Of course, that comes with the need for working remotely, doesn't it? Those ridiculously low-priced homes in low-cost areas are generally so, because there's not much of a job market, there. People always ask why I've lived in such expensive cities my whole life (San Francisco, Portland, Denver) and the answer is "because that is where the high tech jobs are most abundantly found". I would love to have moved into the middle of fucking-nowhere Kansas where my significant other once bought a gorgeous home for under $100k, but then I'd be subjected to the limitations of that job market, too. (Even though I've telecommuted nearly my whole life, businesses are often constrained by the states they do work in as to where they can employ people -- unless you are truly contracting yourself out).
That's also why working remotely should be seen as an attractive benefit, by employers. The same way health insurance and other things are. I have turned down significantly better paying gigs over the last decade, simply because an extra $20k or so does not compensate for the need to own a car, spend hours every day in it, deal with water-cooler bullshit, and exist under flickering fluorescent lights in a crowded office.
I don't understand how this happens. Are these people not social? Are they not assertive? Do they not push back? I'm a few years away from 40, so I don't think I qualify for that range just yet, but the people I work with who are a good deal older than me are aggressive in voicing their disagreements, pointing out where things are fucked, not accepting shitty practices, and pushing for things to be corrected. They don't sit quietly by while products, processes, or themselves are screwed. Where the younger guys may be timid, the more seasoned among them will firmly tell you your shit is fucked and encourage you (and help, if needed) to unfuck it.
Just because two notable names have made a big deal about it doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of such positions. Asking someone to uproot their entire lives and move across the country to benefit you with their extensive knowledge and experience for work that absolutely does not require your on-site and on-hands presence far exceeds "flexibility".
The press covers what the administration instructs them to cover and they don't have time for investigative journalism, when there's tweets to twitter.
Look how things seem to have become worse almost exponentially faster over the last fifteen to twenty years. That all happened under administrations that thought you would give a shit if they were found out.
Now that the seemingly worst has surfaced and society declared that they don't give a fuck -- made some late-night comedy out of it, shrugged, and went back to watching The Walking Dead -- just think how much worse things will get and how much faster it will get there?
Democracy is a fine form of government. The best, in fact. The problem is the user-base. You have all the tools to hold your politicians and government accountable, yet do nothing with them. You have all the tools to assure freedom and self-determination for every individual, yet use those tools to impose your personal ideals and whims upon the rest of society, instead. Yes, it becomes a filthy game of mob-rule when the majority of voters are stupid mouth-breathers, but that is a failure of society and not the form of government and its tools. The solution is to build a better user. Built a better voter. Build a better sense of civics. This means teaching your children about the system and about the fundamental elements of a free society rather than just teaching your child what people your family hates and that you should form all your voting decisions around making sure they are stomped on. This means educating children in school rather than merely indoctrinating them with government propaganda. It means spending more energy teaching children their rights and their civic obligations to maintain the freedoms they have for each following generation rather than eroding them than you spend on strip-searching them, punishing them for speech, and treating them like criminals deprived of all civil liberties.
If you want a better government, breed a better citizen. If we're too lazy and self-involved to do that, then we might as well move to another form of government. Perhaps a meritocracy? At least smart achieving go-getters probably couldn't do much worse than uninformed, selfish, myopic, hateful, uneducated, apathetic, disinterested mouth-breathers.
Also, it's funny that concepts like freedom and self-determination and government leaving you alone at every reasonable opportunity and holding it accountable for its violations of its people is something to rebel against. It's like rebelling against the constitution or something. God damn, people are dumb. I'm glad I'll be dead in a few years or a few decades, because frankly it means not having to give half a fuck about the direction everyone is going in.
So you'd rather take a total shitfest that is the result of ineptitude than a shitfest that is the result of intentional choices of specifically identifiable persons?
I dunno. We have a pretty good form of government with pretty good limitations on that government set out in the Constitution. The only real problem seems to be our insistence on trying to "re-interpret it" and letting people get away with doing that. Complaining about our form of government as a foundational concept as laid out by our founding fathers is a lot like ignoring 90% of a recipe that your mom gives you and then telling her that her recipe tasted like shit.
Why couldn't they pick and choose the ideals to have resurface? Why couldn't you appreciate a time when a hardworking single income earner could support the family and the spouse could afford the time and effort to care for the family and home and errands that *nobody* in families seems to have the time for, anymore . . . and, you know, not support homophobia, racism, labeling everyone commies, etc?
I mean, not that I support this movement, but the idea that if you want to return to some things from a prior time means you want all the bad shit too is silly.
It has been said many times - democracy is a shitty form of government, but it's still the best form of government we've come up. There's simply no way to really afford freedom and independence and self-determination of a society without also allowing every stupid mother fucker in the place to have a vote with just as much weight as the smartest guy.
Of course, there's also a *solution* to that -- don't try to influence the weight of the vote. Instead, increase the education of the majority of voters so that they can make smarter choices. Unfortunately, we have a government that dumbs down society through education and a society that puts little value on education. Good luck fighting against *that*.
I just wish I were born a little later than I was. I have a feeling that, someday, we'll look back on space farmers as a romantic lot. And if you have space farmers, you need space cowboys. I guess I'd rather be a space cowboy, then. And then when I get a little too old for that, I could retire to space farming. Never whaling, though.
Exactly. That was the point I was making that a few people didn't seem to grasp. There is nothing inherently better about "real currency" over bitcoins (allowing certain assumptions about security, privacy, anonymity, stability of bitcoin). It's just that with a dollar, I have not only privacy, but selection. I can buy anything money will buy, with a dollar. With bitcoin, I can only buy what bitcoin will buy -- a selection that pales compared to the dollar (seriously, I've said it before -- the selection of things you can buy with bitcoin generally still looks like the ticket redemption desk of a Chuck E Cheese's). Unless I want to "check out" my bitcoins by exchanging them into dollars . . . which involves paying a MASSIVE fee to the exchange service (what is it, 15% right now? exchange rate fees are usually like 3% for currencies?).
So, if people want to make a ton of assumptions about bitcoin's positives, the bitcoins could someday be worth a lot. Until that day, they're just magic internet money that you can't do much with, unless you're willing to pay a big cut . . . to convert them into "real money" . . . that you can buy real things with . . . in which case, is' essentially just Flooze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com).
Personally, I'd love for a perfectly secure, anonymous, unregulated, universal, stable, reliable currency that I didn't have to worry about magically disappearing on me and could be used online and off and anywhere in the world for any product, service, or good on the planet. Why wouldn't we want that? I just don't think that is Bitcoin. Not yet, at least. In the meantime, it's nothing more than a bubble about to burst propagated by a bunch of drooling "durr me buy fleet of GPUs me mine internet money" morons and indexes/exchanges.
Comment: For the price of Bitcoin to really mean anything, you have to be able to exchange it for local currency
Ignorance: Blissfully believing that the price of stock or the dollar really mean anything; It's the exchange rate for GOODS AND SERVICES you fool. These can be transacted with bitcoin or dollars. Except with bitcoin I can exchange them for stuff not in the company store.
Sorry, but no. "You fool". The value of real-world currency is just as make-believe as bitcoin, true, but I can walk down to the store and buy groceries with the dollar. I can go to the store and buy a video card with the dollar. I can fill my gas tank up with the dollar. I can pay my lawn service with the dollar. I can pay my contractor to redo my kitchen with the dollar. I can buy a bus ticket with the dollar. I can pay my pharmacist with the dollar.
With bitcoin, I can pay for a few services online (here's a huge list of some places you can use bitcoins -- sexual hypnosis tapes, anarchy keyrings and other crap) or get some random crap delivered to me that looks like it came from the back of a 1970s comic book ad. I can only have flexibility, anonymity, and usefulness from it once I have exchanged it for a "real" currency. Like the dollar. And, to do that, I have to give a ridiculously large chunk to the exchanger.
In short, the difference between real world currency and bitcoin is that I can buy anything I want that money will buy. With a few exceptions, your selection looks like the ticket redemption section of a fucking Chuck E. Cheese's.
Despite the flood of the Bitcoin Defense Force, I still purport that Bitcoin is what it clearly was from day one, back when the presentation on what it is and how to use it on their website made it look like one of those scummy scams that you had over a decade ago. You know, the "we pay you to run calculations on your PC!". Run their application on your PC 24x7 and they'll (maybe) pay you a few pennies a month. They were absurd and that Bitcoin chose to present itself in such a similar way as to give off "wait, is this some goofy scam?" way from day one was very telling.
Anyway, I have one point and one question to pose:
Question: If the government regulates, controls, monitors, tracks, and taxes bitcoin, what is the benefit of bitcoin, anymore?
Comment: For the price of Bitcoin to really mean anything, you have to be able to exchange it for local currency that you can use to actually buy things with (you know, unless you want to use your one bitcoin to buy $600 worth of shampoo from the online version of a shitty dollar-store or pay your webhost online). To do that, you have to sell them. Now, take a look at the spread on Bitcoin. Seriously, look how wide that spread is. Makes it pretty clear what the game is, doesn't it?
Further, governments have been pushing for the eradication of hard currency for quite awhile. They may just see Bitcoin as something they can usurp to push for the whole "cashless society" bullshit.
Instagram and Snapchat are two examples of how there is no such thing as a stupid internet idea. Or, rather, there are plenty of stupid internet ideas, but they'll make billions anyway.
Yeah! Stop going to work to get work done, you fucking millennial slacker! Work is for sharing a wallet full of baby photos and bitching about your spouse and forming alliances so someone will cover you when you leave half way through work every third day to deal with your children!
True, but like other delivery methods, the ones who get the funding and assistance of youtube and YouTube "networks" are the mouth-breathing shit-shows and if the others want to make a living from their hard work, they're going to feel compelled to dumb themselves down, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, that comes with the need for working remotely, doesn't it? Those ridiculously low-priced homes in low-cost areas are generally so, because there's not much of a job market, there. People always ask why I've lived in such expensive cities my whole life (San Francisco, Portland, Denver) and the answer is "because that is where the high tech jobs are most abundantly found". I would love to have moved into the middle of fucking-nowhere Kansas where my significant other once bought a gorgeous home for under $100k, but then I'd be subjected to the limitations of that job market, too. (Even though I've telecommuted nearly my whole life, businesses are often constrained by the states they do work in as to where they can employ people -- unless you are truly contracting yourself out).
That's also why working remotely should be seen as an attractive benefit, by employers. The same way health insurance and other things are. I have turned down significantly better paying gigs over the last decade, simply because an extra $20k or so does not compensate for the need to own a car, spend hours every day in it, deal with water-cooler bullshit, and exist under flickering fluorescent lights in a crowded office.
I don't understand how this happens. Are these people not social? Are they not assertive? Do they not push back? I'm a few years away from 40, so I don't think I qualify for that range just yet, but the people I work with who are a good deal older than me are aggressive in voicing their disagreements, pointing out where things are fucked, not accepting shitty practices, and pushing for things to be corrected. They don't sit quietly by while products, processes, or themselves are screwed. Where the younger guys may be timid, the more seasoned among them will firmly tell you your shit is fucked and encourage you (and help, if needed) to unfuck it.
Just because two notable names have made a big deal about it doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of such positions. Asking someone to uproot their entire lives and move across the country to benefit you with their extensive knowledge and experience for work that absolutely does not require your on-site and on-hands presence far exceeds "flexibility".
The press covers what the administration instructs them to cover and they don't have time for investigative journalism, when there's tweets to twitter.
Look how things seem to have become worse almost exponentially faster over the last fifteen to twenty years. That all happened under administrations that thought you would give a shit if they were found out.
Now that the seemingly worst has surfaced and society declared that they don't give a fuck -- made some late-night comedy out of it, shrugged, and went back to watching The Walking Dead -- just think how much worse things will get and how much faster it will get there?
Democracy is a fine form of government. The best, in fact. The problem is the user-base. You have all the tools to hold your politicians and government accountable, yet do nothing with them. You have all the tools to assure freedom and self-determination for every individual, yet use those tools to impose your personal ideals and whims upon the rest of society, instead. Yes, it becomes a filthy game of mob-rule when the majority of voters are stupid mouth-breathers, but that is a failure of society and not the form of government and its tools. The solution is to build a better user. Built a better voter. Build a better sense of civics. This means teaching your children about the system and about the fundamental elements of a free society rather than just teaching your child what people your family hates and that you should form all your voting decisions around making sure they are stomped on. This means educating children in school rather than merely indoctrinating them with government propaganda. It means spending more energy teaching children their rights and their civic obligations to maintain the freedoms they have for each following generation rather than eroding them than you spend on strip-searching them, punishing them for speech, and treating them like criminals deprived of all civil liberties.
If you want a better government, breed a better citizen. If we're too lazy and self-involved to do that, then we might as well move to another form of government. Perhaps a meritocracy? At least smart achieving go-getters probably couldn't do much worse than uninformed, selfish, myopic, hateful, uneducated, apathetic, disinterested mouth-breathers.
Uh. Baby boomers are all over 60.
Also, it's funny that concepts like freedom and self-determination and government leaving you alone at every reasonable opportunity and holding it accountable for its violations of its people is something to rebel against. It's like rebelling against the constitution or something. God damn, people are dumb. I'm glad I'll be dead in a few years or a few decades, because frankly it means not having to give half a fuck about the direction everyone is going in.
And yet everyone eagerly pushes for more government in our lives. Go figure.
"Government sucks and can't do anything right and I want it to carry out my personal agenda against the rest of society!".
So you'd rather take a total shitfest that is the result of ineptitude than a shitfest that is the result of intentional choices of specifically identifiable persons?
I dunno. We have a pretty good form of government with pretty good limitations on that government set out in the Constitution. The only real problem seems to be our insistence on trying to "re-interpret it" and letting people get away with doing that. Complaining about our form of government as a foundational concept as laid out by our founding fathers is a lot like ignoring 90% of a recipe that your mom gives you and then telling her that her recipe tasted like shit.
Why couldn't they pick and choose the ideals to have resurface? Why couldn't you appreciate a time when a hardworking single income earner could support the family and the spouse could afford the time and effort to care for the family and home and errands that *nobody* in families seems to have the time for, anymore . . . and, you know, not support homophobia, racism, labeling everyone commies, etc?
I mean, not that I support this movement, but the idea that if you want to return to some things from a prior time means you want all the bad shit too is silly.
It has been said many times - democracy is a shitty form of government, but it's still the best form of government we've come up. There's simply no way to really afford freedom and independence and self-determination of a society without also allowing every stupid mother fucker in the place to have a vote with just as much weight as the smartest guy.
Of course, there's also a *solution* to that -- don't try to influence the weight of the vote. Instead, increase the education of the majority of voters so that they can make smarter choices. Unfortunately, we have a government that dumbs down society through education and a society that puts little value on education. Good luck fighting against *that*.
Isn't it more like the gulf between focusing on a service versus focusing on the nepotism behind awarding contracts to provide that service?
I just wish I were born a little later than I was. I have a feeling that, someday, we'll look back on space farmers as a romantic lot. And if you have space farmers, you need space cowboys. I guess I'd rather be a space cowboy, then. And then when I get a little too old for that, I could retire to space farming. Never whaling, though.
Can't wait for the nurses to still poke 700 holes in my arm trying to get the vein, anyway.
If your broker took 20% of every transaction, of course. :)
Exactly. That was the point I was making that a few people didn't seem to grasp. There is nothing inherently better about "real currency" over bitcoins (allowing certain assumptions about security, privacy, anonymity, stability of bitcoin). It's just that with a dollar, I have not only privacy, but selection. I can buy anything money will buy, with a dollar. With bitcoin, I can only buy what bitcoin will buy -- a selection that pales compared to the dollar (seriously, I've said it before -- the selection of things you can buy with bitcoin generally still looks like the ticket redemption desk of a Chuck E Cheese's). Unless I want to "check out" my bitcoins by exchanging them into dollars . . . which involves paying a MASSIVE fee to the exchange service (what is it, 15% right now? exchange rate fees are usually like 3% for currencies?).
So, if people want to make a ton of assumptions about bitcoin's positives, the bitcoins could someday be worth a lot. Until that day, they're just magic internet money that you can't do much with, unless you're willing to pay a big cut . . . to convert them into "real money" . . . that you can buy real things with . . . in which case, is' essentially just Flooze (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com).
Personally, I'd love for a perfectly secure, anonymous, unregulated, universal, stable, reliable currency that I didn't have to worry about magically disappearing on me and could be used online and off and anywhere in the world for any product, service, or good on the planet. Why wouldn't we want that? I just don't think that is Bitcoin. Not yet, at least. In the meantime, it's nothing more than a bubble about to burst propagated by a bunch of drooling "durr me buy fleet of GPUs me mine internet money" morons and indexes/exchanges.
Sex.
Comment: For the price of Bitcoin to really mean anything, you have to be able to exchange it for local currency
Ignorance: Blissfully believing that the price of stock or the dollar really mean anything; It's the exchange rate for GOODS AND SERVICES you fool. These can be transacted with bitcoin or dollars. Except with bitcoin I can exchange them for stuff not in the company store.
Sorry, but no. "You fool". The value of real-world currency is just as make-believe as bitcoin, true, but I can walk down to the store and buy groceries with the dollar. I can go to the store and buy a video card with the dollar. I can fill my gas tank up with the dollar. I can pay my lawn service with the dollar. I can pay my contractor to redo my kitchen with the dollar. I can buy a bus ticket with the dollar. I can pay my pharmacist with the dollar.
With bitcoin, I can pay for a few services online (here's a huge list of some places you can use bitcoins -- sexual hypnosis tapes, anarchy keyrings and other crap) or get some random crap delivered to me that looks like it came from the back of a 1970s comic book ad. I can only have flexibility, anonymity, and usefulness from it once I have exchanged it for a "real" currency. Like the dollar. And, to do that, I have to give a ridiculously large chunk to the exchanger.
In short, the difference between real world currency and bitcoin is that I can buy anything I want that money will buy. With a few exceptions, your selection looks like the ticket redemption section of a fucking Chuck E. Cheese's.
Took me way too long to realize what four-digit ID you were talking about. *sigh*
Despite the flood of the Bitcoin Defense Force, I still purport that Bitcoin is what it clearly was from day one, back when the presentation on what it is and how to use it on their website made it look like one of those scummy scams that you had over a decade ago. You know, the "we pay you to run calculations on your PC!". Run their application on your PC 24x7 and they'll (maybe) pay you a few pennies a month. They were absurd and that Bitcoin chose to present itself in such a similar way as to give off "wait, is this some goofy scam?" way from day one was very telling.
Anyway, I have one point and one question to pose:
Question: If the government regulates, controls, monitors, tracks, and taxes bitcoin, what is the benefit of bitcoin, anymore?
Comment: For the price of Bitcoin to really mean anything, you have to be able to exchange it for local currency that you can use to actually buy things with (you know, unless you want to use your one bitcoin to buy $600 worth of shampoo from the online version of a shitty dollar-store or pay your webhost online). To do that, you have to sell them. Now, take a look at the spread on Bitcoin. Seriously, look how wide that spread is. Makes it pretty clear what the game is, doesn't it?
Further, governments have been pushing for the eradication of hard currency for quite awhile. They may just see Bitcoin as something they can usurp to push for the whole "cashless society" bullshit.
Instagram and Snapchat are two examples of how there is no such thing as a stupid internet idea. Or, rather, there are plenty of stupid internet ideas, but they'll make billions anyway.
We want to reveal the lie before Snowden reveals the truth.
Something something "climate change".
Everyone seems to be missing his question. He isn't asking "how do I talk to people, because garsh, I'm awkward". He''s asking:
How do you keep colleagues abreast of your work without having exponentially many needless conversations?
Yeah! Stop going to work to get work done, you fucking millennial slacker! Work is for sharing a wallet full of baby photos and bitching about your spouse and forming alliances so someone will cover you when you leave half way through work every third day to deal with your children!
True, but like other delivery methods, the ones who get the funding and assistance of youtube and YouTube "networks" are the mouth-breathing shit-shows and if the others want to make a living from their hard work, they're going to feel compelled to dumb themselves down, too.