I took COBOL in university too and than I went into industry not as COBOL programmer but as an ETL guy. Getting my job done meant getting data out of the mainframe which proved to be a complex ECO-system of many related COBOL programs with all kinds of copybooks containing complex data structures, calls to sub programs, and control break logic so deeply nested lessor interpreted languages might run of call stack space. I am not suggesting this was badly written spaghetti code either, most of it was very well normalized and followed DRY. Complex business logic (major national retailer) requires complex software.
I am of the belief that people who think 'derp any programmer can just sit down and read COBOL' have never seen thing beyond contrived university assignments and tutorials. Complex software is complex no matter what language you write it in. It does not suddenly become simple because its in COBOL and if you don't actually do COBOL understanding that logic really isn't that strait forward.
Do you know what this does and are your sure?
PERFORM PG1 VARIYING WS-IDXFOO FROM 1 BY 2 UNTIL WS-IDXFOO > 10
AFTER WS-IDXBAR FROM 1 BY 3 UNTIL WS-IDXBAR > 20
Okay its a nested loop with PG1 as its body, sure that much is obvious. When are the values tested at the top of the loop or the bottom? Which index is inner, which the outer. If you are not immediately certain about the answer to this do you really think you are going to understand the program's deeply nested logic?
I would suggest if you have not actually internalized COBOLs reserved words and their arguments you might read a program and think you understand but thinking you understand isn't good enough. You have know for sure before you can go making changes. It will take someone who isn't a native COBOL speak 10x as long for certain. This is all before you get into all the stuff that is typically happening around COBOL programs before and after they run, like SYNCSORTs and other JCL magic.
COBOL is in the end like every other language, a person familiar with software development in the abstract can probably grab a copy of "COBOL for the 21st Century" and work thru a problem, even a big one. The same way they could grab a copy of "Learn Java in Seven Weeks." but it will be a long time before you can keep up with someone who is experienced and practiced. Moving at the "speed of business" will prove difficult.
I don't know that its quite as a bad as all that yet but I agree with your point. The big draw with consoles is they just worked and the life cycles were fairly long.
You did not bring a game home and find out it runs terribly on your video card and you need a better one despite what the system requirements state. You don't install an updated video driver to make your latest game work, and find out you now get weird glitch black boxes in the menus when you run your old favorites.
What was great about consoles is you just pealed off the shrink wrap and started enjoying. No setup, not fuss, no frustration. Even if it was never quite as pretty as the PC version. They are literally destroying the value of the console for me. As much fuss over versions, free disk space, addons, DLC, required internet connections, updates, etc; I could just go back to gaming on the PC or laptop I need anyway and skip the console.
If the costs were that high, petrol or electric tow vehicles would meet planes at the end of the runway already today. I am not saying you are wrong about the inefficiencies, but there is more to this story somehow.
Right but fossil fuels get much lighter as you consume them vent the combustion products externally. Batteries get only very slightly lighter, like you lab quality equipment to measure. That matters for an aircraft, it matters a lot!
One way or the other, the future won't be powered with fossil fuels.
I am going slap a big "we'll see" sticker on that. Yes ultimately in the distant future the fossil fuel era logically must draw to a close because we logically must run out of something we consume at a faster rate than is produced.
That said I suspect the time horizons are a lot longer than you think. I mean fracking and shale oil for example despite Obama's best efforts pretty much ended the recession. The more I did into it, the stronger my conclusion is that North Dakota not Washington got the economy going again. We simply keep finding more supply.
There was lots and lots of people who thought the fracking and new domestic oil finds would prove shallow, they have instead been bonanzas. Meanwhile the alternative energy crowd continues to hand waive the storage problems. We don't have lithium supply to replace the fleet of cars here in the US with electrics for example. Nobody knows where to get it either! It is a physical constraint not simply a technical problem. It might have a technical solution maybe someone can make a dense storage batter without or with a lot less lithium. Maybe we could put induction coils in all federal highways so cars would only need to go literally the last mile on stored power and could use smaller batteries. These things are decades away though, the folks saying by 2025 most cars will be electric are nutz.
As for planes, again not holding my breath here. Airlines have figured out people want more flights per-day not necessarily faster flights or more comfort. They are flying 'regional' jets half way across the country. Its the opposite model of what you need to do in terms of an electric airplane for efficiency reasons. More volume means less weight per cubic of enclosed space. Small planes will be all battery and no room for passengers or people. Big planes are not what the market wants and therefore won't be economical. People will pay more for a petrol powered flight without a 3 hour layover, than they will to travel on 'green jets'.
I'd be on 40 years before electric commercial passenger aviation becomes mainstream. We are as far away form viable commercialization of that as we were when the Germans flew the first ME-262 to commercial jet aviation.
Except the lender are a little smarter than that. Sudent loan debt can't be easily discharged mortgage debt can but the bank usually gets the asset. Traditionally the banks don't really want the asset because the costs of maintaining it and selling it to someone else impairs its value but this is changing
I expect the GP was being sarcastic but that isn't perhaps so crazy. We already treat waste water heavily in most places before we dump it back into rivers or the ocean. If you are doing this on a community scale I don't see why transporting the salt over to the waste water plant and mixing it back into the that isn't entirely impractical.
There are two problems 1) the waste water already will contain a number of dissolved substances it may or may not be able to still dissolve enough salt to match the salinity of the ocean. 2) Not all the water comes back as a waste water to the treatment plant, much of it waters crops or is boiled off in industrial processes etc. So there might not be enough water to redissolve all the salt even if supplemented with storm run off.
At any rate I would expect at least a large portion of the salt could be returned to the environment be simply diluting it in 'fresh' water first. The rest might well be fed into the many industrial and agricultural application for salt.
You are deluding yourself if you think laissez-faire benefits anyone other than the megacorporations and the 1%ers who own/run them.
That just inst true. Real libertarian policies don't favor mega corps at all. Imagine if we had not done the bank bailouts, the auto bailouts, etc. Most of the mega corps you can name and their owners would be nothing today. Mega corps EXIST and only can exist because of interventions and entry barriers large government provides. In absence of those things big ~= brittle, and brittle things break before they get to big.
There is a reason the natural world isn't ruled by giant lizards any longer but by small mama ls and insects. Yes there are still some BIG whales and elephants out there but they are mostly endangered and not competitive. These same rules and evolutionary forces apply to markets.
You're going to have to put up some kind of evidence for that. The millenials are used to having nothing, which is what their parents (and their parents' parents) left them.
Okay let me offer you some evidence then. Picture the tent cities and bread lines of the early 1930's. These kept the economically displaced persons during the depression alive. For that matter imagine the tenements of the 1910s and 1920s. If for example in modern American someone proposed that we could save a bunch of money by replacing public housing with something a lot more like those tenements and we should just get rid of SNAP and replace it with bread and soup lines they would be branded as in humane.
If you won't accept it would politically impossible to impose that level of austerity on today's welfare recipients consider many places its already legally impossible, you are not allowed to create a residential unit without at least one toilet. So a shared bathroom for an entire building won't even fly legally in much of this country.
This was a perfectly acceptable standard of living at that time, today people would riot. Heck in the EU the refuges are burning down their free housing because they don't like the assortment of candy available, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... .
People on UBI will look at the nicer things the earners have, they won't be able to get jobs because they won't have any skills they can offer that automation isn't meeting. They will either let their jealousy drive them to despair or they will develop a sense of entitlement and decide they should have those nice things too! Its human nature.
Now lets talk about your millenials who are used to having nothing. They are not used to having nothing. They are used to attending universities that look like amusement parks compared to fifty years ago. They are used to paying for this with unsecured loans, which they than ask (and when polled indicate they anticipate) forgiveness for. That is not having nothing, that is having it all and not working for it. Once the graduate they move back home and continue their comfortable if freedom lacking existence.
Which is why I am advising all my corporate clients that do SSL intercept to either block site that have used and LE cert, or present the invalid/self signed warning to their users. These things are not better than self singed.
Correct certs are about AUTHENTICATION, Its to make sure that when you put your CC info in you really are sending it to paypal.com and not someone else. However, if letsencrypt lets me register päypal.com and you can't easily see something is different, that certificate isn't helping you to authenticate any more, its essentially a really good fake id! I am going to confuse that with the real paypal.
Its not a question of determining if phishme.com is safe or not its a question of knowing who you are talking to and that can be hard. Its why in the real world a photo id is often required. Are you THAT Bill Gates or just a Bill Gates, which is where letsencrypt is making things harder for everyone. It used to be that a sorta responsible CA would not issue a cert of what is obviously an attempt to conflate you site with a well known brand.
What I think you are missing is that at some point there exists only one commodity or real value: sufficiently advanced automation. If you have that it will obtain anything else you could possibly want for it. Think of ever other commodity as dividends for owning sufficiently advanced automation. Want bread fine you don't need wheat you need robots that can plant a field, harvest, mill, and bake; or you need a robot that can manufacture the robots that do those things.
What you don't need to do is trade with farmer Bob or hire him to tend your field. He has nothing to offer you of any value.
Coming to the conclusion that automation and AI would target countries with higher wage costs seems to be rather obvious. The real question is what will be done to control unending Greed from turning the planet into a Welfare state.
Which will never work, UBI will never work. Why because people will never be satisfied with what they have. They will always want more. The planets resources remain limited. If its no longer a question of how hard they have to work for X; the answer to "why should I not have finer clothes, travel further faster, be warmer or be cooler, eat something nicer, etc will be that I should!"
There may be a short era of good feels, a generation that grew up working a no longer needs to and is simply satisfied with a life of comparative ease; but their grand children will demand free super sonic airline tickers, I promise you!
I am not going to pretend to know where any of this is headed. I don't think its UBI and I don't think its welfare state 2.0. I would be more worried about the collapse of states. You point out corporations are already paying armies of lobbyists to avoid taxes. You really think a group of top tier capital owner class types wont employ an army or robots that looks much more like the armies of the past and simply refuse to pay the taxes? What does for example Amazon need the government for once they can hire/build their own fully automated asset protection?
Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.
Nope at least not until large numbers of people have so much they decided stopping anyone else from taking some if it isn't worth thinking about. We are a looooong way from such a time.
Who knows maybe a day will come where people here on earth just sit back an enjoy free the great riches showering down upon the earth from return of the giant space harvestors their great great great great grandparents sent out to gather resources across the galaxy and beyond.
Until there people will indeed need a form of exchange. If not some fiat currency funny money than it will be something else. The trouble is the barter system really won't work. If the capital class already has a robots to work their fields, maintain their other robots, transport them from place to place, print whatever durable goods they want, etc what exactly will you offer them in exchange?
I don't know what the answers are and I don't know what is going to happen but it simply can't look like the world you are envisioning. It violates far to much of what little we do know about human nature and economics.
Government the bigger and more remote it gets the more it looks upon the population as a herd to be managed, rather than as their friends and neighbors.
This why our system was originally designed to have powerful states and keep a lot of administrative control with even smaller units counties and cities. Modern federalism is nothing more than a system of abuse. The very fact that almost all of us have a higher federal tax bill than state tax bill tells you the system is probably corrupted beyond fixing.
There you go, there is the proof despite what the surveillance acts say about limiting the gathering of information about Americans, the Obama people ran around making sure it was in as many places as possible! They may have had good reasons, but the law is still the law!
Did not watch myself. No need the concept is stupid on its face. Either super wild liberties would have to be taken with cannon, at which point its not the same story any more an using the existing character names and treating their elements as a grab bag is just lazy writing or Batman was going to have to use some device based on Kryptonite to be competitive with the S. Super boring and super predictable just like all DC's shitty Justice League stuff.
It all gets a pass because Batman comics were inventive and cool, Superman comics told a story the public needed to hear at a certain time and will always be loved.
Puting the two together though is just silly. Superman is for all intents and purposes a god. While not wholly omnipotent, he is so far above man that he can freely toss our greatest war machines around like children's toys and even slow the spin of earth altering time. Batman simply isn't in his league. Additionally Superman's original character was almost Christ like in his unfailing sense of justice and strength of character regarding doing the right thing. The Superman of the early comics would never have agreed to even associate with the Bat, so okay we have some conflict but we know who should prevail; Batman is going to have to come around to the S in terms of how they resolve any external conflict.
There just isn't any story there. The only reason those comics get read and the only reason that movie got watched all is the audience is hopelessly uncritical. They love the characters so much they will watch or read anything with them no matter how strained the story surrounding them is. Personally I love both Batman and Superman to much to allow these dumb mashups to ruin them both for me.
At the end of the day these companies facilitate the connection between a producer and consume and then take a cut ( albeit a large one ) for the connection. I just don't see how these companies owe more than the contract specifies.
They don't or at least I agree with you I can't think of a reason they owe more. Our elected leaders figure in though because my larger point is there are structural issues in our economy. An economy that their polices shape which create a level of desperation among a sufficiently substantial part of the work force that people will supply labor to the 'gig economy' companies at 'real' rates that in seem well below what people would have accepted in recent history.
Low relative compensation for labor is creating greater wealth separation between the capital owner class and laboring classes. I don't know anyone who really thinks that is positive trend. Even the most ardent anarcho-capitalists would probably characterize that as a simply fact without placing a value judgement on it. I for one don't think an expanding wealth gap is good for society writ large. I don't think the answer is socialism either. I think the more government you just trade community for bureaucracy. Bureaucracy does not scale in the end, and it does not for a full and fulfilling life make, its absolutist nature (these are rules and you're going to follow them) tend to be anti-freedom and progressively more so as it expands into other areas of life. I would like to see us persue a populist communiterian solution but that does imply some government.
It implies capital controls - you can't send big piles of money abroad, but you can spend freely domestically. You can't hire foreign labor and if you want to import good that have a large foreign laybor component well there are going to have to be tariffs, tariffs high enough that you will decide to make things domestically instead. In other words the tariffs are not designed to increase tax revenues for government re-distribution, they are designed to restrict trade by being high enough few would choose the pay them, but still allow goods and services into the country that cannot be sourced locally at least not in the short term.
It requires tight restrictions on immigration, because communities will need to absorb and integrate new members. A solution like a large immigration tax would probably be in order. Want to stay in the US more than few weeks $50K! Want to be on the citizenship/green card tack $80K!
Come on unless you are going to nity gritty about the meaning of wiretap, that Trumps point is absolutely valid. His rights absolutely were violated!
When surveying foreign citizens, listening is supposed to be limited once an American comes on the line. Intelligence officials and LEOs are not supposed to report names of Americans or widely distribute information about the Americans.
Yes Obama admin people admitted they deliberately widely spread information about Trump's supposed Russia ties to ensure they could not be buried! How fucking noble of them, ask just about any law breaker anywhere ever and they'll have a justification of some kind for you! How did they spread all this information unless the deliberately de-annonomized the Americans on the lines of the Russian nationals they were supposedly surveying for other reasons. How did the press get it? Was it a conspiracy perhaps not; more likely some combination of a lot of individual intelligence people were just sloppy or those who individually decided to break the law and pass information around they had no business passing. Does not matter, it amounts to "police misconduct," none of that information should be consider usable in any "due process" against Trump, and the people who participated should be FIRED promptly for violating the rights of citizens, the fact those citizens were on Trump's campaign team is irrelevant.
I think Clinton is A WORLD of a difference between her and Trump.
No not really HRC has taken just about every position on everything if you follow her statements back to the 08 election! She is a blowhard just like Trump is, just a little more well spoken.
China would be in a much better relationship with us after Trump made his mistakes
China is an EVIL repressive regime that still at least as recently as 2013 drags women against their will to hospitals and focibly kills viable babies in their womb because the mother is unmarried. It has a terrible human rights record. Its a national embarrassment that we ALLOW China to invest in the US. Its am embarrassment we allow companies to do business and import products from there! Its am embarrassment we have a one China policy that recognizes anything other than Taipei as its capital! Seriously anyone who works with the PRC or acts as an apologist for it is human garbage! My BIGGEST regret about my Trump vote so far is he has not been tough enough on China!
and we would get a pro choice supreme court justice
Yes that's what is important getting agenda driven ideologue on the court who will uphold Roe despite it having basically no solid legal reasoning behind it. We would not want to put someone on the Court who actually cares about the integrity of the law and the Constitution because gasp, its not clear how such a person might rule on abortion legislation.
an no Russia affairs
WHAAT seriously her campaign managers brother was/is a Russian affliated banker, Hillary did all sorts of question deals with Russia while Sec State. Selling Uranium stocks? to our former major nuclear rival that according to the left we are all supposed to be afraid of? No Russia ties, your kiddin.
and weird signals we send to around the world weakening the credibility of the White House and American interests.
In your Opinion and the similarly unqualified opinions of MSM journos, not based on any facts or international events that have taken place since Trump took office.
Not a saint but shoot I would take her right now.
Not a saint but very possibly Satan! (I kid I kid). but seriously that position is just stupid Hillary had zero redeeming qualities as a candidate. She was literally the most terrible candidate the DNC could have found! She is a corporate whore that makes Trump seem principled by comparison (and that ain't easy)!
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not.
You are both right and totally wrong at the same time. Socialism isn't about community its about the state as a stand in for community! Yes we need to accept that in the modern world very men can be islands. Bureaucracy isn't the answer though, it does not scale. Just sit an watch Argentina, Greece, and for that matter the whole Western Europe as it faces mass immigration! That is the future socialism results in.
What we need is actually a form of isolationism. We need force the capital class to have some ties to place and their community again. We can't let them just be world tourists! If you make it harder or impossible for them to import labor from elsewhere, make it hard for them to take their capital over national boarders, etc. They will be forced to invest in their local community to secure their own feature. Right now its "I need H1Bs because there are to few qualified Americans" It needs change to "I need to build a science center in $city and donate heavily to the local schools so my business will have pool of qualified people to hire in the future." That is what community is about and that is the relationship between capital and community we need to create.
The gig economy is just gigs for some cash not full time employment.
I frankly don't buy it! There are small groups of people who are interested in that sort of thing. Teenagers who still are largely fed/clothed/housed by their parents, perhaps a stay at home parent needing something to do while the kids are at school, retirees who don't perhaps have savings for entertainment and actually want light work as a diversion. Maybe some trust fund babies that want to make a few bucks without rules attached. I am sure there are others. I am also sure this isn't a large enough labor pool to meet the demand in terms of scale companies like Lyft, Uber, fiverr, Amazon (turk) etc in vision.
The rest of the labor force isn't taking gigs because they want to! They are taking gigs because they are trying to meet needs or at least perceived needs. Most sensible after working a 40-60 hour week want to use their remaining time, to enjoy the home they secured, eat a nice meal, watch a movie, watch the world go by, read a book, talk to family, see friends, etc. Some people who are self employed might be self motivated to work 9 hours + and that might make sense if they are doing it so they can 'get a head' and eventually not have to work so hard etc. Its also different in that they are working for something that is their own, in the same way some of us would work DIY remodeling our own home etc.
Really do think that Uber driver would not be somewhere else if they did not feel like they really needed the money at least on some level? They are doing it out of some kind of insecurity, tangible or emotional. Don't tell me some people just like driving either, I love driving. I take my Sunday drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway either by myself or with my wife. I don't play taxi driver for randos downtown. I don't believe anyone else would either if they were 'entirely free' to decide.
There is some external pressure and its almost certainly in the form under employment, unemployment, under paid and without negotiating leverage, trade competition and similar. The capital owner element of the gig economy is keenly aware of this, its the reason they have a labor pool to hire. I am not saying its exploitative, people should be free to make whatever contract, work whatever job they wish. I just don't have any illusion that this is a bunch of people out there looking to make a little mad money. There are major structural factors at work here and the market is simply responding. I am also of the belief that its response isn't unaffected by governmental policy. They people we voted for are doing this to us.
They have been doing it to us since the 60's. People are getting fed up. Trump is just the tip of the ice burg (hopefully)! The capital class that owns the media and dominates politics are reacting virulently to his populist message and that tells me they are frightened it could endure beyond his presidency. Perhaps someone a little more politically savy will be able to take the Trump ball and run with it.
Slashdot Mirror
And so might a human trader. See the Soros attack on sterling!
I am not sure the computers will be any different than the psychopaths currently pulling the strings.
I took COBOL in university too and than I went into industry not as COBOL programmer but as an ETL guy. Getting my job done meant getting data out of the mainframe which proved to be a complex ECO-system of many related COBOL programs with all kinds of copybooks containing complex data structures, calls to sub programs, and control break logic so deeply nested lessor interpreted languages might run of call stack space. I am not suggesting this was badly written spaghetti code either, most of it was very well normalized and followed DRY. Complex business logic (major national retailer) requires complex software.
I am of the belief that people who think 'derp any programmer can just sit down and read COBOL' have never seen thing beyond contrived university assignments and tutorials. Complex software is complex no matter what language you write it in. It does not suddenly become simple because its in COBOL and if you don't actually do COBOL understanding that logic really isn't that strait forward.
Do you know what this does and are your sure?
PERFORM PG1 VARIYING WS-IDXFOO FROM 1 BY 2 UNTIL WS-IDXFOO > 10
AFTER WS-IDXBAR FROM 1 BY 3 UNTIL WS-IDXBAR > 20
Okay its a nested loop with PG1 as its body, sure that much is obvious. When are the values tested at the top of the loop or the bottom? Which index is inner, which the outer. If you are not immediately certain about the answer to this do you really think you are going to understand the program's deeply nested logic?
I would suggest if you have not actually internalized COBOLs reserved words and their arguments you might read a program and think you understand but thinking you understand isn't good enough. You have know for sure before you can go making changes. It will take someone who isn't a native COBOL speak 10x as long for certain. This is all before you get into all the stuff that is typically happening around COBOL programs before and after they run, like SYNCSORTs and other JCL magic.
COBOL is in the end like every other language, a person familiar with software development in the abstract can probably grab a copy of "COBOL for the 21st Century" and work thru a problem, even a big one. The same way they could grab a copy of "Learn Java in Seven Weeks." but it will be a long time before you can keep up with someone who is experienced and practiced. Moving at the "speed of business" will prove difficult.
$250/hr + travel + accommodations and meals, sounds about right for high end IT consulting work.
That and you don't exactly need a lab to determine, there is more good meat on the bones of that Mammoth or Buffalo than on Bob over there.
I don't know that its quite as a bad as all that yet but I agree with your point. The big draw with consoles is they just worked and the life cycles were fairly long.
You did not bring a game home and find out it runs terribly on your video card and you need a better one despite what the system requirements state. You don't install an updated video driver to make your latest game work, and find out you now get weird glitch black boxes in the menus when you run your old favorites.
What was great about consoles is you just pealed off the shrink wrap and started enjoying. No setup, not fuss, no frustration. Even if it was never quite as pretty as the PC version. They are literally destroying the value of the console for me. As much fuss over versions, free disk space, addons, DLC, required internet connections, updates, etc; I could just go back to gaming on the PC or laptop I need anyway and skip the console.
If the costs were that high, petrol or electric tow vehicles would meet planes at the end of the runway already today. I am not saying you are wrong about the inefficiencies, but there is more to this story somehow.
Right but fossil fuels get much lighter as you consume them vent the combustion products externally. Batteries get only very slightly lighter, like you lab quality equipment to measure. That matters for an aircraft, it matters a lot!
One way or the other, the future won't be powered with fossil fuels.
I am going slap a big "we'll see" sticker on that. Yes ultimately in the distant future the fossil fuel era logically must draw to a close because we logically must run out of something we consume at a faster rate than is produced.
That said I suspect the time horizons are a lot longer than you think. I mean fracking and shale oil for example despite Obama's best efforts pretty much ended the recession. The more I did into it, the stronger my conclusion is that North Dakota not Washington got the economy going again. We simply keep finding more supply.
There was lots and lots of people who thought the fracking and new domestic oil finds would prove shallow, they have instead been bonanzas. Meanwhile the alternative energy crowd continues to hand waive the storage problems. We don't have lithium supply to replace the fleet of cars here in the US with electrics for example. Nobody knows where to get it either! It is a physical constraint not simply a technical problem. It might have a technical solution maybe someone can make a dense storage batter without or with a lot less lithium. Maybe we could put induction coils in all federal highways so cars would only need to go literally the last mile on stored power and could use smaller batteries. These things are decades away though, the folks saying by 2025 most cars will be electric are nutz.
As for planes, again not holding my breath here. Airlines have figured out people want more flights per-day not necessarily faster flights or more comfort. They are flying 'regional' jets half way across the country. Its the opposite model of what you need to do in terms of an electric airplane for efficiency reasons. More volume means less weight per cubic of enclosed space. Small planes will be all battery and no room for passengers or people. Big planes are not what the market wants and therefore won't be economical. People will pay more for a petrol powered flight without a 3 hour layover, than they will to travel on 'green jets'.
I'd be on 40 years before electric commercial passenger aviation becomes mainstream. We are as far away form viable commercialization of that as we were when the Germans flew the first ME-262 to commercial jet aviation.
Except the lender are a little smarter than that. Sudent loan debt can't be easily discharged mortgage debt can but the bank usually gets the asset. Traditionally the banks don't really want the asset because the costs of maintaining it and selling it to someone else impairs its value but this is changing
I expect the GP was being sarcastic but that isn't perhaps so crazy. We already treat waste water heavily in most places before we dump it back into rivers or the ocean. If you are doing this on a community scale I don't see why transporting the salt over to the waste water plant and mixing it back into the that isn't entirely impractical.
There are two problems
1) the waste water already will contain a number of dissolved substances it may or may not be able to still dissolve enough salt to match the salinity of the ocean.
2) Not all the water comes back as a waste water to the treatment plant, much of it waters crops or is boiled off in industrial processes etc. So there might not be enough water to redissolve all the salt even if supplemented with storm run off.
At any rate I would expect at least a large portion of the salt could be returned to the environment be simply diluting it in 'fresh' water first. The rest might well be fed into the many industrial and agricultural application for salt.
You are deluding yourself if you think laissez-faire benefits anyone other than the megacorporations and the 1%ers who own/run them.
That just inst true. Real libertarian policies don't favor mega corps at all. Imagine if we had not done the bank bailouts, the auto bailouts, etc. Most of the mega corps you can name and their owners would be nothing today. Mega corps EXIST and only can exist because of interventions and entry barriers large government provides. In absence of those things big ~= brittle, and brittle things break before they get to big.
There is a reason the natural world isn't ruled by giant lizards any longer but by small mama ls and insects. Yes there are still some BIG whales and elephants out there but they are mostly endangered and not competitive. These same rules and evolutionary forces apply to markets.
You're going to have to put up some kind of evidence for that. The millenials are used to having nothing, which is what their parents (and their parents' parents) left them.
Okay let me offer you some evidence then. Picture the tent cities and bread lines of the early 1930's. These kept the economically displaced persons during the depression alive. For that matter imagine the tenements of the 1910s and 1920s. If for example in modern American someone proposed that we could save a bunch of money by replacing public housing with something a lot more like those tenements and we should just get rid of SNAP and replace it with bread and soup lines they would be branded as in humane.
If you won't accept it would politically impossible to impose that level of austerity on today's welfare recipients consider many places its already legally impossible, you are not allowed to create a residential unit without at least one toilet. So a shared bathroom for an entire building won't even fly legally in much of this country.
This was a perfectly acceptable standard of living at that time, today people would riot. Heck in the EU the refuges are burning down their free housing because they don't like the assortment of candy available, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... .
People on UBI will look at the nicer things the earners have, they won't be able to get jobs because they won't have any skills they can offer that automation isn't meeting. They will either let their jealousy drive them to despair or they will develop a sense of entitlement and decide they should have those nice things too! Its human nature.
Now lets talk about your millenials who are used to having nothing. They are not used to having nothing. They are used to attending universities that look like amusement parks compared to fifty years ago. They are used to paying for this with unsecured loans, which they than ask (and when polled indicate they anticipate) forgiveness for. That is not having nothing, that is having it all and not working for it. Once the graduate they move back home and continue their comfortable if freedom lacking existence.
Which is why I am advising all my corporate clients that do SSL intercept to either block site that have used and LE cert, or present the invalid/self signed warning to their users. These things are not better than self singed.
Correct certs are about AUTHENTICATION, Its to make sure that when you put your CC info in you really are sending it to paypal.com and not someone else. However, if letsencrypt lets me register päypal.com and you can't easily see something is different, that certificate isn't helping you to authenticate any more, its essentially a really good fake id! I am going to confuse that with the real paypal.
Its not a question of determining if phishme.com is safe or not its a question of knowing who you are talking to and that can be hard. Its why in the real world a photo id is often required. Are you THAT Bill Gates or just a Bill Gates, which is where letsencrypt is making things harder for everyone. It used to be that a sorta responsible CA would not issue a cert of what is obviously an attempt to conflate you site with a well known brand.
What I think you are missing is that at some point there exists only one commodity or real value: sufficiently advanced automation. If you have that it will obtain anything else you could possibly want for it. Think of ever other commodity as dividends for owning sufficiently advanced automation. Want bread fine you don't need wheat you need robots that can plant a field, harvest, mill, and bake; or you need a robot that can manufacture the robots that do those things.
What you don't need to do is trade with farmer Bob or hire him to tend your field. He has nothing to offer you of any value.
Coming to the conclusion that automation and AI would target countries with higher wage costs seems to be rather obvious. The real question is what will be done to control unending Greed from turning the planet into a Welfare state.
Which will never work, UBI will never work. Why because people will never be satisfied with what they have. They will always want more. The planets resources remain limited. If its no longer a question of how hard they have to work for X; the answer to "why should I not have finer clothes, travel further faster, be warmer or be cooler, eat something nicer, etc will be that I should!"
There may be a short era of good feels, a generation that grew up working a no longer needs to and is simply satisfied with a life of comparative ease; but their grand children will demand free super sonic airline tickers, I promise you!
I am not going to pretend to know where any of this is headed. I don't think its UBI and I don't think its welfare state 2.0. I would be more worried about the collapse of states. You point out corporations are already paying armies of lobbyists to avoid taxes. You really think a group of top tier capital owner class types wont employ an army or robots that looks much more like the armies of the past and simply refuse to pay the taxes? What does for example Amazon need the government for once they can hire/build their own fully automated asset protection?
Money ceases to be an essential functional commodity in such a circumstance, as people will invent alternative methods of exchange to obtain necessary services.
Nope at least not until large numbers of people have so much they decided stopping anyone else from taking some if it isn't worth thinking about. We are a looooong way from such a time.
Who knows maybe a day will come where people here on earth just sit back an enjoy free the great riches showering down upon the earth from return of the giant space harvestors their great great great great grandparents sent out to gather resources across the galaxy and beyond.
Until there people will indeed need a form of exchange. If not some fiat currency funny money than it will be something else. The trouble is the barter system really won't work. If the capital class already has a robots to work their fields, maintain their other robots, transport them from place to place, print whatever durable goods they want, etc what exactly will you offer them in exchange?
I don't know what the answers are and I don't know what is going to happen but it simply can't look like the world you are envisioning. It violates far to much of what little we do know about human nature and economics.
Government the bigger and more remote it gets the more it looks upon the population as a herd to be managed, rather than as their friends and neighbors.
This why our system was originally designed to have powerful states and keep a lot of administrative control with even smaller units counties and cities. Modern federalism is nothing more than a system of abuse. The very fact that almost all of us have a higher federal tax bill than state tax bill tells you the system is probably corrupted beyond fixing.
"Program Shop"
The proof is the fact that the information exists.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ne...
There you go, there is the proof despite what the surveillance acts say about limiting the gathering of information about Americans, the Obama people ran around making sure it was in as many places as possible! They may have had good reasons, but the law is still the law!
Did not watch myself. No need the concept is stupid on its face. Either super wild liberties would have to be taken with cannon, at which point its not the same story any more an using the existing character names and treating their elements as a grab bag is just lazy writing or Batman was going to have to use some device based on Kryptonite to be competitive with the S. Super boring and super predictable just like all DC's shitty Justice League stuff.
It all gets a pass because Batman comics were inventive and cool, Superman comics told a story the public needed to hear at a certain time and will always be loved.
Puting the two together though is just silly. Superman is for all intents and purposes a god. While not wholly omnipotent, he is so far above man that he can freely toss our greatest war machines around like children's toys and even slow the spin of earth altering time. Batman simply isn't in his league. Additionally Superman's original character was almost Christ like in his unfailing sense of justice and strength of character regarding doing the right thing. The Superman of the early comics would never have agreed to even associate with the Bat, so okay we have some conflict but we know who should prevail; Batman is going to have to come around to the S in terms of how they resolve any external conflict.
There just isn't any story there. The only reason those comics get read and the only reason that movie got watched all is the audience is hopelessly uncritical. They love the characters so much they will watch or read anything with them no matter how strained the story surrounding them is. Personally I love both Batman and Superman to much to allow these dumb mashups to ruin them both for me.
At the end of the day these companies facilitate the connection between a producer and consume and then take a cut ( albeit a large one ) for the connection. I just don't see how these companies owe more than the contract specifies.
They don't or at least I agree with you I can't think of a reason they owe more. Our elected leaders figure in though because my larger point is there are structural issues in our economy. An economy that their polices shape which create a level of desperation among a sufficiently substantial part of the work force that people will supply labor to the 'gig economy' companies at 'real' rates that in seem well below what people would have accepted in recent history.
Low relative compensation for labor is creating greater wealth separation between the capital owner class and laboring classes. I don't know anyone who really thinks that is positive trend. Even the most ardent anarcho-capitalists would probably characterize that as a simply fact without placing a value judgement on it. I for one don't think an expanding wealth gap is good for society writ large. I don't think the answer is socialism either. I think the more government you just trade community for bureaucracy. Bureaucracy does not scale in the end, and it does not for a full and fulfilling life make, its absolutist nature (these are rules and you're going to follow them) tend to be anti-freedom and progressively more so as it expands into other areas of life. I would like to see us persue a populist communiterian solution but that does imply some government.
It implies capital controls - you can't send big piles of money abroad, but you can spend freely domestically. You can't hire foreign labor and if you want to import good that have a large foreign laybor component well there are going to have to be tariffs, tariffs high enough that you will decide to make things domestically instead. In other words the tariffs are not designed to increase tax revenues for government re-distribution, they are designed to restrict trade by being high enough few would choose the pay them, but still allow goods and services into the country that cannot be sourced locally at least not in the short term.
It requires tight restrictions on immigration, because communities will need to absorb and integrate new members. A solution like a large immigration tax would probably be in order. Want to stay in the US more than few weeks $50K! Want to be on the citizenship/green card tack $80K!
Come on unless you are going to nity gritty about the meaning of wiretap, that Trumps point is absolutely valid. His rights absolutely were violated!
When surveying foreign citizens, listening is supposed to be limited once an American comes on the line. Intelligence officials and LEOs are not supposed to report names of Americans or widely distribute information about the Americans.
Yes Obama admin people admitted they deliberately widely spread information about Trump's supposed Russia ties to ensure they could not be buried! How fucking noble of them, ask just about any law breaker anywhere ever and they'll have a justification of some kind for you! How did they spread all this information unless the deliberately de-annonomized the Americans on the lines of the Russian nationals they were supposedly surveying for other reasons. How did the press get it? Was it a conspiracy perhaps not; more likely some combination of a lot of individual intelligence people were just sloppy or those who individually decided to break the law and pass information around they had no business passing. Does not matter, it amounts to "police misconduct," none of that information should be consider usable in any "due process" against Trump, and the people who participated should be FIRED promptly for violating the rights of citizens, the fact those citizens were on Trump's campaign team is irrelevant.
I think Clinton is A WORLD of a difference between her and Trump.
No not really HRC has taken just about every position on everything if you follow her statements back to the 08 election! She is a blowhard just like Trump is, just a little more well spoken.
China would be in a much better relationship with us after Trump made his mistakes
China is an EVIL repressive regime that still at least as recently as 2013 drags women against their will to hospitals and focibly kills viable babies in their womb because the mother is unmarried. It has a terrible human rights record. Its a national embarrassment that we ALLOW China to invest in the US. Its am embarrassment we allow companies to do business and import products from there! Its am embarrassment we have a one China policy that recognizes anything other than Taipei as its capital! Seriously anyone who works with the PRC or acts as an apologist for it is human garbage! My BIGGEST regret about my Trump vote so far is he has not been tough enough on China!
and we would get a pro choice supreme court justice
Yes that's what is important getting agenda driven ideologue on the court who will uphold Roe despite it having basically no solid legal reasoning behind it. We would not want to put someone on the Court who actually cares about the integrity of the law and the Constitution because gasp, its not clear how such a person might rule on abortion legislation.
an no Russia affairs
WHAAT seriously her campaign managers brother was/is a Russian affliated banker, Hillary did all sorts of question deals with Russia while Sec State. Selling Uranium stocks? to our former major nuclear rival that according to the left we are all supposed to be afraid of? No Russia ties, your kiddin.
and weird signals we send to around the world weakening the credibility of the White House and American interests.
In your Opinion and the similarly unqualified opinions of MSM journos, not based on any facts or international events that have taken place since Trump took office.
Not a saint but shoot I would take her right now.
Not a saint but very possibly Satan! (I kid I kid). but seriously that position is just stupid Hillary had zero redeeming qualities as a candidate. She was literally the most terrible candidate the DNC could have found! She is a corporate whore that makes Trump seem principled by comparison (and that ain't easy)!
Americans have to get over their fear of socialism and accept that, all other things being equal, a community that works together is stronger and more prosperous than one that does not.
You are both right and totally wrong at the same time. Socialism isn't about community its about the state as a stand in for community! Yes we need to accept that in the modern world very men can be islands. Bureaucracy isn't the answer though, it does not scale. Just sit an watch Argentina, Greece, and for that matter the whole Western Europe as it faces mass immigration! That is the future socialism results in.
What we need is actually a form of isolationism. We need force the capital class to have some ties to place and their community again. We can't let them just be world tourists! If you make it harder or impossible for them to import labor from elsewhere, make it hard for them to take their capital over national boarders, etc. They will be forced to invest in their local community to secure their own feature. Right now its "I need H1Bs because there are to few qualified Americans" It needs change to "I need to build a science center in $city and donate heavily to the local schools so my business will have pool of qualified people to hire in the future." That is what community is about and that is the relationship between capital and community we need to create.
The gig economy is just gigs for some cash not full time employment.
I frankly don't buy it! There are small groups of people who are interested in that sort of thing. Teenagers who still are largely fed/clothed/housed by their parents, perhaps a stay at home parent needing something to do while the kids are at school, retirees who don't perhaps have savings for entertainment and actually want light work as a diversion. Maybe some trust fund babies that want to make a few bucks without rules attached. I am sure there are others. I am also sure this isn't a large enough labor pool to meet the demand in terms of scale companies like Lyft, Uber, fiverr, Amazon (turk) etc in vision.
The rest of the labor force isn't taking gigs because they want to! They are taking gigs because they are trying to meet needs or at least perceived needs. Most sensible after working a 40-60 hour week want to use their remaining time, to enjoy the home they secured, eat a nice meal, watch a movie, watch the world go by, read a book, talk to family, see friends, etc. Some people who are self employed might be self motivated to work 9 hours + and that might make sense if they are doing it so they can 'get a head' and eventually not have to work so hard etc. Its also different in that they are working for something that is their own, in the same way some of us would work DIY remodeling our own home etc.
Really do think that Uber driver would not be somewhere else if they did not feel like they really needed the money at least on some level? They are doing it out of some kind of insecurity, tangible or emotional. Don't tell me some people just like driving either, I love driving. I take my Sunday drives on the Blue Ridge Parkway either by myself or with my wife. I don't play taxi driver for randos downtown. I don't believe anyone else would either if they were 'entirely free' to decide.
There is some external pressure and its almost certainly in the form under employment, unemployment, under paid and without negotiating leverage, trade competition and similar. The capital owner element of the gig economy is keenly aware of this, its the reason they have a labor pool to hire. I am not saying its exploitative, people should be free to make whatever contract, work whatever job they wish. I just don't have any illusion that this is a bunch of people out there looking to make a little mad money. There are major structural factors at work here and the market is simply responding. I am also of the belief that its response isn't unaffected by governmental policy. They people we voted for are doing this to us.
They have been doing it to us since the 60's. People are getting fed up. Trump is just the tip of the ice burg (hopefully)! The capital class that owns the media and dominates politics are reacting virulently to his populist message and that tells me they are frightened it could endure beyond his presidency. Perhaps someone a little more politically savy will be able to take the Trump ball and run with it.