My cable TV viewing pattern is extremely uneven. I'll watch it a lot for a month, then watch nothing for 2-3 months (like literally, the TV does not get turned on for months). So I'd been itching to cancel. Originally I was going to set up an antenna to pick up over-the-air signals for free local channels, since like you I subscribe to several movie services. But it turns out there's a hill between my house and the TV stations' antennas. When DirecTV Now offered their intro Go Big plan for life for $35/mo, it had every channel I occasionally watched so I jumped on it (it's since gone up to $40/mo, but I've been grandfathered in so still get channels the service has since dropped, like Discovery). I make enough that I can stomach $40/mo even if I don't watch TV that month. And most of the shows I watch can be viewed directly from the channel's Roku channel using my DirecTV Now login, so I don't have to deal with the DirecTV Now app's slow channel service and buffering issues.
Unfortunately, due to my city government granting a cable monopoly in the area, it hasn't saved me as much as I'd hoped. I was originally on a $139/mo basic cable + Internet plan ($69/mo for 12 months promo period). When I canceled cable TV and retained only the Internet portion, it was $69/mo. For a net savings of $30/mo. In the three years since I canceled cable TV (I canceled it before I got DirecTV Now), my Internet service has gone up in price to $79/mo, then $84/mo, currently $89/mo, and they notified me last month that it'll be going up to $94/mo. It's increasing at over 11% per year, or more than 4x the rate of inflation. So three years after cutting the cord, my net outlay for Internet + TV will be only $5/mo less than it was when I subscribed to cable TV.
I suppose it would've been even worse if I'd stayed with cable TV - the TV + Internet plan I used to have is now $240/mo after promo period. But it still feels like I haven't really saved much by cutting the cord. And I don't think I could stomach dropping back to DSL speeds to reduce my Internet bill (the local phone company's fiber rollout seems to have stalled, as some of the city is covered by fiber but I've been waiting for 5 years for fiber to become available at my address). So basically it seems the cable TV companies are just responding to people cutting the cord by cranking up the prices on the people who still subscribe to them - whether it be cable TV and Internet. Resulting in very little cost savings from cutting the cord if you still have to use the cable company for Internet.
If the people making these Linux distros are asking themselves why people aren't adopting their distro, maybe they'd learn more by comparing themselves to Android rather than to Windows.
it shouldnt take more than a notarized copy of your driver's license,
Unless Facebook already has a notarized copy of your DL on file, or you somehow linked your FB account with real-life ID info which can be linked via authenticated services (e.g. state DL database) to that DL, how is FB supposed to know that the John Doe on your DL is the owner of the account, and not a John Doe on someone else's DL? If you did the typical thing and provided only the bare minimum of info needed to create a FB account, then it's impossible to "prove your identity" to FB. To prove your identity at a future date, you must have confirmed your identity at a previous date. Submitting proof of your ID after the fact, is like trying to restore from a backup when you never made backups.
I suppose people's reasoning is that since FB is learning and tracking all this stuff about their identity anyway, it would be relatively trivial for FB to confirm that the identity info they've collected on your account profile's matches your identity, not the impostor's. But that opens up a huge liability issue. Since you allowed your account to be hacked, FB is not liable for the consequences. If they start handing back accounts to people who claim to have been hacked, and they screw up and actually take it away from the real owner and hand it over to an impostor, FB becomes liable for the consequences.
The only real way to prevent this stuff while maintaining your anonymity is to create 2FA recovery tokens - unique cipher-texts which can be used to confirm that you were the person who used the account to create the cipher-texts. By creating those tokens at a previous date, you can provide them at a future date as proof that you're the account's real owner. I've done it for my Google and web hosting accounts (I assume FB has something similar; I wouldn't know since I don't use FB). For domains, I register the important ones for multiple years, and set reminders for myself to renew them before they expire (I deliberately picked my birthday as the renewal day, even if it meant I lost a half year of registration fees - a whole $6).
The reason this bothers people is because it violates to the presumption of innocence. You have to prove you're not drunk before you're allowed to drive. What's next - a sensor which detects that you have a valid driver's license on you before the car will start? (There's a small intersection with right-to-repair as well, as the manufacturer is exerting control over how you can use "your" product after you've purchased it from them.)
I think the bigger take-away is that no ideological position is absolute - not even presumption of innocence. Reasonable violations are allowable as long as we remain vigilant against a slippery slope progression. e.g. We already require people to prove their age when buying alcohol.
But if 10 drunk idiots freeze to death and 10,000 drunk driving related deaths are eliminated, that seems a good trade doesn't it?
Agreed, but there are actually three failure modes here.
Failing to stop a drunk from driving (can be ignored since it's no different from the current situation)
Stopping a drunk from driving, when it was the safer alternative (the scenario outlined here)
Stopping a non-drunk from driving because the car mistakenly thinks they're drunk.
That last one is the big one, because the vast majority of trips are by non-drunk drivers. So a tiny false-positive failure rate can result in a large number of incidents. Typically, increasing the true-positive rate also increases the false-positive rate. That is, reducing the rate at which the system fails to stop a drunk driver also increases the rate at which it mistakenly thinks a non-drunk driver is drunk and prevents them from driving. You have to add the inconvenience and even deaths resulting from the false-positives to your tradeoff balance. Someone who is not drunk could be prevented from driving their car on a -35 F winter night, and freeze to death.
You can't draw conclusions about a UBI by testing it with a limited number of recipients.
If 2000 participants receive a $630 UBI, then each of Finland's 3.5 million working adults is chipping in 36 cents every month to support the UBI.
If 235,000 people receive a $630 UBI (Finland's 6.7% unemployment rate), then each working adult is chipping in $42.30 every month
If a UBI is implemented nationally and (say) 1 million people elect to receive it rather than work, then each remaining working adult will be chipping in $252 every month. And you're likely going to see a lot more dissatisfaction with the program.
If you really want to test it, pick a small city and implement it there, with it being funded entirely by only the city's working population. And even that won't be a truly accurate test since the people will know the test will end, and will be reluctant to quit their job for fear of having difficulty finding a new job when the test ends.
The closest thing to a real national test of a UBI that I can think of is Venezuela. The government there has promised all its citizens a certain level of free social services. The rampant inflation there is a result of the country's productivity level falling below the amount of productivity necessary to provide those services. Productivity is conserved - everything that's consumed must be produced. When you're producing $100 worth of services but people expect to receive (consume) $200 in services, the economy corrects the inequality by devaluing your currency so the $100 you're producing is now priced at $200 thus equaling what people expect to consume. But since productivity hasn't actually increased (only the pricing ofthe currency has), the people are still receiving $100 worth of services, it's just priced at $200.
We don't funnel the money. The "retards" do it by themselves.
Speaking of which, if you don't trust people to spend their own money wisely, how the hell can you trust them to vote wisely? IMHO if you don't believe in capitalism, you don't believe in democracy. Either you trust the people to usually make the right decision when [spending their money | voting], or you don't.
When he made that first $100 on Twitch it was technically a job which required paying payroll tax. (Obviously, the question there is enforcement).
People receiving a 1099 (paid as a contractor) are self-employed. They actually pay more payroll tax than employees. When you're an employee, you're actually only paying half of your Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes - your employer pays the other half. When you're self-employed, you pay both halves by yourself. Currently, both halves are 6.2%. So if your company offers to pay you 5% more if you switch from an employee to a contractor, you'd actually be losing money.
The first year you work for yourself, you get a free pass. The IRS lets you pay all your taxes (including payroll taxes) in April. Subsequent years you have to prepay your taxes (income + payroll) in quarterly installments. To avoid any penalties, you can elect to pay the same amount of taxes you paid the previous year (split into 4 payments). Or you can guesstimate your taxes for the current year, and as long as your payments were at least 90% of what you end up owing in April, you won't be penalized. Obviously the former method is the safer way to go; the latter method is typically only used if you expect your income to drop substantially compared to last year.
If you receive a 1099, it's enforced. The company that paid you (Twitch and YouTube in this case) sends the IRS a copy of the 1099 it sends you. So the IRS knows you received the money, and it'll raise all sorts of red flags if you don't include it in your tax returns. Lack of enforcement happens only when the company doesn't give you a 1099 even though they're supposed to (anyone paid $600 or more in a year is supposed to get a 1099).
I'm taking a risk posting this because anything I post which portrays Tesla is even the slightest negative light, no matter how factual, seems to get modded down by the Teslarati. But here goes:
Fact: 63,000 deliveries (all mdels) in the first quarter (12.7 weeks) works out to 4960 cars per week.
Fact: Despite selling 9x as many vehicles, Ford has a lower market cap than Tesla.
The real test will come when the waitlist is eliminated -- then QoQ or YoY will actually measure deltas in customer demand.
Thing is, it's not really customer demand per se. California has a ZEV mandate. Each year, every car company has to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles - mostly EVs though there's at least one hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in the mix. The formula is a bit complex (factoring in partial ZEVs like plug-in hybrids), but for 2018 it's about 2.5%. For 2025 it'll be 8%.
If a car company can't hit that quota, they must buy credits from a company which exceeded theirs (usually Tesla, so you can nix all the conspiracy theories about the other automakers wanting to kill off Tesla - Tesla is their safety net). If they fail to meet their ZEV quota, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen other states automatically adopt California's auto guidelines, they'd be banned from selling cars to about a third of the U.S.population. No car company wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market, so they are all busy producing EVs. And if there's insufficient demand for EVs for them to meet their quota, they will run sales and incentives (even selling/leasing the EVs at a loss) to meet the quota.
So the growth in customer demand isn't organic. It's mandated by law (that's a fact too). Not saying there isn't demand - there very well could be. But we'll never know exactly how much real demand there is because the law manipulates market forces to make the tail wag the dog (forces automakers to lower the price until a certain level of demand is attained).
And the only non-factual part of this post. Speculation: Tesla may be deliberately trying to slow down production, so they can push more of those preorders into later years when the ZEV mandated percentage is higher. They may be hoping that the other companies will have a harder time hitting the higher quota percentages, which would make Tesla's ZEV credits more valuable. Right now, once all the automakers hit their ZEV quotas, the ZEV credits for any additional cars Tesla sells that year are worthless.
My family runs a commercial building. Despite it being our building, we're not even allowed to enter the units we rent out to our tenants unless the tenant invite us in first. When we evict someone, we have to file paperwork with the city and allow the tenant time to respond (whole process takes about 6 months). And when everything is in order, we're only allowed into our own building with a police escort.
I have security cameras around the outside for the tenants' protection since we've had a few robberies. But no way in hell would I ever get away with putting security cameras in their units, even if I first disclosed it to them. I know it's the same for hotels, and I imagine it's the same for apartment rentals. Why do homeowners running Airbnb rentals get held to a different standard?
Where the dramatic rare instance weighs more heavily in people's minds than the huge majority of mundane typical occurrences.
People view lotteries positively because of the story of the rare winner, while the vast majority of players are losers.
Gambling in general exploits the same thing, although your odds of winning tend to be a bit better.
Many people fear traveling by air, even though it's statistically the safest method of transportation.
Many people fear nuclear power, even though statistically it's the safest power source man has ever invented (fewest deaths for the amount of power generated; yes fewer than wind or solar or hydro).
Anti-vaxxers remember the one dramatic story about a kid who was diagnosed with autism shortly after getting vaccinated, while ignoring the plethora of scientific evidence to the contrary (because "nothing happened" is mundane).
Lots more, but you probably get the idea. People suck at making rational decisions when it comes to rare events.
Those islands are trivial (if a bit costly) to overcome. The U.S. just has to help the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. build their own islands. If you accept China's claim that artificial islands extend territorial waters, then building one just outside of China's territorial waters (200 nautical miles from China's shore) cuts it in half to 100 nmi (new border is the midway point between two land masses). That allows you to build a new island 100 miles from China's shores. Those new islands cut China's territorial waters in half again to 50 nmi. Repeat until the only territorial waters China has are just a few miles from their shoreline. At that point China can either live with their vastly reduced territorial waters, or they can give up the silly notion that artificial islands extend territorial waters.
(This is why I facepalm at Christians who try to put the Ten Commandments up on a pedestal, because clearly they haven't read the New Testament enough.)
While not a "religion" per se, atheism is just as much a faith as any religion.
Logically, you cannot prove a negative (other than disproving every other possible case), meaning you can't prove that there is no god. So the only logically supportable belief is agnosticism - you are uncertain if a god does or does not exist. To take that extra step to atheism - being convinced that there is no god - requires a leap of faith.
Your TV analogy doesn't work because it's trivial to observe that the TV is off. A better analogy is the TV in my house that is unobservable to you and the people debating its state. Religious people might say it's tuned to CNN or NBC. An atheist would say the TV is off, and get into arguments with anyone claiming the TV is on. An agnostic would (logically correctly) say "we can't know the state of the TV" and would pretty much ignore anyone claiming it's on or off, because to them there's no point arguing over something that can't be determined with certainty. (Which incidentally is why engineers are more likely to be religious than scientists. Engineers are used to making important design decisions in the face of uncertainty as a normal course of their work. Scientists rather dislike publishing results unless they're certain.)
The atheist "lack of a belief" argument basically boils down to obfuscating the atheist and agnostic cases to combine them. Yes "we don't know what channel the TV is tuned to, it could be off" is a logically correct statement. But it's rather meaningless since you can just as easily say "we don't know how what channel the TV is tuned to, it could be on" and also be correct.
I attribute this misconception among atheists to the rise of computer science. Computers use boolean logic, where the only possible states are true or false. So failure to confirm the true state logically confirms the false state. But boolean logic is actually a subset of real-world logic, which has three possible states - true, false, and cannot be determined. In the real world, failing to confirm the true state does not prove the false state.
3) The CEO goes to jail, perhaps their family is destroyed, etc. That will show them.
Yes, the CEO put profits above user data. That's a crime and he went to prison.
Generally, financial crimes don't involve prison time because there's no physical harm done. The economic harm is pretty easy to eliminate simply by adjusting the economics. i.e. You make the fine for putting profits above user data security so large that no CEO will put (typical) profits above user data. There's no need for prison sentences; that's just malicious victim-blaming because you're unable to find the thief. Remember, the CEO of the company holding your data isn't the one who stole your data - some hacker did. That's the true criminal. At worst, the company inadequately protected your data, or collected data that you may not have particularly wanted them to collect but you agreed to let them do it. Both are problems which are easily solved with economic disincentives. No need for prison.
The dynamic that's going on here is that in property theft, if the company that's holding property has it stolen, they're out the stolen property. That financial loss creates an incentive for them to adequately protect that property in proportion to its value. But in the case of data, the "stolen" data is merely copied by the thieves. The company is not out the data, and their ability to use it in whatever manner they previously were to generate revenue, is unaffected. The lack of that economic loss when they're hacked is what creates the entire problem. So the simplest solution is just adding an economic loss as a disincentive.
If you immediately jump to prison sentences, the only thing you're going to accomplish is making all these companies move their operations overseas, with all their executive officers located outside the U.S., and only keeping operational staff in the U.S. Your data will still be stolen just as it is now, because you didn't want to add an economic disincentive, and the companies found it easier just to move their executive officers out of the country rather than have them face prison time.
The practical problem is: how do you allow speech by true whistleblowers, or by other people in a position where they genuinely cannot speak with their own voice? How can a platform allow them to use true anonymity, without allowing it for the ACs? I don't think it's really possible.
It's not possible. The trolls are a relatively small percentage of the "problem." The bigger "problem" is that what half of the population sees as legitimate whistleblowing, the other half sees as toxicity that must be silenced and the perpetrators unmasked and banned.
On a meta level, the problem is that we're trying to assign categories to speech based on how we perceive it, rather than on the intent with which it's said. What's sounds like a legitimate anonymous complaint to one person is toxic speech to someone else. Speech really needs to be assessed on the basis of the intent of the speaker, not on how the speech makes you feel. The PC crowd is the one most guilty of this. Someone finds "Negro" printed on their sofa and gets all offended, and sympathetic PC advocates in the media make the story go national. When "negro" is the Spanish word for "black", and the (black) sofa was manufactured in a Spanish-speaking country. Prioritizing people's reaction to the word over the intent with which the word was printed creates a non-existent racial offense.
If you could magically know the speaker's intent, you would know if they're a troll, or if they were being genuine in what they're saying. Unfortunately there is no magic that can tell you this (though occasionally you can tease it out through logical gymnastics - a troll will sometimes exhibit behavior contradictory to if they actually believe what they say). But people are unsatisfied with calling this an unsolvable problem. So they keep trying to solve it by insisting on judging speech based on how the speech is perceived by others.
Well, if you're going to that, then the only metric which works is whether anyone judges the anonymous speech to be useful to them. And if so, then the speech should be allowed. Which is the inverse of the standard currently being used - where people try to get it banned if anyone gets offended by it. If you carry that standard out to its logical conclusion, all speech will be banned because someone, somewhere will be offended by anything that's said.
Ironically, the biggest annoyance I've had lately is due to the EU GDPR ostensibly created to protect your privacy. About 80% of the websites I go to now have a GDPR pop-up I have to click through before I can read the content. If I browse in private/incognito mode, cookies are not retained so I get this pop-up every time I visit the site, which is rather annoying. If I browse in normal mode and agree that I have been informed of the site's privacy policy as per GDPR requirements, it writes a cookie to my browser telling the site not to show the notice again. And the cumulative sum of all those GDPR notification cookies makes my browser uniquely identifiable thus destroying my privacy. Catch-22.
The concern wasn't that the laptop might hold a bomb. They request you remove the laptop from the bag because it contains a lot of dense complex parts which made it difficult to tell what else was in the bag when they only had a top-down view which forced them to look through the laptop. With a 3D computed tomographic view, they can virtually remove the laptop from the image to see what else is in the bag.
It's also worth pointing out that Pan Am 103 was destroyed by a bomb in a radio that was otherwise fully functional. So turning the laptop on doesn't really accomplish anything, other than more security theater. You could still modify the battery so part of it held enough juice to turn on the laptop for the security check, while the rest of it was replaced with Semtex explosive.
It's in their guidelines. (Which are more like general recommendations rather than exact rules, even though Google is perfectly in control of what gets demonettized. One of the reasons I'm not too upset about the EU fining them the same way - telling them they need to clean up their act without telling them exactly what they did wrong.)
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This generation it's social media and video games which are ruining kids' lives.
My generation it was arcades (that's why John Connor as a kid in Terminator 2 is shown as a delinquent "wasting his time" at an arcade, and Flynn in TRON is a failure in life because he owns an arcade).
Back in the 1950s it was rock and roll music.
In the 1930s it was organized sports and baseball cards.
This cycle probably goes back to the dawn of civilization. Older people who don't understand why younger people like the things they do will always come up with criticisms why it's destroying the lives of youth everywhere.
The market demands it. The market always demands it. Free market capitalism is an oxymoron, as it by definition must progress towards monopolism.
The current cable monopolies are a result of local governments giving the cable companies monopolies in exchange for concessions like guarantees to cover low-income areas. Capitalism played no role in them. They're a textbook example of a failure of government regulation, not a failure of capitalism.
Theaters were invented back in the day when people couldn't afford to own their own projector, sound system, and screen. Instead, one person would buy those (expensive) items, and rent out seats to allow people to watch movies on their equipment.
TVs partially displaced theaters, but not entirely because the image and sound quality wasn't as good, and the screen wasn't as big. HDTVs and especially 4k TVs pretty much match theaters in image quality. A lot of people's sound systems now rival a theater's (without a screaming baby in back). And typical screen sizes are starting to pushing into the 70-80 inch range. Meanwhile 4k projectors are approaching $2k. It won't be much longer before the only reason to watch a movie at a theater will be for the social aspect. And I suspect that will be partially offset by voice chat technology used in games allowing multiple people to watch the same movie together in their homes, while being able to make comments to each other in real-time as if they were watching it in the same room. (The current generation of kids seems to prefer virtual social interaction over the Internet over physical social interaction.)
The only theaters I see sticking around are IMAX and 3D (since 3D TVs seem to have died off).
Before the Galaxy S5, they made the first flagship phone which was waterproof. They even went so far as to have their engineers figure out how to make the touchscreen usable while it was wet (AFAIK it's the only phone with that capability). Then the dropped waterproofing as a feature from their phones? WTF? Pure management fail.
When I worked at a hotel, occasionally a convention group would order veggie burgers but leave enough leftovers that the staff were allowed to eat them. These were better than the mass-produced fast food beef hamburgers I've eaten. They were so good I actually went online to track down a retail seller of the veggie patties so I could eat them at home. That's when I discovered from the nutrition label that they got the taste by loading it up with as much saturated fat as a ground beef burger. So basically it wasn't any healthier for you than a beef burger, it was just made from plants to assuage the guilt of vegetarians. (This isn't the same veggie patty, but you can see what I mean about the saturated fat content.)
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My cable TV viewing pattern is extremely uneven. I'll watch it a lot for a month, then watch nothing for 2-3 months (like literally, the TV does not get turned on for months). So I'd been itching to cancel. Originally I was going to set up an antenna to pick up over-the-air signals for free local channels, since like you I subscribe to several movie services. But it turns out there's a hill between my house and the TV stations' antennas. When DirecTV Now offered their intro Go Big plan for life for $35/mo, it had every channel I occasionally watched so I jumped on it (it's since gone up to $40/mo, but I've been grandfathered in so still get channels the service has since dropped, like Discovery). I make enough that I can stomach $40/mo even if I don't watch TV that month. And most of the shows I watch can be viewed directly from the channel's Roku channel using my DirecTV Now login, so I don't have to deal with the DirecTV Now app's slow channel service and buffering issues.
Unfortunately, due to my city government granting a cable monopoly in the area, it hasn't saved me as much as I'd hoped. I was originally on a $139/mo basic cable + Internet plan ($69/mo for 12 months promo period). When I canceled cable TV and retained only the Internet portion, it was $69/mo. For a net savings of $30/mo. In the three years since I canceled cable TV (I canceled it before I got DirecTV Now), my Internet service has gone up in price to $79/mo, then $84/mo, currently $89/mo, and they notified me last month that it'll be going up to $94/mo. It's increasing at over 11% per year, or more than 4x the rate of inflation. So three years after cutting the cord, my net outlay for Internet + TV will be only $5/mo less than it was when I subscribed to cable TV.
I suppose it would've been even worse if I'd stayed with cable TV - the TV + Internet plan I used to have is now $240/mo after promo period. But it still feels like I haven't really saved much by cutting the cord. And I don't think I could stomach dropping back to DSL speeds to reduce my Internet bill (the local phone company's fiber rollout seems to have stalled, as some of the city is covered by fiber but I've been waiting for 5 years for fiber to become available at my address). So basically it seems the cable TV companies are just responding to people cutting the cord by cranking up the prices on the people who still subscribe to them - whether it be cable TV and Internet. Resulting in very little cost savings from cutting the cord if you still have to use the cable company for Internet.
There is one version of Linux which just works. Android's market penetration surpassed Windows several years ago.
If the people making these Linux distros are asking themselves why people aren't adopting their distro, maybe they'd learn more by comparing themselves to Android rather than to Windows.
Unless Facebook already has a notarized copy of your DL on file, or you somehow linked your FB account with real-life ID info which can be linked via authenticated services (e.g. state DL database) to that DL, how is FB supposed to know that the John Doe on your DL is the owner of the account, and not a John Doe on someone else's DL? If you did the typical thing and provided only the bare minimum of info needed to create a FB account, then it's impossible to "prove your identity" to FB. To prove your identity at a future date, you must have confirmed your identity at a previous date. Submitting proof of your ID after the fact, is like trying to restore from a backup when you never made backups.
I suppose people's reasoning is that since FB is learning and tracking all this stuff about their identity anyway, it would be relatively trivial for FB to confirm that the identity info they've collected on your account profile's matches your identity, not the impostor's. But that opens up a huge liability issue. Since you allowed your account to be hacked, FB is not liable for the consequences. If they start handing back accounts to people who claim to have been hacked, and they screw up and actually take it away from the real owner and hand it over to an impostor, FB becomes liable for the consequences.
The only real way to prevent this stuff while maintaining your anonymity is to create 2FA recovery tokens - unique cipher-texts which can be used to confirm that you were the person who used the account to create the cipher-texts. By creating those tokens at a previous date, you can provide them at a future date as proof that you're the account's real owner. I've done it for my Google and web hosting accounts (I assume FB has something similar; I wouldn't know since I don't use FB). For domains, I register the important ones for multiple years, and set reminders for myself to renew them before they expire (I deliberately picked my birthday as the renewal day, even if it meant I lost a half year of registration fees - a whole $6).
The reason this bothers people is because it violates to the presumption of innocence. You have to prove you're not drunk before you're allowed to drive. What's next - a sensor which detects that you have a valid driver's license on you before the car will start? (There's a small intersection with right-to-repair as well, as the manufacturer is exerting control over how you can use "your" product after you've purchased it from them.)
I think the bigger take-away is that no ideological position is absolute - not even presumption of innocence. Reasonable violations are allowable as long as we remain vigilant against a slippery slope progression. e.g. We already require people to prove their age when buying alcohol.
Agreed, but there are actually three failure modes here.
That last one is the big one, because the vast majority of trips are by non-drunk drivers. So a tiny false-positive failure rate can result in a large number of incidents. Typically, increasing the true-positive rate also increases the false-positive rate. That is, reducing the rate at which the system fails to stop a drunk driver also increases the rate at which it mistakenly thinks a non-drunk driver is drunk and prevents them from driving. You have to add the inconvenience and even deaths resulting from the false-positives to your tradeoff balance. Someone who is not drunk could be prevented from driving their car on a -35 F winter night, and freeze to death.
If you really want to test it, pick a small city and implement it there, with it being funded entirely by only the city's working population. And even that won't be a truly accurate test since the people will know the test will end, and will be reluctant to quit their job for fear of having difficulty finding a new job when the test ends.
The closest thing to a real national test of a UBI that I can think of is Venezuela. The government there has promised all its citizens a certain level of free social services. The rampant inflation there is a result of the country's productivity level falling below the amount of productivity necessary to provide those services. Productivity is conserved - everything that's consumed must be produced. When you're producing $100 worth of services but people expect to receive (consume) $200 in services, the economy corrects the inequality by devaluing your currency so the $100 you're producing is now priced at $200 thus equaling what people expect to consume. But since productivity hasn't actually increased (only the pricing ofthe currency has), the people are still receiving $100 worth of services, it's just priced at $200.
We don't funnel the money. The "retards" do it by themselves.
Speaking of which, if you don't trust people to spend their own money wisely, how the hell can you trust them to vote wisely? IMHO if you don't believe in capitalism, you don't believe in democracy. Either you trust the people to usually make the right decision when [spending their money | voting], or you don't.
People receiving a 1099 (paid as a contractor) are self-employed. They actually pay more payroll tax than employees. When you're an employee, you're actually only paying half of your Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes - your employer pays the other half. When you're self-employed, you pay both halves by yourself. Currently, both halves are 6.2%. So if your company offers to pay you 5% more if you switch from an employee to a contractor, you'd actually be losing money.
The first year you work for yourself, you get a free pass. The IRS lets you pay all your taxes (including payroll taxes) in April. Subsequent years you have to prepay your taxes (income + payroll) in quarterly installments. To avoid any penalties, you can elect to pay the same amount of taxes you paid the previous year (split into 4 payments). Or you can guesstimate your taxes for the current year, and as long as your payments were at least 90% of what you end up owing in April, you won't be penalized. Obviously the former method is the safer way to go; the latter method is typically only used if you expect your income to drop substantially compared to last year.
If you receive a 1099, it's enforced. The company that paid you (Twitch and YouTube in this case) sends the IRS a copy of the 1099 it sends you. So the IRS knows you received the money, and it'll raise all sorts of red flags if you don't include it in your tax returns. Lack of enforcement happens only when the company doesn't give you a 1099 even though they're supposed to (anyone paid $600 or more in a year is supposed to get a 1099).
Thing is, it's not really customer demand per se. California has a ZEV mandate. Each year, every car company has to sell a certain percentage of zero emissions vehicles - mostly EVs though there's at least one hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in the mix. The formula is a bit complex (factoring in partial ZEVs like plug-in hybrids), but for 2018 it's about 2.5%. For 2025 it'll be 8%.
If a car company can't hit that quota, they must buy credits from a company which exceeded theirs (usually Tesla, so you can nix all the conspiracy theories about the other automakers wanting to kill off Tesla - Tesla is their safety net). If they fail to meet their ZEV quota, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen other states automatically adopt California's auto guidelines, they'd be banned from selling cars to about a third of the U.S.population. No car company wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market, so they are all busy producing EVs. And if there's insufficient demand for EVs for them to meet their quota, they will run sales and incentives (even selling/leasing the EVs at a loss) to meet the quota.
So the growth in customer demand isn't organic. It's mandated by law (that's a fact too). Not saying there isn't demand - there very well could be. But we'll never know exactly how much real demand there is because the law manipulates market forces to make the tail wag the dog (forces automakers to lower the price until a certain level of demand is attained).
And the only non-factual part of this post. Speculation: Tesla may be deliberately trying to slow down production, so they can push more of those preorders into later years when the ZEV mandated percentage is higher. They may be hoping that the other companies will have a harder time hitting the higher quota percentages, which would make Tesla's ZEV credits more valuable. Right now, once all the automakers hit their ZEV quotas, the ZEV credits for any additional cars Tesla sells that year are worthless.
My family runs a commercial building. Despite it being our building, we're not even allowed to enter the units we rent out to our tenants unless the tenant invite us in first. When we evict someone, we have to file paperwork with the city and allow the tenant time to respond (whole process takes about 6 months). And when everything is in order, we're only allowed into our own building with a police escort.
I have security cameras around the outside for the tenants' protection since we've had a few robberies. But no way in hell would I ever get away with putting security cameras in their units, even if I first disclosed it to them. I know it's the same for hotels, and I imagine it's the same for apartment rentals. Why do homeowners running Airbnb rentals get held to a different standard?
Lots more, but you probably get the idea. People suck at making rational decisions when it comes to rare events.
Those islands are trivial (if a bit costly) to overcome. The U.S. just has to help the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. build their own islands. If you accept China's claim that artificial islands extend territorial waters, then building one just outside of China's territorial waters (200 nautical miles from China's shore) cuts it in half to 100 nmi (new border is the midway point between two land masses). That allows you to build a new island 100 miles from China's shores. Those new islands cut China's territorial waters in half again to 50 nmi. Repeat until the only territorial waters China has are just a few miles from their shoreline. At that point China can either live with their vastly reduced territorial waters, or they can give up the silly notion that artificial islands extend territorial waters.
That's what the Old Testament (the Jewish Torah) teaches.
The New Testament that's the basis of Christianity overturns all those Old Testament rules and replaces them with a new one - "love one another." And no this doesn't mean just other Christians; it means everyone
(This is why I facepalm at Christians who try to put the Ten Commandments up on a pedestal, because clearly they haven't read the New Testament enough.)
While not a "religion" per se, atheism is just as much a faith as any religion.
Logically, you cannot prove a negative (other than disproving every other possible case), meaning you can't prove that there is no god. So the only logically supportable belief is agnosticism - you are uncertain if a god does or does not exist. To take that extra step to atheism - being convinced that there is no god - requires a leap of faith.
Your TV analogy doesn't work because it's trivial to observe that the TV is off. A better analogy is the TV in my house that is unobservable to you and the people debating its state. Religious people might say it's tuned to CNN or NBC. An atheist would say the TV is off, and get into arguments with anyone claiming the TV is on. An agnostic would (logically correctly) say "we can't know the state of the TV" and would pretty much ignore anyone claiming it's on or off, because to them there's no point arguing over something that can't be determined with certainty. (Which incidentally is why engineers are more likely to be religious than scientists. Engineers are used to making important design decisions in the face of uncertainty as a normal course of their work. Scientists rather dislike publishing results unless they're certain.)
The atheist "lack of a belief" argument basically boils down to obfuscating the atheist and agnostic cases to combine them. Yes "we don't know what channel the TV is tuned to, it could be off" is a logically correct statement. But it's rather meaningless since you can just as easily say "we don't know how what channel the TV is tuned to, it could be on" and also be correct.
I attribute this misconception among atheists to the rise of computer science. Computers use boolean logic, where the only possible states are true or false. So failure to confirm the true state logically confirms the false state. But boolean logic is actually a subset of real-world logic, which has three possible states - true, false, and cannot be determined. In the real world, failing to confirm the true state does not prove the false state.
Generally, financial crimes don't involve prison time because there's no physical harm done. The economic harm is pretty easy to eliminate simply by adjusting the economics. i.e. You make the fine for putting profits above user data security so large that no CEO will put (typical) profits above user data. There's no need for prison sentences; that's just malicious victim-blaming because you're unable to find the thief. Remember, the CEO of the company holding your data isn't the one who stole your data - some hacker did. That's the true criminal. At worst, the company inadequately protected your data, or collected data that you may not have particularly wanted them to collect but you agreed to let them do it. Both are problems which are easily solved with economic disincentives. No need for prison.
The dynamic that's going on here is that in property theft, if the company that's holding property has it stolen, they're out the stolen property. That financial loss creates an incentive for them to adequately protect that property in proportion to its value. But in the case of data, the "stolen" data is merely copied by the thieves. The company is not out the data, and their ability to use it in whatever manner they previously were to generate revenue, is unaffected. The lack of that economic loss when they're hacked is what creates the entire problem. So the simplest solution is just adding an economic loss as a disincentive.
If you immediately jump to prison sentences, the only thing you're going to accomplish is making all these companies move their operations overseas, with all their executive officers located outside the U.S., and only keeping operational staff in the U.S. Your data will still be stolen just as it is now, because you didn't want to add an economic disincentive, and the companies found it easier just to move their executive officers out of the country rather than have them face prison time.
It's not possible. The trolls are a relatively small percentage of the "problem." The bigger "problem" is that what half of the population sees as legitimate whistleblowing, the other half sees as toxicity that must be silenced and the perpetrators unmasked and banned.
On a meta level, the problem is that we're trying to assign categories to speech based on how we perceive it, rather than on the intent with which it's said. What's sounds like a legitimate anonymous complaint to one person is toxic speech to someone else. Speech really needs to be assessed on the basis of the intent of the speaker, not on how the speech makes you feel. The PC crowd is the one most guilty of this. Someone finds "Negro" printed on their sofa and gets all offended, and sympathetic PC advocates in the media make the story go national. When "negro" is the Spanish word for "black", and the (black) sofa was manufactured in a Spanish-speaking country. Prioritizing people's reaction to the word over the intent with which the word was printed creates a non-existent racial offense.
If you could magically know the speaker's intent, you would know if they're a troll, or if they were being genuine in what they're saying. Unfortunately there is no magic that can tell you this (though occasionally you can tease it out through logical gymnastics - a troll will sometimes exhibit behavior contradictory to if they actually believe what they say). But people are unsatisfied with calling this an unsolvable problem. So they keep trying to solve it by insisting on judging speech based on how the speech is perceived by others.
Well, if you're going to that, then the only metric which works is whether anyone judges the anonymous speech to be useful to them. And if so, then the speech should be allowed. Which is the inverse of the standard currently being used - where people try to get it banned if anyone gets offended by it. If you carry that standard out to its logical conclusion, all speech will be banned because someone, somewhere will be offended by anything that's said.
Ironically, the biggest annoyance I've had lately is due to the EU GDPR ostensibly created to protect your privacy. About 80% of the websites I go to now have a GDPR pop-up I have to click through before I can read the content. If I browse in private/incognito mode, cookies are not retained so I get this pop-up every time I visit the site, which is rather annoying. If I browse in normal mode and agree that I have been informed of the site's privacy policy as per GDPR requirements, it writes a cookie to my browser telling the site not to show the notice again. And the cumulative sum of all those GDPR notification cookies makes my browser uniquely identifiable thus destroying my privacy. Catch-22.
The concern wasn't that the laptop might hold a bomb. They request you remove the laptop from the bag because it contains a lot of dense complex parts which made it difficult to tell what else was in the bag when they only had a top-down view which forced them to look through the laptop. With a 3D computed tomographic view, they can virtually remove the laptop from the image to see what else is in the bag.
It's also worth pointing out that Pan Am 103 was destroyed by a bomb in a radio that was otherwise fully functional. So turning the laptop on doesn't really accomplish anything, other than more security theater. You could still modify the battery so part of it held enough juice to turn on the laptop for the security check, while the rest of it was replaced with Semtex explosive.
While that's technically true, the difference is so vast that it's a meaningless comparison.
Earth CO2 concentration, current: 0.04%, 20 C
Earth CO2 concentration, worst-case model: 0.2% (est)
Venus CO2 concentration, current: 96.5%, 462 C
Also worth pointing out that
Mars CO2 concentration, current: 95.3%, -125 C to 20 C
The more you know...
This cycle probably goes back to the dawn of civilization. Older people who don't understand why younger people like the things they do will always come up with criticisms why it's destroying the lives of youth everywhere.
The current cable monopolies are a result of local governments giving the cable companies monopolies in exchange for concessions like guarantees to cover low-income areas. Capitalism played no role in them. They're a textbook example of a failure of government regulation, not a failure of capitalism.
Theaters were invented back in the day when people couldn't afford to own their own projector, sound system, and screen. Instead, one person would buy those (expensive) items, and rent out seats to allow people to watch movies on their equipment.
TVs partially displaced theaters, but not entirely because the image and sound quality wasn't as good, and the screen wasn't as big. HDTVs and especially 4k TVs pretty much match theaters in image quality. A lot of people's sound systems now rival a theater's (without a screaming baby in back). And typical screen sizes are starting to pushing into the 70-80 inch range. Meanwhile 4k projectors are approaching $2k. It won't be much longer before the only reason to watch a movie at a theater will be for the social aspect. And I suspect that will be partially offset by voice chat technology used in games allowing multiple people to watch the same movie together in their homes, while being able to make comments to each other in real-time as if they were watching it in the same room. (The current generation of kids seems to prefer virtual social interaction over the Internet over physical social interaction.)
The only theaters I see sticking around are IMAX and 3D (since 3D TVs seem to have died off).
Before the Galaxy S5, they made the first flagship phone which was waterproof. They even went so far as to have their engineers figure out how to make the touchscreen usable while it was wet (AFAIK it's the only phone with that capability). Then the dropped waterproofing as a feature from their phones? WTF? Pure management fail.
When I worked at a hotel, occasionally a convention group would order veggie burgers but leave enough leftovers that the staff were allowed to eat them. These were better than the mass-produced fast food beef hamburgers I've eaten. They were so good I actually went online to track down a retail seller of the veggie patties so I could eat them at home. That's when I discovered from the nutrition label that they got the taste by loading it up with as much saturated fat as a ground beef burger. So basically it wasn't any healthier for you than a beef burger, it was just made from plants to assuage the guilt of vegetarians. (This isn't the same veggie patty, but you can see what I mean about the saturated fat content.)