Which works great if you have that intermediate code, but once it becomes instructions they often do a lot more than what is necessary
No, that's not how this works.
The compiler takes the source code, produces a single-assignment transformation tree, and then discards the original source code. All further analysis is performed on the single-assignment transformation tree. That means 100% of the information a compiler uses to compile a C, C#, Java, Ada, Fortran, JavaScript, etc. program to CPU ISA output in any setting is represented by a tree derivable in reverse from and functionally-equivalent to a tree derived from the output of compilation.
Java, C#, and JS compilers generally target a bytecode architecture, although they also have AOT compilers that spit out native code to avoid the classfile-to-native compilation on each program launch.
unless you know the original intention or can analyse it from the entire program you might have to fully emulate every nuance of the instruction instead of just using the one simple instruction in the other ABI that perform the same intermediate operation
Actually, analysis of the compiled output will tell you things you can derive into a static single assignment tree. For example: if you run a subtraction on x86, it sets the Flags register, which affects branches. If another operation affecting the Flags register occurs before any sort of branch instruction, this is irrelevant, and thus not recorded into the tree. By extension, knowing how such instructions are affected by prior instructions allows you to create a full listing of the logic at each node, such that you can easily understand the conditions for a jump (e.g. if you do SUB %eax,4 and then JLE @addresss, you don't need to encode into the SSA tree that SUB may set the zero flag, signed flag, and overflow flags; you only need to encode that, under the condition %eax is less than or equal to 4, the program takes a branch).
That doesn't tell you what the original source code looks like; it tells you what conditions cause what changes to the tree. After that, you have a tree which reflects the same amount of relevant information (no more, no less) than the one generated from source code.
Yes, the optimization tree generated from a compiled binary really is equivalent to the one generated from source code.
You do know all modern compilers convert program source code into a static single assignment tree which is then optimized by simplifying complex graph traversals with weighted edges based on CPU architecture variations in speed of certain operations, right?
You can turn CPU instruction code into the same static single assignment tree, perform the same optimizations, and emit the code as if it were compiled from source code to target a different ISA.
That's just pointing out that there's gold, but also silver, platinum, and diamonds, and that nobody has dug into the new mines yet. In this case, we can create new mines.
The difference is in perception -- real currency is backed by a government somewhere.
No, fiat currency is legal tender and issued by a government. Its supply is controlled by a government. Its backing is production as a function of productive labor: all income is acquired by all productive activity, on balance. That productive activity includes any waste activity (e.g. if you make 10,000,000 cars and destroy 5,000,000 every year because they didn't sell, your business has to make up revenues eventually to stay on-balance, meaning you have to charge twice as much per car).
As a result, money continuously trends to represent both production and labor time such that it is an exchange medium to transfer labor time by transferring goods produced by that labor time. This is modified by wage inequality (I can trade fewer hours of my labor for more hours of a lower-paid worker's labor), market activities (e.g. business profits, taxes), and government monetary policies (e.g. sustained inflation rates by issuing more currency), and so the adjustment also tends to shift around the balance (debts shrink, revenues grow).
Currency essentially works because it has this representation. It has this representation because it is sufficiently-universal.
The mistake is simple: it's easier to keep an orderly society if everyone is enslaved by a small, powerful policing force with severe response to any deviation from orderly behavior; however, this does not provide people with security.
Tag it "clickbait". Basically, Comey transferred information he was legally and ethically allowed to transfer in a situation where it seemed the best course to protect the integrity of the investigation and minimize the damages. Someone is making a big deal about releasing previously-unreleased information.
125 jobs also doesn't seem like enough of a potential gain in terms of salary cuts to offset the potential PR blowback
People economize. If you can somehow cut costs, you can get lower prices. People will always attempt to maximize the ends achievable by their means, and so will reach for the lowest-price thing that they expect to do the job.
Ever notice that people who cook a lot buy high-end kitchen appliances? $400 food processor, $100 knife, $450 KitchenAid mixer, and so forth. They expect these things to perform better. They'll last longer than the $20 things they buy, produce better results, and do so more-quickly so as to cut the time spent in the kitchen. Meanwhile, you need to mix cake batter twice a year and don't feel like spending 20 minutes doing so with a whisk, so you buy a $40 mixer.
If folks thought the $40 thing would actually do the same job as the $400 thing, they'd buy the $40 one.
Every time you find a new way to produce with less labor, you cut costs. Pay for 10 hours of work done at $20/hr or pay for 5 hours of work done at $20/hr? If those factory workers, putting 10 hours of their time in, can build that car, then they account for $200 of the cost. If they can build two cars in 10 hours, then they account for $100 of the cost of each car. If people aren't buying twice as many cars as a result, then you lay off half your factory workers. Propagate this up through everything that goes into the car and suddenly you can build the same car for half the price.
In the auto industry, they just start adding more-expensive extras to upper-end luxury cars, and move the luxury items downward as their costs fall. The car that a median-income American will buy is the one priced at a certain proportion of his income; that car today is loaded with more shit than the car median-income Americans bought 40 years ago, instead of just being the same car but shitloads cheaper.
If you're dealing with food or new tech (SSDs, new types of TVs, etc.), they come out costing $5,000 and then fall in price to $2,000, $1,000, $500, $350, for the same size and features. The increase in demand--the access to larger markets--retains or creates jobs making TVs. Food, on the other hand... we have far fewer farm workers today than we did in 1890.
Whenever we gain access to new goods and more goods, jobs change over. It's all well-and-good when TVs cost $300 and then a new kind of TV costs $3,000 and eventually costs $300, because people are already buying TVs at that demand rate. When the median income goes up by 20% over a decade and the price of cell phones goes up by 15%,
one in four people making, shipping, and retailing cell phones now no longer has a job doing that
. Then, we buy Bluetooth headsets to go with the cell phones with the money we're no longer spending on cell phones--and jobs are required (created) to make, ship, and retail those, replacing the jobs lost.
People are afraid their job is going to go away. It's not that they won't find another one; it's that their life will be disrupted. Every time someone else's job gets turned over, we all get wealthier; if it's your job, then everyone else gets wealthier and you go out looking for a new source of income so you can get a late start on some of this newly-available wealth. It's a constant process and it's great for everyone; however, when it's your turn to pay the blood sacrifice, you're suddenly not so keen.
This is essentially clickbait news to excite the emotions of those ignorant of economics. Basically, the article (and headline) relies on people's stupidity and sheer lack of education to drive them into a panicked rage.
Think about this: money buys what can be made. Making things takes time. Technology makes it take less time. Labor.
You work for 10 hours, you make $10/hr, the thing you make has to cost at least $100 or you don't get paid. Next guy works for 10 hours, makes $20/hr. You have to work 10 hours to buy something he worked on for 5; he only has to work 5 to buy something you worked on for 10.
Trading labor.
You can produce gold. Excessive amounts of labor can generate enough energy to do it by nuclear fusion; smaller amounts of labor can mine it out of the ground. If you use gold as currency, you get a source of instability by people hoarding it (can't just issue more) or finding new, rich veins.
If cryptocurrencies became the currency, then cryptocurrencies must reflect in value what can be bought.
Because of who holds these currencies and their lack of broad distribution as money, they don't have the purchasing flexibility of currency. That means you can't just take bitcoins and buy stuff. Bitcoins are nothing but a commodity, like gold: there's a cost to produce more, and a current stock.
Cryptocurrency valuations are not based on their capacity as a theoretical currency or even their cost to produce; they're based on a fascination. The market is narrow enough and the capacity to produce e.g. bitcoins is scarce; cryptocurrencies aren't scarce. It's like iPhones versus any Android phone: if people stop caring that it's an iPhone, it can't sell for $1,000 when it's identical to a $500 Android phone. Anyone can create a new cryptocurrency with little cost.
oh bread turns to sugars? "Neanderthal man" didnt have bread either guy
Did they have fruit?! Did Neanderthals find things like peaches, gourds, or potato?! Bread isn't the only thing made out of starch!
Do things effect some individuals more than others? Yes, like all things in regards to bodily health there are variations.
You don't have bodily variations eliminating the need for 60%+ of calories.
It's impossible for Neanderthals to survive without sufficient calories, as a species. By contrast, the ones whose teeth don't rot out by the time they've raised offspring would pass on their genetics more-readily, and the species would thus have adapted as such. That was the point: a large proportion of population can actually make it pretty far eating tons of candy and sugary puddings like humans have for hundreds of years.
Then you go off on a tangent that has nothing to do with our conversation
You claim people will die of malnutrition. I gave a counterpoint about nutrition. You know nothing about nutrition.
It's highly-unlikely soda would destroy a population's capacity to survive by destroying their teeth. It's been proven sugar won't: fluoride and toothbrushes are a recent (late-1800s, early-1900s) cultural phenomena, while shitloads of sugary molasses, hard candies, chocolates, and sugar-glazed sweet breads have been frequently-consumed components of the daily diet for hundreds of years. Humans didn't die out from tooth-rot-before-their-20s.
Uh, what? Both the English and the Irish have a great number of sweets made with sugar in their historical culture. Bread puddings and potato cakes to start with. Chocolate entered Irish culture in the 1600s, and chocolate cakes are actually a staple Irish traditional dessert as far back as the 1700s.
The British first became familiar with tea in 1662.
The British also had a lot of sugary sweets throughout their diets well before tea appeared in their culture.
Can you try not making shit up? There's this thing called "reality" we like to stick to when talking about facts.
Yes, and if you spend x% more each year, then naturally you must ask for x% more money next year
They ask for the maximum amount of money donators are willing to give. Donators are site visitors. Where is this extra money coming from?
Are you telling me the same people are donating 30 times as much as they did 10 years ago? Like, did the 1,000,000 users who donated $5 each in 2007 instead donate $150 each?
Let's look at the part of my argument you ignored: the part about how they somehow managed to get this extra money. Where is this money coming from? Why are people donating more?
Running from October 22, 2007 to January 6, 2008, the 07-08 Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser led to contributions totaling 2.162 million dollars from nearly 45,000 donors worldwide.
Over a period of 50 days, more than 500,000 people from 150 countries donated directly to the Wikimedia Foundation, and nearly 200,000 people donated directly to 12 local chapters. During the 2010 Fundraiser, the Foundation received its millionth donation. Our messages were shown across Wikimedia projects localized into more than 80 languages.
# of donations, 2009: 243,668; total donations: $8,691,995; average donation: $35.67; campaign length: 67 days.
# of donations, 2010: 527,583; total donations: $15,026,289; average donation: $28.48; campaign length: 50 days.
Huh. In 2010, they spent 17 fewer days asking for money; they got less money per individual donations; and they got over twice as many donations.
International localization efforts increased substantially in 2011. Wikimedia volunteers showed their support by translating fundraising messages into over 100 languages to reach hundreds of millions of people. The Wikimedia Foundation integrated with a new payment processor to be able to process donations in 80 currencies, accepting 12 payment methods from countries worldwide.
Twenty more languages in 2011.
# of donations, 2011: 1,130,131; total donations: $24,018,004.28; average donation: $21.25; campaign length: 46 days.
Fewer fundraiser days, more donations, less per donation again!
The Wikimedia Foundation raised $51 million USD in the 2013-14 fiscal year, including $37 million from more than 2.5 million donors through the foundations' s online fundraising. Online funds were raised through desktop, mobile and email campaigns worldwide, making this Wikimedia’s most successful fundraising campaign to date. The overwhelming majority of the Foundation's funding comes from individual Wikipedia readers from all over the world giving an average of $15 USD.
# of donations, 2011: 2,666,167; total donations: $51,070,659.50; average donation: $19.14; campaign length: year-round rolling worldwide, approximately 14 days per country.
More donations, less per donation again!
More than 4 million donors around the world donated $75 million USD to make the Wikimedia Foundation's 2014–2015 fiscal year the most successful fundraising cycle in our history.
Four million donors!!!
Yeah, see, it looks like they're getting more money by getting more people donating. Bigger audience.
Commons content has grown significantly, and it does have large files. As far as I recall, it doesn't account for very many pageviews though, compared to Wikipedia.
You completely ignore that large file content is nothing compared to the entire history of all pages on every Wikipedia ever. Again: Wikipedia pages get edited constantly. The articles about Slashdot and Diazepam have been edited 50 times since August, 2016; the pages about Gravity and Epipens has been edited 250 times in the same period; the page about Donald Trump has had over 500 edits since 27 April 2017; the page about Ronald Reagan has ha
No sitting president has ever been unseated by impeachment. Nixon resigned to escape impeachment. Everywhere else, politicians resign because they're embarrassed.
Shit, I sent a dick pic to a girl I met at a bar and she told her friends. Better quit working toward social progress in the United States.
Every article retains its full history, from its creation to present state. Every edit. That means their database must handle an enormous amount of data, ever-growing, edit after edit. It never changes; it adds.
In 2007, Wikipedia's english site had 1.5 million articles; in 2015 it had 4.6 million. That's three times as many individual articles, with every edit to every article stored forever. The number of pieces and sheer amount of data stored and indexed is a complex, temporal function. For the number of articles, it's (time x rate[article creation]); for the number of pieces of data created, it's (time x rate[edits per article] x articles). Because the number of articles is increasing over time, you're looking at an exponential growth function. Note that it's exponential and not geometric because the rate of edits is related to a polynomial exponent of t, since the number of edits per time increases with time thus (t*(t*r)).
WMF also runs Wikinews, which carries news articles in dozens of languages. It runs Wikipedia in many languages all over the world. Every time it adds a new language, there's a new regional user base. If each language Wikipedia grows as above, then you have cubic growth until the rate of new Wikipedia languages slows.
The volume of data managed, the computer power required to manage that data, back-ups, administration costs, all of that is growing. It's growing faster every day.
As for the "unstable donation-based revenue stream", revenue has been on the up and up for every year of the foundation's existence
As per IRS NPO rules, the organization must show stability in the face of reasonable risks. Revenue streams from donations are not predictable; a sudden recession can slow the revenue stream while not slowing the expenses. As such, Wikipedia is legally required to maintain cash reserves some degree beyond their yearly expenses. When those expenses increase, they need to carry bigger cash reserves.
It looks to me the spending is not driven by need, but by the availability of cash, including cash to pay managers the payments disclosed in the Form 990
Out of $83 million, managers get less than $1 million. Product manager ~$100k, software engineer ~$144k. Management? Executive director $344k; General Counsel (lawyer) $258k; Deputy Director $302k; VP of Engineering $282k; Chief Operating Officer $250k. The executive compensations total about $2 million.
They also spent $3 on a post-it note pad, because that's included in spending of course.
whenever revenue has increased, spending has increased proportionally
From a legal perspective, IRS NPO rules require retention of a certain risk buffer, as well as limits to the amount of cash holding. You can't have revenues that much larger than your expenses.
That's not why spending increases with revenue, though, is it?
Revenue comes from donations. WMF gets donations from users. Users only donate so much. More users means more donations--also, more load, more costs in running the service. Being driven entirely on donations from people looking right at your site, revenue would be directly tied to how much load is on your site and, thus, the cost to support that load, wouldn't it?
Nobody gives a shit about Lyft. How often do you hear about some county trying to sue Lyft for something about taxi laws or whatever? How often do you see anything about Lyft employees being contractor or employees depending on who's making the argument? They're basically the same kind of service, and yet Uber gets all the negative press.
It's not because Uber did something; it's because nobody gives a shit about Lyft. You call the Uber while Googling for a good mechanic when your car breaks down--even if you use Lyft to call the Uber and Google using Bing. Uber gets criticized for Uber behaving terribly when Uber actually behaves terribly--which has been frequent--and it gets criticized for being what Uber is a hell of a lot, too.
WMF spends about 40% of its revenues on engineering. Hosting is just the small cost: I ran a video CDN for over 120 news stations, and the hosting cost was roughly $3,500/month. My salary was over 1.5 times that; and the whole thing was controlled by custom software developed and maintained at costs ranging around $300,000/year. That used a single, non-geographically-distributed database.
WMF has to engineer an enormous, high-availability network with hundreds of replicated caches, databases, and Web servers. It has to handle security, software upgrades, and basic administrative tasks across this infrastructure. Something as simple as keeping system patches up-to-date is an enormous undertaking in that kind of environment, largely due to the amount of risk carried. They don't have one guy running their databases; they have dozens of DBAs, hundreds of sysadmins in total. People who complain that they can't have a $144k salary because someone might hire an Indian for $85k to replace them.
Management and Governance is that whole "running a business" thing. It's the thing that lets you accomplish large tasks without expending enormous amounts of effort. Slashdot, Fark, Ubuntu, Debian, and the FSF all have governance; they don't all get paid for it, but they all invest time. For some organizations, like WMF and FSF, governance is a full-time job for several people, and so... well, we pay them.
All of this means WMF has HR costs, management costs, and functional costs. It also sends 10% of its money to grants, so some millions are just going out to fund charitable efforts. WMF spends more on grants than on hosting; hell, they spend more on legal than on hosting, because they need to avoid enormous costs from frivolous lawsuits by people like Peter Thiel.
So it looks like it's actually kind of expensive to run WMF. They also need to float large amounts of cash holdings year-to-year in case of unstable donation-based revenue streams. As WMF grows in activities, that risk reserve needs to enlarge, so their bank accounts and cash holdings get bigger.
The Democratic party and the Republican party are at odds idealistically, and I tend to favor somewhat of a conservative approach to progressive socioeconomic policy. Even so, the problem isn't exactly ideals, so much as it's wild radicalism: the Republicans and Democrats both leverage fear, uncertainty, and polarized idealism to grab at American mind share. Each party ups the ante at every opportunity, whether that be by loud shrieks and tantrums or by smug self-importance and thinly-veiled insults.
It is, in principle, possible to elevate a party above these behaviors. In the political scene, you have... issues. The hysterical fanaticism coming from the opposition will drive people to lean toward whatever wild claims they make, regardless of merit.
If the Republicans begin calmly laying out plans to "bring jobs back to America" without screaming about threats from foreign nations sucking our economy dry, the Democrats can gain mind share by screaming about the damage to the working-class American by the poverty brought by loss of trade; whereas if the Democrats calmly discuss such economic consequences of protectionism, the Republicans can scream about America's hard-working citizens losing their jobs to China and India, about factories falling apart from disuse, and so forth. The Democrats would actually have the economics right in both cases; the screaming baboon in the room would have the vote.
To actually make progress, you need a well-reasoned plan and a forceful campaign to draw the support of Americans. It doesn't need to be a campaign of fear and volume; it only needs to provide a sense of security to the voter.
The Democrats and Republicans have the spotlight; the Greens and Libertarians are loony, and frequently have pretty bad political behavior as well. The smaller parties often behave in a manner suggesting they would be even worse than our two mains. It's a leadership issue: we need to replace these children with the adults in the room.
Nothing Trump has promised to do would be good for the country and quite a bit of his agenda will hurt a lot of people.
Everybody thinks in terms of trickle-down economics, and so believes moving the average price of pants from $15 to $150 would be good for America if Americans were making pants instead of importing them from China.
They don't understand that then Americans in total would have less capacity to buy things, because they don't grasp that a potential 178,000 jobs in making pants (in this example) is trivial compared to the 125,000,000 employed: they think adding 0.14% more jobs by making everyone else poorer "keeps the money in America", and equate money to wealth. Too bad the same money doesn't buy so much, meaning...
They don't understand that those lost purchases mean fewer potential jobs. You might get +106,000 instead of +178,000, with low enough American wages in the factories. That's a best-case scenario of paying the American factory workers as little as possible--minimum wage, minimum benefits. You lose purchasing ability in the form of, at minimum-wage salaries, 40% as many pants sold.
With that 40% loss in pants shipped and retailed, you lose jobs. A truck carries 20,000 pairs in a 40-foot shipping container (large trailer). 192.6 million pairs imported, now Americans make and buy 115.6 million, that's 77 million fewer pairs, 3,851 fewer truck shipments per year. 981 register scans per hour by a retail worker, 77 million fewer items sold, no longer need ~78,526 retail workers.
There's additional loss in logistics, stocking, and some other stuff. The reduction in items sold is enough to close a couple stores, technically, although you'd only eliminate at best 2,000-3,000 employees in total through that route. The cost of shipping also includes things like truck tires, fuel, and maintenance, and the demand for those goods goes down when we can't afford as many goods (the prices of which already include those costs): a couple mechanics, Goodyear factory workers, and the like lose their jobs. Nothing major, like the huge bomb dropped on retail.
Call it 80,000 jobs. You can create 106,000 minimum-wage factory jobs and eliminate 80,000 other jobs by manufacturing pants in America instead of China. That assumes that the only cost in running the factory is the factory workers; you create fewer jobs and lose more jobs when you also factor in the cost of organization (managers, etc.), equipment, buildings, fuel and electricity, and so forth, all of which exceed the respective costs in the Chinese manufacturing theater.
At the same time, those minimum-wage workers produce pants which cost ~66% more. For a minimum-wage retail worker, a $15 pair of pants costs 1.8 hours of labor; for the minimum-wage factory worker, the $25 pair of pants costs 3 hours of labor. They have to work 1.2 hours longer to draw the wages to produce them.
The cost by number of hours worked to earn the wages to buy the product gets larger if we raise the factory-worker's wage; the number of jobs created shrinks; and the number of jobs lost elsewhere increases. You quickly go from ~26,000 new jobs and 300,000,000 poorer Americans to a direct loss of jobs and even poorer Americans when any of the involved costs increase.
See how many steps you have to work through to get that far? All people see is, "Well, factory workers! Jobs! New jobs!" and "Oh, well, pay the factory workers more and they won't be so poor!" Never mind that paying them more will actually make it harder for them to afford the products they're making--it'll let them afford more Chinese import products, though.
Best part: the end result of a gain or loss in jobs--in employment rate, really--is an adjustment of the labor force to either consume the available additional jobs or reduce the number of job-seekers. In other words: short- and long-term changes keep us around a certain stable employment rate (it's ~5% in
Depends. A lot of people can drink soda and never have a problem, even without brushing their teeth. Some people have acidic saliva and will need new teeth eventually. It has something to do with some food being acidic, I guess.
Have you ever noticed how bread tastes sweet when chewed? Your saliva breaks long-chain starches down into simple sugars. Potato is basically sugar. Likewise, most chewy sugar treats pass through your mouth rapidly without being fermented, mostly. The largest exposure is sucking candy, and even that's mostly-digested. It's comparable to complex carbohydrate intake.
Soda has carbonic acid and can soften teeth. It leeches calcium from the enamel. It doesn't etch teeth, and soda won't dissolve a tooth in any amount of time. Enamel can naturally heal from this; topical fluoride makes this happen more-rapidly, which affords the teeth more protection from physical abrasion. Much ground water contains fluoride in some concentration--often rather high concentrations.
I'm sure they could make it to at least 30. At around 15, they can have babies. Humans ate sweet, acidic things like cherries.
As for malnutrition, you overestimate how much nutrition you need. When you're burning so much raw energy, an abundance of food delivers well more than the minimum nutrition. Granted, in the case of humans, a more plant-heavy diet will greatly increase the risk of malnutrition; animal products provide a greater balance of almost all micronutrients (vitamin C is a particular exception; E is less-essential, but also more available in plants), whereas any given plant source tend to be barren of most nutrients save for any particulars (e.g. broccoli, at 8%DV per serving, is high in calcium, pretty barren in everything else; citrus fruits are high in Vitamin C; pineapple is relatively-high in magnesium; whole grains have trace amounts of everything and won't provide adequate amounts of anything without eating enormous amounts of rice and wheat).
You don't just burn off micronutrients. You can consume them metabolically, in specific ways. Building muscle will consume magnesium, for example. Once you've adapted to exertion, using that muscle burns lots of calories and consumes little magnesium.
"Family? Really? So I can quit and I'd be welcome back at anytime?" Using the word 'quit' wasn't a good idea and my "family" let my ass go and I'm not welcome anymore.
Well, you know, your douchebag brother isn't allowed at family gatherings anymore for being a huge douchebag. Same deal.
A lot of people hate on Uber here, largely because Uber is a different form of organization due to being a different form of service provider and people can't differentiate. Uber allows you to essentially operate as an independent taxi (if that), supplying the value-add of connecting the customer to the service provider, as well as providing additional insurance while you operate, so long as you follow their ToS; people identify Uber as an employer and a taxi service, rather than an intermediary service provider like Expedia, Hotels.com, or AirBNB. To me, that's almost like accusing the Yellow Pages of being a taxi company because they list independent taxi services (Uber is the next evolution of that, except drivers aren't sanctioned taxis).
So that whole thing is silly and Uber is fine. Uber provides a great service, provides insurance, adds traceability and accountability, and generally increases the safety and decreases the cost of hailing a ride while giving people the option to easily get in and get out of the whole service business.
If Uber has workplace problems like sexual harassment, that's a problem. A serious problem. Uber's interaction with its clients on both ends may be great, and it may operate as a valuable business; and if its internals are a counterbalance, its internals need fixing. You don't get to murder people now and then because you're a firefighter and you put yourself in danger every day saving lives; nobody's keeping a running tally.
At the same time, we have Eric Holder.
Fuck.
Is this Eric Holder being Eric Holder, or is this a legitimate investigation with a real cause for concern? Because I could see Uber having serious internal problems, and I could see Holder being a serious political dicktard out to ruin innocent lives for his own political agenda. Both are possible, and, as above, nobody's keeping score; the facts of this case aren't the facts of every previous case.
Depending on the money velocity (of putting it in the bank vs spending it), that could create more or less money.
You missed the part that money, before you spend it, is in the bank; money, after you spend it, is in the bank. It moves from an account at Well's Fargo to another account at Well's Fargo, or from an account at Bank of America to an account at Wachovia. Most money is always in the bank, and petty cash is both small and briefly out of the bank.
In other words: spending the money doesn't take it out of the bank, and so letting it sit at rest doesn't reduce the fractional reserve. There is no "depending on the money velocity" because the money, spent or not, is in the bank. The question is whether it's at rest in an account or moving between accounts by being spent. You're equating "spending" with "not being in the bank", and that's not how it works.
Case in point: I never carry cash, but I spend over $50,000 every year.
However, putting it in stocks or bonds does not take any out of circulation
Trading money between stocks isn't buying goods. It's just traders trying to pull money out of your 401(k), basically.
When you buy into corporate bonds, the money does, in fact, go right into some corporate bank account. The corporation spends that, or else they don't want to have the bond. It's kind of hard to argue against debt as a good place to put money while arguing for the virtues of a fractional reserve system;)
Bonds are also risky, though. There's a whole bond trade, which is about as unproductive as the stock market. When you have billions of dollars, it's generally easier to just negotiate a 3% savings account with your bank and let your bank be a bank.
They really do help about 1% of the people who actually need the help, the rest are loafs who are freeloading, skating taxes and doing cash-only jobs to provide the illusion of being in need of assistance.
We have a robust fraud investigation office servicing all levels of the welfare system. Inappropriate provisioning is mostly in the bureaucracy, where the rules don't cover people with real need and so the caseworkers use their judgment and bend the rules a tad. Actual abuse is approximately zero.
2) the amount of soda, junk food and useless commodities spent using EBT
Some of that is bad habits (soda...); some of it is a matter of people not being able to carry perishable goods or afford the higher-priced not-junk-food. Unsurprisingly, people end up eating what's cheap--in a number of ways. I've found I can design robust food plans on as little as $25/month for 2000kcal/day with several hours of Internet research and strict budgeting and planning behaviors--in other words, several dozen times the effort anyone invests. You have to know what you're going to eat pretty much every day 2 months in advance, what every meal is going to cost, and so forth. This also devotes a surprising amount of time to cooking and cleaning.
At a point, it consumes your life. Likewise, people may not have such planning skills. For the most part, they all believe they don't have another choice.
3) Using their own wads of 'cash' on booze, cigarettes, and anything else that would be shamed upon on the cant-have-that list
Pretty much how it works. A lot of welfare is supplemental--you can even get unemployment if you have a part-time job (20 hours = employed for half a job). That means you have an earmarked account (EBT) and your own personal money (cash).
Why even get a job, when you can get upwards of $300-800/month for free?
For UBI systems, the answer is "to gain more purchasing power and enhance your standard-of-living." For the current public aid system, you're comparing your $10.25/hr welfare with the $10.75/hr FedEx warehouse job that's going to replace and terminate your welfare benefit, so why do you want to get a job making 50 cents an hour?
If they aren't trying to look for new hire [slashdot.org] opportunities
People aren't born with the Computer Programmer DNA. Talent is a myth and poor people aren't going to have a special magical power welling from their souls. The whole idea is mysticism, same shit as homeopathy.
There are people who have had time to train themselves about things and are bad at life in general, so are potentially-useful employees. Better than any other employee? Doubtful. Even given the likelihood in large numbers, you're wasting resources digging for diamonds crapped out into the horse manure when you have access to actual diamond mines.
All this does is keep on enabling a broken government hand-out system, not police it or make it better.
Assuming the prices are better, it allows access to purchase more goods with the same money. That means maybe they can afford $12 family-pack toilet paper instead of $16 family-pack at Wal-Mart, and buy those $8 worth of fruits-and-vegetables (or, you know, pork--actual healthy food) instead of $5 worth of junk food.
There's something else you missed: Unemployment trends toward ~5% in the U.S. (2% in Japan, etc.). If we get lower unemployment, people who plan to take a later retirement generally get laid off less, and job opportunities tend to draw more people to exit college early. If we get higher unemployment, those late retirements slow, and people go as far as taking up grad school to avoid the barren job market (2008 Great Recession, that happened a lot). A low-unemployment market also fails to discourage household members seeking second incomes (e.g. bored hou
Limited applicability, but valid in some cases. Some.
This is part of the reason luxury items which actually cost more to make than most people can afford have higher profit margins (the businesses have higher net profits) than consumer goods. The other part is that high costs and small markets means lots of risk, meaning high probability of failure, and high barrier-to-entry: another player can't just stand up shop next to you and sell at a 10% margin versus your 20% if there are all of 1 million customers in the world for your product.
Fail either of these and you get slimmer margins. They're sort of the same thing: an inability to pay means a loss of demand--consumers aren't willing to pay by virtue of being incapable of exercising any such will, or they're unwilling to pay because the next guy has it cheaper. Higher luxury goods are so expensive their target markets are folks with more-than-well-enough money to spend so freely, and at the same time the markets are capable of supporting fewer suppliers than broad consumer markets and thus fewer competitors to undercut your prices.
The logical progression is, of course, that the ability to produce at lower cost allows you to sell to people with less money, taking even more profit. Keeping that 20% margin is hard, because now 100,000,000 consumers can buy your good instead of 1,000,000, and so a small-time competitor can slip in with a 10% margin and capture your entire vertical. At a point, lowering your prices won't attract enough additional consumers to generate an increase in profit, so these price cuts eventually stop until the product becomes even cheaper to make.
In the case of Amazon, however, it's not just Prime they're selling. They don't want Prime subscriptions so much as they want people to order that $12.99 family pack of toilet paper from them instead of pay $15.99 at Wal-Mart, and they expect these people live disbursement-to-disbursement and so can't plan too far ahead. These potential customers need one- or two-day shipping, and they need it free, so they need Prime.
If the target market is sufficiently small, then even the tiniest subsidy can cover a sizable discount. If 0.01% of their customers are buying groceries and paper towels on EBT, then a 50% discount means Prime for everyone else needs to cost $0.00395 more, or essentially nothing. If this makes an operating profit conversion, it's just slimming Prime margins as a razor-and-blade strategy.
Could end up being good for basically everyone involved except whoever Amazon takes business from. Cheaper access to necessities for EBT recipients, more business for Amazon, more efficiency in consumer spending across the economy at large.
Slashdot Mirror
Which works great if you have that intermediate code, but once it becomes instructions they often do a lot more than what is necessary
No, that's not how this works.
The compiler takes the source code, produces a single-assignment transformation tree, and then discards the original source code. All further analysis is performed on the single-assignment transformation tree. That means 100% of the information a compiler uses to compile a C, C#, Java, Ada, Fortran, JavaScript, etc. program to CPU ISA output in any setting is represented by a tree derivable in reverse from and functionally-equivalent to a tree derived from the output of compilation.
Java, C#, and JS compilers generally target a bytecode architecture, although they also have AOT compilers that spit out native code to avoid the classfile-to-native compilation on each program launch.
unless you know the original intention or can analyse it from the entire program you might have to fully emulate every nuance of the instruction instead of just using the one simple instruction in the other ABI that perform the same intermediate operation
Actually, analysis of the compiled output will tell you things you can derive into a static single assignment tree. For example: if you run a subtraction on x86, it sets the Flags register, which affects branches. If another operation affecting the Flags register occurs before any sort of branch instruction, this is irrelevant, and thus not recorded into the tree. By extension, knowing how such instructions are affected by prior instructions allows you to create a full listing of the logic at each node, such that you can easily understand the conditions for a jump (e.g. if you do SUB %eax,4 and then JLE @addresss, you don't need to encode into the SSA tree that SUB may set the zero flag, signed flag, and overflow flags; you only need to encode that, under the condition %eax is less than or equal to 4, the program takes a branch).
That doesn't tell you what the original source code looks like; it tells you what conditions cause what changes to the tree. After that, you have a tree which reflects the same amount of relevant information (no more, no less) than the one generated from source code.
Yes, the optimization tree generated from a compiled binary really is equivalent to the one generated from source code.
You do know all modern compilers convert program source code into a static single assignment tree which is then optimized by simplifying complex graph traversals with weighted edges based on CPU architecture variations in speed of certain operations, right?
You can turn CPU instruction code into the same static single assignment tree, perform the same optimizations, and emit the code as if it were compiled from source code to target a different ISA.
That's just pointing out that there's gold, but also silver, platinum, and diamonds, and that nobody has dug into the new mines yet. In this case, we can create new mines.
The difference is in perception -- real currency is backed by a government somewhere.
No, fiat currency is legal tender and issued by a government. Its supply is controlled by a government. Its backing is production as a function of productive labor: all income is acquired by all productive activity, on balance. That productive activity includes any waste activity (e.g. if you make 10,000,000 cars and destroy 5,000,000 every year because they didn't sell, your business has to make up revenues eventually to stay on-balance, meaning you have to charge twice as much per car).
As a result, money continuously trends to represent both production and labor time such that it is an exchange medium to transfer labor time by transferring goods produced by that labor time. This is modified by wage inequality (I can trade fewer hours of my labor for more hours of a lower-paid worker's labor), market activities (e.g. business profits, taxes), and government monetary policies (e.g. sustained inflation rates by issuing more currency), and so the adjustment also tends to shift around the balance (debts shrink, revenues grow).
Currency essentially works because it has this representation. It has this representation because it is sufficiently-universal.
LLVM can compile ARM to x86. CIL is compiled to the current platform ISA. Why wouldn't you JIT, instrument, optimize?
The mistake is simple: it's easier to keep an orderly society if everyone is enslaved by a small, powerful policing force with severe response to any deviation from orderly behavior; however, this does not provide people with security.
Tag it "clickbait". Basically, Comey transferred information he was legally and ethically allowed to transfer in a situation where it seemed the best course to protect the integrity of the investigation and minimize the damages. Someone is making a big deal about releasing previously-unreleased information.
125 jobs also doesn't seem like enough of a potential gain in terms of salary cuts to offset the potential PR blowback
People economize. If you can somehow cut costs, you can get lower prices. People will always attempt to maximize the ends achievable by their means, and so will reach for the lowest-price thing that they expect to do the job.
Ever notice that people who cook a lot buy high-end kitchen appliances? $400 food processor, $100 knife, $450 KitchenAid mixer, and so forth. They expect these things to perform better. They'll last longer than the $20 things they buy, produce better results, and do so more-quickly so as to cut the time spent in the kitchen. Meanwhile, you need to mix cake batter twice a year and don't feel like spending 20 minutes doing so with a whisk, so you buy a $40 mixer.
If folks thought the $40 thing would actually do the same job as the $400 thing, they'd buy the $40 one.
Every time you find a new way to produce with less labor, you cut costs. Pay for 10 hours of work done at $20/hr or pay for 5 hours of work done at $20/hr? If those factory workers, putting 10 hours of their time in, can build that car, then they account for $200 of the cost. If they can build two cars in 10 hours, then they account for $100 of the cost of each car. If people aren't buying twice as many cars as a result, then you lay off half your factory workers. Propagate this up through everything that goes into the car and suddenly you can build the same car for half the price.
In the auto industry, they just start adding more-expensive extras to upper-end luxury cars, and move the luxury items downward as their costs fall. The car that a median-income American will buy is the one priced at a certain proportion of his income; that car today is loaded with more shit than the car median-income Americans bought 40 years ago, instead of just being the same car but shitloads cheaper.
If you're dealing with food or new tech (SSDs, new types of TVs, etc.), they come out costing $5,000 and then fall in price to $2,000, $1,000, $500, $350, for the same size and features. The increase in demand--the access to larger markets--retains or creates jobs making TVs. Food, on the other hand... we have far fewer farm workers today than we did in 1890.
Whenever we gain access to new goods and more goods, jobs change over. It's all well-and-good when TVs cost $300 and then a new kind of TV costs $3,000 and eventually costs $300, because people are already buying TVs at that demand rate. When the median income goes up by 20% over a decade and the price of cell phones goes up by 15%,
one in four people making, shipping, and retailing cell phones now no longer has a job doing that
. Then, we buy Bluetooth headsets to go with the cell phones with the money we're no longer spending on cell phones--and jobs are required (created) to make, ship, and retail those, replacing the jobs lost.
People are afraid their job is going to go away. It's not that they won't find another one; it's that their life will be disrupted. Every time someone else's job gets turned over, we all get wealthier; if it's your job, then everyone else gets wealthier and you go out looking for a new source of income so you can get a late start on some of this newly-available wealth. It's a constant process and it's great for everyone; however, when it's your turn to pay the blood sacrifice, you're suddenly not so keen.
This is essentially clickbait news to excite the emotions of those ignorant of economics. Basically, the article (and headline) relies on people's stupidity and sheer lack of education to drive them into a panicked rage.
Think about this: money buys what can be made. Making things takes time. Technology makes it take less time. Labor.
You work for 10 hours, you make $10/hr, the thing you make has to cost at least $100 or you don't get paid. Next guy works for 10 hours, makes $20/hr. You have to work 10 hours to buy something he worked on for 5; he only has to work 5 to buy something you worked on for 10.
Trading labor.
You can produce gold. Excessive amounts of labor can generate enough energy to do it by nuclear fusion; smaller amounts of labor can mine it out of the ground. If you use gold as currency, you get a source of instability by people hoarding it (can't just issue more) or finding new, rich veins.
If cryptocurrencies became the currency, then cryptocurrencies must reflect in value what can be bought.
Because of who holds these currencies and their lack of broad distribution as money, they don't have the purchasing flexibility of currency. That means you can't just take bitcoins and buy stuff. Bitcoins are nothing but a commodity, like gold: there's a cost to produce more, and a current stock.
Cryptocurrency valuations are not based on their capacity as a theoretical currency or even their cost to produce; they're based on a fascination. The market is narrow enough and the capacity to produce e.g. bitcoins is scarce; cryptocurrencies aren't scarce. It's like iPhones versus any Android phone: if people stop caring that it's an iPhone, it can't sell for $1,000 when it's identical to a $500 Android phone. Anyone can create a new cryptocurrency with little cost.
It's all speculation and bullshit.
oh bread turns to sugars? "Neanderthal man" didnt have bread either guy
Did they have fruit?! Did Neanderthals find things like peaches, gourds, or potato?! Bread isn't the only thing made out of starch!
Do things effect some individuals more than others? Yes, like all things in regards to bodily health there are variations.
You don't have bodily variations eliminating the need for 60%+ of calories.
It's impossible for Neanderthals to survive without sufficient calories, as a species. By contrast, the ones whose teeth don't rot out by the time they've raised offspring would pass on their genetics more-readily, and the species would thus have adapted as such. That was the point: a large proportion of population can actually make it pretty far eating tons of candy and sugary puddings like humans have for hundreds of years.
Then you go off on a tangent that has nothing to do with our conversation
You claim people will die of malnutrition. I gave a counterpoint about nutrition. You know nothing about nutrition.
It's highly-unlikely soda would destroy a population's capacity to survive by destroying their teeth. It's been proven sugar won't: fluoride and toothbrushes are a recent (late-1800s, early-1900s) cultural phenomena, while shitloads of sugary molasses, hard candies, chocolates, and sugar-glazed sweet breads have been frequently-consumed components of the daily diet for hundreds of years. Humans didn't die out from tooth-rot-before-their-20s.
Uh, what? Both the English and the Irish have a great number of sweets made with sugar in their historical culture. Bread puddings and potato cakes to start with. Chocolate entered Irish culture in the 1600s, and chocolate cakes are actually a staple Irish traditional dessert as far back as the 1700s.
The British first became familiar with tea in 1662.
The British also had a lot of sugary sweets throughout their diets well before tea appeared in their culture.
Can you try not making shit up? There's this thing called "reality" we like to stick to when talking about facts.
Yes, and if you spend x% more each year, then naturally you must ask for x% more money next year
They ask for the maximum amount of money donators are willing to give. Donators are site visitors. Where is this extra money coming from?
Are you telling me the same people are donating 30 times as much as they did 10 years ago? Like, did the 1,000,000 users who donated $5 each in 2007 instead donate $150 each?
Let's look at the part of my argument you ignored: the part about how they somehow managed to get this extra money. Where is this money coming from? Why are people donating more?
Running from October 22, 2007 to January 6, 2008, the 07-08 Wikimedia Foundation fundraiser led to contributions totaling 2.162 million dollars from nearly 45,000 donors worldwide.
Over a period of 50 days, more than 500,000 people from 150 countries donated directly to the Wikimedia Foundation, and nearly 200,000 people donated directly to 12 local chapters. During the 2010 Fundraiser, the Foundation received its millionth donation. Our messages were shown across Wikimedia projects localized into more than 80 languages.
# of donations, 2009: 243,668; total donations: $8,691,995; average donation: $35.67; campaign length: 67 days.
# of donations, 2010: 527,583; total donations: $15,026,289; average donation: $28.48; campaign length: 50 days.
Huh. In 2010, they spent 17 fewer days asking for money; they got less money per individual donations; and they got over twice as many donations.
International localization efforts increased substantially in 2011. Wikimedia volunteers showed their support by translating fundraising messages into over 100 languages to reach hundreds of millions of people. The Wikimedia Foundation integrated with a new payment processor to be able to process donations in 80 currencies, accepting 12 payment methods from countries worldwide.
Twenty more languages in 2011.
# of donations, 2011: 1,130,131; total donations: $24,018,004.28; average donation: $21.25; campaign length: 46 days.
Fewer fundraiser days, more donations, less per donation again!
The Wikimedia Foundation raised $51 million USD in the 2013-14 fiscal year, including $37 million from more than 2.5 million donors through the foundations' s online fundraising. Online funds were raised through desktop, mobile and email campaigns worldwide, making this Wikimedia’s most successful fundraising campaign to date. The overwhelming majority of the Foundation's funding comes from individual Wikipedia readers from all over the world giving an average of $15 USD.
# of donations, 2011: 2,666,167; total donations: $51,070,659.50; average donation: $19.14; campaign length: year-round rolling worldwide, approximately 14 days per country.
More donations, less per donation again!
More than 4 million donors around the world donated $75 million USD to make the Wikimedia Foundation's 2014–2015 fiscal year the most successful fundraising cycle in our history.
Four million donors!!!
Yeah, see, it looks like they're getting more money by getting more people donating. Bigger audience.
Commons content has grown significantly, and it does have large files. As far as I recall, it doesn't account for very many pageviews though, compared to Wikipedia.
You completely ignore that large file content is nothing compared to the entire history of all pages on every Wikipedia ever. Again: Wikipedia pages get edited constantly. The articles about Slashdot and Diazepam have been edited 50 times since August, 2016; the pages about Gravity and Epipens has been edited 250 times in the same period; the page about Donald Trump has had over 500 edits since 27 April 2017; the page about Ronald Reagan has ha
No sitting president has ever been unseated by impeachment. Nixon resigned to escape impeachment. Everywhere else, politicians resign because they're embarrassed.
Shit, I sent a dick pic to a girl I met at a bar and she told her friends. Better quit working toward social progress in the United States.
Much the same traffic? Does it have much the same content?
Every article retains its full history, from its creation to present state. Every edit. That means their database must handle an enormous amount of data, ever-growing, edit after edit. It never changes; it adds.
In 2007, Wikipedia's english site had 1.5 million articles; in 2015 it had 4.6 million. That's three times as many individual articles, with every edit to every article stored forever. The number of pieces and sheer amount of data stored and indexed is a complex, temporal function. For the number of articles, it's (time x rate[article creation]); for the number of pieces of data created, it's (time x rate[edits per article] x articles). Because the number of articles is increasing over time, you're looking at an exponential growth function. Note that it's exponential and not geometric because the rate of edits is related to a polynomial exponent of t, since the number of edits per time increases with time thus (t*(t*r)).
WMF also runs Wikinews, which carries news articles in dozens of languages. It runs Wikipedia in many languages all over the world. Every time it adds a new language, there's a new regional user base. If each language Wikipedia grows as above, then you have cubic growth until the rate of new Wikipedia languages slows.
The volume of data managed, the computer power required to manage that data, back-ups, administration costs, all of that is growing. It's growing faster every day.
As for the "unstable donation-based revenue stream", revenue has been on the up and up for every year of the foundation's existence
As per IRS NPO rules, the organization must show stability in the face of reasonable risks. Revenue streams from donations are not predictable; a sudden recession can slow the revenue stream while not slowing the expenses. As such, Wikipedia is legally required to maintain cash reserves some degree beyond their yearly expenses. When those expenses increase, they need to carry bigger cash reserves.
It looks to me the spending is not driven by need, but by the availability of cash, including cash to pay managers the payments disclosed in the Form 990
Out of $83 million, managers get less than $1 million. Product manager ~$100k, software engineer ~$144k. Management? Executive director $344k; General Counsel (lawyer) $258k; Deputy Director $302k; VP of Engineering $282k; Chief Operating Officer $250k. The executive compensations total about $2 million.
They also spent $3 on a post-it note pad, because that's included in spending of course.
whenever revenue has increased, spending has increased proportionally
From a legal perspective, IRS NPO rules require retention of a certain risk buffer, as well as limits to the amount of cash holding. You can't have revenues that much larger than your expenses.
That's not why spending increases with revenue, though, is it?
Revenue comes from donations. WMF gets donations from users. Users only donate so much. More users means more donations--also, more load, more costs in running the service. Being driven entirely on donations from people looking right at your site, revenue would be directly tied to how much load is on your site and, thus, the cost to support that load, wouldn't it?
Nobody gives a shit about Lyft. How often do you hear about some county trying to sue Lyft for something about taxi laws or whatever? How often do you see anything about Lyft employees being contractor or employees depending on who's making the argument? They're basically the same kind of service, and yet Uber gets all the negative press.
It's not because Uber did something; it's because nobody gives a shit about Lyft. You call the Uber while Googling for a good mechanic when your car breaks down--even if you use Lyft to call the Uber and Google using Bing. Uber gets criticized for Uber behaving terribly when Uber actually behaves terribly--which has been frequent--and it gets criticized for being what Uber is a hell of a lot, too.
Actually, we can look a bit closer at that.
WMF spends about 40% of its revenues on engineering. Hosting is just the small cost: I ran a video CDN for over 120 news stations, and the hosting cost was roughly $3,500/month. My salary was over 1.5 times that; and the whole thing was controlled by custom software developed and maintained at costs ranging around $300,000/year. That used a single, non-geographically-distributed database.
WMF has to engineer an enormous, high-availability network with hundreds of replicated caches, databases, and Web servers. It has to handle security, software upgrades, and basic administrative tasks across this infrastructure. Something as simple as keeping system patches up-to-date is an enormous undertaking in that kind of environment, largely due to the amount of risk carried. They don't have one guy running their databases; they have dozens of DBAs, hundreds of sysadmins in total. People who complain that they can't have a $144k salary because someone might hire an Indian for $85k to replace them.
Management and Governance is that whole "running a business" thing. It's the thing that lets you accomplish large tasks without expending enormous amounts of effort. Slashdot, Fark, Ubuntu, Debian, and the FSF all have governance; they don't all get paid for it, but they all invest time. For some organizations, like WMF and FSF, governance is a full-time job for several people, and so ... well, we pay them.
All of this means WMF has HR costs, management costs, and functional costs. It also sends 10% of its money to grants, so some millions are just going out to fund charitable efforts. WMF spends more on grants than on hosting; hell, they spend more on legal than on hosting, because they need to avoid enormous costs from frivolous lawsuits by people like Peter Thiel.
So it looks like it's actually kind of expensive to run WMF. They also need to float large amounts of cash holdings year-to-year in case of unstable donation-based revenue streams. As WMF grows in activities, that risk reserve needs to enlarge, so their bank accounts and cash holdings get bigger.
I feel we have a leadership issue.
The Democratic party and the Republican party are at odds idealistically, and I tend to favor somewhat of a conservative approach to progressive socioeconomic policy. Even so, the problem isn't exactly ideals, so much as it's wild radicalism: the Republicans and Democrats both leverage fear, uncertainty, and polarized idealism to grab at American mind share. Each party ups the ante at every opportunity, whether that be by loud shrieks and tantrums or by smug self-importance and thinly-veiled insults.
It is, in principle, possible to elevate a party above these behaviors. In the political scene, you have ... issues. The hysterical fanaticism coming from the opposition will drive people to lean toward whatever wild claims they make, regardless of merit.
If the Republicans begin calmly laying out plans to "bring jobs back to America" without screaming about threats from foreign nations sucking our economy dry, the Democrats can gain mind share by screaming about the damage to the working-class American by the poverty brought by loss of trade; whereas if the Democrats calmly discuss such economic consequences of protectionism, the Republicans can scream about America's hard-working citizens losing their jobs to China and India, about factories falling apart from disuse, and so forth. The Democrats would actually have the economics right in both cases; the screaming baboon in the room would have the vote.
To actually make progress, you need a well-reasoned plan and a forceful campaign to draw the support of Americans. It doesn't need to be a campaign of fear and volume; it only needs to provide a sense of security to the voter.
The Democrats and Republicans have the spotlight; the Greens and Libertarians are loony, and frequently have pretty bad political behavior as well. The smaller parties often behave in a manner suggesting they would be even worse than our two mains. It's a leadership issue: we need to replace these children with the adults in the room.
Nothing Trump has promised to do would be good for the country and quite a bit of his agenda will hurt a lot of people.
Everybody thinks in terms of trickle-down economics, and so believes moving the average price of pants from $15 to $150 would be good for America if Americans were making pants instead of importing them from China.
They don't understand that then Americans in total would have less capacity to buy things, because they don't grasp that a potential 178,000 jobs in making pants (in this example) is trivial compared to the 125,000,000 employed: they think adding 0.14% more jobs by making everyone else poorer "keeps the money in America", and equate money to wealth. Too bad the same money doesn't buy so much, meaning...
They don't understand that those lost purchases mean fewer potential jobs. You might get +106,000 instead of +178,000, with low enough American wages in the factories. That's a best-case scenario of paying the American factory workers as little as possible--minimum wage, minimum benefits. You lose purchasing ability in the form of, at minimum-wage salaries, 40% as many pants sold.
With that 40% loss in pants shipped and retailed, you lose jobs. A truck carries 20,000 pairs in a 40-foot shipping container (large trailer). 192.6 million pairs imported, now Americans make and buy 115.6 million, that's 77 million fewer pairs, 3,851 fewer truck shipments per year. 981 register scans per hour by a retail worker, 77 million fewer items sold, no longer need ~78,526 retail workers.
There's additional loss in logistics, stocking, and some other stuff. The reduction in items sold is enough to close a couple stores, technically, although you'd only eliminate at best 2,000-3,000 employees in total through that route. The cost of shipping also includes things like truck tires, fuel, and maintenance, and the demand for those goods goes down when we can't afford as many goods (the prices of which already include those costs): a couple mechanics, Goodyear factory workers, and the like lose their jobs. Nothing major, like the huge bomb dropped on retail.
Call it 80,000 jobs. You can create 106,000 minimum-wage factory jobs and eliminate 80,000 other jobs by manufacturing pants in America instead of China. That assumes that the only cost in running the factory is the factory workers; you create fewer jobs and lose more jobs when you also factor in the cost of organization (managers, etc.), equipment, buildings, fuel and electricity, and so forth, all of which exceed the respective costs in the Chinese manufacturing theater.
At the same time, those minimum-wage workers produce pants which cost ~66% more. For a minimum-wage retail worker, a $15 pair of pants costs 1.8 hours of labor; for the minimum-wage factory worker, the $25 pair of pants costs 3 hours of labor. They have to work 1.2 hours longer to draw the wages to produce them.
The cost by number of hours worked to earn the wages to buy the product gets larger if we raise the factory-worker's wage; the number of jobs created shrinks; and the number of jobs lost elsewhere increases. You quickly go from ~26,000 new jobs and 300,000,000 poorer Americans to a direct loss of jobs and even poorer Americans when any of the involved costs increase.
See how many steps you have to work through to get that far? All people see is, "Well, factory workers! Jobs! New jobs!" and "Oh, well, pay the factory workers more and they won't be so poor!" Never mind that paying them more will actually make it harder for them to afford the products they're making--it'll let them afford more Chinese import products, though.
Best part: the end result of a gain or loss in jobs--in employment rate, really--is an adjustment of the labor force to either consume the available additional jobs or reduce the number of job-seekers. In other words: short- and long-term changes keep us around a certain stable employment rate (it's ~5% in
Nixon was the only president to ever resign.
Depends. A lot of people can drink soda and never have a problem, even without brushing their teeth. Some people have acidic saliva and will need new teeth eventually. It has something to do with some food being acidic, I guess.
Have you ever noticed how bread tastes sweet when chewed? Your saliva breaks long-chain starches down into simple sugars. Potato is basically sugar. Likewise, most chewy sugar treats pass through your mouth rapidly without being fermented, mostly. The largest exposure is sucking candy, and even that's mostly-digested. It's comparable to complex carbohydrate intake.
Soda has carbonic acid and can soften teeth. It leeches calcium from the enamel. It doesn't etch teeth, and soda won't dissolve a tooth in any amount of time. Enamel can naturally heal from this; topical fluoride makes this happen more-rapidly, which affords the teeth more protection from physical abrasion. Much ground water contains fluoride in some concentration--often rather high concentrations.
I'm sure they could make it to at least 30. At around 15, they can have babies. Humans ate sweet, acidic things like cherries.
As for malnutrition, you overestimate how much nutrition you need. When you're burning so much raw energy, an abundance of food delivers well more than the minimum nutrition. Granted, in the case of humans, a more plant-heavy diet will greatly increase the risk of malnutrition; animal products provide a greater balance of almost all micronutrients (vitamin C is a particular exception; E is less-essential, but also more available in plants), whereas any given plant source tend to be barren of most nutrients save for any particulars (e.g. broccoli, at 8%DV per serving, is high in calcium, pretty barren in everything else; citrus fruits are high in Vitamin C; pineapple is relatively-high in magnesium; whole grains have trace amounts of everything and won't provide adequate amounts of anything without eating enormous amounts of rice and wheat).
You don't just burn off micronutrients. You can consume them metabolically, in specific ways. Building muscle will consume magnesium, for example. Once you've adapted to exertion, using that muscle burns lots of calories and consumes little magnesium.
"Family? Really? So I can quit and I'd be welcome back at anytime?" Using the word 'quit' wasn't a good idea and my "family" let my ass go and I'm not welcome anymore.
Well, you know, your douchebag brother isn't allowed at family gatherings anymore for being a huge douchebag. Same deal.
The politics are amazing.
A lot of people hate on Uber here, largely because Uber is a different form of organization due to being a different form of service provider and people can't differentiate. Uber allows you to essentially operate as an independent taxi (if that), supplying the value-add of connecting the customer to the service provider, as well as providing additional insurance while you operate, so long as you follow their ToS; people identify Uber as an employer and a taxi service, rather than an intermediary service provider like Expedia, Hotels.com, or AirBNB. To me, that's almost like accusing the Yellow Pages of being a taxi company because they list independent taxi services (Uber is the next evolution of that, except drivers aren't sanctioned taxis).
So that whole thing is silly and Uber is fine. Uber provides a great service, provides insurance, adds traceability and accountability, and generally increases the safety and decreases the cost of hailing a ride while giving people the option to easily get in and get out of the whole service business.
If Uber has workplace problems like sexual harassment, that's a problem. A serious problem. Uber's interaction with its clients on both ends may be great, and it may operate as a valuable business; and if its internals are a counterbalance, its internals need fixing. You don't get to murder people now and then because you're a firefighter and you put yourself in danger every day saving lives; nobody's keeping a running tally.
At the same time, we have Eric Holder.
Fuck.
Is this Eric Holder being Eric Holder, or is this a legitimate investigation with a real cause for concern? Because I could see Uber having serious internal problems, and I could see Holder being a serious political dicktard out to ruin innocent lives for his own political agenda. Both are possible, and, as above, nobody's keeping score; the facts of this case aren't the facts of every previous case.
Depending on the money velocity (of putting it in the bank vs spending it), that could create more or less money.
You missed the part that money, before you spend it, is in the bank; money, after you spend it, is in the bank. It moves from an account at Well's Fargo to another account at Well's Fargo, or from an account at Bank of America to an account at Wachovia. Most money is always in the bank, and petty cash is both small and briefly out of the bank.
In other words: spending the money doesn't take it out of the bank, and so letting it sit at rest doesn't reduce the fractional reserve. There is no "depending on the money velocity" because the money, spent or not, is in the bank. The question is whether it's at rest in an account or moving between accounts by being spent. You're equating "spending" with "not being in the bank", and that's not how it works.
Case in point: I never carry cash, but I spend over $50,000 every year.
However, putting it in stocks or bonds does not take any out of circulation
Trading money between stocks isn't buying goods. It's just traders trying to pull money out of your 401(k), basically.
When you buy into corporate bonds, the money does, in fact, go right into some corporate bank account. The corporation spends that, or else they don't want to have the bond. It's kind of hard to argue against debt as a good place to put money while arguing for the virtues of a fractional reserve system ;)
Bonds are also risky, though. There's a whole bond trade, which is about as unproductive as the stock market. When you have billions of dollars, it's generally easier to just negotiate a 3% savings account with your bank and let your bank be a bank.
They really do help about 1% of the people who actually need the help, the rest are loafs who are freeloading, skating taxes and doing cash-only jobs to provide the illusion of being in need of assistance.
We have a robust fraud investigation office servicing all levels of the welfare system. Inappropriate provisioning is mostly in the bureaucracy, where the rules don't cover people with real need and so the caseworkers use their judgment and bend the rules a tad. Actual abuse is approximately zero.
2) the amount of soda, junk food and useless commodities spent using EBT
Some of that is bad habits (soda...); some of it is a matter of people not being able to carry perishable goods or afford the higher-priced not-junk-food. Unsurprisingly, people end up eating what's cheap--in a number of ways. I've found I can design robust food plans on as little as $25/month for 2000kcal/day with several hours of Internet research and strict budgeting and planning behaviors--in other words, several dozen times the effort anyone invests. You have to know what you're going to eat pretty much every day 2 months in advance, what every meal is going to cost, and so forth. This also devotes a surprising amount of time to cooking and cleaning.
At a point, it consumes your life. Likewise, people may not have such planning skills. For the most part, they all believe they don't have another choice.
3) Using their own wads of 'cash' on booze, cigarettes, and anything else that would be shamed upon on the cant-have-that list
Pretty much how it works. A lot of welfare is supplemental--you can even get unemployment if you have a part-time job (20 hours = employed for half a job). That means you have an earmarked account (EBT) and your own personal money (cash).
Why even get a job, when you can get upwards of $300-800/month for free?
For UBI systems, the answer is "to gain more purchasing power and enhance your standard-of-living." For the current public aid system, you're comparing your $10.25/hr welfare with the $10.75/hr FedEx warehouse job that's going to replace and terminate your welfare benefit, so why do you want to get a job making 50 cents an hour?
If they aren't trying to look for new hire [slashdot.org] opportunities
People aren't born with the Computer Programmer DNA. Talent is a myth and poor people aren't going to have a special magical power welling from their souls. The whole idea is mysticism, same shit as homeopathy.
There are people who have had time to train themselves about things and are bad at life in general, so are potentially-useful employees. Better than any other employee? Doubtful. Even given the likelihood in large numbers, you're wasting resources digging for diamonds crapped out into the horse manure when you have access to actual diamond mines.
All this does is keep on enabling a broken government hand-out system, not police it or make it better.
Assuming the prices are better, it allows access to purchase more goods with the same money. That means maybe they can afford $12 family-pack toilet paper instead of $16 family-pack at Wal-Mart, and buy those $8 worth of fruits-and-vegetables (or, you know, pork--actual healthy food) instead of $5 worth of junk food.
There's something else you missed: Unemployment trends toward ~5% in the U.S. (2% in Japan, etc.). If we get lower unemployment, people who plan to take a later retirement generally get laid off less, and job opportunities tend to draw more people to exit college early. If we get higher unemployment, those late retirements slow, and people go as far as taking up grad school to avoid the barren job market (2008 Great Recession, that happened a lot). A low-unemployment market also fails to discourage household members seeking second incomes (e.g. bored hou
Limited applicability, but valid in some cases. Some.
This is part of the reason luxury items which actually cost more to make than most people can afford have higher profit margins (the businesses have higher net profits) than consumer goods. The other part is that high costs and small markets means lots of risk, meaning high probability of failure, and high barrier-to-entry: another player can't just stand up shop next to you and sell at a 10% margin versus your 20% if there are all of 1 million customers in the world for your product.
Fail either of these and you get slimmer margins. They're sort of the same thing: an inability to pay means a loss of demand--consumers aren't willing to pay by virtue of being incapable of exercising any such will, or they're unwilling to pay because the next guy has it cheaper. Higher luxury goods are so expensive their target markets are folks with more-than-well-enough money to spend so freely, and at the same time the markets are capable of supporting fewer suppliers than broad consumer markets and thus fewer competitors to undercut your prices.
The logical progression is, of course, that the ability to produce at lower cost allows you to sell to people with less money, taking even more profit. Keeping that 20% margin is hard, because now 100,000,000 consumers can buy your good instead of 1,000,000, and so a small-time competitor can slip in with a 10% margin and capture your entire vertical. At a point, lowering your prices won't attract enough additional consumers to generate an increase in profit, so these price cuts eventually stop until the product becomes even cheaper to make.
In the case of Amazon, however, it's not just Prime they're selling. They don't want Prime subscriptions so much as they want people to order that $12.99 family pack of toilet paper from them instead of pay $15.99 at Wal-Mart, and they expect these people live disbursement-to-disbursement and so can't plan too far ahead. These potential customers need one- or two-day shipping, and they need it free, so they need Prime.
If the target market is sufficiently small, then even the tiniest subsidy can cover a sizable discount. If 0.01% of their customers are buying groceries and paper towels on EBT, then a 50% discount means Prime for everyone else needs to cost $0.00395 more, or essentially nothing. If this makes an operating profit conversion, it's just slimming Prime margins as a razor-and-blade strategy.
Could end up being good for basically everyone involved except whoever Amazon takes business from. Cheaper access to necessities for EBT recipients, more business for Amazon, more efficiency in consumer spending across the economy at large.