The last thing we need is the government involved with anything that has to do with the Internet lest we end up with the "government's version" of the web.
"Your Honor, the plaintiff is complaining that our firm is providing vigorous and effective defense. Which is precisely what our job is under the rules of the American Bar Association."
Or alternately: "The plaintiff has got to be kidding."
That phenomenon is hardly the fault of either homeless or public libraries.
Yes, homeless hang around libraries. It's a comfortable temperature, there's things to do other than beg for food, there are bathrooms available, and as a member of the public they have every right to be there. And they might well be taking the time to study some new job skills and the like in order to break out of the poverty they're in.
And from the public library's standpoint, their job is to serve whatever members of the public walk in the front door, whoever they are (provided that they aren't trying to do anything illegal). Those same folks that you'd love to avoid are patrons of the library just like you.
I also want to make sure that other government agencies don't feel that it's their right to start sending the overflow of what they have to deal with to the maker spaces I enjoy.
It's public. That means that just because you enjoy those places doesn't mean you have any more right to be there than anyone else.
You don't vote for Kings! The Lady of Ayn Rand, her arm clad in the purist shimmering samite, held aloft a campaign check from the bosom of Wall St, signifying by divine Providence that he, Peter, was to carry their wishes to Washington.
But seriously, the chances are that a lot of the complexity in both site's code bases is that it's doing some very interesting and valuable stuff. Sometimes, when code seems over-complicated, it's for a bad reason like performance or bad design. But a lot of other times, it's to deal with the strange edge cases that were discovered after the code was running, or really useful behind-the-scenes features like appropriately distributed mirroring.
Traditionally Republicans have been more prone to support big business while Democrats are more beholden to labor unions.
One other important part of this equation: After the 1980 election, due in no small part to Ronald Reagan, labor unions were becoming smaller and weaker and poorer. The Democrats realized that if the labor unions fell, and they were still depending on labor unions for their financing, they would become irrelevant.
Now, they could have taken a stand on the side of organized labor, helped force laws that would make it possible for unions to grow again, and help convince workers that unions were their best chance for a better working life. Instead, however, they formed the Democratic Leadership Committee, which was a group within the Democratic Party apparatus that decided that the best source of party funding was to compete with the Republicans for corporate cash. The DLC then used that cash to elect Bill Clinton to the US presidency.
What this effectively means is that very few candidates who stands a serious chance of being elected are not completely beholden to the corporate cash. The few exceptions: Bernie Sanders (who's in a class all by himself as the only actual socialist in national office), a few incumbents who were elected back when unions and labor still mattered in politics, and those candidates who can afford to self-finance (e.g. Al Franken).
Which basically means that working people of all stripes and colors have absolutely no effective representation in their national government.
The problem (which was discussed in great detail yesterday) is that people are using GPS for, among other things, reliably ascertaining the time of day. So it's not just the latest iteration of navigational assistance like it should be.
And as somebody who used to write software for GPS units, they most definitely have their flaws: Among other things, they can't distinguish between "really pleasant parkway" and "next to a sewage treatment plant".
Devil's advocate: Software should make it hard to do stupid or dangerous things without really intending to.
That said, I find it to be an annoying tool more than anything else, because it makes it far far too easy to have lots of people hear discussions that really only need to involve 2 of people on the email. People don't seem to notice that the cost of CC'ing 10 people is as much as 2 minutes per person per email.
The point of the Pledge of Allegiance is not to actually teach kids anything, but to indoctrinate them into being good loyal patriotic Americans ready and willing to do incredibly stupid things (e.g. sign up for the army to go fight in a country they've never heard of who poses no threat to us) on behalf of their country. It's the same sort of instinct that led my schoolteacher to use class time to force me and my classmates to make yellow ribbons and care packages for soldiers back during the 1991 Gulf War, despite my opposition to the war.
The "under God" bit, besides being completely unconstitutional, was introduced in the 1950's solely to demonstrate how much better we were than the godless Commies because we didn't try to indoctrinate our kids with lies about patriotism and duty to country (yeah right).
Oh yeah? Well, I claim 4, which was used no fewer than 5 times in your post.
If you don't want a big lawsuit over it, though, we could just each agree to license our respective digits to each other for free, and then the two of us can go after all those mathematicians and computer types and sue them into the ground!
Hey, what I'm doing is no different than what major software vendors do.
Actually, the primary issue was most definitely not VD. The real issue with sex out of wedlock was that in a society where the most important fact about you was who your father was, any sex out of wedlock threw that paternity into question.
For societies that didn't really care about who your father was, it wasn't an issue. For example, in Norse society it was not uncommon for a male guest to be offered the chance to sleep with the mistress of the house, and a lot of that had to do with men's social standing depending on who's butt you could kick rather than who your daddy was. Similarly, from what we can tell of Irish myth, they really didn't care who the biological dad was, and sex out of wedlock was common.
But even the working poor are able to afford a roof over their heads, running water, in many cases cell phones and internet, and cable tv.
It depends where you are. Let's do the math for a full-time worker earning minimum wage (actually, most of the working poor don't have a full-time job, but we'll be generous and assume they do): $7.25 / hr * 8 hours a day * 23 working days in a typical month = $1325 per month in pre-tax income
Basic expenses: FICA tax: $80 Rent: Varies between about $500 and $1000 for a 1 bedroom or studio apartment Gas, electric, water: $100 Food: $200 Transportation: $60 for a bus pass Clothing: Averages out to about $15 a month Total: $940-1440
Ways you can easily end up in the hole every month: - Working less than full time for any reason, including illness or injury. - Having children to support. - Needing any kind of medical treatment. - Living in a city with higher rents. - Getting pregnant.
If you start with Marx's original assumption that work is what creates value, then lower cost of a product implies less work implies either fewer workers or each worker doing less. It's more profitable for the employer to reduce the number of workers rather than reduce the amount of work each worker does, so that's what happens.
The reason it costs less to keep workers alive with the introduction of new technology is simply that when Marx was writing this stuff, the goods that were being produced in heavy industry were necessities like clothing, or tools to make necessities like steam engines. Ergo, improving the technology to make these goods yields lower costs of necessities.
You are right that Marx's analysis generally focused on an economy run without significant government interference. However, he also did some fascinating analysis of the effects of various British laws passed to curb the abuses of the early Industrial Revolution, including child labor laws, a maximum 12-hour work day, and overtime rules.
In other words, as mentioned by Upton Sinclair over a century ago: ""It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Actually, it would be even questionable whether string theory rises to the level of hypothesis. It's really more a conjecture at this point, since it hasn't gotten as far as generating any sort of testable prediction.
OK, I don't know the situation in the US... but no shelters, etc.?
There are some shelters. There aren't enough of them, they're frequently full, and they typically separate men away from their families. People definitely freeze or starve to death because they don't have shelter space.
I've witnessed some of this stuff: I've volunteered at shelters (they're mostly privately run, so they constantly need donations of time and money). Going into work downtown in a fairly major American city, it wasn't uncommon to find people waking up on the sidewalk, even in the winter.
Long answer: In the United States at least, if you have no college degree but are interested in putting in the time, money, and effort needed to get one, you will get the biggest bang for your buck at your local community college, possibly followed by some time spent at a nearby branch of your state university system. It's not MIT, RIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc, but it's going to be a pretty solid college education at a very reasonable price, and cost considerably less than the clowns at ITT or DeVry or University of Phoenix will charge you.
The only real exception to this rule is if you qualify for significant financial aid that allows you to attend a fantastic technical school at the same or lower cost than your government-run schools.
Well, color me a pinko, but Karl Marx has a remarkably convincing explanation in one section of Das Kapital: The cost of labor (in the absence of minimum wage laws and the like) depends on the cost of keeping workers alive. The introduction of new technology lowers the cost of keeping workers alive, which allows employers to hire fewer workers, pay the workers they do hire less (in real wages) than before, and have higher profits. The one thing he's absolutely clear on is that the technological improvements don't help workers out one bit.
This issue was also the source of the Luddite movement.
Also, nobody would need to starve or freeze to death on the streets, like they do every single day in the US.
While I'd be totally fine with a basic income guarantee, I usually prefer the idea of basic guarantees being in-kind: a voucher for housing which can be applied to rent or mortgage or home repairs, a food program, a real universal health care system, home heating, etc. That way, you're relatively safe from accusations that people are just spending their government money on crack or something. And yes, we've tried a lot of these in the United States, and many of them have worked well until their funding was cut by fiscal conservatives.
But all of that would assume intellectual honesty on the part of those who are against social welfare programs in the US, when all available evidence points to the real opposition to welfare is actually a matter of only slightly veiled racism on the part of conservative Republicans, e.g. "welfare queens" and the like, and has nothing to do with actual results.
Slashdot Mirror
The last thing we need is the government involved with anything that has to do with the Internet lest we end up with the "government's version" of the web.
Yeah, especially not the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. If they got involved, it would just wreck the whole thing.
Also, keep your government hands off of my Medicare!
Thanks for the correction: I'm only lawyer spawn, not a lawyer.
"Your Honor, the plaintiff is complaining that our firm is providing vigorous and effective defense. Which is precisely what our job is under the rules of the American Bar Association."
Or alternately:
"The plaintiff has got to be kidding."
That phenomenon is hardly the fault of either homeless or public libraries.
Yes, homeless hang around libraries. It's a comfortable temperature, there's things to do other than beg for food, there are bathrooms available, and as a member of the public they have every right to be there. And they might well be taking the time to study some new job skills and the like in order to break out of the poverty they're in.
And from the public library's standpoint, their job is to serve whatever members of the public walk in the front door, whoever they are (provided that they aren't trying to do anything illegal). Those same folks that you'd love to avoid are patrons of the library just like you.
I also want to make sure that other government agencies don't feel that it's their right to start sending the overflow of what they have to deal with to the maker spaces I enjoy.
It's public. That means that just because you enjoy those places doesn't mean you have any more right to be there than anyone else.
You don't vote for Kings! The Lady of Ayn Rand, her arm clad in the purist shimmering samite, held aloft a campaign check from the bosom of Wall St, signifying by divine Providence that he, Peter, was to carry their wishes to Washington.
Well, for starters, PHP. *ducks*
But seriously, the chances are that a lot of the complexity in both site's code bases is that it's doing some very interesting and valuable stuff. Sometimes, when code seems over-complicated, it's for a bad reason like performance or bad design. But a lot of other times, it's to deal with the strange edge cases that were discovered after the code was running, or really useful behind-the-scenes features like appropriately distributed mirroring.
"Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley."
-Tom Lehrer
Traditionally Republicans have been more prone to support big business while Democrats are more beholden to labor unions.
One other important part of this equation: After the 1980 election, due in no small part to Ronald Reagan, labor unions were becoming smaller and weaker and poorer. The Democrats realized that if the labor unions fell, and they were still depending on labor unions for their financing, they would become irrelevant.
Now, they could have taken a stand on the side of organized labor, helped force laws that would make it possible for unions to grow again, and help convince workers that unions were their best chance for a better working life. Instead, however, they formed the Democratic Leadership Committee, which was a group within the Democratic Party apparatus that decided that the best source of party funding was to compete with the Republicans for corporate cash. The DLC then used that cash to elect Bill Clinton to the US presidency.
What this effectively means is that very few candidates who stands a serious chance of being elected are not completely beholden to the corporate cash. The few exceptions: Bernie Sanders (who's in a class all by himself as the only actual socialist in national office), a few incumbents who were elected back when unions and labor still mattered in politics, and those candidates who can afford to self-finance (e.g. Al Franken).
Which basically means that working people of all stripes and colors have absolutely no effective representation in their national government.
The problem (which was discussed in great detail yesterday) is that people are using GPS for, among other things, reliably ascertaining the time of day. So it's not just the latest iteration of navigational assistance like it should be.
And as somebody who used to write software for GPS units, they most definitely have their flaws: Among other things, they can't distinguish between "really pleasant parkway" and "next to a sewage treatment plant".
Devil's advocate: Software should make it hard to do stupid or dangerous things without really intending to.
That said, I find it to be an annoying tool more than anything else, because it makes it far far too easy to have lots of people hear discussions that really only need to involve 2 of people on the email. People don't seem to notice that the cost of CC'ing 10 people is as much as 2 minutes per person per email.
The point of the Pledge of Allegiance is not to actually teach kids anything, but to indoctrinate them into being good loyal patriotic Americans ready and willing to do incredibly stupid things (e.g. sign up for the army to go fight in a country they've never heard of who poses no threat to us) on behalf of their country. It's the same sort of instinct that led my schoolteacher to use class time to force me and my classmates to make yellow ribbons and care packages for soldiers back during the 1991 Gulf War, despite my opposition to the war.
The "under God" bit, besides being completely unconstitutional, was introduced in the 1950's solely to demonstrate how much better we were than the godless Commies because we didn't try to indoctrinate our kids with lies about patriotism and duty to country (yeah right).
Oh yeah? Well, I claim 4, which was used no fewer than 5 times in your post.
If you don't want a big lawsuit over it, though, we could just each agree to license our respective digits to each other for free, and then the two of us can go after all those mathematicians and computer types and sue them into the ground!
Hey, what I'm doing is no different than what major software vendors do.
Actually, the primary issue was most definitely not VD. The real issue with sex out of wedlock was that in a society where the most important fact about you was who your father was, any sex out of wedlock threw that paternity into question.
For societies that didn't really care about who your father was, it wasn't an issue. For example, in Norse society it was not uncommon for a male guest to be offered the chance to sleep with the mistress of the house, and a lot of that had to do with men's social standing depending on who's butt you could kick rather than who your daddy was. Similarly, from what we can tell of Irish myth, they really didn't care who the biological dad was, and sex out of wedlock was common.
But even the working poor are able to afford a roof over their heads, running water, in many cases cell phones and internet, and cable tv.
It depends where you are. Let's do the math for a full-time worker earning minimum wage (actually, most of the working poor don't have a full-time job, but we'll be generous and assume they do):
$7.25 / hr * 8 hours a day * 23 working days in a typical month = $1325 per month in pre-tax income
Basic expenses:
FICA tax: $80
Rent: Varies between about $500 and $1000 for a 1 bedroom or studio apartment
Gas, electric, water: $100
Food: $200
Transportation: $60 for a bus pass
Clothing: Averages out to about $15 a month
Total: $940-1440
Ways you can easily end up in the hole every month:
- Working less than full time for any reason, including illness or injury.
- Having children to support.
- Needing any kind of medical treatment.
- Living in a city with higher rents.
- Getting pregnant.
If you start with Marx's original assumption that work is what creates value, then lower cost of a product implies less work implies either fewer workers or each worker doing less. It's more profitable for the employer to reduce the number of workers rather than reduce the amount of work each worker does, so that's what happens.
The reason it costs less to keep workers alive with the introduction of new technology is simply that when Marx was writing this stuff, the goods that were being produced in heavy industry were necessities like clothing, or tools to make necessities like steam engines. Ergo, improving the technology to make these goods yields lower costs of necessities.
You are right that Marx's analysis generally focused on an economy run without significant government interference. However, he also did some fascinating analysis of the effects of various British laws passed to curb the abuses of the early Industrial Revolution, including child labor laws, a maximum 12-hour work day, and overtime rules.
Trouble is, just when we start to get it right, the Loonies will start throwing rocks at us and declare their independence.
In other words, as mentioned by Upton Sinclair over a century ago: ""It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Actually, it would be even questionable whether string theory rises to the level of hypothesis. It's really more a conjecture at this point, since it hasn't gotten as far as generating any sort of testable prediction.
OK, I don't know the situation in the US... but no shelters, etc.?
There are some shelters. There aren't enough of them, they're frequently full, and they typically separate men away from their families. People definitely freeze or starve to death because they don't have shelter space.
I've witnessed some of this stuff: I've volunteered at shelters (they're mostly privately run, so they constantly need donations of time and money). Going into work downtown in a fairly major American city, it wasn't uncommon to find people waking up on the sidewalk, even in the winter.
Paul Krugman actually made the same joke when he posted a preview of his column topic in his blog:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/falling-demand-for-brains/
Absolutely agreed - community college while working isn't easy. State school while working isn't easy.
That doesn't mean that the for-profit schools are any easier, and definitely aren't cheaper or higher quality.
Long answer: In the United States at least, if you have no college degree but are interested in putting in the time, money, and effort needed to get one, you will get the biggest bang for your buck at your local community college, possibly followed by some time spent at a nearby branch of your state university system. It's not MIT, RIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc, but it's going to be a pretty solid college education at a very reasonable price, and cost considerably less than the clowns at ITT or DeVry or University of Phoenix will charge you.
The only real exception to this rule is if you qualify for significant financial aid that allows you to attend a fantastic technical school at the same or lower cost than your government-run schools.
So how did that happen?
Well, color me a pinko, but Karl Marx has a remarkably convincing explanation in one section of Das Kapital: The cost of labor (in the absence of minimum wage laws and the like) depends on the cost of keeping workers alive. The introduction of new technology lowers the cost of keeping workers alive, which allows employers to hire fewer workers, pay the workers they do hire less (in real wages) than before, and have higher profits. The one thing he's absolutely clear on is that the technological improvements don't help workers out one bit.
This issue was also the source of the Luddite movement.
Strangely enough, for a lot of conservatives your "mistake" was more accurate.
Also, nobody would need to starve or freeze to death on the streets, like they do every single day in the US.
While I'd be totally fine with a basic income guarantee, I usually prefer the idea of basic guarantees being in-kind: a voucher for housing which can be applied to rent or mortgage or home repairs, a food program, a real universal health care system, home heating, etc. That way, you're relatively safe from accusations that people are just spending their government money on crack or something. And yes, we've tried a lot of these in the United States, and many of them have worked well until their funding was cut by fiscal conservatives.
But all of that would assume intellectual honesty on the part of those who are against social welfare programs in the US, when all available evidence points to the real opposition to welfare is actually a matter of only slightly veiled racism on the part of conservative Republicans, e.g. "welfare queens" and the like, and has nothing to do with actual results.