the market in the long run (even though they try). Of course, there are exceptions to this rule (Warren Buffet? 0.01% of day traders?), but they are few and far between.
Everyone else on Earth cheers as Wall Street replaced with algorithms capable of morality, compassion and empathy.
Morality, compassion and empathy not required - just algorithms that do the same thing they do...at least we'd eliminate all the smug suits feeling so superior and watch them live off the dole.
I haven't gone looking, but I'd be interested to see what happened to the economy of a 600+ year old steel town.
That's an interesting question, but not the central one here, looking at the big picture.
People in the West fret about machines taking their jobs...but it's not people in the West who are going to be most affected. Yes, there will be people who will be stuck "in between" - their jobs will be automated away, but they will be too old / not adept enough to retrain for a new job (or simply, no one will want to hire them even if they do, for whatever reason). Western countries are however rich enough to take care of those people - yes, relatively speaking, for them it will suck, going from a job to being on the dole until retirement, but this will be a small % of the population.
It's all the aspiring immigrants from poorer countries that will be screwed. Countries like Austria have been importing labour for the blue-collar jobs since the 1950s. Even as the post-war economic boom slowed down, they needed to continue due to dwindling fertility levels (avg. EU TFR 1.58 births/woman - below replacement). If these jobs are automated, it won't be the locals missing out - it will be the prospective immigrants. Western countries might just severely restrict immigration (and accept only small numbers of highly qualified individuals).
This is a problem, not directly for the West, but for the Third World. When the West "poaches" highly qualified people (engineers, scientists, doctors) from the Third World, this is usually great for the West and for those individuals, but terrible for the Third World (which is loosing its most qualified people, of whom it almost always has a shortage and pays a relative fortune to train). Remittances are the only way the Third World profits in that case, usually. However when the West takes in unqualified manual labourers, it's often a win-win-win situation: the West fills jobs it cannot fill with its local population; the immigrants get a higher standard of living; and the Third World replaces often unemployable people who are a social/political problem with money-sending expats. Those who remain there can even, in some cases, benefit from the reduction of the labour pool as wages go up.
Not to mention outsourcing, which is "immigrantless immigration" or "job emigration" - Western countries send over the jobs instead of bringing in people. So what happens when demand for such imported labour in the West disappears? What happens when Western multinationals realize it's cheaper to produce locally in automated 20-people factories than somewhere far away (where labour is cheap but from where transportation costs may be high)? Some (many?) Third World countries may become pressure cookers (some already are - they will get worse) of unemployed and underemployed people. What happens when tons of would-be immigrants come to borders of Western countries, and those countries turn them away since they the only thing they would do with 90% of them is put them on welfare? Now THAT'S going to be the problem, not unemployment in some town in Austria.
You should also read some of Kasparov's "geopolitical analysis". He's a Putin critic, so people give him the benefit of the doubt, but once you read it you realize he's crazy.
Maybe one day Kasparov will embrace natural intelligence and reject Fomenko.
Ditto. Kasparov was a great chess player but he's also nuts. A total crank. I don't anyone really wants Kasparov endorsing anything, except a book on chess.
I think the more realistic explanation is that it was ignored because it means the U.S. would have to knock-off (or obfuscate behind a third party for purposes of deniability, because lets face it we're not going to stop doing it) a lot of the stuff it's doing.
Exactly. Russia doesn't have the NSA, it doesn't have a direct point of access to the world's biggest Internet companies...Russia can't do 10% of what the US does in the "cyber sphere". The biggest cyber warfare nation on the Earth is the USA. They are ahead of everyone else combined by light years.
So of course Obama ignored it, Obama was a big fan of the NSA. As is the entire federal government. Any cyber treaty would severely limit what the US can do NOW, while only theoretically limiting what other countries MIGHT do.
In Canada all phones are unlocked.
As of December 1st, 2017. So not quite yet. (I live in Canada dude, I watch the news.)
I feel like the OS manufacturers (Apple and Google) are doing this on purpose to make people's phones obsolete - especially the lower end models.
Google force feeds you updates of their core apps (Maps, Gmail, Youtube, Play Store, Play Services) which originally were in the ROM (and therefore did not impact you storage) but then eat up your internal storage (these apps, of course, can't be moved to the SD card). Often, if you reject these updates, these apps will just stop working (esp. if you don't update Play Services).
It's like the manufacturers are saying - if you purchased a phone for less than US$200-250 (I'm talking about full price here, unlocked, no contract) then we're just not going to LET YOU to use it more than 2 years...we will bloat the software as to make your phone unusable. The increase on the app limit does the same thing.
If you buy the $600-900 phones, then you might be good for 4 years, 5 if you're lucky.
However, companies are actively pushing these things. I worked for a major (at the time) appliance manufacturer. Why would anyone want their stove, clothes washer, or refrigerator connected to the internet?
I don't know why exactly appliance manufacturers want their products to be connected. I really don't. However I do know that tech companies are pushing this because they see a market where they can achieve the exponential growth they had in their primary markets in the 90s and 2000s.
A year ago, I was at a meeting with a Qualcomm VP (or some high ranking title like that). He showed us their IoT presentation. It was scary. It consisted of an overenthusiastic guy exclaiming how soon, little sensors connected to the internet will be EVERYWHERE and that will be able to monitor EVERYTHING! As if this was a good thing...after seeing the rather pale expressions on our faces he said, "You guys seemed kind of scared, but, it's coming, so just get used to it." I asked my colleague when we're all moving to Madagascar.
It was quite clear from the presentation that Qualcomm no longer sees mobile as a large growth market - it's saturated - and IoT is a great area where their "patents and expertise can be leveraged" (or something like that). They are just pushing this down everyone's throat because they see a chance to sell gazillions of chips with their IP on it.
I don't FB, lost my unused pswd 5-6 yrs ago so I Email my friends. Often its "I spend most of my time on FB and don't remember to check - why aren't you on line"? Ughhhh. It *IS* a problem
This. The only reason I joined FB was because I started missing out on the parties and meets ups. Why didn't anyone call or e-mail me? Oh, there was a Facebook event. WTF is a Facebook event? I left a couple of years later when I gladly traded less party invites for more sanity and privacy.
Also, consider bars and clubs. They used to have websites. Now they have Facebook pages. If they still have websites, it's a single page with a logo, address, and a link to their Facebook page. If my girlfriend didn't have Facebook, I would be at a loss as to where to go out on the weekend, since all information is on Facebook.
I absolutely *HATE* the way the internet has gone backwards. Sometimes I feel we've essentially abandoned the Web. The Web is supposed to be this open thing where everyone has an address and it points to your website that anyone with an internet connection can easily reach. Yet we've closed it all off into walled gardens. First it was the social media platforms, and then mobile made things worse with the invention of apps. Social media on a PC is still accessed via the browser, so it leaves the Web open to you...on a phone, you rarely have the need to open the browser. Paradoxically, it feels a little bit like the pre-internet days when using these services. Facebook and Twitter are the modern AOL and CompuServe.
Part of what muddies the waters here is that Trump's narcissistic ego won't allow him to accept that he won the election despite losing the popular vote. In his fantasies he won by a landslide and received a huge mandate from the American populace.
He won 304:227 - that may not be a landslide but it's pretty convincing. He carried 10 more states than Clinton. It's only slightly less convincing than Obama's win over Romney. When we factor in the fact that everyone was convinced after the primaries that Hillary would mop up and defeat Trump with something like the most convincing electoral vote tally ever, Trump's victory might have very well felt like a landslide to him and his campaign, his ego and penchant for overstatements notwithstanding.
The popular vote is irrelevant. If the popular vote would've been the measure of victory, the campaigns would have looked and acted completely different. Trump might've won in that case too. He might've lost. We just don't know.
You're right, with 94% attendance in the NBA (as measured relative to capacity), there is little incentive to change. I doubt the figure is that high for the NHL though, on average. However, most of the money NBA teams make comes from TV rights and merchandising, not ticket sales. If there were, say 45 games per season instead of 82, each game would be worth more...also they could probably raise ticket prices and still keep the arenas packed.
The only way things will change is if attendance and/or TV viewership starts to drop significantly. The latter will be more of a factor, if it happens, I think.
The NBA, NHL, MLB etc. should adopt the NFL/UCL/EPL paradigm: less, but more meaningful, games. One or two games per week - but games that actually MATTER. Who's gonna watch 1 out of 82 (or whatever the number actually is these days) regular season games when that particular game might matter very little in the grand scheme of things? Once a playoff spot is assured, even the teams sit out their main stars...basically nothing matters until the playoffs.
That's why I stopped watching the NBA and the NHL. I don't have time for that - watching or catching up on 4-5 games per week. So you snooze over the regular season...then you start ignoring the first round of the playoffs...then everything.
Cap regular seasons off at 30 games. Make the playoffs best-of-three (except the finals, which can be best-of-five). Then it would be interesting, and followable for the casual fan.
Your delusion about rich people managing to avoid paying taxes doesn't hold up to reality. At all.
You are the one who is being deluded, I'm afraid, since your long-winded and rather pointless example makes one fatal error - it assumes that everybody making that sort of money will actually honestly declare all of their earnings. You missed the part where the money gets shuffled off to a tax haven. Or siphoned off through one of many industry- and occupation-specific loopholes that in exist in various tax codes. Not to mention using "regulatory arbitrage" (find a way to declare your income as the least-taxable item and/or to declare it in a jurisdiction that has the lowest tax rate).
We're talking about, for example, 18.5 trillion dollars hidden away in tax havens by wealthy individuals (not corporations hiding profits). We're talking about even Buffet, for whom we can I suppose presume that he is doing all things legally (i.e. not illegally hiding his wealth in Liechtenstein or the British Virgin Islands), saying that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
Yes, you indeed get to avoid paying taxes by being rich - if you want to, of course. There are tons of rich people who are perfectly honest. The bad apples however, are significant and a problem. You get to avoid it because you have the money to hire people that will squeeze every loophole in the tax code for you. You have the money to cover the transactional costs of setting up offshore tax shelters. And you have the money to buy political influence, making sure that you can get away with it all. In the end, all of this costs you less than paying the proper tax rate (otherwise you wouldn't do it all). Yes, that is how the world works, really.
(Not to mention that you just pulled some numbers out of a hat in your response, simply to make the numbers line up. Or that you think that for some reason, what happens in one case in the United States is somehow relevant for the entire Western world.)
Sales tax is great. It'll keep those poors where they belong.
All problems related to sales tax being regressive and thus unfair to the poor are solved by
Income taxes are bad because they make labour more expensive. Back in the 1950s, when automation was not as much of a thing and when it used mainly to get humans to work faster (not replace them), it didn't matter. No, I'm not one of the doomsayers who thinks jobs will disappear due to robots, this is vastly overstated. However, there is a lot of worker replacement going on that is purely for the savings, not to improve production (make it faster, more predictable, etc.). For example, what is the purpose of self-checkout kiosks at busy supermarkets or at IKEA? The average customer is faster checking his things out by himself? No, usually he's slower. Makes less mistakes? No, makes more mistakes. Often the attendants (who now cover three of four times as many cash registers as they used to) have to come in and help. The only reason they exist is so the company can hire less people.
Also, income taxes disproportionately burden the middle class. Rich people find ways of avoiding it (they are rich enough to hire expert accountants and lawyers). Poor people - the ones who benefit the most from redistributive government programs - don't pay a lot of it, or don't pay any at all. This opens up a great opportunity for the rich - to convince the middle class that ALL taxes are bad, since they just get taken from them and spent on those lazy poor no-gooders who just live on welfare and do nothing. Then the middle class votes for politicians advocating policies that reduce the tax burden middle class people slightly, but mostly benefit - the rich.
I'm not saying there should be zero income tax, but it should be lower.