It's fairly well known that the cores of iOS and OS X (no slash, please!:-) ) are the same. That's not really the issue here—it's the problems with the differences between the optimal UI for a keyboard-and-mouse-based (or whatever pointing device you prefer) interface and the optimal UI for a touch-based interface.
But while I agree that it would be foolish to try to make a hybridized OS, I could see there being a device that works both ways, a few years from now, by being an iOS device when it's on its own, but when plugged into a special dock, it would become, essentially, the CPU for a monitor, keyboard, and mouse/trackpad/whatever that you have plugged into said dock...and the OS that displayed on that monitor would be OS X, not iOS.
Then you'd easily be able to access all the same documents, media, bookmarks, etc without even needing to sync them through iCloud, because they'd all literally be right on the device.
Now, I don't insist on this prediction by any means. I do think it would be a believable way to do some kind of convergence without the (IMNSHO) ugly compromises required of a convertible device like the Surface, though, and rather cool to boot.
How could you let this thing happen in your religion? How can you be a member in the same club as these fuckers?
I'm not sure that either of those is actually a fair question to ask anyone.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine that there were several groups of militant atheists out bombing churches, mosques, and synagogues around the world, claiming that they were doing it because they were atheists, and all religious people needed to drop their delusions or die. How would you justify being "a member in the same club" as people like that? How would you answer, "How could you let this thing happen in your group?"
The former question is assuming that just because they happen to share some relatively broad affiliation (and yeah, "Muslim" is a truly absurdly broad affiliation; there are more Muslims than there are Chinese people in the world), they can somehow prevent these people from doing terrible things and claiming they're doing it in the name of that affiliation.
The second is assuming that because these things are being done by what are, if you do the numbers, really quite tiny splinter groups of the main affiliation, that all 1.6+ billion other Muslims would renounce their religion and...I dunno, turn atheist?
Basically, what, exactly, is it that you expect the 90+% of all Muslims who don't know any Islamist terrorists, and don't know anyone who knows one, to do about this that you or I couldn't do just as easily?
But what would be the incentive at that point to earn $1M or more per year?
Flip that around: What's the justification for anyone making more than $1 million per year? At least when there's a large percentage of the population attempting to subsist on jobs that pay less than $20,000 per year.
No one in their right mind would want a salary or CG or anything in income that would put them in the $1M+ category--that's just signing up for 100% confiscation. So instead of getting $600B more in taxes, you lose $300B, because all those people will rig their incomes to be $999,999 or less, so there won't be anyone paying that tax.
So, what, you think that money's just going to vanish into thin air?
If the owners of a company are looking at a 100% taxation on incomes over $1 million per year going into effect in the near future, they're not just going to take the money that they would have spent on those salaries and burn it. Some of it they'll just stash, but I bet you that any business owner worth his salt is going to try to grow the business. Hire more staff, add more production, try to grab more market share. Because even though they might not be able to increase the amount of tokens they walk away with at the end of the year beyond what they're going to make this year, they're still going to be competitively-minded. They'll still want to "win", and if they can't stack their tokens higher, then they'll want to increase the size of their empire, or the number of people who say they prefer their brand.
And when they're spending the extra several million dollars on salaries for more people, that generates more payroll taxes, and when they spend it on equipment, that generates more sales taxes, and when they spend it on improving their infrastructure, that increases property value and thus generates more property taxes...so the government's going to be getting more money out of them one way or another.
Unless they just decide they want to cut off their own noses to spite their faces, and just stash the money somewhere. Then they're not giving the government more, but they're also not gaining as much for themselves as they could be.
This is a linchpin of your entire argument, and I do not believe it stands up to basic scrutiny.
First of all, I don't think anyone's proposing a basic income that would put someone who does not work for a living at a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Particularly in its early stages, I would expect such a provision to net you about what you'd get working full-time for minimum wage—which, right now, is somewhere between $15k and $20k per year.
I dunno about you, but if that were my "basic income," I'd still feel a need to work for a living. It would be a huge relief to know that I had that safety net—that if I lost my job, I'd still have that much guaranteed to me—but I would have no desire to rely upon it as my sole source of income.
Second of all, even if the basic income amount were enough for you to live at a level you were content with (and note that that would have to include any discretionary spending you wanted to indulge in, like travel), I know a lot of people who would just never be happy without some kind of meaningful work to do. Sitting at home doing housework, watching TV, or surfing the web would get old for some of them within a month or two, for others no more than a few days.
Third, one thing that prevents a lot of people from getting work is the fact that they don't have enough money to, for instance, own a car to commute in. Basic income would go a long way to ending homelessness, and allow people who want to get jobs, but can't get together enough money to look presentable for a job interview, or even travel to a job interview, to do so.
Beyond these basic points, it's also important to consider the ways in which basic income would change the shape of employment. Liquidity in the labor market would skyrocket, for one thing. If the consequence of quitting your job because you hate it, or standing up to an abusive or negligent employer, is no longer "homeless within 6 months, dead within a year", a lot more people are going to be willing to do that. This shifts the balance of power hugely away from employers and toward employees, compared to where it is now—especially when you consider that there will, in all likelihood, be a fair number of people who do voluntarily leave the workforce entirely to live on basic income. Furthermore, part-time work starts to look significantly better when you don't really need the money that working an extra hour or three a day gets you. So not only are you much more likely to get a job that you actually like (assuming you're bright enough to have gained the skills to do such a job), you get to have more leisure time to do the other things that you really enjoy. And if you don't care about making most people's lives better...then just consider that there are probably a dozen other ways in which the fundamental shape of things will be changed by implementing a meaningful basic income, so assuming that it would be impossible to pay for because "no one would work if they got paid for living" is just lazy and unsupportable.
In the end, it's quite possible that basic income would provide a net boost to the number of people employed, and nearly certain that it would provide a net boost to productivity.
Not when it first appeared, whereupon it was fully expanded and took up the entire front page. And also had red instead of the usual green trim.
AFAIK, the red just means you're seeing it when it's barely past preview status—many stories show up on my feed that way for a few minutes, then after the next auto-refresh, go to green.
I believe it's a more common thing for subscribers to see, as a sort of "early access" type of deal, but since I've never subscribed, I can't say for sure;-)
Maybe because some money is better than no money. Foreign companies likely don't think the way US companies do: these days in the US, if a large company can't be #1 or #2, with an insanely-huge profit margin, they just throw in the towel and go chase after something else (usually failing, whereas they would have made a lot more money just sticking in there and making lower profits as #3, #4, or #5). In other countries, they don't always have this mentality. What's wrong with being #5 and making a small profit while your employees have good jobs and your executives have handsome salaries? Maybe the shareholders won't like it as much, but who cares; if you're a large enough company, you shouldn't need outside investment anyway.
Also, these other companies could be taking the long-term view: it's better for them to hang around and outlast the others, and wait for them to make a misstep, or for people to get sick of their high prices.
I'm not criticizing the idea of being further down the chart than #2. I actually think that's a very healthy thing to have—which is why I think the way things currently operate is a bit skewed. Because when you think about a chart with #1-5 on it, you generally think that maybe #2 is, say, 20% less in profit than #1, and then #3 is around 20% less than #2, and so on. But that isn't what we're seeing with the smartphone market right now: #1 has something like 80-85% of the profit, #2 has 14-19%, #3-5 share the last %, and everyone else (and there's a bunch of them) are losing money.
It just seems to me that there is, in fact, a market for a smartphone that costs somewhat more, but is well-designed, robust, and (though I personally am fond of their products) not Apple. (And not Samsung, either.)
And again, I'm not intending to express strong criticism of the commodity phone makers here—really more a sense of bafflement that there's essentially no one filling that space and making a profit by doing so.
The article does mention, toward the end, the common problem all of these low-cost handset makers have: ZTE has expanded its US marketshare by 50%, but only seen its revenue increase by 4%.
Apple is making plenty of money on smartphones. Samsung is making some money on smartphones. Everyone else is either barely scraping by, or losing money on the category.
Really makes you wonder why they do it sometimes...and why none of the other smartphone makers even seem to be trying to crack the actually-making-money part of the market.
Is this true even if your IP address isn't associated with a valid pay TV subscription?
Seems to be for me. I haven't had a cable TV subscription for nearly 4 years now (since I last moved), and I've barely missed an episode.
You can even watch it without ads with Adblock in Chrome, or by downloading it with youtube-dl. (I'm sure there are other ways that work, too; those are just the ones I've used successfully.)
Just goes to show that as much as big companies and wealthy individuals would like to change that—and have been trying very hard over the past few decades to do so—profit is still not, in fact, more important than free speech. Or the Constitution, or people's lives.
Let's just hope we do see more cases like this. Laws like that are a terrible perversion of the American legislative system.
No one wants to hear it, but we're healthiest eating raw vegetables, fruits, and nuts/seeds/legumes as well.
It's not that no one wants to hear it, it's that it's crap.
Sure, those things are generally healthy for us to eat, but different people's bodies need different nutrients, based on everything from what their evolutionary heritage is to what their gut flora are like to the kind of work they do all day. Some people need significant amounts of meat in their diets. Others need a lot of rice.
There is no One True Diet that's perfect for everyone and will solve all people's health and weight problems, and the sooner the world realizes this, the better off we'll all be.
Everything bumps but CS and IT, for some reason, have refused to do that.
I think a lot of it is due to something I was observing just the other day: Americans, by and large, seem to feel that the way things are now (or were at some idealized point in the past 50 years) is The Way It Was Meant To Be—not just a good way, but the divinely-intended end result of all of history. Thus, changing things from that point is not only a bad idea, but to some extent, impossible. It's just not something that their brains can even conceive of.
Unless, of course, the things you're changing are in an attempt to bring about the End Times. Then it's totally allowed.
(Though this statement of the problem does make heavy reference to believing in a divine plan, I've seen the same sort of mentality in people who weren't particularly religious. They just still couldn't wrap their brains around the idea that the way things are wasn't the way things would/should be forever.)
You are starting to see alot of talk of tiny homes, downsizing, and even nomadic lifestyles.
That's not something that's happening in a vacuum. An awful lot of that sort of movement is arising precisely because profits from increased productivity are not, in fact, "trickling down" to regular people—particularly since the 2008 recession, but it's a trend that's held true since the late 1970s.
Create a bunch of good jobs, increase working wages (as opposed to executive compensation and "investment" income) across the board, and I guarantee you'd see those movements shrink significantly.
and I'll say it again - technology INCREASES jobs, never decreases it - over the long term. Over the short term it can make certain skills worthless, putting some people out of work, but that's it.
If your position is correct, the number of jobs in Agriculture has increased over the long term.
So, for instance, the number of people working on farms has increased over the last century or so.
Yes?
That would only be true if he had said that technology increases jobs in every field—or, perhaps more pertinently, increases jobs in proportion to their current distribution.
He didn't. He just said that it increased jobs overall—that is, if there were 950 farm jobs and 50 office jobs before a particular technological advance, maybe there are 1450 office jobs and 50 farm jobs after. Significant increase in total jobs, even though people who can only do farm work got the shaft.
Now, perhaps his point could be debatable, but it doesn't mean anything remotely like what you've said here.
Thanks for clarifying, but isn't that precisely what an asshole would say?
The problem is, most people—no matter how big an asshole they are—don't actually believe they're assholes. And almost nobody likes being called an asshole, or admitting it, even if they believe they are one.
Men face problems too. White people do. Rich people do. Everybody does.
The whole meme about privilege is just utter fucking bullshit and anybody that pretends it's real is just a cunt that needs educating.
Of course men face problems, and everyone faces problems. Can you actually read the post you're replying to?
Why is it a problem that men enjoy privileges (read: don't face problems that women do)?
(Emphasis added) That's what privilege is: it's not having problems that other groups do because you're not a member of that group.
If you think privilege isn't real, that doesn't prove you're a big strong man. It proves you're a bloody idiot who hasn't a clue about history or current events. Given the way you talk about it, it seems to also prove that you're a self-centered misogynistic bastard who's scared that with the rise of equality and greater awareness of the problems of sexism and, yes, male privilege, society will start to turn against you because you're unwilling to leave behind your bigotry and actually try being a real human being.
That's where not being a leftist comes in handy. I get paid well, and don't have to feel guilty about it, nor about wanting more. And I can walk past the beggars in the subway faking disabilities or telling some sort of bogus sob story and feel nothing more than mild irritation.
There are simple arrangements of sales that emulate rent in that capacity (a "rental shop" would sell above market price on long installment terms, and buy back below market price in one lump sum). The same kind of arrangement would also be fine for land, and would serve the functions where people actually want "rental" housing, while automatically becoming more like a sale for people who really just wanted a sale in the first place (or who just find themselves renting for so long that they might as well have just bought one... and it turns out, they technically did, and eventually it's paid of and done).
Ah, OK. Putting it on a long installment plan does makes it work.
Alice gives Bob some stuff. In exchange Bob gives Alice a thing. Then Alice has to give back the thing, and Bob gets to keep the stuff. Bob has profited at Alice's expense; Alice lost some stuff, and didn't get any thing for it. Why the hell would Alice put up with this? Because she has no choice; Bob has the thing that Alice needs to survive, so she either gives up her stuff and accepts the loss in order to buy herself a little more time, or she dies. (Or gives up the stuff to Charles instead, or Doug, etc, but same difference there).
It's not quite literal theft, but it's close enough.
As a somewhat ancillary point, how do you feel about renting things other than land? For instance, a pressure washer? I have absolutely no desire to own a pressure washer for good; I might need one once every 2-3 years, if that, and it's ridiculously inefficient for everyone who needs one once every 2-3 years to own one. So when I need one, I go down to the local hardware store, which has a couple that it rents out, pay them something like $20 for an hour of its use, and then give it back when I'm done.
I've gained nothing tangible from that save the use of the pressure washer (and the products of my labour with it—to wit, a clean deck/house/whatever). In the absence of the ability to rent, presumably if I wanted such a thing, I would have to either pay the full purchase price of the pressure washer with the understanding that I would be paid back almost all of it when I returned it—which ends up amounting to exactly the same thing, with the added burden of needing to have enough money to purchase a big-ticket item like that—or I would have to pay significantly more for an actual person from the hardware store to bring the pressure washer and use it to wash my deck/house/whatever, in which case I'm paying for a service.
So what's your thought on that sort of rent, and how does it—or does it not—differ fundamentally from renting land?
In the Victorian era, pink was considered a color for boys—it was a lighter version of red, which was considered a very masculine color.
There's absolutely nothing biological about the current trend of girls liking pink. It's entirely a product of our culture, which says "girls should like pink."
Similarly, any research that shows differences in job or academic field preferences by gender had damn well better show some kind of controlling for cultural factors, or it's got absolutely no value in showing what girls "naturally" like.
Dan Aris
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
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FDA Bans Trans Fat
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I think I see where you're coming from better now, though I'm not entirely sure I agree:-)
Part of what I'm not sure about is that you seem to be positing a singularity of will—of thought, intent, and desire—that I think is an oversimplification of how humans actually operate.
I think that what you're saying is that a "moral decision" is a decision that you make to do what you believe is best in the circumstances, according to whatever heuristic you're using for "best"—whether that's "it will make me happiest," "it will bring the greatest good to the greatest number," or "it will make the people I care about happy (even if it makes my life more difficult)". (As an aside, I would dispute that definition of a "moral decision," but I think that's getting into semantics, rather than the actual issue of free will.)
What, then, do you do when, within your own decision-making process, whatever you want to call it, there are two or more heuristics weighted close enough to the same as to be effectively indistinguishable? "I really, really want this, but taking it would be bad, and I want to be a good person" would be a nice, (possibly deceptively) simple example. In such a case, the selfish heuristic, "what will make me happiest right now," is in conflict with (for the sake of argument) a genuine desire to be good, as society defines good. So, if I'm understanding your argument correctly, even though both desires and intentions are strong and clearly formed, the person's decision would not be highly predictable.
On a separate note, I am interested in the characterization of people who let the judgment of others strongly guide their actions as lacking (strong) free will of their own. I can actually think of two people I know personally for whom that's true, though they're very different in nature. One has an almost slavish devotion to her particular idea of religion, even though I'm fairly sure that she doesn't actually like doing most of what she feels she's supposed to do—and if she allowed herself to really think about it, she's certainly got enough critical thinking faculties that she'd see that the specific things she feels are required of her make little sense, even within the context of the stated doctrine of her church. But thinking about it, questioning it, is one of the things she's not allowed to do, so she doesn't. The other person is strongly driven to please his significant other, and I see him frequently tell her that she should make a decision—and he's genuinely fine with the decisions she makes either way. He's just an easygoing person who enjoys doing a lot of different kinds of things, and is happy to leave that decision-making to her when she's got a firm opinion and he doesn't.
So while I suspect that you would say that both of these people similarly lack strong free will, I feel that labeling them in the same way is unnecessarily—and perhaps even unhelpfully—reductionist. In this case, one feels that she has an unshakable obligation to follow certain rules in her life—and is unhappy even while fulfilling it—while the other has made a conscious decision to put another's happiness first—and that makes him happy. So, in the end, while this has been somewhat rambling, perhaps I'm coming back around to the same argument as before—that human brains and their decision-making processes are more complex than your definitions can account for.
Slashdot Mirror
It's fairly well known that the cores of iOS and OS X (no slash, please! :-) ) are the same. That's not really the issue here—it's the problems with the differences between the optimal UI for a keyboard-and-mouse-based (or whatever pointing device you prefer) interface and the optimal UI for a touch-based interface.
But while I agree that it would be foolish to try to make a hybridized OS, I could see there being a device that works both ways, a few years from now, by being an iOS device when it's on its own, but when plugged into a special dock, it would become, essentially, the CPU for a monitor, keyboard, and mouse/trackpad/whatever that you have plugged into said dock...and the OS that displayed on that monitor would be OS X, not iOS.
Then you'd easily be able to access all the same documents, media, bookmarks, etc without even needing to sync them through iCloud, because they'd all literally be right on the device.
Now, I don't insist on this prediction by any means. I do think it would be a believable way to do some kind of convergence without the (IMNSHO) ugly compromises required of a convertible device like the Surface, though, and rather cool to boot.
Dan Aris
How could you let this thing happen in your religion? How can you be a member in the same club as these fuckers?
I'm not sure that either of those is actually a fair question to ask anyone.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine that there were several groups of militant atheists out bombing churches, mosques, and synagogues around the world, claiming that they were doing it because they were atheists, and all religious people needed to drop their delusions or die. How would you justify being "a member in the same club" as people like that? How would you answer, "How could you let this thing happen in your group?"
The former question is assuming that just because they happen to share some relatively broad affiliation (and yeah, "Muslim" is a truly absurdly broad affiliation; there are more Muslims than there are Chinese people in the world), they can somehow prevent these people from doing terrible things and claiming they're doing it in the name of that affiliation.
The second is assuming that because these things are being done by what are, if you do the numbers, really quite tiny splinter groups of the main affiliation, that all 1.6+ billion other Muslims would renounce their religion and...I dunno, turn atheist?
Basically, what, exactly, is it that you expect the 90+% of all Muslims who don't know any Islamist terrorists, and don't know anyone who knows one, to do about this that you or I couldn't do just as easily?
Dan Aris
But what would be the incentive at that point to earn $1M or more per year?
Flip that around: What's the justification for anyone making more than $1 million per year? At least when there's a large percentage of the population attempting to subsist on jobs that pay less than $20,000 per year.
No one in their right mind would want a salary or CG or anything in income that would put them in the $1M+ category--that's just signing up for 100% confiscation. So instead of getting $600B more in taxes, you lose $300B, because all those people will rig their incomes to be $999,999 or less, so there won't be anyone paying that tax.
So, what, you think that money's just going to vanish into thin air?
If the owners of a company are looking at a 100% taxation on incomes over $1 million per year going into effect in the near future, they're not just going to take the money that they would have spent on those salaries and burn it. Some of it they'll just stash, but I bet you that any business owner worth his salt is going to try to grow the business. Hire more staff, add more production, try to grab more market share. Because even though they might not be able to increase the amount of tokens they walk away with at the end of the year beyond what they're going to make this year, they're still going to be competitively-minded. They'll still want to "win", and if they can't stack their tokens higher, then they'll want to increase the size of their empire, or the number of people who say they prefer their brand.
And when they're spending the extra several million dollars on salaries for more people, that generates more payroll taxes, and when they spend it on equipment, that generates more sales taxes, and when they spend it on improving their infrastructure, that increases property value and thus generates more property taxes...so the government's going to be getting more money out of them one way or another.
Unless they just decide they want to cut off their own noses to spite their faces, and just stash the money somewhere. Then they're not giving the government more, but they're also not gaining as much for themselves as they could be.
Dan Aris
(why work if you can get money for free?)
This is a linchpin of your entire argument, and I do not believe it stands up to basic scrutiny.
First of all, I don't think anyone's proposing a basic income that would put someone who does not work for a living at a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. Particularly in its early stages, I would expect such a provision to net you about what you'd get working full-time for minimum wage—which, right now, is somewhere between $15k and $20k per year.
I dunno about you, but if that were my "basic income," I'd still feel a need to work for a living. It would be a huge relief to know that I had that safety net—that if I lost my job, I'd still have that much guaranteed to me—but I would have no desire to rely upon it as my sole source of income.
Second of all, even if the basic income amount were enough for you to live at a level you were content with (and note that that would have to include any discretionary spending you wanted to indulge in, like travel), I know a lot of people who would just never be happy without some kind of meaningful work to do. Sitting at home doing housework, watching TV, or surfing the web would get old for some of them within a month or two, for others no more than a few days.
Third, one thing that prevents a lot of people from getting work is the fact that they don't have enough money to, for instance, own a car to commute in. Basic income would go a long way to ending homelessness, and allow people who want to get jobs, but can't get together enough money to look presentable for a job interview, or even travel to a job interview, to do so.
Beyond these basic points, it's also important to consider the ways in which basic income would change the shape of employment. Liquidity in the labor market would skyrocket, for one thing. If the consequence of quitting your job because you hate it, or standing up to an abusive or negligent employer, is no longer "homeless within 6 months, dead within a year", a lot more people are going to be willing to do that. This shifts the balance of power hugely away from employers and toward employees, compared to where it is now—especially when you consider that there will, in all likelihood, be a fair number of people who do voluntarily leave the workforce entirely to live on basic income. Furthermore, part-time work starts to look significantly better when you don't really need the money that working an extra hour or three a day gets you. So not only are you much more likely to get a job that you actually like (assuming you're bright enough to have gained the skills to do such a job), you get to have more leisure time to do the other things that you really enjoy. And if you don't care about making most people's lives better...then just consider that there are probably a dozen other ways in which the fundamental shape of things will be changed by implementing a meaningful basic income, so assuming that it would be impossible to pay for because "no one would work if they got paid for living" is just lazy and unsupportable.
In the end, it's quite possible that basic income would provide a net boost to the number of people employed, and nearly certain that it would provide a net boost to productivity.
Dan Aris
Not when it first appeared, whereupon it was fully expanded and took up the entire front page. And also had red instead of the usual green trim.
AFAIK, the red just means you're seeing it when it's barely past preview status—many stories show up on my feed that way for a few minutes, then after the next auto-refresh, go to green.
I believe it's a more common thing for subscribers to see, as a sort of "early access" type of deal, but since I've never subscribed, I can't say for sure ;-)
Dan Aris
Like it's news that the TPP is a terrible, terrible treaty and needs to be stopped.
This is just one more reason we need to make quite sure that there's bipartisan opposition to this.
Dan Aris
They make "more than 100%" of the net profits?
I don't think that's possible.
Yes, it is, because, as I mentioned, many of the other manufacturers are losing money. Thus, their share of the profit in the market is negative.
Dan Aris
Maybe because some money is better than no money. Foreign companies likely don't think the way US companies do: these days in the US, if a large company can't be #1 or #2, with an insanely-huge profit margin, they just throw in the towel and go chase after something else (usually failing, whereas they would have made a lot more money just sticking in there and making lower profits as #3, #4, or #5). In other countries, they don't always have this mentality. What's wrong with being #5 and making a small profit while your employees have good jobs and your executives have handsome salaries? Maybe the shareholders won't like it as much, but who cares; if you're a large enough company, you shouldn't need outside investment anyway.
Also, these other companies could be taking the long-term view: it's better for them to hang around and outlast the others, and wait for them to make a misstep, or for people to get sick of their high prices.
I'm not criticizing the idea of being further down the chart than #2. I actually think that's a very healthy thing to have—which is why I think the way things currently operate is a bit skewed. Because when you think about a chart with #1-5 on it, you generally think that maybe #2 is, say, 20% less in profit than #1, and then #3 is around 20% less than #2, and so on. But that isn't what we're seeing with the smartphone market right now: #1 has something like 80-85% of the profit, #2 has 14-19%, #3-5 share the last %, and everyone else (and there's a bunch of them) are losing money.
It just seems to me that there is, in fact, a market for a smartphone that costs somewhat more, but is well-designed, robust, and (though I personally am fond of their products) not Apple. (And not Samsung, either.)
And again, I'm not intending to express strong criticism of the commodity phone makers here—really more a sense of bafflement that there's essentially no one filling that space and making a profit by doing so.
Dan Aris
The article does mention, toward the end, the common problem all of these low-cost handset makers have: ZTE has expanded its US marketshare by 50%, but only seen its revenue increase by 4%.
Apple is making plenty of money on smartphones. Samsung is making some money on smartphones. Everyone else is either barely scraping by, or losing money on the category.
Really makes you wonder why they do it sometimes...and why none of the other smartphone makers even seem to be trying to crack the actually-making-money part of the market.
Dan Aris
Is this true even if your IP address isn't associated with a valid pay TV subscription?
Seems to be for me. I haven't had a cable TV subscription for nearly 4 years now (since I last moved), and I've barely missed an episode.
You can even watch it without ads with Adblock in Chrome, or by downloading it with youtube-dl. (I'm sure there are other ways that work, too; those are just the ones I've used successfully.)
Dan Aris
Perhaps Trevor Noah will justify my subscription.
You know The Daily Show is available for free from its website, right?
Dan Aris
Just goes to show that as much as big companies and wealthy individuals would like to change that—and have been trying very hard over the past few decades to do so—profit is still not, in fact, more important than free speech. Or the Constitution, or people's lives.
Let's just hope we do see more cases like this. Laws like that are a terrible perversion of the American legislative system.
Dan Aris
No one wants to hear it, but we're healthiest eating raw vegetables, fruits, and nuts/seeds/legumes as well.
It's not that no one wants to hear it, it's that it's crap.
Sure, those things are generally healthy for us to eat, but different people's bodies need different nutrients, based on everything from what their evolutionary heritage is to what their gut flora are like to the kind of work they do all day. Some people need significant amounts of meat in their diets. Others need a lot of rice.
There is no One True Diet that's perfect for everyone and will solve all people's health and weight problems, and the sooner the world realizes this, the better off we'll all be.
Dan Aris
Everything bumps but CS and IT, for some reason, have refused to do that.
I think a lot of it is due to something I was observing just the other day: Americans, by and large, seem to feel that the way things are now (or were at some idealized point in the past 50 years) is The Way It Was Meant To Be—not just a good way, but the divinely-intended end result of all of history. Thus, changing things from that point is not only a bad idea, but to some extent, impossible. It's just not something that their brains can even conceive of.
Unless, of course, the things you're changing are in an attempt to bring about the End Times. Then it's totally allowed.
(Though this statement of the problem does make heavy reference to believing in a divine plan, I've seen the same sort of mentality in people who weren't particularly religious. They just still couldn't wrap their brains around the idea that the way things are wasn't the way things would/should be forever.)
Dan Aris
I disagree. No True Scotsman suggests an ad-hoc modification to support a previously inadequate assertion.
So what you're saying is, "That's no true No True Scotsman fallacy!"
;-)
Dan Aris
You are starting to see alot of talk of tiny homes, downsizing, and even nomadic lifestyles.
That's not something that's happening in a vacuum. An awful lot of that sort of movement is arising precisely because profits from increased productivity are not, in fact, "trickling down" to regular people—particularly since the 2008 recession, but it's a trend that's held true since the late 1970s.
Create a bunch of good jobs, increase working wages (as opposed to executive compensation and "investment" income) across the board, and I guarantee you'd see those movements shrink significantly.
Dan Aris
and I'll say it again - technology INCREASES jobs, never decreases it - over the long term. Over the short term it can make certain skills worthless, putting some people out of work, but that's it.
If your position is correct, the number of jobs in Agriculture has increased over the long term.
So, for instance, the number of people working on farms has increased over the last century or so.
Yes?
That would only be true if he had said that technology increases jobs in every field—or, perhaps more pertinently, increases jobs in proportion to their current distribution.
He didn't. He just said that it increased jobs overall—that is, if there were 950 farm jobs and 50 office jobs before a particular technological advance, maybe there are 1450 office jobs and 50 farm jobs after. Significant increase in total jobs, even though people who can only do farm work got the shaft.
Now, perhaps his point could be debatable, but it doesn't mean anything remotely like what you've said here.
Dan Aris
Hate? I'm not the one vehemently claiming that male privilege doesn't exist and using words designed specifically to demean women.
Dan Aris
Thanks for clarifying, but isn't that precisely what an asshole would say?
The problem is, most people—no matter how big an asshole they are—don't actually believe they're assholes. And almost nobody likes being called an asshole, or admitting it, even if they believe they are one.
Dan Aris
. It's not a problem that men don't face problems
No, it's a fucking lie.
Men face problems too. White people do. Rich people do. Everybody does.
The whole meme about privilege is just utter fucking bullshit and anybody that pretends it's real is just a cunt that needs educating.
Of course men face problems, and everyone faces problems. Can you actually read the post you're replying to?
Why is it a problem that men enjoy privileges (read: don't face problems that women do)?
(Emphasis added) That's what privilege is: it's not having problems that other groups do because you're not a member of that group.
If you think privilege isn't real, that doesn't prove you're a big strong man. It proves you're a bloody idiot who hasn't a clue about history or current events. Given the way you talk about it, it seems to also prove that you're a self-centered misogynistic bastard who's scared that with the rise of equality and greater awareness of the problems of sexism and, yes, male privilege, society will start to turn against you because you're unwilling to leave behind your bigotry and actually try being a real human being.
Dan Aris
That's where not being a leftist comes in handy. I get paid well, and don't have to feel guilty about it, nor about wanting more. And I can walk past the beggars in the subway faking disabilities or telling some sort of bogus sob story and feel nothing more than mild irritation.
s/leftist/uncaring, selfish bastard/
Dan Aris
There are simple arrangements of sales that emulate rent in that capacity (a "rental shop" would sell above market price on long installment terms, and buy back below market price in one lump sum). The same kind of arrangement would also be fine for land, and would serve the functions where people actually want "rental" housing, while automatically becoming more like a sale for people who really just wanted a sale in the first place (or who just find themselves renting for so long that they might as well have just bought one... and it turns out, they technically did, and eventually it's paid of and done).
Ah, OK. Putting it on a long installment plan does makes it work.
Dan Aris
Alice gives Bob some stuff. In exchange Bob gives Alice a thing. Then Alice has to give back the thing, and Bob gets to keep the stuff. Bob has profited at Alice's expense; Alice lost some stuff, and didn't get any thing for it. Why the hell would Alice put up with this? Because she has no choice; Bob has the thing that Alice needs to survive, so she either gives up her stuff and accepts the loss in order to buy herself a little more time, or she dies. (Or gives up the stuff to Charles instead, or Doug, etc, but same difference there).
It's not quite literal theft, but it's close enough.
As a somewhat ancillary point, how do you feel about renting things other than land? For instance, a pressure washer? I have absolutely no desire to own a pressure washer for good; I might need one once every 2-3 years, if that, and it's ridiculously inefficient for everyone who needs one once every 2-3 years to own one. So when I need one, I go down to the local hardware store, which has a couple that it rents out, pay them something like $20 for an hour of its use, and then give it back when I'm done.
I've gained nothing tangible from that save the use of the pressure washer (and the products of my labour with it—to wit, a clean deck/house/whatever). In the absence of the ability to rent, presumably if I wanted such a thing, I would have to either pay the full purchase price of the pressure washer with the understanding that I would be paid back almost all of it when I returned it—which ends up amounting to exactly the same thing, with the added burden of needing to have enough money to purchase a big-ticket item like that—or I would have to pay significantly more for an actual person from the hardware store to bring the pressure washer and use it to wash my deck/house/whatever, in which case I'm paying for a service.
So what's your thought on that sort of rent, and how does it—or does it not—differ fundamentally from renting land?
Dan Aris
In the Victorian era, pink was considered a color for boys—it was a lighter version of red, which was considered a very masculine color.
There's absolutely nothing biological about the current trend of girls liking pink. It's entirely a product of our culture, which says "girls should like pink."
Similarly, any research that shows differences in job or academic field preferences by gender had damn well better show some kind of controlling for cultural factors, or it's got absolutely no value in showing what girls "naturally" like.
Dan Aris
I think I see where you're coming from better now, though I'm not entirely sure I agree :-)
Part of what I'm not sure about is that you seem to be positing a singularity of will—of thought, intent, and desire—that I think is an oversimplification of how humans actually operate.
I think that what you're saying is that a "moral decision" is a decision that you make to do what you believe is best in the circumstances, according to whatever heuristic you're using for "best"—whether that's "it will make me happiest," "it will bring the greatest good to the greatest number," or "it will make the people I care about happy (even if it makes my life more difficult)". (As an aside, I would dispute that definition of a "moral decision," but I think that's getting into semantics, rather than the actual issue of free will.)
What, then, do you do when, within your own decision-making process, whatever you want to call it, there are two or more heuristics weighted close enough to the same as to be effectively indistinguishable? "I really, really want this, but taking it would be bad, and I want to be a good person" would be a nice, (possibly deceptively) simple example. In such a case, the selfish heuristic, "what will make me happiest right now," is in conflict with (for the sake of argument) a genuine desire to be good, as society defines good. So, if I'm understanding your argument correctly, even though both desires and intentions are strong and clearly formed, the person's decision would not be highly predictable.
On a separate note, I am interested in the characterization of people who let the judgment of others strongly guide their actions as lacking (strong) free will of their own. I can actually think of two people I know personally for whom that's true, though they're very different in nature. One has an almost slavish devotion to her particular idea of religion, even though I'm fairly sure that she doesn't actually like doing most of what she feels she's supposed to do—and if she allowed herself to really think about it, she's certainly got enough critical thinking faculties that she'd see that the specific things she feels are required of her make little sense, even within the context of the stated doctrine of her church. But thinking about it, questioning it, is one of the things she's not allowed to do, so she doesn't. The other person is strongly driven to please his significant other, and I see him frequently tell her that she should make a decision—and he's genuinely fine with the decisions she makes either way. He's just an easygoing person who enjoys doing a lot of different kinds of things, and is happy to leave that decision-making to her when she's got a firm opinion and he doesn't.
So while I suspect that you would say that both of these people similarly lack strong free will, I feel that labeling them in the same way is unnecessarily—and perhaps even unhelpfully—reductionist. In this case, one feels that she has an unshakable obligation to follow certain rules in her life—and is unhappy even while fulfilling it—while the other has made a conscious decision to put another's happiness first—and that makes him happy. So, in the end, while this has been somewhat rambling, perhaps I'm coming back around to the same argument as before—that human brains and their decision-making processes are more complex than your definitions can account for.
Dan Aris