Costco does indeed pay its employees more -- the few employees that remain, that is. Costco figured out how to minimize human labor early on and has been using wages to put pressure on its competitors who actually employ more warm bodies (and for favorable PR for people like you who just look at the raw hourly wages and think they're a bunch of humanitarians). Here's the take-home from an article on the subject from 2006:
Costco has sales of $51 billion, 110,000 employees (45% part time, similar to WalMart isn't it?) and WalMart has sales (in North America) of $191 billion and 1.3 million associates. So Costco has sales of some $465,000 per employee and WalMart $147,000 per employee. . . . So, in theory, we could in fact get WalMart to pay the same as Costco by making similarly efficient use of labor: that is, firing between two thirds and three quarters of their staff.
and policies like Single Payer health care and basic income are gaining in popularity (with Single Payer being supported by a majority of voters).
You're telling me that the majority of people who were asked if they want More Free Shit said yes? Knock me over with a feather. I'll take a wild guess that the Single Payer polls just ask the question in a vacuum and don't bother to mention the rationing, wait times, and lack of provider choice that result from government-mandated fee structures, but I'd be happy to look at raw data that suggests otherwise.
Try that in a rented single room with no cooking facilities.
Please. For well less than $100 you can get a countertop induction unit -- it heats the pot directly so no real risk of fire -- and about the same gets you a set of perfectly serviceable pots/pans/utensils. Something like that certainly wouldn't be the roughest part of your existence if you're really living in a rented single room.
Heck, even if the efficiency doesn't go up much, it would be great to be able to cut the glare from reflections to minimize issues to air traffic etc. That's always been one of my larger concerns about blanketing large areas with panels.
Ah, so it's the "anonymous Internet commentator Uberbah says it's different" limiting principle. Got it. Hopefully you've contacted the Supreme Court and imbued them with your infinite wisdom on how easy this all is -- they were actually struggling with the issue, but this should clear everything up.
Thoughtless experiment, in areas where prostitution is legal, should they have the right to refuse clients of certain race, ethnicities, genders, or body types? Where does the line get drawn?
Because being a homophobe with your public accommodations is exactly the same as picking and choosing what to allow into your mouth, anus or vagina.
Mocking the slippery slope doesn't make it go away. Please explain the limiting principle that makes a cake shop a "public accommodation" when its owner decides to go into business selling cakes, yet does not make a prostitute's services a "public accommodation" when the prostitute decides to go into business selling their body.
The general public suffers from not being able to use the internet to transfer files back and forth among themselves at reasonable speeds.
This is a circular argument -- you have yet to explain why 10Mbps is not a "reasonable speed" -- particularly when the subject is whether it's an acceptable minimum speed.
You know, peer to peer information sharing, what the internet was designed for.
Ah, here we go. Why don't you just be candid and say you think there's a constitutional right to fat-pipe BitTorrent? And I'll take a cite on that being "what the internet was designed for" if you have one.
Data sizes have grown much faster than transmission speeds in this country.
What does that have to do with the health and safety of the populace? Streaming is a convenience. (And you can run multiple HD streams on 10Mbps in any event.) BitTorrent was 95+% pirated material last I checked. If anything, saturating the internet with this kind of crap puts any genuinely critical traffic at risk.
That aside, a good deal of data bloat is due to lazy/incompetent web designers. If high bandwidth availability didn't allow them to sweep poor performance under the rug, they'd actually have to do something about it.
How fucking long is that in computer years? They're shorter than dog years.
Breathe. How about societal years, since that's really what's at issue here? Just because engineers develop ways to communicate at speed X doesn't mean that consumers suddenly have a vital need to communicate at speed X (or even X/100).
Rather than carrying on with the generalized histrionics, how about you list some specific applications requiring significantly greater than 10Mbps that, in your estimation, (a) a significant cross-section of the populace actually does on a regular basis, and (b) without which they would genuinely suffer? Otherwise you're just arguing we need speed because faster is better, much like insecure people tend to do with cars, CPUs, etc.
Of course companies have done massively stupid coverups of flawed designs, or even deliberately engineered them (I'm looking at you, Volkswagen). But that's not the default, or anywhere close. We don't know yet which bucket this one falls in, but Occam's Razor counsels for incompetence over maliciousness until the evidence says otherwise.
Intel has been aware for quite a long time, a year or more probably.
That just doesn't ring true to me. Intel's last round of processors it released in October were vulnerable. Had they known for a year or more, that would have been plenty of time to roll out a permanent fix in those models before shipment, and they certainly could have done that silently, without breaking the embargo. If you're saying they continued to roll out new flawed chips they had time to fix before release, that's a level of conspiracy theory that's hard to buy into without some concrete evidence.
It's about 200 times faster than typical internet service 20 years ago, for crying out loud. The fact that the Joneses have much faster speeds is utterly irrelevant to the question of how much speed a typical person actually needs.
10 Mbps is a tricycle on the information superhighway.
You've clearly lost perspective. Until last month, my fairly heavy use household has never had (or needed) more than 12 Mbps. Finally got 100M fiber, mainly for the latency and upchannel -- makes the VPNs run smoother. Most of the bandwidth sits unused the vast majority of the time. And so it will for most households that aren't streaming 6 simultaneous Netflix sessions or BitTorrenting the latest... er, Linix distro.
As I said before, Big Broadband is nice. But it's not even close to necessary.
I don't think anyone in this thread said anything about unrepeatable "random selection without any contribution by a human author" -- I certainly didn't. Pseudo-random white noise generators certainly have a human contribution and are repeatable.
To be clear, I'm not taking a strong stance that something like that would be copyrightable -- just pointing out that it's not nearly as clear-cut as folks might think.
Well since I'm old enough to pre-date the internet and FAR older than the web I think I have a better handle on what life is like without internet access than most of the people reading this.
Same here. Given your age I'm frankly a bit surprised that you're not able to put this in better perspective.
While it's perfectly possible to get by without internet service, I don't buy the argument that it isn't a utility of the same importance as phone or mail and just a step behind electricity. It's certainly more important than Cable TV.
But the discussion wasn't about having internet service at all -- it was about having Really Fast Really Cheap internet service. The corollary would be more like a guaranteed three phone lines in every house or overnight mail service for the cost of a first-class stamp. We've never subsidized to the sort of level that you and others are proposing.
And the pipe providers need to be regulated to a similar degree as the electric companies to ensure fair and non-discriminatory access at rational prices even to rural areas.
You forgot about free ponies for everyone.
Broadband by whatever definition you choose is really cool to have, but in no way shape form or fashion approaches a basic need. Growing up in a tech-heavy bubble doubtless makes it hard to comprehend how much of society gets along just fine without it.
Saying there are infinite numbers of permutations as a defense of a particular variant is like taking a recording of an existing song, changing the pitch of a single note, and then claiming that it's a new song.
Well, no, it really isn't. Saying there are infinite numbers of permutations doesn't say anything at all about the number of differences between a particular variant and another already in existence.
creativity plays no part in creating any of those permutations.
Creativity isn't the bottom line of whether something is copyrightable -- originality is. Selecting a specific arrangement of white noise isn't conceptually different in that regard than selecting a specific arrangement of words, musical notes, etc.
Step 1: Repeal Net Neutrality, then offer new, unlimited data plans for mobile/home Internet. Convince people to buy into these "forever unlimited" data plans.
Wow, what a bunch of evil bastards. Good thing smart people like these brave Redditors won't be fooled and will obstinately stick with their tried and true capped plans.
Step 2: Get all data usage (mobile and home) classified under a single umbrella.
All these propositions seem to me to be the byproduct of a few too many fertile imaginations with a bit too much time on their hands, but this one particularly takes the cake. Are they suggesting the United States would essentially co-opt all ISPs and telecom companies and force them to do business in such a restricted way? Has it crossed anyone's mind that we just spent an awful lot of time quarreling about whether there should be more or less governmental control of ISPs, and the new FCC rules go fully in the opposite direction as what would be required here?
Step 3: Quash ISP startups with new regulations making it infeasible for them to access utility poles, junctions, and network infrastructure.
It's a damn good thing fixed wireless hasn't been invented yet -- that way this one actually has a chance.
Step 4: Implement data caps on all the "forever unlimited" data plans. ("Because we have to--don't let bandwidth abusers take your Internet!")
This sort of thing is a plaintiff's lawyer's dream come true. The FTC almost certainly would get involved as well if it was truly a national or even widespread phenomenon as predicted here.
Step 5: Now you are forced to pay $100/month for up to 10-20 GB per month (hint: this translates to about 3 to 7 hours of HD Netflix per month). It will be very expensive to go over that, especially for non-preferred sites (think anything like Kodi, Tor, torrents, etc.).
Sorry, but I'm going to have to swing by Wal-Mart and stock up on tin foil before I can circle back to this one. Once you get over the hump of actually believing that all ISPs would take this drastic of a step with impunity, you then (as with step 3) have to squeeze your eyes shut and pretend that wireless doesn't exist (or you need to add another step where the federal government seizes all wireless spectrum or some similar way of eliminating wireless as a competition vector).
10Mbps is indeed a significant escalation from the 4MBps that was in place a mere 3 years ago. Wheeler jacked it way too far too fast to serve his political purpose of declaring a scarcity of "broadband" coverage.
To look at a 150% increase from 2015 as "regressive" is about the same as politicians wailing about "spending cuts" when what they really mean is that the spending increase didn't end up being as large as they wanted.
It doesn't hold a candle to your shoot-from-the-hip incendiary comment plan. I and others have written repeatedly in detail about why the timing and amount of Equifax's execs' transactions were completely consistent with their past trading patterns and weren't at all consistent with a dump. Did you have some specific facts you wanted to share with the class that support your belief that those transactions were indeed uncharacteristic?
their system was able to accurately classify news stories . . . when evaluated against a ground truth dataset of already correctly classified news articles . . . Articles were drawn from an existing New York Times linguistic dataset
So we've just come up with a more efficient, automated system for people to bucket articles according to their own biases. Hooray, I guess.
Hey, it's funny -- I was just reading an article that explained how the government-funded NSA is bleeding talent because they can make a lot more in the private sector. And there was this dude named rsilvergun who said:
these guys can clear $500k/yr working for Wallstreet. It's no wonder they don't want to settle for $140k/yr working for Uncle Sam.
I know, I know... consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. But still.
We still need real net neutrality in law, not a regulation that three people can overturn.
I'm not sure there's as much advantage there as you might think. As I've mentioned before, a law can be overturned by a similarly small handful of judges, and once overturned is the status quo for the foreseeable future. As it stands, the FCC commissioners' staggered terms effectively create a horizon of a few years before the pendulum could just as well swing back the other direction, just as it did here. That uncertainty itself is likely to keep businesses from making fundamental changes to their models based on the current rules.
Ah, I get it. So you don't even participate in FB, have no basis to believe that what I'm saying is untrue, pretend it didn't just play out right in front of you here, and yet accuse me of making it all up. That's some chutzpah.
It's amusing that you posted this head-in-the-sand gem a full 18 minutes after the AC post right above yours. If you don't see the same and far worse on FB on a daily basis, you've achieved a purified echo chamber indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
There are companies like Costco & Quick Trip that treat their employees pretty well
QuikTrip appears to pay less than $10/hr for regular employees and $12-13/hr for managers, so not sure of your point there.
Costco does indeed pay its employees more -- the few employees that remain, that is. Costco figured out how to minimize human labor early on and has been using wages to put pressure on its competitors who actually employ more warm bodies (and for favorable PR for people like you who just look at the raw hourly wages and think they're a bunch of humanitarians). Here's the take-home from an article on the subject from 2006:
and policies like Single Payer health care and basic income are gaining in popularity (with Single Payer being supported by a majority of voters).
You're telling me that the majority of people who were asked if they want More Free Shit said yes? Knock me over with a feather. I'll take a wild guess that the Single Payer polls just ask the question in a vacuum and don't bother to mention the rationing, wait times, and lack of provider choice that result from government-mandated fee structures, but I'd be happy to look at raw data that suggests otherwise.
Try that in a rented single room with no cooking facilities.
Please. For well less than $100 you can get a countertop induction unit -- it heats the pot directly so no real risk of fire -- and about the same gets you a set of perfectly serviceable pots/pans/utensils. Something like that certainly wouldn't be the roughest part of your existence if you're really living in a rented single room.
Never try to extort someone for more than the cost to have you killed.
Heck, even if the efficiency doesn't go up much, it would be great to be able to cut the glare from reflections to minimize issues to air traffic etc. That's always been one of my larger concerns about blanketing large areas with panels.
Ah, so it's the "anonymous Internet commentator Uberbah says it's different" limiting principle. Got it. Hopefully you've contacted the Supreme Court and imbued them with your infinite wisdom on how easy this all is -- they were actually struggling with the issue, but this should clear everything up.
Mocking the slippery slope doesn't make it go away. Please explain the limiting principle that makes a cake shop a "public accommodation" when its owner decides to go into business selling cakes, yet does not make a prostitute's services a "public accommodation" when the prostitute decides to go into business selling their body.
The general public suffers from not being able to use the internet to transfer files back and forth among themselves at reasonable speeds.
This is a circular argument -- you have yet to explain why 10Mbps is not a "reasonable speed" -- particularly when the subject is whether it's an acceptable minimum speed.
You know, peer to peer information sharing, what the internet was designed for.
Ah, here we go. Why don't you just be candid and say you think there's a constitutional right to fat-pipe BitTorrent? And I'll take a cite on that being "what the internet was designed for" if you have one.
Data sizes have grown much faster than transmission speeds in this country.
What does that have to do with the health and safety of the populace? Streaming is a convenience. (And you can run multiple HD streams on 10Mbps in any event.) BitTorrent was 95+% pirated material last I checked. If anything, saturating the internet with this kind of crap puts any genuinely critical traffic at risk.
That aside, a good deal of data bloat is due to lazy/incompetent web designers. If high bandwidth availability didn't allow them to sweep poor performance under the rug, they'd actually have to do something about it.
How fucking long is that in computer years? They're shorter than dog years.
Breathe. How about societal years, since that's really what's at issue here? Just because engineers develop ways to communicate at speed X doesn't mean that consumers suddenly have a vital need to communicate at speed X (or even X/100).
Rather than carrying on with the generalized histrionics, how about you list some specific applications requiring significantly greater than 10Mbps that, in your estimation, (a) a significant cross-section of the populace actually does on a regular basis, and (b) without which they would genuinely suffer? Otherwise you're just arguing we need speed because faster is better, much like insecure people tend to do with cars, CPUs, etc.
Of course companies have done massively stupid coverups of flawed designs, or even deliberately engineered them (I'm looking at you, Volkswagen). But that's not the default, or anywhere close. We don't know yet which bucket this one falls in, but Occam's Razor counsels for incompetence over maliciousness until the evidence says otherwise.
Intel has been aware for quite a long time, a year or more probably.
That just doesn't ring true to me. Intel's last round of processors it released in October were vulnerable. Had they known for a year or more, that would have been plenty of time to roll out a permanent fix in those models before shipment, and they certainly could have done that silently, without breaking the embargo. If you're saying they continued to roll out new flawed chips they had time to fix before release, that's a level of conspiracy theory that's hard to buy into without some concrete evidence.
10 Mbps is not really fast. It's not even close.
It's about 200 times faster than typical internet service 20 years ago, for crying out loud. The fact that the Joneses have much faster speeds is utterly irrelevant to the question of how much speed a typical person actually needs.
10 Mbps is a tricycle on the information superhighway.
You've clearly lost perspective. Until last month, my fairly heavy use household has never had (or needed) more than 12 Mbps. Finally got 100M fiber, mainly for the latency and upchannel -- makes the VPNs run smoother. Most of the bandwidth sits unused the vast majority of the time. And so it will for most households that aren't streaming 6 simultaneous Netflix sessions or BitTorrenting the latest... er, Linix distro.
As I said before, Big Broadband is nice. But it's not even close to necessary.
I don't think anyone in this thread said anything about unrepeatable "random selection without any contribution by a human author" -- I certainly didn't. Pseudo-random white noise generators certainly have a human contribution and are repeatable.
To be clear, I'm not taking a strong stance that something like that would be copyrightable -- just pointing out that it's not nearly as clear-cut as folks might think.
Well since I'm old enough to pre-date the internet and FAR older than the web I think I have a better handle on what life is like without internet access than most of the people reading this.
Same here. Given your age I'm frankly a bit surprised that you're not able to put this in better perspective.
While it's perfectly possible to get by without internet service, I don't buy the argument that it isn't a utility of the same importance as phone or mail and just a step behind electricity. It's certainly more important than Cable TV.
But the discussion wasn't about having internet service at all -- it was about having Really Fast Really Cheap internet service. The corollary would be more like a guaranteed three phone lines in every house or overnight mail service for the cost of a first-class stamp. We've never subsidized to the sort of level that you and others are proposing.
And the pipe providers need to be regulated to a similar degree as the electric companies to ensure fair and non-discriminatory access at rational prices even to rural areas.
You forgot about free ponies for everyone.
Broadband by whatever definition you choose is really cool to have, but in no way shape form or fashion approaches a basic need. Growing up in a tech-heavy bubble doubtless makes it hard to comprehend how much of society gets along just fine without it.
Saying there are infinite numbers of permutations as a defense of a particular variant is like taking a recording of an existing song, changing the pitch of a single note, and then claiming that it's a new song.
Well, no, it really isn't. Saying there are infinite numbers of permutations doesn't say anything at all about the number of differences between a particular variant and another already in existence.
creativity plays no part in creating any of those permutations.
Creativity isn't the bottom line of whether something is copyrightable -- originality is. Selecting a specific arrangement of white noise isn't conceptually different in that regard than selecting a specific arrangement of words, musical notes, etc.
Step 1: Repeal Net Neutrality, then offer new, unlimited data plans for mobile/home Internet. Convince people to buy into these "forever unlimited" data plans.
Wow, what a bunch of evil bastards. Good thing smart people like these brave Redditors won't be fooled and will obstinately stick with their tried and true capped plans.
Step 2: Get all data usage (mobile and home) classified under a single umbrella.
All these propositions seem to me to be the byproduct of a few too many fertile imaginations with a bit too much time on their hands, but this one particularly takes the cake. Are they suggesting the United States would essentially co-opt all ISPs and telecom companies and force them to do business in such a restricted way? Has it crossed anyone's mind that we just spent an awful lot of time quarreling about whether there should be more or less governmental control of ISPs, and the new FCC rules go fully in the opposite direction as what would be required here?
Step 3: Quash ISP startups with new regulations making it infeasible for them to access utility poles, junctions, and network infrastructure.
It's a damn good thing fixed wireless hasn't been invented yet -- that way this one actually has a chance.
Step 4: Implement data caps on all the "forever unlimited" data plans. ("Because we have to--don't let bandwidth abusers take your Internet!")
This sort of thing is a plaintiff's lawyer's dream come true. The FTC almost certainly would get involved as well if it was truly a national or even widespread phenomenon as predicted here.
Step 5: Now you are forced to pay $100/month for up to 10-20 GB per month (hint: this translates to about 3 to 7 hours of HD Netflix per month). It will be very expensive to go over that, especially for non-preferred sites (think anything like Kodi, Tor, torrents, etc.).
Sorry, but I'm going to have to swing by Wal-Mart and stock up on tin foil before I can circle back to this one. Once you get over the hump of actually believing that all ISPs would take this drastic of a step with impunity, you then (as with step 3) have to squeeze your eyes shut and pretend that wireless doesn't exist (or you need to add another step where the federal government seizes all wireless spectrum or some similar way of eliminating wireless as a competition vector).
'broadband' definitions should only ever escalate
10Mbps is indeed a significant escalation from the 4MBps that was in place a mere 3 years ago. Wheeler jacked it way too far too fast to serve his political purpose of declaring a scarcity of "broadband" coverage.
To look at a 150% increase from 2015 as "regressive" is about the same as politicians wailing about "spending cuts" when what they really mean is that the spending increase didn't end up being as large as they wanted.
It doesn't hold a candle to your shoot-from-the-hip incendiary comment plan. I and others have written repeatedly in detail about why the timing and amount of Equifax's execs' transactions were completely consistent with their past trading patterns and weren't at all consistent with a dump. Did you have some specific facts you wanted to share with the class that support your belief that those transactions were indeed uncharacteristic?
their system was able to accurately classify news stories . . . when evaluated against a ground truth dataset of already correctly classified news articles . . . Articles were drawn from an existing New York Times linguistic dataset
So we've just come up with a more efficient, automated system for people to bucket articles according to their own biases. Hooray, I guess.
the scientists don't really care who pays them.
Hey, it's funny -- I was just reading an article that explained how the government-funded NSA is bleeding talent because they can make a lot more in the private sector. And there was this dude named rsilvergun who said:
these guys can clear $500k/yr working for Wallstreet. It's no wonder they don't want to settle for $140k/yr working for Uncle Sam.
I know, I know... consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. But still.
It's bedtime in Iceland right now. You'll probably have to wait a few hours for the inevitable book-length puff piece.
We still need real net neutrality in law, not a regulation that three people can overturn.
I'm not sure there's as much advantage there as you might think. As I've mentioned before, a law can be overturned by a similarly small handful of judges, and once overturned is the status quo for the foreseeable future. As it stands, the FCC commissioners' staggered terms effectively create a horizon of a few years before the pendulum could just as well swing back the other direction, just as it did here. That uncertainty itself is likely to keep businesses from making fundamental changes to their models based on the current rules.
And all we can find to do is bitch about the price? Maslow is indeed a harsh mistress.
This is amazing stuff, folks. If you want more of it, leave the profit motive in place. If you want less of it, do the opposite.
Ah, I get it. So you don't even participate in FB, have no basis to believe that what I'm saying is untrue, pretend it didn't just play out right in front of you here, and yet accuse me of making it all up. That's some chutzpah.
It's amusing that you posted this head-in-the-sand gem a full 18 minutes after the AC post right above yours. If you don't see the same and far worse on FB on a daily basis, you've achieved a purified echo chamber indeed.