Thanks for the reply - I wanted to add that mine was a bit dickish with the snide remark. This explains a lot, and I guess using debian sid instead of Ubuntu LTS and Mint would go a long way for some of these things albeit there's likely still a package maintainer in the loop.
These OS/distros I've mentioned that are in the "slow loop" do work well still, many users don't want the rug to be pulled under them:) I would say most people come from DOS/Windows and in that realm, you got like a base OS you would update every 2/3 years or even less often, yet easily kept applications up to the latest versions for those you cared about. In Ubuntu there's ppa, great for some things but not always that great it just spares you the./configure make make install never damn working but still something to keep track and worry about. Firefox is unusual as it forced itself into rolling relase even in LTS distros, as it's the most major of graphical applications and the most security critical. Mixed desktop/server installs do exist, I like to say this existed in Windows 95 when you right-click a directory and hit "share".
I don't know how to conclude this. There's been a million flame wars already.
Sure, and I don't want / didn't want to put words in your mouth.
I'm on flimsy ground there, but Xbox is sold and marketed as a console rather than a general purpose computer. If Microsoft does bring out netbooks fully locked down, i.e. ostensibly general purpose computers but locked down like so-called phone and tablets etc. there might be quite some outrage, by that I mean reaching at least in a limited way the courts, media and politics. Google did allow free use of their Chrome netbooks under the guise of "developer mode" (with a caveat) and spared themselves some negative press I think.
Lock down the Windows version sure, but the whole hardware : I wish this won't fly so to speak. At the same time, if only a couple percent or less use the machine in unlocked mode, as with Chromebooks, they hardly lose anything by allowing it.
The few times I wanted to try it (not in the 1999 days but in recent days), it never worked at all. I did try 'terminology' on its own : terminal emulator that promised cool graphics effects or something but it was corrupted or with meaningless/ugly/broken graphics and options. Besides, the screenshots don't show a task bar so if this is yet another twm or fvwm clone please admit it.
Look, it's a crap situation, but in a few years when you're trying to use the web on some low end slow eight core piece of crap that shows a 1080p desktop on a TV (e.g. phone that runs a linux VM), it ought to be useful. The better security might be, well, more sure, when "AI" is used to spread malware. Now I feel for people with custom GUI stuff. But perhaps some of the features belong in the browser itself. Likely, Firefox might become meaningfully "embeddable" ; so many browsers are just skins of Chrome and iOS Safari, but for Firefox there aren't that many (most derivatives are alternate builds or historical) So if you want your star-shaped upside down tabs and whatever, maybe there will be equivalent projects to Vivaldi, Brave etc.
A few thousand dollars, nope. But perhaps $200 for the left speaker, $200 for the right speaker, $100 for the amp and cables etc., $1 worth of speaker cable. Costlier of all, a nice big room and moving furniture around etc.
Then we can compare : cheap ass CD player or beat up PC from 1999 with a cheap sound card or DAC ($30). For vinyl, you need a turn table, a needle, a pre-amp - the pre-amp can be built into anything : turn table, dj mixer, hifi amplifier, standalone. Perhaps $300/$400 total cost for cheap stuff? (up from $100 piece of crap that will damage the discs)
I think "good enough" might be affordable like that. But for the cost of a turntable and stuff you can get a high quality desktop PC (like, gold rated PSU, 110dB S/N ratio sound card and the latest 3GHz dual core) or consumer items like high end smartphone, TV, latest console. Or back up hard drives to not lose your music and crap. I guess the value is to do stuff without needing a fucking computer. Even CD players are small single purpose computers, although they may count as non computer if you wish. Even some millenials appreciate time away from computers.
Remember the arcade games? I believe that was progressive-scan, what we might now called 240p at 60Hz, with the RGB signal coming straight from the little computer buried in the cabinet.
It looked damn fine. You should have seen European SNES + TV with the RGB cable, on a good but otherwise unremarkable TV (ditto SNES/Genesis, and even the Dreamcast), it's much of what I grew up with. SD TV was plagued by broadcasting standards and crap like connections like composite PAL. Even digital SDTV stuff on MPEG2, with the box or player thing plugged in composite PAL was fairly garbage compared to what the displays could possibly do.
In what will forever be a thought experiment.. a widescreen CRT TV might support 480p (possibly 576p. possibly 540p), i.e. without the interlacing. Simply scan the video multiple times so the refresh is 120Hz, 100Hz or even 96Hz for movies. Support legacy inputs if you wish (composite, SCART etc.) but have a HDMI input! Ideally, play some H264, VP8, H265, VP9 video as the source for your TV. (might end up downscaling some 1080i/p to 480p internally, don't care) This would not even be entirely unheard of, 16:9 480p existed as "EDTV" although it was used on plasma and LCD I think. Also, 480p 16:9 is rampant on youtube and elsewhere.
On a grumpy note, I wish there were 480p 60fps content available on the web. No, I don't always have the bandwith for 720p60 and 1080p60 (and if I do, it stutters due to the stupid CPU requirements)
I mean with an x86, depending on country, you might argue of an illegal bundled sale since it is so very much obvious the computer can run pretty much any other OS (such as Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu ) ; more so since Intel stopped doing the Atoms for smartphone that weren't 100% PC compatible.
So, I guess you indirectly mean it's for ARM pieces of crap? although there, the SoC is virtually guaranteed to support Android.
This is more straightforward than RT. RT had a full desktop which you could not use for anything. Like hanging a delicious well made cake in front of your face, then taking it away when you try to reach for it. This was divine retribution not consumer product.
I won't try predicting how much it will fail or success - if it even gets released at all. I find it more appealing than Chromebook and I would certainly choose it over Android for a toy non-smartphone computer, although a locked down computer still is offending. If it's free as in beer and can run in a VM, that won't be the worst platform out there. It might allow side loading so you can install open source programs, warez and malware? The computer it's sold with also doesn't HAVE to be locked down with Secure Boot you can't disable (conjecturing most could be x86). If there are locked down x86 PC sold with it, the lawsuits will be interesting.
Lastly, the Windows Vista/7 win32 desktop is a bloated pig anyway so it might be interesting to see if Metro-only Windows runs really fast and efficient on low end or old hardware. Even though one of the first thing I'd look for is "lol can we install and run Wine in this"
Not really : there's ping, wget, firefox -P --no-remote The latter gives you a secondary browser without a need for Chrome, Chromium or anything MS/Apple.
Windows Scripting Host is basically your bash + perl + awk environment, so to speak. So it IS supposed to launch executables, delete your data, break your computer, make your house catch on fire etc.
That it supports "JScript" perhaps is evil. Like it has to do with the era of ActiveX.
Sometimes the odd thing can run on Wine. E.g., tool to edit a graphics card's BIOS to change the fan speed or clocks etc. ; BIOS is to be downloaded from the Internet or dumped from DOS. Edit your BIOS by running the tool in Wine. Boot DOS from USB (can be MS-DOS) or other means, then flash the modded BIOS to your graphics card.
Perhaps that's a silly example. But a simple, plain application with no particular dependencies or use of features has good chances of working. Like, about any single-author stuff that looks like freeware from the late 90s. How come stuff like that always works? It's like going back to the old days where everything worked (yes that's how I remember the DOS days.)
Well, long ago Microsoft implemented an "Are you sure?" when you run an.exe you downloaded from the web to your dekstop. They do like the "Are you sure?" method a lot - it basically gives you root on most people's running and not-locked desktop session (friends and family etc.), at least on Windows 7. People did complain about Windows not running unsigned drivers. Otherwise, Microsoft has been most interested in locking down their themes. Like removing the color schemes in Windows 7's classic mode. One of the worst Windows 7 "features", I hate that lol.
Indeed there is much lecturing that says "start a business, fail, then fail again, then keep up and be successful!" Exactly the same, just for people from a "good family".
Like, it's the American way of life or something. The awesome part is how many dispositions already exist : when people have revolutionary great new ideas, it's often already been implemented in some form for 30 years, 50 years or 100 years. In that "line of business", you have tax write-offs and bankruptcy. Then it's private family assistance : get a free stay in 5000 sq. ft house or mansion as long as you want, lawyer uncle and/or cousin can help you, whatever. But if you have none of that you might eventually fall back on foods stamps and medicaid (food stamps are merely pitiful and with too many roadblocks). Pitiful is the world, "food stamps" makes it feel like WW2 (even though you didn't have WW2 on your soil) or some poor Sci-Fi dystopia setting like 1984 movie, Soylent Green, Half-Life 2's intro. Duh.
Let's say you don't really need the UBI at all. Perhaps in many years you could find yourself unemployed, even if that's unlikely, for unforeseen reasons. Let's say you have a mortgage and savings, and so by then it about cancels out. So your mortgage is paid off basically and UBI somewhat barely pays the property tax and bills. I'm not referring to your very own personal situation nor do I wish to inquire about it ; I'm saying it could work as a safety net, just as it does for the lower income people. Although I guess you'd be the sort of people to plan around it and the banks would know it. So, the banks might allow successful people to pile up yet more debt and thus claim the safety net for themselves lol.
Maybe I should have more optimistic thinking and think less of disaster scenarios, but I remember there are tales of people driving a fancy SUV to the food banks. I guess they're decently well dressed too. They had a smartphone (this was a few years ago), perhaps this was happening in France and on the French web but might be the US and US web, anyway an outraged pseudonymous person was bitching about all the "well off" people abusing the solidarity intended for real poor people. The infamy! except the SUV had no resale value, a phone has more use value than resale value as well, and these were obviously people in deep shit, with likely way more negative worth than lazy asses can ever accrue in their lifetime:). So, I for one welcome dressed up people with SUV (and families) to show up at food banks or soup kitchens, lol.
If you want to give me a "UBI" all you have to do is adjust the income tax curve, paying out a UBI and then taxing me more to pay for it is just an exercise in how to create black labor and tax fraud.
I did have an opposite thought, from the other side of the spectrum. Let's say I'm a modest entrepreneur, or get a huge confidence boost from the UBI and create my business/gig/whatever (I think people in their early 20s from a bourgeois family have plenty self-confidence when running a small gig). I then have a lot less pressure to rely on black labor for survival.
This might depend a lot on the nature of the business : I could be building barbecues in hard concrete in people's yards, get paid in cash 80% of the time and not get caught. But if my business relies on Uber-like platforms, getting paid on Paypal, ordering a lot of stuff from the Internet etc. then I'm creating a lot of electronic paper trails with my real name and address, or vulnerable proxies like accounts and emails, and I fear being caught. Perhaps I get caught instantly, if the tax services simply ask the Uber-like service for a list of all transactions. Hence with UBI, I might conduct much declared business (even if it adds up to something pretty modest) if I know I have the basic food, shelter and Internet covered.
I can very much understand what you're seeing from your end. Create more taxes which can be "optimized" while you get to keep the UBI they were supposed to pay for. I had never heard of that, thanks.
GGP was effectively arguing against minimum wage. I'll quote :
"What happens to the people would would have profited (not at a living wage level) by my eating out at McDonald's when I choose not to eat out because I don't want (and maybe can't afford) to pay that price?"
This may go ad infinitum until you have live-in valets and servant at $1 an hour (with a few expenses deduced from their pay). Albeit, while it worked up until the 19th century or early 20th century, people from the middle class or upper middle class today would be unable or unwilling to house them. Somehow there is a reasonable demand for fast food outlets and the dumbass kind of retail, as well as unskilled warehousing/shipping, although there's an excess supply of workers. With your hostility to minimum wage, you're turning people into not-quite-slaves. A more slave-like status would be more beneficial for them : want to eat cheaper burgers served by $5/hour or $2/hour workers? Then allow the workers to sleep in your own, personal home. Afterall, slaves got to be housed and fed. We could Uberize this : the fast food restaurant patrons/customers use an "app" when ordering their menu or burger, then at the end of the service an automatic lottery is organized. Workers are sent randomly to the customers's homes, to sleep for the night. (or three nights, or a working week). Every worker rotates and get sent to different customers (if you go there really often, you might get attributed a worker more than once in your lifetime, perhaps the same worker as last time). I'm making an absurd or sarcastic experiment there, to be clear.
About paying a kid to rake leaves. So, you're gonna pay a 12-year-old kid $10 to rake the leaves or something. It's bubble gum money, so a bit removed from living wages. It's also undeclared labour, I don't know if it'd be technically illegal in the US or not - it's obviously entirely benign and very small scale and well regarded by everyone. Now do that with grown-ups and this is getting into illegal, undocumented employment (Mexican gardener etc.). What's Uber : a large, yuuuge scale illegal employment scheme where Uber doesn't pay any of the payroll, tax, and contributions related to pensions or something (I don't know the exact US make up, or the make up for a given State) for each and every of its employees.
Where do these laws come from.. Might have to do with workers using bargaining power (that used to include getting shot and killed during strikes), over the decades and centuries, to collectively refuse to work more than five or six days a week, get fire exits that always open from the inside, two weeks vacations a year etc.., ultimately culminating in minimum wage laws, adjusted for inflation when favorable to the workers.
What's certainly true is Gen X and Millenials sort of woke up in a world where these things are seemingly God given rights. They're not (I'm not sure there's such things as "natural rights" either). That would explain all the real and perceived entitled lazy bums that people like you are constantly complaining about. The worker rights are a permanent bargain or negotiation, like setting your IT consulting rate but on a larger, collective scale, ultimately up to getting certain things inscribed in law. A minimum wage law is a good example and no less legitimate than interest groups voting themselves the F35 fighter or what have you.
I've had fun writing this somewhat.
I even sort of want to convince you this is like two people negotiating a price on a stall, or like a private contract between two free individuals, except the workers have to use their numbers, as in a swarm of fish. Pay the kid only $1 for a whole day worth of raking leaves, he maybe won't come back.. Or he will tell his kid friends you pay ridiculously low, and they all agree to avoid doing little works for such a miser you. Maybe one of the kids's dad will scorn you or laugh at you. But this was in the 196
Ooh, thanks. So I guess it's mostly used as fixed 'eeprom' anyway. Still nice for reads from a microcontroller/embedded.
Do e.g. SIM cards use NOR flash? if you have a fixed allocation for SMS messages and a fixed allocation for contacts, then you might simply do incremental writes when receiving messages or storing new contacts, and not do a power hungry block erase until needed, amirite?
Don't go at MacDonalds? That's a no brainer, if you're not willing to pay don't go for it. Why try to ruin other people's lives with your weird ideas. If you're not willing to pay a useful minimum wage, you might eventually end up with undernourished workers who can't afford heated water at home, perhaps try to live without electricity, they'll go childless, often homeless, family-less, will get serious health problems by age 50 or less, clog the emergency rooms instead of working, and die. Perhaps preparing unsafe or badly cooked burgers along the way, and go to work with contagious illness. Or, they will turn to criminality to supplement their income. More used needles and muggings in the streets, more waste of courts and batteries in tasers will age more.
By the way, let's say your a programmer. Just sitting on your ass and copy pasting crap, so I guess it's fair if you'll earn $22K without healthcare, right? Say, you pay $10000 a year for healthcare, $800 per month for rent, you have a whole big $200 a month left for food and cell plan. Don't complain, that's your new wage lol. Leave the money for those with a "real job".
The first Chromebook was on ARM I think. Another one had the Celeron 847 (x86, sandy bridge, dual core dual thread), it was the Acer C7. Real hard drive (320GB), 2GB built-in RAM and a SO-DIMM slot where you can drop another 4GB or 8GB. So regarding cost (sort of), storage and RAM this little thing did it a bit over 4 years ago.
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Thanks for the reply - I wanted to add that mine was a bit dickish with the snide remark.
This explains a lot, and I guess using debian sid instead of Ubuntu LTS and Mint would go a long way for some of these things albeit there's likely still a package maintainer in the loop.
These OS/distros I've mentioned that are in the "slow loop" do work well still, many users don't want the rug to be pulled under them :) ./configure make make install never damn working but still something to keep track and worry about.
I would say most people come from DOS/Windows and in that realm, you got like a base OS you would update every 2/3 years or even less often, yet easily kept applications up to the latest versions for those you cared about.
In Ubuntu there's ppa, great for some things but not always that great it just spares you the
Firefox is unusual as it forced itself into rolling relase even in LTS distros, as it's the most major of graphical applications and the most security critical.
Mixed desktop/server installs do exist, I like to say this existed in Windows 95 when you right-click a directory and hit "share".
I don't know how to conclude this. There's been a million flame wars already.
Sure, and I don't want / didn't want to put words in your mouth.
I'm on flimsy ground there, but Xbox is sold and marketed as a console rather than a general purpose computer.
If Microsoft does bring out netbooks fully locked down, i.e. ostensibly general purpose computers but locked down like so-called phone and tablets etc. there might be quite some outrage, by that I mean reaching at least in a limited way the courts, media and politics.
Google did allow free use of their Chrome netbooks under the guise of "developer mode" (with a caveat) and spared themselves some negative press I think.
Lock down the Windows version sure, but the whole hardware : I wish this won't fly so to speak.
At the same time, if only a couple percent or less use the machine in unlocked mode, as with Chromebooks, they hardly lose anything by allowing it.
The few times I wanted to try it (not in the 1999 days but in recent days), it never worked at all. I did try 'terminology' on its own : terminal emulator that promised cool graphics effects or something but it was corrupted or with meaningless/ugly/broken graphics and options.
Besides, the screenshots don't show a task bar so if this is yet another twm or fvwm clone please admit it.
Look, it's a crap situation, but in a few years when you're trying to use the web on some low end slow eight core piece of crap that shows a 1080p desktop on a TV (e.g. phone that runs a linux VM), it ought to be useful.
The better security might be, well, more sure, when "AI" is used to spread malware.
Now I feel for people with custom GUI stuff. But perhaps some of the features belong in the browser itself. Likely, Firefox might become meaningfully "embeddable" ; so many browsers are just skins of Chrome and iOS Safari, but for Firefox there aren't that many (most derivatives are alternate builds or historical)
So if you want your star-shaped upside down tabs and whatever, maybe there will be equivalent projects to Vivaldi, Brave etc.
A few thousand dollars, nope. But perhaps $200 for the left speaker, $200 for the right speaker, $100 for the amp and cables etc., $1 worth of speaker cable. Costlier of all, a nice big room and moving furniture around etc.
Then we can compare : cheap ass CD player or beat up PC from 1999 with a cheap sound card or DAC ($30).
For vinyl, you need a turn table, a needle, a pre-amp - the pre-amp can be built into anything : turn table, dj mixer, hifi amplifier, standalone. Perhaps $300/$400 total cost for cheap stuff? (up from $100 piece of crap that will damage the discs)
I think "good enough" might be affordable like that. But for the cost of a turntable and stuff you can get a high quality desktop PC (like, gold rated PSU, 110dB S/N ratio sound card and the latest 3GHz dual core) or consumer items like high end smartphone, TV, latest console. Or back up hard drives to not lose your music and crap.
I guess the value is to do stuff without needing a fucking computer. Even CD players are small single purpose computers, although they may count as non computer if you wish.
Even some millenials appreciate time away from computers.
Remember the arcade games? I believe that was progressive-scan, what we might now called 240p at 60Hz, with the RGB signal coming straight from the little computer buried in the cabinet.
It looked damn fine. You should have seen European SNES + TV with the RGB cable, on a good but otherwise unremarkable TV (ditto SNES/Genesis, and even the Dreamcast), it's much of what I grew up with.
SD TV was plagued by broadcasting standards and crap like connections like composite PAL. Even digital SDTV stuff on MPEG2, with the box or player thing plugged in composite PAL was fairly garbage compared to what the displays could possibly do.
In what will forever be a thought experiment.. a widescreen CRT TV might support 480p (possibly 576p. possibly 540p), i.e. without the interlacing. Simply scan the video multiple times so the refresh is 120Hz, 100Hz or even 96Hz for movies. Support legacy inputs if you wish (composite, SCART etc.) but have a HDMI input! Ideally, play some H264, VP8, H265, VP9 video as the source for your TV. (might end up downscaling some 1080i/p to 480p internally, don't care)
This would not even be entirely unheard of, 16:9 480p existed as "EDTV" although it was used on plasma and LCD I think. Also, 480p 16:9 is rampant on youtube and elsewhere.
On a grumpy note, I wish there were 480p 60fps content available on the web. No, I don't always have the bandwith for 720p60 and 1080p60 (and if I do, it stutters due to the stupid CPU requirements)
Maybe it's stretching things out.. but you might likely be able to install Cygwin and an X server, and run Hexchat from there.
I mean with an x86, depending on country, you might argue of an illegal bundled sale since it is so very much obvious the computer can run pretty much any other OS (such as Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu ) ; more so since Intel stopped doing the Atoms for smartphone that weren't 100% PC compatible.
So, I guess you indirectly mean it's for ARM pieces of crap? although there, the SoC is virtually guaranteed to support Android.
"This monitor comes with so many pixels, you won't even know there are that many!"
Wow, I never thought I would know about the mystery of 720 vs 704 resolution. Thanks.
This is more straightforward than RT. RT had a full desktop which you could not use for anything. Like hanging a delicious well made cake in front of your face, then taking it away when you try to reach for it. This was divine retribution not consumer product.
I won't try predicting how much it will fail or success - if it even gets released at all.
I find it more appealing than Chromebook and I would certainly choose it over Android for a toy non-smartphone computer, although a locked down computer still is offending.
If it's free as in beer and can run in a VM, that won't be the worst platform out there. It might allow side loading so you can install open source programs, warez and malware? The computer it's sold with also doesn't HAVE to be locked down with Secure Boot you can't disable (conjecturing most could be x86). If there are locked down x86 PC sold with it, the lawsuits will be interesting.
Lastly, the Windows Vista/7 win32 desktop is a bloated pig anyway so it might be interesting to see if Metro-only Windows runs really fast and efficient on low end or old hardware. Even though one of the first thing I'd look for is "lol can we install and run Wine in this"
Not really : there's ping, wget, firefox -P --no-remote
The latter gives you a secondary browser without a need for Chrome, Chromium or anything MS/Apple.
Windows Scripting Host is basically your bash + perl + awk environment, so to speak. So it IS supposed to launch executables, delete your data, break your computer, make your house catch on fire etc.
That it supports "JScript" perhaps is evil. Like it has to do with the era of ActiveX.
Yea, I recommend you watch this video if you need to watch something mildly humorous.
(apparently, you peeing on your own car doesn't succeed in chasing the cats out!)
Sometimes the odd thing can run on Wine. E.g., tool to edit a graphics card's BIOS to change the fan speed or clocks etc. ; BIOS is to be downloaded from the Internet or dumped from DOS. Edit your BIOS by running the tool in Wine. Boot DOS from USB (can be MS-DOS) or other means, then flash the modded BIOS to your graphics card.
Perhaps that's a silly example. But a simple, plain application with no particular dependencies or use of features has good chances of working. Like, about any single-author stuff that looks like freeware from the late 90s. How come stuff like that always works? It's like going back to the old days where everything worked (yes that's how I remember the DOS days.)
Well, long ago Microsoft implemented an "Are you sure?" when you run an .exe you downloaded from the web to your dekstop.
They do like the "Are you sure?" method a lot - it basically gives you root on most people's running and not-locked desktop session (friends and family etc.), at least on Windows 7.
People did complain about Windows not running unsigned drivers. Otherwise, Microsoft has been most interested in locking down their themes. Like removing the color schemes in Windows 7's classic mode. One of the worst Windows 7 "features", I hate that lol.
*word
Indeed there is much lecturing that says "start a business, fail, then fail again, then keep up and be successful!"
Exactly the same, just for people from a "good family".
Like, it's the American way of life or something.
The awesome part is how many dispositions already exist : when people have revolutionary great new ideas, it's often already been implemented in some form for 30 years, 50 years or 100 years. In that "line of business", you have tax write-offs and bankruptcy. Then it's private family assistance : get a free stay in 5000 sq. ft house or mansion as long as you want, lawyer uncle and/or cousin can help you, whatever.
But if you have none of that you might eventually fall back on foods stamps and medicaid (food stamps are merely pitiful and with too many roadblocks). Pitiful is the world, "food stamps" makes it feel like WW2 (even though you didn't have WW2 on your soil) or some poor Sci-Fi dystopia setting like 1984 movie, Soylent Green, Half-Life 2's intro. Duh.
Let's say you don't really need the UBI at all. Perhaps in many years you could find yourself unemployed, even if that's unlikely, for unforeseen reasons.
Let's say you have a mortgage and savings, and so by then it about cancels out. So your mortgage is paid off basically and UBI somewhat barely pays the property tax and bills. I'm not referring to your very own personal situation nor do I wish to inquire about it ; I'm saying it could work as a safety net, just as it does for the lower income people. Although I guess you'd be the sort of people to plan around it and the banks would know it. So, the banks might allow successful people to pile up yet more debt and thus claim the safety net for themselves lol.
Maybe I should have more optimistic thinking and think less of disaster scenarios, but I remember there are tales of people driving a fancy SUV to the food banks. I guess they're decently well dressed too. They had a smartphone (this was a few years ago), perhaps this was happening in France and on the French web but might be the US and US web, anyway an outraged pseudonymous person was bitching about all the "well off" people abusing the solidarity intended for real poor people. The infamy! except the SUV had no resale value, a phone has more use value than resale value as well, and these were obviously people in deep shit, with likely way more negative worth than lazy asses can ever accrue in their lifetime :).
So, I for one welcome dressed up people with SUV (and families) to show up at food banks or soup kitchens, lol.
If you want to give me a "UBI" all you have to do is adjust the income tax curve, paying out a UBI and then taxing me more to pay for it is just an exercise in how to create black labor and tax fraud.
I did have an opposite thought, from the other side of the spectrum. Let's say I'm a modest entrepreneur, or get a huge confidence boost from the UBI and create my business/gig/whatever (I think people in their early 20s from a bourgeois family have plenty self-confidence when running a small gig). I then have a lot less pressure to rely on black labor for survival.
This might depend a lot on the nature of the business : I could be building barbecues in hard concrete in people's yards, get paid in cash 80% of the time and not get caught. But if my business relies on Uber-like platforms, getting paid on Paypal, ordering a lot of stuff from the Internet etc. then I'm creating a lot of electronic paper trails with my real name and address, or vulnerable proxies like accounts and emails, and I fear being caught. Perhaps I get caught instantly, if the tax services simply ask the Uber-like service for a list of all transactions. Hence with UBI, I might conduct much declared business (even if it adds up to something pretty modest) if I know I have the basic food, shelter and Internet covered.
I can very much understand what you're seeing from your end. Create more taxes which can be "optimized" while you get to keep the UBI they were supposed to pay for. I had never heard of that, thanks.
I'm getting reasoned arguments at least.
GGP was effectively arguing against minimum wage. I'll quote :
"What happens to the people would would have profited (not at a living wage level) by my eating out at McDonald's when I choose not to eat out because I don't want (and maybe can't afford) to pay that price?"
This may go ad infinitum until you have live-in valets and servant at $1 an hour (with a few expenses deduced from their pay). Albeit, while it worked up until the 19th century or early 20th century, people from the middle class or upper middle class today would be unable or unwilling to house them.
Somehow there is a reasonable demand for fast food outlets and the dumbass kind of retail, as well as unskilled warehousing/shipping, although there's an excess supply of workers.
With your hostility to minimum wage, you're turning people into not-quite-slaves. A more slave-like status would be more beneficial for them : want to eat cheaper burgers served by $5/hour or $2/hour workers? Then allow the workers to sleep in your own, personal home. Afterall, slaves got to be housed and fed. We could Uberize this : the fast food restaurant patrons/customers use an "app" when ordering their menu or burger, then at the end of the service an automatic lottery is organized. Workers are sent randomly to the customers's homes, to sleep for the night. (or three nights, or a working week). Every worker rotates and get sent to different customers (if you go there really often, you might get attributed a worker more than once in your lifetime, perhaps the same worker as last time).
I'm making an absurd or sarcastic experiment there, to be clear.
About paying a kid to rake leaves. So, you're gonna pay a 12-year-old kid $10 to rake the leaves or something. It's bubble gum money, so a bit removed from living wages. It's also undeclared labour, I don't know if it'd be technically illegal in the US or not - it's obviously entirely benign and very small scale and well regarded by everyone. Now do that with grown-ups and this is getting into illegal, undocumented employment (Mexican gardener etc.). What's Uber : a large, yuuuge scale illegal employment scheme where Uber doesn't pay any of the payroll, tax, and contributions related to pensions or something (I don't know the exact US make up, or the make up for a given State) for each and every of its employees.
Where do these laws come from.. Might have to do with workers using bargaining power (that used to include getting shot and killed during strikes), over the decades and centuries, to collectively refuse to work more than five or six days a week, get fire exits that always open from the inside, two weeks vacations a year etc.., ultimately culminating in minimum wage laws, adjusted for inflation when favorable to the workers.
What's certainly true is Gen X and Millenials sort of woke up in a world where these things are seemingly God given rights. They're not (I'm not sure there's such things as "natural rights" either). That would explain all the real and perceived entitled lazy bums that people like you are constantly complaining about. The worker rights are a permanent bargain or negotiation, like setting your IT consulting rate but on a larger, collective scale, ultimately up to getting certain things inscribed in law. A minimum wage law is a good example and no less legitimate than interest groups voting themselves the F35 fighter or what have you.
I've had fun writing this somewhat.
I even sort of want to convince you this is like two people negotiating a price on a stall, or like a private contract between two free individuals, except the workers have to use their numbers, as in a swarm of fish.
Pay the kid only $1 for a whole day worth of raking leaves, he maybe won't come back.. Or he will tell his kid friends you pay ridiculously low, and they all agree to avoid doing little works for such a miser you. Maybe one of the kids's dad will scorn you or laugh at you. But this was in the 196
Replying to myself, I found this that says NOR erases are mega slow. So perhaps NAND on SIM cards.
http://focus.ti.com/pdfs/omap/...
Ooh, thanks.
So I guess it's mostly used as fixed 'eeprom' anyway.
Still nice for reads from a microcontroller/embedded.
Do e.g. SIM cards use NOR flash? if you have a fixed allocation for SMS messages and a fixed allocation for contacts, then you might simply do incremental writes when receiving messages or storing new contacts, and not do a power hungry block erase until needed, amirite?
Don't go at MacDonalds? That's a no brainer, if you're not willing to pay don't go for it. Why try to ruin other people's lives with your weird ideas. If you're not willing to pay a useful minimum wage, you might eventually end up with undernourished workers who can't afford heated water at home, perhaps try to live without electricity, they'll go childless, often homeless, family-less, will get serious health problems by age 50 or less, clog the emergency rooms instead of working, and die. Perhaps preparing unsafe or badly cooked burgers along the way, and go to work with contagious illness. Or, they will turn to criminality to supplement their income. More used needles and muggings in the streets, more waste of courts and batteries in tasers will age more.
By the way, let's say your a programmer. Just sitting on your ass and copy pasting crap, so I guess it's fair if you'll earn $22K without healthcare, right? Say, you pay $10000 a year for healthcare, $800 per month for rent, you have a whole big $200 a month left for food and cell plan. Don't complain, that's your new wage lol. Leave the money for those with a "real job".
The first Chromebook was on ARM I think. Another one had the Celeron 847 (x86, sandy bridge, dual core dual thread), it was the Acer C7. Real hard drive (320GB), 2GB built-in RAM and a SO-DIMM slot where you can drop another 4GB or 8GB. So regarding cost (sort of), storage and RAM this little thing did it a bit over 4 years ago.
NOR flash is byte (or bit) programmable.