Actually, with the genetic drift of breeding programs, I've considered backing up breeds of cats and dogs by sequencing their DNA. It costs ~$1,000 for a 2.8-billion-base-pair sequencing, which would cost ~$286,000 to synthesize and implant into a new cell (clone back out using only organic chemistry, no pre-existing DNA, all test tube work) and make a new cat. If you cut out the variable DNA and replaced it with synthesized DNA, you could start with a model cat and patch it to be a model Mau or Abyssinian or Persian for around $50,000. If you started with a model target cat and patched in the breed-variable DNA, it could run $500-$2,000.
There's no reason we couldn't just store smallpox on floppy disk.
So we already have defamation laws, from which the defense is the information is true; and now we need a "I just don't like the information, even if it is true" law to protect from the same sort of defamation?
In before Remember.Me becomes the search engine and old-style directory of information Google has forgotten.
it's a recognition that there is on;y so much that can be done given we don't have time travel.
The "only so much that can be done" is we burned down your house, murdered your family, and cut off your right hand, so we've given you this loaf of bread to help get you started out.
Compensating people for wrongful imprisonment means taking money from other people. If you don't fix your legal system, you're using more than necessary of other people's money to do that; and, from a macroeconomic standpoint, you have a laborer who goes unused but who collects income, which is similar to just paying people to dig holes and fill them in again: more cost, less product, and the sum total of all consumer money (and thus any portion thereof) carries less buying power.
The "to the extent possible" qualifier is a handwave against the *enormous* social consequences of imprisonment, which death-penalty opponents universally consider no big deal. Nobody cries out about the barbaric practice of imprisoning people in the first place--a much worse crime with many more victims than state execution, and that's not even including secondary victims from the economic impacts and the social impacts of manufacturing criminals by socialization to a prison environment.
The huge movement against the death penalty is as ridiculous as if you started a movement against people causing psychological harm to their kids by buying them ugly goldfish to remind them they're ugly kids: that sounds terrible, and maybe you should worry about it after you start with child sexual abuse, violent physical abuse, drug households, and the broken foster care system that systematically neglects millions of children every year.
Moral victories, though. It sounds better when you say "killing people is bad! We should put them in prison, then we could release them when we discover they're innocent and make amends!" and leave out that THERE IS NO UNDOING THE HORRIFIC DAMAGE YOU HAVE DONE TO THIS INDIVIDUAL AS A PERSON FOREVER. It's also a lot harder to make "prison is barbaric and we should minimize its use as a form of sentencing" sound meaningful, since people can't process that YOU DON'T COME BACK FROM PRISON; PRISON COMES BACK WITH YOU.
People have no sense of economics. The guys who did the (crappy) movie, In Time, kind of got it right, but not in any serious way: you steal from the banks, the banks start charging everyone a shitload. In the movie, they framed it the same way as all normal people think: the banks charged more because they're assholes.
In reality, the cost of production is, essentially, wage-labor time. Wage-labor time includes overhead that's diffused through production (e.g. the CEO doesn't do a damned thing to make hamburgers, but hamburgers carry the partial cost of his salary; I often have to point out this is like $20 or $200 per employee per year, except a Chipotle where their overpaid executive is making $3,400 per employee per year), and *risk* is overhead. Risk has to cover losses sustained in the long-term of operating by amortizing them, charging more than costs in near-term good times and less than costs in near-term bad times. In other words: you charge an extra million dollars per year because, once every 10 years, you experience an average $10 million loss; when you get hit with those, you don't raise prices, because you *already* raised prices.
Our society protects corporations perhaps a little... inefficiently. The basic concept of protecting corporations--from robbery, vandalism, and other risks--is *not* inefficient: if people spent their time stealing from the big bad businesses and passing it out to their friends, we'd have operating cost increases, and thus the price of goods would increase, effectively transferring money from the consumer base to whoever Robin Hood deems worthy. Businesses who don't carry out this transfer go out of business, because eventually they turn negative profits and carry negative assets and have no money to continue operating.
I've had people argue at length that it should be a crime to rob "normal people" because people like us (the guy was middle-class) need our money to get by. He was mad that the police shot someone who was trying to rob a rich guy, and arguing that it's okay for you and me and him to shoot someone who breaks into our homes and steals our shit, because it's wrong to steal from regular folks, but okay to steal from the rich. People see businesses and rich individuals as endless sources of income and, frankly, as a symbol of unfairness, and so they think all kinds of weird shit about that, and then get mad when wage increases turn into price increases.
A flaw in the entropy will give you a 60-bit key if you can guess that much. That's how researchers recover keys from AES just by running on the same machine as an unprivileged user.
We *are* better than the people who commit murder. There's 300 million of us to share the cost of roads, and we all pay pennies; there's *one* murderer, and he takes *all* of the blame for his crimes.
Well, no. We'll dump them on the street into a ruined life, where they'll struggle to survive, develop new mental problems on top of the ones they got from prison, and possibly commit new crimes due to sheer inability to either survive (because of poverty not exempting you of the need to eat) or socially integrate (because you're fucked up in the head from prison). Then we'll put them back in jail in a year or so; or hopefully they'll die in an alleyway first and be not-our-problem.
Oh psh, if they displace the photographs and artifacts from their lives, they'll forget about their dead kid in a year or two. The memories of the events will remain, but the emotional attachment from a constant connection to visual cues of presence will fade. The social connection will fall away and they'll have a bad experience to retell as a story, just a warning to others.
After you've been in jail for 3-4 weeks, your finances are all fucked up. You've lost your job, your income stream has stopped, you're still paying rent or loans (mortgage, car), and your career is probably damaged.
After you've been in jail for 2-3 years, your social connections are all fucked up. Any relationship you had is over. Your friends have moved on. Your family has started thinking about you as an accessory. Reclaiming these things is tough. Your finances are also drained, your career is horribly mangled, and you've lost your house and car and anything else you once owned. You've been desocialized, adapted to a life where you're always threatened, where you have to align with potentially-violent gangs to survive, you've potentially been raped, and you've probably performed sexual favors for protection.
After 15-25 years of jail time (average time an inmate spends on death row in the US is over 15 years), you've passed the career development, relationship development, and family development part of your life. Actually being a human being is now hard; you're an artifact and a burden on society. Your ability to integrate back into society is hampered, as you've spent decades in a prison environment. Your friends have long forgotten you; and your family is uncomfortable at having to associate with you, because you're a stranger yet they're obligated to recognize what they logically (but no longer emotionally) understand as family under the social pressures society places on them.
Tell me again how a wrongful conviction can be reversed.
Risk and punishment are more complex than most people want to argue. A few years back, someone started the argument over whether the death penalty does or does not deter murder. I went digging through data and got conflicting results: in some areas, a repeal of the death penalty didn't do anything; while in others, a repeal of the death penalty caused as much as a quadrupling of homicides in the following two years, and reinstating the death penalty immediately pushed those levels back down--not completely, leaving a long tail of normalization.
I've since figured that there's confounding involved. In low-crime areas, the biggest fear is state retribution (you break law, you get arrested; people in upper-middle-class suburbs have historically associated committing murder with running from the law until you're inevitably captured and executed). In high-crime areas, gang crime will kill you before police; there's so much of it that they'll never find you, anyway, since you left behind just another dead body that anyone from any gang could have produced. Some areas have a sort of hostile-respect social behavior (Texas, where everyone wants to make it clear they're happy to shoot you for standing too close to their property); other areas are full of people who are scared of everything, inviting would-be criminals to do stupid things. Raising or lowering the purported consequences of criminal actions may have a large, small, or non-existent impact on criminal behavior, depending on these and other factors.
From that standpoint, it's hard to make a decision on the death penalty. If you execute 14 murderers per year and 2 are innocent, that's a net-win if abolishing the death penalty results in 3 or more additional murders per year; the blood of the innocent is on your hands either way, so you should try for less blood. If the death penalty is a non-factor in gangland, then maybe you shouldn't bother.
It gets more complex if you consider inmates not slated for execution as "innocent" when a murderer penned in jail for life realizes he's not getting any worse punishment, and so proceeds to stab someone in the throat because he doesn't like the guy. Then you have America: if you're convicted of child molestation or just possession of child pornography, you can go to jail for 8-40 years (!); and while in jail, someone will rape and murder you, and we as Americans tend to find this a good thing. Is that not as much blood on your hands as an execution? I wouldn't call it justice; if it were justice, we would be proud to do it by our own hands.
Then you have the common opinion that we can put someone in jail for 15-25 years and then letting them out because we found out they were innocent. That doesn't absolve you of DESTROYING THEIR LIVES COMPLETELY. For many, even a few weeks in prison will destroy their finances and their careers, leaving their lives in shambles; a few short years destroys all your social connections; and after the 10, 20, or more years many inmates spend on death row before actually getting executed (average is over 15 years), you've missed your dating window, your career building window (in case you wanted to start a career or rebuild your broken one), and really have been excluded from everything people consider "living". Prison is cruel and unusual punishment, and the long prison sentences people swear you can just release an innocent man from after you realize you were wrong cannot be undone by giving the guy a house and a car and some money as an apology.
But, you know. Moral victories. Even if you concretely proved that abolishing the death penalty in a given area directly caused some number of additional innocent murders per year, people would claim they're at least innocent of those murders and have washed their hands of the affair. No responsibility for the problems you cause as long as it's someone else's hands holding the knife. That's why nobody will admit jail time is disproportionate to almost all crimes; we can't even get them to admit 15+ years mandatory SERVED is ludicrous for minor possession of drugs.
I find this position ridiculous because people are quite happy to say, "We might kill an innocent man! Put him in jail and we can let him out in 20 years if we're wrong!" 20 years of isolation from your friends and family, who have ceased caring about you; 20 years without a job, without outside society's social interaction, and without financial growth; 20 years not pursuing your personal or professional goals, whether that's building a career or building a family. You are fucking dead, and you're walking around irritating the rest of us complaining about how your life is now useless; your only compensation is you still have a pulse, and maybe the state will give you some money so you can be miserable in an apartment somewhere.
How about we try fixing our laws, our society, and our legal system? It's not just the courts; the entire social structure which demands action but avoids involvement results in more prosecution and less evidence. Bad economic policies result in more poverty than necessary (we can currently get this to effectively zero in the United States, but that's new--circa 2013 viability marker), leading to more crime, more isolate social group behavior (gangs), and more secondary criminal behavior, ultimately leading to more prosecution in a muddier environment. We can't fix all the problems; we're just lagging behind what we *can* fix now. Get to it.
Execution and incarceration are positive punishment, while fines are negative punishment.
These things don't work, in that the target will attempt to find a way around the problem; however, humans are strong planners, and will analyze risks and avoid doing things if they can't find a way to avoid the risk, or if the risk outweighs the reward. Many animals are weaker at this, and will repeat the behavior if they perceive themselves to have found a way to avoid the risk--even if the risk is severe.
Human operant behavior is confounded by human rational behavior to a much greater degree than in animals. Positive reinforcement generally works better, but that requires having alternative behaviors available which you can reinforce to a point of extinguishing the target behavior. That tends to be technically-complex and raise all kinds of weird social issues, e.g. rape behavior is largely avoided because of the positive reinforcement of social acceptance and the corresponding negative punishment of losing that, and some (much?) of the remaining rape behavior can be diverted by a society which is looser about sex (e.g. some European societies, Greece), making non-rape sex more available (especially if committing rape gets you rejected by future potential partners) at the expense of horrifying the moral compass of the existing society (because sex is bad).
This is also why I make the weak argument that reductions in poverty draw reductions in crime, although people like to immediately claim there will still be some crime anyway (non-zero) and thus reducing poverty doesn't reduce crime (not all, thus not any). I tend to just assume those people are morons.
Well maybe if you were willing to pay $1,400 one-way instead of $850 round-trip to Japan you could ride in a plane with real-time telemetry and all the other expensive bells and whistles.
It's enough for cryptographers to tell you to worry about the entropy source you're using and not magically assume that we can break 96 bits of encryption now but your 128-bit encryption key is fine because we're like 90 billion years off cracking that and maybe 8-12 years off developing newer technology to crack it reasonably fast.
I handle rent by 224sqft apartments. Rents vary between 60 cents per square foot and a little over $1/sqft in low-income areas; I projected $1.33/sqft and $300/month for 224sqft.
As for cost of living, *yes* it lowers cost of living. The base price of any product is the cost to produce it--if you spend $90 to make a toaster and you sell it at WalMart for $45, you're going out of business--and the basic cost of *everything* is wage-labor cost. As I explained: your employer pays you a wage, which you get a fraction of (you pay taxes); and your employer also pays payroll taxes and unemployment insurance on that wage, so the wage-labor cost is *bigger* than just your salary.
I've moved the amount of money you take home up without moving the cost of producing a good up. That lowers the cost of living.
They need to raise wages, and company owners are being scum for trying like hell to keep wages low.
Businesses don't pay wages. A business making a 12% profit doesn't raise wages and cut its profits to 8%; it raises wages and has products that sell for $40 but now cost $45, and so raises the prices. Any competition which prevents this also has a standing downward pressure effect on prices *before* such a wage raise, and so is constantly approaching tapped: all of your competition also follows suit with a price raise if *their* wages go up, too; or else your prices go up, your customers move to your competition, you do a round of layoffs of people who were making stuff that you can't sell anymore, your competition hires more workers for cheap, and everyone continues bitching about low wages.
Employees are the producers. The guy making the toasters is the guy making the toasters. The basic cost is wage-labor, and raising wages raises that cost, thus prices come up.
Rent should NEVER exceed 25% of take home, yet in the usa it regularly is near the 50% mark because wages have been far too low for far too long.
In 1950, the median income family spent 28% of their income on 983sqft median home sizes. In 2003, the median income family spent 33% of their income on 2,300sqft median home sizes. Single-bedroom rental apartments have increased in size from 400sqft in 1920 to nearing 800sqft today; much of that growth was up to 1940, and the remainder has been a long tail.
Meanwhile, median spending on entertainment and other non-essential goods has moved from 25% in 1950 to 44% in 2003. It would appear we're spending much more of our income on shit we don't need, while buying houses that are 2.5 times bigger; if people would just rent places the same size as the apartments and homes they lived in in the 1950s, rent wouldn't exceed 15% of their income.
My Citizen's Dividend plan baselined on $546/month in 2013, which after 2 years of growth is $580/month (by inflation, it's $569/month; but the per-capita income has grown faster than inflation--as is guaranteed in the long term average until the complete collapse of civilization--and the Dividend is a percentage of income). Today that's about $7,000/year of tax-free income (the policy I propose excludes the Dividend from income).
The policy eliminates a 6.2% payroll tax (OASDI--this requires a 15-year transition period where retirees's dividends are padded up to OASDI rates, and then a grandfathering of that income until they die; the total cost of this is 1.5%-2%) and reduces business income taxes by 4.5% absolute (39.6% to 35.1%, or an 11% proportional reduction). That lowers business risk in production and reduces wage-labor cost, allowing the economic forces which draw price downward toward cost to create lower costs as a proportion of employee income (essentially, for every $1 an employer pays to employ you, you take home more under this policy than you do under current).
The policy adjusts personal income tax brackets. This Dividend replaces our ineffective Public Aid system (50 million Americans experience hunger; and only 1 out of every 4 Americans who officially qualify for housing assistance receive it, with the other 75% going onto a waiting list indefinitely), which represents 55% of all Federal Government collected income taxes (business and personal, including personal OASDI), thus the policy slashes those taxes in half (actually by 55%) and applies a 17% flat tax on top of the remainder. That forms a baseline in which the top bracket (39.6%) falls to 34.8%.
To fix the artifact of high regressive taxes from the Social Security Wage Base (currently 32.2% taxes at $80k falling to 26% at $118.5k), I shifted around all the tax brackets based on income distribution to collect a full 30%. My final model is a 43% tax at the top ($400k+), with reduced taxes below that. I would prefer to drive that back down to below 40% as wealth increases; and I don't want to drop the extra 3% immediately (at $10 million income, you'd pay $117k more in taxes), and so would slowly shift the taxes to phase this in. Such a phase-in would likely peak at an absolute tax below 43%, and allow a shorter phase-out of the high tax period.
Under this tax structure, an individual or married-filing-jointly household making $1,000,000/year takes home $9,126 more than today; a zero-income, two-person household takes in $13,920; a single-income earner at minimum wage ($8.25/hr here in MD) takes home $21k or $6,229 more than under the current tax structure; a single-income family (married-filing-jointly) at minimum wage takes home $29.7k or $14,642 more; and a married-filing-jointly household with two adults and a household income of 84,290 takes home *exactly* $84,290 or $17,227 more than under current policy.
There is also a minimized public aid system via EBT providing food and other care for children (families), at a cost of 1.4% of AGI (compared to the 17.2% our currently-defunct system costs). Transitional costs are under 3% and diffuse through the tax system I've outlined by reducing the tax advantages I've described; those costs bleed off over ~30 years, with the long tail being grandfathered OASDI top-up.
This is actually enough to get by on--I had predicted a profit motive for 224sqft apartments, but someone started selling 225sqft apartments and got into the news--and I've only encountered a difficult bootstrapping problem if you start homeless, have zero money, no friends, no family, no charity, and can't get a $100 credit card. It turns out stocking your kitchen with pots, pans, and tableware is expensive. I can navigate the bootstrapping problem only by combining the food, personal care, and clothing portions of the budget into one lump, and even then it's hard for the first month; by the fourth month, I'm on-balance and save
Yeah aren't men usually better programmers, by the simple fact that more men want to be programmers? I mean if you force a guy to be a mechanic and he doesn't like cars, that doesn't quite work; if you force a girl to be a programmer and she wants to be a teacher...
The line is still "we need college to make more STEM degrees". I've been telling people we need to drop the state-funded tuition thing, but they're attached to the meaningless buzzword "education"--something they so severely lack that they can't recognize the discussion is about workforce development and shifting the responsibility (cost, time) from the employer to the worker.
The whole idea of state-funded tuition is people, on their own time, speculate on the future of the job market in general. What jobs will be available? Particularly, what jobs will be accessible to me? How many people will be competing for them? How will the need for this skill grow? How many other people will go to college to obtain this skill? The least-important question is, of course, how much will it pay? Before you can even get paid, you have to juggle a myriad of concerns about if there will be an employer somewhere for whom you can work, and if that employer will select you over any other available candidates; that means you have to predict location, need, and the perceptions and actions of all other students attempting to enter the workforce. Ignoring the cost of tuition (taxpayer money or out-of-pocket), this is a huge time investment at huge risk.
Sans-state-funded-tuition, employers encounter a labor shortage: non-working individuals can't leave college and enter the workforce as skilled professionals because they can't pay for college. Rich people mainly become lawyers, doctors, or business people; the middle-class like to live rich, and we don't save up for $200,000 for 4 years of art college ($50k/year outlay). State-subsidized colleges will even charge $66,000 ($16.5k/year) for tuition ($70k/$17.5k with books), and out-of-state (unsubsidized) those same colleges charge $142,600 ($35,600/year) for a bachelor's degree's 4 years. 10% of Americans make over $144k, and the median income is about $55k; there is no way your parents are paying 65% of their income per child to send you to college. They'd have to save 14% of their end-state income per child to make a college fund--that's over 18 years, and after inflation you're talking about saving a quarter of your income to make your kid's college fund. For over 80% of the country, it's just not happening.
With such a labor shortage, businesses have to build the workforce. Today, businesses have shortened their payroll budgeting periods to 18 months: they examine their own growth, their target market, and their human resources and determine what jobs they're going to post in the next 1.5 years. That means they're already preparing to hire a new programmer over a year before they put up that Dice posting you applied to. Businesses know what jobs they're going to need, what skills the employee will need, and roughly how fast they need it; or, more accurately, they can predict these things *much* more effectively and with an extreme reduction of risk compared to the nebulous market speculation a high-school graduate has to perform when entering college.
Under that pressure, businesses would optimize their performance by hiring job entrants early and shifting low-skilled, time-intensive, easily-verified work from their high-cost employees to their low-cost employees. In carpentry, you have people who make precision cuts to assemble furniture, people who build finished floors and walls, people who place straight framing and joists, and people who fetch tools and cut wedges so all these expensive and highly-skilled craftsmen don't spend 40% of their time doing useless bullshit and getting paid 3x as much as the apprentice. In computer programming, you have code clean-up and refactoring, which a highly-skilled software architect can quickly examine and verify using his tools, his vast experience, and his $144k salary while the $35k entrant gets his college tuition paid for by his employer.
Shifting this cost onto the employer is efficient because it reduces risk, and thus waste. The employer takes much less risk when paying for tui
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You don't know what technology is, do you?
The cardboard box was once a known sample that nobody bothered to destroy.
Actually, with the genetic drift of breeding programs, I've considered backing up breeds of cats and dogs by sequencing their DNA. It costs ~$1,000 for a 2.8-billion-base-pair sequencing, which would cost ~$286,000 to synthesize and implant into a new cell (clone back out using only organic chemistry, no pre-existing DNA, all test tube work) and make a new cat. If you cut out the variable DNA and replaced it with synthesized DNA, you could start with a model cat and patch it to be a model Mau or Abyssinian or Persian for around $50,000. If you started with a model target cat and patched in the breed-variable DNA, it could run $500-$2,000.
There's no reason we couldn't just store smallpox on floppy disk.
So we already have defamation laws, from which the defense is the information is true; and now we need a "I just don't like the information, even if it is true" law to protect from the same sort of defamation?
In before Remember.Me becomes the search engine and old-style directory of information Google has forgotten.
it's a recognition that there is on;y so much that can be done given we don't have time travel.
The "only so much that can be done" is we burned down your house, murdered your family, and cut off your right hand, so we've given you this loaf of bread to help get you started out.
Compensating people for wrongful imprisonment means taking money from other people. If you don't fix your legal system, you're using more than necessary of other people's money to do that; and, from a macroeconomic standpoint, you have a laborer who goes unused but who collects income, which is similar to just paying people to dig holes and fill them in again: more cost, less product, and the sum total of all consumer money (and thus any portion thereof) carries less buying power.
The "to the extent possible" qualifier is a handwave against the *enormous* social consequences of imprisonment, which death-penalty opponents universally consider no big deal. Nobody cries out about the barbaric practice of imprisoning people in the first place--a much worse crime with many more victims than state execution, and that's not even including secondary victims from the economic impacts and the social impacts of manufacturing criminals by socialization to a prison environment.
The huge movement against the death penalty is as ridiculous as if you started a movement against people causing psychological harm to their kids by buying them ugly goldfish to remind them they're ugly kids: that sounds terrible, and maybe you should worry about it after you start with child sexual abuse, violent physical abuse, drug households, and the broken foster care system that systematically neglects millions of children every year.
Moral victories, though. It sounds better when you say "killing people is bad! We should put them in prison, then we could release them when we discover they're innocent and make amends!" and leave out that THERE IS NO UNDOING THE HORRIFIC DAMAGE YOU HAVE DONE TO THIS INDIVIDUAL AS A PERSON FOREVER. It's also a lot harder to make "prison is barbaric and we should minimize its use as a form of sentencing" sound meaningful, since people can't process that YOU DON'T COME BACK FROM PRISON; PRISON COMES BACK WITH YOU.
People have no sense of economics. The guys who did the (crappy) movie, In Time, kind of got it right, but not in any serious way: you steal from the banks, the banks start charging everyone a shitload. In the movie, they framed it the same way as all normal people think: the banks charged more because they're assholes.
In reality, the cost of production is, essentially, wage-labor time. Wage-labor time includes overhead that's diffused through production (e.g. the CEO doesn't do a damned thing to make hamburgers, but hamburgers carry the partial cost of his salary; I often have to point out this is like $20 or $200 per employee per year, except a Chipotle where their overpaid executive is making $3,400 per employee per year), and *risk* is overhead. Risk has to cover losses sustained in the long-term of operating by amortizing them, charging more than costs in near-term good times and less than costs in near-term bad times. In other words: you charge an extra million dollars per year because, once every 10 years, you experience an average $10 million loss; when you get hit with those, you don't raise prices, because you *already* raised prices.
Our society protects corporations perhaps a little... inefficiently. The basic concept of protecting corporations--from robbery, vandalism, and other risks--is *not* inefficient: if people spent their time stealing from the big bad businesses and passing it out to their friends, we'd have operating cost increases, and thus the price of goods would increase, effectively transferring money from the consumer base to whoever Robin Hood deems worthy. Businesses who don't carry out this transfer go out of business, because eventually they turn negative profits and carry negative assets and have no money to continue operating.
I've had people argue at length that it should be a crime to rob "normal people" because people like us (the guy was middle-class) need our money to get by. He was mad that the police shot someone who was trying to rob a rich guy, and arguing that it's okay for you and me and him to shoot someone who breaks into our homes and steals our shit, because it's wrong to steal from regular folks, but okay to steal from the rich. People see businesses and rich individuals as endless sources of income and, frankly, as a symbol of unfairness, and so they think all kinds of weird shit about that, and then get mad when wage increases turn into price increases.
A flaw in the entropy will give you a 60-bit key if you can guess that much. That's how researchers recover keys from AES just by running on the same machine as an unprivileged user.
Dead men tell no tales.
We *are* better than the people who commit murder. There's 300 million of us to share the cost of roads, and we all pay pennies; there's *one* murderer, and he takes *all* of the blame for his crimes.
Well, no. We'll dump them on the street into a ruined life, where they'll struggle to survive, develop new mental problems on top of the ones they got from prison, and possibly commit new crimes due to sheer inability to either survive (because of poverty not exempting you of the need to eat) or socially integrate (because you're fucked up in the head from prison). Then we'll put them back in jail in a year or so; or hopefully they'll die in an alleyway first and be not-our-problem.
If killing people is so expensive, where do poor people get the financial backing to commit murder?
Oh psh, if they displace the photographs and artifacts from their lives, they'll forget about their dead kid in a year or two. The memories of the events will remain, but the emotional attachment from a constant connection to visual cues of presence will fade. The social connection will fall away and they'll have a bad experience to retell as a story, just a warning to others.
Don't be so melodramatic.
After you've been in jail for 3-4 weeks, your finances are all fucked up. You've lost your job, your income stream has stopped, you're still paying rent or loans (mortgage, car), and your career is probably damaged.
After you've been in jail for 2-3 years, your social connections are all fucked up. Any relationship you had is over. Your friends have moved on. Your family has started thinking about you as an accessory. Reclaiming these things is tough. Your finances are also drained, your career is horribly mangled, and you've lost your house and car and anything else you once owned. You've been desocialized, adapted to a life where you're always threatened, where you have to align with potentially-violent gangs to survive, you've potentially been raped, and you've probably performed sexual favors for protection.
After 15-25 years of jail time (average time an inmate spends on death row in the US is over 15 years), you've passed the career development, relationship development, and family development part of your life. Actually being a human being is now hard; you're an artifact and a burden on society. Your ability to integrate back into society is hampered, as you've spent decades in a prison environment. Your friends have long forgotten you; and your family is uncomfortable at having to associate with you, because you're a stranger yet they're obligated to recognize what they logically (but no longer emotionally) understand as family under the social pressures society places on them.
Tell me again how a wrongful conviction can be reversed.
Risk and punishment are more complex than most people want to argue. A few years back, someone started the argument over whether the death penalty does or does not deter murder. I went digging through data and got conflicting results: in some areas, a repeal of the death penalty didn't do anything; while in others, a repeal of the death penalty caused as much as a quadrupling of homicides in the following two years, and reinstating the death penalty immediately pushed those levels back down--not completely, leaving a long tail of normalization.
I've since figured that there's confounding involved. In low-crime areas, the biggest fear is state retribution (you break law, you get arrested; people in upper-middle-class suburbs have historically associated committing murder with running from the law until you're inevitably captured and executed). In high-crime areas, gang crime will kill you before police; there's so much of it that they'll never find you, anyway, since you left behind just another dead body that anyone from any gang could have produced. Some areas have a sort of hostile-respect social behavior (Texas, where everyone wants to make it clear they're happy to shoot you for standing too close to their property); other areas are full of people who are scared of everything, inviting would-be criminals to do stupid things. Raising or lowering the purported consequences of criminal actions may have a large, small, or non-existent impact on criminal behavior, depending on these and other factors.
From that standpoint, it's hard to make a decision on the death penalty. If you execute 14 murderers per year and 2 are innocent, that's a net-win if abolishing the death penalty results in 3 or more additional murders per year; the blood of the innocent is on your hands either way, so you should try for less blood. If the death penalty is a non-factor in gangland, then maybe you shouldn't bother.
It gets more complex if you consider inmates not slated for execution as "innocent" when a murderer penned in jail for life realizes he's not getting any worse punishment, and so proceeds to stab someone in the throat because he doesn't like the guy. Then you have America: if you're convicted of child molestation or just possession of child pornography, you can go to jail for 8-40 years (!); and while in jail, someone will rape and murder you, and we as Americans tend to find this a good thing. Is that not as much blood on your hands as an execution? I wouldn't call it justice; if it were justice, we would be proud to do it by our own hands.
Then you have the common opinion that we can put someone in jail for 15-25 years and then letting them out because we found out they were innocent. That doesn't absolve you of DESTROYING THEIR LIVES COMPLETELY. For many, even a few weeks in prison will destroy their finances and their careers, leaving their lives in shambles; a few short years destroys all your social connections; and after the 10, 20, or more years many inmates spend on death row before actually getting executed (average is over 15 years), you've missed your dating window, your career building window (in case you wanted to start a career or rebuild your broken one), and really have been excluded from everything people consider "living". Prison is cruel and unusual punishment, and the long prison sentences people swear you can just release an innocent man from after you realize you were wrong cannot be undone by giving the guy a house and a car and some money as an apology.
But, you know. Moral victories. Even if you concretely proved that abolishing the death penalty in a given area directly caused some number of additional innocent murders per year, people would claim they're at least innocent of those murders and have washed their hands of the affair. No responsibility for the problems you cause as long as it's someone else's hands holding the knife. That's why nobody will admit jail time is disproportionate to almost all crimes; we can't even get them to admit 15+ years mandatory SERVED is ludicrous for minor possession of drugs.
The definition of murder is unlawful killing: murder is killing when the state says it's not okay.
I find this position ridiculous because people are quite happy to say, "We might kill an innocent man! Put him in jail and we can let him out in 20 years if we're wrong!" 20 years of isolation from your friends and family, who have ceased caring about you; 20 years without a job, without outside society's social interaction, and without financial growth; 20 years not pursuing your personal or professional goals, whether that's building a career or building a family. You are fucking dead, and you're walking around irritating the rest of us complaining about how your life is now useless; your only compensation is you still have a pulse, and maybe the state will give you some money so you can be miserable in an apartment somewhere.
How about we try fixing our laws, our society, and our legal system? It's not just the courts; the entire social structure which demands action but avoids involvement results in more prosecution and less evidence. Bad economic policies result in more poverty than necessary (we can currently get this to effectively zero in the United States, but that's new--circa 2013 viability marker), leading to more crime, more isolate social group behavior (gangs), and more secondary criminal behavior, ultimately leading to more prosecution in a muddier environment. We can't fix all the problems; we're just lagging behind what we *can* fix now. Get to it.
Execution and incarceration are positive punishment, while fines are negative punishment.
These things don't work, in that the target will attempt to find a way around the problem; however, humans are strong planners, and will analyze risks and avoid doing things if they can't find a way to avoid the risk, or if the risk outweighs the reward. Many animals are weaker at this, and will repeat the behavior if they perceive themselves to have found a way to avoid the risk--even if the risk is severe.
Human operant behavior is confounded by human rational behavior to a much greater degree than in animals. Positive reinforcement generally works better, but that requires having alternative behaviors available which you can reinforce to a point of extinguishing the target behavior. That tends to be technically-complex and raise all kinds of weird social issues, e.g. rape behavior is largely avoided because of the positive reinforcement of social acceptance and the corresponding negative punishment of losing that, and some (much?) of the remaining rape behavior can be diverted by a society which is looser about sex (e.g. some European societies, Greece), making non-rape sex more available (especially if committing rape gets you rejected by future potential partners) at the expense of horrifying the moral compass of the existing society (because sex is bad).
This is also why I make the weak argument that reductions in poverty draw reductions in crime, although people like to immediately claim there will still be some crime anyway (non-zero) and thus reducing poverty doesn't reduce crime (not all, thus not any). I tend to just assume those people are morons.
Inject ethanol.
Well maybe if you were willing to pay $1,400 one-way instead of $850 round-trip to Japan you could ride in a plane with real-time telemetry and all the other expensive bells and whistles.
It's enough for cryptographers to tell you to worry about the entropy source you're using and not magically assume that we can break 96 bits of encryption now but your 128-bit encryption key is fine because we're like 90 billion years off cracking that and maybe 8-12 years off developing newer technology to crack it reasonably fast.
That does not lower rents and cost of living.
I handle rent by 224sqft apartments. Rents vary between 60 cents per square foot and a little over $1/sqft in low-income areas; I projected $1.33/sqft and $300/month for 224sqft.
As for cost of living, *yes* it lowers cost of living. The base price of any product is the cost to produce it--if you spend $90 to make a toaster and you sell it at WalMart for $45, you're going out of business--and the basic cost of *everything* is wage-labor cost. As I explained: your employer pays you a wage, which you get a fraction of (you pay taxes); and your employer also pays payroll taxes and unemployment insurance on that wage, so the wage-labor cost is *bigger* than just your salary.
I've moved the amount of money you take home up without moving the cost of producing a good up. That lowers the cost of living.
They need to raise wages, and company owners are being scum for trying like hell to keep wages low.
Businesses don't pay wages. A business making a 12% profit doesn't raise wages and cut its profits to 8%; it raises wages and has products that sell for $40 but now cost $45, and so raises the prices. Any competition which prevents this also has a standing downward pressure effect on prices *before* such a wage raise, and so is constantly approaching tapped: all of your competition also follows suit with a price raise if *their* wages go up, too; or else your prices go up, your customers move to your competition, you do a round of layoffs of people who were making stuff that you can't sell anymore, your competition hires more workers for cheap, and everyone continues bitching about low wages.
Employees are the producers. The guy making the toasters is the guy making the toasters. The basic cost is wage-labor, and raising wages raises that cost, thus prices come up.
Rent should NEVER exceed 25% of take home, yet in the usa it regularly is near the 50% mark because wages have been far too low for far too long.
In 1950, the median income family spent 28% of their income on 983sqft median home sizes. In 2003, the median income family spent 33% of their income on 2,300sqft median home sizes. Single-bedroom rental apartments have increased in size from 400sqft in 1920 to nearing 800sqft today; much of that growth was up to 1940, and the remainder has been a long tail.
Meanwhile, median spending on entertainment and other non-essential goods has moved from 25% in 1950 to 44% in 2003. It would appear we're spending much more of our income on shit we don't need, while buying houses that are 2.5 times bigger; if people would just rent places the same size as the apartments and homes they lived in in the 1950s, rent wouldn't exceed 15% of their income.
How about we do it the other way round?
My Citizen's Dividend plan baselined on $546/month in 2013, which after 2 years of growth is $580/month (by inflation, it's $569/month; but the per-capita income has grown faster than inflation--as is guaranteed in the long term average until the complete collapse of civilization--and the Dividend is a percentage of income). Today that's about $7,000/year of tax-free income (the policy I propose excludes the Dividend from income).
The policy eliminates a 6.2% payroll tax (OASDI--this requires a 15-year transition period where retirees's dividends are padded up to OASDI rates, and then a grandfathering of that income until they die; the total cost of this is 1.5%-2%) and reduces business income taxes by 4.5% absolute (39.6% to 35.1%, or an 11% proportional reduction). That lowers business risk in production and reduces wage-labor cost, allowing the economic forces which draw price downward toward cost to create lower costs as a proportion of employee income (essentially, for every $1 an employer pays to employ you, you take home more under this policy than you do under current).
The policy adjusts personal income tax brackets. This Dividend replaces our ineffective Public Aid system (50 million Americans experience hunger; and only 1 out of every 4 Americans who officially qualify for housing assistance receive it, with the other 75% going onto a waiting list indefinitely), which represents 55% of all Federal Government collected income taxes (business and personal, including personal OASDI), thus the policy slashes those taxes in half (actually by 55%) and applies a 17% flat tax on top of the remainder. That forms a baseline in which the top bracket (39.6%) falls to 34.8%.
To fix the artifact of high regressive taxes from the Social Security Wage Base (currently 32.2% taxes at $80k falling to 26% at $118.5k), I shifted around all the tax brackets based on income distribution to collect a full 30%. My final model is a 43% tax at the top ($400k+), with reduced taxes below that. I would prefer to drive that back down to below 40% as wealth increases; and I don't want to drop the extra 3% immediately (at $10 million income, you'd pay $117k more in taxes), and so would slowly shift the taxes to phase this in. Such a phase-in would likely peak at an absolute tax below 43%, and allow a shorter phase-out of the high tax period.
Under this tax structure, an individual or married-filing-jointly household making $1,000,000/year takes home $9,126 more than today; a zero-income, two-person household takes in $13,920; a single-income earner at minimum wage ($8.25/hr here in MD) takes home $21k or $6,229 more than under the current tax structure; a single-income family (married-filing-jointly) at minimum wage takes home $29.7k or $14,642 more; and a married-filing-jointly household with two adults and a household income of 84,290 takes home *exactly* $84,290 or $17,227 more than under current policy.
There is also a minimized public aid system via EBT providing food and other care for children (families), at a cost of 1.4% of AGI (compared to the 17.2% our currently-defunct system costs). Transitional costs are under 3% and diffuse through the tax system I've outlined by reducing the tax advantages I've described; those costs bleed off over ~30 years, with the long tail being grandfathered OASDI top-up.
This is actually enough to get by on--I had predicted a profit motive for 224sqft apartments, but someone started selling 225sqft apartments and got into the news--and I've only encountered a difficult bootstrapping problem if you start homeless, have zero money, no friends, no family, no charity, and can't get a $100 credit card. It turns out stocking your kitchen with pots, pans, and tableware is expensive. I can navigate the bootstrapping problem only by combining the food, personal care, and clothing portions of the budget into one lump, and even then it's hard for the first month; by the fourth month, I'm on-balance and save
Yeah aren't men usually better programmers, by the simple fact that more men want to be programmers? I mean if you force a guy to be a mechanic and he doesn't like cars, that doesn't quite work; if you force a girl to be a programmer and she wants to be a teacher...
The line is still "we need college to make more STEM degrees". I've been telling people we need to drop the state-funded tuition thing, but they're attached to the meaningless buzzword "education"--something they so severely lack that they can't recognize the discussion is about workforce development and shifting the responsibility (cost, time) from the employer to the worker.
The whole idea of state-funded tuition is people, on their own time, speculate on the future of the job market in general. What jobs will be available? Particularly, what jobs will be accessible to me? How many people will be competing for them? How will the need for this skill grow? How many other people will go to college to obtain this skill? The least-important question is, of course, how much will it pay? Before you can even get paid, you have to juggle a myriad of concerns about if there will be an employer somewhere for whom you can work, and if that employer will select you over any other available candidates; that means you have to predict location, need, and the perceptions and actions of all other students attempting to enter the workforce. Ignoring the cost of tuition (taxpayer money or out-of-pocket), this is a huge time investment at huge risk.
Sans-state-funded-tuition, employers encounter a labor shortage: non-working individuals can't leave college and enter the workforce as skilled professionals because they can't pay for college. Rich people mainly become lawyers, doctors, or business people; the middle-class like to live rich, and we don't save up for $200,000 for 4 years of art college ($50k/year outlay). State-subsidized colleges will even charge $66,000 ($16.5k/year) for tuition ($70k/$17.5k with books), and out-of-state (unsubsidized) those same colleges charge $142,600 ($35,600/year) for a bachelor's degree's 4 years. 10% of Americans make over $144k, and the median income is about $55k; there is no way your parents are paying 65% of their income per child to send you to college. They'd have to save 14% of their end-state income per child to make a college fund--that's over 18 years, and after inflation you're talking about saving a quarter of your income to make your kid's college fund. For over 80% of the country, it's just not happening.
With such a labor shortage, businesses have to build the workforce. Today, businesses have shortened their payroll budgeting periods to 18 months: they examine their own growth, their target market, and their human resources and determine what jobs they're going to post in the next 1.5 years. That means they're already preparing to hire a new programmer over a year before they put up that Dice posting you applied to. Businesses know what jobs they're going to need, what skills the employee will need, and roughly how fast they need it; or, more accurately, they can predict these things *much* more effectively and with an extreme reduction of risk compared to the nebulous market speculation a high-school graduate has to perform when entering college.
Under that pressure, businesses would optimize their performance by hiring job entrants early and shifting low-skilled, time-intensive, easily-verified work from their high-cost employees to their low-cost employees. In carpentry, you have people who make precision cuts to assemble furniture, people who build finished floors and walls, people who place straight framing and joists, and people who fetch tools and cut wedges so all these expensive and highly-skilled craftsmen don't spend 40% of their time doing useless bullshit and getting paid 3x as much as the apprentice. In computer programming, you have code clean-up and refactoring, which a highly-skilled software architect can quickly examine and verify using his tools, his vast experience, and his $144k salary while the $35k entrant gets his college tuition paid for by his employer.
Shifting this cost onto the employer is efficient because it reduces risk, and thus waste. The employer takes much less risk when paying for tui