The largest effect of the UBI would be at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Many people who are well paid are very good at their job... and they like it. You do well at what you like. The highest paid are the most skilled. There is a pleasure in doing skilled work well.
At the other end of the ladder, people who are low paid generally do work that is unpleasant, repetitive, and un-satisfying. But they do it because they need the money. With the UBI they no longer need the money to survive. So they quit, and live on the UBI if that's the best they can do. So much less skilled work goes undone. But that work is still necessary to society. Some of it can be automated, but much can't be automated, at least in a cost effective way.
So salary (and working conditions) for low paid jobs goes way up. The salary for the garbage collector now reflects a new scarcity in the labor market. People doing unpleasant work may then be paid more than people doing more skilled and pleasant work. Construction workers may be paid more than lawyers. Neither can do the work of the other. Which is more important to society? Which job is harder to automate?
I've known Richard Burr since 1994. He was an appliance salesman who wanted to be in Congress. I was a campaign organizer for his opponent in that race. He has no understanding of tech issues which makes it all the more ridiculous that he is Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Burr is doing this because he is up for re-election this November. His opponent in the race is Deborah Ross, an intelligent and hard working former member of the NC House of Representatives and former State Director of the North Carolina ACLU. If you really want to fix the Burr problem, consider making a donation to the Deborah Ross for Senate Campaign. https://secure.actblue.com/con...
The value (as with most things) lies not in the rocks but in the attitude of the buyers. The rocks are deemed as special because they came from another place and have a documented history (killed a cow). But that is the perception of a buyer with a very Earth-centric view. In fact, Earth is a big rock in space and every clod on it's surface is a "space rock".
Once we become a space-faring civilization, this rarity value attached to non-Earth rocks will seem very quaint. Since almost all the matter in the universe is "non-Earth", it will be Earth rocks that will have the value of the rare.
The new law (HB2) states that discrimination is not a cause of action in state courts. This reverses a 30 year precedent. The Republicans want to talk about bathrooms because they think (and they are probably right) that most citizens don't even know what a transgender person is. But citizens do know what jobs are.... so when companies like Paypal start reducing jobs in North Carolina, that message will get through. It will be painful to us to lose those jobs, but it is worth it to have a future where discrimination is not state policy.
As a citizen of North Carolina, I am grateful to Paypal for standing up to protect people from discrimination. As bad as the treatment of transgender folks is in this law, the real impact is much broader. This law removes the right of all citizens to access state courts to sue for employment or housing discrimination based on age, race, national origin, or sex. The Republicans are using the bathroom stuff as cover because they think a majority of voters don't identify with transgender people. But the real impact is to legalize all forms of discrimination in North Carolina.
You can replace the transit shadow with 10 hrs of 30 MW laser light. But that assumes you know where the aliens are so you know when to start and stop the laser. But if you don't know where the aliens are, you have to assume that someone is always watching. So that would be 876 times as much energy in order to run the laser continuously.
Copyright reassignment is necessary to enforce the provisions of the GPL. If the holder of the copyright is not aware that his code has been stolen, or if he has died or can't afford to pay a lawyer, then the GPL is worthless because it can't be enforced. If the copyright is reassigned to the FSF, for example, they will pay the lawyer to sue on behalf of the GPL. The GPL is silent of reassignment. If a project leader is requiring it, the contributor is free to take all the existing project code and fork the whole thing. That's how the GPL prevents any one person from having leverage over the code.
The "freedom" of the MIT license is the freedom to deny others access to source code. ReDox claims that they aren't worried about someone adding proprietary code because it would, by definition, have to be an improvement in order to be successful. Yes, except Windows is successful without being an improvement on Linux. How did that happen? It happens because people become dependent on a particular feature, a particular standard Over time that may become inferior but because it's now proprietary, it can't be improved without violating copyright.
So why not use GPL? ReDox never really answers that obvious question. If the ReDox folks have a great idea, just implement it in the GPL and then everyone can enjoy that great idea. But what they really want is for many people to donate their code so they can then make a profit off it. And that's why the GPL wins over time.
Also, note that the attack on the GPL specifically focuses on libraries. But in general Linux libraries are covered under the LGPL and not the GPL. So ReDox is setting up a straw man argument. If libraries are a problem, then compare your license to the LGPL.
I thought I had looked at most of them. Today I tried Mate and it is very good at such customization too. And it looks pretty. I was a KDE guy 15 years ago but it was not keeping up. That's when I went to Gnome. And then Gnome 3 forced me to move to Xfce. If Xfce fucks up, maybe I will consider KDE or Mate again.
BTW, the reason I said Xfce was the only desktop that empowers the user was that I was hoping someone like you would correct me.:) And it worked... twice.
Good question. First you should ask yourself why there is a whole separate distribution just to support a different desktop. Xubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu and is identical in most ways. But after copying most of Ubuntu, it's developers make a big deal out of changing the desktop. If they put all their effort into just perfecting that Xfce desktop on Ubuntu instead of being diverted by supporting the management of a separate distribution, they might have the time and resources to do a better job.
We have had a recent lesson in this fallacy in the case of Mint. Mint is also a copy of Ubuntu and it exists primarily as a platform for the Cinnamon desktop. But because they were slow to handle security problems, Mint was hacked and code compromised. I don't trust Mint to this day. So I suggest starting with a secure and solid Ubuntu base and just perfect your desktop on that distro.
I don't doubt that Mate may be "more polished" than Xfce. I tried Cinnamon and it was much prettier. Xfce is sort of "no frills" in the appearance department. But when it comes to functionality, Xfce is the best I've found. Like Gnome2 in the old days, it lets you define panels, size them and put them where you want. And then you can create launchers for applications, urls, or files and drag those you your panels. This is a most useful feature that I've only found in Xfce. Can Mate do that?
The fact that such a trivial customization is newsworthy tells you just how bad Unity is. There is nothing special about having a user defined layout of the desktop. Many other distros have provided such user freedom and Ubuntu did too in the past. But now the default desktop is Unity which goes out of it's way to take away user choice in the name of "unifying" the desktop between laptops and phones. Yes, you will have the same desktop and it will be crippled everywhere.
I like Ubuntu as an operating system. It's stable (if you use the LTS version), has the best and fastest security updates and is the Linux OS with the best hardware compatibility. But I can't tolerate Unity. So when I install Ubuntu, the first change I make is to go to the Ubuntu Software Center and search for xfce4 (the current xfce desktop) and install "Meta-package for the Xfce Lightweight Desktop Environment". This will let you choose which desktop you want each time you log on. You can use Unity where that is your preference and switch to Xfce when you want.
Xfce lets you define the exact size and positions of all panels. You can have docking panels on the sides, top, bottom.... wherever you want. But the best thing about Xfce is that it lets you create desktop launchers of your own. Just right click on the desktop, choose application launcher, url link, or file manager folder. And these launchers can be dragged to the panels you have created and docked there. Gnome used to let you do that, but no more. As far as I can determine, Xfce is the only desktop that empowers the user in such a useful way.
An AI that can beat the human champion at the Go game (https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=alphago) is capable of learning a task of unlimited complexity. The only limitation will be the difficulty of training the AI. Given enough training time, there is no job that can't be replaced.
If Puzder is going to fire Suzie rather than give her a $3 raise, then his taxes are going to go up to pay for her social safety net costs. It's impossible to have a society where a large fraction of people can't find work that pays a living wage. Those people will vote (or act in other ways) to overturn the system that is making their lives impossible.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
tnk1, I'm inclined to think that the worm has turned in Germany. Exposure of spying by the US on the Chancellor and other high government officials has poisoned the well. It would be a political death sentence for any politician or government employee who was caught helping the US spy on Germans.
What happens when Microsoft, operating under a secret NSA Security Letter, intentionally induces a fault in the Azure Cloud service of an individual of interest. And then of course the Data Trustee gives the Microsoft engineer access to the customer's data. If the NSA knows what they want, the access would not have to be for an extended period of time. No, this won't work for mass surveillance or even continuous surveillance of one individual. But it is not data security of the type implied by the announcement.
This headline is very misleading. Yes, 3D XPoint itself is 1000 times as fast as flash. But it's limited by the interface speed. Using the PCIe-NVme interface, the Optane SSD will be about 7 times as fast as a flash SSD. To take advantage of the full 3D XPoint speed, there will have to be a new, custom interface, and probably some software and operating system changes. All this is great but the headline is jumping ahead of the linked stories.
Really? Please tell me how salary "privacy" benefits workers... unless they are incompetent. Is that what you are saying? Protect the privacy of the incompetent?
From the article; "a single leadership decision eliminated salary negotiation for new employees"
Salary transparency is a good idea and it can make gender or racial discrimination more difficult. But what does that have to do with eliminating salary negotiation? Employees (new or old) could still negotiate based on their worth to the company. And transparency would mean that everyone would know what their salary was. So everyone could judge whether the employee was worth what they were being paid. It would be possible for each worker to determine if they were being short-changed because a less talented or less hard-working employee was being paid more. That is exactly the information that is necessary to engage in principled and informed negotiations. And preventing that knowledge is exactly what companies like to do to prevent informed negotiations.
Mike Griffin has complained about NASA priorities ever since he was fired in 2009 and stopped setting the priorities. You may remember the public campaign he and his wife waged to keep his government job. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/2845... And he hopes a new incoming President will re-appoint him as NASA head.
Griffin wants to go back to the expensive paradigm of sending humans to the surface of the moon. This may be an engineering objective (it's fun to build cool stuff) but it is not a top scientific objective. NASA is planning for exploration and eventual colonization of Mars. The truth is that it is astronomically (pun intended) expensive to put humans in such a hostile environment as space. There is really only one goal that makes such expenditures worthwhile. That is the establishment of a permanent self-sustaining human colony off the Earth. The rest, including further exploration of the Moon, can be better carried out by AI or remote controlled robotic vehicles.
What do you mean, "net neutrality came too late to make any real difference"? The net was born neutral from the time it was opened to public and commercial interests. And neutrality is the natural state of any communication network. You have to intentionally and continuously work to tilt the internet to special interests. It is being re-claimed in the US even as we speak. Why would India start it's citizens off in a distorted world/
It is not a crime to do nothing. If Apple already has a key, they can be compelled under discovery to turn it over. But they can't be compelled to create one if it does not exist. You can't require someone to act against their will. That is called slavery.
When you compare the industrialized world to India, Africa, South America you are ignoring an important fact. In those poor countries there is an unsustainable birth rate. There are too many people. That means unemployment and it means that human labor is cheaper than automation even for menial labor. In India, they don't use mechanical vibrators to settle and smooth poured concrete. it's cheaper to have twenty guys mix it with their feet and smooth it by hand. That's why automation has not taken hold there.
Countries like Germany and Japan have zero internal population growth so their unemployment rate is low for now. Unless those countries take the luddite path, they will move to UBI as automation takes over.
Slashdot Mirror
The largest effect of the UBI would be at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Many people who are well paid are very good at their job... and they like it. You do well at what you like. The highest paid are the most skilled. There is a pleasure in doing skilled work well.
At the other end of the ladder, people who are low paid generally do work that is unpleasant, repetitive, and un-satisfying. But they do it because they need the money. With the UBI they no longer need the money to survive. So they quit, and live on the UBI if that's the best they can do. So much less skilled work goes undone. But that work is still necessary to society. Some of it can be automated, but much can't be automated, at least in a cost effective way.
So salary (and working conditions) for low paid jobs goes way up. The salary for the garbage collector now reflects a new scarcity in the labor market. People doing unpleasant work may then be paid more than people doing more skilled and pleasant work. Construction workers may be paid more than lawyers. Neither can do the work of the other. Which is more important to society? Which job is harder to automate?
I've known Richard Burr since 1994. He was an appliance salesman who wanted to be in Congress. I was a campaign organizer for his opponent in that race. He has no understanding of tech issues which makes it all the more ridiculous that he is Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Burr is doing this because he is up for re-election this November. His opponent in the race is Deborah Ross, an intelligent and hard working former member of the NC House of Representatives and former State Director of the North Carolina ACLU. If you really want to fix the Burr problem, consider making a donation to the Deborah Ross for Senate Campaign. https://secure.actblue.com/con...
The value (as with most things) lies not in the rocks but in the attitude of the buyers. The rocks are deemed as special because they came from another place and have a documented history (killed a cow). But that is the perception of a buyer with a very Earth-centric view. In fact, Earth is a big rock in space and every clod on it's surface is a "space rock".
Once we become a space-faring civilization, this rarity value attached to non-Earth rocks will seem very quaint. Since almost all the matter in the universe is "non-Earth", it will be Earth rocks that will have the value of the rare.
The new law (HB2) states that discrimination is not a cause of action in state courts. This reverses a 30 year precedent. The Republicans want to talk about bathrooms because they think (and they are probably right) that most citizens don't even know what a transgender person is. But citizens do know what jobs are.... so when companies like Paypal start reducing jobs in North Carolina, that message will get through. It will be painful to us to lose those jobs, but it is worth it to have a future where discrimination is not state policy.
As a citizen of North Carolina, I am grateful to Paypal for standing up to protect people from discrimination. As bad as the treatment of transgender folks is in this law, the real impact is much broader. This law removes the right of all citizens to access state courts to sue for employment or housing discrimination based on age, race, national origin, or sex. The Republicans are using the bathroom stuff as cover because they think a majority of voters don't identify with transgender people. But the real impact is to legalize all forms of discrimination in North Carolina.
You can replace the transit shadow with 10 hrs of 30 MW laser light. But that assumes you know where the aliens are so you know when to start and stop the laser. But if you don't know where the aliens are, you have to assume that someone is always watching. So that would be 876 times as much energy in order to run the laser continuously.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who at the time referenced in the leaked documents was CEO of Halliburton. Oh, he is also a war criminal.
Copyright reassignment is necessary to enforce the provisions of the GPL. If the holder of the copyright is not aware that his code has been stolen, or if he has died or can't afford to pay a lawyer, then the GPL is worthless because it can't be enforced. If the copyright is reassigned to the FSF, for example, they will pay the lawyer to sue on behalf of the GPL. The GPL is silent of reassignment. If a project leader is requiring it, the contributor is free to take all the existing project code and fork the whole thing. That's how the GPL prevents any one person from having leverage over the code.
The "freedom" of the MIT license is the freedom to deny others access to source code. ReDox claims that they aren't worried about someone adding proprietary code because it would, by definition, have to be an improvement in order to be successful. Yes, except Windows is successful without being an improvement on Linux. How did that happen? It happens because people become dependent on a particular feature, a particular standard Over time that may become inferior but because it's now proprietary, it can't be improved without violating copyright.
So why not use GPL? ReDox never really answers that obvious question. If the ReDox folks have a great idea, just implement it in the GPL and then everyone can enjoy that great idea. But what they really want is for many people to donate their code so they can then make a profit off it. And that's why the GPL wins over time.
Also, note that the attack on the GPL specifically focuses on libraries. But in general Linux libraries are covered under the LGPL and not the GPL. So ReDox is setting up a straw man argument. If libraries are a problem, then compare your license to the LGPL.
I thought I had looked at most of them. Today I tried Mate and it is very good at such customization too. And it looks pretty. I was a KDE guy 15 years ago but it was not keeping up. That's when I went to Gnome. And then Gnome 3 forced me to move to Xfce. If Xfce fucks up, maybe I will consider KDE or Mate again.
BTW, the reason I said Xfce was the only desktop that empowers the user was that I was hoping someone like you would correct me. :) And it worked... twice.
And Gnome Classic has eliminated user created launchers.
Good question. First you should ask yourself why there is a whole separate distribution just to support a different desktop. Xubuntu is a derivative of Ubuntu and is identical in most ways. But after copying most of Ubuntu, it's developers make a big deal out of changing the desktop. If they put all their effort into just perfecting that Xfce desktop on Ubuntu instead of being diverted by supporting the management of a separate distribution, they might have the time and resources to do a better job.
We have had a recent lesson in this fallacy in the case of Mint. Mint is also a copy of Ubuntu and it exists primarily as a platform for the Cinnamon desktop. But because they were slow to handle security problems, Mint was hacked and code compromised. I don't trust Mint to this day. So I suggest starting with a secure and solid Ubuntu base and just perfect your desktop on that distro.
I don't doubt that Mate may be "more polished" than Xfce. I tried Cinnamon and it was much prettier. Xfce is sort of "no frills" in the appearance department. But when it comes to functionality, Xfce is the best I've found. Like Gnome2 in the old days, it lets you define panels, size them and put them where you want. And then you can create launchers for applications, urls, or files and drag those you your panels. This is a most useful feature that I've only found in Xfce. Can Mate do that?
The fact that such a trivial customization is newsworthy tells you just how bad Unity is. There is nothing special about having a user defined layout of the desktop. Many other distros have provided such user freedom and Ubuntu did too in the past. But now the default desktop is Unity which goes out of it's way to take away user choice in the name of "unifying" the desktop between laptops and phones. Yes, you will have the same desktop and it will be crippled everywhere.
I like Ubuntu as an operating system. It's stable (if you use the LTS version), has the best and fastest security updates and is the Linux OS with the best hardware compatibility. But I can't tolerate Unity. So when I install Ubuntu, the first change I make is to go to the Ubuntu Software Center and search for xfce4 (the current xfce desktop) and install "Meta-package for the Xfce Lightweight Desktop Environment". This will let you choose which desktop you want each time you log on. You can use Unity where that is your preference and switch to Xfce when you want.
Xfce lets you define the exact size and positions of all panels. You can have docking panels on the sides, top, bottom.... wherever you want. But the best thing about Xfce is that it lets you create desktop launchers of your own. Just right click on the desktop, choose application launcher, url link, or file manager folder. And these launchers can be dragged to the panels you have created and docked there. Gnome used to let you do that, but no more. As far as I can determine, Xfce is the only desktop that empowers the user in such a useful way.
An AI that can beat the human champion at the Go game (https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=alphago) is capable of learning a task of unlimited complexity. The only limitation will be the difficulty of training the AI. Given enough training time, there is no job that can't be replaced.
If Puzder is going to fire Suzie rather than give her a $3 raise, then his taxes are going to go up to pay for her social safety net costs. It's impossible to have a society where a large fraction of people can't find work that pays a living wage. Those people will vote (or act in other ways) to overturn the system that is making their lives impossible.
I'm always amazed that the rich think they can hide in their gated communities and enjoy the fruits of other people's labor.
tnk1, I'm inclined to think that the worm has turned in Germany. Exposure of spying by the US on the Chancellor and other high government officials has poisoned the well. It would be a political death sentence for any politician or government employee who was caught helping the US spy on Germans.
What happens when Microsoft, operating under a secret NSA Security Letter, intentionally induces a fault in the Azure Cloud service of an individual of interest. And then of course the Data Trustee gives the Microsoft engineer access to the customer's data. If the NSA knows what they want, the access would not have to be for an extended period of time.
No, this won't work for mass surveillance or even continuous surveillance of one individual. But it is not data security of the type implied by the announcement.
This headline is very misleading. Yes, 3D XPoint itself is 1000 times as fast as flash. But it's limited by the interface speed. Using the PCIe-NVme interface, the Optane SSD will be about 7 times as fast as a flash SSD. To take advantage of the full 3D XPoint speed, there will have to be a new, custom interface, and probably some software and operating system changes. All this is great but the headline is jumping ahead of the linked stories.
Really? Please tell me how salary "privacy" benefits workers... unless they are incompetent. Is that what you are saying? Protect the privacy of the incompetent?
From the article; "a single leadership decision eliminated salary negotiation for new employees"
Salary transparency is a good idea and it can make gender or racial discrimination more difficult. But what does that have to do with eliminating salary negotiation? Employees (new or old) could still negotiate based on their worth to the company. And transparency would mean that everyone would know what their salary was. So everyone could judge whether the employee was worth what they were being paid. It would be possible for each worker to determine if they were being short-changed because a less talented or less hard-working employee was being paid more. That is exactly the information that is necessary to engage in principled and informed negotiations. And preventing that knowledge is exactly what companies like to do to prevent informed negotiations.
Mike Griffin has complained about NASA priorities ever since he was fired in 2009 and stopped setting the priorities. You may remember the public campaign he and his wife waged to keep his government job. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/2845... And he hopes a new incoming President will re-appoint him as NASA head.
Griffin wants to go back to the expensive paradigm of sending humans to the surface of the moon. This may be an engineering objective (it's fun to build cool stuff) but it is not a top scientific objective. NASA is planning for exploration and eventual colonization of Mars. The truth is that it is astronomically (pun intended) expensive to put humans in such a hostile environment as space. There is really only one goal that makes such expenditures worthwhile. That is the establishment of a permanent self-sustaining human colony off the Earth. The rest, including further exploration of the Moon, can be better carried out by AI or remote controlled robotic vehicles.
What do you mean, "net neutrality came too late to make any real difference"? The net was born neutral from the time it was opened to public and commercial interests. And neutrality is the natural state of any communication network. You have to intentionally and continuously work to tilt the internet to special interests. It is being re-claimed in the US even as we speak. Why would India start it's citizens off in a distorted world/
It is not a crime to do nothing. If Apple already has a key, they can be compelled under discovery to turn it over. But they can't be compelled to create one if it does not exist. You can't require someone to act against their will. That is called slavery.
When you compare the industrialized world to India, Africa, South America you are ignoring an important fact. In those poor countries there is an unsustainable birth rate. There are too many people. That means unemployment and it means that human labor is cheaper than automation even for menial labor. In India, they don't use mechanical vibrators to settle and smooth poured concrete. it's cheaper to have twenty guys mix it with their feet and smooth it by hand. That's why automation has not taken hold there.
Countries like Germany and Japan have zero internal population growth so their unemployment rate is low for now. Unless those countries take the luddite path, they will move to UBI as automation takes over.