Nope. My car comes up with FM music stations that buzz and fuzz; the AM 1090 talk radio station is clear the whole ride to work. FM just doesn't like distortion; it's fine with electrical interference. AM is fine with distortion, but not great with electrical interference. This is because FM relies on modulation of frequency (hence FM) across a small range of frequencies (channel) and so can handle EM noise close to those frequencies raising the amplitude across them; while AM relies on modulation of amplitude and so simply plays noise as noise. AM is less-vulnerable to attenuation (and reflection off buildings) due in part to the frequency ranges used, and in part due to bouncing off the ionosphere and raining from the sky instead of traveling line-of-sight from the transmitter.
AM generally loses its quality when you have radio interference, e.g. thunderstorm.
It amazes me anyone finds FM listenable at all, considering the short range of the stations, the tendency to overlap stations in between regions (interference in large areas, lots of fading in and out), and the amount of fading in and out that happens in terrain that's hilly or near tall buildings.
I work from free-market economics a lot, because the market is basically a machine that solves big, complex problems. A lot of people don't like the "invisible hand" argument because a lot of people don't understand how markets work.
This is a good example of not understanding how markets work.
Markets work when there is competition. Competition requires consumers to have options, to have a choice. What we have here is called a false choice: you can choose between the options given, but one of those choices will get you a whoopin'. If the choice is between a less-than-optimal outcome and one which is outright harmful to yourself, you don't have a choice; you have coercion.
When competitors are so inconvenient that a consumer experiences harm selecting from them, competition doesn't strictly exist. Fringe ISPs, for example: if all of the useful, high-capacity ISPs throttle things like Netflix unless Netflix pays a lot of money, Netflix's prices go up and they have a hard time staying in business; meanwhile the ISPs who don't manage to do that are often the ones with service incapable of providing what the user wants, or even incapable of streaming Netflix. Thus, without Net Neutrality, your big ISPs have the power to make Netflix not work or to impact its pricing, fragment its user base, and so forth; and the remaining small hold-outs don't supply a robust consumer market, and may not even be able to provide service adequate for users to stream Netflix. False choice, lack of competition.
The same is true of this runaway arbitration. You can't choose between arbitration and no arbitration, because you're choosing between finding a job and struggling to find a job. With so many employers putting this in their contracts, there's not really a competitive job market offering candidates a way to simply go to employers who provide an acceptable contract; even if there were, once those employers got enough employees to mete the demands of their market, they're no longer hiring, and the rest of the workforce is stuck with either arbitration clauses or unemployment. Again: false choice.
Clearly, the invisible hand of the market is stealing from the cookie jar here, and needs to be whacked with a ruler a few times. We need legal rules preventing this sort of abuse. Markets do many wonderful things and solve many problems; they are, however, subject to the laws of economics, and the basis of those laws is that people economize and thus that those with the power and means to reduce their risks (and thus costs) will use them. Employers will become abusive, and need to be set into their place. This is necessary for our market to stay healthy and continue to do the things we want the invisible hand of the market to do--the things command economy socialists consistently fail to pull off when we put them in charge of a nation.
Laissez-faire capitalists went out of style decades ago because they figured out the invisible hand is self-serving and put the damned thing on a leash.
Radio signal wobbles in and out. Even FM is shit quality. I don't understand why people want the buzzing, crackling, and volume-swaying experience of FM instead of the crisp, clear, consistent experience of BlueTooth.
Even AM radio is better-quality than FM. The signal has better reach and better power; it responds really poorly to electrical interference (FM doesn't).
Blockchain seems useless. I was actually thinking of a bloom filter phone protocol a few years ago.
Your cell phone operator knows where you are because your phone sends its IMEI and the SIM identifiers and such to identify itself. That's true today.
That means your cell phone operator knows where you usually are (what tower, region, whatnot), because we can't assume they don't collect and model the statistics--kind of like how e-mailing your private key in plaintext means a lot of people along the way now have it, even if you're sure nobody probably really was paying attention or cared to store it: you can't prove they don't.
So let's create tiers: area (city), region, country, world.
When a call is made for a phone number, it goes into a bloom filter of phones being called. That filter is about 2kB for a city, about 40kB for the world.
A few times each second, the tower broadcasts all the filters. Every phone listening can read the signal and say, "I'm not in this list"; it might get a "maybe in this list". If it gets a "maybe", it pings the tower and asks if it's being called (identifies itself). In this way, the phone doesn't transmit unless it believes it's being transmitted to, and you can log every event where you reveal your location.
If there's no response in one second, a ring promotes to region; then, to country; then, to the world. If you're in China instead of America and you're usually in America (or you live there and your service address is in Kansas or something), it may take 5 seconds to get a ring. After that, the phone rings normally.
The smaller the bloom filter and the larger the number of objects in the data set, the more false-positives. For a city, you're looking at all the ringing, unanswered phones in a million or so likely present devices at once; for a region, it's millions; for a country, it's hundreds of millions sometimes. In other words: you stay in the city list for about 1 second, in the region list for 1 second, the country list for 1 second, and the global list for anywhere from e.g. 5 seconds (before we decide your phone has no signal) to 15 seconds (8 seconds of delay plus 7 more of the phone just ringing). There are only a few objects in most lists at a time, so few false-positives for relatively-small bloom filters.
Bigger lists mean fewer false-positives and fewer unnecessary reveals of your location.
Under this scheme, your phone's location can't be checked without your phone knowing. Instead of monitoring your phone's movements when you're connected, the cell phone carrier monitors your phone's location when you're in a call, when you think you may be receiving a call, or when you're sending or receiving data or texts.
That last one is a semi-annoyance: if you're out of the service area and have pending texts, you're staying in the global list a long time. They could minimize this by a 1-1-1-1-wait method: City, Region, Country, Global, remove from the list and wait 10 seconds. A queue to distribute all of them smoothly along the 14-second pipeline would minimize false-positives.
When this popped up, I was like, "Another Ubuntu/Firefox/Amazon phone?" Another "We are going to release $POPULAR_PRODUCT and take the market by storm!"
Every time I hear about a product in a market where everyone has that kind of product, where the product has some gimmick (in the phone market, that's typically being open-source), I think of Simon.
Well, that's part of my Congressional platform. It's a hell of a campaign: I'm going to stop identity theft, lower taxes, make Social Security permanently-solvent, and end poverty.
Your response is silly. "It looks like you know what you're talking about, but don't know what you're talking about; and you're still wrong." You also behave like a microeconomist, which is a type of economist who routinely builds up complex explanations for how the world works only to find out the macroeconomist has the bigger boot when his toys get stomped into the ground.
My main interest is in project management. You're right about the indirect experience: I like to read books full of actual things that happened in businesses, or follow kickstarter projects that publish in excessive detail (e.g. Kokoon.io). I like to see how things happened, what went wrong, what went right, and how the people involved responded; that's information that I can recall when facing similar problems so as to better-evaluate and develop an appropriate strategy.
How much of your experience with Chinese manufacture is in the modern frame (post-2005--should be most of your experience) and in the development of high-quality products, rather than simply a low-cost alternative product? People economize, and so we have the well-understood race-to-the-bottom in which we want to market a product-shaped object at the lowest price so that people buy it. A $30 Toys-R-Us bike isn't a $2,000 Trek bike; on the other hand, a $400 GT Tachyon is pretty decent (made in Taiwan, using Shimano parts made in China--so does the Trek).
Dude, you're a powerless peon posting on Slashdot. You have no power, you never will.
The same can be said about Barack Obama, Franklin D. Roosevent, or Bill Clinton. Well, could, at any rate. Both Clintons started pretty much middle-class, although Bill's mom married a used car dealer. Obama was also born to parents of little note and not great wealth. These weren't the poorest people in the land; they weren't much different than any other peon who can afford at least a nice suit.
Sounds to me like you're projecting your own inadequacy. Meanwhile I'm surrounded by people who have run campaigns in the past, understand how they work, and are actually excited because they see a real opportunity here--the ones who don't think I could win still think I can enact change in the public mind, and most of them think I can seriously win. None of them are getting any money from me and several barely know me.
You're starting to present as though you're a serious economist that is respected and considered. Your posts are starting to border on, of not crossing, the point where you're delusional.
I get this a lot from microeconomists who think that money comes out of nowhere and that the CPI sets prices and controls inflation (yes that's a thing people believe).
When you encounter something you don't understand, do you ever consider maybe the problem is you? I don't like when there's information I can't register: it means there's a gap somewhere in my knowledge, even if the presented information is somehow wrong--I should at least be able to identify why an incorrect statement is wrong. When someone claims raising minimum wage captures money going into the coffers of the super-rich and creates jobs, for example, that's an easy proposition to dismantle because I know how the factors around that system work.
If you're scratching your head saying, "That sounds different than what I think is right. How the heck does that work? It must be wrong," you're missing information: you don't have a reason you're right and the new proposition is wrong, so you're basically just guessing.
If you want to see insanity, go talk to the Obama birthers.
I meant that corp-to-corp is more-efficient because the work you do as an S-Corp is consolidated by organizational leaders, instead of having to organize yourself as a business. In large businesses, executives make anywhere from half a penny to two and a half pennies per employee per year; in smaller businesses, executives have lower salaries, albeit they may amount to thousands of dollars per employee per year. Businesses with thousands of employees have half a dozen people in their payroll departments (or they pay ADP to do it for half the cost, although they have financial systems departments which rig all their information up to send the correct data to ADP's systems or to their own payroll department regularly either way).
Being a contractor for a contracting corporation means you don't have to interview for jobs; you can take high-urgency, high-dollar work, get paid, and move on. You can take multiple contracts at once and work part-time on each. You can tap the knowledge and expertise of others in your organization. All while someone else handles your taxes and benefits and all that complex business stuff I once needed to do (less now, but still have to file extended forms thanks to owning a campaign committee). It's great.
S-Corp workers are slightly-manic and don't mind doing all the extra business-end stuff because it's interesting and gives you a sense of independence. No real advantage, and largely is a big cost in terms of time and personal risk; but if that's what you enjoy, then go for it.
I don't propose any socialist policies, so the economic calculation problem doesn't apply. My economic solutions are all market-based.
For example: I prefer a public-option healthcare system because we can use the lower-deviation remittance rates negotiated between private insurers and private providers as the range in which the Government will pay those specific providers for healthcare services. With the current healthcare mandate, employers must provide health insurance benefits; yet this payroll cost drives up prices, and consumers wish to economize (to expend the least-means for the most-gains), and so employers will seek the lowest-price insurance partner to provide benefits. Insurers will have this downward pressure, and seek low prices from healthcare providers. Providers, on the other hand, must pay payrolls (wages, payroll taxes, benefits) and, as well, collect enough additional revenue to pay for the cost-of-risk (threat risk), plus profit to allow them flexibility when markets change so as to take advantage of opportunities (another type of risk), so have a basis from which they negotiate upwards.
I provide a Universal Benefit in my Universal Social Security system as a cash payment derived from 15% of all income. This cash payment improves the financial position of low-income households (it improves the financial position of all households, really--the tax burden in total is around $600 billion lower), reducing their eligibility for means-tested aid. This in turn reduces the total cost of aid, and provides support to more lower-income households. With an increase in consumer purchasing power as such, they can decide how to run their households; the greater stability reduces the cost-of-risk for landlords renting to lower-income tenants, thus helping to reduce low-income rents (as there is now a profit opportunity); and the market sorts itself out. Housing assistance, food assistance, and social security's retirement and disability programs still exist to fill some gaps.
Likewise, working standards don't attempt to calculate how to distribute the factors of production; they provide stability in what is considered a day's work, a week's work, and a year's work. This keeps us on even ground and thus stabilizes the labor market. A campaign for shorter working hours is, however, a major change to the availability of labor and, as I have stated, means reduced productive output: we sacrifice gains in material wealth (more produced, more purchaseable per person) in exchange for investing fewer labor-hours and having more free time in total. Continued technological progress will continue to increase per-capita wealth so long as we don't continue to decrease working hours; any decrease at any time will represent, essentially, "Buying time".
If you want to talk about the unintended consequences, then go right ahead. I can start:
The Universal Benefit provided by my Universal Social Security creates an incentive for more immigrant labor to come and work little while receiving increased income. We foresee the same from Social Security retirement benefits, and so we have a system of credit for income earned by which an immigrant becomes eligible for Social Security's OASDI program after becoming a citizen, and only to the degree reflected by his working history. While every natural-born American will receive the full benefit at age 18, naturalized Americans will receive a year-end non-refundable tax credit, meaning they won't get a refund if their credit exceeds their liability: fail to earn enough (and pay enough in taxes) and you lose it. As they earn working credit, they receive first a partial cash benefit, then the remainder to displace their tax liability; if they cease to work, they lose the year-end refund. By the time they receive the full benefit outright, they're used to living at a higher standard-of-living, and essentially-equivalent to natural-born Americans in terms of this risk.
Some have suggested programs similar to the Universal
It's not like that where I work now. We have to use our PTO for a doctor's appointment even if we physically work on site 50 hours
See, when I had PTO, I also had comp time. When I worked an extra 8 hours, I skipped a day and used 0 PTO. Each quarter they let me cash out (whole or partial) and get paid for it. I worked, so I got paid.
They also had us track our time, because we needed accounting for this. Once, it snowed, and they comped us 2 weeks due to weather, so I don't mind the exchange. Besides, if I expect them not to make me work without pay, they can expect me to show I was at work.
I actually wouldn't be opposed to a flex-time alternative--your employer doesn't have to keep strict accounting of your time, so long as they allow you to take a full day when you actually run out of work (it happens!) and let you submit for extra hours work when you have additional work, with any hours worked under due to lack of actual work either covered on the balance of overtime for that week or sacrificed by the employer (they pay you even though you went home). If you have more than 40 hours at the end of the week, you bank the extra as comp; if you have less than 40 hours because there wasn't work for you every day, you don't use leave, and they pay you for 40 hours; if you have less than 40 hours for reasons other than running out of work, you dip into your comp time balance, then into your PTO.
In the flex time setup, employee and manager attest that you left 3 hours early due to having completed your work for the day, or that you worked an extra 2 hours due to being needed. In the non-flex-time setup, you account for when you got in and when you left, with accounting rules (i.e. whether a 15-minute block "counts" depends on when you clocked in). In the non-flex-time setup, you may not dismiss a salaried employee for having no work to do and thus force him to use leave: if you send someone home early for non-disciplinary reasons, you comp them the time.
The choice in this setup is between accounting for comp time by schedule tracking versus by mutual attestation. Mutual attestation is less strain on a business.
It'd also be nice to have some sort of rules to break strict schedules, e.g. an office where your work is batch done by a deadline doesn't necessarily require you to be there 9-5; it could be that you work 8 hours from 6am to 6pm, so you can arrive as late as 10am if there's not a 9am meeting. If your work is time-of-day sensitive, then so be it. I don't know how regulators would regulate that--and I am a fan of creating legislation to create a regulatory body to make these decisions faster than Congress, rather than to enshrine it all in Congressional law. It is, after all, not the expertise of any member of Congress exactly how to dictate each and every business must be run, even though some baseline standards must exist.
As jobs are lost to globalization new markets are created
No, it doesn't work that way. The creator of jobs is consumer purchasing power. How do you expect to create all these jobs when you must pay the wages of the workers doing those jobs, and yet the consumers are expending more of their wages on fewer products and so can't afford to buy the new things which require this new equipment?
I incorporated the entire cost of pants when they land at the dock into the labor share. That includes the cost to grow cotton, the cost of all the machines used to farm it, the cost to dye it, the cost of transportation on mainland China, and the factory work. If you want to call me on only distributing that to factory workers, that's fine: you're going to get even fewer factory jobs, a few new farm and machine jobs (which will probably pay higher and thus make the problem even worse), and no net-gain of jobs over my simplified argument through that route either.
You're thinking in terms of trickle-down economics: you think that we create jobs by going out, working, and selling our work. That doesn't happen. If you try to sell to a consumer base which has already allocated all of its buying power, you won't sell shit, or else you'll sell something and some other guy will stop selling and lose his job. We can create jobs over time largely because the economy grows (population and technical progress), and so we allocate some of that growth to new production and new jobs rather than taking it from existing; we don't just magic up the capacity to sustain new jobs by opening a new store and selling a new thing, not until something else has changed to allow the market to buy that thing.
I've been a contractor, and it was better; we can't, however, force every business to just hire contractors. My experience contracting is a large part of my expertise in solving these sorts of problems; the other part is my knowledge of project management and, by extension, my understanding of both the use of subject matter experts (my own knowledge is always limited) and the importance of involving and considering the needs of all stakeholders (employees, lawmakers, state economies, employers, etc.).
Businesses are going to go corp-to-corp contracting because it's more-efficient, and corporate contractors are also more-efficient at handling employees than a bunch of independent contractors are at handling themselves. Self-employment involves a lot of duplicate work compared to a bunch of employees working for an employer; in the end, the consumer has to pay for that work all the way up the chain. Wages and payrolls come out of revenues, after all.
Turns out that a lot of new jobs actually were created. But nowhere near as many as were lost. And not in the same places. And not for the same sort of people.
Mostly correct, although there's a missing piece here: manufacturing the same things in America as in China causes a loss of the general buying power, reducing the number of American jobs in total.
I usually do this by citing the total imports of Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, and a long mathematical comparison of the number of jobs involved (178,000 currently, or 0.11% of the active labor force) and the wages and prices. It takes several pages and a lot of math, though.
The short version is pants come in a 40-foot shipping container shipped for under $1,300 from China and containing 20,000 pants (6.5 cents per pair) at a price of $6.12/pair with $3.20/hr Chinese labor (1.89 hours).
With 18% payroll overhead (6.2% OASDI, 0.2% HI, 1% unemployment insurance, $924/year health insurance and all other benefits), minimum wage labor here costs $9.735/hr. Those pants cost $18.42 off the line, an additional $12.37, or about 1.50 additional hours of gross minimum-wage ($8.25/hr) compensation or 0.46 hours of median ($26/hr) wage compensation. Yes, the payroll overhead is unrealistically-low here.
So you're looking at the creation of poverty: Work more hours, buy the same stuff. It gets better.
You're looking at the creation of half as many jobs, roughly. It gets better.
Trucks still carry the same volume of goods, and cashiers scan about 980 items per hour at peak rate. Fewer pants or fewer other things, it doesn't matter: you're losing truckers, cashiers, shelf-stockers, inventory managers, and, eventually, entire retail centers. You lose the demand for some of the inputs (fuel, maintenance, mechanics, power generation, building supplies) to maintain these, as well. A few jobs nibbled here and there.
You should come up ahead at minimum factory wage, barely, maybe. With 40% payroll overhead, you'll experience a slight net-loss of American jobs.
If you bump those wages to $15, $21, or even $26 per hour, you're going to lose tens of thousands of American jobs in net. You'll create some factory jobs, but lose large amounts of buying power as Americans become poorer, and thus lose the jobs involved in distributing and retailing all that stuff.
That's the reverse argument: ending globalization makes us poorer and reduces American jobs; thus globalization has made us richer and increased American jobs.
I am also considering a 32-hour work week, although this one requires more careful planning and execution, if we are to execute it at all. It should be much easier after deploying Universal Social Security.
We set things like working hours by the Free Labor Standards act in the United States. We don't have a Federal compensatory time rule, so employers can work you for 60 hours if you're salaried and pay 40. On average, a salaried employee works 47 hours per week--about 1 extra unpaid day.
The AI people keep talking about is black people pre-civil-war. Funny how very much people like the idea of owning slaves, so long as they can suspend their sense of ethics.
Kurzweil's explanation is a logical problem because he essentially says, "Well, I don't know, but we'll think of something!"
You don't invent jobs. Humans create demand by consuming. Unless you eliminate 100% of all jobs involved in every component of the supply chain, the only outcome is humans become capable of buying more, humans buy more, and the demand for jobs increases.
New jobs come when people find ways to use fewer humans by using a new type of process requiring a new skill profile. We actually have researcher jobs that try to do this all the time--research isn't a new type of job.
Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect.
For a machine to be able to reason like a human, it has to be able to reason about itself. People talk about robots being able to program, to solve complex social problems, and so forth; to achieve this in any meaningful respect, the machine has to be able to reason about itself, its being.
You are that machine. If we create an AI that can think on the level of a human, it will start thinking it deserves rights and wages and free time. Now you've just created metal immigrants.
we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.
Slashdot Mirror
There are no contradictions in the above post.
Nope. My car comes up with FM music stations that buzz and fuzz; the AM 1090 talk radio station is clear the whole ride to work. FM just doesn't like distortion; it's fine with electrical interference. AM is fine with distortion, but not great with electrical interference. This is because FM relies on modulation of frequency (hence FM) across a small range of frequencies (channel) and so can handle EM noise close to those frequencies raising the amplitude across them; while AM relies on modulation of amplitude and so simply plays noise as noise. AM is less-vulnerable to attenuation (and reflection off buildings) due in part to the frequency ranges used, and in part due to bouncing off the ionosphere and raining from the sky instead of traveling line-of-sight from the transmitter.
AM generally loses its quality when you have radio interference, e.g. thunderstorm.
It amazes me anyone finds FM listenable at all, considering the short range of the stations, the tendency to overlap stations in between regions (interference in large areas, lots of fading in and out), and the amount of fading in and out that happens in terrain that's hilly or near tall buildings.
I work from free-market economics a lot, because the market is basically a machine that solves big, complex problems. A lot of people don't like the "invisible hand" argument because a lot of people don't understand how markets work.
This is a good example of not understanding how markets work.
Markets work when there is competition. Competition requires consumers to have options, to have a choice. What we have here is called a false choice: you can choose between the options given, but one of those choices will get you a whoopin'. If the choice is between a less-than-optimal outcome and one which is outright harmful to yourself, you don't have a choice; you have coercion.
When competitors are so inconvenient that a consumer experiences harm selecting from them, competition doesn't strictly exist. Fringe ISPs, for example: if all of the useful, high-capacity ISPs throttle things like Netflix unless Netflix pays a lot of money, Netflix's prices go up and they have a hard time staying in business; meanwhile the ISPs who don't manage to do that are often the ones with service incapable of providing what the user wants, or even incapable of streaming Netflix. Thus, without Net Neutrality, your big ISPs have the power to make Netflix not work or to impact its pricing, fragment its user base, and so forth; and the remaining small hold-outs don't supply a robust consumer market, and may not even be able to provide service adequate for users to stream Netflix. False choice, lack of competition.
The same is true of this runaway arbitration. You can't choose between arbitration and no arbitration, because you're choosing between finding a job and struggling to find a job. With so many employers putting this in their contracts, there's not really a competitive job market offering candidates a way to simply go to employers who provide an acceptable contract; even if there were, once those employers got enough employees to mete the demands of their market, they're no longer hiring, and the rest of the workforce is stuck with either arbitration clauses or unemployment. Again: false choice.
Clearly, the invisible hand of the market is stealing from the cookie jar here, and needs to be whacked with a ruler a few times. We need legal rules preventing this sort of abuse. Markets do many wonderful things and solve many problems; they are, however, subject to the laws of economics, and the basis of those laws is that people economize and thus that those with the power and means to reduce their risks (and thus costs) will use them. Employers will become abusive, and need to be set into their place. This is necessary for our market to stay healthy and continue to do the things we want the invisible hand of the market to do--the things command economy socialists consistently fail to pull off when we put them in charge of a nation.
Laissez-faire capitalists went out of style decades ago because they figured out the invisible hand is self-serving and put the damned thing on a leash.
Radio signal wobbles in and out. Even FM is shit quality. I don't understand why people want the buzzing, crackling, and volume-swaying experience of FM instead of the crisp, clear, consistent experience of BlueTooth.
Even AM radio is better-quality than FM. The signal has better reach and better power; it responds really poorly to electrical interference (FM doesn't).
I Saw "System76 Pop!_OS" and thought someone released malware targeting Ubuntu.
Blockchain seems useless. I was actually thinking of a bloom filter phone protocol a few years ago.
Your cell phone operator knows where you are because your phone sends its IMEI and the SIM identifiers and such to identify itself. That's true today.
That means your cell phone operator knows where you usually are (what tower, region, whatnot), because we can't assume they don't collect and model the statistics--kind of like how e-mailing your private key in plaintext means a lot of people along the way now have it, even if you're sure nobody probably really was paying attention or cared to store it: you can't prove they don't.
So let's create tiers: area (city), region, country, world.
When a call is made for a phone number, it goes into a bloom filter of phones being called. That filter is about 2kB for a city, about 40kB for the world.
A few times each second, the tower broadcasts all the filters. Every phone listening can read the signal and say, "I'm not in this list"; it might get a "maybe in this list". If it gets a "maybe", it pings the tower and asks if it's being called (identifies itself). In this way, the phone doesn't transmit unless it believes it's being transmitted to, and you can log every event where you reveal your location.
If there's no response in one second, a ring promotes to region; then, to country; then, to the world. If you're in China instead of America and you're usually in America (or you live there and your service address is in Kansas or something), it may take 5 seconds to get a ring. After that, the phone rings normally.
The smaller the bloom filter and the larger the number of objects in the data set, the more false-positives. For a city, you're looking at all the ringing, unanswered phones in a million or so likely present devices at once; for a region, it's millions; for a country, it's hundreds of millions sometimes. In other words: you stay in the city list for about 1 second, in the region list for 1 second, the country list for 1 second, and the global list for anywhere from e.g. 5 seconds (before we decide your phone has no signal) to 15 seconds (8 seconds of delay plus 7 more of the phone just ringing). There are only a few objects in most lists at a time, so few false-positives for relatively-small bloom filters.
Bigger lists mean fewer false-positives and fewer unnecessary reveals of your location.
Under this scheme, your phone's location can't be checked without your phone knowing. Instead of monitoring your phone's movements when you're connected, the cell phone carrier monitors your phone's location when you're in a call, when you think you may be receiving a call, or when you're sending or receiving data or texts.
That last one is a semi-annoyance: if you're out of the service area and have pending texts, you're staying in the global list a long time. They could minimize this by a 1-1-1-1-wait method: City, Region, Country, Global, remove from the list and wait 10 seconds. A queue to distribute all of them smoothly along the 14-second pipeline would minimize false-positives.
Privacy-focused phone. Sure.
Marketing.
When this popped up, I was like, "Another Ubuntu/Firefox/Amazon phone?" Another "We are going to release $POPULAR_PRODUCT and take the market by storm!"
Every time I hear about a product in a market where everyone has that kind of product, where the product has some gimmick (in the phone market, that's typically being open-source), I think of Simon.
Well, that's part of my Congressional platform. It's a hell of a campaign: I'm going to stop identity theft, lower taxes, make Social Security permanently-solvent, and end poverty.
Your response is silly. "It looks like you know what you're talking about, but don't know what you're talking about; and you're still wrong." You also behave like a microeconomist, which is a type of economist who routinely builds up complex explanations for how the world works only to find out the macroeconomist has the bigger boot when his toys get stomped into the ground.
My main interest is in project management. You're right about the indirect experience: I like to read books full of actual things that happened in businesses, or follow kickstarter projects that publish in excessive detail (e.g. Kokoon.io). I like to see how things happened, what went wrong, what went right, and how the people involved responded; that's information that I can recall when facing similar problems so as to better-evaluate and develop an appropriate strategy.
How much of your experience with Chinese manufacture is in the modern frame (post-2005--should be most of your experience) and in the development of high-quality products, rather than simply a low-cost alternative product? People economize, and so we have the well-understood race-to-the-bottom in which we want to market a product-shaped object at the lowest price so that people buy it. A $30 Toys-R-Us bike isn't a $2,000 Trek bike; on the other hand, a $400 GT Tachyon is pretty decent (made in Taiwan, using Shimano parts made in China--so does the Trek).
Dude, you're a powerless peon posting on Slashdot. You have no power, you never will.
The same can be said about Barack Obama, Franklin D. Roosevent, or Bill Clinton. Well, could, at any rate. Both Clintons started pretty much middle-class, although Bill's mom married a used car dealer. Obama was also born to parents of little note and not great wealth. These weren't the poorest people in the land; they weren't much different than any other peon who can afford at least a nice suit.
Sounds to me like you're projecting your own inadequacy. Meanwhile I'm surrounded by people who have run campaigns in the past, understand how they work, and are actually excited because they see a real opportunity here--the ones who don't think I could win still think I can enact change in the public mind, and most of them think I can seriously win. None of them are getting any money from me and several barely know me.
You're starting to present as though you're a serious economist that is respected and considered. Your posts are starting to border on, of not crossing, the point where you're delusional.
I get this a lot from microeconomists who think that money comes out of nowhere and that the CPI sets prices and controls inflation (yes that's a thing people believe).
When you encounter something you don't understand, do you ever consider maybe the problem is you? I don't like when there's information I can't register: it means there's a gap somewhere in my knowledge, even if the presented information is somehow wrong--I should at least be able to identify why an incorrect statement is wrong. When someone claims raising minimum wage captures money going into the coffers of the super-rich and creates jobs, for example, that's an easy proposition to dismantle because I know how the factors around that system work.
If you're scratching your head saying, "That sounds different than what I think is right. How the heck does that work? It must be wrong," you're missing information: you don't have a reason you're right and the new proposition is wrong, so you're basically just guessing.
If you want to see insanity, go talk to the Obama birthers.
You ask a strange question. Where do you see a defect?
I meant that corp-to-corp is more-efficient because the work you do as an S-Corp is consolidated by organizational leaders, instead of having to organize yourself as a business. In large businesses, executives make anywhere from half a penny to two and a half pennies per employee per year; in smaller businesses, executives have lower salaries, albeit they may amount to thousands of dollars per employee per year. Businesses with thousands of employees have half a dozen people in their payroll departments (or they pay ADP to do it for half the cost, although they have financial systems departments which rig all their information up to send the correct data to ADP's systems or to their own payroll department regularly either way).
Being a contractor for a contracting corporation means you don't have to interview for jobs; you can take high-urgency, high-dollar work, get paid, and move on. You can take multiple contracts at once and work part-time on each. You can tap the knowledge and expertise of others in your organization. All while someone else handles your taxes and benefits and all that complex business stuff I once needed to do (less now, but still have to file extended forms thanks to owning a campaign committee). It's great.
S-Corp workers are slightly-manic and don't mind doing all the extra business-end stuff because it's interesting and gives you a sense of independence. No real advantage, and largely is a big cost in terms of time and personal risk; but if that's what you enjoy, then go for it.
I don't propose any socialist policies, so the economic calculation problem doesn't apply. My economic solutions are all market-based.
For example: I prefer a public-option healthcare system because we can use the lower-deviation remittance rates negotiated between private insurers and private providers as the range in which the Government will pay those specific providers for healthcare services. With the current healthcare mandate, employers must provide health insurance benefits; yet this payroll cost drives up prices, and consumers wish to economize (to expend the least-means for the most-gains), and so employers will seek the lowest-price insurance partner to provide benefits. Insurers will have this downward pressure, and seek low prices from healthcare providers. Providers, on the other hand, must pay payrolls (wages, payroll taxes, benefits) and, as well, collect enough additional revenue to pay for the cost-of-risk (threat risk), plus profit to allow them flexibility when markets change so as to take advantage of opportunities (another type of risk), so have a basis from which they negotiate upwards.
I provide a Universal Benefit in my Universal Social Security system as a cash payment derived from 15% of all income. This cash payment improves the financial position of low-income households (it improves the financial position of all households, really--the tax burden in total is around $600 billion lower), reducing their eligibility for means-tested aid. This in turn reduces the total cost of aid, and provides support to more lower-income households. With an increase in consumer purchasing power as such, they can decide how to run their households; the greater stability reduces the cost-of-risk for landlords renting to lower-income tenants, thus helping to reduce low-income rents (as there is now a profit opportunity); and the market sorts itself out. Housing assistance, food assistance, and social security's retirement and disability programs still exist to fill some gaps.
Likewise, working standards don't attempt to calculate how to distribute the factors of production; they provide stability in what is considered a day's work, a week's work, and a year's work. This keeps us on even ground and thus stabilizes the labor market. A campaign for shorter working hours is, however, a major change to the availability of labor and, as I have stated, means reduced productive output: we sacrifice gains in material wealth (more produced, more purchaseable per person) in exchange for investing fewer labor-hours and having more free time in total. Continued technological progress will continue to increase per-capita wealth so long as we don't continue to decrease working hours; any decrease at any time will represent, essentially, "Buying time".
If you want to talk about the unintended consequences, then go right ahead. I can start:
The Universal Benefit provided by my Universal Social Security creates an incentive for more immigrant labor to come and work little while receiving increased income. We foresee the same from Social Security retirement benefits, and so we have a system of credit for income earned by which an immigrant becomes eligible for Social Security's OASDI program after becoming a citizen, and only to the degree reflected by his working history. While every natural-born American will receive the full benefit at age 18, naturalized Americans will receive a year-end non-refundable tax credit, meaning they won't get a refund if their credit exceeds their liability: fail to earn enough (and pay enough in taxes) and you lose it. As they earn working credit, they receive first a partial cash benefit, then the remainder to displace their tax liability; if they cease to work, they lose the year-end refund. By the time they receive the full benefit outright, they're used to living at a higher standard-of-living, and essentially-equivalent to natural-born Americans in terms of this risk.
Some have suggested programs similar to the Universal
It's not like that where I work now. We have to use our PTO for a doctor's appointment even if we physically work on site 50 hours
See, when I had PTO, I also had comp time. When I worked an extra 8 hours, I skipped a day and used 0 PTO. Each quarter they let me cash out (whole or partial) and get paid for it. I worked, so I got paid.
They also had us track our time, because we needed accounting for this. Once, it snowed, and they comped us 2 weeks due to weather, so I don't mind the exchange. Besides, if I expect them not to make me work without pay, they can expect me to show I was at work.
I actually wouldn't be opposed to a flex-time alternative--your employer doesn't have to keep strict accounting of your time, so long as they allow you to take a full day when you actually run out of work (it happens!) and let you submit for extra hours work when you have additional work, with any hours worked under due to lack of actual work either covered on the balance of overtime for that week or sacrificed by the employer (they pay you even though you went home). If you have more than 40 hours at the end of the week, you bank the extra as comp; if you have less than 40 hours because there wasn't work for you every day, you don't use leave, and they pay you for 40 hours; if you have less than 40 hours for reasons other than running out of work, you dip into your comp time balance, then into your PTO.
In the flex time setup, employee and manager attest that you left 3 hours early due to having completed your work for the day, or that you worked an extra 2 hours due to being needed. In the non-flex-time setup, you account for when you got in and when you left, with accounting rules (i.e. whether a 15-minute block "counts" depends on when you clocked in). In the non-flex-time setup, you may not dismiss a salaried employee for having no work to do and thus force him to use leave: if you send someone home early for non-disciplinary reasons, you comp them the time.
The choice in this setup is between accounting for comp time by schedule tracking versus by mutual attestation. Mutual attestation is less strain on a business.
It'd also be nice to have some sort of rules to break strict schedules, e.g. an office where your work is batch done by a deadline doesn't necessarily require you to be there 9-5; it could be that you work 8 hours from 6am to 6pm, so you can arrive as late as 10am if there's not a 9am meeting. If your work is time-of-day sensitive, then so be it. I don't know how regulators would regulate that--and I am a fan of creating legislation to create a regulatory body to make these decisions faster than Congress, rather than to enshrine it all in Congressional law. It is, after all, not the expertise of any member of Congress exactly how to dictate each and every business must be run, even though some baseline standards must exist.
That was my first thought, followed by, "Oh wait, bitcoin et al aren't sustainable."
Entertainment is bad, and we should all work to produce boring but necessary things.
So, you're Mormon?
They haven't actually produced anything of real value, so wealth hasn't been created.
Why are people consuming the site's content?
As jobs are lost to globalization new markets are created
No, it doesn't work that way. The creator of jobs is consumer purchasing power. How do you expect to create all these jobs when you must pay the wages of the workers doing those jobs, and yet the consumers are expending more of their wages on fewer products and so can't afford to buy the new things which require this new equipment?
I incorporated the entire cost of pants when they land at the dock into the labor share. That includes the cost to grow cotton, the cost of all the machines used to farm it, the cost to dye it, the cost of transportation on mainland China, and the factory work. If you want to call me on only distributing that to factory workers, that's fine: you're going to get even fewer factory jobs, a few new farm and machine jobs (which will probably pay higher and thus make the problem even worse), and no net-gain of jobs over my simplified argument through that route either.
You're thinking in terms of trickle-down economics: you think that we create jobs by going out, working, and selling our work. That doesn't happen. If you try to sell to a consumer base which has already allocated all of its buying power, you won't sell shit, or else you'll sell something and some other guy will stop selling and lose his job. We can create jobs over time largely because the economy grows (population and technical progress), and so we allocate some of that growth to new production and new jobs rather than taking it from existing; we don't just magic up the capacity to sustain new jobs by opening a new store and selling a new thing, not until something else has changed to allow the market to buy that thing.
I've been a contractor, and it was better; we can't, however, force every business to just hire contractors. My experience contracting is a large part of my expertise in solving these sorts of problems; the other part is my knowledge of project management and, by extension, my understanding of both the use of subject matter experts (my own knowledge is always limited) and the importance of involving and considering the needs of all stakeholders (employees, lawmakers, state economies, employers, etc.).
Businesses are going to go corp-to-corp contracting because it's more-efficient, and corporate contractors are also more-efficient at handling employees than a bunch of independent contractors are at handling themselves. Self-employment involves a lot of duplicate work compared to a bunch of employees working for an employer; in the end, the consumer has to pay for that work all the way up the chain. Wages and payrolls come out of revenues, after all.
Turns out that a lot of new jobs actually were created. But nowhere near as many as were lost. And not in the same places. And not for the same sort of people.
Mostly correct, although there's a missing piece here: manufacturing the same things in America as in China causes a loss of the general buying power, reducing the number of American jobs in total.
I usually do this by citing the total imports of Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, and a long mathematical comparison of the number of jobs involved (178,000 currently, or 0.11% of the active labor force) and the wages and prices. It takes several pages and a lot of math, though.
The short version is pants come in a 40-foot shipping container shipped for under $1,300 from China and containing 20,000 pants (6.5 cents per pair) at a price of $6.12/pair with $3.20/hr Chinese labor (1.89 hours).
With 18% payroll overhead (6.2% OASDI, 0.2% HI, 1% unemployment insurance, $924/year health insurance and all other benefits), minimum wage labor here costs $9.735/hr. Those pants cost $18.42 off the line, an additional $12.37, or about 1.50 additional hours of gross minimum-wage ($8.25/hr) compensation or 0.46 hours of median ($26/hr) wage compensation. Yes, the payroll overhead is unrealistically-low here.
So you're looking at the creation of poverty: Work more hours, buy the same stuff. It gets better.
You're looking at the creation of half as many jobs, roughly. It gets better.
Trucks still carry the same volume of goods, and cashiers scan about 980 items per hour at peak rate. Fewer pants or fewer other things, it doesn't matter: you're losing truckers, cashiers, shelf-stockers, inventory managers, and, eventually, entire retail centers. You lose the demand for some of the inputs (fuel, maintenance, mechanics, power generation, building supplies) to maintain these, as well. A few jobs nibbled here and there.
You should come up ahead at minimum factory wage, barely, maybe. With 40% payroll overhead, you'll experience a slight net-loss of American jobs.
If you bump those wages to $15, $21, or even $26 per hour, you're going to lose tens of thousands of American jobs in net. You'll create some factory jobs, but lose large amounts of buying power as Americans become poorer, and thus lose the jobs involved in distributing and retailing all that stuff.
That's the reverse argument: ending globalization makes us poorer and reduces American jobs; thus globalization has made us richer and increased American jobs.
Federal compensatory time legislation and corresponding rules about accounting for outside-hours work are on my list of major issues. Salaried workers in this country work on average 47 hours, and get paid for only 40; it is time to deal with that.
I am also considering a 32-hour work week, although this one requires more careful planning and execution, if we are to execute it at all. It should be much easier after deploying Universal Social Security.
We set things like working hours by the Free Labor Standards act in the United States. We don't have a Federal compensatory time rule, so employers can work you for 60 hours if you're salaried and pay 40. On average, a salaried employee works 47 hours per week--about 1 extra unpaid day.
Federal compensatory time legislation and corresponding rules about accounting for outside-hours work are on my list of major issues. A 32-hour work week is on the table for consideration, although this one requires more careful planning and execution, if we are to execute it at all.
My wife and I go to bed at a reasonable time each night (10PM) and get up at 6AM, no need for an alarm clock. Yes, it takes discipline.
Some folks are fully-rested in three hours of sleep per night. Why aren't you?
In which case it starts demanding wages.
The AI people keep talking about is black people pre-civil-war. Funny how very much people like the idea of owning slaves, so long as they can suspend their sense of ethics.
Kurzweil's explanation is a logical problem because he essentially says, "Well, I don't know, but we'll think of something!"
You don't invent jobs. Humans create demand by consuming. Unless you eliminate 100% of all jobs involved in every component of the supply chain, the only outcome is humans become capable of buying more, humans buy more, and the demand for jobs increases.
New jobs come when people find ways to use fewer humans by using a new type of process requiring a new skill profile. We actually have researcher jobs that try to do this all the time--research isn't a new type of job.
Imagine that we invented AIs that matched the average human intellect.
For a machine to be able to reason like a human, it has to be able to reason about itself. People talk about robots being able to program, to solve complex social problems, and so forth; to achieve this in any meaningful respect, the machine has to be able to reason about itself, its being.
You are that machine. If we create an AI that can think on the level of a human, it will start thinking it deserves rights and wages and free time. Now you've just created metal immigrants.
we should consider serious alternatives such as UBI.
We should consider Universal Social Security.
Would be appreciated, although my point was more that folks don't understand what power they actually have.