If China required unemployment insurance, health insurance, retirement plans, caps on hours a person was allowed to work
In China, under the Social Insurance Law both employers and employees are required to make contributions (at different rates) to a pension fund, unemployment insurance fund and medical insurance fund, as well as the Housing Provident Fund. Employers, but not employees, are also required to contribute to the work-related injury and maternity insurance funds.
Under the Chinese Standard Working Time System, workers shall not work more than 8 hours a day and shall not work more than 40 hours a week; workers have at least one day off per week.
To the extent that labor costs less in China, it is due to the massive surplus of rural labor moving into urban manufacutring zones. However China's GDP per worker is only 17% that of the USA due to less capital per worker being available for productivity. But capital investment continues in China, worker productivity is growing, and wages are growing - especially as the surplus rural labor pool runs out.
You know what is the worst? When you are in a public bathroom and have to use a Dyson Airblade Hand Dryer, because your hands inevitably end up touching the yellow part where everyone else's hands have inevitably ended up touching, yuck, and besides the thing never seems to dry your hands fully.
You know what is the best? The XLERATOR which is like putting your hands around the back end of a jet engine, totally dry in under 10 seconds.
What you don't get is that America's comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] is bullshit, AKA "marketing".
I argue that marketing is not "bullshit." Marketing is the information exchange process to link consumers with the products that they desire. It is not easy and effortless, it takes great effort on the part of both consumer and vendor to effectively information match needs with goods.
And yes, sometimes consumers don't know what they need before marketing. This isn't just an issue with consumer goods, it is an issue with industrial goods as well. For example, a company may not know what advantages a cloud deployment could provide until they receive an effective marketing message that informs them.
I remember calling company after company in the mid-1990's trying to sell them web sites. They would often tell me "our customers will never be on the Internet" and I had to convince them that the investment would give them access to a new and growing geographically diverse market who would be more likely to make effortless ecommerce purchases.
The average annual percent change, 1987-2014, of productivity of US motor vehicle manufacturing workers is 3.6%. So whichever workers are still left are doing a better job!
When I looked into that some time recently I believe for a visible red light laser you'd see significant dispersion after less than 10km
Actually we bounce laser beams off of the Moon to measure Earth/Moon distance on a regular basis.
I find the laser acceleration an engineering scale problem, and solvable for a very, very small probe.
However I do not see any way a very, very small probe can have enough energy to transmit a signal back to earth. Ultra-short pulse lasers are clearly the sanest way to transmit data between the stars, but we are generally talking about some of the largest lasers ever built by mankind with 10m telescopes. Not something a micro-probe could do.
Current UK minimum wage for over 21 is $9.62/hour. California is talking about $15!
Also both UK and Australian minimum wages have lower wages for young people. For example, UK minimum wage for 18-21 year olds is $7.61/hour. For some reason, the US applies minimum wages to people of all ages, despite the fact that flipping burgers should probably not be a life-long career.
If all restaurants have the same cost, then all are as competitive as they were be before.
Except they lose competitiveness versus making your own food.
Spending on restaurants has just surpassed spending on groceries in the US for the first time. This could slide back into reverse now with rising minimum wages.
This is a typical build vs. buy decision. You save time eating at McDonalds, but if it costs more, you might make your own sandwich.
This also applies to nannies: a female computer programmer makes a decision to have a nanny care for her child instead of her so she can work. If the nanny's wages goes up, the programmer may chose to leave the workforce because she is no longer making enough to cover child care (especially after taxes). Note that the latter scenario is the loss of two jobs, the nanny and the computer programmer. The economy has a double loss.
Inflation is currently about 6.5% for the working poor (real inflation, e.g. the increased cost of food, shelter, transportation
Then eliminate NIMBY regulations on housing. My block has 30 single-family homes in an urban setting. You could allow two 60-story apartment buildings to be built here, house four times as many people with the same living space, and have plenty of green park land, playgrounds, and bike paths between them.
NIMBY regulations that price workers out of cities takes 0.25% off of US GDP growth every year.
A new Subway can't make it paying people $15 an hour? There is something wrong somewhere in the franchise's business model.
Without $15 minimum wage: "A worker can't command $15/hour on the market? There is something wrong somewhere with that worker's business model, and they will have to take a lower wage."
With $15 minimum wage: "A worker isn't worth $15/hour minimum wage? Then there is something wrong somewhere with that worker's business model, and they have to go jobless."
I can tell you right now that good 4K is going to required 25 Mbps and up of HEVC for on-demand (and ~35 Mbps for live encoded 60p sports content, the bit rate of live 4K cable channels in Korea and Japan).
If you are only going to be able to stream 15 Mbps, then a 1080p24 image would look far better at that bit rate than a 2160p24 image!
That is one reason for the existence of Vidity 4K/HDR download (not streaming) service. The average US Internet connection can not sustain 25 Mbps.
There actually is an FCC rule about this based on the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA):
Full-length Internet video programming must be captioned if the programming is shown on TV in the U.S. with captions after Sept. 30, 2013.
We don't actually use "line 21" any more, as analog is dead in the US. CTA-608 and CTA-708 format captions are carried over HD-SDI in ancillary data packets, or more likely for Internet workflows, they are carried in user data or SEI messages of the compressed video codec in a file.
retarded licensing contracts. The content providers don't have a fucking clue that some people want to watch anything anywhere and that we're willing to pay for it. They want to nickel and dime every region independently to maximize profits.
I don't think anyone in the media industry is unaware of the consumer desire to watch any content anywhere, but the problem is that in many territories "non-internet media" like cable TV and over-the-air TV is paying so much more than Internet media SVOD distributors. You can't make your reliable, paying distributors mad by encouraging distribution channel cannibalization.
The top content producing media companies have gross profit margins between 30% and 40% right now, and international revenue is rising quickly - often based on syndication to countries where TV access is way ahead of Internet access, and where poor people are more likely to watch free broadcast TV than have any kind of subscription.
The actual reason Netflix's catalog is so sparse -- where the fuck is Seinfeld? Big Bang Theory? -- is because licensing costs go up about 10% every few years. Sadly, Netflix just doesn't the capital nor critical mass that the cable industry has.:-/
The truth is that (in just the US) Big Bang Theory can regularly bring in 20 million viewers in live + 7 days VOD, and the advertising opportunity revenue for that will blow away any kind of SVOD revenue.
Japan has a far higher suicide rate than the US, despite having almost all arms highly controlled since samurai times. Japan's leading method of suicide is hanging.
The City should use eminent domain and take over large blocks, and rent them to public school teachers, college instructors, and make it available after that for people with an income up to 1.5 times the poverty level.
BTW, given the population density in SF, the average number of people in a 200 * 300 foot block is 37. So you would need SF City to take over 162 blocks to house 6,000 SF school personnel at current density.
The City should use eminent domain and take over large blocks, and rent them to public school teachers, college instructors, and make it available after that for people with an income up to 1.5 times the poverty level.
How about the city should drop their stupid height limits and let people build huge apartment buildings (like Hong Kong), then with the extra tax revenue generated they can build six 60-story apartment buildings and house all 6000 employees of San Francisco schools.
This is almost exactly the same thing as that offer from Sprint to allow streaming videos from certain providers
Was this case involving "certain providers" delivering content over the Internet (between AS's), or was it delivering content from within the private network of the carrier?
According to his LinkedIn account, Leo Perrero was an "Application Developer Specialist" at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, with his previous job being "Intel Systems Administrator" at IBM Global Services.
Based on his positions and skill recommendations, it looks like he was a SysAdmin mainly, and perhaps did some scripts that got him the "Application Developer Specialist" title.
I appreciate good SysAdmins, but most don't really need a college degree, and actually one of the best SysAdmins I ever met was a high school dropout.
In the upcoming virtualized, cloud world, SysAdmins could be based anywhere, and DevOps is going to reduce the number of admins per server.
"Brazil's limited experiment with market-oriented reforms has been uneven and even derailed in some areas. The state's presence in such sectors as energy, financial services, and electricity remains extensive. The legacy of decades of central planning, state meddling in economic activity continues even where it has demonstrably failed, and the weak rule of law further undermines economic progress."
"Graft remains endemic, and Brazilians disapprove of President Dilma Rousseff's policies on corruption and crime. In 2014, a former director of state-owned Petrobas accused more than 40 politicians, including one minister and three governors, in a massive kickback investigation. Brazilâ(TM)s judiciary is inefficient and subject to political and economic influence. The court system is overburdened, and contract disputes can be lengthy and complex."
"If that's true, then one of the most important public-policy challenges is figuring out how to enable more people to move to where the good jobs are. Lack of affordable housing in already crowded boomtowns is a problem. Moretti co-wrote a paper last year contending that reducing regulatory constraints on housing construction in San Jose, San Francisco and New York could increase U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent."
Major cities should have no limits to density of development. They should have brand new 60 story apartment buildings with a bit of green space between them. Instead, SF is full of three story buildings built between 1930 and 1950, most of which will get flattened when the next big quake comes.
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If China required unemployment insurance, health insurance, retirement plans, caps on hours a person was allowed to work
In China, under the Social Insurance Law both employers and employees are required to make contributions (at different rates) to a pension fund, unemployment insurance fund and medical insurance fund, as well as the Housing Provident Fund. Employers, but not employees, are also required to contribute to the work-related injury and maternity insurance funds.
Under the Chinese Standard Working Time System, workers shall not work more than 8 hours a day and shall not work more than 40 hours a week; workers have at least one day off per week.
To the extent that labor costs less in China, it is due to the massive surplus of rural labor moving into urban manufacutring zones. However China's GDP per worker is only 17% that of the USA due to less capital per worker being available for productivity. But capital investment continues in China, worker productivity is growing, and wages are growing - especially as the surplus rural labor pool runs out.
You know what is the worst? When you are in a public bathroom and have to use a Dyson Airblade Hand Dryer, because your hands inevitably end up touching the yellow part where everyone else's hands have inevitably ended up touching, yuck, and besides the thing never seems to dry your hands fully.
You know what is the best? The XLERATOR which is like putting your hands around the back end of a jet engine, totally dry in under 10 seconds.
What you don't get is that America's comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] is bullshit, AKA "marketing".
I argue that marketing is not "bullshit." Marketing is the information exchange process to link consumers with the products that they desire. It is not easy and effortless, it takes great effort on the part of both consumer and vendor to effectively information match needs with goods.
And yes, sometimes consumers don't know what they need before marketing. This isn't just an issue with consumer goods, it is an issue with industrial goods as well. For example, a company may not know what advantages a cloud deployment could provide until they receive an effective marketing message that informs them.
I remember calling company after company in the mid-1990's trying to sell them web sites. They would often tell me "our customers will never be on the Internet" and I had to convince them that the investment would give them access to a new and growing geographically diverse market who would be more likely to make effortless ecommerce purchases.
I hope that Gordon's prediction is incorrect, but being in the manufacturing industry and seeing the new hires come and go makes me worry.
Yet Manufacturing Sector: Real Output Per Hour is at all time highs.
The average annual percent change, 1987-2014, of productivity of US motor vehicle manufacturing workers is 3.6%. So whichever workers are still left are doing a better job!
When I looked into that some time recently I believe for a visible red light laser you'd see significant dispersion after less than 10km
Actually we bounce laser beams off of the Moon to measure Earth/Moon distance on a regular basis.
I find the laser acceleration an engineering scale problem, and solvable for a very, very small probe.
However I do not see any way a very, very small probe can have enough energy to transmit a signal back to earth. Ultra-short pulse lasers are clearly the sanest way to transmit data between the stars, but we are generally talking about some of the largest lasers ever built by mankind with 10m telescopes. Not something a micro-probe could do.
The minimum wage rises every year in the UK
Current UK minimum wage for over 21 is $9.62/hour. California is talking about $15!
Also both UK and Australian minimum wages have lower wages for young people. For example, UK minimum wage for 18-21 year olds is $7.61/hour. For some reason, the US applies minimum wages to people of all ages, despite the fact that flipping burgers should probably not be a life-long career.
If all restaurants have the same cost, then all are as competitive as they were be before.
Except they lose competitiveness versus making your own food.
Spending on restaurants has just surpassed spending on groceries in the US for the first time. This could slide back into reverse now with rising minimum wages.
This is a typical build vs. buy decision. You save time eating at McDonalds, but if it costs more, you might make your own sandwich.
This also applies to nannies: a female computer programmer makes a decision to have a nanny care for her child instead of her so she can work. If the nanny's wages goes up, the programmer may chose to leave the workforce because she is no longer making enough to cover child care (especially after taxes). Note that the latter scenario is the loss of two jobs, the nanny and the computer programmer. The economy has a double loss.
Inflation is currently about 6.5% for the working poor (real inflation, e.g. the increased cost of food, shelter, transportation
Then eliminate NIMBY regulations on housing. My block has 30 single-family homes in an urban setting. You could allow two 60-story apartment buildings to be built here, house four times as many people with the same living space, and have plenty of green park land, playgrounds, and bike paths between them.
NIMBY regulations that price workers out of cities takes 0.25% off of US GDP growth every year.
A new Subway can't make it paying people $15 an hour? There is something wrong somewhere in the franchise's business model.
Without $15 minimum wage: "A worker can't command $15/hour on the market? There is something wrong somewhere with that worker's business model, and they will have to take a lower wage."
With $15 minimum wage: "A worker isn't worth $15/hour minimum wage? Then there is something wrong somewhere with that worker's business model, and they have to go jobless."
I can tell you right now that good 4K is going to required 25 Mbps and up of HEVC for on-demand (and ~35 Mbps for live encoded 60p sports content, the bit rate of live 4K cable channels in Korea and Japan).
If you are only going to be able to stream 15 Mbps, then a 1080p24 image would look far better at that bit rate than a 2160p24 image!
That is one reason for the existence of Vidity 4K/HDR download (not streaming) service. The average US Internet connection can not sustain 25 Mbps.
Especially with IPv6...we will miss NAT!
There actually is an FCC rule about this based on the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA):
Full-length Internet video programming must be captioned if the programming is shown on TV in the U.S. with captions after Sept. 30, 2013.
We don't actually use "line 21" any more, as analog is dead in the US. CTA-608 and CTA-708 format captions are carried over HD-SDI in ancillary data packets, or more likely for Internet workflows, they are carried in user data or SEI messages of the compressed video codec in a file.
retarded licensing contracts. The content providers don't have a fucking clue that some people want to watch anything anywhere and that we're willing to pay for it. They want to nickel and dime every region independently to maximize profits.
I don't think anyone in the media industry is unaware of the consumer desire to watch any content anywhere, but the problem is that in many territories "non-internet media" like cable TV and over-the-air TV is paying so much more than Internet media SVOD distributors. You can't make your reliable, paying distributors mad by encouraging distribution channel cannibalization.
The top content producing media companies have gross profit margins between 30% and 40% right now, and international revenue is rising quickly - often based on syndication to countries where TV access is way ahead of Internet access, and where poor people are more likely to watch free broadcast TV than have any kind of subscription.
The actual reason Netflix's catalog is so sparse -- where the fuck is Seinfeld? Big Bang Theory? -- is because licensing costs go up about 10% every few years. Sadly, Netflix just doesn't the capital nor critical mass that the cable industry has. :-/
The truth is that (in just the US) Big Bang Theory can regularly bring in 20 million viewers in live + 7 days VOD, and the advertising opportunity revenue for that will blow away any kind of SVOD revenue.
Japan has a far higher suicide rate than the US, despite having almost all arms highly controlled since samurai times. Japan's leading method of suicide is hanging.
The City should use eminent domain and take over large blocks, and rent them to public school teachers, college instructors, and make it available after that for people with an income up to 1.5 times the poverty level.
BTW, given the population density in SF, the average number of people in a 200 * 300 foot block is 37. So you would need SF City to take over 162 blocks to house 6,000 SF school personnel at current density.
The City should use eminent domain and take over large blocks, and rent them to public school teachers, college instructors, and make it available after that for people with an income up to 1.5 times the poverty level.
How about the city should drop their stupid height limits and let people build huge apartment buildings (like Hong Kong), then with the extra tax revenue generated they can build six 60-story apartment buildings and house all 6000 employees of San Francisco schools.
This is almost exactly the same thing as that offer from Sprint to allow streaming videos from certain providers
Was this case involving "certain providers" delivering content over the Internet (between AS's), or was it delivering content from within the private network of the carrier?
That's a diversion. It's the same coax going into the house, it's the same overall bandwidth on that coax. Comcast is playing with words.
If it doesn't leave their AS, is it really "Internet"?
Remember, the FCC issued an "Open Internet Order", not an "Open Private Network Order".
(Maybe you have to get really specific and the service has to stay on the same layer 2 LAN? :)
According to his LinkedIn account, Leo Perrero was an "Application Developer Specialist" at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, with his previous job being "Intel Systems Administrator" at IBM Global Services.
Based on his positions and skill recommendations, it looks like he was a SysAdmin mainly, and perhaps did some scripts that got him the "Application Developer Specialist" title.
I appreciate good SysAdmins, but most don't really need a college degree, and actually one of the best SysAdmins I ever met was a high school dropout.
In the upcoming virtualized, cloud world, SysAdmins could be based anywhere, and DevOps is going to reduce the number of admins per server.
The meteor would need to be at least the size of a fighter jet to be trackable.
Meteors leave long trails of ionized gas that are reflective to radar. Here is a radar meteor trail.
The Index of Economic Freedom says:
"Brazil's limited experiment with market-oriented reforms has been uneven and even derailed in some areas. The state's presence in such sectors as energy, financial services, and electricity remains extensive. The legacy of decades of central planning, state meddling in economic activity continues even where it has demonstrably failed, and the weak rule of law further undermines economic progress."
"Graft remains endemic, and Brazilians disapprove of President Dilma Rousseff's policies on corruption and crime. In 2014, a former director of state-owned Petrobas accused more than 40 politicians, including one minister and three governors, in a massive kickback investigation. Brazilâ(TM)s judiciary is inefficient and subject to political and economic influence. The court system is overburdened, and contract disputes can be lengthy and complex."
Public schools were free the last time I checked.
Oh yes, like Santa Clara High School where only 31% of the students are proficient in mathematics....
The best line of the article is:
"If that's true, then one of the most important public-policy challenges is figuring out how to enable more people to move to where the good jobs are. Lack of affordable housing in already crowded boomtowns is a problem. Moretti co-wrote a paper last year contending that reducing regulatory constraints on housing construction in San Jose, San Francisco and New York could increase U.S. gross domestic product by 9.5 percent."
Major cities should have no limits to density of development. They should have brand new 60 story apartment buildings with a bit of green space between them. Instead, SF is full of three story buildings built between 1930 and 1950, most of which will get flattened when the next big quake comes.
I make a good life in Silicon Valley on $50,000 per year.
How much do you pay for your kids' school?