I stopped reading at "liberals." The fact that you people have spent so many years using that word as a term of abuse is one of the reasons we have such a polarized society at this point. Conservatives need to let go of their hatred before it's too late.
I once got into a taxi at an airport in Chicago. Before we set off the driver pointed at the meter talking in thick Pidgin English that I could barely understand. The only word I could pick out was "meter." I just nodded politely and said yes because I wanted to get to my hotel for a meeting. When I got to the hotel he started wrangling with me to about paying more than was on the meter, apparently he had turned it off at some stage of the journey for some unfathomable reason. He got really belligerent about it too. The hotel was reimbursing me for the trip and after about five minutes of him, the hotel concierge and me trying to discuss it I just asked the manager to reimburse him what he wanted because I hadn't a clue what was going on and it was only another $20 or so.
I know that some people like apps like Uber because they minimize human communication, but it's still a vital skill. As long as you're not asking drivers to write a book report on Ulysses by Joyce, expecting them to communicate clearly in the local language is not too much to ask for.
Large scale display advertising is dwindling. Online advertising is much more precise, it gets sellers much closer to the holy grail of only spending money on advertising to the people who actually end up buying. So if radio is becoming more fragmented like social media, surely that just means that artists have a better chance of reaching their intended audience? Instead of your traditional Irish / Brazilian Zouk fusion tune being lost in the maelstrom of generic pop music, it now finds a place to play on a niche station that has listeners who are interested in that type of music.
I swear, every day I go onto LinkedIn and see pretentious articles with headlines like "Facebook is dead," "Social media is dead" and similar bullshit. It's nothing but clickbait and has no basis in fact. Radio might be an old medium but it's going strong, and will continue to do so as long as we have to drive cars manually. When all cars become self-driving then we'll reassess the situation, but until then...
I once got into a taxi at an airport in Chicago. Before we set off the driver pointed at the meter talking in thick Pidgin English that I could barely understand. The only word I could pick out was "meter." I just nodded politely and said yes because I wanted to get to my hotel for a meeting. When I got to the hotel he started wrangling with me to about paying more than was on the meter, apparently he had turned it off at some stage of the journey for some unfathomable reason. He got really belligerent about it too. The hotel was reimbursing me for the trip and after about five minutes of him, the hotel concierge and me trying to discuss it I just asked the manager to reimburse him what he wanted because I hadn't a clue what was going on and it was only another $20 or so.
I know that some people like apps like Uber because they minimize human communication, but it's still a vital skill. As long as you're not asking drivers to write a book report on Ulysses by Joyce, expecting them to communicate clearly in the local language is not too much to ask for.
No, this is the way cities were built in the pre-auto era. City governments made a deliberate choice to try to build everything around the automobile and the result was catastrophic.
There is massive pent-up demand for vibrant urban living. There's no need to "force" it on anyone.
False. The standard of living in the developing world has vastly improved and billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. This in turn has benefited rich world countries by making our goods more affordable. It has also reduced migration to some rich world countries. Case in point is the USA in which net migration from Mexico is in negative numbers.
At the same time a whole bunch of folks are out of jobs and can't afford to buy food. ?
Where? In the US unemployment is only at about 2 and a half percent.
So could someone explain to me why we hate protectionism?
Because the last time it was tried on a large scale in western countries it set up the economic conditions that led to two world wars.
Um, walkable surfaces is precisely what I said is a better solution. Subway systems are great too, but they're a little useless if each transit node is a mile away from the entrance to the nearest building.
Glad you mentioned peasants. Low-income people are the ones who suffer the most from sprawl since many of them can't afford cars, resulting in multi-hour commutes in areas that are poorly served by public transport.
Solutions like this are classic examples of tech-rich people thinking they have all the answers when there's a whole bank of qualified specialist people already working in that field who know what's really needed to fix the problem but have only been stymied by politics.
If traffic is driving Musk nuts then the solution is not to find innovative new ways to handle more traffic. The solution is to ask why is traffic so bad in the first place.
Recommended reading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs
Or if that's too heavy, try Suburban Nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream.
Only then will you come to see the culprit: Single Use Zoning, aka the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) rules. Single-use zoning forces everybody to make several car journeys just to get through a typical day. Going to work? Car. Going out for lunch? Car. Going home form work? Car. Need to go out for a bottle of milk and postage stamp? Car. Going to a movie? Car.
No bloody wonder the place is flooded with traffic. You try to build a city around the automobile and it becomes a hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. You try to widen roads to accommodate more cars and the laws of induced demand kick in, resulting in even more traffic and roads as choked as they were before.
Learn a few things about urban planning, Elon. Don't arrogantly assume that you're the first person to want to address this problem. Smart growth and sustainable, walkable, transit-oriented development is a far better solution than drilling holes in the ground and cracking puns about the word "boring." It requires years of tedious work and politicking to build support for smart growth. A city is not a private company with which you can do what you like. There are elected councils, public advisory committees, public hearings, tax implications, and all manner of complex bureaucratic hoops that you have to jump through to fix these things.
Interesting. Personally I think that the "obsolete human" has been predicted since the dawn of the industrial revolution but has yet to come to pass. For every innovation, several other new industries seem to pop up. Switchboard operators are (mostly) gone but now there's an army of people taking calls from irate telecom customers. Bank tellers are just about obsolete but now there's a bank of people manning customer service help lines, and on top of this is all the people providing the online services that made said operators redundant. This is the most automated time in history and yet unemployment doesn't seem to be all that high.
That said, if we ever do reach widespread human redundancy then I'd like to see the size of universal income tied to certain conditions, such as ability to work (or otherwise) and community work carried out, or maybe some sort of educational or artistic endeavor. I've seen the idle dependency culture first hand when I lived in an English slum surrounded by career unemployed dole junkies. It was not a pretty sight.
Stephen Fry once nailed it on the QI show (which I highly recommend watching, BTW). He was talking about some obscure but interesting topic when one of the contestants asked "Stephen, are we ever going to use this information?"
He lit up and went off on her, saying:
"It’s extraordinary, it’s always the children who say ‘Sir, sir, what’s the point of geometry’, or ‘What’s the point of Latin,’ that end up having no job, being alcoholic, and they don’t notice that the ones who actually find knowledge for its own sake, and pleasure in information, in history, in the world and nature around us, actually getting on and DOING things with their fucking lives it’s an odd thing"
Applying the order to those already in possession of visas and green cards sure looks like the DHS bureaucracy doing a mini-rebellion by applying the EO to its most extreme levels, rather than using good legal reasoning based on due process. It's clear from the text of the EO that they were to implement it "to the extent allowed by law" which does not permit abuse of discretion. Sometimes people in agencies will cynically implement an order in a way as to inconvenience those it isn't intended to cover to generate outrage.
Quite right. It's all the agencies' fault. The buck doesn't stop in the Oval Office at all.
I heard yesterday about a senior executive at Oracle who regularly travels internationally to places like China for meetings with suppliers. He manages about 500 people. He's now stuck in the country and unable to do a large part of his job because he happened to be born in Iran. "Make America Great Again" my ass.
This is about Micro$oft short changing American citizens on jobs by importing and hiring cheaper labor from other countries. Simple as that.
Loathe as I am to feed an AC troll, I suspect that MS get their foreign-born workforce from more locations than just the seven countries banned by Trump.
Nobody who works full time should live in poverty. Period.
NOBODY IS FORCING THEM TO DO ANYTHING. Get it through your head.
Oh really? Nobody is forced by circumstances to take any work out of desperation? I hope the world's a bit more understanding when you get laid off and have to dismount from your high horse.
So go work elsewhere with better conditions? I mean you guys act like someone is forcing them to do this. There are lots of jobs for people who want to work. Go find one that treats you like a human being.
Fine. Bring back slavery then. If employers are under no obligation to pay a living wage, why insist on them paying anything?
It IS a company's job to pay a living wage to its workers. We had this discussion during the civil war. Slavery is now illegal. It's a moral issue. In any case there's also the economic argument that impoverishing the middle class (who drive economic growth through consumption) is a bit of a silly idea.
If you have such a low opinion of your workers that you dismiss them all as making "poor lifestyle choices" then you should not be in business. And no. I did not say that someone starting a business has an automatic right to be successful, but someone starting a business should have enough money on hand to pay for what he uses, be it materials or labor.
I'm sorry, but there are certain jobs in society that really aren't meant for a person to fully support themselves. Even moreso when the person is trying to support themselves and their family. Delivering the local newspaper was great job when I was 12 and I wanted to buy some hockey cards and music CDs. It's not a job that really requires any skills, and even if you are doing it full time, I couldn't see it being a job that's likely to pay a living wage.
Same with the job I had flipping burgers at McDonald's. I was making minimum wage and even if I was working full time, there's no way that I really deserved to make a living wage in that job. Again, it required very little skill and they didn't really expect much from me other than to show up and make some hamburgers. But that's fine because I was in highschool and just wanted some money for CDs, computer games, and going out to the movies.
Theses were great jobs to get me used to working, and if they weren't allowed to pay me such low wages, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to work at all. Especially in the year 2016. They will just get a robot to do your job if it becomes too expensive for a person to do it.
If you want to make a living wage, be prepared to get some real skills. You don't deserve money for doing nothing, or for doing a job that requires almost no skills.
Sorry but this is complete and utter bullshit.
A paper round, by definition, only takes a limited amount of time in the morning and could never become full time, so your comparison is irrelevant. As for flipping burgers, some people do this work because they need to support a family. If you spend 40 hours per week flipping burgers then you should not need to work a second and third job just to pay your bills because some other people have made a value judgment about how important your job is.
Flipping burgers is no less skilled than a lot of production line jobs in manufacturing industry, and in the days when the west was a manufacturing economy, workers were paid enough to keep a roof over their heads and raise a family.
Christ. Even in the days of domestic service, rich people ensured that their butlers, maids, and other personal servants had food to eat and a roof over their heads.
I say again that too many people have been conditioned into thinking that it's acceptable to pay starvation wages to the hardest working people in society, and conditioned into demonizing those at the bottom end of the pay scale. If that's not class warfare then I don't know what is.
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Both.
I stopped reading at "liberals." The fact that you people have spent so many years using that word as a term of abuse is one of the reasons we have such a polarized society at this point. Conservatives need to let go of their hatred before it's too late.
I once got into a taxi at an airport in Chicago. Before we set off the driver pointed at the meter talking in thick Pidgin English that I could barely understand. The only word I could pick out was "meter." I just nodded politely and said yes because I wanted to get to my hotel for a meeting. When I got to the hotel he started wrangling with me to about paying more than was on the meter, apparently he had turned it off at some stage of the journey for some unfathomable reason. He got really belligerent about it too. The hotel was reimbursing me for the trip and after about five minutes of him, the hotel concierge and me trying to discuss it I just asked the manager to reimburse him what he wanted because I hadn't a clue what was going on and it was only another $20 or so.
I know that some people like apps like Uber because they minimize human communication, but it's still a vital skill. As long as you're not asking drivers to write a book report on Ulysses by Joyce, expecting them to communicate clearly in the local language is not too much to ask for.
Large scale display advertising is dwindling. Online advertising is much more precise, it gets sellers much closer to the holy grail of only spending money on advertising to the people who actually end up buying. So if radio is becoming more fragmented like social media, surely that just means that artists have a better chance of reaching their intended audience? Instead of your traditional Irish / Brazilian Zouk fusion tune being lost in the maelstrom of generic pop music, it now finds a place to play on a niche station that has listeners who are interested in that type of music.
I swear, every day I go onto LinkedIn and see pretentious articles with headlines like "Facebook is dead," "Social media is dead" and similar bullshit. It's nothing but clickbait and has no basis in fact. Radio might be an old medium but it's going strong, and will continue to do so as long as we have to drive cars manually. When all cars become self-driving then we'll reassess the situation, but until then...
I once got into a taxi at an airport in Chicago. Before we set off the driver pointed at the meter talking in thick Pidgin English that I could barely understand. The only word I could pick out was "meter." I just nodded politely and said yes because I wanted to get to my hotel for a meeting. When I got to the hotel he started wrangling with me to about paying more than was on the meter, apparently he had turned it off at some stage of the journey for some unfathomable reason. He got really belligerent about it too. The hotel was reimbursing me for the trip and after about five minutes of him, the hotel concierge and me trying to discuss it I just asked the manager to reimburse him what he wanted because I hadn't a clue what was going on and it was only another $20 or so.
I know that some people like apps like Uber because they minimize human communication, but it's still a vital skill. As long as you're not asking drivers to write a book report on Ulysses by Joyce, expecting them to communicate clearly in the local language is not too much to ask for.
No, this is the way cities were built in the pre-auto era. City governments made a deliberate choice to try to build everything around the automobile and the result was catastrophic.
There is massive pent-up demand for vibrant urban living. There's no need to "force" it on anyone.
All salaries stagnated.
False. The standard of living in the developing world has vastly improved and billions of people have been lifted out of poverty. This in turn has benefited rich world countries by making our goods more affordable. It has also reduced migration to some rich world countries. Case in point is the USA in which net migration from Mexico is in negative numbers.
At the same time a whole bunch of folks are out of jobs and can't afford to buy food. ?
Where? In the US unemployment is only at about 2 and a half percent.
So could someone explain to me why we hate protectionism?
Because the last time it was tried on a large scale in western countries it set up the economic conditions that led to two world wars.
Um, walkable surfaces is precisely what I said is a better solution. Subway systems are great too, but they're a little useless if each transit node is a mile away from the entrance to the nearest building.
Sounds like mixed-income blocks, one of the tenets of new urbanism and is easily found in older cities.
Glad you mentioned peasants. Low-income people are the ones who suffer the most from sprawl since many of them can't afford cars, resulting in multi-hour commutes in areas that are poorly served by public transport.
Yeah, right. Enjoy your choked and congested LA hellscape. I'll stick to my compact walkable neighborhood.
Solutions like this are classic examples of tech-rich people thinking they have all the answers when there's a whole bank of qualified specialist people already working in that field who know what's really needed to fix the problem but have only been stymied by politics.
If traffic is driving Musk nuts then the solution is not to find innovative new ways to handle more traffic. The solution is to ask why is traffic so bad in the first place.
Recommended reading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jacobs
Or if that's too heavy, try Suburban Nation: The rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream.
Only then will you come to see the culprit: Single Use Zoning, aka the BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) rules. Single-use zoning forces everybody to make several car journeys just to get through a typical day. Going to work? Car. Going out for lunch? Car. Going home form work? Car. Need to go out for a bottle of milk and postage stamp? Car. Going to a movie? Car.
No bloody wonder the place is flooded with traffic. You try to build a city around the automobile and it becomes a hostile environment for pedestrians and cyclists. You try to widen roads to accommodate more cars and the laws of induced demand kick in, resulting in even more traffic and roads as choked as they were before.
Learn a few things about urban planning, Elon. Don't arrogantly assume that you're the first person to want to address this problem. Smart growth and sustainable, walkable, transit-oriented development is a far better solution than drilling holes in the ground and cracking puns about the word "boring." It requires years of tedious work and politicking to build support for smart growth. A city is not a private company with which you can do what you like. There are elected councils, public advisory committees, public hearings, tax implications, and all manner of complex bureaucratic hoops that you have to jump through to fix these things.
Interesting. Personally I think that the "obsolete human" has been predicted since the dawn of the industrial revolution but has yet to come to pass. For every innovation, several other new industries seem to pop up. Switchboard operators are (mostly) gone but now there's an army of people taking calls from irate telecom customers. Bank tellers are just about obsolete but now there's a bank of people manning customer service help lines, and on top of this is all the people providing the online services that made said operators redundant. This is the most automated time in history and yet unemployment doesn't seem to be all that high.
That said, if we ever do reach widespread human redundancy then I'd like to see the size of universal income tied to certain conditions, such as ability to work (or otherwise) and community work carried out, or maybe some sort of educational or artistic endeavor. I've seen the idle dependency culture first hand when I lived in an English slum surrounded by career unemployed dole junkies. It was not a pretty sight.
Stephen Fry once nailed it on the QI show (which I highly recommend watching, BTW). He was talking about some obscure but interesting topic when one of the contestants asked "Stephen, are we ever going to use this information?"
He lit up and went off on her, saying:
"It’s extraordinary, it’s always the children who say ‘Sir, sir, what’s the point of geometry’, or ‘What’s the point of Latin,’ that end up having no job, being alcoholic, and they don’t notice that the ones who actually find knowledge for its own sake, and pleasure in information, in history, in the world and nature around us, actually getting on and DOING things with their fucking lives it’s an odd thing"
He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. He would NOT be comfortable "just" moving to Singapore or London.
Applying the order to those already in possession of visas and green cards sure looks like the DHS bureaucracy doing a mini-rebellion by applying the EO to its most extreme levels, rather than using good legal reasoning based on due process. It's clear from the text of the EO that they were to implement it "to the extent allowed by law" which does not permit abuse of discretion. Sometimes people in agencies will cynically implement an order in a way as to inconvenience those it isn't intended to cover to generate outrage.
Quite right. It's all the agencies' fault. The buck doesn't stop in the Oval Office at all.
I heard yesterday about a senior executive at Oracle who regularly travels internationally to places like China for meetings with suppliers. He manages about 500 people. He's now stuck in the country and unable to do a large part of his job because he happened to be born in Iran. "Make America Great Again" my ass.
This is about Micro$oft short changing American citizens on jobs by importing and hiring cheaper labor from other countries. Simple as that.
Loathe as I am to feed an AC troll, I suspect that MS get their foreign-born workforce from more locations than just the seven countries banned by Trump.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Nobody who works full time should live in poverty. Period.
NOBODY IS FORCING THEM TO DO ANYTHING. Get it through your head.
Oh really? Nobody is forced by circumstances to take any work out of desperation? I hope the world's a bit more understanding when you get laid off and have to dismount from your high horse.
So go work elsewhere with better conditions? I mean you guys act like someone is forcing them to do this. There are lots of jobs for people who want to work. Go find one that treats you like a human being.
Fine. Bring back slavery then. If employers are under no obligation to pay a living wage, why insist on them paying anything?
It IS a company's job to pay a living wage to its workers. We had this discussion during the civil war. Slavery is now illegal. It's a moral issue. In any case there's also the economic argument that impoverishing the middle class (who drive economic growth through consumption) is a bit of a silly idea.
If you have such a low opinion of your workers that you dismiss them all as making "poor lifestyle choices" then you should not be in business. And no. I did not say that someone starting a business has an automatic right to be successful, but someone starting a business should have enough money on hand to pay for what he uses, be it materials or labor.
I'm sorry, but there are certain jobs in society that really aren't meant for a person to fully support themselves. Even moreso when the person is trying to support themselves and their family. Delivering the local newspaper was great job when I was 12 and I wanted to buy some hockey cards and music CDs. It's not a job that really requires any skills, and even if you are doing it full time, I couldn't see it being a job that's likely to pay a living wage.
Same with the job I had flipping burgers at McDonald's. I was making minimum wage and even if I was working full time, there's no way that I really deserved to make a living wage in that job. Again, it required very little skill and they didn't really expect much from me other than to show up and make some hamburgers. But that's fine because I was in highschool and just wanted some money for CDs, computer games, and going out to the movies.
Theses were great jobs to get me used to working, and if they weren't allowed to pay me such low wages, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to work at all. Especially in the year 2016. They will just get a robot to do your job if it becomes too expensive for a person to do it.
If you want to make a living wage, be prepared to get some real skills. You don't deserve money for doing nothing, or for doing a job that requires almost no skills.
Sorry but this is complete and utter bullshit.
A paper round, by definition, only takes a limited amount of time in the morning and could never become full time, so your comparison is irrelevant. As for flipping burgers, some people do this work because they need to support a family. If you spend 40 hours per week flipping burgers then you should not need to work a second and third job just to pay your bills because some other people have made a value judgment about how important your job is.
Flipping burgers is no less skilled than a lot of production line jobs in manufacturing industry, and in the days when the west was a manufacturing economy, workers were paid enough to keep a roof over their heads and raise a family.
Christ. Even in the days of domestic service, rich people ensured that their butlers, maids, and other personal servants had food to eat and a roof over their heads.
I say again that too many people have been conditioned into thinking that it's acceptable to pay starvation wages to the hardest working people in society, and conditioned into demonizing those at the bottom end of the pay scale. If that's not class warfare then I don't know what is.
Thank you for letting us know that you don't know anyone in the situation described. Now what, pray tell, does that have to do with the price of rice?