Pretty much, yes. Mind you, this starts getting into the same line of thinking that laws and police and prisons don't help, because arresting and imprisoning someone happens after a crime: some people surmise there is no deterrent effect, and so we would have exactly as much crime and as many murders and thefts and assaults and rapes if we just gave up on policing and shut down all the prisons.
That's not because of speech; it's because of consequences. You repeatedly tell some gay faggot he's a gay deepthroating faggot giving everyone AIDS and he has severe emotional issues because you're an asshole? LAWSUIT FOR HARASSMENT! You make up a bunch of shit about a dude having sex with 11-year-old girls? LAWSUIT FOR FUCKING UP HIS SOCIAL LIFE! You scream into a crowd and cause panic and rioting? CHARGES FOR CAUSING PERSONAL DAMAGE, PROPERTY DAMAGE, AND CIVIL UNREST!
Lawsuits come from standing; criminal charges come from criminal intent, such as hiring someone to murder people.
Competition works as thus: supplying the first units of a thing requires less labor (less cost) than supplying further units, unless you have an advantage (a more productive mine, local access to materials, better processes); you can inflate your prices to some point below what the next guy can charge. If it costs you $100/unit to build, and the next guy spends $150/unit, you can raise your prices as high as $150/unit; you can keep your prices as low as $100/unit to undercut and weaken the competition; you cannot go below $100/unit, and your competition cannot go below $150/unit, without taking losses and risking business failure.
Whenever I explain wealth, people tell me I'm full of shit because reducing costs doesn't reduce price to consumers. They then turn around and argue something magical about competition driving prices down.
This is textbook cybersquatting. He bought a whole bunch on speculation hoping to get rich quick, and now wants to cash in his lottery ticket. It's a little too late for him to claim he has a legitimate business use for it.
Thing is he bought generic domain names, and has a right to own them. He's had it for 15 years. They're claiming that's just fine, and that he could sell it to them, but didn't; then, when it expired and he renewed, they claimed he doesn't have the right to RETAIN his property (we treat domains as property, because we consider the purchase of lease as ownership, not licensing: YOU CAN SELL YOUR DOMAINS TO OTHER PEOPLE).
In effect, if you own a domain, and another company thinks they have a claim to it that does not predate your ownership, all they have to do is wait for renewal. When it comes time for your domain to expire, renewing it is treated as buying it new. If you owned Windows.com 5 years before Microsoft made Windows, Microsoft couldn't do shit; if you renewed it when it expired 8 years later, Microsoft could treat you exactly like you just registered Windows.com that day, claiming you maliciously started infringing on their trademark, even if you weren't infringing before due to prior ownership. Renewal is new ownership.
It's a bullshit approach. The plaintiff is suing because they've come up with a name, found someone else owns the name, and don't want to buy the property.
2. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of such speech
That's exactly what it means, you thick titanium plank. It means you can say Obama is a cock-sucking negro ape and the thought police won't come to your house for speaking ill of the president! It means you can say Bush staged 9/11 and not have black helicopters show up to abduct you from work! That's the whole point of freedom: to exempt you from certain consequences of certain actions!
Only your stupid strawman is ridiculous, I'm suggesting that if you WORK at a major bank and you are responsible for their backups then part of that is being able to do bare metal recovery AND walk others through the process.
Your argument was that some stupid intern you hired might not be able to figure out how to use an encryption key, so the process should be simple; then it was that keys and documents get lost, and you should be a good enough admin to know wtf you're doing; now it's that you have the whole process memorized, being the veteran resident expert on the business's particular system and having designed it from the ground up.
Let's refresh your memory:
If you can't successfully explain a recovery procedure to a recent average high school student over the phone then you are doing it wrong. If someone in ten or twenty years needs to track down a key from ex-employees that have moved or died then you are doing it wrong.
As well,
With respect - professional engineer here, guy with a HR granted title of engineer there. You really should choose your insults a bit more carefully. I'm sure you have plenty of skills I do not have but to me IT in general is a subset of what I was doing last century, so you have only succeeded in making me laugh by puffing yourself up.
In the last decade, we've moved on to virtualization, infrastructure as a service, and document stores like MongoDB. Last decade, when you were doing this shit, you probably had huge SQL relational databases, which are like collections of giant CSV files with indexes; those databases were a step forward from LDAP, a form of hierarchical database, basically a giant file system with tiny files; while document stores are basically giant collections of XML- or JSON-like data, with indexes. Routers are now ASAs, with 10 MICROSECOND switching while deep-packet-inspecting 26 gigabytes of data per second, thanks to using ASIC logic instead of general-purpose CPUs; switches operate on layer 3, analyzing IP headers, because why not blur the line between what is a fucking switch and what is a router?
Not to say that old skill sets don't found new skill sets, but we have managed to get rather dated here rather quickly. I've compensated largely by constantly collecting more information and keeping a broad knowledge base, rather than staying current in a single technology. Everything from financial systems to devops, from back-ups to system programming, has some level of competence on my skill sheet--some of them are very low levels of competence, some (like Unix administration) are such high levels of competence that I'm over-invested, to the point that I can use awk to impressive but wholly-unnecessary effect.
I branched out into project management because this is just too much crap to use effectively any other way, which is why I have comments on long-term planning, and particularly on risk management. Losing an encryption key is one of the most minor risks I can imagine, and every scenario you suggest is patently ridiculous. Twenty-year-old back-ups? A process that hasn't changed while the data center around it has undergone disruptive transformations? Keys owned by employees, rather than static in the back-up system and transferred off-site over key exchange protocols? People overwrite tapes every year in a cycle; your back-up process would not work if not updated to keep up with your data center's needs; and any such stupidity as poor encryption key handling would be projected early in the process, or else you're completely incompetent and likely won't have working back-ups anyway.
Wu claims Google's first informational result is a "search result", rather than differentiating between content and information searches. Google isn't providing its own result first; it's providing an answer to a semantic question.
There are three types of searches: Official contact (what is the home page of Microsoft?); research (find me a bunch of information about lions); and simple information (what time is it in Brazil?). Google often gives any simple query related to a particular entity an Official Contact result first (e.g. searching for Windows 10 will give you the Microsoft page for Windows 10 first), and starts with a Simple Information result if the search looks informational (e.g. what is the national animal of Scotland?).
Wu fails to differentiate, instead seeing a search engine as a research platform: if you ask for any topic, you are asking for a library of writings on the topic, rather than trying to find a specific and utterly small piece of information.
Never mind that; Timothy has learned to not end a sentence in a preposition. Maybe he'll learn to correctly use the serial comma in lists of three or more items! Quick, set up a class so he can teach the other editors English!
You're ridiculous. "Oh, I can just walk into a major bank, an insurance company, or a credit card processor, and, with no foreknowledge of their systems, wave my hand and reconstruct their entire data center from back-ups, no planning required!" You'll get a non-working system.
You're one of those people who thinks he's a rockstar developer, a magic sysadmin with the Midas touch. I've watched hundreds of people like you destroy businesses and then walk off smiling to yourself about how you did a perfect job. I have been there, and I have done that; you are a child to me, an artifact from my past whose knowledge and experiences are a subset of mine.
I imagine you would attack less if it was you being condemned.
You imagine a lot.
Your viewpoint on this change doesn't seem to take in to account the various leakages and inequalities present in the system
It doesn't by design. Such things are built on top the system. It's like saying that clay earth only bears 1500 pounds per square foot load: this is a fact, just as the stated facts I have given about economics. You add an argument similar to that engineers sometimes design shoddy buildings, or that builders sometimes cut corners; those are also true, and have nothing to do with how much load the earth will bear. The fact remains you can improve your structure to bear 1500 pounds per square foot load without collapsing, and it will still collapse if the earth below it only bears 1200 pounds per square inch; you must improve the earth before the structure.
Pushing for a great economic leap forward in the united states is, in my opinion, bankrupting us.
A great economic leap forward would not bankrupt us; however, a massive switch to automation would cause something akin to the Industrial Revolution, which I've accounted for. The massive unemployment will go beyond the 47% of jobs which we can automate now: with those laborers displaced, the consumer base drops by a good 47%, which means you can sell all your inexpensive goods only to half as many consumers, which has nasty implications. The Information Age unbound struggling markets: businesses couldn't double capacity to manage contracts and invoices by doubling the number of workers; the mistakes went up exponentially, and the feasibility of managing all this information was non-existent until we brought in computers, hence allowing explosive economic growth and rapid creation of jobs to employ the displaced. Mechanization will replace linear labor scaling with machine work, so will simply create a large term of unemployment.
This won't bankrupt the country--far from it--but it will inconvenience many people. I provide a welfare system which doesn't increase in costs when more people are unemployed, and which is stable against all disruptions which don't destroy the economy outright, and which completely eliminates homelessness and hunger; people tell me this is immoral because those dirty poor people should just get a job. 55 million hungry in the United States of America, 600,000 homeless, and 4.8 million homed on HUD vouchers (5.4 million WOULD be homeless), and they tell me it's immoral to provide a welfare solution that costs 98% of what our current costs, but eliminates these problems.
Morality is an excuse to protect your ego from the suffering you inflict on others.
All these products and luxuries that we spend our money on, which cost ever so much less, are in fact bankrupting us
All these products and luxuries costing ever so much are reflective of when shirts used to cost 479 labor-hours (~$3500 today), and then factories and mechanization made them cost $25, and suddenly every beggar could buy himself two shirts.
You main point being that economics is a zero sum game is so obviously wrong
How retarded are you?
I described economics in a way where you start with people spending $320/year on chairs, and wind up with them spending $320/year on chairs AND CUSHIONS. That's not zero-sum; are you fucking stupid? More shit is coming out of one side without more shit going in the other.
Nor do I think the world should bow to economics, but take it under advisement and engineer it to the benefit of the majority of the population.
Nobody should bow to any science as a set of rules; sciences are tools. Engineers figure out how to abuse the rules to make interesting things happen.
The trade advantage is certainly lesser, but it doesn't ruin the whole picture.
Correct. You understand my point, I see: we rapidly move total wealth forward, so even the lowest and most abuse face an improving life situation. You argue that we shouldn't abuse the child of Omelas today so that he may be better off--but still abused--tomorrow; I only argue that it is more efficient, which you seem to understand. I find morality silly, but won't argue it in this case; I always attack morality where it leads to conclusions in which people would rather let millions suffer and die than condemn thousands, because you are responsible for that suffering and death by your refusal to stop it.
The question becomes one of to what extent is is no longer possible to limit workforce replacements to a small enough percentage that it's beneficial to the overall economy.
No, it doesn't. The problem isn't of how much, but how much per unit time; if the question becomes how much, implement complete and total communism, because you have entered a post-scarcity economy and everyone has so much money they can't find any way to spend it all.
We roll the dice you're stumbling over every once in a while. The last bad one was the Industrial Age, where we had 70% unemployment for 60 years; it sucked.
The last good one was the Information Age, where we replaced mostly clerks in offices managing paper document stores so large that an ever-expanding army of clerks couldn't do it--that is, you may hire 2000 clerks to handle 2000 times as many leases and contracts, but your workforce isn't going to handle the workload anyway, and your business is going to collapse under its own weight; the Information Age (computers) solved this by making it POSSIBLE to expand industries that desperately wanted to grow, not by throwing out massive numbers of jobs and then trying to make up new markets. New markets came rapidly because new jobs in existing markets showed up everywhere, and everyone got friggin' rich.
The next one is the automation age; it resembles the industrial revolution more than the information age, and will sharply create a 50%-ish drop in employment in industries which are not hitting walls trying to expand. Those industries are sized for the demand, and won't explosively grow; new jobs won't rapidly appear over night due to automation, and so the turn-over won't magic up so much wealth as to expand the middle class and create new markets out of nothing.
I think that eventually we'll reach a point where there's enough material wealth generated through automation that everyone can be given food, shelter, and clothing at no cost
Automation won't do it. The core problem is energy scarcity; we can transmute any material into any other material through energy-expensive processes, so we are capable of using millions of times more energy than we currently produce or consume. A dyson sphere completely enclosing the sun and using modern parabolic reflector sterling engines at 39% efficiency would generate 13,000 TRILLION times as much energy as we use now, and would end us into an unknown post-scarcity economy as you suggest; however, I don't project the specifics being something I can simply describe, and don't attempt to do so. It may not instantly create a utopia; it will create the economic situation prerequisite for a utopia.
As for today, a capitalist solution works. For just a hair below the cost of our current welfare system in America, we can create a capitalist feedback loop that supplies everyone food, shelter, clothing, utilities, clean water, and so forth. Any business participating in the supply side will make billions in pure profit, so somebody will do so; as for the incentive to work, I specify everyone (even Warren Buffet) gets the Dividend payment each month, and so employment carries no risk of losing welfare benefits, nor reduction in benefits, and so a job is always an improvement in your financial situation. Incentive.
it is entirely because the labor is so cheap, and the environmental regulations so lax, that what you're really doing is hurting your own country to make some other people very rich at the expense of just about everyone else.
Debatable. Your environmental argument is stronger than your labor argument for technical reasons, rather than reasons of rhetoric; it is the technical reasons which concern me.
Realize every cost in every product or service you buy is human labor. Profit margins come on top of human labor. This works out in aggregate, which is important for many reasons: in major aggregate, bulk purchase agreements are bound by this human labor cost and nothing else.
Consider you make steel automobile frames, which use refined steel, which is processed from coal and steel ore. Humans mine coal and steel (it's complex enough, let's ignore the cost of machines, tools, and fuel at the mining level), which mining companies sell to the refinery; humans refine steel, which the refinery sells to you.
When you buy steel, you pay a mark-up on refined steel above its material and labor costs. The refinery buys coal and steel ore as material, which the mining companies mark up above their human labor costs. In aggregate, the price of your automobile frames includes your mark-up, the steel mill mark-up, and the mining company mark-up; while the cost includes the raw human labor and nothing else. Put the mark-up and human labor together and you get the price.
GM orders 100 million automobile frames from you. For this, you negotiate with your steel refinery for 100 million units of refined steel. For this, the refinery negotiates a massive ore and coal order from the ore and coal mining companies, respectively. These large orders provide a big profit opportunity: rather than mark up $100/ton, the mining companies mark up $1/ton, selling millions of tons of material they wouldn't have normally sold, profiting millions of dollars they would never have gained if you went elsewhere. You refine the ore into steel for frames, and charge a $1 mark-up on that instead of the usual $100 mark-up, which, with 100 million frames, nets you $100 million of profit.
That's just business. You know about bulk ordering; I will explain an important factor here.
Supply-and-demand suggests this high demand will drive the prices up, yet it drives prices down. That's because supply-and-demand doesn't account for market negotiation; we shoehorn competition here. Regardless, another mechanism is at play: labor cost.
Say coal costs $200/ton to extract, because you get a 10 tonne block of coal by an hour of effort from 200 miners making $10/hr. If you try to increase supply, the next best mines--the ones not being tapped right now--supply blocks of 75% rock and dirt mixed with 25% coal, meaning 200 miners still cost $2000 to pull that block out of the ground, but it only has 2.5 tonnes of coal--it costs you $800/tonne, plus cost to sift and refine the coal out. Existing coal companies can raise prices up to about $800/tonne without worrying about a new competitor showing up with a source of cheap coal (actually higher, because they can significantly undercut and bankrupt any new competitor immediately).
Invent new tools and new mining techniques.
In this new process, the labor involved in tool production, tool maintenance, mine planning, managing, and executing tallies up to about an hour of 100 laborers averaging $10/hr to pull one 10-tonne block of coal from the ground. That means it costs $100/ton for coal.
When someone comes along and says they want 10 million tonnes of coal, you can make them a deal for $200/tonne and not go bankrupt. Below that and you run red. Discover a new process, and suddenly your competitor breaks even at $200/tonne, while you make a 50% profit margin selling at $150/tonne--a price that would bankrupt your competitor in 6 months if they tried to fill that order at that price!
It's that long because there's oversupply of tech workers, so they get to wait for 100 applicants and then run through everyone to negotiate as low a salary as possible. This is the result of government-supported college education and a poor K-12 primary education system, instead of market-supported career education and a functional K-12 primary education system.
Take a look at AMANDA for an example - you can get stuff back with "dd" and "tar" if necessary instead of using the actual AMANDA software.
Which a McBurgerFlipper won't know how to do. Even as an experienced systems integration engineer, I would need a few hours at least to develop a plan on how to do that. I have tapes all over the place with multiple days's worth of differential backups, and I need to use dd and tar to get the data out, restore it to the appropriate systems, restore differentials and incrementals IN PROPER ORDER--meaning I have to verify I'm using the tapes in the correct order--get that data into the appropriate applications, configure the different servers on the new network so the applications can actually interact and function, and so forth.
There is no such thing as "put the tape in and tell Amanda to rebuild your data center". It's never been that way. In days of old, when servers had tape drives, you could bare-metal restore by taking the correct tape to the correct server and running restore software--requiring you to know which tape goes to which server and how to boot alternate media. When it came to banks of tapes in centralized backup, you had to configure each system to get on the network first, and to interact with your back-up system. Now we have complex PXE setups and all, which are fast, but require knowledge--even knowing how to work them, you have to know the overall engineering plan to set them up.
It's great that you take home back-ups onto an external hard drive, but we're talking about restoring data centers here.
Oh yeah, right, and as long as there's no BPA in your water bottles, they're perfectly safe. Whoops! Wait, as long as there's no BPS in your water bottles
Water bottles are PET or, if you're extremely lucky, Polypropylene. Polycarbonate uses bisphenol; PET and PP are both fully non-toxic according to all modern science, in the same way modern science finds glass fully non-toxic and copper considerably poisonous.
they also break more easily than copper.
Switching from copper to CPVC and PEX was mostly driven by copper piping's tendency to corrode, weaken, and burst. CPVC and PEX fail far less frequently, with far longer lifetimes (50+ years for PEX), and with the most frequent failure mode being poorly-formed joints (which copper is susceptible to as well--your soldering sucks).
So it's better to build new boxes and stuff poor people into them than to simply put them into homes which are currently lying vacant and which will otherwise be destroyed and become crack houses, insurance arson targets, and homes for feral cats?
I have more efficient solutions that are less-expensive and more effective than putting people into homes not fit for human habitation. If you want to go that route, it would be easier to just execute all the poor people, since they're going to die of respiratory problems thanks to all the mold in those houses.
We can create a profitable market for providing small apartments, food, clothing, and clean water to homeless people, which would cost in total 98% of what our current main welfare programs cost, but be damn near 100% effective (the 600,000 homeless and 54 million hungry would no longer be homeless or hungry; the 4.8 million on HUD vouchers would self-support, or rather the HUD voucher would phase out as new people self-support and current beneficiaries recover and move out of the HUD program).
Are there jobs there? Is it a shithole? Will it have water in five years?
Yes, yes, and yes. Livable houses quickly become unlivable houses without maintenance. I live across the street from a house that went from livable and in good repair to molding, sagging, and damaged in 4 years of non-habitation. Within 10 years, a house can become unstable. Without humidity, temperature, insect, rodent, and plant control, everything attacks the structure: mold, fungus, and burrowing insects grow and weaken wood; rodents chew through electrical lines, drywall, carpet, insulation, wood, and so forth; tree roots can attack foundations, while creeping vines can attack siding and mortar, destroying wood, plastic, and brick; moisture seeping into concrete and masonry, along with temperature fluctuations, can reduce brick to quarter-sized fragments in less than two years (a clogged gutter did this to my house: it looked like you smashed up the bricks below the constant waterfall with a jackhammer).
Whoever said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is an idiot. The $3000 you spend just to run your air conditioning, $1000 on general maintenance, hours in the yard, and occasional large appliance repairs (furnace) save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. Give it two years and you'll have to dump $50k-$100k into a 1300sqft town house to gut and restore it. A gram of prevention is worth several kilos of cure.
The context for their statement of a million dollars was America, where most cabbies carry a few hundred thousand. I recall numbers like $50,000 in countries where $30,000 was the norm, and suggestions of bigger numbers in some places that I never found specifics about and so never pursed much as argument.
Where my knowledge of Uber's insurance coverage has been concrete, they've always carried more than cabbies; where I've only had vague hints, I've always just ignored those such markets due to insufficient data. I have no comment on Uber's precise operations where I have no precise information.
Sale price. Home values don't really change--that is to say, clearly, the value of purchasing a home over a payment term doesn't change. A $1300/month 30-year term house is a $1300/month 30-year term house. If interest rates go up, the market will bear $1300/month for that house (plus the inflation, of course), so the price must come down. In the end, you pay the same.
in which case, the average house cost to the buyer is the same at 3% or 14%
Right.
People buy houses based on monthly payment, not transaction amount.
Right again.
The interest rate just changes the numbers on the amortization table.
WRONG!
This is a simplified explanation: it's functionally correct, but technically incorrect. Think like the "principle and interest" explanation: you don't really pay $SOMEDOLLARS on principle and $OTHERDOLLARS on interest; rather, you accrue interest every day, increasing your loan balance, and then pay down the balance, with the relative difference between payment dates being the imaginary "principle", and the interest accrued that month being the "interest". It describes the effective behavior of your payments, yes, but the whole process is completely divorced from reality.
Let's say you take a $320,000 loan at 3.5% for 30 years. Down payment made, sale price, none of that matters; the fact is, after all of it, you have to borrow $320,000, at 3.5%, for 30 years. Your monthly payment is $1,436.94.
The first month, your payment is $933.33 interest and $503.61 principle, by the strange definition above. You accrue $933.33 before your first payment, and then pay down your balance by the $1,400-ish. In fact, your first six months are $933.33, $931.86, $930.39, $928.91 $927.43, $925.95. Your principle payments are $503.61, $505.08, $506.55, $508.03, $509.51, and $511.
If, in that first month, you pay an extra $2,540.17, you skip the next five months's payments. Your balance moves down to where it would be when you made your sixth payment, and so you skip accruing that interest--$4,644.45. Instead of a $1,400 payment, you have to find a $4,000 payment, but that's the effect.
Let's change the interest rate to 14%.
Let's say you take a $120,000 loan at 14% for 30 years. Down payment made, sale price, none of that matters; the fact is, after all of it, you have to borrow $120,000, at 14%, for 30 years. Your monthly payment is $1,421.85.
That's almost exactly the same payment.
The first month, your payment is $1,400.00 interest and $21.85 principle, by the strange definition above. You accrue $1,400 before your first payment, and then pay down your balance by the $1,400-ish. In fact, your first six months are $1,400, $1,399.75, $1,399.49, $1,399.23, $1,398.96, $1,398.70. Your principle payments are $21.85, $22.10, $22.36, $22.62, $22.88, $23.15.
If, in that first month, you pay an extra $113.11, you skip the next five months's payments. Your balance moves down to where it would be when you made your sixth payment, and so you skip accruing that interest--$6,996.13. Instead of a $1,400 payment, you have to find a $1,550 payment, but that's the effect.
Do you see the difference here?
In your early payments, if you throw down an extra $20, you save yourself $1,400. In fact, two and a half years in, dropping an extra $30 would save you $1,391.62, if you had only paid the minimum until then. Obviously, if you're doubling principle payment, you'd have to pay $45 two and a half years in, and would only save about $1,380 for that single extra payment.
It means if you raise your first payment by $258, you skip nearly a year of interest ($15,382). If you pay your second payment plus $297, you save $15,343 and skip ahead a whole year. Even if you just throw an extra $50 on every payment, you save yourself 8 years and $120,000 off the loan.
Slashdot Mirror
Ich mag es nicht wenn andere underbrachen meine Meditation.
I must speak to Keitel, Jodl, Krebs, and Borgdorf.
Pretty much, yes. Mind you, this starts getting into the same line of thinking that laws and police and prisons don't help, because arresting and imprisoning someone happens after a crime: some people surmise there is no deterrent effect, and so we would have exactly as much crime and as many murders and thefts and assaults and rapes if we just gave up on policing and shut down all the prisons.
That's not because of speech; it's because of consequences. You repeatedly tell some gay faggot he's a gay deepthroating faggot giving everyone AIDS and he has severe emotional issues because you're an asshole? LAWSUIT FOR HARASSMENT! You make up a bunch of shit about a dude having sex with 11-year-old girls? LAWSUIT FOR FUCKING UP HIS SOCIAL LIFE! You scream into a crowd and cause panic and rioting? CHARGES FOR CAUSING PERSONAL DAMAGE, PROPERTY DAMAGE, AND CIVIL UNREST!
Lawsuits come from standing; criminal charges come from criminal intent, such as hiring someone to murder people.
Competition works as thus: supplying the first units of a thing requires less labor (less cost) than supplying further units, unless you have an advantage (a more productive mine, local access to materials, better processes); you can inflate your prices to some point below what the next guy can charge. If it costs you $100/unit to build, and the next guy spends $150/unit, you can raise your prices as high as $150/unit; you can keep your prices as low as $100/unit to undercut and weaken the competition; you cannot go below $100/unit, and your competition cannot go below $150/unit, without taking losses and risking business failure.
Whenever I explain wealth, people tell me I'm full of shit because reducing costs doesn't reduce price to consumers. They then turn around and argue something magical about competition driving prices down.
This is textbook cybersquatting. He bought a whole bunch on speculation hoping to get rich quick, and now wants to cash in his lottery ticket. It's a little too late for him to claim he has a legitimate business use for it.
Thing is he bought generic domain names, and has a right to own them. He's had it for 15 years. They're claiming that's just fine, and that he could sell it to them, but didn't; then, when it expired and he renewed, they claimed he doesn't have the right to RETAIN his property (we treat domains as property, because we consider the purchase of lease as ownership, not licensing: YOU CAN SELL YOUR DOMAINS TO OTHER PEOPLE).
In effect, if you own a domain, and another company thinks they have a claim to it that does not predate your ownership, all they have to do is wait for renewal. When it comes time for your domain to expire, renewing it is treated as buying it new. If you owned Windows.com 5 years before Microsoft made Windows, Microsoft couldn't do shit; if you renewed it when it expired 8 years later, Microsoft could treat you exactly like you just registered Windows.com that day, claiming you maliciously started infringing on their trademark, even if you weren't infringing before due to prior ownership. Renewal is new ownership.
It's a bullshit approach. The plaintiff is suing because they've come up with a name, found someone else owns the name, and don't want to buy the property.
2. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of such speech
That's exactly what it means, you thick titanium plank. It means you can say Obama is a cock-sucking negro ape and the thought police won't come to your house for speaking ill of the president! It means you can say Bush staged 9/11 and not have black helicopters show up to abduct you from work! That's the whole point of freedom: to exempt you from certain consequences of certain actions!
Only your stupid strawman is ridiculous, I'm suggesting that if you WORK at a major bank and you are responsible for their backups then part of that is being able to do bare metal recovery AND walk others through the process.
Your argument was that some stupid intern you hired might not be able to figure out how to use an encryption key, so the process should be simple; then it was that keys and documents get lost, and you should be a good enough admin to know wtf you're doing; now it's that you have the whole process memorized, being the veteran resident expert on the business's particular system and having designed it from the ground up.
Let's refresh your memory:
If you can't successfully explain a recovery procedure to a recent average high school student over the phone then you are doing it wrong. If someone in ten or twenty years needs to track down a key from ex-employees that have moved or died then you are doing it wrong.
As well,
With respect - professional engineer here, guy with a HR granted title of engineer there. You really should choose your insults a bit more carefully. I'm sure you have plenty of skills I do not have but to me IT in general is a subset of what I was doing last century, so you have only succeeded in making me laugh by puffing yourself up.
In the last decade, we've moved on to virtualization, infrastructure as a service, and document stores like MongoDB. Last decade, when you were doing this shit, you probably had huge SQL relational databases, which are like collections of giant CSV files with indexes; those databases were a step forward from LDAP, a form of hierarchical database, basically a giant file system with tiny files; while document stores are basically giant collections of XML- or JSON-like data, with indexes. Routers are now ASAs, with 10 MICROSECOND switching while deep-packet-inspecting 26 gigabytes of data per second, thanks to using ASIC logic instead of general-purpose CPUs; switches operate on layer 3, analyzing IP headers, because why not blur the line between what is a fucking switch and what is a router?
Not to say that old skill sets don't found new skill sets, but we have managed to get rather dated here rather quickly. I've compensated largely by constantly collecting more information and keeping a broad knowledge base, rather than staying current in a single technology. Everything from financial systems to devops, from back-ups to system programming, has some level of competence on my skill sheet--some of them are very low levels of competence, some (like Unix administration) are such high levels of competence that I'm over-invested, to the point that I can use awk to impressive but wholly-unnecessary effect.
I branched out into project management because this is just too much crap to use effectively any other way, which is why I have comments on long-term planning, and particularly on risk management. Losing an encryption key is one of the most minor risks I can imagine, and every scenario you suggest is patently ridiculous. Twenty-year-old back-ups? A process that hasn't changed while the data center around it has undergone disruptive transformations? Keys owned by employees, rather than static in the back-up system and transferred off-site over key exchange protocols? People overwrite tapes every year in a cycle; your back-up process would not work if not updated to keep up with your data center's needs; and any such stupidity as poor encryption key handling would be projected early in the process, or else you're completely incompetent and likely won't have working back-ups anyway.
Wu claims Google's first informational result is a "search result", rather than differentiating between content and information searches. Google isn't providing its own result first; it's providing an answer to a semantic question.
There are three types of searches: Official contact (what is the home page of Microsoft?); research (find me a bunch of information about lions); and simple information (what time is it in Brazil?). Google often gives any simple query related to a particular entity an Official Contact result first (e.g. searching for Windows 10 will give you the Microsoft page for Windows 10 first), and starts with a Simple Information result if the search looks informational (e.g. what is the national animal of Scotland?).
Wu fails to differentiate, instead seeing a search engine as a research platform: if you ask for any topic, you are asking for a library of writings on the topic, rather than trying to find a specific and utterly small piece of information.
Yeah, I bought a $1000 machine to make a $2 battery cover for my phone.
In the industry, they call it the "lost wax process"...
Never mind that; Timothy has learned to not end a sentence in a preposition. Maybe he'll learn to correctly use the serial comma in lists of three or more items! Quick, set up a class so he can teach the other editors English!
You're ridiculous. "Oh, I can just walk into a major bank, an insurance company, or a credit card processor, and, with no foreknowledge of their systems, wave my hand and reconstruct their entire data center from back-ups, no planning required!" You'll get a non-working system.
You're one of those people who thinks he's a rockstar developer, a magic sysadmin with the Midas touch. I've watched hundreds of people like you destroy businesses and then walk off smiling to yourself about how you did a perfect job. I have been there, and I have done that; you are a child to me, an artifact from my past whose knowledge and experiences are a subset of mine.
I imagine you would attack less if it was you being condemned.
You imagine a lot.
Your viewpoint on this change doesn't seem to take in to account the various leakages and inequalities present in the system
It doesn't by design. Such things are built on top the system. It's like saying that clay earth only bears 1500 pounds per square foot load: this is a fact, just as the stated facts I have given about economics. You add an argument similar to that engineers sometimes design shoddy buildings, or that builders sometimes cut corners; those are also true, and have nothing to do with how much load the earth will bear. The fact remains you can improve your structure to bear 1500 pounds per square foot load without collapsing, and it will still collapse if the earth below it only bears 1200 pounds per square inch; you must improve the earth before the structure.
Pushing for a great economic leap forward in the united states is, in my opinion, bankrupting us.
A great economic leap forward would not bankrupt us; however, a massive switch to automation would cause something akin to the Industrial Revolution, which I've accounted for. The massive unemployment will go beyond the 47% of jobs which we can automate now: with those laborers displaced, the consumer base drops by a good 47%, which means you can sell all your inexpensive goods only to half as many consumers, which has nasty implications. The Information Age unbound struggling markets: businesses couldn't double capacity to manage contracts and invoices by doubling the number of workers; the mistakes went up exponentially, and the feasibility of managing all this information was non-existent until we brought in computers, hence allowing explosive economic growth and rapid creation of jobs to employ the displaced. Mechanization will replace linear labor scaling with machine work, so will simply create a large term of unemployment.
This won't bankrupt the country--far from it--but it will inconvenience many people. I provide a welfare system which doesn't increase in costs when more people are unemployed, and which is stable against all disruptions which don't destroy the economy outright, and which completely eliminates homelessness and hunger; people tell me this is immoral because those dirty poor people should just get a job. 55 million hungry in the United States of America, 600,000 homeless, and 4.8 million homed on HUD vouchers (5.4 million WOULD be homeless), and they tell me it's immoral to provide a welfare solution that costs 98% of what our current costs, but eliminates these problems.
Morality is an excuse to protect your ego from the suffering you inflict on others.
All these products and luxuries that we spend our money on, which cost ever so much less, are in fact bankrupting us
All these products and luxuries costing ever so much are reflective of when shirts used to cost 479 labor-hours (~$3500 today), and then factories and mechanization made them cost $25, and suddenly every beggar could buy himself two shirts.
You main point being that economics is a zero sum game is so obviously wrong
How retarded are you?
I described economics in a way where you start with people spending $320/year on chairs, and wind up with them spending $320/year on chairs AND CUSHIONS. That's not zero-sum; are you fucking stupid? More shit is coming out of one side without more shit going in the other.
Nor do I think the world should bow to economics, but take it under advisement and engineer it to the benefit of the majority of the population.
Nobody should bow to any science as a set of rules; sciences are tools. Engineers figure out how to abuse the rules to make interesting things happen.
The trade advantage is certainly lesser, but it doesn't ruin the whole picture.
Correct. You understand my point, I see: we rapidly move total wealth forward, so even the lowest and most abuse face an improving life situation. You argue that we shouldn't abuse the child of Omelas today so that he may be better off--but still abused--tomorrow; I only argue that it is more efficient, which you seem to understand. I find morality silly, but won't argue it in this case; I always attack morality where it leads to conclusions in which people would rather let millions suffer and die than condemn thousands, because you are responsible for that suffering and death by your refusal to stop it.
The question becomes one of to what extent is is no longer possible to limit workforce replacements to a small enough percentage that it's beneficial to the overall economy.
No, it doesn't. The problem isn't of how much, but how much per unit time; if the question becomes how much, implement complete and total communism, because you have entered a post-scarcity economy and everyone has so much money they can't find any way to spend it all.
We roll the dice you're stumbling over every once in a while. The last bad one was the Industrial Age, where we had 70% unemployment for 60 years; it sucked.
The last good one was the Information Age, where we replaced mostly clerks in offices managing paper document stores so large that an ever-expanding army of clerks couldn't do it--that is, you may hire 2000 clerks to handle 2000 times as many leases and contracts, but your workforce isn't going to handle the workload anyway, and your business is going to collapse under its own weight; the Information Age (computers) solved this by making it POSSIBLE to expand industries that desperately wanted to grow, not by throwing out massive numbers of jobs and then trying to make up new markets. New markets came rapidly because new jobs in existing markets showed up everywhere, and everyone got friggin' rich.
The next one is the automation age; it resembles the industrial revolution more than the information age, and will sharply create a 50%-ish drop in employment in industries which are not hitting walls trying to expand. Those industries are sized for the demand, and won't explosively grow; new jobs won't rapidly appear over night due to automation, and so the turn-over won't magic up so much wealth as to expand the middle class and create new markets out of nothing.
I think that eventually we'll reach a point where there's enough material wealth generated through automation that everyone can be given food, shelter, and clothing at no cost
Automation won't do it. The core problem is energy scarcity; we can transmute any material into any other material through energy-expensive processes, so we are capable of using millions of times more energy than we currently produce or consume. A dyson sphere completely enclosing the sun and using modern parabolic reflector sterling engines at 39% efficiency would generate 13,000 TRILLION times as much energy as we use now, and would end us into an unknown post-scarcity economy as you suggest; however, I don't project the specifics being something I can simply describe, and don't attempt to do so. It may not instantly create a utopia; it will create the economic situation prerequisite for a utopia.
As for today, a capitalist solution works. For just a hair below the cost of our current welfare system in America, we can create a capitalist feedback loop that supplies everyone food, shelter, clothing, utilities, clean water, and so forth. Any business participating in the supply side will make billions in pure profit, so somebody will do so; as for the incentive to work, I specify everyone (even Warren Buffet) gets the Dividend payment each month, and so employment carries no risk of losing welfare benefits, nor reduction in benefits, and so a job is always an improvement in your financial situation. Incentive.
Solving poverty wasn't a difficult problem.
What is this of which you speak? Can someone expand on these thing?
it is entirely because the labor is so cheap, and the environmental regulations so lax, that what you're really doing is hurting your own country to make some other people very rich at the expense of just about everyone else.
Debatable. Your environmental argument is stronger than your labor argument for technical reasons, rather than reasons of rhetoric; it is the technical reasons which concern me.
Realize every cost in every product or service you buy is human labor. Profit margins come on top of human labor. This works out in aggregate, which is important for many reasons: in major aggregate, bulk purchase agreements are bound by this human labor cost and nothing else.
Consider you make steel automobile frames, which use refined steel, which is processed from coal and steel ore. Humans mine coal and steel (it's complex enough, let's ignore the cost of machines, tools, and fuel at the mining level), which mining companies sell to the refinery; humans refine steel, which the refinery sells to you.
When you buy steel, you pay a mark-up on refined steel above its material and labor costs. The refinery buys coal and steel ore as material, which the mining companies mark up above their human labor costs. In aggregate, the price of your automobile frames includes your mark-up, the steel mill mark-up, and the mining company mark-up; while the cost includes the raw human labor and nothing else. Put the mark-up and human labor together and you get the price.
GM orders 100 million automobile frames from you. For this, you negotiate with your steel refinery for 100 million units of refined steel. For this, the refinery negotiates a massive ore and coal order from the ore and coal mining companies, respectively. These large orders provide a big profit opportunity: rather than mark up $100/ton, the mining companies mark up $1/ton, selling millions of tons of material they wouldn't have normally sold, profiting millions of dollars they would never have gained if you went elsewhere. You refine the ore into steel for frames, and charge a $1 mark-up on that instead of the usual $100 mark-up, which, with 100 million frames, nets you $100 million of profit.
That's just business. You know about bulk ordering; I will explain an important factor here.
Supply-and-demand suggests this high demand will drive the prices up, yet it drives prices down. That's because supply-and-demand doesn't account for market negotiation; we shoehorn competition here. Regardless, another mechanism is at play: labor cost.
Say coal costs $200/ton to extract, because you get a 10 tonne block of coal by an hour of effort from 200 miners making $10/hr. If you try to increase supply, the next best mines--the ones not being tapped right now--supply blocks of 75% rock and dirt mixed with 25% coal, meaning 200 miners still cost $2000 to pull that block out of the ground, but it only has 2.5 tonnes of coal--it costs you $800/tonne, plus cost to sift and refine the coal out. Existing coal companies can raise prices up to about $800/tonne without worrying about a new competitor showing up with a source of cheap coal (actually higher, because they can significantly undercut and bankrupt any new competitor immediately).
Invent new tools and new mining techniques.
In this new process, the labor involved in tool production, tool maintenance, mine planning, managing, and executing tallies up to about an hour of 100 laborers averaging $10/hr to pull one 10-tonne block of coal from the ground. That means it costs $100/ton for coal.
When someone comes along and says they want 10 million tonnes of coal, you can make them a deal for $200/tonne and not go bankrupt. Below that and you run red. Discover a new process, and suddenly your competitor breaks even at $200/tonne, while you make a 50% profit margin selling at $150/tonne--a price that would bankrupt your competitor in 6 months if they tried to fill that order at that price!
You'll no
It's that long because there's oversupply of tech workers, so they get to wait for 100 applicants and then run through everyone to negotiate as low a salary as possible. This is the result of government-supported college education and a poor K-12 primary education system, instead of market-supported career education and a functional K-12 primary education system.
You mean like putting a comment bubble over the word "At[***]"?
Take a look at AMANDA for an example - you can get stuff back with "dd" and "tar" if necessary instead of using the actual AMANDA software.
Which a McBurgerFlipper won't know how to do. Even as an experienced systems integration engineer, I would need a few hours at least to develop a plan on how to do that. I have tapes all over the place with multiple days's worth of differential backups, and I need to use dd and tar to get the data out, restore it to the appropriate systems, restore differentials and incrementals IN PROPER ORDER--meaning I have to verify I'm using the tapes in the correct order--get that data into the appropriate applications, configure the different servers on the new network so the applications can actually interact and function, and so forth.
There is no such thing as "put the tape in and tell Amanda to rebuild your data center". It's never been that way. In days of old, when servers had tape drives, you could bare-metal restore by taking the correct tape to the correct server and running restore software--requiring you to know which tape goes to which server and how to boot alternate media. When it came to banks of tapes in centralized backup, you had to configure each system to get on the network first, and to interact with your back-up system. Now we have complex PXE setups and all, which are fast, but require knowledge--even knowing how to work them, you have to know the overall engineering plan to set them up.
It's great that you take home back-ups onto an external hard drive, but we're talking about restoring data centers here.
Oh yeah, right, and as long as there's no BPA in your water bottles, they're perfectly safe. Whoops! Wait, as long as there's no BPS in your water bottles
Water bottles are PET or, if you're extremely lucky, Polypropylene. Polycarbonate uses bisphenol; PET and PP are both fully non-toxic according to all modern science, in the same way modern science finds glass fully non-toxic and copper considerably poisonous.
they also break more easily than copper.
Switching from copper to CPVC and PEX was mostly driven by copper piping's tendency to corrode, weaken, and burst. CPVC and PEX fail far less frequently, with far longer lifetimes (50+ years for PEX), and with the most frequent failure mode being poorly-formed joints (which copper is susceptible to as well--your soldering sucks).
So it's better to build new boxes and stuff poor people into them than to simply put them into homes which are currently lying vacant and which will otherwise be destroyed and become crack houses, insurance arson targets, and homes for feral cats?
I have more efficient solutions that are less-expensive and more effective than putting people into homes not fit for human habitation. If you want to go that route, it would be easier to just execute all the poor people, since they're going to die of respiratory problems thanks to all the mold in those houses.
We can create a profitable market for providing small apartments, food, clothing, and clean water to homeless people, which would cost in total 98% of what our current main welfare programs cost, but be damn near 100% effective (the 600,000 homeless and 54 million hungry would no longer be homeless or hungry; the 4.8 million on HUD vouchers would self-support, or rather the HUD voucher would phase out as new people self-support and current beneficiaries recover and move out of the HUD program).
Are there jobs there? Is it a shithole? Will it have water in five years?
Yes, yes, and yes. Livable houses quickly become unlivable houses without maintenance. I live across the street from a house that went from livable and in good repair to molding, sagging, and damaged in 4 years of non-habitation. Within 10 years, a house can become unstable. Without humidity, temperature, insect, rodent, and plant control, everything attacks the structure: mold, fungus, and burrowing insects grow and weaken wood; rodents chew through electrical lines, drywall, carpet, insulation, wood, and so forth; tree roots can attack foundations, while creeping vines can attack siding and mortar, destroying wood, plastic, and brick; moisture seeping into concrete and masonry, along with temperature fluctuations, can reduce brick to quarter-sized fragments in less than two years (a clogged gutter did this to my house: it looked like you smashed up the bricks below the constant waterfall with a jackhammer).
Whoever said an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is an idiot. The $3000 you spend just to run your air conditioning, $1000 on general maintenance, hours in the yard, and occasional large appliance repairs (furnace) save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in repair costs. Give it two years and you'll have to dump $50k-$100k into a 1300sqft town house to gut and restore it. A gram of prevention is worth several kilos of cure.
The context for their statement of a million dollars was America, where most cabbies carry a few hundred thousand. I recall numbers like $50,000 in countries where $30,000 was the norm, and suggestions of bigger numbers in some places that I never found specifics about and so never pursed much as argument.
Where my knowledge of Uber's insurance coverage has been concrete, they've always carried more than cabbies; where I've only had vague hints, I've always just ignored those such markets due to insufficient data. I have no comment on Uber's precise operations where I have no precise information.
Depends on how you define "price".
Sale price. Home values don't really change--that is to say, clearly, the value of purchasing a home over a payment term doesn't change. A $1300/month 30-year term house is a $1300/month 30-year term house. If interest rates go up, the market will bear $1300/month for that house (plus the inflation, of course), so the price must come down. In the end, you pay the same.
in which case, the average house cost to the buyer is the same at 3% or 14%
Right.
People buy houses based on monthly payment, not transaction amount.
Right again.
The interest rate just changes the numbers on the amortization table.
WRONG!
This is a simplified explanation: it's functionally correct, but technically incorrect. Think like the "principle and interest" explanation: you don't really pay $SOMEDOLLARS on principle and $OTHERDOLLARS on interest; rather, you accrue interest every day, increasing your loan balance, and then pay down the balance, with the relative difference between payment dates being the imaginary "principle", and the interest accrued that month being the "interest". It describes the effective behavior of your payments, yes, but the whole process is completely divorced from reality.
Let's say you take a $320,000 loan at 3.5% for 30 years. Down payment made, sale price, none of that matters; the fact is, after all of it, you have to borrow $320,000, at 3.5%, for 30 years. Your monthly payment is $1,436.94.
The first month, your payment is $933.33 interest and $503.61 principle, by the strange definition above. You accrue $933.33 before your first payment, and then pay down your balance by the $1,400-ish. In fact, your first six months are $933.33, $931.86, $930.39, $928.91 $927.43, $925.95. Your principle payments are $503.61, $505.08, $506.55, $508.03, $509.51, and $511.
If, in that first month, you pay an extra $2,540.17, you skip the next five months's payments. Your balance moves down to where it would be when you made your sixth payment, and so you skip accruing that interest--$4,644.45. Instead of a $1,400 payment, you have to find a $4,000 payment, but that's the effect.
Let's change the interest rate to 14%.
Let's say you take a $120,000 loan at 14% for 30 years. Down payment made, sale price, none of that matters; the fact is, after all of it, you have to borrow $120,000, at 14%, for 30 years. Your monthly payment is $1,421.85.
That's almost exactly the same payment.
The first month, your payment is $1,400.00 interest and $21.85 principle, by the strange definition above. You accrue $1,400 before your first payment, and then pay down your balance by the $1,400-ish. In fact, your first six months are $1,400, $1,399.75, $1,399.49, $1,399.23, $1,398.96, $1,398.70. Your principle payments are $21.85, $22.10, $22.36, $22.62, $22.88, $23.15.
If, in that first month, you pay an extra $113.11, you skip the next five months's payments. Your balance moves down to where it would be when you made your sixth payment, and so you skip accruing that interest--$6,996.13. Instead of a $1,400 payment, you have to find a $1,550 payment, but that's the effect.
Do you see the difference here?
In your early payments, if you throw down an extra $20, you save yourself $1,400. In fact, two and a half years in, dropping an extra $30 would save you $1,391.62, if you had only paid the minimum until then. Obviously, if you're doubling principle payment, you'd have to pay $45 two and a half years in, and would only save about $1,380 for that single extra payment.
It means if you raise your first payment by $258, you skip nearly a year of interest ($15,382). If you pay your second payment plus $297, you save $15,343 and skip ahead a whole year. Even if you just throw an extra $50 on every payment, you save yourself 8 years and $120,000 off the loan.
A 15-year loan o