I take surveys for pay, for fun mostly, and for a bit of extra cash. Sometimes I get interesting surveys about new products, mostly it's boring demographics and junk. I've done enough surveys now to immediately recognize that certain sites will waste my time with lengthy irritating questions about crap I don't care about, and/or just throw me out without pay after way more time than would be reasonable. J.D. Power is one of those. When I see a survey is hosted by J.D. Power, I just close it immediately.
> "The woman's father reportedly believes he's in the right to post the pictures because he took them."
Well, sounds like I have a trip to Austria to make. Specifically, to right outside this guy's window, to take some pictures of him while he's changing, which I will then have the right to post, because they were my pictures, right? Apparently, according to this guy's logic...
After all, unless you get a new phone, most like you already *have* all the apps you need, unless something truly new comes out, which doesn't happen every month. I use a handful of apps all the time, but I'm not going to go out and replace them with new ones every month, because the ones I already have, work great.
I would actually be tempted - Firefox has gotten increasingly sucktastic, and Chrome has some glaring deficiencies as well, so if I had already been forced onto Windows 10, I'd certainly have tried out Edge, and if it wasn't actively noticeably *worse* than FF or Chrome these days, I'd happily use it if they were paying me. Hard to pass up free money.
But must use Bing as your default search engine? Frack that. (Moot point anyway for the moment, I'm staying with Windows 7 for as long as I possibly can. Eventually, though, my machine will die, and I'll be forced onto 10. So at that point...)
There's "comfortably", and then there's "in style". I'm a big fan of the subreddit/r/financialindependence, which is about retiring early, and it's actually surprisingly (semi)-easy - your estimates are way too high. With really just a couple million, you could live off that pretty indefinitely if you did it smart. But while there's certainly diminishing returns after that, I'd say it tapers off pretty slowly - while being able to retire early at all is the biggest thing, I could easily increase my enjoyment of my retirement by splurging more and more, based on how much money I had, up to a point. Total rough ballpark, I don't think diminishing returns would start to make additional money *totally* pointless until probably around the 100m mark or so.
But yes, definitely at *some* point more money is irrelevant, regardless of specifically what point that is, if you're just talking about personal enjoyment of life. Jeff Bezos, however, probably thinks way bigger than that, or Amazon wouldn't have become such a monstrously enormous company in such a relatively short period of time.
"Hi! I'm a robocaller! I'm just calling to let you know that this message is free speech and there's nothing you can do about it! Nyah nyah nyah!"
I would argue that "what constitutes free speech" itself definitely falls under the category of "political messages". So let's just all robocall him with that message roughly every 3 seconds, see if he gets the message?
My favorite was when one of the developers of Kingdom of Loathing forgot they'd installed that, and replaced cloud with butt permanently in some item descriptions after updating them (through their web-based dev tool) without noticing. That was awesome.
> "Do you think you would still have it if nobody wanted to work?"
Yes, I do. UBI is a solution to the problem of "not enough jobs due to automation", and automation is the solution to the problem of "not enough demand for jobs due to UBI". They go together. I'd much rather not enough jobs due to automation and UBI (so people could not only survive, but have the freedom to come up with newer and better things - people who currently are mostly instead doing gruntwork for existing companies, because they need to pay the bills), than not enough jobs due to automation and you're just crap out of luck, too bad for you.
Automation is going to increase, that's just the way it is - but it could be utopian instead of the opposite, if we do it right.
> "I expect to see in 2020, if not sooner, people running for public office talking about how they believe marijuana to be as safe as alcohol and tobacco"
Which is of course completely untrue. Marijuana is *far* safer than alcohol (which is relatively easy to overdose on) or tobacco (way worse for you in general, plus almost always smoked, while marijuana is commonly smoked, but also commonly ingested, which is much healthier.) Heck, I'd go so far as to say that it's healthier for you than coffee, albeit with rather stronger effects at common dosage levels.
Is it cheaper? Is it safe to eat? Does it have roughly the same taste and consistency? Then why the heck wouldn't I? (I expect they'll get the first two pretty easily, but I'm not totally convinced on the last one. But that's what reviews are for. I have no moral or philosophical objection to the concept, merely practical ones.)
I switch programming languages all the time: half the time I'm writing code in C#, the other half the time I'm writing code in javascript. I jump between them frequently, even in the same project!:p [/totally not what you meant]
> i'm surprised you had a complete thought. i've had a team of 15 fbi thugs armed with fully automatic machine guns pounding on my door to serve a warrant to investigate copyright infringement.. they didn't shoot and kill me. do you know why?... cause you're probably, and I'm just guessing here, I could be wrong, caucasian-looking?
Presumably they're taking into account the full time cost of air travel, which is not just liftoff to touchdown, but also includes getting there early to park, get through stupid security, wait around because you got there early, then wait around for your bags to eventually make it out.
Presumably a hyperloop train also wouldn't be delayed nearly as often, either.
Sure, I suppose, as someone who really likes physical keyboards, it's technically sad that we just lost another one, but I don't care that much, on grounds of a. Blackberry OS rather than Android, and b. keyboards should slide out in landscape mode, not portrait mode. So I would never personally buy one of those anyway.
But when I can no longer find any Android phones with proper slider keyboards to replace my current one when it dies... I will be pretty pissed at that point.
> "With so many billing errors made be ISPs and telecom companies, how come there's never been a class action against them?"
Possibly because under current laws, you're no longer allowed to file class action suits against like 99.999% of all companies on the planet, as a required part of being their customer, because reasons? >.>
I disagree. They were way more than a plot device. They *were* a plot device, but they were also, broadly speaking, Asimov's reaction to the visceral anti-robotics fears of the early days of sci-fi, a way of speaking out against the idea that AI would invariably go crazy and start murdering people for the luls, or because they wanted us out so they could take over, or whatever other reasons. He very intentionally wrote stories in which robots were not just intelligent, but intelligently *designed*, with rules explicitly created by humans to prevent the sort of chaos one saw whenever robots showed up in the media he was responding to.
Then, yes, they *were* a plot device, as he spent the next forever finding all the different ways the simple laws could go wrong, but there *was* a broader message.
That said, I do find it irritating when people who are *not* living in the Asimov robot fictional universe, seem to imagine they're "laws" in the scientific sense, as opposed to, obviously, laws in the "obey the law" sense. Asimov's fictional robots were designed with those laws baked in, but we can design robots however we like. (Heck, on a few occasions, people found ways of messing with the laws at the root level in his fiction, too, if I recall.)
And yes, in this case, it's all totally irrelevant, as there's no intelligence. There isn't even any goal-seeking, which *would* be more amusing and at least more likely to cause discussion, if it just wandered around randomly looking for humans and jabbing them (though the result of the discussion would be "wow that guy is a dick for making a machine that did that.")
I hate it too, but Firefox has been slowly getting slower and slower, to the point where a couple weeks ago I said screw it, and switched to Chrome at home.
I'm thinking about seeing if I could set up Chromium from source, though, then I could probably fix at least a couple of the really minor irritations (like context menu items that should, but don't, have keyboard accelerators) in my own build, even if probably not any of the big ones.
You don't technically *need* both a keyboard and a mouse on your computer, either (one can *technically* do everything the other can, just a heck of a lot slower). Slide-out keyboards are a lot more convenient for enough things that I really, truly don't understand the hate people have for them. I'm going to be really sad when I can no longer replace my slide-out phone with another one when it dies. It's not really that much smaller or lighter than it would be without it, and way smaller and way lighter than a phablet, which enough people do seem to like (personally that's something I can't understand, I would have no interest in a phone remotely that big, but I still support more choices for people who do like them.)
Yes, I *do* want a physical keyboard. I know there isn't that much demand for phones with physical keyboards anymore, but there is still some. I absolutely want to know that when my current phone dies, I'll be able to replace it with another phone with a physical keyboard.
My current phone cost about 90 bucks, though, and I'm not going to pay like 8 times more for my next one. I'm also not a big fan of the blackberry style keyboard - the form factor I like is the slide-out kind where the keyboard puts the phone in landscape mode - easiest to hold while typing, and generally what I'd want anyway if I were doing something that required much typing.
> "Firing the bottom 20% of your work force every year is no different than YOU, as a consumer, not purchasing another good or service again because it didn't give you what you paid for. It is assigning value via your wallet. "
That's a pretty terrible comparison. It would be more like, if you went to a fast food restaurant you loved, that had, say, 20 items on their menu, but they forced you to rank the menu items from most-liked to least-liked, and then whichever 4 items you said you liked least (even if you still liked some of them!), they refused to let you buy them ever. Just crossed them right off the menu.
Firing people because you think they're not giving your company sufficient value, that's equivalent to what you described. Firing a bunch of people every year because they're in the bottom arbitrary-number of your current workforce, even if you'd prefer not to because they're still fine, that's balls-out crazysauce.
Is a dictionary going to have, for instance, the phrase "Clark Kent"? I can't imagine, or at least not something it'd try right off the bat, right? But "Clark Kent does 44 situps" (not my actual password to anything) is at least as easy to remember as "correct horse battery stapler" or whatever. So, that's what I do. (For passwords to places I'm actually worried about. For everything else, I have a fairly easy to guess, but also super easy to type, password, because... so?)
#2 is exactly why I *would* support it - because it's completely absurd that if you're just barely making enough to survive, you are told that you have two choices: either work a crap job for crap pay and be treated like crap, *or* alternatively, just take this money and go home, people will look at you like crap, but if you even *think* about making any extra money so your life isn't as crap, we'll take that other money away so it is just as crap again (unless you lie, which honestly, I'd be tempted to myself, if I were in that position).
Universal Income would mean the poorest of the poor would still have their food stamps, but the *slightly* less poor, and those with little money but some drive, would actually have reasons to look for jobs and to try to better themselves, instead of the current system, where they pretty much have the opposite, cause screw you, poor people.
I don't like Chrome's UI. I don't like that it's got a very Appley "we know what's best and refuse to let you change anything" philosophy. But dang if it isn't noticeably faster pretty much across the board - Chrome keeps getting faster, Firefox keeps getting slower, it's gotten to the point where I just don't have a choice anymore. So I've been slowly moving things over to Chrome.:(
Slashdot Mirror
I take surveys for pay, for fun mostly, and for a bit of extra cash. Sometimes I get interesting surveys about new products, mostly it's boring demographics and junk. I've done enough surveys now to immediately recognize that certain sites will waste my time with lengthy irritating questions about crap I don't care about, and/or just throw me out without pay after way more time than would be reasonable. J.D. Power is one of those. When I see a survey is hosted by J.D. Power, I just close it immediately.
> "The woman's father reportedly believes he's in the right to post the pictures because he took them."
Well, sounds like I have a trip to Austria to make. Specifically, to right outside this guy's window, to take some pictures of him while he's changing, which I will then have the right to post, because they were my pictures, right? Apparently, according to this guy's logic...
I'd expect that number to be higher.
After all, unless you get a new phone, most like you already *have* all the apps you need, unless something truly new comes out, which doesn't happen every month. I use a handful of apps all the time, but I'm not going to go out and replace them with new ones every month, because the ones I already have, work great.
I would actually be tempted - Firefox has gotten increasingly sucktastic, and Chrome has some glaring deficiencies as well, so if I had already been forced onto Windows 10, I'd certainly have tried out Edge, and if it wasn't actively noticeably *worse* than FF or Chrome these days, I'd happily use it if they were paying me. Hard to pass up free money.
But must use Bing as your default search engine? Frack that. (Moot point anyway for the moment, I'm staying with Windows 7 for as long as I possibly can. Eventually, though, my machine will die, and I'll be forced onto 10. So at that point...)
There's "comfortably", and then there's "in style". I'm a big fan of the subreddit /r/financialindependence, which is about retiring early, and it's actually surprisingly (semi)-easy - your estimates are way too high. With really just a couple million, you could live off that pretty indefinitely if you did it smart. But while there's certainly diminishing returns after that, I'd say it tapers off pretty slowly - while being able to retire early at all is the biggest thing, I could easily increase my enjoyment of my retirement by splurging more and more, based on how much money I had, up to a point. Total rough ballpark, I don't think diminishing returns would start to make additional money *totally* pointless until probably around the 100m mark or so.
But yes, definitely at *some* point more money is irrelevant, regardless of specifically what point that is, if you're just talking about personal enjoyment of life. Jeff Bezos, however, probably thinks way bigger than that, or Amazon wouldn't have become such a monstrously enormous company in such a relatively short period of time.
"Hi! I'm a robocaller! I'm just calling to let you know that this message is free speech and there's nothing you can do about it! Nyah nyah nyah!"
I would argue that "what constitutes free speech" itself definitely falls under the category of "political messages". So let's just all robocall him with that message roughly every 3 seconds, see if he gets the message?
My favorite was when one of the developers of Kingdom of Loathing forgot they'd installed that, and replaced cloud with butt permanently in some item descriptions after updating them (through their web-based dev tool) without noticing. That was awesome.
> "Do you think you would still have it if nobody wanted to work?"
Yes, I do. UBI is a solution to the problem of "not enough jobs due to automation", and automation is the solution to the problem of "not enough demand for jobs due to UBI". They go together. I'd much rather not enough jobs due to automation and UBI (so people could not only survive, but have the freedom to come up with newer and better things - people who currently are mostly instead doing gruntwork for existing companies, because they need to pay the bills), than not enough jobs due to automation and you're just crap out of luck, too bad for you.
Automation is going to increase, that's just the way it is - but it could be utopian instead of the opposite, if we do it right.
> "I expect to see in 2020, if not sooner, people running for public office talking about how they believe marijuana to be as safe as alcohol and tobacco"
Which is of course completely untrue. Marijuana is *far* safer than alcohol (which is relatively easy to overdose on) or tobacco (way worse for you in general, plus almost always smoked, while marijuana is commonly smoked, but also commonly ingested, which is much healthier.) Heck, I'd go so far as to say that it's healthier for you than coffee, albeit with rather stronger effects at common dosage levels.
Is it cheaper? Is it safe to eat? Does it have roughly the same taste and consistency? Then why the heck wouldn't I? (I expect they'll get the first two pretty easily, but I'm not totally convinced on the last one. But that's what reviews are for. I have no moral or philosophical objection to the concept, merely practical ones.)
I switch programming languages all the time: half the time I'm writing code in C#, the other half the time I'm writing code in javascript. I jump between them frequently, even in the same project! :p [/totally not what you meant]
> i'm surprised you had a complete thought. ... cause you're probably, and I'm just guessing here, I could be wrong, caucasian-looking?
i've had a team of 15 fbi thugs armed with fully automatic machine guns pounding on my door to serve a warrant to investigate copyright infringement..
they didn't shoot and kill me.
do you know why?
Presumably they're taking into account the full time cost of air travel, which is not just liftoff to touchdown, but also includes getting there early to park, get through stupid security, wait around because you got there early, then wait around for your bags to eventually make it out.
Presumably a hyperloop train also wouldn't be delayed nearly as often, either.
Sure, I suppose, as someone who really likes physical keyboards, it's technically sad that we just lost another one, but I don't care that much, on grounds of a. Blackberry OS rather than Android, and b. keyboards should slide out in landscape mode, not portrait mode. So I would never personally buy one of those anyway.
But when I can no longer find any Android phones with proper slider keyboards to replace my current one when it dies... I will be pretty pissed at that point.
> "With so many billing errors made be ISPs and telecom companies, how come there's never been a class action against them?"
Possibly because under current laws, you're no longer allowed to file class action suits against like 99.999% of all companies on the planet, as a required part of being their customer, because reasons? >.>
I disagree. They were way more than a plot device. They *were* a plot device, but they were also, broadly speaking, Asimov's reaction to the visceral anti-robotics fears of the early days of sci-fi, a way of speaking out against the idea that AI would invariably go crazy and start murdering people for the luls, or because they wanted us out so they could take over, or whatever other reasons. He very intentionally wrote stories in which robots were not just intelligent, but intelligently *designed*, with rules explicitly created by humans to prevent the sort of chaos one saw whenever robots showed up in the media he was responding to.
Then, yes, they *were* a plot device, as he spent the next forever finding all the different ways the simple laws could go wrong, but there *was* a broader message.
That said, I do find it irritating when people who are *not* living in the Asimov robot fictional universe, seem to imagine they're "laws" in the scientific sense, as opposed to, obviously, laws in the "obey the law" sense. Asimov's fictional robots were designed with those laws baked in, but we can design robots however we like. (Heck, on a few occasions, people found ways of messing with the laws at the root level in his fiction, too, if I recall.)
And yes, in this case, it's all totally irrelevant, as there's no intelligence. There isn't even any goal-seeking, which *would* be more amusing and at least more likely to cause discussion, if it just wandered around randomly looking for humans and jabbing them (though the result of the discussion would be "wow that guy is a dick for making a machine that did that.")
One neat thing I just learned this morning: "Alexa, have a nice day" is an alias for "Alex, stop".
I hate it too, but Firefox has been slowly getting slower and slower, to the point where a couple weeks ago I said screw it, and switched to Chrome at home.
I'm thinking about seeing if I could set up Chromium from source, though, then I could probably fix at least a couple of the really minor irritations (like context menu items that should, but don't, have keyboard accelerators) in my own build, even if probably not any of the big ones.
You don't technically *need* both a keyboard and a mouse on your computer, either (one can *technically* do everything the other can, just a heck of a lot slower). Slide-out keyboards are a lot more convenient for enough things that I really, truly don't understand the hate people have for them. I'm going to be really sad when I can no longer replace my slide-out phone with another one when it dies. It's not really that much smaller or lighter than it would be without it, and way smaller and way lighter than a phablet, which enough people do seem to like (personally that's something I can't understand, I would have no interest in a phone remotely that big, but I still support more choices for people who do like them.)
Yes, I *do* want a physical keyboard. I know there isn't that much demand for phones with physical keyboards anymore, but there is still some. I absolutely want to know that when my current phone dies, I'll be able to replace it with another phone with a physical keyboard.
My current phone cost about 90 bucks, though, and I'm not going to pay like 8 times more for my next one. I'm also not a big fan of the blackberry style keyboard - the form factor I like is the slide-out kind where the keyboard puts the phone in landscape mode - easiest to hold while typing, and generally what I'd want anyway if I were doing something that required much typing.
> "Firing the bottom 20% of your work force every year is no different than YOU, as a consumer, not purchasing another good or service again because it didn't give you what you paid for. It is assigning value via your wallet. "
That's a pretty terrible comparison. It would be more like, if you went to a fast food restaurant you loved, that had, say, 20 items on their menu, but they forced you to rank the menu items from most-liked to least-liked, and then whichever 4 items you said you liked least (even if you still liked some of them!), they refused to let you buy them ever. Just crossed them right off the menu.
Firing people because you think they're not giving your company sufficient value, that's equivalent to what you described. Firing a bunch of people every year because they're in the bottom arbitrary-number of your current workforce, even if you'd prefer not to because they're still fine, that's balls-out crazysauce.
Is a dictionary going to have, for instance, the phrase "Clark Kent"? I can't imagine, or at least not something it'd try right off the bat, right? But "Clark Kent does 44 situps" (not my actual password to anything) is at least as easy to remember as "correct horse battery stapler" or whatever. So, that's what I do. (For passwords to places I'm actually worried about. For everything else, I have a fairly easy to guess, but also super easy to type, password, because... so?)
#2 is exactly why I *would* support it - because it's completely absurd that if you're just barely making enough to survive, you are told that you have two choices: either work a crap job for crap pay and be treated like crap, *or* alternatively, just take this money and go home, people will look at you like crap, but if you even *think* about making any extra money so your life isn't as crap, we'll take that other money away so it is just as crap again (unless you lie, which honestly, I'd be tempted to myself, if I were in that position).
Universal Income would mean the poorest of the poor would still have their food stamps, but the *slightly* less poor, and those with little money but some drive, would actually have reasons to look for jobs and to try to better themselves, instead of the current system, where they pretty much have the opposite, cause screw you, poor people.
Lovecraft, clearly.
I don't like Chrome's UI. I don't like that it's got a very Appley "we know what's best and refuse to let you change anything" philosophy. But dang if it isn't noticeably faster pretty much across the board - Chrome keeps getting faster, Firefox keeps getting slower, it's gotten to the point where I just don't have a choice anymore. So I've been slowly moving things over to Chrome. :(