And when a content provider doesn't switch to a lower-bitrate stream, what then? Endless buffering? It's not always automatic. Also, will downloads be restricted to streaming rates? It would be quite annoying, to say the least, to be made to wait for hours when you could have downloaded any other file of comparable size in a fraction of the time—provided it wasn't video.
At the very least it would be fraudulent to advertise a higher Internet access speed than the throttled video rate. Per the ITU's definition, 4G service supports at least 100 Mbit/sec. If they throttle video (or any other legal content) down to 10 Mbit/sec they aren't selling 4G service. (Not that you could actually get 100 Mbit/sec on their "4G" network in the first place, but that's a separate issue.)
These antics are exactly why all traffic should be encrypted and obfuscated to prevent content identification. If an ISP wants to throttle all traffic to 10 Mbit/sec, fine. They can advertise that as the maximum supported speed. The fact that they can even tell which traffic is video in the first place is a failing of the current, excessively trusting, design.
I would hypothesize that this point occurs when the minimum wage is just very slightly below the actual productivity of the people receiving that wage. Unfortunately, minimum useful productivity levels differ across different industries.... So I don't think we can ever really achieve this unless every possible job in every possible location has a different minimum wage.... Instead, for the sake of simplicity we implement one minimum wage.
That's a good start, but there is a rather good approximation at hand for "the actual productivity of the people receiving that wage": the pay the employee is able to negotiate in a free market. If you use that approximation, of course, then the ideal "minimum wage" as you defined it would always be slightly below the wage the employee is actually receiving, and would thus have no effect and might as well not exist at all.
Banks don't keep much cash in the vault... It's not the same as cramming it under a mattress.
And even if it were, so what? At least it isn't in the market bidding up prices on consumer goods. Locking cash up in a vault is basically the same as investing in the broadest possible market fund—the currency itself. Each remaining unit of currency becomes slightly more valuable for as long as the cash remains "hoarded". In a growing economy with a more-or-less fixed money supply, the return for setting your money aside and not spending it on either consumer goods or more specific investments is identical to the market's average rate of return, i.e. the rate of deflation.
The only ones harmed when you choose to neither spend nor invest—in the absence of any investments offering a solid return above the rate of deflation—are the tax-collectors, who take a cut every time money changes hands. Naturally they would promote a narrative which claims higher "velocity of money" as a public good, since increased "velocity" means more transactions and thus more tax revenues. Economically, however, investing money in below-average ventures is nothing but a waste of perfectly good resources which could have been put aside in hopes of better future opportunities.
If someone is willing to work for less than they need to survive, then they are obviously being subsidized somehow (living in parents basement, government food stamps & welfare, shoplifting from employer, etc).
Or perhaps they already have another non-subsidized source of income, such as savings from previous employment, and they just want to earn some extra spending money. Or perhaps you're simply overestimating the amount they need to survive—if one is willing to economize and accept some unpopular trade-offs one can actually get by on a lot less than the official poverty line, especially if there are no dependents to worry about. Many things which were deemed luxuries not very long ago have been reclassified as basic necessities, but in fact are not actually needed for survival.
In any case, minimum wage would just be another form of subsidy, paid for partly (mostly) by would-be employees unable to get jobs at the mandated minimum wage and partly by the employers of the marginally-productive—two groups especially ill-suited to be subsidizing anyone.
All the grocery stores in town decide they don't like you because of something you posted on Facebook, so they each decide independently to ban you from their stores, just because of what you posted on the internet, and now you cannot buy any food -- and will starve to death.
There are other sources for food besides the in-town grocery stores, you know. Perhaps you have to drive to the next town over. Perhaps you have to get someone else to buy food for you. Perhaps you even have to start raising your own food. Access to grocery stores were you can simply buy whatever food you need is a luxury, and one that the owners of those stores are not in any sense obligated to offer, to the public in general or to you in particular. If you wish to continue receiving the external benefit of easy access to food procured by others at affordable prices, consider how they may feel about your rhetoric and stop taking the benefits of their voluntary cooperation for granted.
You are now being deprived of life and liberty by corporations,
Not even close. Excluding you from what is supposed to be a mutually beneficial, voluntary trade relationship is not in any sense depriving you of your life or your liberty. Others are not responsible for the fact that you need food, or obligated to sell it to you. Coming up with the food you need is your problem, and something you should have thought of before alienating those you have come to depend on. Realistically speaking, you aren't going to starve—and even if you did, it wouldn't be anyone's fault but your own for failing to take reality into account.
There's nothing in the constitution to say that corporations have a secure right to make arbitrary decisions to refuse to deal with certain people based on the content of speech they made.
Sure there is: involuntary servitude is banned under the 13th Amendment, except as punishment for a crime. That implies that both the owners and the employees of the corporation have the right to choose whether or not to provide their services. If they were forced by law to provide services in any particular instance that would be involuntary servitude, and thus unconstitutional.
I have a 401k as well, but when I draw that down, it goes down. And when it's gone it's gone.
That depends entirely on how much you decide to take out. If you're getting an average APY of 5% on your investments, for example, you can siphon off up to that amount every year without reducing the principle at all. Assuming that (below average) level of return, your $1,500/mo. pension is equivalent to only $360,000 in a 401k or IRA.
(In the event that the 401k/IRA rules say that you have to take out more than 5% each year, just transfer the excess into a standard broad-market mutual fund for similar results.)
I am not talking about wealth over time, I'm talking about wealth right now. Wealth right now is fixed.
Of course "wealth right now" is "fixed". Anything "right now" is fixed—you've frozen it in one moment in time. This is not the same as saying that wealth is fixed in general, which would imply that wealth cannot change over time.
Over time it changes, that's why we have inflation.
Inflation is not due to an increase wealth, but rather an increase in money. More specifically, price inflation is due to the money supply increasing faster than the supply of goods, which may be either increasing or decreasing.
So yes, you have less because Bill Gates has more.... The problem is the wealthy benefit disproportionally more than everyone else. Their portion of tomorrow's pie is bigger.
The amount you receive does not decrease just because Bill Gates's share is increasing. That is what it would mean for wealth to be fixed—more pie for anyone else means less for you, not merely relative to them but relative to what you had before. Perhaps you're getting a smaller percentage, but it's still at least as large in absolute terms.
I do not disagree that the wealthy receive a larger portion of the increase when the "pie" gets bigger. I would not call it "disproportionate", though, since they were in large part responsible for the growth in the first place. (Just look at what has happened to less enlightened countries when they decided to penalize being wealthy if you're tempted to take continual economic growth for granted.) The wealthy get a larger share of the increase, to be sure; but what is much more notable is that all those other individuals who did not save and invest and thus contribute to the growth of the economy nonetheless received an unearned external benefit right alongside them.
New laws need to be adopted such that shifting money tax free through IP licensing and other such loop holes are closed.
Easier said than done. These "loopholes" are a perfectly natural consequence of enforcing IP "rights" as if they were actual property rights. If IP is a legitimate concept, the majority of the profits derived from the use of that IP should accrue to the IP holder, not the user of the IP. After all, so long as the business cannot legally operate without licensing that IP, the foreign IP holder is providing the majority of the value (despite not doing any of the work).
The only real way to close the "loophole" is to do away with the concept of IP altogether.
However, after the IP is transferred and once operations commence, this becomes frustrating for the US government (and citizens) because money that was made in the US becomes taxed in Ireland.
But was the money made in the US? Pretending for a moment that the concept of IP has any legitimacy at all, why shouldn't the profit accrue primarily to the IP holder in Ireland, and not the licensee in the US? Isn't that how IP is supposed to work, rewarding IP holders at the expense of "makers"? You can't really support the principle of IP while simultaneously condemning US companies for paying IP licencing fees to foreign IP holders. The IP portion of a business is simply more mobile than, say, a physical manufacturing plant. Unlike actual property, IP per se has no location, and it doesn't matter where the IP holder is physically located.
The entire point of copyrights and patents is to circumvent the normal rules of the market and basically give companies what amounts to a legal right to print money in the form of permission to copy existing works. The fact that profits attributable to some sort of IP can be easily transferred to a subsidiary in a favorable tax jurisdiction is a natural consequence of buying into the fiction that ideas should be treated like property. Any attempt to change this result, short of doing away with IP altogether, will result in unintended consequences.
Usually companies place the servers that will ultimately
handle the HTTP request for a given TLD within or near to the geographic area of that TLDS' users.
Near the users, yes, for performance reasons. However, while it may be common practice for companies catering to users in a particular country to register a site with the corresponding ccTLD, this is not something you can take for granted in the general case. Apart from certain unusually restrictive ccTLDs, the servers (and users) for any domain may be located anywhere in the world. A ccTLD suffix is at best a hint about the intended audience, subject to many exceptions.
Perhaps "nothing to do with" was a bit strong—there is a certain degree of correlation—but it is not the case that a server's location can be confidently determined by the TLD of the domain(s) that it serves.
However, for global companies such as Google...
Google, the owner of goo.gl? A domain name with a Greenland TLD serving as a URL shortener for primarily non-Greenland visitors?
More to the point, as Luthair said earlier, while the TLD might suggest the site's intended audience, and perhaps even hint at the location of the server, it doesn't necessarily match the visitor's location. Someone from the EU can easily access the US/international version of Google through google.com/ncr ("no country redirect"), to say nothing of proxies and VPNs. If the EU wants to censor content coming from non-EU-hosted sites, it needs to filter the traffic itself at the EU border, at its own expense. Note that I am not saying that this is a good idea; not trying to censor the Internet would of course be preferable. The only other way this can logically end, though, is with every web site restricted to the least common denominator of allowable material among all Internet-connected countries, at which point we might as well just shut down the Internet for lack of content.
If you access a different TLD, then you are connecting to servers in a different country
The TLD of the domain generally has nothing to do with the location of the servers. Some countries even make a tidy profit letting foreign sites use their TLDs when they happen to be common suffixes. Examples: goo.gl (Greenland), itun.es (Spain), spoti.fi (Finland), buy.me (Montenegro). The servers for those TLDs, and their intended audiences, can be located almost anywhere in the world.
When the intention of registering a *.uk domain is to cater to users in the UK, it makes sense to host the servers there as well for better performance—but this is by no means mandatory.
The government didn't start the employer sponsored healthcare system, the market did.
You're half-right. Employers started offering health insurance (among other benefits) "voluntarily" in response to Depression-era wage ceilings. They couldn't offer the higher pay they needed to retain their best employees so they came up with a workaround, paying some of their employees' living expenses directly and reserving the more tightly regulated wages for rewarding performance. Now we're stuck with it despite the obvious drawbacks (employer chooses the insurance plans; losing your job implies losing your health insurance). It's a good example of unintended negative side effects of price controls in the labor market.
On a truly private health insurance market chronic conditions would not be covered
Rightly so. It's more expensive to pay for treatment of chronic conditions indirectly through insurance vs. directly paying the health care provider. Why should an insurance company take a cut of the revenue? Chronic conditions are not unrealized risks; insurance has no place here.
nor would catastrophic health conditions because people underestimate the chances that they have them
Yet, surprisingly, people actually do buy insurance against "catastrophic" conditions—and not just employer-provided health insurance or the legally-mandated minimum level of automotive insurance. You're really not giving people enough credit here.
(I would personally expect most people to be more likely to overestimate the chances of truly catastrophic conditions, once they get past the sense of "immortality" which comes with adolescence. The general tendency I have observed is to underestimate things that happen often, and overestimate things which happen rarely.)
I suspect the argument you'd get back is that the potential to commit mass mayhem is much higher now, which justifies giving governments the power to put anybody under a microscope whenever they like.... As far as it goes, it's a good argument.
No, it is not a good argument. You are talking about placing constraints on every innocent individuals' behavior—with non-compliance punishable by loss of property, loss of freedom, and ultimately loss of life depending on how much the individual resists this violation of their natural rights—on the basis of something no more palpable than a generic, unsubstantiated fear of what someone might do. No amount of "potential to commit mass mayhem" could possibly justify that kind of response.
If the data being fed in is accurate, I don't see how we can treat that bias as anything other than a rational response.
The real problem isn't that the tool is making an data-driven (even if "biased") assessment regarding the tendencies of a subgroup within the population, but rather that the tendencies of the group are being used to make decisions about how to treat individuals. That is the essence of stereotyping, whether it's done by a human or by a machine. Stereotyping is wrong because it disregards individual choices and personal responsibility; morality aside, it's also a poor guide since the variation within a given group tends to be much larger than the variation between groups. Knowing that one group tends to be better at math than another, for example, is a poor predictor of how two specific individuals selected from those respective groups will compare.
The solution to stereotyping is "getting to know the individual". To counter it in AIs we need to give them more information to work with—much more. When an AI is able to take into account the subject's entire life history and render an informed opinion about that particular individual, and not just generalize about the groups they belong to, then we can say that the algorithm has a chance of being just and fair. Until then we need to be careful about how we apply them.
Curious Kid: So, this means that you... pay all your taxes to fund all the social programs that you advocate for?
First, no court has yet found that they do not pay all of "their" taxes—they pay what is legally required, just like everyone else. Second, if Google actually wants to take care of the poor it would be more effective to just support the appropriate programs directly, and not outsource that responsibility to the government. Taxes are not primarily a way to help the poor; they are a way to (inefficiently) force others to contribute to social programs and subsidies you approve of against their will. Only a small fraction of the money taken in taxes actually makes it to someone in need.
I like attributes and logic (expressions) in a tubular form to both more easily identify visual patterns...
This text resulted in a very strange mental image, until I suddenly realized that you meant "tabular", as opposed to arranging your attributes and logic in the shape of a tube. Still, perhaps the cylindrical mental model of coding might have some merit...?
"char* example;" becomes "define a character array called example"
Except that isn't correct: The code is defining a pointer to zero or more characters, not a character array. To define a character array you need to allocate space to store some characters, as in "char example[N]". The pointer version should be read as "define a character pointer called example". (Or "char pointer", "pointer to char",
etc.—the main point being that "example" is a pointer, not an array.)
Your solution sounds complicated, and depends on specific storage mediums. Fortunately, there is a simpler alternative. This happens to be one of the things that blockchains are particularly good for. Whenever you create an official document, just sign it and upload the detached signature to the Bitcoin blockchain. In the event of a dispute over the historicity of the document you can point to the matching entry on the blockchain to prove that the document existed at that point in time. The proof-of-work algorithm and corresponding computation time expended by Bitcoin miners ensures that transactions older than a few hours are nearly impossible to tamper with.
The percentage of tax you pay is not all that relevant... What matters is what you get in exchange.
The system is involuntary, so what what you get is irrelevant. Someone else decides that, not you, which means it's all to their benefit, not yours. Perhaps you would have chosen to pay for those things, perhaps not. Either way, those in power cannot take any credit for providing goods and services of their own choosing, payed for with stolen funds. If you would have chosen to purchase those same goods and services freely then forcing you to do so adds no value; if not, they have only made you worse off by making you pay for something you didn't want, or couldn't afford.
In the absence of reliable GPS, a drone can also be programmed to follow a route using inertial guidance and/or a ground-facing camera, neither of which can be jammed.
Nobody tried putting out similar phones with the only real difference being replaceable batteries.
And you aren't going to get that situation, because a replaceable battery requires a very different phone design. People were able to choose from a variety of designs, some with replaceable batteries and some without, and the ones without were more popular precisely because the resources (size, weight, cost) that would have been spent on allowing the battery to be user-replaceable went into other features instead—features which will not be available on phones with replaceable batteries.
Why does the lack of open source drivers mean old phones can't run new OS versions?
New OS versions generally come with new versions of the kernel. Proprietary, binary-only drivers tend to only work with the particular version of the kernel they were built for. It is possible to upgrade other parts of the system, to a point, without changing the kernel, but the closed-source drivers act as a fixed point which the rest of the system has to work around, and you don't get the features and performance improvements included in more recent kernels. The older the drivers are the harder it is to bridge the gap between the OS version the drivers were designed for and the APIs expected by the latest software.
To some extent this also impacts non-obsolete devices, and is part of the reason why my OnePlus 3T with the latest available OS update based on Android 7.1.1 still reports that it's running Linux 3.18—when the latest mainline stable version is 4.11. Linux 3.18 hasn't been current since the release of 3.19 on February 8, 2015. No doubt some bugfixes and security patches have been backported, but it's still missing most of the development which has occurred over the last 29 months, and the main reason for that is maintaining support for closed-source drivers. The need for specific kernel versions and the associated workarounds means that each device is its own fork of the OS with all the associated development overhead, which is unsustainable over the long term. Support for older devices has to be dropped as resources become strained. To support older devices indefinitely they need to be folded into the mainline development effort, which means no device-specific workarounds. You shouldn't need to download an image of "Cyanogenmod Nougat for the Galaxy S3"; there should be one version of Cyanogenmod with all the drivers which works on every brand of device, just as with the various Linux distributions for PCs. (Aside from compiling for different CPU architectures, of course, just like i386 vs. amd64.)
Also, regardless of compatibility issues, if there is a problem with a proprietary driver and no open-source alternative there is very little anyone else can do about it if the manufacturer doesn't provide an update.
>Consumers have spoken and prefer Uh, no, reduced sales at greater margin means exactly the opposite of that, but with more profits.
It's not a popularity contest; the quantity sold is meaningless. All that matters is the revenue. The consumers, as a group, have spoken and are willing to pay more, as a group, for cheaper, less-durable items.
The manufacturer's profit margin was never a factor. In a competitive market economy the profit margin at equilibrium is going to be approximately the same across all markets regardless of revenues or cost of goods sold. If it's lower than average in one area the marginal suppliers shut down and put their capital elsewhere, allowing prices to rise; if it's higher, new suppliers enter the market seeking a share of the profits and driving prices down. All an individual manufacturer can do to optimize profits is do a better job of giving the consumers what they actually want. In this case, that is less-durable goods at a correspondingly lower price.
Slashdot Mirror
And when a content provider doesn't switch to a lower-bitrate stream, what then? Endless buffering? It's not always automatic. Also, will downloads be restricted to streaming rates? It would be quite annoying, to say the least, to be made to wait for hours when you could have downloaded any other file of comparable size in a fraction of the time—provided it wasn't video.
At the very least it would be fraudulent to advertise a higher Internet access speed than the throttled video rate. Per the ITU's definition, 4G service supports at least 100 Mbit/sec. If they throttle video (or any other legal content) down to 10 Mbit/sec they aren't selling 4G service. (Not that you could actually get 100 Mbit/sec on their "4G" network in the first place, but that's a separate issue.)
These antics are exactly why all traffic should be encrypted and obfuscated to prevent content identification. If an ISP wants to throttle all traffic to 10 Mbit/sec, fine. They can advertise that as the maximum supported speed. The fact that they can even tell which traffic is video in the first place is a failing of the current, excessively trusting, design.
I would hypothesize that this point occurs when the minimum wage is just very slightly below the actual productivity of the people receiving that wage. Unfortunately, minimum useful productivity levels differ across different industries. ... So I don't think we can ever really achieve this unless every possible job in every possible location has a different minimum wage. ... Instead, for the sake of simplicity we implement one minimum wage.
That's a good start, but there is a rather good approximation at hand for "the actual productivity of the people receiving that wage": the pay the employee is able to negotiate in a free market. If you use that approximation, of course, then the ideal "minimum wage" as you defined it would always be slightly below the wage the employee is actually receiving, and would thus have no effect and might as well not exist at all.
Banks don't keep much cash in the vault... It's not the same as cramming it under a mattress.
And even if it were, so what? At least it isn't in the market bidding up prices on consumer goods. Locking cash up in a vault is basically the same as investing in the broadest possible market fund—the currency itself. Each remaining unit of currency becomes slightly more valuable for as long as the cash remains "hoarded". In a growing economy with a more-or-less fixed money supply, the return for setting your money aside and not spending it on either consumer goods or more specific investments is identical to the market's average rate of return, i.e. the rate of deflation.
The only ones harmed when you choose to neither spend nor invest—in the absence of any investments offering a solid return above the rate of deflation—are the tax-collectors, who take a cut every time money changes hands. Naturally they would promote a narrative which claims higher "velocity of money" as a public good, since increased "velocity" means more transactions and thus more tax revenues. Economically, however, investing money in below-average ventures is nothing but a waste of perfectly good resources which could have been put aside in hopes of better future opportunities.
If someone is willing to work for less than they need to survive, then they are obviously being subsidized somehow (living in parents basement, government food stamps & welfare, shoplifting from employer, etc).
Or perhaps they already have another non-subsidized source of income, such as savings from previous employment, and they just want to earn some extra spending money. Or perhaps you're simply overestimating the amount they need to survive—if one is willing to economize and accept some unpopular trade-offs one can actually get by on a lot less than the official poverty line, especially if there are no dependents to worry about. Many things which were deemed luxuries not very long ago have been reclassified as basic necessities, but in fact are not actually needed for survival.
In any case, minimum wage would just be another form of subsidy, paid for partly (mostly) by would-be employees unable to get jobs at the mandated minimum wage and partly by the employers of the marginally-productive—two groups especially ill-suited to be subsidizing anyone.
All the grocery stores in town decide they don't like you because of something you posted on Facebook, so they each decide independently to ban you from their stores, just because of what you posted on the internet, and now you cannot buy any food -- and will starve to death.
There are other sources for food besides the in-town grocery stores, you know. Perhaps you have to drive to the next town over. Perhaps you have to get someone else to buy food for you. Perhaps you even have to start raising your own food. Access to grocery stores were you can simply buy whatever food you need is a luxury, and one that the owners of those stores are not in any sense obligated to offer, to the public in general or to you in particular. If you wish to continue receiving the external benefit of easy access to food procured by others at affordable prices, consider how they may feel about your rhetoric and stop taking the benefits of their voluntary cooperation for granted.
You are now being deprived of life and liberty by corporations,
Not even close. Excluding you from what is supposed to be a mutually beneficial, voluntary trade relationship is not in any sense depriving you of your life or your liberty. Others are not responsible for the fact that you need food, or obligated to sell it to you. Coming up with the food you need is your problem, and something you should have thought of before alienating those you have come to depend on. Realistically speaking, you aren't going to starve—and even if you did, it wouldn't be anyone's fault but your own for failing to take reality into account.
There's nothing in the constitution to say that corporations have a secure right to make arbitrary decisions to refuse to deal with certain people based on the content of speech they made.
Sure there is: involuntary servitude is banned under the 13th Amendment, except as punishment for a crime. That implies that both the owners and the employees of the corporation have the right to choose whether or not to provide their services. If they were forced by law to provide services in any particular instance that would be involuntary servitude, and thus unconstitutional.
I have a 401k as well, but when I draw that down, it goes down. And when it's gone it's gone.
That depends entirely on how much you decide to take out. If you're getting an average APY of 5% on your investments, for example, you can siphon off up to that amount every year without reducing the principle at all. Assuming that (below average) level of return, your $1,500/mo. pension is equivalent to only $360,000 in a 401k or IRA.
(In the event that the 401k/IRA rules say that you have to take out more than 5% each year, just transfer the excess into a standard broad-market mutual fund for similar results.)
I am not talking about wealth over time, I'm talking about wealth right now. Wealth right now is fixed.
Of course "wealth right now" is "fixed". Anything "right now" is fixed—you've frozen it in one moment in time. This is not the same as saying that wealth is fixed in general, which would imply that wealth cannot change over time.
Over time it changes, that's why we have inflation.
Inflation is not due to an increase wealth, but rather an increase in money. More specifically, price inflation is due to the money supply increasing faster than the supply of goods, which may be either increasing or decreasing.
So yes, you have less because Bill Gates has more. ... The problem is the wealthy benefit disproportionally more than everyone else. Their portion of tomorrow's pie is bigger.
The amount you receive does not decrease just because Bill Gates's share is increasing. That is what it would mean for wealth to be fixed—more pie for anyone else means less for you, not merely relative to them but relative to what you had before. Perhaps you're getting a smaller percentage, but it's still at least as large in absolute terms.
I do not disagree that the wealthy receive a larger portion of the increase when the "pie" gets bigger. I would not call it "disproportionate", though, since they were in large part responsible for the growth in the first place. (Just look at what has happened to less enlightened countries when they decided to penalize being wealthy if you're tempted to take continual economic growth for granted.) The wealthy get a larger share of the increase, to be sure; but what is much more notable is that all those other individuals who did not save and invest and thus contribute to the growth of the economy nonetheless received an unearned external benefit right alongside them.
New laws need to be adopted such that shifting money tax free through IP licensing and other such loop holes are closed.
Easier said than done. These "loopholes" are a perfectly natural consequence of enforcing IP "rights" as if they were actual property rights. If IP is a legitimate concept, the majority of the profits derived from the use of that IP should accrue to the IP holder, not the user of the IP. After all, so long as the business cannot legally operate without licensing that IP, the foreign IP holder is providing the majority of the value (despite not doing any of the work).
The only real way to close the "loophole" is to do away with the concept of IP altogether.
However, after the IP is transferred and once operations commence, this becomes frustrating for the US government (and citizens) because money that was made in the US becomes taxed in Ireland.
But was the money made in the US? Pretending for a moment that the concept of IP has any legitimacy at all, why shouldn't the profit accrue primarily to the IP holder in Ireland, and not the licensee in the US? Isn't that how IP is supposed to work, rewarding IP holders at the expense of "makers"? You can't really support the principle of IP while simultaneously condemning US companies for paying IP licencing fees to foreign IP holders. The IP portion of a business is simply more mobile than, say, a physical manufacturing plant. Unlike actual property, IP per se has no location, and it doesn't matter where the IP holder is physically located.
The entire point of copyrights and patents is to circumvent the normal rules of the market and basically give companies what amounts to a legal right to print money in the form of permission to copy existing works. The fact that profits attributable to some sort of IP can be easily transferred to a subsidiary in a favorable tax jurisdiction is a natural consequence of buying into the fiction that ideas should be treated like property. Any attempt to change this result, short of doing away with IP altogether, will result in unintended consequences.
Usually companies place the servers that will ultimately handle the HTTP request for a given TLD within or near to the geographic area of that TLDS' users.
Near the users, yes, for performance reasons. However, while it may be common practice for companies catering to users in a particular country to register a site with the corresponding ccTLD, this is not something you can take for granted in the general case. Apart from certain unusually restrictive ccTLDs, the servers (and users) for any domain may be located anywhere in the world. A ccTLD suffix is at best a hint about the intended audience, subject to many exceptions.
Perhaps "nothing to do with" was a bit strong—there is a certain degree of correlation—but it is not the case that a server's location can be confidently determined by the TLD of the domain(s) that it serves.
However, for global companies such as Google...
Google, the owner of goo.gl? A domain name with a Greenland TLD serving as a URL shortener for primarily non-Greenland visitors?
More to the point, as Luthair said earlier, while the TLD might suggest the site's intended audience, and perhaps even hint at the location of the server, it doesn't necessarily match the visitor's location. Someone from the EU can easily access the US/international version of Google through google.com/ncr ("no country redirect"), to say nothing of proxies and VPNs. If the EU wants to censor content coming from non-EU-hosted sites, it needs to filter the traffic itself at the EU border, at its own expense. Note that I am not saying that this is a good idea; not trying to censor the Internet would of course be preferable. The only other way this can logically end, though, is with every web site restricted to the least common denominator of allowable material among all Internet-connected countries, at which point we might as well just shut down the Internet for lack of content.
If you access a different TLD, then you are connecting to servers in a different country
The TLD of the domain generally has nothing to do with the location of the servers. Some countries even make a tidy profit letting foreign sites use their TLDs when they happen to be common suffixes. Examples: goo.gl (Greenland), itun.es (Spain), spoti.fi (Finland), buy.me (Montenegro). The servers for those TLDs, and their intended audiences, can be located almost anywhere in the world.
When the intention of registering a *.uk domain is to cater to users in the UK, it makes sense to host the servers there as well for better performance—but this is by no means mandatory.
The government didn't start the employer sponsored healthcare system, the market did.
You're half-right. Employers started offering health insurance (among other benefits) "voluntarily" in response to Depression-era wage ceilings. They couldn't offer the higher pay they needed to retain their best employees so they came up with a workaround, paying some of their employees' living expenses directly and reserving the more tightly regulated wages for rewarding performance. Now we're stuck with it despite the obvious drawbacks (employer chooses the insurance plans; losing your job implies losing your health insurance). It's a good example of unintended negative side effects of price controls in the labor market.
On a truly private health insurance market chronic conditions would not be covered
Rightly so. It's more expensive to pay for treatment of chronic conditions indirectly through insurance vs. directly paying the health care provider. Why should an insurance company take a cut of the revenue? Chronic conditions are not unrealized risks; insurance has no place here.
nor would catastrophic health conditions because people underestimate the chances that they have them
Yet, surprisingly, people actually do buy insurance against "catastrophic" conditions—and not just employer-provided health insurance or the legally-mandated minimum level of automotive insurance. You're really not giving people enough credit here.
(I would personally expect most people to be more likely to overestimate the chances of truly catastrophic conditions, once they get past the sense of "immortality" which comes with adolescence. The general tendency I have observed is to underestimate things that happen often, and overestimate things which happen rarely.)
Thank you for pointing out the insanity of the prescription system.
I suspect the argument you'd get back is that the potential to commit mass mayhem is much higher now, which justifies giving governments the power to put anybody under a microscope whenever they like. ... As far as it goes, it's a good argument.
No, it is not a good argument. You are talking about placing constraints on every innocent individuals' behavior—with non-compliance punishable by loss of property, loss of freedom, and ultimately loss of life depending on how much the individual resists this violation of their natural rights—on the basis of something no more palpable than a generic, unsubstantiated fear of what someone might do. No amount of "potential to commit mass mayhem" could possibly justify that kind of response.
If the data being fed in is accurate, I don't see how we can treat that bias as anything other than a rational response.
The real problem isn't that the tool is making an data-driven (even if "biased") assessment regarding the tendencies of a subgroup within the population, but rather that the tendencies of the group are being used to make decisions about how to treat individuals. That is the essence of stereotyping, whether it's done by a human or by a machine. Stereotyping is wrong because it disregards individual choices and personal responsibility; morality aside, it's also a poor guide since the variation within a given group tends to be much larger than the variation between groups. Knowing that one group tends to be better at math than another, for example, is a poor predictor of how two specific individuals selected from those respective groups will compare.
The solution to stereotyping is "getting to know the individual". To counter it in AIs we need to give them more information to work with—much more. When an AI is able to take into account the subject's entire life history and render an informed opinion about that particular individual, and not just generalize about the groups they belong to, then we can say that the algorithm has a chance of being just and fair. Until then we need to be careful about how we apply them.
Curious Kid: So, this means that you ... pay all your taxes to fund all the social programs that you advocate for?
First, no court has yet found that they do not pay all of "their" taxes—they pay what is legally required, just like everyone else. Second, if Google actually wants to take care of the poor it would be more effective to just support the appropriate programs directly, and not outsource that responsibility to the government. Taxes are not primarily a way to help the poor; they are a way to (inefficiently) force others to contribute to social programs and subsidies you approve of against their will. Only a small fraction of the money taken in taxes actually makes it to someone in need.
I like attributes and logic (expressions) in a tubular form to both more easily identify visual patterns...
This text resulted in a very strange mental image, until I suddenly realized that you meant "tabular", as opposed to arranging your attributes and logic in the shape of a tube. Still, perhaps the cylindrical mental model of coding might have some merit...?
"char* example;" becomes "define a character array called example"
Except that isn't correct: The code is defining a pointer to zero or more characters, not a character array. To define a character array you need to allocate space to store some characters, as in "char example[N]". The pointer version should be read as "define a character pointer called example". (Or "char pointer", "pointer to char", etc.—the main point being that "example" is a pointer, not an array.)
Your solution sounds complicated, and depends on specific storage mediums. Fortunately, there is a simpler alternative. This happens to be one of the things that blockchains are particularly good for. Whenever you create an official document, just sign it and upload the detached signature to the Bitcoin blockchain. In the event of a dispute over the historicity of the document you can point to the matching entry on the blockchain to prove that the document existed at that point in time. The proof-of-work algorithm and corresponding computation time expended by Bitcoin miners ensures that transactions older than a few hours are nearly impossible to tamper with.
The percentage of tax you pay is not all that relevant... What matters is what you get in exchange.
The system is involuntary, so what what you get is irrelevant. Someone else decides that, not you, which means it's all to their benefit, not yours. Perhaps you would have chosen to pay for those things, perhaps not. Either way, those in power cannot take any credit for providing goods and services of their own choosing, payed for with stolen funds. If you would have chosen to purchase those same goods and services freely then forcing you to do so adds no value; if not, they have only made you worse off by making you pay for something you didn't want, or couldn't afford.
ctrl-shift-t only opens the last tab, not the last 10
Each use opens one tab, but you can use it up to 10 times in a row. This will reopen the last 10 closed tabs, and not the same tab 10 times.
In the absence of reliable GPS, a drone can also be programmed to follow a route using inertial guidance and/or a ground-facing camera, neither of which can be jammed.
Nobody tried putting out similar phones with the only real difference being replaceable batteries.
And you aren't going to get that situation, because a replaceable battery requires a very different phone design. People were able to choose from a variety of designs, some with replaceable batteries and some without, and the ones without were more popular precisely because the resources (size, weight, cost) that would have been spent on allowing the battery to be user-replaceable went into other features instead—features which will not be available on phones with replaceable batteries.
Why does the lack of open source drivers mean old phones can't run new OS versions?
New OS versions generally come with new versions of the kernel. Proprietary, binary-only drivers tend to only work with the particular version of the kernel they were built for. It is possible to upgrade other parts of the system, to a point, without changing the kernel, but the closed-source drivers act as a fixed point which the rest of the system has to work around, and you don't get the features and performance improvements included in more recent kernels. The older the drivers are the harder it is to bridge the gap between the OS version the drivers were designed for and the APIs expected by the latest software.
To some extent this also impacts non-obsolete devices, and is part of the reason why my OnePlus 3T with the latest available OS update based on Android 7.1.1 still reports that it's running Linux 3.18—when the latest mainline stable version is 4.11. Linux 3.18 hasn't been current since the release of 3.19 on February 8, 2015. No doubt some bugfixes and security patches have been backported, but it's still missing most of the development which has occurred over the last 29 months, and the main reason for that is maintaining support for closed-source drivers. The need for specific kernel versions and the associated workarounds means that each device is its own fork of the OS with all the associated development overhead, which is unsustainable over the long term. Support for older devices has to be dropped as resources become strained. To support older devices indefinitely they need to be folded into the mainline development effort, which means no device-specific workarounds. You shouldn't need to download an image of "Cyanogenmod Nougat for the Galaxy S3"; there should be one version of Cyanogenmod with all the drivers which works on every brand of device, just as with the various Linux distributions for PCs. (Aside from compiling for different CPU architectures, of course, just like i386 vs. amd64.)
Also, regardless of compatibility issues, if there is a problem with a proprietary driver and no open-source alternative there is very little anyone else can do about it if the manufacturer doesn't provide an update.
>Consumers have spoken and prefer
Uh, no, reduced sales at greater margin means exactly the opposite of that, but with more profits.
It's not a popularity contest; the quantity sold is meaningless. All that matters is the revenue. The consumers, as a group, have spoken and are willing to pay more, as a group, for cheaper, less-durable items.
The manufacturer's profit margin was never a factor. In a competitive market economy the profit margin at equilibrium is going to be approximately the same across all markets regardless of revenues or cost of goods sold. If it's lower than average in one area the marginal suppliers shut down and put their capital elsewhere, allowing prices to rise; if it's higher, new suppliers enter the market seeking a share of the profits and driving prices down. All an individual manufacturer can do to optimize profits is do a better job of giving the consumers what they actually want. In this case, that is less-durable goods at a correspondingly lower price.