They are so consistent with this crap lately, I'm starting to wonder if it isn't a strategy: let the consumers beta test and debug the next big corporate version. The last corporate version was XP, now it seems to be 7. If I wasn't being ironic, I'd suggest that the next corporate version will be Windows X.
Yes, it's the property taxes that already deprive a person of their property. Where I live, I have to pay about 3% of the value of my home every year for the honor of keeping it.
Apple will go there, but only if they can make 40% margin on the hardware. At the moment, that would mean something like slightly nicer Chromebooks for $350... maybe, but I'm skeptical.
That's a reasonable solution in a world with a COLA, but not without it, because you're depriving someone of their property and that's not acceptable when the system doesn't guarantee basic income.
Rent controls already deprive a person of the use of their property, so it's not really any different in concept.
That said, appearances matter to the courts and the public, so you work it all out so that it looks like a business tax. Something like x percent of the appraised value of the property is due every year, just like a rental property tax. Already common practice. Any balance not paid goes into a lien, which must be satisfied at sale and the proceeds redistributed as a "homestead credit" to the person who lived there when the tax was paid / due.
Yeah, it's effectively the same thing as simply handing parts of the deed over, but all done with tax code that had been implemented and passed all of the courts.
It sounds to me like a failure of rent control, not a problem with Google. Either it was implemented poorly or it is a fundamentally flawed concept. You have a bunch of people who seem to feel entitled to lower-than-market living costs. Now, I agree that gentrification is a real social problem, and possibly some kind of rent control could help mitigate it - but this is a problem that the community needs to solve, not a company. While there might be some added incentive for people to live where they otherwise might not, the fact is that the main effect of the Google buses is probably of taking cars off of the road. SF was gentrifying before Google came along - it's a trend in many US cities right now. I'm glad we are talking about it, but I think Google is being singled out a bit unfairly.
Since we are talking about gentrification, I wonder if a system requiring rent-to-own contracts instead of leases would serve the same purpose? By that, I mean where every day you live in a house/apartment, you own a little more of it. When you move out, the landlord can buy you out or profit share with you. If the area gentrifies rapidly, your share of the property will be worth a lot more than you paid in and you'll gain from the neighborhood's resurgence. I'm sure there are all sorts of ill effects that I haven't considered, but I'm just throwing it out there. I'm sure some legal eagles could make it all done in tax law, if there are constitutional concerns. Seems these days that the constitution matters little if the legislation is done in the tax code.
There are some real problems with this, though. The US is fairly unique in that the poor live near city centers, due to urban decay and white flight among other things. Europe usually has the opposite problem - poor concentrated in the suburbs. Poor concentrated anywhere is a bad problem to have. The problem remains that the jobs tend to be closer to the rich people, but now you are making the poor drive cars into the city for work instead of taking the bus or train when they live in an urban area. Access to services is also worse when the poor are forced into a suburban setting - everything is more spread out geographically.
Anyway, it's not Google's fight - but it is a symptom of an unhealthy housing situation. You don't want all the people of means to be completely disconnected from the problems of everyday people.
If you aren't afraid of the command line, then you can do this on Windows, too.
Using the "win" command in NirCmd, you can screw around with window sizes and placement. The "window" command of the for-pay software Take Command can do this as well. There are also ways to manipulate windows in Powershell.
Yup. And I'd bet that autonomous cars will get you a discount, like having a theft deterrent device. Owners won't care too much that they are liable, since they were always liable and their insurance just went down. Behind the scenes I expect all sorts of juicy court battles, as insurers and manufactures fight over things like manufacturing defects vs improper sensor maintenance and the like - but to the owner of the vehicle, I don't expect much resistance.
Actually, no, not in the context of this thread. Space is clearly being used in the sense of being the area of the universe exclusive of Earth. But thanks for the science lesson, and I'm not sure how it would change the discussion in any way.
I agree with you on policy, but technically the boss has the right to have whatever policy he wants. It's his company, after all. Now if your "boss" is just the manager directly above you, they may very well be violating some company policy...
I'm not slamming liberal arts. I think that a liberal arts education is valuable... for the right person. It's just that your average person from a modest means is going to find it very hard to get a job with certain liberal arts degrees. College started as an elite experience, and there are a lot of leftover ideas from that time - the whole "student athlete" charade chief among them.
Hulu and Netflix turn a $100 product into a $9 one.
This. We dropped our cable to "limited basic", and even then, only because it was the same price as internet-only. What replaced it? Netflix, Prime, and the general free internet.
Netflix is successful, but it represents only a tiny fraction of internet users (40 million) - most still only click on free things.
Yes, the incentives are all off with that setup. You create an intense incentive to game the sensing equipment, and the amount distributed to smaller outfits makes it impossible to actually turn a profit.
There are many problems, and we aren't going to work them all out on Slashdot:)
One reason that people work at McDonald's with college degrees is that the traditional, elite "liberal arts" education is sold as a job-getter to non-elites. Sure, a wealthy man can find a job for his liberal-arts educated son. Good luck to the liberal-arts educated guy whose dad is a factory worker, or even in prison. For most people in the middle or lower classes, college should be used to develop an actual skill. A liberal-arts education is great, but it is a luxury unless one can be assured that they will attend graduate school.
With the disappearance of factory jobs, we really are leaving our high-school graduates hanging out to dry. Good paying jobs require more skill now, and I think if we want to maintain a non-college track, we should seriously consider extending free pubilc education through associates-level courses.
Massive numbers of factory jobs are gone. Probably forever. We can blame robots, China, or whatever but the reality is that they are gone. We need to be realistic about what the next generation of kids needs to have a shot at a middle class lifestyle.
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They are so consistent with this crap lately, I'm starting to wonder if it isn't a strategy: let the consumers beta test and debug the next big corporate version. The last corporate version was XP, now it seems to be 7. If I wasn't being ironic, I'd suggest that the next corporate version will be Windows X.
Well, obviously my proposal would require changing the law.
Rent is determined by market forces, not the costs to the landlord. If anything, this will nail property values - probably not affect rents.
Yes, it's the property taxes that already deprive a person of their property. Where I live, I have to pay about 3% of the value of my home every year for the honor of keeping it.
Apple will go there, but only if they can make 40% margin on the hardware. At the moment, that would mean something like slightly nicer Chromebooks for $350... maybe, but I'm skeptical.
I replaced my motherboard, processor, and RAM... does that count?
That's a reasonable solution in a world with a COLA, but not without it, because you're depriving someone of their property and that's not acceptable when the system doesn't guarantee basic income.
Rent controls already deprive a person of the use of their property, so it's not really any different in concept.
That said, appearances matter to the courts and the public, so you work it all out so that it looks like a business tax. Something like x percent of the appraised value of the property is due every year, just like a rental property tax. Already common practice. Any balance not paid goes into a lien, which must be satisfied at sale and the proceeds redistributed as a "homestead credit" to the person who lived there when the tax was paid / due.
Yeah, it's effectively the same thing as simply handing parts of the deed over, but all done with tax code that had been implemented and passed all of the courts.
That seems reasonable except for the fact that most other cities also have gentrification without being subject to Prop 13.
Agreed. It's a horse of a different color - not all that radical. However, it would eliminate the landlord's incentive to kick you out.
It sounds to me like a failure of rent control, not a problem with Google. Either it was implemented poorly or it is a fundamentally flawed concept. You have a bunch of people who seem to feel entitled to lower-than-market living costs. Now, I agree that gentrification is a real social problem, and possibly some kind of rent control could help mitigate it - but this is a problem that the community needs to solve, not a company. While there might be some added incentive for people to live where they otherwise might not, the fact is that the main effect of the Google buses is probably of taking cars off of the road. SF was gentrifying before Google came along - it's a trend in many US cities right now. I'm glad we are talking about it, but I think Google is being singled out a bit unfairly.
Since we are talking about gentrification, I wonder if a system requiring rent-to-own contracts instead of leases would serve the same purpose? By that, I mean where every day you live in a house/apartment, you own a little more of it. When you move out, the landlord can buy you out or profit share with you. If the area gentrifies rapidly, your share of the property will be worth a lot more than you paid in and you'll gain from the neighborhood's resurgence. I'm sure there are all sorts of ill effects that I haven't considered, but I'm just throwing it out there. I'm sure some legal eagles could make it all done in tax law, if there are constitutional concerns. Seems these days that the constitution matters little if the legislation is done in the tax code.
There are some real problems with this, though. The US is fairly unique in that the poor live near city centers, due to urban decay and white flight among other things. Europe usually has the opposite problem - poor concentrated in the suburbs. Poor concentrated anywhere is a bad problem to have. The problem remains that the jobs tend to be closer to the rich people, but now you are making the poor drive cars into the city for work instead of taking the bus or train when they live in an urban area. Access to services is also worse when the poor are forced into a suburban setting - everything is more spread out geographically.
Anyway, it's not Google's fight - but it is a symptom of an unhealthy housing situation. You don't want all the people of means to be completely disconnected from the problems of everyday people.
If you aren't afraid of the command line, then you can do this on Windows, too.
Using the "win" command in NirCmd, you can screw around with window sizes and placement. The "window" command of the for-pay software Take Command can do this as well. There are also ways to manipulate windows in Powershell.
He wants you to use Flash.
Yup. And I'd bet that autonomous cars will get you a discount, like having a theft deterrent device. Owners won't care too much that they are liable, since they were always liable and their insurance just went down. Behind the scenes I expect all sorts of juicy court battles, as insurers and manufactures fight over things like manufacturing defects vs improper sensor maintenance and the like - but to the owner of the vehicle, I don't expect much resistance.
If scientists knew how to correct the ignorant media in an effective way, they'd be a happy lot indeed.
Actually, no, not in the context of this thread. Space is clearly being used in the sense of being the area of the universe exclusive of Earth. But thanks for the science lesson, and I'm not sure how it would change the discussion in any way.
All very interesting, but not at all relevant to space, which is already hostile to life.
Please post some examples of your hobby, so that we can pick it apart for no good reason. Or maybe that is your hobby, in which case - good job.
A lot of people on here probably do just that when they write and host open source software.
I agree with you on policy, but technically the boss has the right to have whatever policy he wants. It's his company, after all. Now if your "boss" is just the manager directly above you, they may very well be violating some company policy...
I'm not slamming liberal arts. I think that a liberal arts education is valuable... for the right person. It's just that your average person from a modest means is going to find it very hard to get a job with certain liberal arts degrees. College started as an elite experience, and there are a lot of leftover ideas from that time - the whole "student athlete" charade chief among them.
LOL, think of it as good, paying jobs. I had "good jobs" and then I inserted "paying" with grammatical tragedy as the result.
Hulu and Netflix turn a $100 product into a $9 one.
This. We dropped our cable to "limited basic", and even then, only because it was the same price as internet-only. What replaced it? Netflix, Prime, and the general free internet.
Netflix is successful, but it represents only a tiny fraction of internet users (40 million) - most still only click on free things.
Yes, the incentives are all off with that setup. You create an intense incentive to game the sensing equipment, and the amount distributed to smaller outfits makes it impossible to actually turn a profit.
There are many problems, and we aren't going to work them all out on Slashdot :)
One reason that people work at McDonald's with college degrees is that the traditional, elite "liberal arts" education is sold as a job-getter to non-elites. Sure, a wealthy man can find a job for his liberal-arts educated son. Good luck to the liberal-arts educated guy whose dad is a factory worker, or even in prison. For most people in the middle or lower classes, college should be used to develop an actual skill. A liberal-arts education is great, but it is a luxury unless one can be assured that they will attend graduate school.
With the disappearance of factory jobs, we really are leaving our high-school graduates hanging out to dry. Good paying jobs require more skill now, and I think if we want to maintain a non-college track, we should seriously consider extending free pubilc education through associates-level courses.
Massive numbers of factory jobs are gone. Probably forever. We can blame robots, China, or whatever but the reality is that they are gone. We need to be realistic about what the next generation of kids needs to have a shot at a middle class lifestyle.