Except this is more like going to Carl's Jr. and wanting to buy a large coke, and being told that you can only have that if you buy a burger and fries that you don't want. You can't just pay a reasonable price delta for the large coke, you also have to buy the shit you don't want for even more money.
And there's nothing you can do about it because there's only Carl's Jr. for 250 miles in every direction and their same bad deal.
You can have both though. The wage battle is the same, and we know companies can afford to pay $200k/yr, so they can and do continue to do so regardless of location. The difference is the company that can afford to pay me that and live in an area with a fraction of the cost is going to be better than the one who pays just a bit more in silicon valley, unless you are very young and really sold on urban lifestyle at any cost (I was never that young...)
All I know is living here I can have a fast car, a big house, have college funds for my kids, my wife can work or not at her discretion, we still have a well stocked retirement fund and I can also enjoy my job and not have to get promoted into low oxygen jobs. The si valley dream is still alive and well, these companies are making a fortune, but employees aren't benefitting because of high costs. It's bad for everyone: employers are having to fight a wage war that is starting to hurt, employees aren't really able to benefit from the money, while more and more wealth is concentrating in a small area unevenly, driving inflation up locally.
If you spread that across our entire country, things might be very different politically and economically. If everyone is bought in, people tend to think more alike.
There was a belief that men were just better writers, naturally. Today, there are more women published than men, and the publishing industry is notoriously tough to crack and demands sales above all else. In other words, the marketplace just preferred women authors to men.
Or women aren't interested in directing sci-fi and aren't trying. Or women aren't interested in directing the sort of sci-fi that I will line up to watch, and aren't trying.
I don't personally doubt that they CAN, I question if they want to.
I think you're missing the point. If there's something systemic that is preventing women from breaking into directing, that's potentially a huge pool of talent wasted. Who is to say there aren't women out there that could do a better job with a film than the male director that gets selected in part because of his sex? Making films isn't a cut and dried task — talent matters. We got Frankenstein (the novel) in spite of systemic sexism. What all did we miss?
As a stale pale male I'm pretty happy with the genre as it is, and don't care. What I'm tired of is bad sci-fi that has been ruined in some vain attempt to locate an audience that doesn't appear to be very interested. Turn on the SciFi channel and mostly get spammed with a lot of bad.
The sad parts are when they do a really good season one of something, and then go off the rails in season 2, searching for that broader audience. It's maddening.
I personally don't care who made the thing I watch, male or female, black or white. I don't even bother to look, as far as I know they are female. But the content I care about, and if it requires turning things I care about into things I don't care about to bring in women, or blacks or whatever, then it's futile. I'm no longer interested. The same goes double to bring in a larger male audience, a lot of sci-fi I used to like has been ruined in the past 15-20 years to make them more action packed and war-mongery. No thank you.
...the sillycon valley. It's always going to be the center of tech, but there's a large hunk of america that costs a tiny fraction where anyone can live like a king on $100k/yr.
It's a nice place, I spent the past week there, but I am glad to have left too. Paying 33% more in gas, 50% more in food, 30% more in groceries and the crowding and density didn't really endear it to me. To get an equivalent size house there to what I own would have cost almost 20x the price, and I know damn well I'm not going to get 20x the salary.
I'm just not convinced that in the digital era that the silicon valley created that we all need to pile in there anymore. Video conferencing works well, email works well, networks work well. Let's spread out some.
Subsidizing Amazon because it refuses to pay its employees enough to live
Amazon is one of many employers guilty of this. Remember Walmart? They are also guilty. These companies come up because they're huge, but this happens all over. The problem is not one company, ultimately where there is large supply but limited demand prices will drop.
I consider it working because the employees are productive and contributing. The funding model is not ideal, but it's not so easy to wave a wand and fix it.
It isn't fair to the workers, and it isn't fair to me
There is no fair. There are solutions and consequences. One solution is to raise minimum wage, in so doing inflation will also rise. This won't happen immediately, it will take some time, but ultimately the price of goods will rise. Assuming you and I get appropriate wage increases to compensate, these warehouse workers will ultimately remain in poverty, still on government subsidy. Or, you and I don't get raises, and we have less wealth.
Or we explicitly subsidize them, giving them what they NEED and controlling the damage. This seems more ideal to you and I, although maybe the people receiving foodstamps would prefer cash. It's not ideal, but it is working.
t isn't fair to business that pay their workers enough to live
These businesses are choosing to make the choice that isn't in their best interests. They should be lobbying for a minimum wage increase, or they need to accept the price of their ad hoc solution. I'm not saying I don't approve of them, I really do approve. But by using an ad hoc approach, they're injuring themselves when they probably should be pushing to set the bar in the right place.
Amazon didn't put them on welfare and food stamps. If anything, Amazon has started the process of helping them move away from that by getting work experience and skills which can translate into a better job later on.
This is what we say to make ourselves feel better. I don't really believe it though. This is likely the terminus for most of these workers. However as a society we have obtained productivity from these people, who might in other systems have been unproductive and possibly troublesome. Ultimately productive citizens produce a stronger nation and greater overall wealth for everyone. Any changes we consider should ensure that they remain productive.
I do not think Amazon in particular is the troublemaker.
In this case I'd say the "system" is working reasonably well under the boundary conditions we've set. These people are working, but not making enough and using government subsidy to make ends meet.
I'd be way more concerned about headlines like "Warehouse workers quit, make more money on social programs" or "Warehouse workers dying of starvation".
Is it fair that they don't make a living wage? No. But this is how our economic system works, and there's a lot of money and bullets invested in maintaining it no matter what.
That's the thing, I don't see anything wrong with Reddit (twitter is another story). These people exist, and while society has managed to mostly marginalize if not entirely abjure this element in every day social context, the power of the internet does serve to remind us that they still exist. The solution should mostly be the same: moderated spaces should have the power to remove this element and maintain the sanitized social sphere that they desire. Unmoderated forums are... buyer beware. Censorship will end up reigning supreme, but as long as its not in the hands of one person or group, it will be possible to attain some semblance of free speech.
The only thing "wrong" is that perhaps one might be led to believe there are more neo-nazi's (for example) than actually exist. The internet does not give us a good way of counting bodies, only posts and avatars, both of which are very misleading. In this way it's dangerous to "democracy" in that very small fringe elements might lead themselves to believe they are more popular than they actually are, and when they do not win the vote, are likely to believe foul play or conspiracy. That is kind of dangerous, but not reddit's fault.
I honestly have no idea what this guy is going on about. I hear people say things that sound like technical jargon, I have no idea what they are saying, but it's not really "out of touch".
I hear a lot of political crap, mostly from facebook, mostly from the opposite of Si Valley, and honestly most of it sounds like russbot vomit. Either that or the US is on the edge of a civil war, waged by a secret far right militia against some "liberal soft coup" that I've never heard of. Does this make me out of touch with reality? Or them? It's difficult to tell sometimes, and depends heavily on reference point.
I'm thinking this guy is just fishing for examples so we can write an article for him. I conclude this with my need for a tactical retreat to enact my vertical strategy.
I walked in the door, here in TX, and was greeted by a white guy with a Boston accent, not that it should matter. Now I know some Texans who would like Mass. to be declared a foreign state, but at present, it is not. The sales people I worked with were what I think is fairly representative of the US: mostly white, some hispanic, some black and one asian, based on his accent born in America. 0% indian "visa workers".
In fairness, that has been my experience with Ford, GM and Honda as well, so I'm not even really sure what your point is, except perhaps that you don't like Tesla and, optimistically, have an objection to the use of legal immigrants in the labor pool. Or you're a racist troll. One of those for sure.
I do work in the high tech industry, a disproportionate number of my coworkers are Indian "visa workers", or visa workers who have become citizens. But they're far too well paid to want to be salesmen, sales support staff or service staff. I might agree that it is tragic that we have to import foreign labor in highly educated positions because we can't find enough Americans to fill those positions, while we have a number of Americans who have no job at all, but that's a different problem. One we created with pretty much the wrong policy on education, recently made wrongest.
I'm glad though that you brought up Mercedes. My dad bought the Benz. It's been in the shop fully half the time due to an electronics problem that nobody seems to be able to diagnose. He's pretty pissed off, and he actually paid more for his more conventional luxury car than I paid for my fully electric sedan. So I can't support the Benz right now, and I have similarly bad views on Audi from coworkers. If I were to get anything else, it would be a BMW or another Accord.
Your post is 0% true, except you may or may not actually have a Benz. I doubt it.
Not to mention that most of the problem with American car MFGs are the people left in Detroit. They offshored most of the MFG, but it was the management (corporate and union) that was the actual problem.
I'd stay the hell away too. I'm happy with my made in the USA Honda's, and my made in the USA Tesla. When I had cars from American companies, none of them were actually made in America, and all of them had real problems before the first 5 years was up. So again, why does Elon want to use Detroit? I think he'd be better off using a kindergarten.
Netflix also provides funding for shows that may have begun on another network, but lost funding or whose target audience might be better served on Netflix. Basically they sometimes take a syndicated show that got cancelled and carry it on. I've seen it a couple times, but I can't at the moment remember where.
In context with technical people speaking technical jargon, not with the general population of the United States who almost certainly have no idea what that is, nor, specifically, a congressdork who actually demonstrated he has no idea what it is.
He's right to deny it, he'd be morally upstanding if he asked for clarification about the term before having answered.
Before you assert this is ridiculous, I bring up the Bill Clinton sex "lie". It turns out that while oral sex is as old as time, we can split hair on whether that is considered sexual intercourse without technically having lied. Most reasonable people would consider it to be a sex act, or even having had sex, but it is not "sexual intercourse" which has a precise definition. When up against the wall with this audience, splitting hairs is necessary. I'm not defending him, I hate what Facebook does, but all this circus is showing is how incapable our government is of understanding technology.
A better comparison would be a third party wiretapping your phone, creating a list of everyone you calling to, then selling such list for profit.
I think that's not a good example, if they were doing that then hopefully people go to jail.
I think a better comparison is wiretapping all of your friends and associates who all consented to it, and recording their side of the conversation, and interpolating things about you and your actions from the references. Then associating that with publicly available information about you.
It's not the same thing, and it does not seem like the law has anything to say about it. Friends are allowed to snitch on your activities to the police, the police are allowed to act on it, and it is admissible in court. There are a few exceptions that vary from place to place (doctors, lawyers, sometimes spouses, etc.). I think this is just the first time in history so much of this is thrust into the public for all to see. Normally what you and your friends do is localized to your local social/geographical sphere, it's not easily searched.
I think he denied the vocabulary word "Shadow Profile", which is reasonable to do since the term has no accepted definition in his context. A definition was asserted (which may or may not correlate to common parlance), and he admitted to doing what was asked.
I'm not sure there's anything to see here, except maybe the congressman asked the wrong question or asserted the wrong definition. I'm thinking the latter.
While, as a hardware engineer, I love the idea of factories coming back to the US so I don't have to deal with the incessant BS of dealing with China/Taiwan factories, I'm not going to blame the media for the reason they got there in the first place.
They got there because those companies can make things for cheap, they can do it by breaking many of the labor/environment laws the western world has adopted, they have a comparatively infinite supply of cheap labor, and they have a lot of inexpensive space to build out. So by moving this back to the US, and complying with US laws, paying US labor rates and US property values, the product is certainly going to cost more.
Will it cost more and be like Apple, a solid system that can be relied on? Or is to going to cost more and still feel like an HP/Dell/Lenovo craptop, wherein we should just go buy one of those for cheaper?
This is how the world really works. I wish them well, I hope they take the harder path and succeed, but I'm not going to blame the media for "spreading lies", I'm not going to blame the liberals for setting labor standards or environmental standards. I'm going to once again point the finger at ourselves for believing that we can have a global economy in the first place, as long as national boundaries and laws vary so wildly.
Slashdot Mirror
Except this is more like going to Carl's Jr. and wanting to buy a large coke, and being told that you can only have that if you buy a burger and fries that you don't want. You can't just pay a reasonable price delta for the large coke, you also have to buy the shit you don't want for even more money.
And there's nothing you can do about it because there's only Carl's Jr. for 250 miles in every direction and their same bad deal.
You can have both though. The wage battle is the same, and we know companies can afford to pay $200k/yr, so they can and do continue to do so regardless of location. The difference is the company that can afford to pay me that and live in an area with a fraction of the cost is going to be better than the one who pays just a bit more in silicon valley, unless you are very young and really sold on urban lifestyle at any cost (I was never that young...)
All I know is living here I can have a fast car, a big house, have college funds for my kids, my wife can work or not at her discretion, we still have a well stocked retirement fund and I can also enjoy my job and not have to get promoted into low oxygen jobs. The si valley dream is still alive and well, these companies are making a fortune, but employees aren't benefitting because of high costs. It's bad for everyone: employers are having to fight a wage war that is starting to hurt, employees aren't really able to benefit from the money, while more and more wealth is concentrating in a small area unevenly, driving inflation up locally.
If you spread that across our entire country, things might be very different politically and economically. If everyone is bought in, people tend to think more alike.
Oddly we make the same or close to the same inflated salary outside of Ca, and actually do live like kings. Maybe it depends on industry.
There was a belief that men were just better writers, naturally. Today, there are more women published than men, and the publishing industry is notoriously tough to crack and demands sales above all else. In other words, the marketplace just preferred women authors to men.
Or women aren't interested in directing sci-fi and aren't trying. Or women aren't interested in directing the sort of sci-fi that I will line up to watch, and aren't trying.
I don't personally doubt that they CAN, I question if they want to.
I think you're missing the point. If there's something systemic that is preventing women from breaking into directing, that's potentially a huge pool of talent wasted. Who is to say there aren't women out there that could do a better job with a film than the male director that gets selected in part because of his sex? Making films isn't a cut and dried task — talent matters. We got Frankenstein (the novel) in spite of systemic sexism. What all did we miss?
As a stale pale male I'm pretty happy with the genre as it is, and don't care. What I'm tired of is bad sci-fi that has been ruined in some vain attempt to locate an audience that doesn't appear to be very interested. Turn on the SciFi channel and mostly get spammed with a lot of bad.
The sad parts are when they do a really good season one of something, and then go off the rails in season 2, searching for that broader audience. It's maddening.
I personally don't care who made the thing I watch, male or female, black or white. I don't even bother to look, as far as I know they are female. But the content I care about, and if it requires turning things I care about into things I don't care about to bring in women, or blacks or whatever, then it's futile. I'm no longer interested. The same goes double to bring in a larger male audience, a lot of sci-fi I used to like has been ruined in the past 15-20 years to make them more action packed and war-mongery. No thank you.
...the sillycon valley. It's always going to be the center of tech, but there's a large hunk of america that costs a tiny fraction where anyone can live like a king on $100k/yr.
It's a nice place, I spent the past week there, but I am glad to have left too. Paying 33% more in gas, 50% more in food, 30% more in groceries and the crowding and density didn't really endear it to me. To get an equivalent size house there to what I own would have cost almost 20x the price, and I know damn well I'm not going to get 20x the salary.
I'm just not convinced that in the digital era that the silicon valley created that we all need to pile in there anymore. Video conferencing works well, email works well, networks work well. Let's spread out some.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I cannot take you seriously.
Subsidizing Amazon because it refuses to pay its employees enough to live
Amazon is one of many employers guilty of this. Remember Walmart? They are also guilty. These companies come up because they're huge, but this happens all over. The problem is not one company, ultimately where there is large supply but limited demand prices will drop.
I consider it working because the employees are productive and contributing. The funding model is not ideal, but it's not so easy to wave a wand and fix it.
It isn't fair to the workers, and it isn't fair to me
There is no fair. There are solutions and consequences. One solution is to raise minimum wage, in so doing inflation will also rise. This won't happen immediately, it will take some time, but ultimately the price of goods will rise. Assuming you and I get appropriate wage increases to compensate, these warehouse workers will ultimately remain in poverty, still on government subsidy. Or, you and I don't get raises, and we have less wealth.
Or we explicitly subsidize them, giving them what they NEED and controlling the damage. This seems more ideal to you and I, although maybe the people receiving foodstamps would prefer cash. It's not ideal, but it is working.
t isn't fair to business that pay their workers enough to live
These businesses are choosing to make the choice that isn't in their best interests. They should be lobbying for a minimum wage increase, or they need to accept the price of their ad hoc solution. I'm not saying I don't approve of them, I really do approve. But by using an ad hoc approach, they're injuring themselves when they probably should be pushing to set the bar in the right place.
Amazon didn't put them on welfare and food stamps. If anything, Amazon has started the process of helping them move away from that by getting work experience and skills which can translate into a better job later on.
This is what we say to make ourselves feel better. I don't really believe it though. This is likely the terminus for most of these workers. However as a society we have obtained productivity from these people, who might in other systems have been unproductive and possibly troublesome. Ultimately productive citizens produce a stronger nation and greater overall wealth for everyone. Any changes we consider should ensure that they remain productive.
I do not think Amazon in particular is the troublemaker.
In this case I'd say the "system" is working reasonably well under the boundary conditions we've set. These people are working, but not making enough and using government subsidy to make ends meet.
I'd be way more concerned about headlines like "Warehouse workers quit, make more money on social programs" or "Warehouse workers dying of starvation".
Is it fair that they don't make a living wage? No. But this is how our economic system works, and there's a lot of money and bullets invested in maintaining it no matter what.
That's the thing, I don't see anything wrong with Reddit (twitter is another story). These people exist, and while society has managed to mostly marginalize if not entirely abjure this element in every day social context, the power of the internet does serve to remind us that they still exist. The solution should mostly be the same: moderated spaces should have the power to remove this element and maintain the sanitized social sphere that they desire. Unmoderated forums are ... buyer beware. Censorship will end up reigning supreme, but as long as its not in the hands of one person or group, it will be possible to attain some semblance of free speech.
The only thing "wrong" is that perhaps one might be led to believe there are more neo-nazi's (for example) than actually exist. The internet does not give us a good way of counting bodies, only posts and avatars, both of which are very misleading. In this way it's dangerous to "democracy" in that very small fringe elements might lead themselves to believe they are more popular than they actually are, and when they do not win the vote, are likely to believe foul play or conspiracy. That is kind of dangerous, but not reddit's fault.
We knew that engineers would leave. The question is whether the jobs are leaving with them. I don't think I see that trend.
I honestly have no idea what this guy is going on about. I hear people say things that sound like technical jargon, I have no idea what they are saying, but it's not really "out of touch".
I hear a lot of political crap, mostly from facebook, mostly from the opposite of Si Valley, and honestly most of it sounds like russbot vomit. Either that or the US is on the edge of a civil war, waged by a secret far right militia against some "liberal soft coup" that I've never heard of. Does this make me out of touch with reality? Or them? It's difficult to tell sometimes, and depends heavily on reference point.
I'm thinking this guy is just fishing for examples so we can write an article for him. I conclude this with my need for a tactical retreat to enact my vertical strategy.
I walked in the door, here in TX, and was greeted by a white guy with a Boston accent, not that it should matter. Now I know some Texans who would like Mass. to be declared a foreign state, but at present, it is not. The sales people I worked with were what I think is fairly representative of the US: mostly white, some hispanic, some black and one asian, based on his accent born in America. 0% indian "visa workers".
In fairness, that has been my experience with Ford, GM and Honda as well, so I'm not even really sure what your point is, except perhaps that you don't like Tesla and, optimistically, have an objection to the use of legal immigrants in the labor pool. Or you're a racist troll. One of those for sure.
I do work in the high tech industry, a disproportionate number of my coworkers are Indian "visa workers", or visa workers who have become citizens. But they're far too well paid to want to be salesmen, sales support staff or service staff. I might agree that it is tragic that we have to import foreign labor in highly educated positions because we can't find enough Americans to fill those positions, while we have a number of Americans who have no job at all, but that's a different problem. One we created with pretty much the wrong policy on education, recently made wrongest.
I'm glad though that you brought up Mercedes. My dad bought the Benz. It's been in the shop fully half the time due to an electronics problem that nobody seems to be able to diagnose. He's pretty pissed off, and he actually paid more for his more conventional luxury car than I paid for my fully electric sedan. So I can't support the Benz right now, and I have similarly bad views on Audi from coworkers. If I were to get anything else, it would be a BMW or another Accord.
Your post is 0% true, except you may or may not actually have a Benz. I doubt it.
Not to mention that most of the problem with American car MFGs are the people left in Detroit. They offshored most of the MFG, but it was the management (corporate and union) that was the actual problem.
I'd stay the hell away too. I'm happy with my made in the USA Honda's, and my made in the USA Tesla. When I had cars from American companies, none of them were actually made in America, and all of them had real problems before the first 5 years was up. So again, why does Elon want to use Detroit? I think he'd be better off using a kindergarten.
Netflix also provides funding for shows that may have begun on another network, but lost funding or whose target audience might be better served on Netflix. Basically they sometimes take a syndicated show that got cancelled and carry it on. I've seen it a couple times, but I can't at the moment remember where.
If the problem is idiots
That's the problem, we don't know that. Tesla said so.
I'm not sure I totally trust the NTSB either, so I'm happy to have two points of view.
In context with technical people speaking technical jargon, not with the general population of the United States who almost certainly have no idea what that is, nor, specifically, a congressdork who actually demonstrated he has no idea what it is.
He's right to deny it, he'd be morally upstanding if he asked for clarification about the term before having answered.
Before you assert this is ridiculous, I bring up the Bill Clinton sex "lie". It turns out that while oral sex is as old as time, we can split hair on whether that is considered sexual intercourse without technically having lied. Most reasonable people would consider it to be a sex act, or even having had sex, but it is not "sexual intercourse" which has a precise definition. When up against the wall with this audience, splitting hairs is necessary. I'm not defending him, I hate what Facebook does, but all this circus is showing is how incapable our government is of understanding technology.
A better comparison would be a third party wiretapping your phone, creating a list of everyone you calling to, then selling such list for profit.
I think that's not a good example, if they were doing that then hopefully people go to jail.
I think a better comparison is wiretapping all of your friends and associates who all consented to it, and recording their side of the conversation, and interpolating things about you and your actions from the references. Then associating that with publicly available information about you.
It's not the same thing, and it does not seem like the law has anything to say about it. Friends are allowed to snitch on your activities to the police, the police are allowed to act on it, and it is admissible in court. There are a few exceptions that vary from place to place (doctors, lawyers, sometimes spouses, etc.). I think this is just the first time in history so much of this is thrust into the public for all to see. Normally what you and your friends do is localized to your local social/geographical sphere, it's not easily searched.
I think he denied the vocabulary word "Shadow Profile", which is reasonable to do since the term has no accepted definition in his context. A definition was asserted (which may or may not correlate to common parlance), and he admitted to doing what was asked.
I'm not sure there's anything to see here, except maybe the congressman asked the wrong question or asserted the wrong definition. I'm thinking the latter.
Too bad only the result was committed, some people in east texas need to be committed as well.
While, as a hardware engineer, I love the idea of factories coming back to the US so I don't have to deal with the incessant BS of dealing with China/Taiwan factories, I'm not going to blame the media for the reason they got there in the first place.
They got there because those companies can make things for cheap, they can do it by breaking many of the labor/environment laws the western world has adopted, they have a comparatively infinite supply of cheap labor, and they have a lot of inexpensive space to build out. So by moving this back to the US, and complying with US laws, paying US labor rates and US property values, the product is certainly going to cost more.
Will it cost more and be like Apple, a solid system that can be relied on? Or is to going to cost more and still feel like an HP/Dell/Lenovo craptop, wherein we should just go buy one of those for cheaper?
This is how the world really works. I wish them well, I hope they take the harder path and succeed, but I'm not going to blame the media for "spreading lies", I'm not going to blame the liberals for setting labor standards or environmental standards. I'm going to once again point the finger at ourselves for believing that we can have a global economy in the first place, as long as national boundaries and laws vary so wildly.
Many of their chipsets are made in malaysia, or were when I worked there.
Would a horseless carriage be useful if it required a horse?
The problem is when they try to save some money and use a donkey instead. They drive like a total ass.
It needs to keep his contacts exposed and on the pcb at all times to avoid any provocation on its part.