Hating both major parties as much as I do, I've never voted for either in my many years as an eligible adult voter. More than useless, I'm always horrified at what either might think up at any given moment.
That said, let me just say that there is hate enough in me to leave plenty left over for the Libertarians. You would think that between the 2 major parties, they could have a perfect monopoly on utter insanity. You would be wrong.
Tell me Mr. Libertarian, would the LP have done anything differently with the DOJ antitrust case against Microsoft? What about the FCC restrictions on media ownership, aren't those rather anti-libertarian?
Maybe what you say is true. The problem is, most people with any sense learned long ago, that they don't want both candidates (even no matter who they happen to be) *equally*. When you positively dislike both of them to such an incredible degree, that you can't be comforted even a little bit by the other ("hey, at least it's not..."), then what?
I have a metaphor that explains this fairly well. One day, before you wake up, someone breaks in and kidnaps you. Chloroform, handcuffs, chains... there is no escaping. The kidnapper doesn't want ransom, he has no political demands, he's just a nutcase. He drags you up to his cabin in the mountains, and each day, he wakes you up, and asks you to vote on how he will torture you. Electrocuting your gonads, or being sodomized with a gnarled tree branch encrusted with rusty nails.
He's very charming. He tells you that while he may not torture you in the way that you voted for, there is a good chance that he actually will. He tells you that a mature responsible person would want a say in how they are tortured. And of course, if you stop voting, things may get even worse down the road... what happens 6 months from now, when he decides to amputate various extremeties? If only you had been voting, you could have expressed your dislike of that sort of thing, maybe it wouldn't have happened.
Which would you vote for, gonad electrocution, or gnarled tree branch sodomy? I can't say for sure which you would, but you strike me as the kind of person that would sit there arguing about the pros and cons of each.
Well, a sane person understands that this guy will torture you no matter what, and that its all just a big brainfuck. The sane person sits there, refusing to *encourage* the psychopath. Says nothing. Just like you should do. Don't vote for either Kerry or Bush. Oh, and one other thing. The sane person also gives some serious concentration to how he just might break free and kill the nutjob.
Yes, because Kerry cherry-picking the biggest democrat "loyalist no matter what" appointees for one or two controversial issues like "free unnotified drive-through abortions for 13 yr old bisexuals" is exactly how I pick a president.
Is this a joke? If so, haha. Might as well laugh, can't do much else. If its a troll, I respect that too, keep up the trolling. If its some asshat attempt to smear my comment as conspiracy, I invite you to read, even just a little. After all, the proper way to make me look like the fool, is to pick apart what I've said piece by piece, showing everyone how it couldn't be so...
If your vote does nothing, you have simply thrown your vote away.
Finally, a practical idea. What we all need to do, and by we, I mean registered voters, is listen to the opinion polls on CNN, to find out who will win the election. Then, we all vote for that candidate, even if we prefer the other... after all, a vote for the losing candidate is a vote thrown away!
Yes, but a vote for Kerry is a vote for Kerry. Either way we're screwed.
On a more serious note, I'm always slightly amazed that people seem so eager and enthusiastic at voting for the lesser of two evils. Do they wake up on inauguration day thinking to themselves "Gee, things are only 92% as bad as they would have been if Dubya were still president!" ?
Americans have been bred and trained to be "asleep" for 8 generations or more. Ever wonder how the unions ever came to be? Lord forbid that they didn't exist, and someone was trying to unionize now... it would be impossible. I wondered, then I realized people 100 years ago were different than you and I. Back then, they had wills. Ours have been erased. Oh well, the unions were co-opted long ago, and are worthless.
This book (online ebook) deals with the situation from a different angle, and much of what he says pertaining to our own discussion is tangential to our own. Don't read it if you are depressed easily.
A gasoline powered flying robot, a helicopter of some sort. Have any electronics powered by some sort of small generator/dynamo running off the engine. Here's the cool part... have it with a sensor in the gas tank, so it knows when it is getting empty. Have a straw coming out the bottom that it can siphon with... then put up a big 50 gallon drum with a homing beacon for it to find. Wouldn't have to be really intelligent, just enough to keep from crashing into things, and to find its way home. Send it out all day buzzing the neighbors.
Allow me to introduce myself, my name is unpronoucable without a tertiary lingual organ, but you may call me "Deebalgribblegribble". I worked in the Intergalactic Department of Gold and Platinum Mining. Recently due to several high profile political crisis, our agency has been on a footstring budget, and transporting these rare and expensive elements has been increasingly difficult.I am forced to take many risky shortcuts to move my quota of bullion each trimonth. One such shortcut would be Earth itself! If only we had a refueling outpost there. However, if you would allow me to land on your property (what a quaint notion, in the TibbleTak Empire, everyone owns their own Zik-class planet), I could surely leave behind a modest amount of gold, as much as 19,000 earth pounds. This would ocurr every 9.1 of your earth months. Of course, there is the matter of refueling, which may be difficult, though not impossible given your rapidly progressing technology. Having been referred to you by a close and mutual friend, I took the opportunity to set up an account with a subsidiary of your Dow Chemical company, which I have been assured is an esteemed banking institution. Our mutual friend promised that you would never pass up such an incredible opportunity, and so, if you transfer a negligible manufacturing fee to this bank, for the fuel I need to prepare this nefarious and dangerous navigation challenge, we could alter the path of the freigter fleet immediately. By this time next April month, you could be rich, and my transport schedule could be back to normal. Now, Even as close and mutual as our mutual friend is friendly, I could not trust such a plan on his personal assurances, so forgive me if I have take the opportunity to contact some of our friendly friends mutual other friends, to see whether they would be willing to assist in this very important endeavor. If they transfer the fee first, I will have no more gold or platinum to spare on this round of the transportation, and you may not be able to participate until May month of year 2005! So please, transfer this fee today, so that we may immediately begin to start planning this important plan. I will even arrange for some Alpha Reticulan sex slaves to be transported to your residence, the species with 19 vaginal orifices! Attached you will find a file indicating the proper routing and account numbers, and plans for building a proper landing zone for our saucers!
Thank you, Deebalgribblegribble Assistant Deputy Undersecretary Assistant of Intergalactic Gold and Platinum Mining Transportation
Thankfully, our government is supposed to work in such a way, that the right things happen even if unpopular. For instance, we can't all vote to strip you of your voting rights. Or at least, thats the theory.
Advocating that people "vote with dollars" is a bad idea. People can't win in those elections. Then again, they can't win in the one I'm advocating either.
It wasn't covered on CNN (think this was during the Scott Peterson bruhaha), but AOLTW bought the federal government, acquiring all of their assets, including the FCC. This wasn't their first purchase either, they were encouraged to do so by their profitable acquisitions of the governments of Belize, Argentina and Poland.
They sell naming rights to hurricanes, btw. Tropical storm Nokia just faded into nothing... talk about picking the wrong horse! So the natural disaster angle is out, too.
Luckily, there is no lack of mismanagement going on. So I'm confident that things will be back in order soon enough.
That critical part wouldn't happen to be the engine, would it? You know, the roughly cylindrical device that looks like a giant turd wrapped in tinfoil and then squashed slightly? A tinfoil-covered turd that just spins slowly, like it's roasting on a spit? I suppose that's there to turn the propeller. The engine that they stretch an entire episode around, where they treat it like it's some redneck's V8 in his 22 yr old Firebird, complete with airhead slut (who becomes the mechanic? Engineer? Scotty was an engineer, she's a monkey with a wrench.).
Josh Whedon's "great" space western is one part really bad scifi, one part bad western, with a pinch of bad acting. But to do it right, to make this movie the shitfest that it strives to be, Josh needs to think big. This movie needs George Lucas as CGI director, and Rick Berman as a scriptwriter or at least plot consultant.
SCOsource chief Chris Sontag, the SCO VP in charge of the company's hate-inducing IP push, claims TISC, which folded immediately after the spec was published, exceeded its rights even though both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee.
Sontag also says that any entities that ignore SCO's ELF copyrights are infringing. Such a claim is likely to put SCO on a war footing, if it isn't already, with the Free Software Foundation, whose GNU operating environment makes broad use of ELF.
How can they copyright a format? Each ELF formatted executable is distinct, and I believe that nothing other than a header too short to enjoy copyright protection is the same for any of them. No one, Torvalds included, has published the ELF specifications (the paper itself), which is the only thing that is copyrightable. It's like saying you copyrighted putting your right shoe on first, and then the second. It's dumb.
This is exactly the kind of attitude that makes it hard for me to have any sympathy for the pro-copyright faction.
It ignores the spirit of a law that admittedly has been stretched out of all proportion. In creating copyright to promote the public domain, it is the intention of it that everyone, everywhere can have it, should they wish. Temporary (or should I call them eternal?) restrictions on this fundamental human right exist only to serve as encouragement for those that create such products. Since these "copyright" owners refuse to sell him a copy, thereby refusing the encouragement they are meant to have, there is no reason to deprive this guy of it.
Do they put up a webpage saying "If you download impossible to find, but still copyrighted music, please send your credit card payment here.." ?
NO.
This guy, liar though he might be, talks as if they'd recieve fair compensation for it. But that would ruin their entire strategy, which is to undermine one of the more inspired ideas in our Constitution. Fuck them, fuck you.
It still applies, even more so than for consumer level connections. With the astronomically expensive hardware, they can multiplex what can only be described as simply insane amounts of bandwidth, with each year seeing yet another increase. Unless something changes drastically, it might be many years before the only way to increase bandwidth would be to light dark fiber, or lay more.
I contend that the level of abuse will be far greater and more pervasive with these systems. I contend that they will add little or no benefit. That it is possible is little excuse for turning the world into a fishbowl.
How someone can "abuse" a camera IN A PUBLIC PLACE is beyond me.
First, I'm not the one moderating, I just write them. So don't blame me for a +5.
Second, until the CCTV control room is in a public place, it's quite easy for me to imagine it being abused. And since you don't seem so technically savvy, I'll spell it out. These cameras will someday very soon, not be the grainy 1978 recorded by VHS security cameras you think of. They'll be digital, the security tapes will be a big terabyte array that will store this stuff forever. They'll not only introduce new software to mine the "data", they'll be able to use it on archived footage. So even if the software won't be developed for 30 years, the video footage they have of you now, will still be subject to that software. That CCTV control room won't be in public, mind you, so when the monitoring technician decides to code up that nose-picking search, you won't consider that abuse? That's the least malevolent abuse I can come up with, and it's still slightly disturbing.
I'm not likely to need one of these cameras, and the "an innocent man has nothing to hide bit" is just sick.
Don't take the number out of it's context, even if it was tongue in cheek. It included quite a few other conditionals.
Securing a conviction isn't "catching" the criminal either. But distant grainy video that shows few if any facial details can't convict by itself, and assuming other evidence, probably isn't necessary. Last thing I want is for the police to contrive the case against someone who is innocent of trashing my place, even if they are the kind of asshole who might have done the deed given the chance or whim.
75 new police officers would cost more, I'd think... but I'll take you up on this hypothetical. I would gladly welcome the extra police officers. Those police officers will likely notice real crimes (not to mention be able to respond to them almost immediately), but not notice very many of those details (that aren't crimes themselves) that could be abused down the road. Their memories wouldn't be archived forever, and subject to some fancy SQL search. The people who would search the video footage, would be forced to ask live human beings, and leave some sort of trail.
In short, the police officers might be abusable (or even the abusers) themselves, but there are limiting factors here, it is manageable. Can one of these officers invade someone's privacy, even in public? Maybe, but they can be reprimanded or even fired. You have a chance to *notice* if they go to far. Can the camera be reprimanded or fired, and how likely are you to notice if it aims at a bedroom window and the lens zooms?
Hardly. It's more a matter of whether or not the low end apartment prices have went up significantly in the few years that I've had cause to worry about them.
And $13 is too high. If you want something to troll about, go find another topic.
Assuming that I'm right with my figures, $11 an hour means about $120 a month that doesn't get allocated to the necessities. Save it, blow it, hire hookers... but I took living wage to mean no spending money.
Or maybe I'm wrong and $11 leaves with nothing other than the basics. So what? I'm pretty close to the correct number, even if it's not exact.
In 2001, I was working in Chicago. Many of the McDonalds there were using a robot drink dispenser. As soon as an order was keyed in, a rotating platform would have a cup dropped onto it, where the thing would rotate the cup underneath the correct fountain and dispense the drink, to be rotated again for a lid to be popped onto it. Was interesting how it would react to multiple drinks when they weren't all the same flavor. It would put all 4 cups down, then rotate back and forth so that the flavors were in the order keyed in, presumably so that stupid wageslaves wouldn't get them mixed up when handing to customers. Seemed like it would be rather reliable to me.
And practically all of the stores I've been to have the french fry basket dispensers. Seems a small step to have the thing drop the baskets into the fryers.
I do agree about the burgers, which seem more difficult, but what about the rest of a fast food joint? Many of the tasks, including "building" the sandwiches seem easily within the realm of automation.
Varies from city to city, but in Richmond, VA USA, for a single person it has to be at least $10 an hour. Even that will only get you a shitty apartment, groceries and gas money. I'd hate to think what a living wage would be in a real city like NYC, Chicago or LA.
BTW, my figures are with my own tax with-holding and assume you already own a car. If you had to buy even a used one, I don't think that $10ph is enough. And without a car, you'd be unable to get all but the worst kinds of shitty minimum wage jobs.
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Hating both major parties as much as I do, I've never voted for either in my many years as an eligible adult voter. More than useless, I'm always horrified at what either might think up at any given moment.
That said, let me just say that there is hate enough in me to leave plenty left over for the Libertarians. You would think that between the 2 major parties, they could have a perfect monopoly on utter insanity. You would be wrong.
Tell me Mr. Libertarian, would the LP have done anything differently with the DOJ antitrust case against Microsoft? What about the FCC restrictions on media ownership, aren't those rather anti-libertarian?
Maybe what you say is true. The problem is, most people with any sense learned long ago, that they don't want both candidates (even no matter who they happen to be) *equally*. When you positively dislike both of them to such an incredible degree, that you can't be comforted even a little bit by the other ("hey, at least it's not..."), then what?
I have a metaphor that explains this fairly well. One day, before you wake up, someone breaks in and kidnaps you. Chloroform, handcuffs, chains... there is no escaping. The kidnapper doesn't want ransom, he has no political demands, he's just a nutcase. He drags you up to his cabin in the mountains, and each day, he wakes you up, and asks you to vote on how he will torture you. Electrocuting your gonads, or being sodomized with a gnarled tree branch encrusted with rusty nails.
He's very charming. He tells you that while he may not torture you in the way that you voted for, there is a good chance that he actually will. He tells you that a mature responsible person would want a say in how they are tortured. And of course, if you stop voting, things may get even worse down the road... what happens 6 months from now, when he decides to amputate various extremeties? If only you had been voting, you could have expressed your dislike of that sort of thing, maybe it wouldn't have happened.
Which would you vote for, gonad electrocution, or gnarled tree branch sodomy? I can't say for sure which you would, but you strike me as the kind of person that would sit there arguing about the pros and cons of each.
Well, a sane person understands that this guy will torture you no matter what, and that its all just a big brainfuck. The sane person sits there, refusing to *encourage* the psychopath. Says nothing. Just like you should do. Don't vote for either Kerry or Bush. Oh, and one other thing. The sane person also gives some serious concentration to how he just might break free and kill the nutjob.
Yes, because Kerry cherry-picking the biggest democrat "loyalist no matter what" appointees for one or two controversial issues like "free unnotified drive-through abortions for 13 yr old bisexuals" is exactly how I pick a president.
Is this a joke? If so, haha. Might as well laugh, can't do much else. If its a troll, I respect that too, keep up the trolling. If its some asshat attempt to smear my comment as conspiracy, I invite you to read, even just a little. After all, the proper way to make me look like the fool, is to pick apart what I've said piece by piece, showing everyone how it couldn't be so...
If your vote does nothing, you have simply thrown your vote away.
Finally, a practical idea. What we all need to do, and by we, I mean registered voters, is listen to the opinion polls on CNN, to find out who will win the election. Then, we all vote for that candidate, even if we prefer the other... after all, a vote for the losing candidate is a vote thrown away!
Yes, but a vote for Kerry is a vote for Kerry. Either way we're screwed.
On a more serious note, I'm always slightly amazed that people seem so eager and enthusiastic at voting for the lesser of two evils. Do they wake up on inauguration day thinking to themselves "Gee, things are only 92% as bad as they would have been if Dubya were still president!" ?
Americans have been bred and trained to be "asleep" for 8 generations or more. Ever wonder how the unions ever came to be? Lord forbid that they didn't exist, and someone was trying to unionize now... it would be impossible. I wondered, then I realized people 100 years ago were different than you and I. Back then, they had wills. Ours have been erased. Oh well, the unions were co-opted long ago, and are worthless.
This book (online ebook) deals with the situation from a different angle, and much of what he says pertaining to our own discussion is tangential to our own. Don't read it if you are depressed easily.
A gasoline powered flying robot, a helicopter of some sort. Have any electronics powered by some sort of small generator/dynamo running off the engine. Here's the cool part... have it with a sensor in the gas tank, so it knows when it is getting empty. Have a straw coming out the bottom that it can siphon with... then put up a big 50 gallon drum with a homing beacon for it to find. Wouldn't have to be really intelligent, just enough to keep from crashing into things, and to find its way home. Send it out all day buzzing the neighbors.
What a great idea!
Hello and greetings, exalted earthling!
Allow me to introduce myself, my name is unpronoucable without a tertiary lingual organ, but you may call me "Deebalgribblegribble". I worked in the Intergalactic Department of Gold and Platinum Mining. Recently due to several high profile political crisis, our agency has been on a footstring budget, and transporting these rare and expensive elements has been increasingly difficult.I am forced to take many risky shortcuts to move my quota of bullion each trimonth. One such shortcut would be Earth itself! If only we had a refueling outpost there. However, if you would allow me to land on your property (what a quaint notion, in the TibbleTak Empire, everyone owns their own Zik-class planet), I could surely leave behind a modest amount of gold, as much as 19,000 earth pounds. This would ocurr every 9.1 of your earth months. Of course, there is the matter of refueling, which may be difficult, though not impossible given your rapidly progressing technology. Having been referred to you by a close and mutual friend, I took the opportunity to set up an account with a subsidiary of your Dow Chemical company, which I have been assured is an esteemed banking institution. Our mutual friend promised that you would never pass up such an incredible opportunity, and so, if you transfer a negligible manufacturing fee to this bank, for the fuel I need to prepare this nefarious and dangerous navigation challenge, we could alter the path of the freigter fleet immediately. By this time next April month, you could be rich, and my transport schedule could be back to normal. Now, Even as close and mutual as our mutual friend is friendly, I could not trust such a plan on his personal assurances, so forgive me if I have take the opportunity to contact some of our friendly friends mutual other friends, to see whether they would be willing to assist in this very important endeavor. If they transfer the fee first, I will have no more gold or platinum to spare on this round of the transportation, and you may not be able to participate until May month of year 2005! So please, transfer this fee today, so that we may immediately begin to start planning this important plan. I will even arrange for some Alpha Reticulan sex slaves to be transported to your residence, the species with 19 vaginal orifices! Attached you will find a file indicating the proper routing and account numbers, and plans for building a proper landing zone for our saucers!
Thank you,
Deebalgribblegribble
Assistant Deputy Undersecretary Assistant of Intergalactic Gold and Platinum Mining Transportation
Thankfully, our government is supposed to work in such a way, that the right things happen even if unpopular. For instance, we can't all vote to strip you of your voting rights. Or at least, thats the theory.
Advocating that people "vote with dollars" is a bad idea. People can't win in those elections. Then again, they can't win in the one I'm advocating either.
It wasn't covered on CNN (think this was during the Scott Peterson bruhaha), but AOLTW bought the federal government, acquiring all of their assets, including the FCC. This wasn't their first purchase either, they were encouraged to do so by their profitable acquisitions of the governments of Belize, Argentina and Poland.
They sell naming rights to hurricanes, btw. Tropical storm Nokia just faded into nothing... talk about picking the wrong horse! So the natural disaster angle is out, too.
Luckily, there is no lack of mismanagement going on. So I'm confident that things will be back in order soon enough.
That critical part wouldn't happen to be the engine, would it? You know, the roughly cylindrical device that looks like a giant turd wrapped in tinfoil and then squashed slightly? A tinfoil-covered turd that just spins slowly, like it's roasting on a spit? I suppose that's there to turn the propeller. The engine that they stretch an entire episode around, where they treat it like it's some redneck's V8 in his 22 yr old Firebird, complete with airhead slut (who becomes the mechanic? Engineer? Scotty was an engineer, she's a monkey with a wrench.).
Josh Whedon's "great" space western is one part really bad scifi, one part bad western, with a pinch of bad acting. But to do it right, to make this movie the shitfest that it strives to be, Josh needs to think big. This movie needs George Lucas as CGI director, and Rick Berman as a scriptwriter or at least plot consultant.
What's worse than a rabid libertarian? An aynrandist. Ba-da-bump. Thank you folks, I'll be here all week.
I volunteer to help. I'll even bring the handcuffs, duct tape and a garbage bag.
SCOsource chief Chris Sontag, the SCO VP in charge of the company's hate-inducing IP push, claims TISC, which folded immediately after the spec was published, exceeded its rights even though both Novell and the old SCO - as well as Microsoft, IBM and Intel - were on the committee.
Sontag also says that any entities that ignore SCO's ELF copyrights are infringing. Such a claim is likely to put SCO on a war footing, if it isn't already, with the Free Software Foundation, whose GNU operating environment makes broad use of ELF.
How can they copyright a format? Each ELF formatted executable is distinct, and I believe that nothing other than a header too short to enjoy copyright protection is the same for any of them. No one, Torvalds included, has published the ELF specifications (the paper itself), which is the only thing that is copyrightable. It's like saying you copyrighted putting your right shoe on first, and then the second. It's dumb.
This is exactly the kind of attitude that makes it hard for me to have any sympathy for the pro-copyright faction.
It ignores the spirit of a law that admittedly has been stretched out of all proportion. In creating copyright to promote the public domain, it is the intention of it that everyone, everywhere can have it, should they wish. Temporary (or should I call them eternal?) restrictions on this fundamental human right exist only to serve as encouragement for those that create such products. Since these "copyright" owners refuse to sell him a copy, thereby refusing the encouragement they are meant to have, there is no reason to deprive this guy of it.
Do they put up a webpage saying "If you download impossible to find, but still copyrighted music, please send your credit card payment here.." ?
NO.
This guy, liar though he might be, talks as if they'd recieve fair compensation for it. But that would ruin their entire strategy, which is to undermine one of the more inspired ideas in our Constitution. Fuck them, fuck you.
Yes, if evolution progresses, they'll become an insurance company in less than 5 years.
It still applies, even more so than for consumer level connections. With the astronomically expensive hardware, they can multiplex what can only be described as simply insane amounts of bandwidth, with each year seeing yet another increase. Unless something changes drastically, it might be many years before the only way to increase bandwidth would be to light dark fiber, or lay more.
I contend that the level of abuse will be far greater and more pervasive with these systems. I contend that they will add little or no benefit. That it is possible is little excuse for turning the world into a fishbowl.
How someone can "abuse" a camera IN A PUBLIC PLACE is beyond me.
First, I'm not the one moderating, I just write them. So don't blame me for a +5.
Second, until the CCTV control room is in a public place, it's quite easy for me to imagine it being abused. And since you don't seem so technically savvy, I'll spell it out. These cameras will someday very soon, not be the grainy 1978 recorded by VHS security cameras you think of. They'll be digital, the security tapes will be a big terabyte array that will store this stuff forever. They'll not only introduce new software to mine the "data", they'll be able to use it on archived footage. So even if the software won't be developed for 30 years, the video footage they have of you now, will still be subject to that software. That CCTV control room won't be in public, mind you, so when the monitoring technician decides to code up that nose-picking search, you won't consider that abuse? That's the least malevolent abuse I can come up with, and it's still slightly disturbing.
I'm not likely to need one of these cameras, and the "an innocent man has nothing to hide bit" is just sick.
Don't take the number out of it's context, even if it was tongue in cheek. It included quite a few other conditionals.
Securing a conviction isn't "catching" the criminal either. But distant grainy video that shows few if any facial details can't convict by itself, and assuming other evidence, probably isn't necessary. Last thing I want is for the police to contrive the case against someone who is innocent of trashing my place, even if they are the kind of asshole who might have done the deed given the chance or whim.
75 new police officers would cost more, I'd think... but I'll take you up on this hypothetical. I would gladly welcome the extra police officers. Those police officers will likely notice real crimes (not to mention be able to respond to them almost immediately), but not notice very many of those details (that aren't crimes themselves) that could be abused down the road. Their memories wouldn't be archived forever, and subject to some fancy SQL search. The people who would search the video footage, would be forced to ask live human beings, and leave some sort of trail.
In short, the police officers might be abusable (or even the abusers) themselves, but there are limiting factors here, it is manageable. Can one of these officers invade someone's privacy, even in public? Maybe, but they can be reprimanded or even fired. You have a chance to *notice* if they go to far. Can the camera be reprimanded or fired, and how likely are you to notice if it aims at a bedroom window and the lens zooms?
Hardly. It's more a matter of whether or not the low end apartment prices have went up significantly in the few years that I've had cause to worry about them.
And $13 is too high. If you want something to troll about, go find another topic.
Assuming that I'm right with my figures, $11 an hour means about $120 a month that doesn't get allocated to the necessities. Save it, blow it, hire hookers... but I took living wage to mean no spending money.
Or maybe I'm wrong and $11 leaves with nothing other than the basics. So what? I'm pretty close to the correct number, even if it's not exact.
In 2001, I was working in Chicago. Many of the McDonalds there were using a robot drink dispenser. As soon as an order was keyed in, a rotating platform would have a cup dropped onto it, where the thing would rotate the cup underneath the correct fountain and dispense the drink, to be rotated again for a lid to be popped onto it. Was interesting how it would react to multiple drinks when they weren't all the same flavor. It would put all 4 cups down, then rotate back and forth so that the flavors were in the order keyed in, presumably so that stupid wageslaves wouldn't get them mixed up when handing to customers. Seemed like it would be rather reliable to me.
And practically all of the stores I've been to have the french fry basket dispensers. Seems a small step to have the thing drop the baskets into the fryers.
I do agree about the burgers, which seem more difficult, but what about the rest of a fast food joint? Many of the tasks, including "building" the sandwiches seem easily within the realm of automation.
Varies from city to city, but in Richmond, VA USA, for a single person it has to be at least $10 an hour. Even that will only get you a shitty apartment, groceries and gas money. I'd hate to think what a living wage would be in a real city like NYC, Chicago or LA.
BTW, my figures are with my own tax with-holding and assume you already own a car. If you had to buy even a used one, I don't think that $10ph is enough. And without a car, you'd be unable to get all but the worst kinds of shitty minimum wage jobs.