There are tons of them for mobile phones. They do things like tell you have far you've ridden, what you're average speed is/was, if your pace was faster or slower than the last mile or the last time you did it, or how it compared to the best time anybody has recorded on that route. AND they record elevation changes because those make a big difference. The problem is that GPS does it badly.
Since pressure is used in things like altimeters, it's not hard to see why it might be better than GPS at measuring elevation changes. In fact they could combine and compare information between the barometer and GPS to give more accurate results than one or the other.
I have no idea what the barometer inside the iPhone is for and it may well have more than one purpose. However I can say that lots of fitness apps use GPS to record elevation changes and they are notoriously bad. I've also used a combination temperature / pressure sensor to measure altitude in model rockets. You have to set the base altitude. It wasn't foolproof but much more reliable than GPS is. I'm sure you could use both to get more accurate results than one or the other.
Pressure changes due to movement of weather systems tend to happen slowly and I would think for the purpose of measuring elevation changes wouldn't be much of a factor unless you're in the middle of a tornado or hurricane.
Airplanes, skydivers, and hikers have all used altimeters that relied on pressure changes.
One of our neighbors' daughters graduated from high school this year. She and her sister used to hang out with my two kids when they were much younger. They'd stage and record these "shows" using a camcorder. It was tame and goofy stuff. So before her graduation party I posted a couple of them on youtube and shared the link with my neighbor. I marked it as private.
I reassured the mom that it wasn't public. She didn't care, - but the kids sure did. They were mortified at the thought that their friends might find it. Teenagers are VERY image conscious. Even though they'll post the dumbest stuff on youtube, snapchat, and instagram, - things that they'll find much more embarrassing a decade from now, they want to control their image. I get that.
There is no doubt in my mind that childhood pictures could be a source of ridicule for a teen. At the same time, I doubt their friends' or enemies' opinions about them are influenced one way or the other by naked baby pictures. As a teen it's hard to see that though and I think the parents need a little more empathy in this case. It's idiotic that something like this requires intervention by a court to resolve but I blame the parents both for being stupid about it and for raising a kid that would file a lawsuit over it.
The industrial revolution created a boatload of jobs that required very little skill. And with the rise in unionization, eventually these jobs actually paid pretty well leading to the creation of a substantial middle class and a large population of consumers who could afford the stuff that was being produced. A high school level education was more than enough to qualify somebody for these jobs.
So much of that is no longer true. The number of people in union jobs in the US is shrinking all the time. The new jobs that are being created as a result of new technology either require specialized skills or don't pay squat. A college education is now seen as a must and to get it means taking on substantial debt for a lot of people.
On a radio program over labor day weekend I heard serious talk that the concept of retirement will disappear for most of the work force. It will no longer be possible to save enough. People will be expected to make multiple career changes over their lifetime. For somebody who's young that may not seem like a big deal, but to somebody in their 40's or 50's, raising their own kids, dealing with ageism and the prospect of going back to school, while taking on more debt to prepare for another career is extremely discouraging.
It's a broken system and people are already hurting. Why do you think people like Donald Trump generate so much support? It is because vast swaths of our society that enjoyed relative financial security in the past, no longer do. Why do you think people are suspicious of immigration and trade deals? Because there aren't enough well paying jobs.
Like I said, at this point in my career I'm more excited by interesting projects than by working with particular tools, or fighting platform wars for that matter. Hosting a web application on Windows would rarely be my choice all things being equal. But all things are almost never equal. If one can't acknowledge that given a organization's current infrastructure, budget, expertise, time constraints, etc that sometimes Windows is at least a reasonable choice, if not the better one for that situation, then it's not an issue of competence. It's an issue of narrow-mindedness.
Further, there is often good reason to push functionality to the client. For example, the web apps I often work on need to be able to deal with intermittent connectivity and sometimes high latency. For a web application that does almost nothing but display information, server side functionality might be adequate, but that's not the world we're in anymore.
Anyone that knows what they are doing and are creating a complex web application will be writing a lot of javascript and maybe some java or C# on the server side.
The competent will choose a language, not just based on personal preference or their skill level, but on what makes sense to use for the task at hand. At this point in my career, it's the project that gets me excited and not working with any particular language. I can be equally happy coding in C, Go, Java, Python, or even javascript. I'm not much of a Windows guy but I ended up thoroughly enjoying myself writing a powershell script about a year ago.
I agree it is really early. However, it would seem to me that the EU has a built-in incentive to isolate the UK. If you can leave the EU without meaningful consequences, then the EU will collapse as other member countries start to bail.
And if they're in front of, say, a PC or Android tablet instead of their phone? If you want to ensure they get the message, you have to send it over IMessage *and* whatever other platform they use (most likely Skype or AIM). Or, you could skip iMessage and just send it on the other platform, which they'll likely have installed on their PC, tablet, and phone, so they'll get it wherever they are without you having to send it twice.
That's precisely the scenario I talked about in my initial post, and it's precisely why my die-hard Apple friends have abandoned iMessage (and Messages on their Macs and iPads) as unreliable.
That's the real problem though isn't it? If I'm going to send a message to somebody, I have no idea what device they're in front of, or if they're near any device at all. I'll use the messages app either on my phone or on my Mac and that message will get to them on their phone (at least) whether it's an iPhone or not. I'm not going to send two messages because SMS is the least (or may be better said "most") common denominator. I'm certainly not going to use Skype unless I know for a fact that they do. Other friends or associates might prefer hangouts. Some of them may have Skype installed on all their devices while others may not. Frankly, I don't want to keep track of that.
Your friends may use something instead of the messages app on their iPhone for long group chats when they know what everyone else is using, but I doubt they've abandoned it for all texting.
Right now there is no universal protocol for messaging, but most people have a phone which is capable of sending and receiving SMS/MMS messages. That is your safest bet, or you could, you know... call them.
And to be clear, one doesn't explicitly choose to use iMessage or not. The built in messaging apps will use iMessage to communicate with other apple devices when they can, but will use something else when they can't. Instead of creating an iMessage for Android, Apple could simply allow the messages app on the iPhone to use an AIM, Yahoo, or Google account like the Messages app on the Mac does. But again, none of of those are universal.
How is GOOGLE Hangouts not vendor locked? Besides I'd change "Hangouts works everywhere" to "Hangouts works every now and then". We've had a weekly meeting with remote developers for months now and have gone back to just using a speakerphone because of all the issues we had with hangouts.
Are you thinking of FaceTime? That's the closest Apple equivalent to Skype, not iMessage.
Anyway this can get a little confusing. iPads, iPhones, and Macs all have a "Messages" app that can use iMessage as a protocol to communicate with other Apple devices. Messages on OS X can also use Yahoo, AOL, or Google messaging accounts. Messages on an iPhone can use SMS to send messages in addition to iMessage.
So you could always text somebody on an Android phone from an iPhone using the messages app. If somebody with an iPhone wasn't able to text you on your android phone it could be because that in their contacts they had an email address or something associated with an iCloud account you had and Messages was using that to send the message rather than your phone number.
In the past, someone trying to send an IM to your android phone using messages on OS X wouldn't work. But then a couple of years ago, Apple added a new feature called "SMS relay" to the iPhone that lets it forward messages from OS X over SMS to people on non Apple devices. The catch is that the iPhone has to be on the same wifi network as the mac for that to work.
When you're spending billions of the public's money on a highly visible program, failure puts continued funding in jeopardy. Failure in this case would be loss of life. I think the public can tolerate failure if it follows initial success and there is reason to believe that further attempts would also be successful.
Getting congress to agree to spend any significant money on an actual Mars program is a long shot anyway. If it weren't for fear of the Soviets gaining supremacy in space, there probably wouldn't have been funding for the Apollo program either. If you somehow manage to get funding for a Mars program and that first mission fails, kiss the program goodbye.
Musk can be more cavalier because it's his company's money he's spending.
When you pick a place to live, is your decision based strictly on what's contained within the property lines of that specific location? Of course not. The neighborhood and everything about it plays into that decision. If part of the reason you bought a property there is because you wanted quiet streets that are safe for your kids to bike on, then you would be pissed too if some app is routing rush hour traffic through your neighborhood on streets that weren't designed for that amount of traffic.
I specifically said "It depends" and "sometimes", so no I don't know for sure what the mix of funding sources for road maintenance is in that area. I seriously doubt the poster I was responding to does either when he claimed that "we are all paying the taxes necessary for you to have a road to your home". You said "much of" but your neighborhood would be unusual if most of the road funding comes state gas taxes and registration fees. There was a time when user fees paid for close to 70% of the road maintenance and construction in the US but it's barely over 50% now and is probably much less when we're talking about residential streets as opposed to freeways or highways.
The people in that neighborhood aren't seeing a significant increase in traffic levels because of that road closure. They are seeing an increased level of traffic because Waze is directing people to use streets that were never intended to handle that much traffic. Without the road that is under construction that level of traffic would be on some major arterial road somewhere else, not on their streets.
On the block I live on there is a busy arterial street on one side. We knew that when we moved in. On the other end is a quiet street that abuts a park. We knew that too. The value of the homes on our block are set accordingly. When our kids take off on their bikes, they know to go to the quiet end of the block. My son rode his bike to school until he started high school in a different part of the city. To suddenly have hundreds more cars coming down our street during rush hour isn't just an annoyance, it would be a safety issue.
At least where I live the city will put speed bumps in as along as most of the people living on the street are OK with it and are willing to pay for them. It's not great for the house living right next to the speed bumps as they have to listen to cars slowing and accelerating.
There are other traffic calming measures such as making the streets narrower, - even if it's just at intersections. Sometimes you can get the city to post a lower speed limit.
It depends. Sometimes road repairs are partially covered by local residents through special assessments. A fair amount comes from property taxes. Depending on where the drivers actually live, they may not be paying into the pool of funding for those streets.
Pension funds work roughly same way. A mix of past contributions, investment income, and current contributions pay for current retirees. It's not an account that the employee has with a fixed amount of money in it.
The free market depends on a level playing field which rarely exists (at least not for long) without collective bargaining and regulation, - and then it's no longer a free market. Then you have a mixed economy which I think is a reasonable solution.
If I win the lottery, I can consume more, but have I increased my productivity? If I short sell a stock, have I produced anything? If I'm living off my parents' investment income, am I producing anything at all?
Yes, on average you have to increase productivity to allow more to be consumed but it doesn't mean that right mix of things are being produced and that the products and services are getting distributed effectively. I'd argue that large segments of society over consume while other large segments under consume. My belief is that GDP can go down and quality of life can still improve. How much of what gets produced ends up in a landfill? How much do externalities end up costing society?
And obviously, there is not a direct link between production and consumption. Just because 20 widgets are produced, doesn't mean 20 are consumed. And that's why the economy IS so much about money. Because money is the means by which widgets get consumed. If most of the money ends up in the hands of 1% of the population, it will be a big problem eventually. It's a problem because 1% of the population can consume only so many widgets. Increasing productivity does nothing unless the population as a whole has the means to purchase those widgets.
But **on average**, by nature of the "progressive" taxation system, of course those at above-median income will have to pay more, probably far more, than they take out.
But not necessarily more than they'd pay on their own for the same services if they were only available from private providers operating for-profit businesses. The wealthier you are, the less that is true but I'm guessing that even engineers enjoy the added benefits of paid family leave and more vacation per year that the more progressive society provides. Even though I make a decent income, it would be a net gain for me if my taxes were 50 percent, but I didn't have to pay for my kids' college tuition, our health care, save for our retirement, and a had a couple of extra weeks of paid vacation per year.
Besides, you don't get away from that issue in the US system even with the lower taxes. On average, a US citizen is going to pay more for health insurance than than they will ever get back in services, otherwise health insurance companies would go out of business.
Another benefit from a more progressive society is there is less of a gap between rich and poor in the first place so there is less need to subsidize. And finally, even the wealthy benefit when society as a whole is stable, healthy, and well educated.
My wife may have wanted to stay home anyway to be with the kids. She's lucky that she works in an industry where she can make decent money for part time work and she can take a few years off and still be employable. That's kind of rare.
There is a significant financial risk for women who do stay home. If something happens to their husband, - he dies or is no longer able to work, they're screwed. After a few years at home, it's going to be much harder to find a job that makes up for his lost income.
If a woman is dependent on her husband for income, it also puts her on unequal footing. Getting divorced if she's unhappy with the marriage is problematic since she's less able to earn a decent income on her own. If she had maintained a career that's not as much of a problem.
In a progressive country like Sweden, 70% of the workforce is unionized so your janitors are probably making a decent wage. The degree to which their benefits are subsidized by engineers and the like isn't as much as you'd imagine. And just because your dual engineer income family might be paying in at a high rate now, doesn't mean that they both will still be healthy and employed for the remainder of their working years. Crap happens and they may well find that they are getting out much more than they put in.
In the US, it's not being taken from you to begin with. You can also live off a single income if you're engineers. If both of you work, you can just bank the 2nd income.
Your claims are absurd. They sound like old Soviet propaganda.
They aren't "claims". Those are the laws, policies, and the stats. You pay less in taxes in the US, but you're getting less in return and just having to pay somebody else (more) for those services. For health care, you're paying insurance companies and your paying with lower wages because your company is paying the insurance companies. Your either saving for your kids' college education or they're going into debt or both. Instead of the government managing a pension fund on your behalf, you have to pay into a 401K, IRA, or equivalent.
I guess if you consider health care, retirement savings, and college tuition for your kids to be optional expenses, then yes, you come out way ahead in the US.
I'm an IT director at a 100 person non-profit. I'm making a decent wage, but not a fortune. My wife works part time (less than 20 hours a week). We have what's considered to be an upper-middle class income. She was working very little when our kids were really young. So it's not like the lifestyle you're describing is foreign to me. But, by the time our kids get through college I'll be just a few years from retirement and I wish we were socking more away. We don't live extravagantly and we have virtually no debt. If 50+ percent of our income went to taxes and we didn't have to worry about health care costs, college tuition, or saving for retirement, I would take that deal.
I know lots of people my age and older that have virtually no retirement savings. 68% of working age people in the US are not participating in an employee sponsored retirement plan. Presumably some of them don't need to, but I'm guessing that's a small percentage. We are headed for a real crisis.
Not exactly. For example, in Sweden it also goes to pay for health care, university level education, and other social programs while in the US much of that is coming out of your own pocket along with retirement savings. You could argue that it comes out even in the end or that maybe we even come out ahead in the US but that wouldn't be true. The average Swede has about 10% more disposable income along with about twice the amount of vacation per year.
Along with that Swedish families get 480 days of parental leave per child, - much of which is paid and can be taken anytime up until the child is 8 years old.
Women found breaking the law said it so it must be true...What would you do if an "organized crime boss" demanded something from you? This isn't Juarez, America has the rule of law
Despite having the "rule of law", organized crime still exists in the US and manages to blackmail, bully, and coerce people into doing all kinds of things. But again if you read the article, you'll find that these are Asian crime bosses and presumably the prostitutes are brought here from Asia. Not hard to imagine that crossing their pimps could lead to severe consequences for the prostitutes themselves or for their family back home.
I'm sure one reason they don't go to the authorities is one you just implied, - they're just whores, who is going to believe them? I'd bet their pimps drill that one into them.
It should be illegal to enter a contract for sex when the person providing the sex is being forced to provide it and is not even the one getting compensated for it.
Read a little closer. These aren't women who chose to be prostitutes rather than being dental hygienists or auto mechanics. They were coerced or forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses. Debts that may have not have even been their own but of their family members. They were neither safe nor secure and it's doubtful they were allowed to keep much of the money.
How much were the Amazon and Microsoft directors aware of this exploitation? Don't know, but apparently the prosecutors think they knew these women didn't have many other options.
Slashdot Mirror
Fitness Apps, - cycling, running, etc.
There are tons of them for mobile phones. They do things like tell you have far you've ridden, what you're average speed is/was, if your pace was faster or slower than the last mile or the last time you did it, or how it compared to the best time anybody has recorded on that route. AND they record elevation changes because those make a big difference. The problem is that GPS does it badly.
Since pressure is used in things like altimeters, it's not hard to see why it might be better than GPS at measuring elevation changes. In fact they could combine and compare information between the barometer and GPS to give more accurate results than one or the other.
I have no idea what the barometer inside the iPhone is for and it may well have more than one purpose. However I can say that lots of fitness apps use GPS to record elevation changes and they are notoriously bad. I've also used a combination temperature / pressure sensor to measure altitude in model rockets. You have to set the base altitude. It wasn't foolproof but much more reliable than GPS is. I'm sure you could use both to get more accurate results than one or the other.
Pressure changes due to movement of weather systems tend to happen slowly and I would think for the purpose of measuring elevation changes wouldn't be much of a factor unless you're in the middle of a tornado or hurricane.
Airplanes, skydivers, and hikers have all used altimeters that relied on pressure changes.
One of our neighbors' daughters graduated from high school this year. She and her sister used to hang out with my two kids when they were much younger. They'd stage and record these "shows" using a camcorder. It was tame and goofy stuff. So before her graduation party I posted a couple of them on youtube and shared the link with my neighbor. I marked it as private.
I reassured the mom that it wasn't public. She didn't care, - but the kids sure did. They were mortified at the thought that their friends might find it. Teenagers are VERY image conscious. Even though they'll post the dumbest stuff on youtube, snapchat, and instagram, - things that they'll find much more embarrassing a decade from now, they want to control their image. I get that.
There is no doubt in my mind that childhood pictures could be a source of ridicule for a teen. At the same time, I doubt their friends' or enemies' opinions about them are influenced one way or the other by naked baby pictures. As a teen it's hard to see that though and I think the parents need a little more empathy in this case. It's idiotic that something like this requires intervention by a court to resolve but I blame the parents both for being stupid about it and for raising a kid that would file a lawsuit over it.
The industrial revolution created a boatload of jobs that required very little skill. And with the rise in unionization, eventually these jobs actually paid pretty well leading to the creation of a substantial middle class and a large population of consumers who could afford the stuff that was being produced. A high school level education was more than enough to qualify somebody for these jobs.
So much of that is no longer true. The number of people in union jobs in the US is shrinking all the time. The new jobs that are being created as a result of new technology either require specialized skills or don't pay squat. A college education is now seen as a must and to get it means taking on substantial debt for a lot of people.
On a radio program over labor day weekend I heard serious talk that the concept of retirement will disappear for most of the work force. It will no longer be possible to save enough. People will be expected to make multiple career changes over their lifetime. For somebody who's young that may not seem like a big deal, but to somebody in their 40's or 50's, raising their own kids, dealing with ageism and the prospect of going back to school, while taking on more debt to prepare for another career is extremely discouraging.
It's a broken system and people are already hurting. Why do you think people like Donald Trump generate so much support? It is because vast swaths of our society that enjoyed relative financial security in the past, no longer do. Why do you think people are suspicious of immigration and trade deals? Because there aren't enough well paying jobs.
Like I said, at this point in my career I'm more excited by interesting projects than by working with particular tools, or fighting platform wars for that matter. Hosting a web application on Windows would rarely be my choice all things being equal. But all things are almost never equal. If one can't acknowledge that given a organization's current infrastructure, budget, expertise, time constraints, etc that sometimes Windows is at least a reasonable choice, if not the better one for that situation, then it's not an issue of competence. It's an issue of narrow-mindedness.
Further, there is often good reason to push functionality to the client. For example, the web apps I often work on need to be able to deal with intermittent connectivity and sometimes high latency. For a web application that does almost nothing but display information, server side functionality might be adequate, but that's not the world we're in anymore.
Anyone that knows what they are doing and are creating a complex web application will be writing a lot of javascript and maybe some java or C# on the server side.
The competent will choose a language, not just based on personal preference or their skill level, but on what makes sense to use for the task at hand. At this point in my career, it's the project that gets me excited and not working with any particular language. I can be equally happy coding in C, Go, Java, Python, or even javascript. I'm not much of a Windows guy but I ended up thoroughly enjoying myself writing a powershell script about a year ago.
I agree it is really early. However, it would seem to me that the EU has a built-in incentive to isolate the UK. If you can leave the EU without meaningful consequences, then the EU will collapse as other member countries start to bail.
And if they're in front of, say, a PC or Android tablet instead of their phone? If you want to ensure they get the message, you have to send it over IMessage *and* whatever other platform they use (most likely Skype or AIM). Or, you could skip iMessage and just send it on the other platform, which they'll likely have installed on their PC, tablet, and phone, so they'll get it wherever they are without you having to send it twice. That's precisely the scenario I talked about in my initial post, and it's precisely why my die-hard Apple friends have abandoned iMessage (and Messages on their Macs and iPads) as unreliable.
That's the real problem though isn't it? If I'm going to send a message to somebody, I have no idea what device they're in front of, or if they're near any device at all. I'll use the messages app either on my phone or on my Mac and that message will get to them on their phone (at least) whether it's an iPhone or not. I'm not going to send two messages because SMS is the least (or may be better said "most") common denominator. I'm certainly not going to use Skype unless I know for a fact that they do. Other friends or associates might prefer hangouts. Some of them may have Skype installed on all their devices while others may not. Frankly, I don't want to keep track of that.
Your friends may use something instead of the messages app on their iPhone for long group chats when they know what everyone else is using, but I doubt they've abandoned it for all texting.
Right now there is no universal protocol for messaging, but most people have a phone which is capable of sending and receiving SMS/MMS messages. That is your safest bet, or you could, you know... call them.
And to be clear, one doesn't explicitly choose to use iMessage or not. The built in messaging apps will use iMessage to communicate with other apple devices when they can, but will use something else when they can't. Instead of creating an iMessage for Android, Apple could simply allow the messages app on the iPhone to use an AIM, Yahoo, or Google account like the Messages app on the Mac does. But again, none of of those are universal.
How is GOOGLE Hangouts not vendor locked? Besides I'd change "Hangouts works everywhere" to "Hangouts works every now and then". We've had a weekly meeting with remote developers for months now and have gone back to just using a speakerphone because of all the issues we had with hangouts.
Are you thinking of FaceTime? That's the closest Apple equivalent to Skype, not iMessage.
Anyway this can get a little confusing. iPads, iPhones, and Macs all have a "Messages" app that can use iMessage as a protocol to communicate with other Apple devices. Messages on OS X can also use Yahoo, AOL, or Google messaging accounts. Messages on an iPhone can use SMS to send messages in addition to iMessage.
So you could always text somebody on an Android phone from an iPhone using the messages app. If somebody with an iPhone wasn't able to text you on your android phone it could be because that in their contacts they had an email address or something associated with an iCloud account you had and Messages was using that to send the message rather than your phone number.
In the past, someone trying to send an IM to your android phone using messages on OS X wouldn't work. But then a couple of years ago, Apple added a new feature called "SMS relay" to the iPhone that lets it forward messages from OS X over SMS to people on non Apple devices. The catch is that the iPhone has to be on the same wifi network as the mac for that to work.
When you're spending billions of the public's money on a highly visible program, failure puts continued funding in jeopardy. Failure in this case would be loss of life. I think the public can tolerate failure if it follows initial success and there is reason to believe that further attempts would also be successful.
Getting congress to agree to spend any significant money on an actual Mars program is a long shot anyway. If it weren't for fear of the Soviets gaining supremacy in space, there probably wouldn't have been funding for the Apollo program either. If you somehow manage to get funding for a Mars program and that first mission fails, kiss the program goodbye.
Musk can be more cavalier because it's his company's money he's spending.
When you pick a place to live, is your decision based strictly on what's contained within the property lines of that specific location? Of course not. The neighborhood and everything about it plays into that decision. If part of the reason you bought a property there is because you wanted quiet streets that are safe for your kids to bike on, then you would be pissed too if some app is routing rush hour traffic through your neighborhood on streets that weren't designed for that amount of traffic.
I specifically said "It depends" and "sometimes", so no I don't know for sure what the mix of funding sources for road maintenance is in that area. I seriously doubt the poster I was responding to does either when he claimed that "we are all paying the taxes necessary for you to have a road to your home". You said "much of" but your neighborhood would be unusual if most of the road funding comes state gas taxes and registration fees. There was a time when user fees paid for close to 70% of the road maintenance and construction in the US but it's barely over 50% now and is probably much less when we're talking about residential streets as opposed to freeways or highways.
The people in that neighborhood aren't seeing a significant increase in traffic levels because of that road closure. They are seeing an increased level of traffic because Waze is directing people to use streets that were never intended to handle that much traffic. Without the road that is under construction that level of traffic would be on some major arterial road somewhere else, not on their streets.
On the block I live on there is a busy arterial street on one side. We knew that when we moved in. On the other end is a quiet street that abuts a park. We knew that too. The value of the homes on our block are set accordingly. When our kids take off on their bikes, they know to go to the quiet end of the block. My son rode his bike to school until he started high school in a different part of the city. To suddenly have hundreds more cars coming down our street during rush hour isn't just an annoyance, it would be a safety issue.
At least where I live the city will put speed bumps in as along as most of the people living on the street are OK with it and are willing to pay for them. It's not great for the house living right next to the speed bumps as they have to listen to cars slowing and accelerating.
There are other traffic calming measures such as making the streets narrower, - even if it's just at intersections. Sometimes you can get the city to post a lower speed limit.
It depends. Sometimes road repairs are partially covered by local residents through special assessments. A fair amount comes from property taxes. Depending on where the drivers actually live, they may not be paying into the pool of funding for those streets.
Pension funds work roughly same way. A mix of past contributions, investment income, and current contributions pay for current retirees. It's not an account that the employee has with a fixed amount of money in it.
The free market depends on a level playing field which rarely exists (at least not for long) without collective bargaining and regulation, - and then it's no longer a free market. Then you have a mixed economy which I think is a reasonable solution.
If I win the lottery, I can consume more, but have I increased my productivity? If I short sell a stock, have I produced anything? If I'm living off my parents' investment income, am I producing anything at all?
Yes, on average you have to increase productivity to allow more to be consumed but it doesn't mean that right mix of things are being produced and that the products and services are getting distributed effectively. I'd argue that large segments of society over consume while other large segments under consume. My belief is that GDP can go down and quality of life can still improve. How much of what gets produced ends up in a landfill? How much do externalities end up costing society?
And obviously, there is not a direct link between production and consumption. Just because 20 widgets are produced, doesn't mean 20 are consumed. And that's why the economy IS so much about money. Because money is the means by which widgets get consumed. If most of the money ends up in the hands of 1% of the population, it will be a big problem eventually. It's a problem because 1% of the population can consume only so many widgets. Increasing productivity does nothing unless the population as a whole has the means to purchase those widgets.
Oh sure, crap can happen.
But **on average**, by nature of the "progressive" taxation system, of course those at above-median income will have to pay more, probably far more, than they take out.
But not necessarily more than they'd pay on their own for the same services if they were only available from private providers operating for-profit businesses. The wealthier you are, the less that is true but I'm guessing that even engineers enjoy the added benefits of paid family leave and more vacation per year that the more progressive society provides. Even though I make a decent income, it would be a net gain for me if my taxes were 50 percent, but I didn't have to pay for my kids' college tuition, our health care, save for our retirement, and a had a couple of extra weeks of paid vacation per year.
Besides, you don't get away from that issue in the US system even with the lower taxes. On average, a US citizen is going to pay more for health insurance than than they will ever get back in services, otherwise health insurance companies would go out of business.
Another benefit from a more progressive society is there is less of a gap between rich and poor in the first place so there is less need to subsidize. And finally, even the wealthy benefit when society as a whole is stable, healthy, and well educated.
If daycare were free, what would your wife do?
My wife may have wanted to stay home anyway to be with the kids. She's lucky that she works in an industry where she can make decent money for part time work and she can take a few years off and still be employable. That's kind of rare.
There is a significant financial risk for women who do stay home. If something happens to their husband, - he dies or is no longer able to work, they're screwed. After a few years at home, it's going to be much harder to find a job that makes up for his lost income.
If a woman is dependent on her husband for income, it also puts her on unequal footing. Getting divorced if she's unhappy with the marriage is problematic since she's less able to earn a decent income on her own. If she had maintained a career that's not as much of a problem.
In a progressive country like Sweden, 70% of the workforce is unionized so your janitors are probably making a decent wage. The degree to which their benefits are subsidized by engineers and the like isn't as much as you'd imagine. And just because your dual engineer income family might be paying in at a high rate now, doesn't mean that they both will still be healthy and employed for the remainder of their working years. Crap happens and they may well find that they are getting out much more than they put in.
In the US, it's not being taken from you to begin with. You can also live off a single income if you're engineers. If both of you work, you can just bank the 2nd income.
Your claims are absurd. They sound like old Soviet propaganda.
They aren't "claims". Those are the laws, policies, and the stats. You pay less in taxes in the US, but you're getting less in return and just having to pay somebody else (more) for those services. For health care, you're paying insurance companies and your paying with lower wages because your company is paying the insurance companies. Your either saving for your kids' college education or they're going into debt or both. Instead of the government managing a pension fund on your behalf, you have to pay into a 401K, IRA, or equivalent.
I guess if you consider health care, retirement savings, and college tuition for your kids to be optional expenses, then yes, you come out way ahead in the US.
I'm an IT director at a 100 person non-profit. I'm making a decent wage, but not a fortune. My wife works part time (less than 20 hours a week). We have what's considered to be an upper-middle class income. She was working very little when our kids were really young. So it's not like the lifestyle you're describing is foreign to me. But, by the time our kids get through college I'll be just a few years from retirement and I wish we were socking more away. We don't live extravagantly and we have virtually no debt. If 50+ percent of our income went to taxes and we didn't have to worry about health care costs, college tuition, or saving for retirement, I would take that deal.
I know lots of people my age and older that have virtually no retirement savings. 68% of working age people in the US are not participating in an employee sponsored retirement plan. Presumably some of them don't need to, but I'm guessing that's a small percentage. We are headed for a real crisis.
Not exactly. For example, in Sweden it also goes to pay for health care, university level education, and other social programs while in the US much of that is coming out of your own pocket along with retirement savings. You could argue that it comes out even in the end or that maybe we even come out ahead in the US but that wouldn't be true. The average Swede has about 10% more disposable income along with about twice the amount of vacation per year.
Along with that Swedish families get 480 days of parental leave per child, - much of which is paid and can be taken anytime up until the child is 8 years old.
Unless your country is progressive enough that childcare is either free or highly subsidized.
Women found breaking the law said it so it must be true...What would you do if an "organized crime boss" demanded something from you? This isn't Juarez, America has the rule of law
Despite having the "rule of law", organized crime still exists in the US and manages to blackmail, bully, and coerce people into doing all kinds of things. But again if you read the article, you'll find that these are Asian crime bosses and presumably the prostitutes are brought here from Asia. Not hard to imagine that crossing their pimps could lead to severe consequences for the prostitutes themselves or for their family back home.
I'm sure one reason they don't go to the authorities is one you just implied, - they're just whores, who is going to believe them? I'd bet their pimps drill that one into them.
It should be illegal to enter a contract for sex when the person providing the sex is being forced to provide it and is not even the one getting compensated for it.
Read a little closer. These aren't women who chose to be prostitutes rather than being dental hygienists or auto mechanics. They were coerced or forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses. Debts that may have not have even been their own but of their family members. They were neither safe nor secure and it's doubtful they were allowed to keep much of the money.
How much were the Amazon and Microsoft directors aware of this exploitation? Don't know, but apparently the prosecutors think they knew these women didn't have many other options.