Two weeks ago my Persian friend asked me if I knew of any schools that can teach him to be a pilot in a short period of time. I told him that if there were, they'd be nervous about having an Arab as a student.
A few months before that my Indian (as in from India) friend had to move out of his house, and asked if he could stay at my place for a while until he finds a permanent residence. I told him sure, there are lots of Indian reservations around here (Phoenix.)
In either case this does go to further a point I commonly make: Socialized health care doesn't necessarily lead to increased life expectancy. I think America has a relatively shorter one mainly due to our lifestyles. Socialized medicine isn't going to do anything to stop obesity or drug abuse for example.
I had the exact same specs in my 2000 Inspiron 8000, probably even the exact same panel too, though to be honest the display looked washed out and had a crap viewing angle compared to even the lower resolution displays we have today. So long as you were looking at it from dead center it looked pretty nice for its time though.
It is slightly different in that Tesla cars are a lot more energy efficient than gas driven cars.
That is, it isn't a simple matter of transferring the energy from the power company to the car instead of getting it from the pump, rather the car itself uses less energy period. This is mostly a result of combustion engines wasting most of their energy towards producing heat rather than actually putting the car in motion (Hybrids are also guilty here - their main saving grace is that energy production is at more of a constant rate as well as frequent re-use of kinetic energy, so less energy is wasted as heat than a regular car, but energy is still wasted almost as much.)
Though progressives often have these strange justifications for more government regulation. I recall once on slashdot talking up how stupid it is that in Oregon you can't pump your own gas due to regulation. Sure enough some derp comes along talking about how he'd prefer it that way for safety reasons, never mind that actually driving a car is a *lot* more dangerous than simply putting gas in it.
As much as I know it pains the US to see privacy advocacy, I'm a bit dumbfounded as to why the UN would want it. Most of its members don't even like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, so why would they give a damn about privacy? The only thing I can think of is to kneecap the competitive advantage that the US economy has in the tech sector, which by its nature is very anti-privacy, though more as a result of the way it functions than any interest in spying on you.
The EU is already red handed guilty of this because they raise a huge stink over it and want to push laws trying to bring more business to their domestic tech services, even though their governments often do worse things (Or would do worse things if they had the capability. Which they mainly don't due to a lack of jurisdiction; part of the reason why they need to have more of these services run domestically.)
Hmm...I wonder if you have something there. The "generation y" (the generation I'm a part of, actually) mostly seems to value "being a badass" (or something to that effect, I don't quite know how to name it.) By that, I mean this:
That is today's "alpha male". A pathetic loser who has done jail a few times, but that is where selective selection is carrying us, so who am I to judge. That and of course, this:
Probably not good to post your name and UID if your goal is to prevent overzealous moderation - some moderators like to go looking for old posts of yours and downmod them to hit your karma score anyways. It's an asshole thing to do, but they do it anyways. Just part of how slashdot's moderation system is broken, just yesterday I had a post get moderated "redundant" because somebody disagreed with it, and I get moderated "overrated" all the time for the same reason.
Doubt it. It's not advanced because it's not that interesting. Everyone can write code and share code and be sure that, because of copyright protection and whatever OSS license, it will be returned to the public. Surely this is better than having to fiddle with hex dumps for ten hours just to understand that they changed that int to a float.
I think it would be just because of the sheer profit involved in doing so would be great. Take for example how some Chinese company wrote their own World of Warcraft client from scratch (deliberately sans the graphics) that blizzards servers can't distinguish from a real client so that they could run multiple instances of bots on fewer machines for gold farming.
However on that same token, anti-debugger code would probably become a lot more advanced as well.
False dilemma. Our education system can suck on average and still produce plenty of competent engineers. The US has a very stratified education system; there's the school systems in poor areas which produce illiterates, and the school systems in wealthy areas which have pretty decent results.
It's highly unlikely that every successful school is going to produce mostly engineers at the expense of every other profession. The reality is that they're going to have whatever spread the individual students desire, only the total output is low.
Besides, homegrown students these days tend to be entitled. I remember having an argument a while back here on slashdot with some dude basically saying that he essentially expects his employer to buy him a computer. My former employer once told me about how he regularly gets applicants who ask for more money than he even makes and he's a pretty damn good coder himself.
The problem with quotas is they assume that a perfect ratio of people of a given race/gender will actually want to do a given career. Forget about the cultural differences that tend to follow races and genders that may predispose one group towards a given path than another group. If there are too many white or asian males who want to be in IT, then sorry some of them were just born the wrong color and/or should cut their dick off, so sayeth the lord affirmative action.
You really can't have it both ways on this one slashdot. Either:
We're doing pretty damn shitty at producing competent engineers and we need to import talent via H-1B.
Or:
Our education system is just fantastic and therefore H-1B visas are unnecessary.
The second one really doesn't seem likely. Likewise, without H-1B visas, it will be hard as hell for US firms to compete on the global economy. How the hell would they be expected to do so without being able to hire any talent?
Well to be honest that's actually the nature of doing business.
Most rich entrepreneurs you talk to will probably mention that they failed numerous times before they became successful. Most of the time these failures come at great personal expense, so it isn't as if they're just gambling only with other people's money.
Not everybody has the stomach to even do that much. Most people would never take the risk necessary, and even if they were willing to, most of them don't have the ability to manage a successful idea properly.
If they didn't break the law, or didn't do anything unethical, then why do they need to be punished? Sometimes the market just doesn't have a need for what their company offers anymore, so they lose their business. Look at blackberry. Blackberry didn't really do anything wrong, just they didn't do enough things right. Their CEO doesn't need punishment for that company falling to where it is. It's probable that he's very good at his job, but his failure was being unable to see where Android and Apple were taking over his market.
If you punished every CEO who was behind a failed company, then a lot of successful companies wouldn't exist today. Take Google for example, its executives saw numerous spectacular failures before their successes. If you punished Larry Paige and Sergey Brinn for their failures and never allowed them to run another company again, there would be no Google.
You know what happens when other countries create laws like this? Those who build businesses, aka the entrepreneurs, move to places where they are unrestricted. Right now that is America. Why do you think America is the home of practically all of the worlds largest tech firms? There's otherwise nothing particularly spectacular about America other than the fact that it's a very profit friendly environment.
I say let Switzerland create a maximum wage, that just means more for us.
Why? Sites like thepiratebay are a weak point of piracy. Not that killing thepiratebay will kill piracy (because somebody else will surface in their place) but if you put them in a place where they can't be easily taken down then your system becomes more resilient.
So a more equitable wealth distribution is a bad thing because it makes the ultra rich less special... Got it.
Well you're making a bad assumption here. You're assuming that wealth and money are the same thing.
60 cents is money. An apple is wealth.
Having an apple cost 60 cents is a lot easier for a poor person to afford than having it cost a dollar. Yet a rich person wouldn't really notice a difference between those two prices. So by raising the price who have you affected more, the poor person or the rich person?
That is not necessarily how it works. You're assuming wages can only grow by raising prices of products. What's being proposed here is lowering executive's pay.
Employee compensation is always going to get baked into the cost of goods. If you create a wage floor, that invariably raises prices. Some 70% of all jobs are provided by small businesses, and small businesses are the least equipped to handle raising the minimum wage, never mind the fact that they already don't have million dollar a year salaried executives. Their margins are probably already thin as well.
Suppose you operate your own independent grocery store. If the minimum wage goes up beyond what you already pay your workers, and you yourself are already collecting very little as it is, then where do you get the money to pay these increased wages?
What's most shocking about this is that big corporations like wal-mart wouldn't really break a sweat, so minimum wage hikes negatively affect them the least. Yes, read that again: High minimum wages make smaller businesses harder to keep afloat financially, with minimal impact on big corporations. Yet most people who love the idea of high minimum wages are very anti-corporation.
I'm not sure what study you're citing, but I've seen good management and bad management. Most people are bad at management, which is why most small businesses fail.
Sometimes you can make decisions that seem like a good idea and are very sound, but don't end up being being good decisions. I'll cite myself as an example: I've been mining bitcoins for months, and I've seen the value of my bitcoins rise and fall in bubbles. I observed just within the last week a bubble, and two days ago I sold my first bitcoins for $706 per bitcoin expecting them to crash shortly afterwards. The price hit $845 earlier today and I'm looking like the fool because of it.
You see, hindsight is 20/20. You can make pretty damn good decisions, and then it turns out later that it actually wasn't a good decision, but the reasons why were never clear until afterwards. Executives are paid under the assumption that they're much more likely to make good decisions than bad ones - never under the assumption that every decision they make will turn shit into gold.
And to my credit, so far bitcoin has paid me a lot more than I've paid into it.
Well let's look at how that might be possible for a second. Somebody isn't going to just pay whatever price somebody else wants for a given good; they'll try to go for the lower price. The reason people pay these high prices comes from two ends: Higher money supply making money valued less against the goods it buys, and the costs of distributing these goods being higher because you have to pay more to have them distributed (think the people who move these goods from ship to shore, and from shore to shelf.)
An analogy I like to make is a movie theater, which creates a closed system of artificial scarcity when you enter. If a soda costs a dollar, you might be annoyed that the price is high, but there's nowhere else to buy so you'll pay that price. If it rises to three dollars, a poor person would scoff at it and just do without a soda. A rich person on the other hand might have plenty of money, and therefore he values his money less against the actual soda, so if he wants a soda he'll buy one.
Likewise if you give everybody more money, then people value money less. In addition to that, the guy who fills the soda also might work minimum wage. You therefore have to pay him more money for that soda. If he wasn't making minimum wage before you raised the minimum wage, then he's now closer to minimum wage than before, meanwhile the value of his money that he brings in is now reduced. He is now able to afford less, and chances are he wasn't rich to begin with. That is how you make the poor poorer with minimum wage.
By keeping this very high wage floor, Australia has caused itself to be a (sort of) closed system like the movie theater. Once the goods hit Australia's shores, the money required to buy them becomes much higher than some other country (say, the USA) because how everybody perceives money is different there.
There isn't some fat guy sitting behind a desk somewhere plotting how he'll raise the prices in Australia. Really it's everybody in the economy who is valuing their money less, so they demand more money for goods that they sell, and they are willing to pay more money for goods they sell as well. That is simply the result of high wage floors.
I like how so many of these posts on slashdot make the CEO job look easy.
You'd swear that all of these scam artists who go out of their way to steal databases of credit cards or spam penis pills for maybe a five figure income would give it up for an eight figure income if all it involved was the steps you listed above.
Maybe they just don't want to be too greedy right?
Well let's look at how some of these people got that money to make it to the presidency. Obama was a "community organizer", which basically means that he shouted whatever words people wanted to hear on a particular day and then followed that up with high fives. People then gave him money for that. He did the same thing to land the nobel peace prize.
At least the CEO might have done something productive. Just like with the peace prize, Obama didn't actually do anything useful to get himself there, rather he just talked about how great things would be, yet nobody goes around demanding that we take Obama's money away.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are some true stories of things I've done:
Two weeks ago my Persian friend asked me if I knew of any schools that can teach him to be a pilot in a short period of time. I told him that if there were, they'd be nervous about having an Arab as a student.
A few months before that my Indian (as in from India) friend had to move out of his house, and asked if he could stay at my place for a while until he finds a permanent residence. I told him sure, there are lots of Indian reservations around here (Phoenix.)
Am I a racist?
In either case this does go to further a point I commonly make: Socialized health care doesn't necessarily lead to increased life expectancy. I think America has a relatively shorter one mainly due to our lifestyles. Socialized medicine isn't going to do anything to stop obesity or drug abuse for example.
640x480 is more 1995. In 1985 it was still very common to use a monochrome plasma display.
I had the exact same specs in my 2000 Inspiron 8000, probably even the exact same panel too, though to be honest the display looked washed out and had a crap viewing angle compared to even the lower resolution displays we have today. So long as you were looking at it from dead center it looked pretty nice for its time though.
My main concern would be the range of the car being reduced while I stayed at a motel, not necessarily the expense as it wouldn't be *that* high.
That isn't to say that this doesn't need to be fixed (and wow, in what parallel universe can my post be interpreted as trolling?)
It is slightly different in that Tesla cars are a lot more energy efficient than gas driven cars.
That is, it isn't a simple matter of transferring the energy from the power company to the car instead of getting it from the pump, rather the car itself uses less energy period. This is mostly a result of combustion engines wasting most of their energy towards producing heat rather than actually putting the car in motion (Hybrids are also guilty here - their main saving grace is that energy production is at more of a constant rate as well as frequent re-use of kinetic energy, so less energy is wasted as heat than a regular car, but energy is still wasted almost as much.)
This.
Though progressives often have these strange justifications for more government regulation. I recall once on slashdot talking up how stupid it is that in Oregon you can't pump your own gas due to regulation. Sure enough some derp comes along talking about how he'd prefer it that way for safety reasons, never mind that actually driving a car is a *lot* more dangerous than simply putting gas in it.
As much as I know it pains the US to see privacy advocacy, I'm a bit dumbfounded as to why the UN would want it. Most of its members don't even like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, so why would they give a damn about privacy? The only thing I can think of is to kneecap the competitive advantage that the US economy has in the tech sector, which by its nature is very anti-privacy, though more as a result of the way it functions than any interest in spying on you.
The EU is already red handed guilty of this because they raise a huge stink over it and want to push laws trying to bring more business to their domestic tech services, even though their governments often do worse things (Or would do worse things if they had the capability. Which they mainly don't due to a lack of jurisdiction; part of the reason why they need to have more of these services run domestically.)
Hmm...I wonder if you have something there. The "generation y" (the generation I'm a part of, actually) mostly seems to value "being a badass" (or something to that effect, I don't quite know how to name it.) By that, I mean this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/18/desmond-hatchett-30-kids_n_1528850.html
That is today's "alpha male". A pathetic loser who has done jail a few times, but that is where selective selection is carrying us, so who am I to judge. That and of course, this:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/22/justice/knockout-game-teen-assaults/
Probably not good to post your name and UID if your goal is to prevent overzealous moderation - some moderators like to go looking for old posts of yours and downmod them to hit your karma score anyways. It's an asshole thing to do, but they do it anyways. Just part of how slashdot's moderation system is broken, just yesterday I had a post get moderated "redundant" because somebody disagreed with it, and I get moderated "overrated" all the time for the same reason.
Doubt it. It's not advanced because it's not that interesting. Everyone can write code and share code and be sure that, because of copyright protection and whatever OSS license, it will be returned to the public. Surely this is better than having to fiddle with hex dumps for ten hours just to understand that they changed that int to a float.
I think it would be just because of the sheer profit involved in doing so would be great. Take for example how some Chinese company wrote their own World of Warcraft client from scratch (deliberately sans the graphics) that blizzards servers can't distinguish from a real client so that they could run multiple instances of bots on fewer machines for gold farming.
However on that same token, anti-debugger code would probably become a lot more advanced as well.
False dilemma. Our education system can suck on average and still produce plenty of competent engineers. The US has a very stratified education system; there's the school systems in poor areas which produce illiterates, and the school systems in wealthy areas which have pretty decent results.
It's highly unlikely that every successful school is going to produce mostly engineers at the expense of every other profession. The reality is that they're going to have whatever spread the individual students desire, only the total output is low.
Besides, homegrown students these days tend to be entitled. I remember having an argument a while back here on slashdot with some dude basically saying that he essentially expects his employer to buy him a computer. My former employer once told me about how he regularly gets applicants who ask for more money than he even makes and he's a pretty damn good coder himself.
The problem with quotas is they assume that a perfect ratio of people of a given race/gender will actually want to do a given career. Forget about the cultural differences that tend to follow races and genders that may predispose one group towards a given path than another group. If there are too many white or asian males who want to be in IT, then sorry some of them were just born the wrong color and/or should cut their dick off, so sayeth the lord affirmative action.
I can actually see why there are, actually. Not necessarily coders, but STEM in particular.
http://slashdot.org/story/13/10/09/004251/us-adults-score-poorly-on-worldwide-test
You really can't have it both ways on this one slashdot. Either:
We're doing pretty damn shitty at producing competent engineers and we need to import talent via H-1B.
Or:
Our education system is just fantastic and therefore H-1B visas are unnecessary.
The second one really doesn't seem likely. Likewise, without H-1B visas, it will be hard as hell for US firms to compete on the global economy. How the hell would they be expected to do so without being able to hire any talent?
Well to be honest that's actually the nature of doing business.
Most rich entrepreneurs you talk to will probably mention that they failed numerous times before they became successful. Most of the time these failures come at great personal expense, so it isn't as if they're just gambling only with other people's money.
Not everybody has the stomach to even do that much. Most people would never take the risk necessary, and even if they were willing to, most of them don't have the ability to manage a successful idea properly.
If they didn't break the law, or didn't do anything unethical, then why do they need to be punished? Sometimes the market just doesn't have a need for what their company offers anymore, so they lose their business. Look at blackberry. Blackberry didn't really do anything wrong, just they didn't do enough things right. Their CEO doesn't need punishment for that company falling to where it is. It's probable that he's very good at his job, but his failure was being unable to see where Android and Apple were taking over his market.
If you punished every CEO who was behind a failed company, then a lot of successful companies wouldn't exist today. Take Google for example, its executives saw numerous spectacular failures before their successes. If you punished Larry Paige and Sergey Brinn for their failures and never allowed them to run another company again, there would be no Google.
You know what happens when other countries create laws like this? Those who build businesses, aka the entrepreneurs, move to places where they are unrestricted. Right now that is America. Why do you think America is the home of practically all of the worlds largest tech firms? There's otherwise nothing particularly spectacular about America other than the fact that it's a very profit friendly environment.
I say let Switzerland create a maximum wage, that just means more for us.
Why? Sites like thepiratebay are a weak point of piracy. Not that killing thepiratebay will kill piracy (because somebody else will surface in their place) but if you put them in a place where they can't be easily taken down then your system becomes more resilient.
Cox in Phoenix Arizona.
So a more equitable wealth distribution is a bad thing because it makes the ultra rich less special... Got it.
Well you're making a bad assumption here. You're assuming that wealth and money are the same thing.
60 cents is money. An apple is wealth.
Having an apple cost 60 cents is a lot easier for a poor person to afford than having it cost a dollar. Yet a rich person wouldn't really notice a difference between those two prices. So by raising the price who have you affected more, the poor person or the rich person?
That is not necessarily how it works. You're assuming wages can only grow by raising prices of products. What's being proposed here is lowering executive's pay.
Employee compensation is always going to get baked into the cost of goods. If you create a wage floor, that invariably raises prices. Some 70% of all jobs are provided by small businesses, and small businesses are the least equipped to handle raising the minimum wage, never mind the fact that they already don't have million dollar a year salaried executives. Their margins are probably already thin as well.
Suppose you operate your own independent grocery store. If the minimum wage goes up beyond what you already pay your workers, and you yourself are already collecting very little as it is, then where do you get the money to pay these increased wages?
What's most shocking about this is that big corporations like wal-mart wouldn't really break a sweat, so minimum wage hikes negatively affect them the least. Yes, read that again: High minimum wages make smaller businesses harder to keep afloat financially, with minimal impact on big corporations. Yet most people who love the idea of high minimum wages are very anti-corporation.
It's not the same handle, somebody replaced one of the l's with an uppercase i.
I'm not sure what study you're citing, but I've seen good management and bad management. Most people are bad at management, which is why most small businesses fail.
Sometimes you can make decisions that seem like a good idea and are very sound, but don't end up being being good decisions. I'll cite myself as an example: I've been mining bitcoins for months, and I've seen the value of my bitcoins rise and fall in bubbles. I observed just within the last week a bubble, and two days ago I sold my first bitcoins for $706 per bitcoin expecting them to crash shortly afterwards. The price hit $845 earlier today and I'm looking like the fool because of it.
You see, hindsight is 20/20. You can make pretty damn good decisions, and then it turns out later that it actually wasn't a good decision, but the reasons why were never clear until afterwards. Executives are paid under the assumption that they're much more likely to make good decisions than bad ones - never under the assumption that every decision they make will turn shit into gold.
And to my credit, so far bitcoin has paid me a lot more than I've paid into it.
Gouging and profiteering you say?
Well let's look at how that might be possible for a second. Somebody isn't going to just pay whatever price somebody else wants for a given good; they'll try to go for the lower price. The reason people pay these high prices comes from two ends: Higher money supply making money valued less against the goods it buys, and the costs of distributing these goods being higher because you have to pay more to have them distributed (think the people who move these goods from ship to shore, and from shore to shelf.)
An analogy I like to make is a movie theater, which creates a closed system of artificial scarcity when you enter. If a soda costs a dollar, you might be annoyed that the price is high, but there's nowhere else to buy so you'll pay that price. If it rises to three dollars, a poor person would scoff at it and just do without a soda. A rich person on the other hand might have plenty of money, and therefore he values his money less against the actual soda, so if he wants a soda he'll buy one.
Likewise if you give everybody more money, then people value money less. In addition to that, the guy who fills the soda also might work minimum wage. You therefore have to pay him more money for that soda. If he wasn't making minimum wage before you raised the minimum wage, then he's now closer to minimum wage than before, meanwhile the value of his money that he brings in is now reduced. He is now able to afford less, and chances are he wasn't rich to begin with. That is how you make the poor poorer with minimum wage.
By keeping this very high wage floor, Australia has caused itself to be a (sort of) closed system like the movie theater. Once the goods hit Australia's shores, the money required to buy them becomes much higher than some other country (say, the USA) because how everybody perceives money is different there.
There isn't some fat guy sitting behind a desk somewhere plotting how he'll raise the prices in Australia. Really it's everybody in the economy who is valuing their money less, so they demand more money for goods that they sell, and they are willing to pay more money for goods they sell as well. That is simply the result of high wage floors.
Except most of those who are wealthy don't have a parent's trust fund.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2012/04/20/most-wealthy-individuals-earned-not-inherited-their-wealth-2/
I like how so many of these posts on slashdot make the CEO job look easy.
You'd swear that all of these scam artists who go out of their way to steal databases of credit cards or spam penis pills for maybe a five figure income would give it up for an eight figure income if all it involved was the steps you listed above.
Maybe they just don't want to be too greedy right?
Well let's look at how some of these people got that money to make it to the presidency. Obama was a "community organizer", which basically means that he shouted whatever words people wanted to hear on a particular day and then followed that up with high fives. People then gave him money for that. He did the same thing to land the nobel peace prize.
At least the CEO might have done something productive. Just like with the peace prize, Obama didn't actually do anything useful to get himself there, rather he just talked about how great things would be, yet nobody goes around demanding that we take Obama's money away.
Paying one person a higher wage does not, but raising the minimum wage does.
Wage floors reduce the value of money. What good does it do to give somebody more money if that money now buys less?