You got together a car way better than any taxi, 'for fun', caring nothing for the depreciation of your asset you bring to the table, in order to be a dilettante scab just on a whim.
It's not automatically a race to the bottom for passengers, so long as Uber can continue to get people like you who aren't actually committed, and as long as the passengers' luck holds out.
It's a race to the bottom for that entire employment sector because any driver, either taxi or uber, has to compete with YOU 'for fun' when you don't actually have to get paid because you don't really care. You don't have to care about wearing out your resources because you'll likely just drop out if something happens to your car, you don't have to care about getting paid since you're doing it 'for fun', and as long as Uber or Lyft can get hold of enough people like you, everybody has to compete on your terms.
And you're losing money. You're the sucker, you just get to opt out before you lose everything as it's just a gig, 'for fun'. You don't have to consider wear on your vehicle, your insurance, any of that. You're doing it for some other reason and as long as the company can find more like you
It's one thing when you 'pay to play' at some Sunset Strip nightclub, in order to get your music out there. Yeah, that's no business plan but it's an ego thing and performing on stage and it's easy to see how that type of 'work' ends up for dilettantes and trust-funders, generally unable to provide a living wage to your average musician.
It's VERY WEIRD if you have to be a superstar freakin' cab driver to earn a living because everybody else is losing money on the deal. Just saying. Your activity contributes to a situation where everybody else has to match your level of interaction/committment/cashflow. Cabdriving is not meant to be a hobby you spend some money on to have an interesting experience on weekends. (of course, Uber is liable to take it to 'cabdriving is not for humans' in the relatively near future)
No, that's actually a terrific analogy. Uber is lottery economics, but in a different way from things like writing apps for iPhone (where you will fail and lose time and money hoping to be one of the three trendy apps that makes somebody millions).
In the Uber model, you are the lottery ticket, and Uber is the gambler. Their purpose is to keep squeezing the situation and conditions of employment until they are holding a large number of winning lottery tickets. That is defined as 'person who is dumb enough to substantially lose money and resources competing with rivals for that Uber job'.
Everybody haughtily suggests that THEY would insist upon good terms, put away money for retirement (rather than dump it back into the vehicle and into fancier bottles of water: hey look, an Uber driver with a complimentary wet bar for passengers! Top that, taxis! Stuff like that)
As such, they are saying that THEY are not Uber's winning tickets, because they would demand too much or call Uber's bluff and leave. Every time they do, Uber gets another chance to try and find somebody more desperate. It's a race-to-the-bottom condition, not necessarily even for passengers depending on the terms Uber sets, but for anybody trying to conduct business in that market segment. It's dumping to try and lock in total control of the market.
We don't know Uber would take the Wal-Mart approach of cutting back customer quality and draining money that way. They could also take the Google approach of doubling down to try and get into a unassailable position in order to control future transportation completely (when the self-driving cars take over).
For the time being, if you are an Uber driver you are the lottery ticket Uber purchases. If you exercise rational self-interest you are a losing lottery ticket. Uber requires that you not do that. The business is based on taking maximum advantage of people prepared to be cheated in order to undercut the next guy, and this is not a model where you can bring rational choices and expect to survive for long.
To be a winning ticket for Uber, you need to act as if you are sacrificing heavily in the short term so you can build a better position competing for work in the future as a day laborer. Because if you won't, the guy next to you might: and then you lose everything, Uber doesn't want you. The self-sacrificing guy made a better (to them) offer.
This is the problem with setting up a class of employment based on rational self-interest where employers benefit most by people abandoning that rational self-interest. It's a lottery, and you know you can't trust most people to stay rational enough of the time.
Half of half of $500,000 is still a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars more than my deadbeat neighbors, and the government is giving them that money just so they can turn around and give it right back to ME.
By all means go all galt and refuse to come to work if this upsets you so.
I'll be running my business, and I'll happily take that $125,000 and whatever happy, insured employees I've got. And maybe I can turn around and take all your customers when you quit. That's business
I think you may be a little mixed up about the goose that laid the golden egg. You may be thinking guys like Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk are the goose, and the hordes of welfare rabble are seeking to kill that goose.
The hordes of underclass people consuming (whether with crappy jobs or on welfare or a basic income) are the goose.
Everybody wants 'a bit more money', no matter how much they already have.
Let me address this from the point of view of a small business guy (and not a rich tech employee vesting their options)
Let's say what you can do to better yourself is make a lemonade stand, 'cos you got lemons.
Your neighbors are lazy bastards and won't squeeze lemons, so you win: you are demonstrably more motivated than them, and they are bad. With me so far?
In the current system, you do your lemonade stand, and you have to compete with Minute Maid, aka the Coca-Cola company. They don't have to buy lemons as they can buy citric acid and corn syrup by the ton, in bulk, for a substantial discount. You squeeze your lemons and try to sell your lemonade anyhow, but your neighbors can't buy any because they are broke. Even if you convince them your stuff is better than corn syrup and citric acid, they are deadbeats and can't afford to buy anything but Coca-Cola products.
In the commie pinko star trek system (also seen in Universal Basic Income theory), the Coca-Cola company is doubtless still huge but is hit up aggressively for money as that's where the money is: same with Donald Trump and all the biggest winners of the system. They don't notice all that much as one's lifestyle is much the same if you're 30 or if you're 300 times richer than the average Joe: those guys used to BE 30 times richer and it seemed fine to them at the time, there were still Ferraris and Rolexes to be had. The money taken from these money-outliers, these network-effect winners, is then given to all your lazy bastard neighbors who sit around doing nothing but drinking lemonade all day.
They can now afford to buy your lemonade if you still want to sell it to them, and they're less stressed out and have more time to pay attention to what you're telling them.
Some of you guys see civilization-destroying looters where I see customers. Just sayin'. We already know that if you dump money into the underclasses of society it goes into immediate economic activity rather than abstractions like investment. It can BE an investment pool for anybody willing to actually work and make something other people might want.
This is not communism, it's still capitalism: all the more in fact since it recirculates resources into small business and local economies completely without regulation. Go ahead and throw out all labor laws and just give every citizen a grand or two a month automatically, from bum to Trump, and then tax everybody a quarter or a third of what they earn with absolutely no loopholes (and money-shuffling capital gains also counts as 'earns'). Much much simpler and the number of customers (as well as students) skyrockets, and no central authority has to decide what shall succeed or fail.
But you gotta remove the requirement to work and make it 'go to work to get MORE than just survival in some podunk town somewhere, in a cruddy apartment'. Right now it's lottery economics: everybody starves to make the payoff for the Silicon Valley tech nerd more impressive. The Trek future can't work that way. Even if you got very enthusiastic about total genocide of all poor losers, your customer base collapses more and more. The customer base MUST have money in capitalism or the whole thing fails.
Depends on whether you consider cloud backups a thing, or indeed public-facing cloud backups as Google Photos appears to be.
Or, public-facing cloud backups tagged by slowly improving AI on the cusp of deciding whether you are man or ape? http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
I can see it is embarrassing to Google that its AI is deciding black people are gorillas. Tells you something about who's coding the low levels of this AI as it gathers itself together. It's growing from the bones of things like Google Photos, fed by the wittingly or unwittingly given visual data of the world, and you do have to have imagination to conclude something like Google Photos is a way to steal all your data, whether or not you delete 'the app' that set it transferring all your images to an apparently public-facing server. Hope your selfies aren't too naughty! Who do you think is going to steal them, other humans?
I'm pretty sure they aren't proposing to sell the fruits of this to humans.
Because to Google, "Le Singularity, c'est moi". The intelligence that directs all the self-driving cars, that takes over from all human foibles, is to be THEIRS and so the important thing is simply to get the data and to build the neural networks—so, they are "also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics - words to be careful about in photos of people - and image recognition itself - eg better recognition of dark-skinned faces" quite literally. That's the purpose of Google Photos and why they'll spend money on cloud servers for the world, asking nothing. Le Singularity, c'est moi.
Whilst it is nice that Skynet will not begin herding black people to special zoos thanks to the timely intervention of the BBC, it is unsettling to get this glimpse of the Singularity forming through actions like these. Black people are gorillas, large dogs are horses, and the personality is being trained through collective input but initially formed by people who will set up an AI to consider some Homo Sapiens as people and others as presentient animals, and think nothing of it until caught at it.
In the event that Google moved out of the US and moved to a country where they are twenty times the size, manpower and influence of the country's government, is that the point that some people see 'em as an independent entity on scale with a government and with their own purposes which are indistinguishable from such a government?
Folks keep going on about the NSA but I'm not really sure which is bigger or more capable, Google or the NSA. Google has nicer campuses. As far as we know...
Hm. Creative Commons-Attribution is very similar to endorsement. What do you think of French moral rights, such as right of association?
Currently in the field of music we're getting some rumblings on this front, such as David Byrne suing Charlie Crist for using his song 'Road to Nowhere' in politics- it goes back further with Rush vs. Rand Paul, and Jackson Browne and Van Halen vs. John McCain.
Earlier, both parties tried to co-opt Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA", which has lyrics hinting obliquely at the futility of the Vietnam war.
I use CC myself- the same one Trent Reznor went for, which is not straight-up CC-Attribution. Let's assume you know an artist (not me! I'm a nerd!:D ) capable of writing music that seizes the emotions and powerfully moves people, with lyrical themes which are simple and general (as good lyrics often are). This means the work in question, while powerful, isn't real specific. It can be personal, in other words, the meaning is spelled out by context.
To what extent do you feel popular culture should get to override moral rights such as right of association? If someone does a powerful but ambiguous song, and their arch-enemies (in terms of belief systems) seek to use their work to back and support themselves, to what extent does the artist get to prohibit that particular use? Under ordinary copyright the artist can do this, and under CC-Attribution it is quite the opposite: the arch-enemy not only gets to use the work, but is required to also attribute, associating the artist's name with their worst enemy.
I think one counterargument is that attribution lets people look up the original artist and learn more about their differing beliefs and values- but you're going to run into a problem with asymmetry of information, where most people will not look and will assume the artist is sympathetic if the musical theme seems like it might be sympathetic to the cause.
I'd like to know how much of that declining CD sales is the crappy major label stuff, and how much is indie. It seems to me that doing GOOD CDs would still work for indie music, if you made it an appealing package- I like the jacket/sleeve type, like a miniature record rather than a plastic case. If you can do replication runs the per-disc cost is not super high at this point, and it's as 'permanent' as CDs ever were, and can be made to sound pretty much as good as records.
Case in point: if you record a record to the computer, and burn a CD out of it using decent practices like dithering to 16 bit etc, it still sounds like the record. It IS possible to make CDs sound good, people just DON'T for the most part because it's not obvious.
"Where are you going to get funding for your research"
I think Big Oil has a _little_ money stashed away somewhere. As impoverished as they are, seems like they might take an interest. Not that they have any connections into things like government, etc. to help you get your message out;)...I think the word is 'gobsmacked', thanks Gordon Ramsay. I am gobsmacked every time anyone brings up the poor hungry moneyless anti-global-warming researchers. I would have thought a relative scarcity of those implies it's really, really REALLY hard to even pretend they have a case, because those who benefit from their position have such outrageously deep pockets.
I suppose it might be a case of Big Oil wanting the global warming narrative to advance, because peak oil is also a reality to them and they'd like to get going on future prices much higher than the current world economy could possibly support. Establish alternate energy to take up the slack, and jack up the price of oil as a luxury energy source. Makes sense to me;)
Think of it as a really big-ass spaceship, on which life support looks like it's getting sketchy.
We get to decide what we consider life support. If it's going to become a giant pit of lava in which space salamanders thrive, we get to say 'hey, this is our spaceship, get your own, that's not what I call life support'.
We get to be non-stupid if we like- calculating out the stuff we consume, what it's doing, where it goes, making reasonably educated guesses on what's happening. A previous poster noted cancer rates during the smoggiest parts of the Industrial Revolution. We get to draw conclusions about this without looking for outliers (ooo look, a 102-year old guy who smokes cigars instead of eating! Everything we know is wrong!)
We get to have opinions on what to do, with or without the amazing invasive-species-like ability of our species to loot the henhouse and shit where we eat- the fact that we can always come up with individuals to loot and pillage ANYTHING doesn't mean all human endeavors are worthless.
All we can do is the best we can, which empirical evidence tends to suggest isn't super impressive. But we are allowed to try- and if some of you guys have an attitude of "you're just a bunch of dicks manipulating government and opinion to hurt my profits when I should be allowed to loot the henhouse 'cos it doesn't really matter and everybody dies anyway", we are allowed to be dicks about it.
Think of it as us using the same fox-like wiles and manipulativeness natural to our species, towards a different end. Let's play tug-of-war with it, and for every excessive telegenic weather event (driven by the increased energy in the heating climate- obviously this doesn't produce a steady-state hotter earth, it produces increasingly violent weather, learn 2 chaos theory) we'll point out the influence of greater (hotter) climate energy over the pictures of devastation.
Go right ahead and keep pointing at glaciers and saying they will always be there. Glaciers are a lot more boring than hurricanes and heat waves. Make the right connections and global warming becomes a much more exciting television story.
I'm not an iPhone coder, but if I was, I would really enjoy sabotaging all you silly people by putting out a flashlight app that did not have any ads in any way:)
The gratitude I'd get would be worth the effort, and being 'positioned' as a helpful, smart programmer who respects people's attention and wishes, is more valuable than being recognized as a dumbass who'll put out the 1000th flashlight app with an ad on it in hopes of being paid by foolish advertisers to market to other dumbasses who are by definition in the dark trying to see something other than the screen:D
Oh, no, I'm assuming they are indeed that 'totalitarian', but I'm also going to assume they'll be coaxing all the app developers to use this but will not be placing ads on their own software. Think about it, who would pay them for that- themselves? Ads are for third parties to pay someone for your attention.
I'm weird about my attention. I try to produce a lot of things, only beginning with software, which must come out of my own attention and thought, and I am very fierce at defending my mental 'space'. There's one brick-and-mortar place that I'll carry a 'coupon card' for, and that's my primary supermarket. Every little hardware store and book place (okay, every big corporate one) insists on my carrying their savings card, or will claim that I can have an imaginary card that I don't even have to carry, but they're missing the point:
I know I only have that one supermarket card where I buy most of my food, and I don't have to think about that. Anything else, I don't have to remember or look up whether I have their card, because I won't- I say no thank you and pay effectively an 'I don't have to think about you' tax for the privilege of not having to care about the fucking place or consider them special in any way.
And that's the point: every dipshit corporate bookstore etc. wants to be my SPECIAL friend and have me thinking about them and their services constantly, and I'm sorry- I have to think about things to feed myself and my cats, or I won't come up with new stuff. I'm sure there are people who put burgers in sacks all day who can spend their time thinking 'I am a Borders/Hilton/Home Despot Preferred Customer and must seek out those places to consume at, for which I will be rewarded with special treatment!' but if that thought comes into my head it's one more thing to keep track of, purportedly for my benefit but actually not. My time isn't free...
Want to know the primary reason I got an iPhone? I rightly trusted that I would not ever, not once, have to crack a manual to fully use the thing. It would be 'discoverable' and require no training or special attention. It was... know the first thing I look for in reviews of app store items? Whether or not they show advertisements and such things, which is always revealed in reviews by someone who feels as I do. If they talk about sitting through ads, I'm already gone. I've rejected more than one app product, even free ones, for that.
I used to use an Apple product called Cyberdog. It was special- built on the OpenDoc extensible app framework, at the time it was the only thing where you could fire up web pages, email etc. and everything would just be there. Everything else, Netscape, Eudora etc, all fired up splash screens and made you watch effectively a little ad for the product you already were using. Why not spend the time you're already wasting letting the program load, thinking about the program itself rather than the task you intended to do using it? Right?
Apple's OSX stuff like Mail came out, and it was a flashback to the days of Cyberdog- and now I'm using all sorts of internet apps that just launch and go, such as Firefox from which I'm posting this. I'm looking at the interface and I've got a raft of little crap in the address bar, but not even a logo advertising that it is Firefox on the program window itself. I believe Safari also has a similar ethos.
If Apple is making an ad service, they will not be using it for their OWN stuff, and will not be requiring that app developers place ads- they might require that if app developers place ads, they MUST do so through Apple's setup, but that's typical Apple, typical 'any megacorporation'.
Jobs is the guy that once raged at a developer, insisting he make a program launch two seconds faster, counting up the number of yearly launches over the entire userbase and claiming the two seconds would save the equivalent of several HUMAN LIVES not spent sitting waiting for the program to launch. This guy is not going to stick me with click-throughs or wasted banner ad space
I do a variation on this to pay my mortgage and feed my cats...
I run airwindows.com and write audio software for musicians and mix engineers. Some of the earliest stuff, a decade ago, was GPL, and I continue to be willing to talk freely about pretty much anything (talking tech becomes a turn-off for musicians, so I don't often get into it as a rule)
What I did to start making (some) actual money versus 'no money' was this:
Pick out some of the stuff, including everything that was GPL, and make it 'free beer' free. Since it's all mine, anybody wanting stuff added to the GPL pool can have it for the asking- it becomes dual-licensed because I'm not actually drawing from the GPL pool. I ended up including source for the public domain FreeverbCJ, and RMSBuddyCJ is GPL- but when I did closed reverbs I didn't even draw on the PD Freeverb stuff, I wrote up a much less object-oriented framework from scratch based on general reverb concepts. I don't use graphics code so I didn't draw from RMS Buddy for anything closed.
Pick out some of the stuff to be closed, and put it out there in such a way that you basically pay for access to get the widget in the first place. Kagi has a nice little setup where they can sell digital downloads with URLs that are temporary- there's no one fixed URL given out. I also keep prices at maybe a fifth of what the big nasty copy-protect guys are doing, and consider sales to be a lifetime thing- I'll support what I put out so long as I'm alive to do it. I keep it real simple so I can do that- if Logic changes and breaks existing plugins, it's on me to make it right for everybody I've sold to, since I haven't given them the code to fix it themselves:P
Lastly, I passionately believe that selling closed source software has to be a 'pull' rather than 'push' model: some people seem to think because they can have an idea, people are OBLIGATED to pay them. I think that has to be earned. I think it has to be earned by behavior. I wouldn't pay for someone to come and kick me in the teeth, so why would I pay for someone to come and shut off my software or audit my shop to see if I'm taking more than I ought? What makes that THEIR bailiwick? (I'm talking of Waves and their raids on studios.)
My stuff's copy protection is the original source of access- Kagi charges for the initial download, there's no place (or shouldn't be) saying 'download anything, pay if YOU feel like it' because why should it be that easy when I've repeatedly worked with people over the years and given refunds if they made a mistake? The effect is the same (except I pay a fee on refunds and chargebacks), it's just that you don't get to have the full product just on a bored random whim. There are demos for that;)
Once you do have it, I start looking like the open-source world again: there is no dongle, there is no serial #, the bit of software is just the bit of software. It's not even the unlocked demo- there is no unlock to the demo, the product is the same code with the demo stuff (an output muting at intervals) commented out and a recompile. It's a black box like most commercial closed software, but it's a box without locks or traps or alarms- it just sits there working, you can back it up, and the only thing that prevents people from widely filesharing my work is earned respect. I WILL not add stuff that would get in the way of a real user just to fight 'pirates' when I could give a sh*t and earn some of their respect instead.
I also have the following unusual attitude: digital stuff not being used doesn't exist. If somebody who doesn't mix downloads three of my best, costliest (alright, $60) plugins and puts them in their Components folder and then never mixes a song- as far as I'm concerned, there is no 'theft' because it's meaningless. It's the same with a lot of mp3 filesharing, with obsessive warezing- hell, I have legitimate books, legitimate programs I don't read or use. How much more with the guy who's a big collector and eeevil w@r3z puppy and
I would point out that at least in recording studios, you'd better be ready to fetch coffee and get it right- because it's a winnowing-out process that is teaching the studio about you as much as you're learning about the studio.
The studio needs you not to come in there thinking your book learning prepares you for the real job. Hypothetical example- let's say you're tracking heavy guitars. You've experimented, and you discovered that if you swap out the SM57 often used for this for an Audix D6 (a kick drum mic!) you get a way bigger, more metal heavy guitar sound, so you're ready to make your contribution and you put up the D6 instead- and get spanked for it and banished, even though in solo it obviously sounds much bigger. You are sad.
And well you should be- because your 'better sound' isn't going to sit in the mix. It's stomping all over the bass, the top end fights with the vocals, it's throwing the whole balance of attention off and worse, the guitar players for this band aren't so hot and it's the bass and drums that are really going to salvage things, especially the bass which is nailing a deceptively simple part that you wrote off as unimaginative- but which the more experienced guys recognize as the song's basic hook, simple as it is. Your guitar sound's screwing that up completely.
Back to the coffee. If you can't come up with the humility to try and do your best on an apparently menial task such as getting the coffee right- even though it offers no opening for you to show off your skills- what chance do you have of getting a mix right, when most of the 'impressive smart-guy engineer' tricks anybody could offer will not actually serve the song other than as distractions- when you're working with bands which very likely have only one chance in their lives to grab at the chimera of recording industry success? Very often showing YOUR quality will detract from the quality of the final result, if nothing else by distracting.
I honestly think the rules are different for glamour professions (like studio internships!) where there's a long line of would-be superstars trying to get a chance to show their awesome to the world. Hell, the musicians have to pay to gig in some locales. I'm not sure it's the same for software employers- but I am sure the motivation's the same. It's either riches or status, and when it's status ('I work for Google, I'm elite' or whatever) there will be people ready to pay to work at the status job.
And when you have jobs like in the recording studio, where the depth of 'black arts' knowledge can be pretty deep and counterintuitive, especially in mix which is a whole can of worms all its own- there's a relevance to the unpaid coffee-fetcher internship, because it's like boot camp- as long as you haven't figured out how little you really know, you are dragging down the whole enterprise with careers at stake. _Everybody_ is running scared and groping in the dark above a certain success level, because there aren't consistent, predictable metrics for what's going to work... it gets pretty voodoo dance-y after a while.
Just some thoughts from an old slashdotter with studio-owning friends...
Too right. It's really weird to return to Slashdot and see the tone of the discussion...
People are so very quick to spot that career politicians have the morals of robber barons, and this shocks and offends everybody to the point where the cry goes up, 'Off with their heads! We will trust entirely in business, which must be honorable or expire in competitive battle!'...when business IS robber barons, that have the morals of career politicians- and you don't really have any better chance of monitoring them and getting coherent information than you had with the politicians.
And without that coherent information, you are boned and cannot maintain the anti-hierarchical system you seek.
I see naive people.
Some of you guys need to take a sabbatical like I have, get out in the world, or at least get into some political blogs that aren't 'Red State'. The questions are sadly complicated, and none of the answers are really free from consequence- put it this way, when your answer looks really simple, you have an = somewhere that you meant ==, and though you think you understand what's going to happen, the compiler's going to happily follow your instructions and deliver results that will shock you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're a little confused.
You got together a car way better than any taxi, 'for fun', caring nothing for the depreciation of your asset you bring to the table, in order to be a dilettante scab just on a whim.
It's not automatically a race to the bottom for passengers, so long as Uber can continue to get people like you who aren't actually committed, and as long as the passengers' luck holds out.
It's a race to the bottom for that entire employment sector because any driver, either taxi or uber, has to compete with YOU 'for fun' when you don't actually have to get paid because you don't really care. You don't have to care about wearing out your resources because you'll likely just drop out if something happens to your car, you don't have to care about getting paid since you're doing it 'for fun', and as long as Uber or Lyft can get hold of enough people like you, everybody has to compete on your terms.
And you're losing money. You're the sucker, you just get to opt out before you lose everything as it's just a gig, 'for fun'. You don't have to consider wear on your vehicle, your insurance, any of that. You're doing it for some other reason and as long as the company can find more like you
It's one thing when you 'pay to play' at some Sunset Strip nightclub, in order to get your music out there. Yeah, that's no business plan but it's an ego thing and performing on stage and it's easy to see how that type of 'work' ends up for dilettantes and trust-funders, generally unable to provide a living wage to your average musician.
It's VERY WEIRD if you have to be a superstar freakin' cab driver to earn a living because everybody else is losing money on the deal. Just saying. Your activity contributes to a situation where everybody else has to match your level of interaction/committment/cashflow. Cabdriving is not meant to be a hobby you spend some money on to have an interesting experience on weekends. (of course, Uber is liable to take it to 'cabdriving is not for humans' in the relatively near future)
No, that's actually a terrific analogy. Uber is lottery economics, but in a different way from things like writing apps for iPhone (where you will fail and lose time and money hoping to be one of the three trendy apps that makes somebody millions).
In the Uber model, you are the lottery ticket, and Uber is the gambler. Their purpose is to keep squeezing the situation and conditions of employment until they are holding a large number of winning lottery tickets. That is defined as 'person who is dumb enough to substantially lose money and resources competing with rivals for that Uber job'.
Everybody haughtily suggests that THEY would insist upon good terms, put away money for retirement (rather than dump it back into the vehicle and into fancier bottles of water: hey look, an Uber driver with a complimentary wet bar for passengers! Top that, taxis! Stuff like that)
As such, they are saying that THEY are not Uber's winning tickets, because they would demand too much or call Uber's bluff and leave. Every time they do, Uber gets another chance to try and find somebody more desperate. It's a race-to-the-bottom condition, not necessarily even for passengers depending on the terms Uber sets, but for anybody trying to conduct business in that market segment. It's dumping to try and lock in total control of the market.
We don't know Uber would take the Wal-Mart approach of cutting back customer quality and draining money that way. They could also take the Google approach of doubling down to try and get into a unassailable position in order to control future transportation completely (when the self-driving cars take over).
For the time being, if you are an Uber driver you are the lottery ticket Uber purchases. If you exercise rational self-interest you are a losing lottery ticket. Uber requires that you not do that. The business is based on taking maximum advantage of people prepared to be cheated in order to undercut the next guy, and this is not a model where you can bring rational choices and expect to survive for long.
To be a winning ticket for Uber, you need to act as if you are sacrificing heavily in the short term so you can build a better position competing for work in the future as a day laborer. Because if you won't, the guy next to you might: and then you lose everything, Uber doesn't want you. The self-sacrificing guy made a better (to them) offer.
This is the problem with setting up a class of employment based on rational self-interest where employers benefit most by people abandoning that rational self-interest. It's a lottery, and you know you can't trust most people to stay rational enough of the time.
Oh, you mean 'Seattle'?
Half of half of $500,000 is still a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars more than my deadbeat neighbors, and the government is giving them that money just so they can turn around and give it right back to ME.
By all means go all galt and refuse to come to work if this upsets you so.
I'll be running my business, and I'll happily take that $125,000 and whatever happy, insured employees I've got. And maybe I can turn around and take all your customers when you quit. That's business
I think you may be a little mixed up about the goose that laid the golden egg. You may be thinking guys like Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk are the goose, and the hordes of welfare rabble are seeking to kill that goose.
The hordes of underclass people consuming (whether with crappy jobs or on welfare or a basic income) are the goose.
Trump and the others are the egg.
Kill wisely.
Everybody wants 'a bit more money', no matter how much they already have.
Let me address this from the point of view of a small business guy (and not a rich tech employee vesting their options)
Let's say what you can do to better yourself is make a lemonade stand, 'cos you got lemons.
Your neighbors are lazy bastards and won't squeeze lemons, so you win: you are demonstrably more motivated than them, and they are bad. With me so far?
In the current system, you do your lemonade stand, and you have to compete with Minute Maid, aka the Coca-Cola company. They don't have to buy lemons as they can buy citric acid and corn syrup by the ton, in bulk, for a substantial discount. You squeeze your lemons and try to sell your lemonade anyhow, but your neighbors can't buy any because they are broke. Even if you convince them your stuff is better than corn syrup and citric acid, they are deadbeats and can't afford to buy anything but Coca-Cola products.
In the commie pinko star trek system (also seen in Universal Basic Income theory), the Coca-Cola company is doubtless still huge but is hit up aggressively for money as that's where the money is: same with Donald Trump and all the biggest winners of the system. They don't notice all that much as one's lifestyle is much the same if you're 30 or if you're 300 times richer than the average Joe: those guys used to BE 30 times richer and it seemed fine to them at the time, there were still Ferraris and Rolexes to be had. The money taken from these money-outliers, these network-effect winners, is then given to all your lazy bastard neighbors who sit around doing nothing but drinking lemonade all day.
They can now afford to buy your lemonade if you still want to sell it to them, and they're less stressed out and have more time to pay attention to what you're telling them.
Some of you guys see civilization-destroying looters where I see customers. Just sayin'. We already know that if you dump money into the underclasses of society it goes into immediate economic activity rather than abstractions like investment. It can BE an investment pool for anybody willing to actually work and make something other people might want.
This is not communism, it's still capitalism: all the more in fact since it recirculates resources into small business and local economies completely without regulation. Go ahead and throw out all labor laws and just give every citizen a grand or two a month automatically, from bum to Trump, and then tax everybody a quarter or a third of what they earn with absolutely no loopholes (and money-shuffling capital gains also counts as 'earns'). Much much simpler and the number of customers (as well as students) skyrockets, and no central authority has to decide what shall succeed or fail.
But you gotta remove the requirement to work and make it 'go to work to get MORE than just survival in some podunk town somewhere, in a cruddy apartment'. Right now it's lottery economics: everybody starves to make the payoff for the Silicon Valley tech nerd more impressive. The Trek future can't work that way. Even if you got very enthusiastic about total genocide of all poor losers, your customer base collapses more and more. The customer base MUST have money in capitalism or the whole thing fails.
Depends on whether you consider cloud backups a thing, or indeed public-facing cloud backups as Google Photos appears to be.
Or, public-facing cloud backups tagged by slowly improving AI on the cusp of deciding whether you are man or ape? http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
I can see it is embarrassing to Google that its AI is deciding black people are gorillas. Tells you something about who's coding the low levels of this AI as it gathers itself together. It's growing from the bones of things like Google Photos, fed by the wittingly or unwittingly given visual data of the world, and you do have to have imagination to conclude something like Google Photos is a way to steal all your data, whether or not you delete 'the app' that set it transferring all your images to an apparently public-facing server. Hope your selfies aren't too naughty! Who do you think is going to steal them, other humans?
I'm pretty sure they aren't proposing to sell the fruits of this to humans.
Because to Google, "Le Singularity, c'est moi". The intelligence that directs all the self-driving cars, that takes over from all human foibles, is to be THEIRS and so the important thing is simply to get the data and to build the neural networks—so, they are "also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics - words to be careful about in photos of people - and image recognition itself - eg better recognition of dark-skinned faces" quite literally. That's the purpose of Google Photos and why they'll spend money on cloud servers for the world, asking nothing. Le Singularity, c'est moi.
Whilst it is nice that Skynet will not begin herding black people to special zoos thanks to the timely intervention of the BBC, it is unsettling to get this glimpse of the Singularity forming through actions like these. Black people are gorillas, large dogs are horses, and the personality is being trained through collective input but initially formed by people who will set up an AI to consider some Homo Sapiens as people and others as presentient animals, and think nothing of it until caught at it.
Meet the new boss, I guess.
I polish Red Wolves and pinch Grey ones, but prefer not to do anything to my father's side.
Man, the five-digit Slashdot ID users are loonies... I'm not sure this one isn't serious.
Extended use of Slashdot.org is evil!
In the event that Google moved out of the US and moved to a country where they are twenty times the size, manpower and influence of the country's government, is that the point that some people see 'em as an independent entity on scale with a government and with their own purposes which are indistinguishable from such a government?
Folks keep going on about the NSA but I'm not really sure which is bigger or more capable, Google or the NSA. Google has nicer campuses. As far as we know...
Or at least Phys Ed :)
Who're you calling a youngster? XD
Hm. Creative Commons-Attribution is very similar to endorsement. What do you think of French moral rights, such as right of association?
Currently in the field of music we're getting some rumblings on this front, such as David Byrne suing Charlie Crist for using his song 'Road to Nowhere' in politics- it goes back further with Rush vs. Rand Paul, and Jackson Browne and Van Halen vs. John McCain.
Earlier, both parties tried to co-opt Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA", which has lyrics hinting obliquely at the futility of the Vietnam war.
I use CC myself- the same one Trent Reznor went for, which is not straight-up CC-Attribution. Let's assume you know an artist (not me! I'm a nerd! :D ) capable of writing music that seizes the emotions and powerfully moves people, with lyrical themes which are simple and general (as good lyrics often are). This means the work in question, while powerful, isn't real specific. It can be personal, in other words, the meaning is spelled out by context.
To what extent do you feel popular culture should get to override moral rights such as right of association? If someone does a powerful but ambiguous song, and their arch-enemies (in terms of belief systems) seek to use their work to back and support themselves, to what extent does the artist get to prohibit that particular use? Under ordinary copyright the artist can do this, and under CC-Attribution it is quite the opposite: the arch-enemy not only gets to use the work, but is required to also attribute, associating the artist's name with their worst enemy.
I think one counterargument is that attribution lets people look up the original artist and learn more about their differing beliefs and values- but you're going to run into a problem with asymmetry of information, where most people will not look and will assume the artist is sympathetic if the musical theme seems like it might be sympathetic to the cause.
No, that would be mean :D
I'd like to know how much of that declining CD sales is the crappy major label stuff, and how much is indie. It seems to me that doing GOOD CDs would still work for indie music, if you made it an appealing package- I like the jacket/sleeve type, like a miniature record rather than a plastic case. If you can do replication runs the per-disc cost is not super high at this point, and it's as 'permanent' as CDs ever were, and can be made to sound pretty much as good as records.
Case in point: if you record a record to the computer, and burn a CD out of it using decent practices like dithering to 16 bit etc, it still sounds like the record. It IS possible to make CDs sound good, people just DON'T for the most part because it's not obvious.
"Where are you going to get funding for your research"
I think Big Oil has a _little_ money stashed away somewhere. As impoverished as they are, seems like they might take an interest. Not that they have any connections into things like government, etc. to help you get your message out ;) ...I think the word is 'gobsmacked', thanks Gordon Ramsay. I am gobsmacked every time anyone brings up the poor hungry moneyless anti-global-warming researchers. I would have thought a relative scarcity of those implies it's really, really REALLY hard to even pretend they have a case, because those who benefit from their position have such outrageously deep pockets.
I suppose it might be a case of Big Oil wanting the global warming narrative to advance, because peak oil is also a reality to them and they'd like to get going on future prices much higher than the current world economy could possibly support. Establish alternate energy to take up the slack, and jack up the price of oil as a luxury energy source. Makes sense to me ;)
Think of it as a really big-ass spaceship, on which life support looks like it's getting sketchy.
We get to decide what we consider life support. If it's going to become a giant pit of lava in which space salamanders thrive, we get to say 'hey, this is our spaceship, get your own, that's not what I call life support'.
We get to be non-stupid if we like- calculating out the stuff we consume, what it's doing, where it goes, making reasonably educated guesses on what's happening. A previous poster noted cancer rates during the smoggiest parts of the Industrial Revolution. We get to draw conclusions about this without looking for outliers (ooo look, a 102-year old guy who smokes cigars instead of eating! Everything we know is wrong!)
We get to have opinions on what to do, with or without the amazing invasive-species-like ability of our species to loot the henhouse and shit where we eat- the fact that we can always come up with individuals to loot and pillage ANYTHING doesn't mean all human endeavors are worthless.
All we can do is the best we can, which empirical evidence tends to suggest isn't super impressive. But we are allowed to try- and if some of you guys have an attitude of "you're just a bunch of dicks manipulating government and opinion to hurt my profits when I should be allowed to loot the henhouse 'cos it doesn't really matter and everybody dies anyway", we are allowed to be dicks about it.
Think of it as us using the same fox-like wiles and manipulativeness natural to our species, towards a different end. Let's play tug-of-war with it, and for every excessive telegenic weather event (driven by the increased energy in the heating climate- obviously this doesn't produce a steady-state hotter earth, it produces increasingly violent weather, learn 2 chaos theory) we'll point out the influence of greater (hotter) climate energy over the pictures of devastation.
Go right ahead and keep pointing at glaciers and saying they will always be there. Glaciers are a lot more boring than hurricanes and heat waves. Make the right connections and global warming becomes a much more exciting television story.
I'm not an iPhone coder, but if I was, I would really enjoy sabotaging all you silly people by putting out a flashlight app that did not have any ads in any way :)
The gratitude I'd get would be worth the effort, and being 'positioned' as a helpful, smart programmer who respects people's attention and wishes, is more valuable than being recognized as a dumbass who'll put out the 1000th flashlight app with an ad on it in hopes of being paid by foolish advertisers to market to other dumbasses who are by definition in the dark trying to see something other than the screen :D
Oh, no, I'm assuming they are indeed that 'totalitarian', but I'm also going to assume they'll be coaxing all the app developers to use this but will not be placing ads on their own software. Think about it, who would pay them for that- themselves? Ads are for third parties to pay someone for your attention.
I'm weird about my attention. I try to produce a lot of things, only beginning with software, which must come out of my own attention and thought, and I am very fierce at defending my mental 'space'. There's one brick-and-mortar place that I'll carry a 'coupon card' for, and that's my primary supermarket. Every little hardware store and book place (okay, every big corporate one) insists on my carrying their savings card, or will claim that I can have an imaginary card that I don't even have to carry, but they're missing the point:
I know I only have that one supermarket card where I buy most of my food, and I don't have to think about that. Anything else, I don't have to remember or look up whether I have their card, because I won't- I say no thank you and pay effectively an 'I don't have to think about you' tax for the privilege of not having to care about the fucking place or consider them special in any way.
And that's the point: every dipshit corporate bookstore etc. wants to be my SPECIAL friend and have me thinking about them and their services constantly, and I'm sorry- I have to think about things to feed myself and my cats, or I won't come up with new stuff. I'm sure there are people who put burgers in sacks all day who can spend their time thinking 'I am a Borders/Hilton/Home Despot Preferred Customer and must seek out those places to consume at, for which I will be rewarded with special treatment!' but if that thought comes into my head it's one more thing to keep track of, purportedly for my benefit but actually not. My time isn't free...
Want to know the primary reason I got an iPhone? I rightly trusted that I would not ever, not once, have to crack a manual to fully use the thing. It would be 'discoverable' and require no training or special attention. It was... know the first thing I look for in reviews of app store items? Whether or not they show advertisements and such things, which is always revealed in reviews by someone who feels as I do. If they talk about sitting through ads, I'm already gone. I've rejected more than one app product, even free ones, for that.
I used to use an Apple product called Cyberdog. It was special- built on the OpenDoc extensible app framework, at the time it was the only thing where you could fire up web pages, email etc. and everything would just be there. Everything else, Netscape, Eudora etc, all fired up splash screens and made you watch effectively a little ad for the product you already were using. Why not spend the time you're already wasting letting the program load, thinking about the program itself rather than the task you intended to do using it? Right?
Apple's OSX stuff like Mail came out, and it was a flashback to the days of Cyberdog- and now I'm using all sorts of internet apps that just launch and go, such as Firefox from which I'm posting this. I'm looking at the interface and I've got a raft of little crap in the address bar, but not even a logo advertising that it is Firefox on the program window itself. I believe Safari also has a similar ethos.
If Apple is making an ad service, they will not be using it for their OWN stuff, and will not be requiring that app developers place ads- they might require that if app developers place ads, they MUST do so through Apple's setup, but that's typical Apple, typical 'any megacorporation'.
Jobs is the guy that once raged at a developer, insisting he make a program launch two seconds faster, counting up the number of yearly launches over the entire userbase and claiming the two seconds would save the equivalent of several HUMAN LIVES not spent sitting waiting for the program to launch. This guy is not going to stick me with click-throughs or wasted banner ad space
I do a variation on this to pay my mortgage and feed my cats...
I run airwindows.com and write audio software for musicians and mix engineers. Some of the earliest stuff, a decade ago, was GPL, and I continue to be willing to talk freely about pretty much anything (talking tech becomes a turn-off for musicians, so I don't often get into it as a rule)
What I did to start making (some) actual money versus 'no money' was this:
Pick out some of the stuff, including everything that was GPL, and make it 'free beer' free. Since it's all mine, anybody wanting stuff added to the GPL pool can have it for the asking- it becomes dual-licensed because I'm not actually drawing from the GPL pool. I ended up including source for the public domain FreeverbCJ, and RMSBuddyCJ is GPL- but when I did closed reverbs I didn't even draw on the PD Freeverb stuff, I wrote up a much less object-oriented framework from scratch based on general reverb concepts. I don't use graphics code so I didn't draw from RMS Buddy for anything closed.
Pick out some of the stuff to be closed, and put it out there in such a way that you basically pay for access to get the widget in the first place. Kagi has a nice little setup where they can sell digital downloads with URLs that are temporary- there's no one fixed URL given out. I also keep prices at maybe a fifth of what the big nasty copy-protect guys are doing, and consider sales to be a lifetime thing- I'll support what I put out so long as I'm alive to do it. I keep it real simple so I can do that- if Logic changes and breaks existing plugins, it's on me to make it right for everybody I've sold to, since I haven't given them the code to fix it themselves :P
Lastly, I passionately believe that selling closed source software has to be a 'pull' rather than 'push' model: some people seem to think because they can have an idea, people are OBLIGATED to pay them. I think that has to be earned. I think it has to be earned by behavior. I wouldn't pay for someone to come and kick me in the teeth, so why would I pay for someone to come and shut off my software or audit my shop to see if I'm taking more than I ought? What makes that THEIR bailiwick? (I'm talking of Waves and their raids on studios.)
My stuff's copy protection is the original source of access- Kagi charges for the initial download, there's no place (or shouldn't be) saying 'download anything, pay if YOU feel like it' because why should it be that easy when I've repeatedly worked with people over the years and given refunds if they made a mistake? The effect is the same (except I pay a fee on refunds and chargebacks), it's just that you don't get to have the full product just on a bored random whim. There are demos for that ;)
Once you do have it, I start looking like the open-source world again: there is no dongle, there is no serial #, the bit of software is just the bit of software. It's not even the unlocked demo- there is no unlock to the demo, the product is the same code with the demo stuff (an output muting at intervals) commented out and a recompile. It's a black box like most commercial closed software, but it's a box without locks or traps or alarms- it just sits there working, you can back it up, and the only thing that prevents people from widely filesharing my work is earned respect. I WILL not add stuff that would get in the way of a real user just to fight 'pirates' when I could give a sh*t and earn some of their respect instead.
I also have the following unusual attitude: digital stuff not being used doesn't exist. If somebody who doesn't mix downloads three of my best, costliest (alright, $60) plugins and puts them in their Components folder and then never mixes a song- as far as I'm concerned, there is no 'theft' because it's meaningless. It's the same with a lot of mp3 filesharing, with obsessive warezing- hell, I have legitimate books, legitimate programs I don't read or use. How much more with the guy who's a big collector and eeevil w@r3z puppy and
But he's OUR uncultured pathetic little micromanaging dictatorial prick :D
I would point out that at least in recording studios, you'd better be ready to fetch coffee and get it right- because it's a winnowing-out process that is teaching the studio about you as much as you're learning about the studio.
The studio needs you not to come in there thinking your book learning prepares you for the real job. Hypothetical example- let's say you're tracking heavy guitars. You've experimented, and you discovered that if you swap out the SM57 often used for this for an Audix D6 (a kick drum mic!) you get a way bigger, more metal heavy guitar sound, so you're ready to make your contribution and you put up the D6 instead- and get spanked for it and banished, even though in solo it obviously sounds much bigger. You are sad.
And well you should be- because your 'better sound' isn't going to sit in the mix. It's stomping all over the bass, the top end fights with the vocals, it's throwing the whole balance of attention off and worse, the guitar players for this band aren't so hot and it's the bass and drums that are really going to salvage things, especially the bass which is nailing a deceptively simple part that you wrote off as unimaginative- but which the more experienced guys recognize as the song's basic hook, simple as it is. Your guitar sound's screwing that up completely.
Back to the coffee. If you can't come up with the humility to try and do your best on an apparently menial task such as getting the coffee right- even though it offers no opening for you to show off your skills- what chance do you have of getting a mix right, when most of the 'impressive smart-guy engineer' tricks anybody could offer will not actually serve the song other than as distractions- when you're working with bands which very likely have only one chance in their lives to grab at the chimera of recording industry success? Very often showing YOUR quality will detract from the quality of the final result, if nothing else by distracting.
I honestly think the rules are different for glamour professions (like studio internships!) where there's a long line of would-be superstars trying to get a chance to show their awesome to the world. Hell, the musicians have to pay to gig in some locales. I'm not sure it's the same for software employers- but I am sure the motivation's the same. It's either riches or status, and when it's status ('I work for Google, I'm elite' or whatever) there will be people ready to pay to work at the status job.
And when you have jobs like in the recording studio, where the depth of 'black arts' knowledge can be pretty deep and counterintuitive, especially in mix which is a whole can of worms all its own- there's a relevance to the unpaid coffee-fetcher internship, because it's like boot camp- as long as you haven't figured out how little you really know, you are dragging down the whole enterprise with careers at stake. _Everybody_ is running scared and groping in the dark above a certain success level, because there aren't consistent, predictable metrics for what's going to work... it gets pretty voodoo dance-y after a while.
Just some thoughts from an old slashdotter with studio-owning friends...
I cannot mod your funny higher than 5, but I love you, dear Anonymous Coward :)
Too right. It's really weird to return to Slashdot and see the tone of the discussion...
People are so very quick to spot that career politicians have the morals of robber barons, and this shocks and offends everybody to the point where the cry goes up, 'Off with their heads! We will trust entirely in business, which must be honorable or expire in competitive battle!' ...when business IS robber barons, that have the morals of career politicians- and you don't really have any better chance of monitoring them and getting coherent information than you had with the politicians.
And without that coherent information, you are boned and cannot maintain the anti-hierarchical system you seek.
I see naive people.
Some of you guys need to take a sabbatical like I have, get out in the world, or at least get into some political blogs that aren't 'Red State'. The questions are sadly complicated, and none of the answers are really free from consequence- put it this way, when your answer looks really simple, you have an = somewhere that you meant ==, and though you think you understand what's going to happen, the compiler's going to happily follow your instructions and deliver results that will shock you.
...would you LIKE some?
*bing!*