Going the speed limit tends to cause contention and increase the rate of crashes because of people changing lanes and driving around you (= aggressive driving). Because that can't be stopped, we arrest the slow driver (going 10mph over the speed limit when everyone else in that lane is doing 85mph) for obstructing traffic.
It's an "obvious falsehood" as much as it's obvious that video games make people violent murderers because there's conflict in video games.
Look, money is labor trade. You work for $10/hr, I work for $20/hr, I can induce you to work 2 hours for every 1 hour I work. (Caveat: taxes, etc.; it's not that straightforward.) Making a product requires a certain amount of labor, thus wages. To pay wages, you need revenue, thus prices which collect at least that much revenue.
In other words: the number of sustainable jobs is governed by how much people can trade for their labor. Taking it in one step closer, it's governed by how much people can spend. Jobs are created by demand: you want (and have the money) to buy 1,000,000 of a thing a year, we have enough people to make 500,000 of that thing per year, we gotta hire twice as many people to keep up.
So Chinese labor, including social insurances (taxes for things like unemployment) costs $3.20/hr. Take a look at Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, at $6.12/pair import cost. It costs under $1,300 to import a 40-foot-long shipping container, roughly 20,000 pairs of trousers, at 6.5 cents per pair. Average retail? $14.97.
You're talking about 1.89 hours of labor per pair. Trucks that ship 20,000 of these to the warehouses around the country. 987 retail scans per cashier per hour. People stocking shelves. Roughly half the actual cost is domestic shipping; retail is trivial.
At minimum wage ($8.25/hr), and with 18% overhead (that means your employer pays 6.2% OASDI payroll, 0.2% Medicare payroll, and $1,900/year for all of your benefits), you're looking at $27.25/pair for pants. You're going to lose 40% of the involved shipping and retail jobs. It comes out to be, maybe, 40,000 net new American jobs in total, out of an apparent 171,000 full-time jobs required to produce the number of trousers we import.
By that time, minimum-wage workers go from working 1.81 hours to working 3.3 hours to buy a pair of pants. The median-income ($54k) household must expend 0.55 hours today to buy a pair of trousers, and 1.01 hours if we stop importing them from China. These expenses mean you either buy fewer pants or buy fewer of other things. If those other things are physical goods, you have less shipping and retail, and fewer jobs there; if they're things like Spotify, Netflix, and other digital services, you have fewer tech jobs.
Bump that to $21/hr (GM line worker, model cost $24.78) and you're already around a net 90,000 loss of American jobs, with minimum wage workers expending 6.5 hours and the median-income household expending 1.99 hours to buy pants (= poorer). Last I checked, the average cost of an American factory worker was $78/hr.
So I can pull the number of Chinese imported pairs of pants (it's 195,585,312 pairs in 2015), compute the number of theoretical factory jobs required (it's 171,056), and spend a few pages writing out methodology, information sources, data analytics, and just plain how many retail-level jobs are represented by the same dollars going to fewer people (because that's what paying more for the same thing is: giving someone more money, and giving someone else less); and it'll turn into a huge, huge roll of stuff that would never keep your minuscule attention span.
It's not that Americans need 6 billion more dollars to keep from cutting into jobs; it's not even that they need to be more-productive on their end to have more wealth. The problem is the labor on the other end--at the factory--is so slow and expensive that it's going to cut into your paycheck. Generally, when you get to this point, someone proposes the correct solution: Reduce the labor by automating the factories. That means create as few American factory worker jobs as possible to avoid destroying other American jobs and spiking unemployment. Of course, with China doing just that on their end as soon as the technology to automate the factories exists, you're still better off just letting them make the damned things; we've got better things to do--like build a gigabit Internet infrastructure.
what I hear is "all immigrants BAD", which is stupid. I feel like the prevailing attitude is "the US's borders should have been closed the day after MY ancestors got here".
It's pretty much this, yeah. Economics is complex and difficult. People want to believe that you have a solid linkage between lever A and trapdoor B; it's not like that. It takes me several hours of research and a few pages of dissertation to work out how moving imports to American manufacture affects America, and it's always three parts: it makes all Americans poorer, no matter what we pay the factory workers; it might create jobs if we pay the Americans as little as possible, and will net-reduce American total jobs faster and faster as we increase the American wage for these factory jobs; and the job change doesn't matter anyway because population and labor force rapidly expand and contract to move toward a stable unemployment level.
If you want to send a signal to reassure Americans, well. Welcome to politics. Fact: we've created more jobs than population growth year-after-year since the recession (that's what's driving unemployment down). In tech, we've created far more tech jobs than the total lay-offs, year-after-year, meaning those H1-Bs aren't cutting into the total tech job market. These are comforting facts.
It's also an economic fact that prices are constrained by costs: you can't price something so low that your revenue won't pay the wages required to make it. That's not just about hiring $80,000 Indians instead of $140,000 Americans; the core of wealth is technical progress. Economic growth can be from population growth (when population is below carry capacity) or technical progress; technical progress reduces the wage-hours invested to produce goods and service, meaning we end up able to make and buy more for the same hours of labor worked. Prices come down because of competitive market forces, but only so far as is both profitable and mathematically sustainable.
That means somebody's gotta lose their job eventually.
So yes, that reassurance? It's true. It's also political: even without the H1-B labor, we're going to have rounds of layoffs every time things get better. That part you don't call attention to in this context.
Huh. I thought power was a long standard for decades now. USB is fairly-new. Planes have had headphone ports (powered) pretty much as part of being on a passenger airplane forever, and some fancy new planes have display screens there now; they've been built to deliver wiring to seats effectively for as long as pretty much every passenger plane in service today has been in service, and retrofitting seating with electrical wiring is trivial. Given that every airliner seat I've ever seen for real or depicted in any media has had power ports so you can plug in a laptop, I'd assumed that part was pretty much ubiquitous.
Oh holy shit, I just actually took a look at their technology.
They're using an argon-gas atmosphere to create an effective clean room, and then rapidly depositing titanium by turning it into a charged vapor (plasma) so that it binds to the part. They basically get a solid, perfect chunk of metal roughly in the shape of the part they need, rapidly, because the atom-thick charged metallic gas sticks to the metallic substrate with no impurities between, and so doesn't create air bubbles or whatnot. It's like electroplating, in a mechanical sense, but the physics are entirely different.
So it's titanium plated onto titanium millions of times with precision until you get what's almost a machined part, and then some quick machining. Instead of milling a block into a complex shape, you mill what looks like something a (skilled) child would make with Playdoh after being shown that complex shape into the final product.
That's nifty. I bet it takes surprisingly-little energy, too. If you're converting metal into a plasma gas, you're essentially mobilizing atoms with close to the minimum energy required to do so. This versus forcefully crushing things or melting things, leaking heat all over the place in the process.
Planes today have built-in entertainment, including power ports and even USB ports to charge your phone. Buses... don't. I mean, they do here, but I get that this isn't basically every bus in the world just yet. On the other hand, I also can't imagine a regular bus trip that takes that long enough for which you would reasonably expect to kill a battery watching NetFlix (which, for the most part, is going to be the screen eating most of the power).
Most endpoints seem to not be places you'd think to go just to sit around watching movies on your phone, except for a hotel or your home. Transit seems the most likely use case, and transit generally doesn't invoke "NetFlix killed my battery" concerns because it's either short or it's very long and right next to a charger.
Besides that, though, pretty much every concern about battery life seems to be "how fast will it die while I watch HD movies on my phone?" I just don't see how you imagine your phone dying from that, gives how frequently you have access to a charger, and how likely you are to be watching movies on your phone in any given situation. I also don't imagine everyone's daily commute is 3 hours each way to the office by bus.
Even when I think really hard about proposed situations in which this could happen, it's like listening to people ask if a computer given incorrect inputs will still arrive at correct conclusions. There aren't any natural thoughts which would lead me to reason such a situation, although there are conceptual sequences of events which could do it. Thus far, every one of those concepts seems like something that wouldn't occur.
I'm kind of irked that everything is called 3D printing. Additive (deposit plastic blobs), subtractive (etch away metal), that machine where a bunch of people keep placing bricks at the top of a conveyor that then rolls down a road like a carpet (it's essentially hand-built, but the machine arranges and deposits the brick road while a bunch of people stand around just grabbing stuff out of a hopper and rapidly stacking it up straight instead of taking forever to actually move along the ground putting bricks in), the like.
When someone says "3D printing", we mostly think of rapid prototyping processes: get a new product to a physical form quickly, but producing the physical form is really, really slow. Instead of 5 weeks to get an assembly ready, you can do it in a couple hours of CAD and then an hour or ten of producing the part. Volume-production in 3D printing as such is slower than assdongs.
On the other hand, it seems like we'd call injection molding "3D Printing" these days. Injection molding is so fucking fast. Do you know how mny legos they make every day?
It's got one of those heterogeneous processors I think. Runs a slow and a fast core at the same time.
If you're running Netflix, you're probably close to a charger, like in the car or something. Either that or you're a sad, pathetic fool who goes out to the McDonalds so you can sit there watching Netflix on your phone for 2 hours.
I get decent battery life out of Spotify, at least.
I don't know; I'll skip the 3t (I have a OnePlus One) and wait for the OnePlus Five to get Lineage OS anyway. I don't play well with vendor OSes.
When I had the OPO, they had regular updates until they dropped CyanogenOS for OxygenOS. The default OS was also very clean, although it pestered me to buy some themes with a non-removable notification (themes needed updates, which required a Cyanogen account or some such rubbish, which I wasn't into). Not quite straight CyanogenMod, but not the crapload of garbage as on regular phones.
I think my last-run OnePlus One might be dying. Not sure. It seems to have a tad bit of trouble with bluetooth sometimes, and is slow about Wifi. I can't tell if that's CyanogenMod, hardware, or something else without another phone to compare to. The plastic part of the encasing body is chipping and fraying along the connection to the bezel as well.
It's still an overall solid phone, despite being four generations out of date. I'm a little annoyed at it being only two years old and the 5 is coming out. The OnePlus Two is as of July, 2015; I got the OnePlus One around March, 2015. I pay about $160/year for unlimited voice and SMS, 2GB LTE+ on T-Mobile's network, one line; at two years's replacement, the phone is costing me $175 on top of that. At three it'd be $120. So long as it doesn't give out on me, it's still workable for now; this phone is still of a spec I'd buy new.
I'd actually be interested in a phone with half the dimensions, the same screen resolution, and a stylus.
I have nfc what's going on with this cat. It was following me a lot. I petted it and it tried to run, but then got confused, and came over, got petted, ran back and forth a lot, looked terrified. Then started following me.
Fed the cat. Cat eats, runs to me, needs to be petted to continue eating. What? Food, dammit. Eat the food. What does it want?
Eventually I let the cat into my house, because it kept trying to come inside with me. It found four smaller cats under my couch; I never knew they were there.
Now the cat keeps following me, meowing a lot, and wants to be petted all the time. Why does this cat want so much god damned attention?! Won't even stop purring.
I see entire aisles of that stuff at Safeway and Wegman's.
Safeway and Wegman's also don't have CEOs who made front-page Slashdot last year after telling the press that their customers were basically liberal hippies who will pay out the nose for shit they don't need. I still don't get how a business stays in business after announcing to the world with seething contempt that its strategy is to mainly target stupid people with jacked-up prices.
You said you like their food. You didn't rant about how GMOs are toxic because genetic sciencification, or rant about farming techniques and involved chemicals, or even make a bad economics argument about buying locally-sourced goods.
You seem to have, at least, expressed a line of reasoning that has no connection to anything that was said.
That's a real thing. Transporting fruits long distances generally involves methods which do bad things to the quality.
Mostly, the localism pitch is about economics; the problem is "buy local" has the same implications as a protectionist strategy, albeit a much
smaller poverty-inducing effect.
Whole Foods? "Yeah our customers are delusional, retarded hipsters with too much money and not enough brains to realize we're fucking them" Whole Foods? The company whose upper management actually announced that, yes, their business model is basically "sell to morons at inflated prices"?
It has a halo it found in a crackerjack box. They're marketing pseudoscientific bullshit like localism, organic farming, anti-GMO sentiment, and everything. If only they would expand to Whole Foods medicine; the anti-vaxxer crowd fits comfortably next to the same sort of mindless idiots who make up the anti-GMO movement (not the anti-Monsanto movement, but the ones who think GMO is somehow dangerous for simply being tampered with).
Remember when that Swiss psychologist in the 1400s said books would cause information overload, burn out childrens's brains, and generally destroy society?
Remember when the United States tried to create a public school system and the entire field of Psychiatry considered it a crisis because we'd end up burning out children's brains with excessive information?
Remember when video games were going to ruin children because they don't read anymore, and instead lock themselves away alone with their electronic toys?
Remember the Internet?
Anything new is deleterious to our society's health.
That depends on if they're using the standard warehouse-as-a-retail-store that's basically a giant, grounded faraday cage and blocks all cell phone signal. Also depends on if you're in Delaware or PA where cell phone towers can be sparse.
You can't eliminate a position to save $15/hr unless that position is useless and the person there is a welfare case. You have to replace the technology with less-expensive technology and reduce labor hours that way.
Let's say the total labor involvement to design, build, maintain, fuel, and operate a machine over its entire lifetime is equivalent to having $9/hr employees provide the replaced business activities. That is to say: the wage time invested, total, across that machine's entire existence, is equivalent to the wages of $9/hr employees producing the same things the machine does. In that case, replacing $15/hr employees with this saves you $6/hr per employee.
If your employees are $5/hr, it costs more to use the machine.
As technology improves over time, eventually you have those $9/hr employees making $11/hr, but the machine only costs $10.25/hr. At that point, it's cheaper but not necessarily strategic to replace the employees.
If you predict the technology will fall in price to $7/hr in the next three years and those machines have a 15-year ROI, you may find it most-profitable to keep your $11/hr employees for a few more years. Then you have $11.70/hr employees (2% per year raise), and a $7/hr machine. Now you start rolling out the machines. You've avoided being locked into a $10.25/hr TCO with only minimal opex.
I just paid $164.80, including all taxes, for the next 12 months of cellular service (over T-Mobile's towers) with unlimited voice and SMS, 2GB of high-speed data per month, and unlimited throttled data after that.
I use some 300MB/month of data. If I turn off the Android Data Saver and use Spotify for ~1hr/day in the car, it racks up around 900MB-1.5GB/month. Mind you, I can't do regular 200-300MB LineageOS updates over LTE+ without massively inflating my data usage (it's about a gigabyte per month just for that), and I certainly can't drive down the highway with one hand on the wheel and the other holding my phone to watch 1080p Netflix all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Going the speed limit tends to cause contention and increase the rate of crashes because of people changing lanes and driving around you (= aggressive driving). Because that can't be stopped, we arrest the slow driver (going 10mph over the speed limit when everyone else in that lane is doing 85mph) for obstructing traffic.
It's an "obvious falsehood" as much as it's obvious that video games make people violent murderers because there's conflict in video games.
Look, money is labor trade. You work for $10/hr, I work for $20/hr, I can induce you to work 2 hours for every 1 hour I work. (Caveat: taxes, etc.; it's not that straightforward.) Making a product requires a certain amount of labor, thus wages. To pay wages, you need revenue, thus prices which collect at least that much revenue.
In other words: the number of sustainable jobs is governed by how much people can trade for their labor. Taking it in one step closer, it's governed by how much people can spend. Jobs are created by demand: you want (and have the money) to buy 1,000,000 of a thing a year, we have enough people to make 500,000 of that thing per year, we gotta hire twice as many people to keep up.
So Chinese labor, including social insurances (taxes for things like unemployment) costs $3.20/hr. Take a look at Men and Boys's Cotton Trousers and Shorts, at $6.12/pair import cost. It costs under $1,300 to import a 40-foot-long shipping container, roughly 20,000 pairs of trousers, at 6.5 cents per pair. Average retail? $14.97.
You're talking about 1.89 hours of labor per pair. Trucks that ship 20,000 of these to the warehouses around the country. 987 retail scans per cashier per hour. People stocking shelves. Roughly half the actual cost is domestic shipping; retail is trivial.
At minimum wage ($8.25/hr), and with 18% overhead (that means your employer pays 6.2% OASDI payroll, 0.2% Medicare payroll, and $1,900/year for all of your benefits), you're looking at $27.25/pair for pants. You're going to lose 40% of the involved shipping and retail jobs. It comes out to be, maybe, 40,000 net new American jobs in total, out of an apparent 171,000 full-time jobs required to produce the number of trousers we import.
By that time, minimum-wage workers go from working 1.81 hours to working 3.3 hours to buy a pair of pants. The median-income ($54k) household must expend 0.55 hours today to buy a pair of trousers, and 1.01 hours if we stop importing them from China. These expenses mean you either buy fewer pants or buy fewer of other things. If those other things are physical goods, you have less shipping and retail, and fewer jobs there; if they're things like Spotify, Netflix, and other digital services, you have fewer tech jobs.
Bump that to $21/hr (GM line worker, model cost $24.78) and you're already around a net 90,000 loss of American jobs, with minimum wage workers expending 6.5 hours and the median-income household expending 1.99 hours to buy pants (= poorer). Last I checked, the average cost of an American factory worker was $78/hr.
So I can pull the number of Chinese imported pairs of pants (it's 195,585,312 pairs in 2015), compute the number of theoretical factory jobs required (it's 171,056), and spend a few pages writing out methodology, information sources, data analytics, and just plain how many retail-level jobs are represented by the same dollars going to fewer people (because that's what paying more for the same thing is: giving someone more money, and giving someone else less); and it'll turn into a huge, huge roll of stuff that would never keep your minuscule attention span.
It's not that Americans need 6 billion more dollars to keep from cutting into jobs; it's not even that they need to be more-productive on their end to have more wealth. The problem is the labor on the other end--at the factory--is so slow and expensive that it's going to cut into your paycheck. Generally, when you get to this point, someone proposes the correct solution: Reduce the labor by automating the factories. That means create as few American factory worker jobs as possible to avoid destroying other American jobs and spiking unemployment. Of course, with China doing just that on their end as soon as the technology to automate the factories exists, you're still better off just letting them make the damned things; we've got better things to do--like build a gigabit Internet infrastructure.
He's a President; he doesn't have a constituency.
what I hear is "all immigrants BAD", which is stupid. I feel like the prevailing attitude is "the US's borders should have been closed the day after MY ancestors got here".
It's pretty much this, yeah. Economics is complex and difficult. People want to believe that you have a solid linkage between lever A and trapdoor B; it's not like that. It takes me several hours of research and a few pages of dissertation to work out how moving imports to American manufacture affects America, and it's always three parts: it makes all Americans poorer, no matter what we pay the factory workers; it might create jobs if we pay the Americans as little as possible, and will net-reduce American total jobs faster and faster as we increase the American wage for these factory jobs; and the job change doesn't matter anyway because population and labor force rapidly expand and contract to move toward a stable unemployment level.
If you want to send a signal to reassure Americans, well. Welcome to politics. Fact: we've created more jobs than population growth year-after-year since the recession (that's what's driving unemployment down). In tech, we've created far more tech jobs than the total lay-offs, year-after-year, meaning those H1-Bs aren't cutting into the total tech job market. These are comforting facts.
It's also an economic fact that prices are constrained by costs: you can't price something so low that your revenue won't pay the wages required to make it. That's not just about hiring $80,000 Indians instead of $140,000 Americans; the core of wealth is technical progress. Economic growth can be from population growth (when population is below carry capacity) or technical progress; technical progress reduces the wage-hours invested to produce goods and service, meaning we end up able to make and buy more for the same hours of labor worked. Prices come down because of competitive market forces, but only so far as is both profitable and mathematically sustainable.
That means somebody's gotta lose their job eventually.
So yes, that reassurance? It's true. It's also political: even without the H1-B labor, we're going to have rounds of layoffs every time things get better. That part you don't call attention to in this context.
You can call attention to it in another context. Americans do need reassurance against the pain distributed by those general economic forces, after all; and we're currently able to supply that, but only with new policy--and no new taxes. What our nation really hungers for is a new deal for the American people, and it's about time we commit ourselves thusly.
Huh. I thought power was a long standard for decades now. USB is fairly-new. Planes have had headphone ports (powered) pretty much as part of being on a passenger airplane forever, and some fancy new planes have display screens there now; they've been built to deliver wiring to seats effectively for as long as pretty much every passenger plane in service today has been in service, and retrofitting seating with electrical wiring is trivial. Given that every airliner seat I've ever seen for real or depicted in any media has had power ports so you can plug in a laptop, I'd assumed that part was pretty much ubiquitous.
Oh holy shit, I just actually took a look at their technology.
They're using an argon-gas atmosphere to create an effective clean room, and then rapidly depositing titanium by turning it into a charged vapor (plasma) so that it binds to the part. They basically get a solid, perfect chunk of metal roughly in the shape of the part they need, rapidly, because the atom-thick charged metallic gas sticks to the metallic substrate with no impurities between, and so doesn't create air bubbles or whatnot. It's like electroplating, in a mechanical sense, but the physics are entirely different.
So it's titanium plated onto titanium millions of times with precision until you get what's almost a machined part, and then some quick machining. Instead of milling a block into a complex shape, you mill what looks like something a (skilled) child would make with Playdoh after being shown that complex shape into the final product.
That's nifty. I bet it takes surprisingly-little energy, too. If you're converting metal into a plasma gas, you're essentially mobilizing atoms with close to the minimum energy required to do so. This versus forcefully crushing things or melting things, leaking heat all over the place in the process.
I haven't been below 70% charge in years.
Planes today have built-in entertainment, including power ports and even USB ports to charge your phone. Buses ... don't. I mean, they do here, but I get that this isn't basically every bus in the world just yet. On the other hand, I also can't imagine a regular bus trip that takes that long enough for which you would reasonably expect to kill a battery watching NetFlix (which, for the most part, is going to be the screen eating most of the power).
Most endpoints seem to not be places you'd think to go just to sit around watching movies on your phone, except for a hotel or your home. Transit seems the most likely use case, and transit generally doesn't invoke "NetFlix killed my battery" concerns because it's either short or it's very long and right next to a charger.
Besides that, though, pretty much every concern about battery life seems to be "how fast will it die while I watch HD movies on my phone?" I just don't see how you imagine your phone dying from that, gives how frequently you have access to a charger, and how likely you are to be watching movies on your phone in any given situation. I also don't imagine everyone's daily commute is 3 hours each way to the office by bus.
Even when I think really hard about proposed situations in which this could happen, it's like listening to people ask if a computer given incorrect inputs will still arrive at correct conclusions. There aren't any natural thoughts which would lead me to reason such a situation, although there are conceptual sequences of events which could do it. Thus far, every one of those concepts seems like something that wouldn't occur.
That basically describes all technology ever.
I'm kind of irked that everything is called 3D printing. Additive (deposit plastic blobs), subtractive (etch away metal), that machine where a bunch of people keep placing bricks at the top of a conveyor that then rolls down a road like a carpet (it's essentially hand-built, but the machine arranges and deposits the brick road while a bunch of people stand around just grabbing stuff out of a hopper and rapidly stacking it up straight instead of taking forever to actually move along the ground putting bricks in), the like.
When someone says "3D printing", we mostly think of rapid prototyping processes: get a new product to a physical form quickly, but producing the physical form is really, really slow. Instead of 5 weeks to get an assembly ready, you can do it in a couple hours of CAD and then an hour or ten of producing the part. Volume-production in 3D printing as such is slower than assdongs.
On the other hand, it seems like we'd call injection molding "3D Printing" these days. Injection molding is so fucking fast. Do you know how mny legos they make every day?
It's got one of those heterogeneous processors I think. Runs a slow and a fast core at the same time.
If you're running Netflix, you're probably close to a charger, like in the car or something. Either that or you're a sad, pathetic fool who goes out to the McDonalds so you can sit there watching Netflix on your phone for 2 hours.
I get decent battery life out of Spotify, at least.
I'm surrounded by people with $800 Android phones.
I don't know; I'll skip the 3t (I have a OnePlus One) and wait for the OnePlus Five to get Lineage OS anyway. I don't play well with vendor OSes.
When I had the OPO, they had regular updates until they dropped CyanogenOS for OxygenOS. The default OS was also very clean, although it pestered me to buy some themes with a non-removable notification (themes needed updates, which required a Cyanogen account or some such rubbish, which I wasn't into). Not quite straight CyanogenMod, but not the crapload of garbage as on regular phones.
I think my last-run OnePlus One might be dying. Not sure. It seems to have a tad bit of trouble with bluetooth sometimes, and is slow about Wifi. I can't tell if that's CyanogenMod, hardware, or something else without another phone to compare to. The plastic part of the encasing body is chipping and fraying along the connection to the bezel as well.
It's still an overall solid phone, despite being four generations out of date. I'm a little annoyed at it being only two years old and the 5 is coming out. The OnePlus Two is as of July, 2015; I got the OnePlus One around March, 2015. I pay about $160/year for unlimited voice and SMS, 2GB LTE+ on T-Mobile's network, one line; at two years's replacement, the phone is costing me $175 on top of that. At three it'd be $120. So long as it doesn't give out on me, it's still workable for now; this phone is still of a spec I'd buy new.
I'd actually be interested in a phone with half the dimensions, the same screen resolution, and a stylus.
I have nfc what's going on with this cat. It was following me a lot. I petted it and it tried to run, but then got confused, and came over, got petted, ran back and forth a lot, looked terrified. Then started following me.
Fed the cat. Cat eats, runs to me, needs to be petted to continue eating. What? Food, dammit. Eat the food. What does it want?
Eventually I let the cat into my house, because it kept trying to come inside with me. It found four smaller cats under my couch; I never knew they were there.
Now the cat keeps following me, meowing a lot, and wants to be petted all the time. Why does this cat want so much god damned attention?! Won't even stop purring.
It appears to not affect humans in that way.
No, they don't do anything. Marketing does something to sell you bullshit.
I see entire aisles of that stuff at Safeway and Wegman's.
Safeway and Wegman's also don't have CEOs who made front-page Slashdot last year after telling the press that their customers were basically liberal hippies who will pay out the nose for shit they don't need. I still don't get how a business stays in business after announcing to the world with seething contempt that its strategy is to mainly target stupid people with jacked-up prices.
You said you like their food. You didn't rant about how GMOs are toxic because genetic sciencification, or rant about farming techniques and involved chemicals, or even make a bad economics argument about buying locally-sourced goods.
You seem to have, at least, expressed a line of reasoning that has no connection to anything that was said.
That's a real thing. Transporting fruits long distances generally involves methods which do bad things to the quality.
Mostly, the localism pitch is about economics; the problem is "buy local" has the same implications as a protectionist strategy, albeit a much smaller poverty-inducing effect.
How can anyone support organic food?
Vaccines cause autism etc. etc. Do you really need to ask?
Whole Foods? "Yeah our customers are delusional, retarded hipsters with too much money and not enough brains to realize we're fucking them" Whole Foods? The company whose upper management actually announced that, yes, their business model is basically "sell to morons at inflated prices"?
It has a halo it found in a crackerjack box. They're marketing pseudoscientific bullshit like localism, organic farming, anti-GMO sentiment, and everything. If only they would expand to Whole Foods medicine; the anti-vaxxer crowd fits comfortably next to the same sort of mindless idiots who make up the anti-GMO movement (not the anti-Monsanto movement, but the ones who think GMO is somehow dangerous for simply being tampered with).
He's an anesthesiologist, not a child psychologist.
Remember when that Swiss psychologist in the 1400s said books would cause information overload, burn out childrens's brains, and generally destroy society?
Remember when the United States tried to create a public school system and the entire field of Psychiatry considered it a crisis because we'd end up burning out children's brains with excessive information?
Remember when video games were going to ruin children because they don't read anymore, and instead lock themselves away alone with their electronic toys?
Remember the Internet?
Anything new is deleterious to our society's health.
That depends on if they're using the standard warehouse-as-a-retail-store that's basically a giant, grounded faraday cage and blocks all cell phone signal. Also depends on if you're in Delaware or PA where cell phone towers can be sparse.
You can't eliminate a position to save $15/hr unless that position is useless and the person there is a welfare case. You have to replace the technology with less-expensive technology and reduce labor hours that way.
Let's say the total labor involvement to design, build, maintain, fuel, and operate a machine over its entire lifetime is equivalent to having $9/hr employees provide the replaced business activities. That is to say: the wage time invested, total, across that machine's entire existence, is equivalent to the wages of $9/hr employees producing the same things the machine does. In that case, replacing $15/hr employees with this saves you $6/hr per employee.
If your employees are $5/hr, it costs more to use the machine.
As technology improves over time, eventually you have those $9/hr employees making $11/hr, but the machine only costs $10.25/hr. At that point, it's cheaper but not necessarily strategic to replace the employees.
If you predict the technology will fall in price to $7/hr in the next three years and those machines have a 15-year ROI, you may find it most-profitable to keep your $11/hr employees for a few more years. Then you have $11.70/hr employees (2% per year raise), and a $7/hr machine. Now you start rolling out the machines. You've avoided being locked into a $10.25/hr TCO with only minimal opex.
I just paid $164.80, including all taxes, for the next 12 months of cellular service (over T-Mobile's towers) with unlimited voice and SMS, 2GB of high-speed data per month, and unlimited throttled data after that.
I use some 300MB/month of data. If I turn off the Android Data Saver and use Spotify for ~1hr/day in the car, it racks up around 900MB-1.5GB/month. Mind you, I can't do regular 200-300MB LineageOS updates over LTE+ without massively inflating my data usage (it's about a gigabyte per month just for that), and I certainly can't drive down the highway with one hand on the wheel and the other holding my phone to watch 1080p Netflix all the time.