What I would like is for Slashdot to just stop posting this shit, because it generates all kinds of rage-inducing stupidity from people who don't understand economics.
Let's start with demand-side economics. Jobs come from consumer purchasing power. That means the consumer has a certain pool of buying power (we represent this with "money"; don't get too attached), and everything he buys is made by labor. When that labor costs more (more labor or more wages), the amount of money required for a product increases. If the consumer can buy fewer products--for example, due to spending more on some product--then there are less products made, and the jobs associated with those products goes away.
A lot of people say, "Oh, but the money transfers to another consumer!" Yes, and that's all well and good, and you still have that consumer capable of buying fewer products with that money. It iterates: in cycle 1, fewer products are bought; in cycle 2, fewer products are bought, although some of the things being bought are being bought by *other* *people* who now have a higher wage; in cycle 3, repeats. It adjusts down, and you end up with those fewer people who can now buy more things, and a bunch of other people unemployed, and a bunch of people who were richer who are now slightly poorer.
The next big topic then is technological growth. Technological growth is reducing the *amount* of labor required to produce a product. When we improve technology as such, a smaller amount of buying power can then buy the given product. We create unemployment in that way, and the reduced cost of the product translates to a reduced price, which leaves more buying power in the hands of the consumer. The consumer buys other products (in the current decade or two, that's been more and better healthcare, along with smart phones, video games, and other electronics), which require labor for production, which creates new jobs to replace old jobs.
This technological growth allows population growth and an increased minimum standard-of-living. If it comes slowly enough, it's relatively harmless, holding a low level of unemployment; if it comes *rapidly*, it causes high unemployment. The Industrial Revolution is an example of sudden high unemployment from new technology; agriculture in America over the past 150 years is an example of slow technological growth.
The raising of minimum wage helps encourage businesses to go from low-cost solutions (cheap wages) to high-cost solutions (machines made by more and more expensive labor). The machines may take, for illustrative purposes, twice as much labor time to produce as they replace; which would restrict our ability to produce other things if it weren't for the fact that this cost rolls down to the products, reducing the consumer's ability to buy those things anyway.
The machines usually come when a business determines a strategic entry point based on finances and long-term speculation on the probable reduction of cost of machine deployment (maximizing ROI with risk appetite and risk tolerance considerations); bumping the wages up increases risk, causing more rapid deployment. This rapid deployment eliminates jobs more quickly, creating a higher transitional unemployment rate; and the cost of machines being higher than the pre-raise wage cost reduces consumer buying power, more permanently eliminating jobs. As well, providing new employment requires finding a consumer market capable of paying the wage cost of the humans involved; this is slower when wages are higher, so the wage bump reduces the speed of recovery.
This compound problem is unique to the modern era, insomuch that it's not a trait of the 1900s. Minimum wages were a good and viable strategy for the past hundred years; we have new threats in the system now. As well, technological growth has brought us to a point where non-wage alternatives such as a welfare-replacing basic income are viable *if* implemented properly (and highly destructive if implemented improperly). Non-wage
We're trying to assign guilt and claim one party or another is liars. Hard evidence is different than soft evidence, and these words have real meaning.
It's a Tesla, it has several thousand made, and it's expensive. They paid for a car, not prestige service; you are assuming it's Tesla's business strategy to put out a face of luxury and haught, rather than to put out a face of the future of technology.
If it were an Aston Martin, maybe they would have sent a personal representative to his house. As it stands, it was an off-the-shelf $60,000 car, the kind of thing upper-middle-class folks take a second mortgage out to buy, like an Audi S5. It's the kind of car *I've* considered buying, and I make $75,000. The car is an "I have a special thing" car, not an "I am a special person" car.
I notice you didn't include things like servers, routers
You mean "Linux has its embedded home in small-form-factor PCs, such as home routers and set-top boxes" doesn't include routers?
If we want to bring servers into the mix, can we talk about how there are fewer servers than *people* involved with any given business, and how we're reducing the number of actual server devices by doing combined services in "The Cloud"? I.e. you need 1/10 a server, I need 1/10 a server, they all need 1/10 a server, let's all rent 1 server from some other guy. Meanwhile, at the companies renting the server, they *already* had more people--and one or more work PCs per person, almost always running Windows (and typically running MacOSX otherwise)--than servers, thus for every 1 Linux they had many Windows. That's not even counting the businesses running non-Linux servers, most of whom are running a mostly-Windows server base if not a zero-Linux server base (colleges and anyone in medical do this a lot).
Linux is big, but it's not bigger than everything else.
A slightly higher percentage of Americans have desktop and laptop computers than have smart phones; and half of Americans have iOS. Across the world, almost 90% of desktops and laptops are Windows, and more people own Windows PCs than Linux-Android tablets and phones; while 58% of devices are Android. In terms of sheer software installation volume, there are many more PCs than people, thanks to office PCs and one-PC-per-family-member.
Java has the claim of running on almost every god damn thing and having more users than anything ever made besides tits. Even with Android, the Windows installation and user bases are pretty far in the lead.
In terms of new devices and software installations per year, it's definitely Android; those are short-lived devices, though, with many people replacing their smart phones after two years (two weeks if you're an iOS user). PCs did that in the late 90s.
There's a disturbing amount of non-smart-phone embedded Windows; it's eclipsed by every other OS, both in-house and QNX. Linux has its embedded home in small-form-factor PCs, such as home routers and set-top boxes; most of everything that's not a PC-by-another-name runs a customized OS, either modified QNX or some proprietary ARM microkernel written specifically for the device. Too bad they're not running Linux on medical devices and ATMs; they're all Windows.
My impression is Linux isn't inherently bigger and more complex than things like Windows and AIX; it has many fewer users; and yet it draws on a much greater pool of developer time. It's inefficient, costly, and wasteful. The project just isn't well-run; it's mostly arguments, bits of code in and out, and no planning or goals.
An economy, by its nature, must grow by creating unemployment. Unemployment is transitional, and reduces over time as prices move toward costs, leaving buying power in consumer hands. A social safety net is a response to that unemployment.
Economies create unemployment as they grow because creating more stuff per each person happens in one of two ways: somebody works longer hours OR we find a way to produce the same things with fewer hours. If we produce, say, the same amount of food with 90% as many labor-hours involved, then 10% of all agricultural workers become unemployed. Those people are unemployed for a time; then, later, when the dust settles and prices come down (this can take months or years), we as consumers have more money to spend because we're buying the same food for a smaller proportion of our incomes. When we spend that money, we try to buy things produced by labor-hours, which means we need to hire people again.
In the end, we have more stuff per person, creating wealth; along the way, we create transitional unemployment.
I didn't forget; the big wall of text is big enough without me describing the entire span of non-fucked-up economic theory, much less the history of economics and how it's evolved to where it reached today.
Inventory build up will only count on value added up to the point that no more value is got.
I don't use the term "value" when describing economics. It's a personal quirk, stemming from having synthesized economic theory in a bubble and then gone back to check against modern theory--a process which gave me a whole lot of useful terms and pinned my own theories to more robust theories, and also confused the hell out of me since modern theory is kind-of broken.
The degree to which I consider it broken has lessened since I've figured out *why* it's broken: my theories are for understanding the functional behavior of economies; modern theories are concerned with *measuring* that behavior, which creates some broken ideas. In particular, modern Solow-Swan models are *great* for separating the technological growth from the population growth function of economies; and they divide economic inputs into land, labor, and capital. "Land" includes natural resources such as gold ore in mines, and "Capital" includes machines; one is a labor modulator (we synthesize Molybdenum and Cesium by nuclear fusion--essentially alchemy--but turning lead into gold takes more labor than digging gold out of the ground), and the other is a roll-up of labor (human labor time builds, maintains, fuels, and operates machines; claiming that building and maintaining is not labor is... weird).
The divided theory produces a lot of strange conclusions about how economics works, while the labor-common theory produces a theory of scarcity which predicts other economic theories (notably, supply-and-demand, demand-side economics, broken window concept, and so forth) and explains a lot of strange behaviors and exceptions to theory which economists scratch their heads about. At the same time, the divided theory allows you to *measure* an economy in a meaningful (but not entirely accurate) way, which the labor-common theory can't do. Different tools.
Output is potential wealth, but is only realized through transaction, so people need to have resources to buy that output.
That's too abstract for me to want to approach--not necessarily wrong, although it's a detail I think markets handle on their own. You've hit demand-side economics, though: the jobs are in place to produce things, and they exist based on consumer ability to buy those things which are produced.
If you have 100 people working to make 100 pounds of rice, moving 20 of them to doing nothing means you only have 80 pounds of rice. If they're all still getting paid (i.e. those 20 aren't unemployed; they're administratively employed in a way which does not increase output), but there's only 80 pounds of rice, then *all of the income* can only buy *80% as much rice*. You've lost some wealth because there's less stuff per person, and you can make up some monetary theories about inflation because rice apparently costs slightly more (let's not go there).
The overproduction you cite is not sustainable, because you're producing rice at a higher cost than the next guy: you're piling up tons and tons of rice, non-stop, meaning you've got to get an income flow to pay all these workers, which means you have to charge more than someone who is *not* stockpiling up so much rice and thus isn't paying as many labor-hours. If it's actually true that nobody *can* buy that output, raising your prices won't work: nobody can afford the new prices (buying that output, but not receiving it), and so the jobs making excess must go away. Put these together and you realize markets tend to not pile up tons of stock for no reason (a stabilizing stockpile is useful; an infinitely-growing stockpile is not, unless you're infinitely producing oil from atmosphere and pumping it into the gr
Why would they call him? Why would you waste time on a freaking phone call trying to find someone at their home, interrupt them on their time, and then deliver blunt push-information to them while they try to argue with you on the phone? Even the fucking newspaper didn't call me on the phone when they claimed I owed them money (I didn't; I cancelled my account, they stopped sending papers, they kept trying to bill me--I canceled the card after multiple attempted contacts to cancel the charges--and then they claimed they delivered papers I never bought).
It would only get *into* the call center by calling in. If it stayed in the call center, the call center person would have said, "Oh, hello Mr. Baddriver. Your car crashed itself? Oh my, let's see here... okay it says in the logs that you put it into summon mode, then summoned it 20 minutes later, on a public street, parked on the wrong side of the road, and it hit a trailer rig from the end usually attached to a truck. So... yeah, summon mode says not to do that...? Nothing we can do for you here, Mr. Baddriver. Have a nice day!"
If it went to engineering, the call center would have to take the information, disconnect the call, and forward it to an engineering team for analysis. It would go into the queue for hours or days, then generate a response. Again: rather than a callback, they'd probably just send a fucking letter. In writing. With copies at their HQ. That they can claim as "Delivered In Writing" if legally challenged. That saves you the hearsay "what did the support rep tell him?" "Did he hear it properly?" "What was his impression after getting off the phone?" bullshit, because the customer can re-read the conversation and you can present it *in* *writing* to the judge at court.
"Man look at this shit! My car just crashed into this thing all by itself!"
Tesla: "You have to jiggle the handle, double-tap the shifter button, pull into drive, put into park, then confirm YES on the vehicle's panel to activate Summon Mode, and then you can get out of the car and later Summon via your smart phone and it'll self-drive. The vehicle's black box reports the handle was jiggled and tapped and slapped and the driver activated Summon Mode, and then summoned the car later."
Friend: "Uh-hyuk! Ah come'd out 'n his car done crayshed rawt entah that thar trailor!"
It's not like his friend would have seen anything but a car that somehow magically crashed itself since the last time we were outside. He probably has no idea how it happened, just that it did.
Human effort is made more productive by technological growth. In the early 1900s, 60% of United States laborers were agricultural workers; we invented tons of new farm technologies, and now 2% of United States workers provide food, fiber (clothing), and biofuels for the US and an export market--and half their output is global exports. Just in 1950, middle-class American families spent over 30% of their household income on food; with advances in agricultural technology replacing humans with technology produced using fewer humans than the technology replaced, people now spend under 12% of their income on food.
Human effort doesn't create wealth; output creates wealth. Technology increases output. The single, simple danger is removing jobs too quickly to replace them: once you've deployed new technology and eliminated the corresponding jobs, wage-labor costs go down, and the minimum price drops; it takes time for market forces (notably inflation pressure and competition--both directly with producers of similar goods and indirectly with *anything* *else* consumers might buy instead of fancy Uggs or tablets or paperback books) to leave the money back in consumer hands, and then laborers have to compete with machines on wage-labor costs.
Minimum wage hikes exacerbate this by speeding the replacement of labor with machines WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in wage-labor cost, thus without increasing consumer buying power: instead of costing $40, a Toaster suddenly costs $55, but we replace the high-wage humans with lower-cost machines to make a $50 toaster. Consumers are no more wealthy, and thus can't buy more stuff, thus can't create new jobs (and, in the case where the cost of labor-replacing machines exceeds the pre-wage-increase cost of human labor, the consumer base becomes *less* capable of sustaining existing jobs, and so more people go unemployed). At the same time, with wage-labor being more expensive, it's harder for consumers to supply the purchasing power to create new jobs for the displaced: your economy gets poorer.
This is why economic policies such as non-wage standard-of-living systems like a Citizen's Dividend need to replace minimum wages. It's also why sales taxes are horrible, payroll taxes are bad, and progressive taxes are the best currently-known tax: sales and payroll tax increase consumer expenditure, thus creating a poorer consumer class and reducing the number of available jobs per consumer; while progressive income taxes allow you to reduce taxes on the working class consumer *without* raising taxes on the rich upper class as the income gap spreads, thus creating a more powerful consumer class and increasing the number of jobs available per consumer.
We need an increase in the take-home pay per wage-dollar expenditure: when your employer spend $1,000 on your salary, you should come home with something closer to $1,000. If you come home with $600, you still have to buy products at prices reflecting a portion of a wage-laborer's $1,000; if you come home with $800, that price is still based on a portion of the same $1,000 of wage-labor, but you're both taking home 1/3 more money out of that cost, and your ability to buy products is increased by that much.
Such policies are not very hard to design; transitioning onto them is the difficult part.
If you move a cell, Excel tries to update all references to that cell to follow. I use the same feature in LibreOffice Calc, which is how I discovered it; it works in Google Sheets, too.
No, no, it's not like that. What's bad for the economy is the concentration of income among high-income earners with a high proportional rate of saving. We can counter this by using progressive taxes, where a nominal increase at the top (back the fuck up, Picketty) allows a nominal decrease at the bottom; as the income gap widens (the *whole* *economy* gets richer, and the small high-income group collectively takes more than the large working-class consumer group), we leave the taxes as-is at the top and lower them at the bottom. That increases the amount of consumer take-home pay relative to employer wage-labor cost, which increases the amount of consumer spending relative to what the employers are paying to produce products, which increases the amount of labor businesses can employ, decreasing unemployment, increasing production per capita, and creating more jobs.
The broken window thing is a special case of inefficiency whereby someone gets paid to do something non-useful; it's the opposite of technological growth. Instead of requiring fewer people making product X and thus shifting them to making product Y, we slip a useless individual into the production of product X. This increases its price, leaving less money in the hands of consumers after they buy. The person added to the production cycle could get paid just as much making some useful product; instead, he gets paid for doing effectively nothing, thus leaving us all spending the same amount of money in total but buying slightly less stuff in total.
Let's fix our Office Administration education, then. OFAD is a field I take seriously, seeing as I was like 3 credits away from a degree in it once upon a time. I am surrounded by such mooks who call themselves customer-oriented contractors, but can't even write a fucking report in Word because they can't keep their formatting straight because they create headings by return-return-return-bold-22pt or it winds up bold/underline or 24pt sometimes or intented weird or whatever. You have no business communicating to a customer if the shit you send them looks worse than what a child might make with crayons.
The answer is teaching these people to do their jobs, not blaming them for being treated like typewriter operators.
It's funny everyone is responding to the implicit flaw, but nobody is calling it out: "I know how to program, but not what to program" no, you're at a point where you know something about programming, but not how to program.
I know like 30 programming languages; I know about C#; I know design patterns; I know architecture; I know how to decouple my code and why; and I've developed lots of targeted strategies to solve specific implementation problems in a game I'm programming in Unity 3D. I don't know *how* to program; I know a lot *about* programming, and I'm spending an inordinate amount of time trying to connect one small problem to another small problem. Every little thing is a massive undertaking, because I have an enormous warehouse of tools and I'm not certain how to properly apply any of them or which to use, even though I know what every single one of them is for.
Even the summary is like, "You know how to program, so you should program little things so you can figure out how to program."
If you can get feedback and correction, it's one of the most efficient ways to mass-learn; if you're just digging on your own and your self-activation is weak, it's one of the best ways to quit programming.
As per Deliberate Practice and modern cognitive science, expertise is developed by a process in which a student takes action which produces errors, then learns from those errors. Deliberate Practice is the most efficient form of practice: it targets specific technical skills (design patterns, integrating of small goals into large architecture, reflection, implementing simple algorithms, planning, etc.) in a goal-oriented way which produces constant and immediate feedback. Such action directly corrects the basic, inherent weaknesses in your abilities, producing the most impact with the least time and effort.
If you try to contribute to an open source software project, you have to exercise a large set of skills, notably in reading and understanding code. Then you have to exercise a smaller set of implementation. For a novice, this massed learning produces a huge amount of domain knowledge--all unrefined and shitty--which gives you a launching pad to develop expertise; and, being a huge amount of new knowledge, it consumes 20 times more energy than ANYTHING ELSE YOU COULD DO WITH YOUR BRAIN. This exhausts your PFC and dlPFC, sapping your willpower and driving you into a low-energy state: the part of your brain says "X is hard but I need to X" gets tired, and the part of your brain that says "X is hard, look at cat pictures" takes over. This is generally a good thing, since it keeps your brain from critically exhausting all its energy and failing, thus terminating your heartbeat and breathing; unfortunately, pushing yourself that hard *also* develops a negative reward whereby you start immediately feeling tired when faced with work, and so you never do anything useful again.
Learning is complex, but not hard. If you feel utterly overwhelmed, that means you should take a break and review; stop shoving new knowledge into your brain.
The difference is that background checks discover what crimes people HAVE ALREADY COMITTED.
False. Comparing non-fingerprint background checks to fingerprint background checks, the non-fingerprint background checks provide data INCLUDING the prior seven years of arrest records WHERE NO CONVICTION WAS RENDERED, while the fingerprinted background checks MAY provide arrest records WHERE NO CONVICTION WAS RENDERED for an indefinite period.
That means if I accuse you of molesting a 9-year-old girl, the police arrest you, and the courts decide I'm crazy and full of shit, Uber's background check will show your arrest for child molestation for 7 years, while an FBI background check may (or may not) still show that arrest 15 years later.
If you're found guilty, the non-fingerprint background check will find that conviction until you die. 50 years later, it's still on your public record, sans-fingerprinting.
Also: my point wasn't the technical merits; it was the perception. You said you don't see the point; the point is FINGERPRINT CHECKS CREATE A PERCEPTION THAT NON-FINGERPRINT-CHECKED PEOPLE ARE POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS, and there is no basis for this. Thus we create a baseless prejudice against non-fingerprinted drivers, wherein people believe they are more dangerous than fingerprinted drivers. The example I gave was also a baseless and useless mechanism people have actually used to determine if someone is a potential criminal--it was and is just as effective as fingerprint-based background checks in comparison to non-fingerprint-based background checks.
You can get Continental's Extreme Contact DWS 06 model for the Toyota Prius stock, which is a particularly high-performance all-season. It's not as high-performance as the Goodyear Assurance TripleTred, which performs almost as well in wet/dry as high-performance summer tires when loaded onto a non-performance passenger vehicle (don't put TripleTreds on your Pontiac GTO and expect PolePosition performance; don't put PolePositions on your Mazda 3 and expect race car performance and a huge improvement in handling characteristics over TripleTreds).
Various top-performing Ponteza summer tires are available for the Toyota Prius stock size as well, although I seriously doubt they outperform a high-end UHP All-Season when mounted on something like a Prius.
Many of these tires hold their form rigid when inflated to rated pressure, rather than bulging. You can run them at a full 50PSI (I've run S04 PolePositions and my TripleTreds at a full 50PSI on a 2,800 pound Mazda 3) at all times in all conditions with all vehicle loads. That gives you a round profile and reduces rolling resistance, while also increasing contact patch pressure and reducing braking distance in wet and dry conditions. For the snow you want real snow tires; UHP all-seasons will drive you around pretty well, but nothing like a real snow tire. I just compensate by driving slower and more cautiously in snow.
Conventional fill-up stations operating as high-speed charging ports would use a flywheel to pre-store energy, thus smoothing out their access on the grid. Larger or simply more flywheels would allow off-peak storage, and recharging is constant (you can grid draw to regenerate the flywheel even while tapping power from it), thus making the power draw of all EV recharging equivalent to the base load average of all Tesla energy consumption.
Hydrogen storage is effectively a combination of a gasoline car with its gas cap off and a Tesla with a slow short in its battery: the hydrogen is impossible to properly contain (and so dissipates slowly, even through an inch of high-density solid steel, just like if you left your gas cap off and your gasoline evaporated) and requires extreme cooling to reasonably store (usually liquid nitrogen, although liquid helium retains the hydrogen in a properly-built tank for *much* longer; and the LN2 cooling system requires active electrical pumps).
There is no reason to believe storage of hydrogen will ever improve to the point of storing it in a low-energy, low-seepage containment unit. The most advanced hydrogen storage is combining it with carbon to form hydrocarbon--typically methane.
Slashdot Mirror
It goes: Layoffs, price reductions, new products, new jobs. The price reductions come from paying fewer peoples's wages per product sold.
What I would like is for Slashdot to just stop posting this shit, because it generates all kinds of rage-inducing stupidity from people who don't understand economics.
Let's start with demand-side economics. Jobs come from consumer purchasing power. That means the consumer has a certain pool of buying power (we represent this with "money"; don't get too attached), and everything he buys is made by labor. When that labor costs more (more labor or more wages), the amount of money required for a product increases. If the consumer can buy fewer products--for example, due to spending more on some product--then there are less products made, and the jobs associated with those products goes away.
A lot of people say, "Oh, but the money transfers to another consumer!" Yes, and that's all well and good, and you still have that consumer capable of buying fewer products with that money. It iterates: in cycle 1, fewer products are bought; in cycle 2, fewer products are bought, although some of the things being bought are being bought by *other* *people* who now have a higher wage; in cycle 3, repeats. It adjusts down, and you end up with those fewer people who can now buy more things, and a bunch of other people unemployed, and a bunch of people who were richer who are now slightly poorer.
The next big topic then is technological growth. Technological growth is reducing the *amount* of labor required to produce a product. When we improve technology as such, a smaller amount of buying power can then buy the given product. We create unemployment in that way, and the reduced cost of the product translates to a reduced price, which leaves more buying power in the hands of the consumer. The consumer buys other products (in the current decade or two, that's been more and better healthcare, along with smart phones, video games, and other electronics), which require labor for production, which creates new jobs to replace old jobs.
This technological growth allows population growth and an increased minimum standard-of-living. If it comes slowly enough, it's relatively harmless, holding a low level of unemployment; if it comes *rapidly*, it causes high unemployment. The Industrial Revolution is an example of sudden high unemployment from new technology; agriculture in America over the past 150 years is an example of slow technological growth.
The raising of minimum wage helps encourage businesses to go from low-cost solutions (cheap wages) to high-cost solutions (machines made by more and more expensive labor). The machines may take, for illustrative purposes, twice as much labor time to produce as they replace; which would restrict our ability to produce other things if it weren't for the fact that this cost rolls down to the products, reducing the consumer's ability to buy those things anyway.
The machines usually come when a business determines a strategic entry point based on finances and long-term speculation on the probable reduction of cost of machine deployment (maximizing ROI with risk appetite and risk tolerance considerations); bumping the wages up increases risk, causing more rapid deployment. This rapid deployment eliminates jobs more quickly, creating a higher transitional unemployment rate; and the cost of machines being higher than the pre-raise wage cost reduces consumer buying power, more permanently eliminating jobs. As well, providing new employment requires finding a consumer market capable of paying the wage cost of the humans involved; this is slower when wages are higher, so the wage bump reduces the speed of recovery.
This compound problem is unique to the modern era, insomuch that it's not a trait of the 1900s. Minimum wages were a good and viable strategy for the past hundred years; we have new threats in the system now. As well, technological growth has brought us to a point where non-wage alternatives such as a welfare-replacing basic income are viable *if* implemented properly (and highly destructive if implemented improperly). Non-wage
My god, you're all trickle-down economists.
We're trying to assign guilt and claim one party or another is liars. Hard evidence is different than soft evidence, and these words have real meaning.
It's a Tesla, it has several thousand made, and it's expensive. They paid for a car, not prestige service; you are assuming it's Tesla's business strategy to put out a face of luxury and haught, rather than to put out a face of the future of technology.
If it were an Aston Martin, maybe they would have sent a personal representative to his house. As it stands, it was an off-the-shelf $60,000 car, the kind of thing upper-middle-class folks take a second mortgage out to buy, like an Audi S5. It's the kind of car *I've* considered buying, and I make $75,000. The car is an "I have a special thing" car, not an "I am a special person" car.
I notice you didn't include things like servers, routers
You mean "Linux has its embedded home in small-form-factor PCs, such as home routers and set-top boxes" doesn't include routers?
If we want to bring servers into the mix, can we talk about how there are fewer servers than *people* involved with any given business, and how we're reducing the number of actual server devices by doing combined services in "The Cloud"? I.e. you need 1/10 a server, I need 1/10 a server, they all need 1/10 a server, let's all rent 1 server from some other guy. Meanwhile, at the companies renting the server, they *already* had more people--and one or more work PCs per person, almost always running Windows (and typically running MacOSX otherwise)--than servers, thus for every 1 Linux they had many Windows. That's not even counting the businesses running non-Linux servers, most of whom are running a mostly-Windows server base if not a zero-Linux server base (colleges and anyone in medical do this a lot).
Linux is big, but it's not bigger than everything else.
A slightly higher percentage of Americans have desktop and laptop computers than have smart phones; and half of Americans have iOS. Across the world, almost 90% of desktops and laptops are Windows, and more people own Windows PCs than Linux-Android tablets and phones; while 58% of devices are Android. In terms of sheer software installation volume, there are many more PCs than people, thanks to office PCs and one-PC-per-family-member.
Java has the claim of running on almost every god damn thing and having more users than anything ever made besides tits. Even with Android, the Windows installation and user bases are pretty far in the lead.
In terms of new devices and software installations per year, it's definitely Android; those are short-lived devices, though, with many people replacing their smart phones after two years (two weeks if you're an iOS user). PCs did that in the late 90s.
There's a disturbing amount of non-smart-phone embedded Windows; it's eclipsed by every other OS, both in-house and QNX. Linux has its embedded home in small-form-factor PCs, such as home routers and set-top boxes; most of everything that's not a PC-by-another-name runs a customized OS, either modified QNX or some proprietary ARM microkernel written specifically for the device. Too bad they're not running Linux on medical devices and ATMs; they're all Windows.
My impression is Linux isn't inherently bigger and more complex than things like Windows and AIX; it has many fewer users; and yet it draws on a much greater pool of developer time. It's inefficient, costly, and wasteful. The project just isn't well-run; it's mostly arguments, bits of code in and out, and no planning or goals.
An economy, by its nature, must grow by creating unemployment. Unemployment is transitional, and reduces over time as prices move toward costs, leaving buying power in consumer hands. A social safety net is a response to that unemployment.
Economies create unemployment as they grow because creating more stuff per each person happens in one of two ways: somebody works longer hours OR we find a way to produce the same things with fewer hours. If we produce, say, the same amount of food with 90% as many labor-hours involved, then 10% of all agricultural workers become unemployed. Those people are unemployed for a time; then, later, when the dust settles and prices come down (this can take months or years), we as consumers have more money to spend because we're buying the same food for a smaller proportion of our incomes. When we spend that money, we try to buy things produced by labor-hours, which means we need to hire people again.
In the end, we have more stuff per person, creating wealth; along the way, we create transitional unemployment.
I didn't forget; the big wall of text is big enough without me describing the entire span of non-fucked-up economic theory, much less the history of economics and how it's evolved to where it reached today.
Inventory build up will only count on value added up to the point that no more value is got.
I don't use the term "value" when describing economics. It's a personal quirk, stemming from having synthesized economic theory in a bubble and then gone back to check against modern theory--a process which gave me a whole lot of useful terms and pinned my own theories to more robust theories, and also confused the hell out of me since modern theory is kind-of broken.
The degree to which I consider it broken has lessened since I've figured out *why* it's broken: my theories are for understanding the functional behavior of economies; modern theories are concerned with *measuring* that behavior, which creates some broken ideas. In particular, modern Solow-Swan models are *great* for separating the technological growth from the population growth function of economies; and they divide economic inputs into land, labor, and capital. "Land" includes natural resources such as gold ore in mines, and "Capital" includes machines; one is a labor modulator (we synthesize Molybdenum and Cesium by nuclear fusion--essentially alchemy--but turning lead into gold takes more labor than digging gold out of the ground), and the other is a roll-up of labor (human labor time builds, maintains, fuels, and operates machines; claiming that building and maintaining is not labor is ... weird).
The divided theory produces a lot of strange conclusions about how economics works, while the labor-common theory produces a theory of scarcity which predicts other economic theories (notably, supply-and-demand, demand-side economics, broken window concept, and so forth) and explains a lot of strange behaviors and exceptions to theory which economists scratch their heads about. At the same time, the divided theory allows you to *measure* an economy in a meaningful (but not entirely accurate) way, which the labor-common theory can't do. Different tools.
Output is potential wealth, but is only realized through transaction, so people need to have resources to buy that output.
That's too abstract for me to want to approach--not necessarily wrong, although it's a detail I think markets handle on their own. You've hit demand-side economics, though: the jobs are in place to produce things, and they exist based on consumer ability to buy those things which are produced.
If you have 100 people working to make 100 pounds of rice, moving 20 of them to doing nothing means you only have 80 pounds of rice. If they're all still getting paid (i.e. those 20 aren't unemployed; they're administratively employed in a way which does not increase output), but there's only 80 pounds of rice, then *all of the income* can only buy *80% as much rice*. You've lost some wealth because there's less stuff per person, and you can make up some monetary theories about inflation because rice apparently costs slightly more (let's not go there).
The overproduction you cite is not sustainable, because you're producing rice at a higher cost than the next guy: you're piling up tons and tons of rice, non-stop, meaning you've got to get an income flow to pay all these workers, which means you have to charge more than someone who is *not* stockpiling up so much rice and thus isn't paying as many labor-hours. If it's actually true that nobody *can* buy that output, raising your prices won't work: nobody can afford the new prices (buying that output, but not receiving it), and so the jobs making excess must go away. Put these together and you realize markets tend to not pile up tons of stock for no reason (a stabilizing stockpile is useful; an infinitely-growing stockpile is not, unless you're infinitely producing oil from atmosphere and pumping it into the gr
Why would they call him? Why would you waste time on a freaking phone call trying to find someone at their home, interrupt them on their time, and then deliver blunt push-information to them while they try to argue with you on the phone? Even the fucking newspaper didn't call me on the phone when they claimed I owed them money (I didn't; I cancelled my account, they stopped sending papers, they kept trying to bill me--I canceled the card after multiple attempted contacts to cancel the charges--and then they claimed they delivered papers I never bought).
It would only get *into* the call center by calling in. If it stayed in the call center, the call center person would have said, "Oh, hello Mr. Baddriver. Your car crashed itself? Oh my, let's see here... okay it says in the logs that you put it into summon mode, then summoned it 20 minutes later, on a public street, parked on the wrong side of the road, and it hit a trailer rig from the end usually attached to a truck. So... yeah, summon mode says not to do that...? Nothing we can do for you here, Mr. Baddriver. Have a nice day!"
If it went to engineering, the call center would have to take the information, disconnect the call, and forward it to an engineering team for analysis. It would go into the queue for hours or days, then generate a response. Again: rather than a callback, they'd probably just send a fucking letter. In writing. With copies at their HQ. That they can claim as "Delivered In Writing" if legally challenged. That saves you the hearsay "what did the support rep tell him?" "Did he hear it properly?" "What was his impression after getting off the phone?" bullshit, because the customer can re-read the conversation and you can present it *in* *writing* to the judge at court.
You mean what he claims to have witnessed.
"Man look at this shit! My car just crashed into this thing all by itself!"
Tesla: "You have to jiggle the handle, double-tap the shifter button, pull into drive, put into park, then confirm YES on the vehicle's panel to activate Summon Mode, and then you can get out of the car and later Summon via your smart phone and it'll self-drive. The vehicle's black box reports the handle was jiggled and tapped and slapped and the driver activated Summon Mode, and then summoned the car later."
Friend: "Uh-hyuk! Ah come'd out 'n his car done crayshed rawt entah that thar trailor!"
It's not like his friend would have seen anything but a car that somehow magically crashed itself since the last time we were outside. He probably has no idea how it happened, just that it did.
It is productive human effort that CREATES wealth
Human effort is made more productive by technological growth. In the early 1900s, 60% of United States laborers were agricultural workers; we invented tons of new farm technologies, and now 2% of United States workers provide food, fiber (clothing), and biofuels for the US and an export market--and half their output is global exports. Just in 1950, middle-class American families spent over 30% of their household income on food; with advances in agricultural technology replacing humans with technology produced using fewer humans than the technology replaced, people now spend under 12% of their income on food.
Human effort doesn't create wealth; output creates wealth. Technology increases output. The single, simple danger is removing jobs too quickly to replace them: once you've deployed new technology and eliminated the corresponding jobs, wage-labor costs go down, and the minimum price drops; it takes time for market forces (notably inflation pressure and competition--both directly with producers of similar goods and indirectly with *anything* *else* consumers might buy instead of fancy Uggs or tablets or paperback books) to leave the money back in consumer hands, and then laborers have to compete with machines on wage-labor costs.
Minimum wage hikes exacerbate this by speeding the replacement of labor with machines WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in wage-labor cost, thus without increasing consumer buying power: instead of costing $40, a Toaster suddenly costs $55, but we replace the high-wage humans with lower-cost machines to make a $50 toaster. Consumers are no more wealthy, and thus can't buy more stuff, thus can't create new jobs (and, in the case where the cost of labor-replacing machines exceeds the pre-wage-increase cost of human labor, the consumer base becomes *less* capable of sustaining existing jobs, and so more people go unemployed). At the same time, with wage-labor being more expensive, it's harder for consumers to supply the purchasing power to create new jobs for the displaced: your economy gets poorer.
This is why economic policies such as non-wage standard-of-living systems like a Citizen's Dividend need to replace minimum wages. It's also why sales taxes are horrible, payroll taxes are bad, and progressive taxes are the best currently-known tax: sales and payroll tax increase consumer expenditure, thus creating a poorer consumer class and reducing the number of available jobs per consumer; while progressive income taxes allow you to reduce taxes on the working class consumer *without* raising taxes on the rich upper class as the income gap spreads, thus creating a more powerful consumer class and increasing the number of jobs available per consumer.
We need an increase in the take-home pay per wage-dollar expenditure: when your employer spend $1,000 on your salary, you should come home with something closer to $1,000. If you come home with $600, you still have to buy products at prices reflecting a portion of a wage-laborer's $1,000; if you come home with $800, that price is still based on a portion of the same $1,000 of wage-labor, but you're both taking home 1/3 more money out of that cost, and your ability to buy products is increased by that much.
Such policies are not very hard to design; transitioning onto them is the difficult part.
If you move a cell, Excel tries to update all references to that cell to follow. I use the same feature in LibreOffice Calc, which is how I discovered it; it works in Google Sheets, too.
No, no, it's not like that. What's bad for the economy is the concentration of income among high-income earners with a high proportional rate of saving. We can counter this by using progressive taxes, where a nominal increase at the top (back the fuck up, Picketty) allows a nominal decrease at the bottom; as the income gap widens (the *whole* *economy* gets richer, and the small high-income group collectively takes more than the large working-class consumer group), we leave the taxes as-is at the top and lower them at the bottom. That increases the amount of consumer take-home pay relative to employer wage-labor cost, which increases the amount of consumer spending relative to what the employers are paying to produce products, which increases the amount of labor businesses can employ, decreasing unemployment, increasing production per capita, and creating more jobs.
The broken window thing is a special case of inefficiency whereby someone gets paid to do something non-useful; it's the opposite of technological growth. Instead of requiring fewer people making product X and thus shifting them to making product Y, we slip a useless individual into the production of product X. This increases its price, leaving less money in the hands of consumers after they buy. The person added to the production cycle could get paid just as much making some useful product; instead, he gets paid for doing effectively nothing, thus leaving us all spending the same amount of money in total but buying slightly less stuff in total.
It's really complex.
Let's fix our Office Administration education, then. OFAD is a field I take seriously, seeing as I was like 3 credits away from a degree in it once upon a time. I am surrounded by such mooks who call themselves customer-oriented contractors, but can't even write a fucking report in Word because they can't keep their formatting straight because they create headings by return-return-return-bold-22pt or it winds up bold/underline or 24pt sometimes or intented weird or whatever. You have no business communicating to a customer if the shit you send them looks worse than what a child might make with crayons.
The answer is teaching these people to do their jobs, not blaming them for being treated like typewriter operators.
It's funny everyone is responding to the implicit flaw, but nobody is calling it out: "I know how to program, but not what to program" no, you're at a point where you know something about programming, but not how to program.
I know like 30 programming languages; I know about C#; I know design patterns; I know architecture; I know how to decouple my code and why; and I've developed lots of targeted strategies to solve specific implementation problems in a game I'm programming in Unity 3D. I don't know *how* to program; I know a lot *about* programming, and I'm spending an inordinate amount of time trying to connect one small problem to another small problem. Every little thing is a massive undertaking, because I have an enormous warehouse of tools and I'm not certain how to properly apply any of them or which to use, even though I know what every single one of them is for.
Even the summary is like, "You know how to program, so you should program little things so you can figure out how to program."
If you can get feedback and correction, it's one of the most efficient ways to mass-learn; if you're just digging on your own and your self-activation is weak, it's one of the best ways to quit programming.
As per Deliberate Practice and modern cognitive science, expertise is developed by a process in which a student takes action which produces errors, then learns from those errors. Deliberate Practice is the most efficient form of practice: it targets specific technical skills (design patterns, integrating of small goals into large architecture, reflection, implementing simple algorithms, planning, etc.) in a goal-oriented way which produces constant and immediate feedback. Such action directly corrects the basic, inherent weaknesses in your abilities, producing the most impact with the least time and effort.
If you try to contribute to an open source software project, you have to exercise a large set of skills, notably in reading and understanding code. Then you have to exercise a smaller set of implementation. For a novice, this massed learning produces a huge amount of domain knowledge--all unrefined and shitty--which gives you a launching pad to develop expertise; and, being a huge amount of new knowledge, it consumes 20 times more energy than ANYTHING ELSE YOU COULD DO WITH YOUR BRAIN. This exhausts your PFC and dlPFC, sapping your willpower and driving you into a low-energy state: the part of your brain says "X is hard but I need to X" gets tired, and the part of your brain that says "X is hard, look at cat pictures" takes over. This is generally a good thing, since it keeps your brain from critically exhausting all its energy and failing, thus terminating your heartbeat and breathing; unfortunately, pushing yourself that hard *also* develops a negative reward whereby you start immediately feeling tired when faced with work, and so you never do anything useful again.
Learning is complex, but not hard. If you feel utterly overwhelmed, that means you should take a break and review; stop shoving new knowledge into your brain.
It's disgusting to see how people are most interested in awarding the Gold Medal of Participation to everyone who fucks up.
The difference is that background checks discover what crimes people HAVE ALREADY COMITTED.
False. Comparing non-fingerprint background checks to fingerprint background checks, the non-fingerprint background checks provide data INCLUDING the prior seven years of arrest records WHERE NO CONVICTION WAS RENDERED, while the fingerprinted background checks MAY provide arrest records WHERE NO CONVICTION WAS RENDERED for an indefinite period.
That means if I accuse you of molesting a 9-year-old girl, the police arrest you, and the courts decide I'm crazy and full of shit, Uber's background check will show your arrest for child molestation for 7 years, while an FBI background check may (or may not) still show that arrest 15 years later.
If you're found guilty, the non-fingerprint background check will find that conviction until you die. 50 years later, it's still on your public record, sans-fingerprinting.
Also: my point wasn't the technical merits; it was the perception. You said you don't see the point; the point is FINGERPRINT CHECKS CREATE A PERCEPTION THAT NON-FINGERPRINT-CHECKED PEOPLE ARE POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS, and there is no basis for this. Thus we create a baseless prejudice against non-fingerprinted drivers, wherein people believe they are more dangerous than fingerprinted drivers. The example I gave was also a baseless and useless mechanism people have actually used to determine if someone is a potential criminal--it was and is just as effective as fingerprint-based background checks in comparison to non-fingerprint-based background checks.
You can get Continental's Extreme Contact DWS 06 model for the Toyota Prius stock, which is a particularly high-performance all-season. It's not as high-performance as the Goodyear Assurance TripleTred, which performs almost as well in wet/dry as high-performance summer tires when loaded onto a non-performance passenger vehicle (don't put TripleTreds on your Pontiac GTO and expect PolePosition performance; don't put PolePositions on your Mazda 3 and expect race car performance and a huge improvement in handling characteristics over TripleTreds).
Various top-performing Ponteza summer tires are available for the Toyota Prius stock size as well, although I seriously doubt they outperform a high-end UHP All-Season when mounted on something like a Prius.
Many of these tires hold their form rigid when inflated to rated pressure, rather than bulging. You can run them at a full 50PSI (I've run S04 PolePositions and my TripleTreds at a full 50PSI on a 2,800 pound Mazda 3) at all times in all conditions with all vehicle loads. That gives you a round profile and reduces rolling resistance, while also increasing contact patch pressure and reducing braking distance in wet and dry conditions. For the snow you want real snow tires; UHP all-seasons will drive you around pretty well, but nothing like a real snow tire. I just compensate by driving slower and more cautiously in snow.
Conventional fill-up stations operating as high-speed charging ports would use a flywheel to pre-store energy, thus smoothing out their access on the grid. Larger or simply more flywheels would allow off-peak storage, and recharging is constant (you can grid draw to regenerate the flywheel even while tapping power from it), thus making the power draw of all EV recharging equivalent to the base load average of all Tesla energy consumption.
Next problem.
Hydrogen storage is effectively a combination of a gasoline car with its gas cap off and a Tesla with a slow short in its battery: the hydrogen is impossible to properly contain (and so dissipates slowly, even through an inch of high-density solid steel, just like if you left your gas cap off and your gasoline evaporated) and requires extreme cooling to reasonably store (usually liquid nitrogen, although liquid helium retains the hydrogen in a properly-built tank for *much* longer; and the LN2 cooling system requires active electrical pumps).
There is no reason to believe storage of hydrogen will ever improve to the point of storing it in a low-energy, low-seepage containment unit. The most advanced hydrogen storage is combining it with carbon to form hydrocarbon--typically methane.
Put better tires on your car and stop driving dealer tires.