I think it's reasonable to argue that slavery would have ended because it was economically inefficient. Slaves are expensive compared to machines and free labor.
Around here, truth in sale disclosures are required and also require a municipal housing inspector to check for significant code violations.
So serious problems that make the house fail housing codes will block the sale. IMHO, home inspectors are mostly a scam to find obvious problems that any informed person who has lived in a house might find.
If I was buying in an area with serious bug problems like termites, I'd hire an exterminator. "Home inspectors" cover too much ground to really offer serious expertise, and besides turning on the heat in July don't actually do much testing.
If I had a first-time relative buying a house, I would have them skip the inspector and consider hiring a roofing contractor instead. A new roof is $10k or more and a bad roof is the source of major expense. I'd probably also consider hiring a furnace repair person to check out the furnace, since that's another $5-10k to replace.
Yeah, inspections make sense on paper but in practice they're kind of worthless.
My wife and I actually took what amounted to a "home inspection" class before we bought our house. Taught by a home inspector, even, and the class was a lot of useful information about various problems you can find in a house. The guy was ASHI certified and our realtor even knew him by association with other sales.
Anyway, we hire this same guy to do the inspection on the house we bought. As it turns out, he totally misses the boat on a couple of things, including a bathroom vent fan that was only venting into the insulation -- it didn't even have a roof vent. And this guy went on the roof!!
So like the second weekend we're in the house, I have to do my first major home improvement task, cutting a hole in the roof to mount a vent and ducting to vent the bathroom fan, something that he totally should have caught and as a major code violation I could have gotten spiffed from the seller for.
I mean, maybe these guys do regularly find major problems in houses that would escape naive buyers, but their "inspection" doesn't really seem like it can be in-depth enough to find serious big-ticket items. Our city has truth in housing disclosures that require a city inspector to do a walk-through, so I think major code violations would get caught.
IMHO, you're better off spending the money on the gas company's insurance plan for a year to guard against unexpected appliance/furnance/ac repairs, because that's what's likely to go south. Just having your eyes open and looking for obvious problems (water stains, etc) is probably about as good as a home inspector really gets.
What's weird is that subletting rooms in your house was pretty normal, say up through maybe the 1950s? I mean people did have full-on rooming houses in some larger homes.
I think it was largely the post-war economic prosperity that got many families into single family houses and a lot of lower income single people either out of their parents' homes or into their own apartments vs. something like a rooming house or the really old-school residential hotel where rooms were let by the week.
I often can't help but see a lot of this as just the arc of middle class prosperity slowly winding down and people reverting to the economic systems -- like rooming houses -- of the pre-prosperity model.
Didn't Honda settle a claim that it built over a million cars with oil consumption problems?
My take is mostly that the Japanese cars were vastly superior to Americans in reliability up to maybe the early 2000s when the American brands mostly recovered through revised engines, power trains and basic quality control.
I think a big problem for American car brands isn't the engineering or build quality per se, it's the business culture of Big 3 car dealers. Japanese cars seemed to have much more streamlined trim lines which made the buying process better (and probably contributed to reliability, too). American car dealers liked complex trim lines and options because it enables a ton of pricing confusion and dealer-installation profit opportunities.
Not that Japanese car dealers don't have sleaze opportunities, too -- most are owned by regional dealership groups which sell all major brands -- but I think the influence of their parent companies made for less general business-as-usual.
What the hell is up with the United States when it comes to fucked up expensive mobile service?
A couple of decades of phones subsidized by carriers and paid for via long-term contracts which include carrier locking of the device. A mash-up of carrier technologies also contributed to lock-in as I don't think it was until recently you could find a phone that would do CDMA and GSM, plus the CDMA standard didn't even have a SIM card you could swap.
It may also be that the geographic size of the US actually makes carrier costs higher due to the larger number of sq. miles to cover, although you could counter this with the costs/complexity of setting up cell sites in old, densely populated European urban areas. In the US carriers can often just long-term lease ground in a parking lot or some other underutilized area.
I think the PHEV concept works better actually with a *larger* battery. I think a Volt type car with 100 mile battery range and generator makes more sense than one with only 50 mile range.
I don't consider my commutes extreme, but they vary enough that I'd be draining that 50 mile battery to 10-20% capacity regularly enough that I'd worry about the pack life. A 100 mile range I could do almost exclusively on battery power.
I would imagine this creates a ton of extra work for the airlines when people who want to switch seats to stay together flood the departure gate attendants. Worse yet are the people who don't notice until they board, and then panic when they are split up.
About 25% of my flights, I get asked if I would switch seats with someone so a family can be together. My policy is never to switch seats unless offered a superior seat, so there's a whole bunch of inefficiency for flight attendants trying to seat families together after/during boarding.
It also can't be a good customer service experience if families remain split up due to lack of options to move people -- the people sitting next to kids might not like it, the people split up don't like it, it drags down employee morale, it's just awful in all kinds of ways.
I don't even know what "traditional fares" are anymore. I think too often we keep referring to fares charged in the US during airline regulation, which was such a different market then it's almost not even a comparison anymore, like comparing the cost of horses and wagons to Uber.
Plus nobody these days pays a base, advertised fare anymore -- it has a bunch of added fees and add-ons.
I would be in favor of lightly regulating the passenger experience if only because it wouldn't create a competitive disadvantage for any one airline and may even improve their efficiency (like a lot less carry on baggage).
I've worked in SMB IT consulting for 13 years now, and as I see it most small businesses don't spend enough on IT all the way around the block -- desktop hardware, server hardware OS and applications, and tech labor hours. My rule of thumb is that an extra $10k spent a year will, in 1-3 years, get most of them totally caught up if not somewhere ahead of the curve.
The SMBs that are headed and run by owners are constantly cutting corners in all aspects of their business because each year's profit is extra money in their personal pocket. I know from the slightly larger ones with more administrative staff that many have no-show jobs with relatives on the payroll, wife and sometimes the kids get their cars paid for, etc. The owners look at the business as a lifestyle support mechanism first, and then a business second.
I think the mistake that gets made on the IT side, usually by younger guys, is too much configuration that usually winds up causing some kind of reliability failure. They want to create a maze of group policies, they want to script stuff, and while some of it is great, there's no time to document it so when it breaks it causes real headaches. Doing as little as necessary of this stuff makes the environment much more stable and easier to troubleshoot.
Group policy especially seems like a real trap -- I've walked into places with insane GPOs, dozens to hundreds of policies that take hours to sort out. The MS GPO system has awful reporting and documentation built into it, you literally have to create external documentation that explains what the goal of a policy was and what each setting was meant to do. If you don't, you have a total mess. I once worked on a project to do this -- 685 GPOs, and it was something like 100 hours to fix it, mostly because it required so much manual auditing, and even then we wound up deleting many policies because it just wasn't clear what the goal was or it seemed to be a policy for older platforms like XP.
But by and large, if you work for an IT consultancy you're only getting hired by the less competent (to incompetent) businesses because they don't have a strategy for IT at all, other than "spend as little as possible". And these places are generally a mess because of it and unless they're willing to spend, they're not gonna wind up satisfied.
The problem with games is that you can create perverse incentives. You couple the game success elements with actual work goals and assume that people motivated to win game points will also wind up achieving the work goals.
But if the rewards are tied to the game success elements (points, stars, etc) people often find out how to earn these elements without achieving the work goals.
35 million dollar man in 2018 dollars, unless his price tag increased along the lines of the defense department, in which case he's the $300 million dollar man.
I'd wager that on modern diesel-electric ships with electric azimuth thrusters that LNG is the ideal fuel. The prime mover is basically a medium sized electric power plant that provides both power for the drives and the shipboard electrical consumption, and I'd wager they're using gas turbines which can then be spun at optimum efficiency.
I've been looking at marine chartplotters and they actually advertise the GPS sample rate they can achieve. My guess is if you have a 30 Hz sample rate you will get a lot more precision as you wind up averaging out the outlier data points.
I sometimes misplace my phone inside my house, and "find my iphone" on the computer will often let me find it simply based on how accurate the location shown on the map is.
What do North and South Dakota have that Oklahoma doesn't?
My wife is from North Dakota and I've been everywhere from Bismark/Mandan, Devils Lake, Grand Forks and Fargo. Literally none of those places meet any of your criteria -- shit airports with flights to MSP or maybe Denver. No interesting activities beyond mainstream movies and (admittedly good) college hockey. The food is for shit unless you're a bar food fan. They do like to drink A LOT there, if that's your thing. Grand Forks and Fargo are prone to flooding and are cold even by my Minnesota standards in the winter. The only outdoor activities are hunting and fishing.
I mean, the people are great, I've liked most people I've met, but it's the ass end of the universe.
I can't comment about South Dakota too much, as I was only there twice,20 years ago, but it's not much different IMHO. Neither Rapid City or Sioux Falls are any better than Fargo or Bismark.
Nebraska at least has Omaha, but really, it's not great, either.
These dying-ass, country-fuck places need to pull their heads out of their asses. They can decide if they want to dry up and blow away or get into the 21st century. Fiber internet everywhere. Legalize pot. Make air travel easy, even if it means leasing a 737 and running 3x daily shuttles to an airport with direct international flights.
You want street gangs fighting over smuggled cigarettes? Jailing people for possessing or selling cigarettes? Adding to the police bureaucracy to enforce a tobacco ban?
A criminalization prohibition of tobacco is ridiculous and wouldn't work.
The closest you could come would be some kind of extreme regulation on commercial sales and activity, perhaps make it something like marijuana in states that have legalized it.
There's something about the ad-supported internet that feels like a perpetual motion machine or a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Somehow it seems like there's a weird subsidy or transfer of wealth involved from the real economy to the internet economy going on that cant possibly be sustainable.
It's like aliens will visit Earth in 20 years and marvel at how the entire planet is dedicated to making and watching ads and the resources necessary to keep the internet turned on. Either that, or they will wonder what Easter Island-like culture Earth had that built data centers and powered them until the environment was exhausted, all for ads.
I'll admit to being mostly devoid of details, but the NYTimes made it sound like Amazon's tax credits in NYC are some percentage of the jobs they actually wind up creating there, it's not like Amazon gets a single giant lump sum, although I'm sure there is some large-ish one-time up-front credit or other "incentive" that is front-loaded and not related to the number of jobs they create.
I don't know about this specific explanation, but in general it's definitely believable. If you increase the transaction overhead and friction, economists would generally expect fewer transactions.
Personally, I think this would just be a temporary dip until people got up to speed on entering a PIN with a purchase and merchants (especially restaurants) altered their transaction workflows to accommodate to allow for chip/pin transactions (eg, tips).
The decline in transactions is what scares off the credit card industries as they benefit from transaction fees from every transaction, even fraudulent ones.
I'm sure businesses with stored credit card info also fear it, as it makes their payment model less reliable and any transition to a pin based system would basically put a lot of their customers/business relationships up for grabs as these business relationships would need to be renewed.
Basically the bottom line is PIN would result in some short-term reduction in transaction volume and create disruption in existing cash flows, and since they can mostly stick merchants for the cost of fraud, these players have no incentive to make transactions more secure.
That's the best question in this thread. I would argue that the financial and business markets both believe nobody has an alternative.
We hear a lot of about in these kinds of threads about how Linux is a great alternative on the desktop, but if that was actually true, wouldn't we be hearing about more large-scale desktop migrations, or the markets punishing Microsoft when they make mistakes with Win10?
Haha, the old Slashdot standard of mistaking possible with practical or even desirable.
I figure a job change has to be really good to make the transaction costs of moving worthwhile, moving an entire family could cost upwards of $20,000 when you factor in market-necessary home improvements, selling costs, buying costs, moving costs, and any changes necessary to live in the new house (everything from fixing what's broken to furniture that fits the new house). Moving more than 3 times probably nullifies the financial gain from more lucrative positions.
In fact, I'd even argue that economics suggests that frequent moving isn't that common, mostly because homes are generally oriented towards ownership and not rental. If frequent moving was economically desirable, we'd have a different economic structure around housing oriented towards longer term leases and rentals vs ownership, and probably an entirely different housing model than single family homes.
While it's true there's a lot of rental out there, it's generally occupied by either childless old people, very young people or low-income families. Family housing generally isn't rental, and even if you wanted it your selection would be pretty tough because 3-4 BR, 1500 sq ft rentals are really uncommon. It's 1-2 BR and smaller sq footage.
Moving a lot for a job is like chasing a mirage, it's all energy spent and little actually gained. It's best to min-max housing location, likely employment centers, commutes, schools, and then stay put. There's so much more to choosing your residence than commute -- access to shops, restaurants, recreation, etc.
I kind of wonder if Microsoft actually *has* considered this and how much work it would actually take to port the UI to Linux.
I'm guessing at some point it's a weird bastard with just the kernal calls swapped but most of the shared code still in external dynamic libraries.
Management has a vested interest in systems which allow a small number of people to control a large number of people. It enables the people at the top of the organization to claim to be in control and extract large compensation amounts for the benefits of their control.
Switching to another system usually involves a compelling purpose for switching from the existing system and almost always it's the promise of reduced costs. So most modern systems of management really are focused on control and cost reduction.
It's no surprise that when you focus on control and cost reduction as your primary goals that the ability of these products to achieve goals like "quality outputs" are seriously in question and often a failure from the perspectives of those subject to these systems.
I wonder what economists would think of a proposal that forced corporations controlling more than 50 percent of their market to be broken apart. If the economics suggests they'll (eventually) recombine anyway, then the market gets the benefit of competition and innovation at least for a while. Companies that don't wind up controlling more than 50% don't have to break up, but also lack the ability to control the market.
I think nationalizing the cell tower networks makes a lot of sense. So much wasted spectrum and backhaul having 3 different companies serving the same geographic footprint.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's reasonable to argue that slavery would have ended because it was economically inefficient. Slaves are expensive compared to machines and free labor.
Around here, truth in sale disclosures are required and also require a municipal housing inspector to check for significant code violations.
So serious problems that make the house fail housing codes will block the sale. IMHO, home inspectors are mostly a scam to find obvious problems that any informed person who has lived in a house might find.
If I was buying in an area with serious bug problems like termites, I'd hire an exterminator. "Home inspectors" cover too much ground to really offer serious expertise, and besides turning on the heat in July don't actually do much testing.
If I had a first-time relative buying a house, I would have them skip the inspector and consider hiring a roofing contractor instead. A new roof is $10k or more and a bad roof is the source of major expense. I'd probably also consider hiring a furnace repair person to check out the furnace, since that's another $5-10k to replace.
Yeah, inspections make sense on paper but in practice they're kind of worthless.
My wife and I actually took what amounted to a "home inspection" class before we bought our house. Taught by a home inspector, even, and the class was a lot of useful information about various problems you can find in a house. The guy was ASHI certified and our realtor even knew him by association with other sales.
Anyway, we hire this same guy to do the inspection on the house we bought. As it turns out, he totally misses the boat on a couple of things, including a bathroom vent fan that was only venting into the insulation -- it didn't even have a roof vent. And this guy went on the roof!!
So like the second weekend we're in the house, I have to do my first major home improvement task, cutting a hole in the roof to mount a vent and ducting to vent the bathroom fan, something that he totally should have caught and as a major code violation I could have gotten spiffed from the seller for.
I mean, maybe these guys do regularly find major problems in houses that would escape naive buyers, but their "inspection" doesn't really seem like it can be in-depth enough to find serious big-ticket items. Our city has truth in housing disclosures that require a city inspector to do a walk-through, so I think major code violations would get caught.
IMHO, you're better off spending the money on the gas company's insurance plan for a year to guard against unexpected appliance/furnance/ac repairs, because that's what's likely to go south. Just having your eyes open and looking for obvious problems (water stains, etc) is probably about as good as a home inspector really gets.
What's weird is that subletting rooms in your house was pretty normal, say up through maybe the 1950s? I mean people did have full-on rooming houses in some larger homes.
I think it was largely the post-war economic prosperity that got many families into single family houses and a lot of lower income single people either out of their parents' homes or into their own apartments vs. something like a rooming house or the really old-school residential hotel where rooms were let by the week.
I often can't help but see a lot of this as just the arc of middle class prosperity slowly winding down and people reverting to the economic systems -- like rooming houses -- of the pre-prosperity model.
Didn't Honda settle a claim that it built over a million cars with oil consumption problems?
My take is mostly that the Japanese cars were vastly superior to Americans in reliability up to maybe the early 2000s when the American brands mostly recovered through revised engines, power trains and basic quality control.
I think a big problem for American car brands isn't the engineering or build quality per se, it's the business culture of Big 3 car dealers. Japanese cars seemed to have much more streamlined trim lines which made the buying process better (and probably contributed to reliability, too). American car dealers liked complex trim lines and options because it enables a ton of pricing confusion and dealer-installation profit opportunities.
Not that Japanese car dealers don't have sleaze opportunities, too -- most are owned by regional dealership groups which sell all major brands -- but I think the influence of their parent companies made for less general business-as-usual.
What the hell is up with the United States when it comes to fucked up expensive mobile service?
A couple of decades of phones subsidized by carriers and paid for via long-term contracts which include carrier locking of the device. A mash-up of carrier technologies also contributed to lock-in as I don't think it was until recently you could find a phone that would do CDMA and GSM, plus the CDMA standard didn't even have a SIM card you could swap.
It may also be that the geographic size of the US actually makes carrier costs higher due to the larger number of sq. miles to cover, although you could counter this with the costs/complexity of setting up cell sites in old, densely populated European urban areas. In the US carriers can often just long-term lease ground in a parking lot or some other underutilized area.
I think the PHEV concept works better actually with a *larger* battery. I think a Volt type car with 100 mile battery range and generator makes more sense than one with only 50 mile range.
I don't consider my commutes extreme, but they vary enough that I'd be draining that 50 mile battery to 10-20% capacity regularly enough that I'd worry about the pack life. A 100 mile range I could do almost exclusively on battery power.
Besides making them more money?
I would imagine this creates a ton of extra work for the airlines when people who want to switch seats to stay together flood the departure gate attendants. Worse yet are the people who don't notice until they board, and then panic when they are split up.
About 25% of my flights, I get asked if I would switch seats with someone so a family can be together. My policy is never to switch seats unless offered a superior seat, so there's a whole bunch of inefficiency for flight attendants trying to seat families together after/during boarding.
It also can't be a good customer service experience if families remain split up due to lack of options to move people -- the people sitting next to kids might not like it, the people split up don't like it, it drags down employee morale, it's just awful in all kinds of ways.
I don't even know what "traditional fares" are anymore. I think too often we keep referring to fares charged in the US during airline regulation, which was such a different market then it's almost not even a comparison anymore, like comparing the cost of horses and wagons to Uber.
Plus nobody these days pays a base, advertised fare anymore -- it has a bunch of added fees and add-ons.
I would be in favor of lightly regulating the passenger experience if only because it wouldn't create a competitive disadvantage for any one airline and may even improve their efficiency (like a lot less carry on baggage).
I've worked in SMB IT consulting for 13 years now, and as I see it most small businesses don't spend enough on IT all the way around the block -- desktop hardware, server hardware OS and applications, and tech labor hours. My rule of thumb is that an extra $10k spent a year will, in 1-3 years, get most of them totally caught up if not somewhere ahead of the curve. The SMBs that are headed and run by owners are constantly cutting corners in all aspects of their business because each year's profit is extra money in their personal pocket. I know from the slightly larger ones with more administrative staff that many have no-show jobs with relatives on the payroll, wife and sometimes the kids get their cars paid for, etc. The owners look at the business as a lifestyle support mechanism first, and then a business second. I think the mistake that gets made on the IT side, usually by younger guys, is too much configuration that usually winds up causing some kind of reliability failure. They want to create a maze of group policies, they want to script stuff, and while some of it is great, there's no time to document it so when it breaks it causes real headaches. Doing as little as necessary of this stuff makes the environment much more stable and easier to troubleshoot. Group policy especially seems like a real trap -- I've walked into places with insane GPOs, dozens to hundreds of policies that take hours to sort out. The MS GPO system has awful reporting and documentation built into it, you literally have to create external documentation that explains what the goal of a policy was and what each setting was meant to do. If you don't, you have a total mess. I once worked on a project to do this -- 685 GPOs, and it was something like 100 hours to fix it, mostly because it required so much manual auditing, and even then we wound up deleting many policies because it just wasn't clear what the goal was or it seemed to be a policy for older platforms like XP. But by and large, if you work for an IT consultancy you're only getting hired by the less competent (to incompetent) businesses because they don't have a strategy for IT at all, other than "spend as little as possible". And these places are generally a mess because of it and unless they're willing to spend, they're not gonna wind up satisfied.
The problem with games is that you can create perverse incentives. You couple the game success elements with actual work goals and assume that people motivated to win game points will also wind up achieving the work goals. But if the rewards are tied to the game success elements (points, stars, etc) people often find out how to earn these elements without achieving the work goals.
35 million dollar man in 2018 dollars, unless his price tag increased along the lines of the defense department, in which case he's the $300 million dollar man.
I'd wager that on modern diesel-electric ships with electric azimuth thrusters that LNG is the ideal fuel. The prime mover is basically a medium sized electric power plant that provides both power for the drives and the shipboard electrical consumption, and I'd wager they're using gas turbines which can then be spun at optimum efficiency.
I've been looking at marine chartplotters and they actually advertise the GPS sample rate they can achieve. My guess is if you have a 30 Hz sample rate you will get a lot more precision as you wind up averaging out the outlier data points.
I sometimes misplace my phone inside my house, and "find my iphone" on the computer will often let me find it simply based on how accurate the location shown on the map is.
What do North and South Dakota have that Oklahoma doesn't?
My wife is from North Dakota and I've been everywhere from Bismark/Mandan, Devils Lake, Grand Forks and Fargo. Literally none of those places meet any of your criteria -- shit airports with flights to MSP or maybe Denver. No interesting activities beyond mainstream movies and (admittedly good) college hockey. The food is for shit unless you're a bar food fan. They do like to drink A LOT there, if that's your thing. Grand Forks and Fargo are prone to flooding and are cold even by my Minnesota standards in the winter. The only outdoor activities are hunting and fishing.
I mean, the people are great, I've liked most people I've met, but it's the ass end of the universe.
I can't comment about South Dakota too much, as I was only there twice,20 years ago, but it's not much different IMHO. Neither Rapid City or Sioux Falls are any better than Fargo or Bismark.
Nebraska at least has Omaha, but really, it's not great, either.
These dying-ass, country-fuck places need to pull their heads out of their asses. They can decide if they want to dry up and blow away or get into the 21st century. Fiber internet everywhere. Legalize pot. Make air travel easy, even if it means leasing a 737 and running 3x daily shuttles to an airport with direct international flights.
You want street gangs fighting over smuggled cigarettes? Jailing people for possessing or selling cigarettes? Adding to the police bureaucracy to enforce a tobacco ban? A criminalization prohibition of tobacco is ridiculous and wouldn't work. The closest you could come would be some kind of extreme regulation on commercial sales and activity, perhaps make it something like marijuana in states that have legalized it.
There's something about the ad-supported internet that feels like a perpetual motion machine or a violation of the laws of thermodynamics. Somehow it seems like there's a weird subsidy or transfer of wealth involved from the real economy to the internet economy going on that cant possibly be sustainable. It's like aliens will visit Earth in 20 years and marvel at how the entire planet is dedicated to making and watching ads and the resources necessary to keep the internet turned on. Either that, or they will wonder what Easter Island-like culture Earth had that built data centers and powered them until the environment was exhausted, all for ads.
I'll admit to being mostly devoid of details, but the NYTimes made it sound like Amazon's tax credits in NYC are some percentage of the jobs they actually wind up creating there, it's not like Amazon gets a single giant lump sum, although I'm sure there is some large-ish one-time up-front credit or other "incentive" that is front-loaded and not related to the number of jobs they create.
I don't know about this specific explanation, but in general it's definitely believable. If you increase the transaction overhead and friction, economists would generally expect fewer transactions. Personally, I think this would just be a temporary dip until people got up to speed on entering a PIN with a purchase and merchants (especially restaurants) altered their transaction workflows to accommodate to allow for chip/pin transactions (eg, tips). The decline in transactions is what scares off the credit card industries as they benefit from transaction fees from every transaction, even fraudulent ones. I'm sure businesses with stored credit card info also fear it, as it makes their payment model less reliable and any transition to a pin based system would basically put a lot of their customers/business relationships up for grabs as these business relationships would need to be renewed. Basically the bottom line is PIN would result in some short-term reduction in transaction volume and create disruption in existing cash flows, and since they can mostly stick merchants for the cost of fraud, these players have no incentive to make transactions more secure.
That's the best question in this thread. I would argue that the financial and business markets both believe nobody has an alternative.
We hear a lot of about in these kinds of threads about how Linux is a great alternative on the desktop, but if that was actually true, wouldn't we be hearing about more large-scale desktop migrations, or the markets punishing Microsoft when they make mistakes with Win10?
Haha, the old Slashdot standard of mistaking possible with practical or even desirable.
I figure a job change has to be really good to make the transaction costs of moving worthwhile, moving an entire family could cost upwards of $20,000 when you factor in market-necessary home improvements, selling costs, buying costs, moving costs, and any changes necessary to live in the new house (everything from fixing what's broken to furniture that fits the new house). Moving more than 3 times probably nullifies the financial gain from more lucrative positions.
In fact, I'd even argue that economics suggests that frequent moving isn't that common, mostly because homes are generally oriented towards ownership and not rental. If frequent moving was economically desirable, we'd have a different economic structure around housing oriented towards longer term leases and rentals vs ownership, and probably an entirely different housing model than single family homes.
While it's true there's a lot of rental out there, it's generally occupied by either childless old people, very young people or low-income families. Family housing generally isn't rental, and even if you wanted it your selection would be pretty tough because 3-4 BR, 1500 sq ft rentals are really uncommon. It's 1-2 BR and smaller sq footage.
Moving a lot for a job is like chasing a mirage, it's all energy spent and little actually gained. It's best to min-max housing location, likely employment centers, commutes, schools, and then stay put. There's so much more to choosing your residence than commute -- access to shops, restaurants, recreation, etc.
I kind of wonder if Microsoft actually *has* considered this and how much work it would actually take to port the UI to Linux. I'm guessing at some point it's a weird bastard with just the kernal calls swapped but most of the shared code still in external dynamic libraries.
Management has a vested interest in systems which allow a small number of people to control a large number of people. It enables the people at the top of the organization to claim to be in control and extract large compensation amounts for the benefits of their control. Switching to another system usually involves a compelling purpose for switching from the existing system and almost always it's the promise of reduced costs. So most modern systems of management really are focused on control and cost reduction. It's no surprise that when you focus on control and cost reduction as your primary goals that the ability of these products to achieve goals like "quality outputs" are seriously in question and often a failure from the perspectives of those subject to these systems.
I wonder what economists would think of a proposal that forced corporations controlling more than 50 percent of their market to be broken apart. If the economics suggests they'll (eventually) recombine anyway, then the market gets the benefit of competition and innovation at least for a while. Companies that don't wind up controlling more than 50% don't have to break up, but also lack the ability to control the market. I think nationalizing the cell tower networks makes a lot of sense. So much wasted spectrum and backhaul having 3 different companies serving the same geographic footprint.