that Cox (or was it Comcast) reported in their SEC filing that the actual cost of providing broadband is about $7/mo (total cost). Being an SEC filing it wasn't likely to be a lie (you don't lie to investors. Everyone else, ok, but not investors ).
I don't know about the rest of/. but I pay $75/mo. There's really only 1 broadband provider. In theory I could go with DSL but it's slow, very unreliable and when it breaks they don't fix it. They just wait for you to cancel service and go back to cable.
When we have a service that has so much demonstrated value and that virtually everybody wants and that costs only $7/mo to provide you'd think we'd make it a public utility. Of course, everytime we suggest that it gets shouted down with "Do whatever you want just not with _my_ money!"...:(. I miss doing things for the public good. And I miss the days (how brief) when we didn't just hand billions of dollars worth of public infrastructure to companies so they could take on a 90% surcharge.
as such things usually are. It's not about deciding to be a cab driver. It's about accepting the low pay and complete lack of any financial stability. I forget who but some economist called it a 'fragile' existence. 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Meaning they're 1 check away from homelessness. You would think they'd be marching in the streets demanding change. They're not. Another phrase comes to mind: Quiet desperation.
See, if you're gonna live like that you need something to keep you going. Something to let you ignore just how terrifyingly precarious your entire life is. Stupidity only goes so far. Logic won't get you out of that. If you start thinking logically you'll demand better condition. That's where the Job Creator narrative (among others) comes in. You can't sustain your blind faith in capitalism (not shared by the capitalists, who rely heavily on the gov't to bail them out every 10-15 years when they tank the economy with their gambling) without a powerful narrative that shifts your self image away from the reality of your one-major-expense-away-from-disaster life and to one of an upper middle class working man who's just a little down on his luck. I'm sure you know the Steinbeck (or was it Wright?) quote I'm hinting at .
because they get put out of business the moment the local labor board points out that Uber drivers are employees in all ways and means. There's been several "It's Uber for...X!" companies that have failed. Uber has deep pockets from investor backing that allow them to keep appealing the rulings. Their plan is pretty obvious to keep appealing until self driving cars are a reality.
to their industry. The Taxi cab companies already treat their employees like shit. Uber brought some of that out in the open, but it's not like they're changing anything. What Uber is disrupting is the Job Creator narrative. That a job, any job, is always in a person's best interest. Any fool can see the trap Uber's laying out for their drivers, customers and society at large. They're talking the cost of running a business and putting it off onto someone else. Insurance costs and the cost of paying for damage done will go to the driver and then to society at large when the under paid and under insured driver can't make good. Health Care costs will be born by the tax payer too. Or those costs will fall to the injured passenger. Vehicle maintenance, long term planing, etc all falls on the driver.
See, in America like a lot of places you're told that if you're loyal and hard working the company will take care of you. Uber is disrupting that narrative. There's a chance (however small) that people at large will realize the narrative is bullshit. If that happens we'll see socialism take root in America. Then again Uber might have their self driving cars before all that happens. We'll see.
In the real world law is complicated. You have to use very, very precise language and lots of it or you have a lot of unintended consequences. You're legal system then goes one of two ways: Either no law is enforced because everyone is afraid of applying the vague language harmfully or law becomes a psychotic crapshoot as laws are applied willy-nilly however a person feels at that point in time.
You might get away with a flat tax in a few hundred pages, but it's a very, very regressive tax. That means it hurts the poor and middle class while helping the rich. There's a reason all of the flat tax proponents are on the right wing in any country, and it's not just because us left-wingers like overly complicated gov't. It's because gov't and society are complicated by their very nature. If you try to escape that complexity all you're going to do is get dragged down by the ones who've long since realized that's not possible...
is the problem I see. Brand new shinny terminals knock out the transaction in 10-15 seconds tops. Beaten up old terminals from the early '00s still have the readers but they're processors weren't fast enough to do the cryptography. They're also dodgy and unreliable. Still, it beats waiting for someone to county out change from their fanny pack...
and maybe they will do fine. So long as none of them gets sick. Or bets on the wrong horse in the real estate market. Or gets out maneuver by an actual member of the ruling class and has their company get pulled out from under them.
It's also not that difficult if you have the wherewithal to become a highly paid engineer at Intel. Not a lot of people do. Take those kids in Flint, MI. None of them are going to be engineers now. That's not how lead poisoning works. Yeah, that's an unpleasant thing to say, but also true.
Basically, you've got a few engineers who are one illness or financial mistake away from ruin and a massive population (66% last I checked) living paycheck to paycheck. That sucks. We're America. We can do better.
and it's not entirely impossible we could do something about it. Trump, believe it or not, is the working class trying to do something. You're laughing, but he at least supports Tariffs and other pro-worker policies. Sanders is another example of the trend. The bad part is you'll notice the trend only happens on the national level. If you look at most good things (end of Separate but Equal, getting Lead out of gas, the EPA) they come from the national government. That's because State gov'ts are too small. They get picked apart by robber barons and mega corps. You will note that those same Robber Barons spent the better half of the 80s, 90s and '00s convincing the working class that gov't was the problem, not the solution. But I've yet to hear of a convincing alternative that can stand up to those same barons. And I don't see the barons cutting their share of the gov't pie. Just ours.
is we Americans are pretty much ignoring infrastructure expenses. What happens if the outer tank breaks? It's sorta like if my air bags go off. After that I probably want a new car. But to keep up the Car analogy we keep driving it and the next time we're dead.
I'm also reminded of our response to Flint, MI's water crisis. Which is a big "meh". We can't even get a disaster fixed _after_ it happens. So I get nervous when I see a potential disaster that can (for some indeterminate amount of time) be ignored by a country with a long history of ignoring problems...
And sorry for the dupe post, replied to the wrong thread:P.
is we Americans are pretty much ignoring infrastructure expenses. What happens if the outer tank breaks? It's sorta like if my air bags go off. After that I probably want a new car. But to keep up the Car analogy we keep driving it and the next time we're dead.
I'm also reminded of our response to Flint, MI's water crisis. Which is a big "meh". We can't even get a disaster fixed _after_ it happens. So I get nervous when I see a potential disaster that can (for some indeterminate amount of time) be ignored by a country with a long history of ignoring problems...
not after we repealed Glass-Steagall and let the investment bankers get buddy buddy with the Mortgage bankers. See, we used to keep the risky wallstreet stuff separate from the stable Mortgage, car and Student Loan stuff. We don't do that anymore. So a Stock market crash doesn't just devalue the paper money of the 1%ers, it wrecks the whole economy. That's sorta why we separated them in the first place...
it's because companies like LinkedIn need very few employees relative to the amount of paying users. That's what scale really means. It means the investors can make a shitload of money without all those pesky employees ruining it for them. Investors have been living high off the massive productivity gains they've squeezed out of the work force, but they're kinda hitting the limits of that until automation kicks in. They're a little nervous about full blown automation because if they're not careful they'll end up with socialism when people notice there aren't any jobs anymore. So they're moving at a snails pace and using companies like LinkedIn to realize the profits they demand.
Once companies like that dry up be afraid. These folks run the economy and have a boundless desire for wealth. I'm not sure what they're going to do but if you're a member of the working class instead of the ruling one it's not going to be pretty...
because of God. I'm not sure how to counter that sentiment. Reason and logic won't work because, well, if they did then we wouldn't be having this conversation...
They're trying to position bots with machine learning as a replacement for company specific apps that take care of customer service issues. If it works out expect millions of customer service jobs to go away. Funny thing is it's mostly a problem for the developing world because those low end jobs have already moved over there.
Between the 60 hour work weeks and automation there's not a lot of work to go around in a country where your entire quality of life is based on your job.
Firefox made their name as a viable alternative the the crapfest that IE had become in the absence of meaningful competition. Then the got much, much bigger as google sought to ensure there was a platform for their adverts that wasn't under the control of a competitor with a history of using it's market dominance to crush otherwise stronger rivals. Well google has chrome for that now (and android, and ChromeOS) so FF can take a flying leap as far as they care.
I think the browser's pretty much done innovating. At the end of the day it's a content delivery device. There's only so much it can do. Maybe it can do it better, but anything FF can do google can (and will) match with Chrome short of them patenting it and suing (which the community would savage them for).
It's not enough to improve when there's good enough. Outside of a few/. geeks people use whatever software they first come across unless that software is painfully bad. IE 11 and Chrome are both just fine.
Come 'on folks. You're never going to get that small gov't you keep dreaming of. The wealthy and powerful won't allow it. So why not take some of that big gov't for yourselves? If there's a tool and it does good work, use it. Yeah, it's a dangerous tool, but so is fire.
Real computer science is just math with computers. This sounds like businesses are tired of having to pay for some extra specialized training they want which has little to no value outside of their exact use case. I'm seeing this a lot with colleges where more and more they exist to get you ready for one very specific job. That'd be peachy if that job lasted 50 years and then you retire but a lot of times it's so highly specialized you might have trouble finding work in a decade. Meanwhile you're still paying off the $100k of student loans it took to get that training.
When did the general population stop noticing crap like this?
Not looking forward to re-writing my plugin. I might not bother. It's been a fun project but Mozilla is asking me to do a lot of work without much support (so far anyway). They're gonna yank the XUL UI language without there being good replacements (HTML doesn't work right from an addon context because of the security constraints) and take away overlays (that let me access web content without a major mess of code).
That said their reasons aren't too bad and have nothing to do with a walled garden. The addon signing is there to give them a kill switch so that if somebody sells their addon to a malware company and it starts spewing adds they can revoke the signature and shut it down. I get a couple offers a year to "buy" my plugin and figured out pretty quick what they were after (my plugin's under the Moz license, so they could fork it or submit patches to mainline if they just wanted to pitch in).
As for the chromification, that's because they want to make it snappier by doing multi-process. And that means not letting my add on hold up the main thread. Honestly that's the biggest thing holding back my efforts to port to Chrome. It's a nightmare to deal with all the callbacks and such when you can't even hold up the thread for simple things like writing a few bytes of preferences to disk. You don't want to know what I had to do just to get that working... OTOH they're right that it'll make the browser seem snappier. But to be blunt I don't care. I've got an 4 year old A10-5800 and I've yet to be able to do anything in my single threaded Firefox addon that even slows down that old workhorse.
Oh, and yeah, the article is B.S.. Even in Chrome I can call out to executable files that run with the users permissions (basically root if you're a Windows User). It looked like click bait to me so I didn't RTFA.
Slashdot Mirror
that Cox (or was it Comcast) reported in their SEC filing that the actual cost of providing broadband is about $7/mo (total cost). Being an SEC filing it wasn't likely to be a lie (you don't lie to investors. Everyone else, ok, but not investors ).
/. but I pay $75/mo. There's really only 1 broadband provider. In theory I could go with DSL but it's slow, very unreliable and when it breaks they don't fix it. They just wait for you to cancel service and go back to cable.
:(. I miss doing things for the public good. And I miss the days (how brief) when we didn't just hand billions of dollars worth of public infrastructure to companies so they could take on a 90% surcharge.
I don't know about the rest of
When we have a service that has so much demonstrated value and that virtually everybody wants and that costs only $7/mo to provide you'd think we'd make it a public utility. Of course, everytime we suggest that it gets shouted down with "Do whatever you want just not with _my_ money!"...
as such things usually are. It's not about deciding to be a cab driver. It's about accepting the low pay and complete lack of any financial stability. I forget who but some economist called it a 'fragile' existence. 66% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Meaning they're 1 check away from homelessness. You would think they'd be marching in the streets demanding change. They're not. Another phrase comes to mind: Quiet desperation.
See, if you're gonna live like that you need something to keep you going. Something to let you ignore just how terrifyingly precarious your entire life is. Stupidity only goes so far. Logic won't get you out of that. If you start thinking logically you'll demand better condition. That's where the Job Creator narrative (among others) comes in. You can't sustain your blind faith in capitalism (not shared by the capitalists, who rely heavily on the gov't to bail them out every 10-15 years when they tank the economy with their gambling) without a powerful narrative that shifts your self image away from the reality of your one-major-expense-away-from-disaster life and to one of an upper middle class working man who's just a little down on his luck. I'm sure you know the Steinbeck (or was it Wright?) quote I'm hinting at .
because they get put out of business the moment the local labor board points out that Uber drivers are employees in all ways and means. There's been several "It's Uber for...X!" companies that have failed. Uber has deep pockets from investor backing that allow them to keep appealing the rulings. Their plan is pretty obvious to keep appealing until self driving cars are a reality.
to their industry. The Taxi cab companies already treat their employees like shit. Uber brought some of that out in the open, but it's not like they're changing anything. What Uber is disrupting is the Job Creator narrative. That a job, any job, is always in a person's best interest. Any fool can see the trap Uber's laying out for their drivers, customers and society at large. They're talking the cost of running a business and putting it off onto someone else. Insurance costs and the cost of paying for damage done will go to the driver and then to society at large when the under paid and under insured driver can't make good. Health Care costs will be born by the tax payer too. Or those costs will fall to the injured passenger. Vehicle maintenance, long term planing, etc all falls on the driver.
See, in America like a lot of places you're told that if you're loyal and hard working the company will take care of you. Uber is disrupting that narrative. There's a chance (however small) that people at large will realize the narrative is bullshit. If that happens we'll see socialism take root in America. Then again Uber might have their self driving cars before all that happens. We'll see.
In the real world law is complicated. You have to use very, very precise language and lots of it or you have a lot of unintended consequences. You're legal system then goes one of two ways: Either no law is enforced because everyone is afraid of applying the vague language harmfully or law becomes a psychotic crapshoot as laws are applied willy-nilly however a person feels at that point in time.
You might get away with a flat tax in a few hundred pages, but it's a very, very regressive tax. That means it hurts the poor and middle class while helping the rich. There's a reason all of the flat tax proponents are on the right wing in any country, and it's not just because us left-wingers like overly complicated gov't. It's because gov't and society are complicated by their very nature. If you try to escape that complexity all you're going to do is get dragged down by the ones who've long since realized that's not possible...
Exclusive, low price items for a membership fee? If I were Costco I'd be nervous...
seeing as how they were about to be forced to do it at gun point.
is the problem I see. Brand new shinny terminals knock out the transaction in 10-15 seconds tops. Beaten up old terminals from the early '00s still have the readers but they're processors weren't fast enough to do the cryptography. They're also dodgy and unreliable. Still, it beats waiting for someone to county out change from their fanny pack...
and maybe they will do fine. So long as none of them gets sick. Or bets on the wrong horse in the real estate market. Or gets out maneuver by an actual member of the ruling class and has their company get pulled out from under them.
It's also not that difficult if you have the wherewithal to become a highly paid engineer at Intel. Not a lot of people do. Take those kids in Flint, MI. None of them are going to be engineers now. That's not how lead poisoning works. Yeah, that's an unpleasant thing to say, but also true.
Basically, you've got a few engineers who are one illness or financial mistake away from ruin and a massive population (66% last I checked) living paycheck to paycheck. That sucks. We're America. We can do better.
and it's not entirely impossible we could do something about it. Trump, believe it or not, is the working class trying to do something. You're laughing, but he at least supports Tariffs and other pro-worker policies. Sanders is another example of the trend. The bad part is you'll notice the trend only happens on the national level. If you look at most good things (end of Separate but Equal, getting Lead out of gas, the EPA) they come from the national government. That's because State gov'ts are too small. They get picked apart by robber barons and mega corps. You will note that those same Robber Barons spent the better half of the 80s, 90s and '00s convincing the working class that gov't was the problem, not the solution. But I've yet to hear of a convincing alternative that can stand up to those same barons. And I don't see the barons cutting their share of the gov't pie. Just ours.
is we Americans are pretty much ignoring infrastructure expenses. What happens if the outer tank breaks? It's sorta like if my air bags go off. After that I probably want a new car. But to keep up the Car analogy we keep driving it and the next time we're dead. I'm also reminded of our response to Flint, MI's water crisis. Which is a big "meh". We can't even get a disaster fixed _after_ it happens. So I get nervous when I see a potential disaster that can (for some indeterminate amount of time) be ignored by a country with a long history of ignoring problems...
:P.
And sorry for the dupe post, replied to the wrong thread
is we Americans are pretty much ignoring infrastructure expenses. What happens if the outer tank breaks? It's sorta like if my air bags go off. After that I probably want a new car. But to keep up the Car analogy we keep driving it and the next time we're dead.
I'm also reminded of our response to Flint, MI's water crisis. Which is a big "meh". We can't even get a disaster fixed _after_ it happens. So I get nervous when I see a potential disaster that can (for some indeterminate amount of time) be ignored by a country with a long history of ignoring problems...
not after we repealed Glass-Steagall and let the investment bankers get buddy buddy with the Mortgage bankers. See, we used to keep the risky wallstreet stuff separate from the stable Mortgage, car and Student Loan stuff. We don't do that anymore. So a Stock market crash doesn't just devalue the paper money of the 1%ers, it wrecks the whole economy. That's sorta why we separated them in the first place...
it's because companies like LinkedIn need very few employees relative to the amount of paying users. That's what scale really means. It means the investors can make a shitload of money without all those pesky employees ruining it for them. Investors have been living high off the massive productivity gains they've squeezed out of the work force, but they're kinda hitting the limits of that until automation kicks in. They're a little nervous about full blown automation because if they're not careful they'll end up with socialism when people notice there aren't any jobs anymore. So they're moving at a snails pace and using companies like LinkedIn to realize the profits they demand.
Once companies like that dry up be afraid. These folks run the economy and have a boundless desire for wealth. I'm not sure what they're going to do but if you're a member of the working class instead of the ruling one it's not going to be pretty...
it's just a really, really low bar...
because of God. I'm not sure how to counter that sentiment. Reason and logic won't work because, well, if they did then we wouldn't be having this conversation...
that a Job Creator can use to make more jobs. Now don't you feel silly (you becha)?
We actually learned how to stop them ages ago. Elizabeth Warren wrote done books about it and talks to anybody who'll listen about it.
They're trying to position bots with machine learning as a replacement for company specific apps that take care of customer service issues. If it works out expect millions of customer service jobs to go away. Funny thing is it's mostly a problem for the developing world because those low end jobs have already moved over there.
Between the 60 hour work weeks and automation there's not a lot of work to go around in a country where your entire quality of life is based on your job.
Or your whole comment would be b.s..
Besides, the rich are going to get subsidies. Get over it. Focus on your needs and if you're a decent sort of chap the other 99%.
Firefox made their name as a viable alternative the the crapfest that IE had become in the absence of meaningful competition. Then the got much, much bigger as google sought to ensure there was a platform for their adverts that wasn't under the control of a competitor with a history of using it's market dominance to crush otherwise stronger rivals. Well google has chrome for that now (and android, and ChromeOS) so FF can take a flying leap as far as they care.
/. geeks people use whatever software they first come across unless that software is painfully bad. IE 11 and Chrome are both just fine.
I think the browser's pretty much done innovating. At the end of the day it's a content delivery device. There's only so much it can do. Maybe it can do it better, but anything FF can do google can (and will) match with Chrome short of them patenting it and suing (which the community would savage them for).
It's not enough to improve when there's good enough. Outside of a few
dog-eat-dog capitalism for the poor...
Come 'on folks. You're never going to get that small gov't you keep dreaming of. The wealthy and powerful won't allow it. So why not take some of that big gov't for yourselves? If there's a tool and it does good work, use it. Yeah, it's a dangerous tool, but so is fire.
Real computer science is just math with computers. This sounds like businesses are tired of having to pay for some extra specialized training they want which has little to no value outside of their exact use case. I'm seeing this a lot with colleges where more and more they exist to get you ready for one very specific job. That'd be peachy if that job lasted 50 years and then you retire but a lot of times it's so highly specialized you might have trouble finding work in a decade. Meanwhile you're still paying off the $100k of student loans it took to get that training.
When did the general population stop noticing crap like this?
Not looking forward to re-writing my plugin. I might not bother. It's been a fun project but Mozilla is asking me to do a lot of work without much support (so far anyway). They're gonna yank the XUL UI language without there being good replacements (HTML doesn't work right from an addon context because of the security constraints) and take away overlays (that let me access web content without a major mess of code).
That said their reasons aren't too bad and have nothing to do with a walled garden. The addon signing is there to give them a kill switch so that if somebody sells their addon to a malware company and it starts spewing adds they can revoke the signature and shut it down. I get a couple offers a year to "buy" my plugin and figured out pretty quick what they were after (my plugin's under the Moz license, so they could fork it or submit patches to mainline if they just wanted to pitch in).
As for the chromification, that's because they want to make it snappier by doing multi-process. And that means not letting my add on hold up the main thread. Honestly that's the biggest thing holding back my efforts to port to Chrome. It's a nightmare to deal with all the callbacks and such when you can't even hold up the thread for simple things like writing a few bytes of preferences to disk. You don't want to know what I had to do just to get that working... OTOH they're right that it'll make the browser seem snappier. But to be blunt I don't care. I've got an 4 year old A10-5800 and I've yet to be able to do anything in my single threaded Firefox addon that even slows down that old workhorse.
Oh, and yeah, the article is B.S.. Even in Chrome I can call out to executable files that run with the users permissions (basically root if you're a Windows User). It looked like click bait to me so I didn't RTFA.