"In 1942, the Spanish dictator General Franco moved Spain onto Central European Time to follow Nazi Germany."...and they remain there today. That is, Spain is West of Greenwich, but on the time zone one East of Greenwich. And its a 2013 article about this costing productivity, but they remain there today.
I recently caught an article by Max Read about how much of the Internet is "fake" in the sense that the readership is actually bots defrauding those paying for the ads: http://nymag.com/intelligencer...
I bring up this topic because it strikes me that the people paying for all these sites may soon demand to know how many verifiable human beings are actually in the audience.
5 years ago, much less 20, you wouldn't have caught me saying that a lot of the web should be not locked behind paywalls exactly, but require proof-of-individual-humanity at least. And that would in practice lead to "proof" via credit card. Now I'm ready to cave on that anyway.
I'd rather live in a society that has cops; rather drink in a bar that has bouncers. I'd rather talk in a space where threats of violence result in not only permanent expulsion, but the same legal consequences as saying the same thing to my face. (An assault charge. Mere threats are an assault. Hence the term "assault and battery" if actual contact occurs.) Right now, assault is a crime IRL but not on the Internet, in any practical sense.
And I think that 99% of this crap would stop if the commentators all knew that the threatened person could find out where they live and send over cops with an assault charge.
I have an appalling habit, of comments on news columns. It's pointless, I know, it's identical to shouting at the TV, but there you go. (It started with/. in the 90s) I notice that the NYT and WaPo, which require a sign-up to comment, almost never have harsh language, much less threats. I used to comment at The Atlantic, which did not...and now The Atlantic has shut down the whole comment system, since they were just providing a chat room that was mostly used by angry people, the thoughtful ones having been chased out of the bar with no bouncers.
versus the comment-count on more articles nearby that arguably fit the "news for nerds" description much better. It used to be rare to see a/. post so failed that the comment-count was two digits. Now it's common. 47 comments on "most powerful GPS", 26 on "200 million smartphones". I don't think the current/. crowd cares much about those kind of stories any more.
But here we are with 300+ on a sociological/political topic. The vast majority of them negative. More of a pile-on than a discussion worth reading, I got bored quickly. (Though the story of the guy who had to pretend to be "Alice" was great. I notice none of the pile-on gang replied to *that* post with some claim it was a flawed study that proved nothing. Switching claimed gender and getting an utterly different experience immediately, strikes me as a very clear scientific study, particularly as it is repeated with every class by the professor, semester after semester, and the outcome is, classic science here, reliably replicable)
The stated numbers suggest 4 ugly notes per day, per person - enough to make me drop my landline if they were phoned to me. Speaking of women just walking away from a medium, as I read through this topic, I couldn't find a post that was clearly from a woman. Maybe there were lots of posts by women slashdotters who happened not to mention it, but I frankly doubt it. I think there are barely any women at all reading this or commenting on it, and any that are, are reticent to mention their gender. How much time am I going to want to spend on a forum like that? It has more limited participation than friendlier ones, fewer points of view.
For anybody who wants another point of view, my big Xmas present this year was running into the excellent and funny prose of journalist Laurie Penny, who wrote a "long read" on her decade of experience with social media and being a huge magnet for online abuse: https://longreads.com/2018/03/...
Slashdot is just becoming a poor place to read any discussions of technology news, and a great place to read a pile-on about politics, but not about real politics like tax rates or industrial regulation or public programs; just the endless, tedious "my group is hard done by" bickering of politics-as-two-sports-teams. Got bored with that on USENET in the 1990s.
I now spend fewer minutes per week on slashdot than I used to spend per day. It's a shame.
There was an omission in the original article that I see continued here: why can't the "boss" tell that it has been automated, that the employee is not busy? I put "boss" in quotes because it's clear these people do not HAVE any boss at all, if there's nobody tracking their day closely enough to spot complete inactivity for months on end.
This actually raises a question of a second person not doing their own job: the boss clearly is not. A real boss understands the jobs below her well enough to take them over, if slowly and with documentation at hand. At the very least, they see their staff every day or nearly, ask them about specific issues at least once a week, sit down for a half-to-one-hour chat every month. If this is a professional enough staff position to be programming their work, they are not sweeping floors, they are doing complex "symbolic analysis" (i.e. screen work) that should require constant adjustment and correction to the corporate mission.
A good boss would have detected declining time spent on the original tasks, and slipstreamed in more work gradually, the drop to zero-hours would never have happened. NB: This increased work is the more usual phenomenon, resulting in the tragicomical loading of huge amounts of work onto a single position that is never given increased pay. They just eventually leave and get to forever tell the story of how it took 3 people to replace them. THAT'S a common story!
So the story should not have been about the undersupervised employees who have no responsibility to do their boss's job for them. The headline should be "Supervisors so clueless they don't know their employees have automated everything."
It's really interesting to me that the article writer and much of slashdot are not jumping on the "boss" thing - it suggests that supervision of IT staff is routinely this detached and clueless. Much depends on employees being willing, out of pride or whatever, to do more work for the same money, voluntarily. Which usually happens.
Thank you for warning me off. I was rather tempted by the Prime thing because of Jack Ryan, though I don't buy enough through Amazon to make it worthwhile otherwise. Combining TV shows with free delivery is certainly a bizarre, counterintuitive bundling, but it might have worked.
I guess I'll have to do without. Or look up this "piracy" stuff of which you speak.
Mostly, though, I've just been discovering all the TV I missed over many years that is now in box sets at my library. When it's easy for me to buy content without paying for a bundle of other stuff, I'll start buying.
"55 years" is practically identical with the time that "women's liberation" first became a common term. If it takes 55 years of pressure to get ONE Nobel awarded, it's not a very big effect.
She might be a "token" of course, in the Jackie Robinson sense: if there's a pervasive tendency to dismiss a group, that dismissal is highlighted when a particularly un-dismissable talent comes along, and you kind of have to recognize them, however late.
If there was a Nobel in Physics awarded to a woman every five years, when less than 20% of physicists are women, that would be a strong indicator. (17% of Cornell physics grad students are women). This is pretty much the opposite, being way under 17% of the recent Nobels.
It's cool to see this news come out today, when even Canadian Conservatives are reluctantly admitting admiration for Chrystia Freeland and her calm, don't-get-insulted renegotiations of NAFTA. She did indeed give up some concessions to Mr. Trump's horrors of the Canadian Dairy Industry. Under NAFTA, they were allowed access to only 3.25% of the Canadian dairy market. Under the new agreement, they will have access to a bigly 3.6%. No wonder Mr. Trump has hailed it as "historic".
I don't mean that a privately-made map is inherently public, of course, just that almost the only people who found it worthwhile to map were governments. Better put would be "inherently of low value, but to large numbers of people so that cheap access for everybody was the only way to pay for it".
A map has huge value when you need to find someplace new, but the huge majority of travel is to already-known locations. Cab drivers are an exception, but consider London, where "The Knowledge" required for cab drivers, is a memorized map learned on the job.
So there are very few indeed private companies mapping - the paper maps of your town for decades were just purchased data from the city government, sold for a tiny fraction of what it cost the city to make, because the city had to map every pipe and street anyway to maintain them. Indeed, to know where the heck the property lots were. (Land titles are generally a higher level of government, but where I worked, the Province had an agreement with the City to let the City map all lots inside its borders and provide that to Provincial Land Titles).
Google changed that with their cool car-with-8-cameras mapping, but generally also buys the City data because it's sold so cheaply - and is maintained every year, whereas you can see on the Google maps that the photos are only refreshed after multiple years.
For non-commercial use, City data is mostly free these days - "open data" initiatives became common years ago and they post up files in ESRI's "shape file" format (ESRI is the Microsoft of GIS, their formats are like MS office formats). There are also free standards like "KML" files.
Bottom line, there is no reason to let any private companies take over this space. The government mapping efforts have not ceased; the "value added" from information about business and services is *easily* exceeded by the OSM editing described here: people who live there will always have an advantage at highlighting local interests. (Also, the value of a location depends on who likes it, not "who pays google" to flag it.) The streetview is one of those features that's more cool than actually useful.
OSM is available for your phone, by the way, and works almost identically to google: uses your GPS to just show the map around you. Give it a try!
"They"? If you don't live in a democracy, it's "they" and you should probably leave for a place that has it.
If you do live in a democracy, it's "WE", and you should use your vote. All the problems you describe affect your entire neighbourhood. Get organized and all vote.
I can't remember the details now. (In particular, I cannot remember the date or who drove me home) But I can recall these kinds of bugs where you put in the "print" statement after every line, and figure, NOW it will be revealed......and the bug goes away. And I gradually removed print statements and brought the code back to not-inspected, and the bug stays gone.
Your REAL nightmare would be to have it come back at that point, it would start to feel like the X-files. (It's close to that in Ellen Ullman's nighmarish novel, "The Bug")
I never had it go THAT far, but I did "cure" some bugs by looking for them, having them disappear without me knowing what part of the search process changed something in the non-Print-statements and made it go away, then wondered for ages what the hell had really gone wrong...usually every time I used the program for years, still feeling mistrustful and often double-checking it.
Flu pandemic is one of the three "not ridiculously unlikely" emergencies our building picked for its "Emergency Preparedness" considerations. Basically, if something has a 1% chance per year of happening or better, then we'd include it. That came down to major earthquake, 100-year storm, and this, all of which can disrupt basic services and even food supply.
The movie "Contagion" shows a fairly realistic depiction of how such a pandemic could go, and food supplies do run short at one point, the army is handing out MREs, and not enough everywhere.
When I took training for it at work (running a water treatment plant) years back, they point out that it isn't about that many dying, or even that many being sick: it's how many people are home with sick kids and other relatives, how many SAY they are because they're terrified to leave the house. So we trained up all the office staff to be able to (basically, with supervision) run the plant so that even if we were at 25% (plant-experienced) staffing, we could keep the water on. Electrical and gas utilities have similar strategies. Grocery chains and private trucking companies do not, to my knowledge.
Can we round up all the journalists who cannot keep "energy" and "power flow" straight? Actually, find out which ones actually understand the notion of "first derivative", and to be really squishy-soft generous, they'd only have to get examples of change-over-time, which are most of them in journalism. Economics is riddled with them, and then there's climatology.
Anyway, round 'em all up and redirect them to a more appropriate profession, perhaps shoe sales or real estate development. Because if you can't understand that "five gigawatts" is a rate of energy flow (per second) and cannot be combined with the words "per day", you should not be writing for newspapers.
Oh, and you can't comment on climatology issues in any way unless you can explain "second derivative" clearly, and not just with time-based examples. This would not rule out lots of people on the other (wrong) side of the debate from myself, but it would mean at least the debates were not hopelessly stupid.
... from the usual "political correctness" complaint, which is somebody with a regular appearance on a major newspaper page, TV or radio show, complaining to an audience of millions that they are being "silenced". ( https://www.theguardian.com/us... )
On a practical note, if these millions are "unsilenced", how I am supposed to find time to listen to them? I can only listen to each of even one million people every month, if I spend 18 hours a day listening to each for two seconds.
Basic research! Nothing more likely to "fail" in the commercial sense, and so hated by free market companies that hate risk (all of them); nothing more likely - longer term - to come up with the big finds that create whole new economic sectors.
Their "ARPAnet" idea wasn't even supposed to make money, that's the funny bit.
With just a little luck, some of this research will end up creating whole new economic opportunities, which will result in a few people becoming billionaires, who will probably, with tiresome regularity, turn out to be libertarians who don't believe government can do anything useful and attempt to pay no taxes.
Ah, those public bureaucrat-scientists struggling for grants: America's true Job Creators.
(Juuuust kidding, of course. America's real job creators are consumers: without people putting butts in seats of the restaurant, neither the cooks&waiters, nor the restaurant owner, nor his banker, have any jobs.)
It is great to be prepared for natural disasters, flu epidemics, and so on, and that's a great list. A dramatist would say your list is prep for a "Man vs Nature" story.
The hedgies in this story, however, are concerned with Man vs Man.
They really think that the downtrodden masses will rise up against them. The discussion was not about food, shelter, solar power: it was about "angry mobs" and security guards.
This comes up but rarely in history... mobs of the poor, if they aren't as poor as Les Miserables, on the brink of starving, just aren't your security problem. For a poor person in extremis, "expend more energy, taking a risk on violence against those with more resources, including resources for violence", is almost never a good idea.
The vastly more realistic scenario from history is found in Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell" about improv disaster response to 1906 San Francisco, another earthquake in Mexico City, Halifax 1917, London during the Blitz, 9/11, Katrina and Sandy. In every case, people responded by helping others with ingenuity and generosity, not turning into destructive mobs. And in every case, the Authorities assumed they'd turn into destructive mobs and sent troops out into the streets to "keep order". Mostly, innocent people got shot by panicky, trigger-happy army troops, regular police not being enough for the fears of the politicians. (With New Orleans, it was complicated by the troops just being back from Iraq. They did not see dark-skinned civilians as people to Serve and Protect.)
By far the best security advice to give these rich people is to not make that mistake. By far their best security strategy, given history, is to stockpile HUGE amounts of food, clothing, medical supplies, shelters, energy, and make friends with six doctors to come bring their families when things get tense.
Then give it away. Soon you will be surrounded by a thousand "guards" who will remain grateful and loyal even should the supplies get short.
It's both funny and pathetic that he could have laid out that case, shown all the histories, had all the facts on his side, and not made a dent in their mindset. I really don't think their minds are capable of going there. They see regular people as an enemy of sorts, to be defeated - all the time, not just after the giant meteor strike.
There, I have now doubled the number of times that "France" has been mentioned in a discussion that includes extravagant statements about the unaffordability of nuclear power, how it only survives by huge subsidies.
None of these people ever explain how France has not gone broke, relying on it for 75% of power generation for over 40 years. The power utility has separate books, so you're presumably including a vast nuclear-wing conspiracy to steal trillions from French taxpayers, decade after decade, right-wing and left-wing governments alike keeping the dread secret... of the money smuggled over to the electrical utility to fake up a profit.
Or we could go with Occam's and figure they really produce power with nukes at about a mid-range price for Europe, far cheaper than Germany and Belgium: https://1-stromvergleich.com/e...
As for safety and all that, this is France, fercrissake; they take to the streets in crowds of black masks, smashing windows, in support of disgruntled train drivers: https://www.theguardian.com/wo......so I really think they would have called their government on the malfeasance if there had been any with nuclear reactors.
It totally blows me away how aggressively Americans preserve their lack of interest in other countries. The fact that something worked somewhere else never makes any impression on them. Everybody else has universal health insurance? Still can't actually work. (On the right.) France runs the country on nukes since Disco was cool? It's still technically and financially impossible. (On the left.)
...and the story "The Gang" which was autobiographical, not fictional. Ellison joined a juvenile street gang in the 1950's (think West Side Story) just to get background for writing about them. The initiation involved a knife-fight. Keep in mind Ellison was 5'2".
He got a 7-inch height upgrade being played by a 24-year-old James Caan in the 1964 "Alfred Hitchcock Hour" teleplay he wrote himself. With the gang leader played by none other than Walter Koenig. Both men appeared in B5 over thirty years later.
I did assume that google would not miss any opportunity for revenue. But I don't think your story invalidates the assumption unless your "town building" was a restaurant building in a town. Locating public buildings enhances googles value, but google has little hope of getting every town to pay, so I can see where public buildings would get in free.
I spent most of my career building GIS maps for Calgary, Canada, for the water & sewer systems; our whole asset-management strategy was based on a GIS map/database of all infrastructure. (Some screen snaps: http://brander.ca/work.html )
It was like the sun coming out when I found open-source GIS solutions in PostGIS and QGIS about 2013, and it freed me from the "ESRI jail", wherein for large corporate mapping, ESRI is the 800-lb gorilla of the market, and all its data formats are proprietary and impenetrable. That was when I found OSM, and the salient feature to me is this:
* For a building to be named in Google, the business has to pay Google. * For a building to be identified on OSM, somebody has to like that business enough to type it in. It just needs one fan.
That's it. One serves the google accounts payable dept, one serves the general public. Really, if the map is good enough to find routes and get you there, the actual map service is a wash, and this feature is critically important.
Current WH staff setting up their own private accounts after the election to use for White House business was not a notable issue. It went away in a few days. https://www.politico.com/story...
The Bush WH staff using a private server for WH communications during the sell-job for the Iraq War in 2002-2003, and then wiping the server, deleting 22 million emails rather than hand any over to the government records office, was not an issue. It went away in a few days at the time, and again in a few days during the 2016 election when Newsweek magazine attempted to revive the story:
No, I am not waving my arms around crying conspiracy. The press really did harp on the HRC email story, some 30X as much coverage as "issues" got; but the thing is, people kept clicking on the stories; and not changing channels; and the press responds to that.
I really don't understand it and don't have a theory for why Americans are so fascinated with the slightest wrongs done by Democrats (I mean, FIVE investigations of Clinton firings in the WH travel office??) and so uninterested in the most jaw-dropping things done by the right, but they just are. I think Al Franken had it right, that the only press bias is a "sell eyeballs to advertisers" bias and the unfairness of it all must be laid at the feet of The People themselves. Truly, Americans have the government they deserve.
Here's my two "greatest hits" on that score: 1) Nixon's collusion with a foreign power (S. Vietnam) to ruin the 1968 Peace Talks to deny Democrats a win during the election campaign was called treason by some who became aware of his calls to them via CIA wiretaps:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0......20,000 Americans died in the ensuing four years. (NB: Might have happened either way; but Nixon's *intent* was to extend the war.)
2) Eight news organizations paid to have the Florida ballots carefully and repeatedly recounted and found that Gore won no matter how you counted hanging chads and dimples and all that:
https://www.consortiumnews.com......the Washington Post put that story on page a10 and it was gone in a few days. I was actually unaware of it, and I'm a news junkie.
So that's what will happen to this story too. I don't know why it works this way with American news, but it does.
Both those links come from Jon Schwarz' eye-opening history in The Intercept last December: https://theintercept.com/2017/......where Schwarz dryly notes that: "For their part, the elite print and broadcast media accepted the right’s critique that they were – as huge profit-driven corporations naturally tend to be – horribly liberal. "...and I'm sure that's part of it. But the news media can't control stories all THAT well. People really do just look away after a few days, from Republican malfeasance, all the way up to torture. Heck, Democrats look away from it, including Obama looking the other way on torture.
So this is nothing, and will be gone in a few days. QED. I'm willing to lay money on it if anybody is skeptical.
Your "properly constructed roads" is a "No True Scotsman" dodge. Roads that carry only local car traffic (i.e. roads that primarily exist to provide access to the houses along it, little or no "pass through" traffic) are built to standards that cause that level of traffic to wear them out in about 40 years. Building them to last longer would be a waste of money because the extra is being spent 40 years before it is needed, at interest cost. (Another 19-year-old 2nd-year engineering student in my class was aghast, why don't we just build all roads to last 200 years? The prof asked him if he was serving the public trust by asking them for 3X as much money, or building "monuments to engineers" on somebody else's dime? And yes, spending 3X as much to get 5X as long-lasting a road is a fail, because it's all spent up front, and money has a time-value.)
But cities (this is not yet apparent in much of North America) go on for hundreds of years and those roads will require many re-pavings. Right now, so many roads in America are on their first paving that was paid for by the purchase of the house (developer had to build the road to sell the subdivision and added the cost of pipes and roads to the house-price), and governments have yet to truly face up to the long-term maintenance cost of asphalt. So instead of keeping the road up, they let them run downhill into bad surface - potholes, cracks - and America is a much shabbier-looking place than it was in the 1960s. When they finally face up to it, the cost of this marvelous free public gift to anybody who owns a car may finally stimulate some taxes or fees that target the beneficiaries of public money, not everybody.
For some reason, this made me think that it would be like the whole nation was conveyor belts, just step on and go anywhere. Obviously, this is is true of any nation with roads, but the "free" thing makes a psychological difference: you spend money to go places you have a need to go, but if it's free, you might wander anywhere aimlessly, like a man out for a walk.
The conveyor belt image sent me over to my Heinlein collection to carefully re-read the start of "The Roads Must Roll", confirming what I'd suspected: Heinlein never mentions payment. The entrance to the Road lacks all toll-booths or other mentions of payment. Indeed, how could there be when he describes that you can get on anywhere, just step on the outer 5MPH strip going by, and work your way inward to faster strips if you aren't travelling locally. There are, however, many paragraphs expended clarifying that the whole economy is dependent on them, and they re-designed all their cities around them.
I think Mr. TANSTAAFL actually proposed that moving mechanical roads would be like the asphalt roads they replaced: just free for all to use. The same concept of "public road" that every government ever had to maintain (at great public expense, your city streets department is likely more expensive than either water or sewer) just had the cost of maintaining mechanism tacked on. They already had to up the roads budget 500% to install and maintain asphalt instead of dirt decades ago, this is just the same increase again as society became another 500% richer from the "Douglas-Martin Sunpower screens" and so forth.
Pigeonholing Heinlein as a libertarian, or militarist, or whatever, was never wise; the guy had his opinions, but his imagination that roamed over all sorts of ideas always ruled over that when he had an idea he couldn't resist.
Computers are a commodity for me, like 99.99% of their purchasers. We have no meaningful option to switch from Intel, because the Genius of the Free Market (tm) took away all our alternatives one-by-one, as we watched the last three decades of open, fair competition. Now the great winner of the Free Market competition, presumably the best of the best, has failed us. And we must wait (no option) for them to fix their failure.
The bigger picture for me is that I don't want to buy one of their computers in the meantime. Why would I? They're all damaged goods, it's as if they were still selling the e-coli lettuce and asking us to just take extra care eating it.
With the first two bugs, I'd heard that, ummm... coffee lake (?) by late this fall might have fixes out of the factory. But not these next eight? When exactly should I buy?
The 'when' question arises if you look back over a few years of my/. posts and see how many have the basic subject of "Moore's Law is over, at least on the desktop", where my 2013 purchase of an i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz × 12 is still hard to beat by more than about 30% - and the chip model, if not my purchase, is already over 5 years of age. I'm mainly wanting a new machine because by this point there's a new bus, faster memory and SSD, though even all that still won't give me a whole doubling of performance.
So I have the option to just wait - what? Will another year do it now? For "Latte Lake"? (I made that up.)
For Intel, it cuts both ways; this has to be holding up other sales, but also, when they have bug-free hardware to sell us again, surely there will be a big burst of replacements. Hard to imagine a stronger economic pressure...except for that dratted "monopoly" status that makes them pretty insensitive to all user pain and pressure.
Because a "good alignment" has the one clear definition but "good movie" does not?
Perhaps a female director could clarify for me how a female character feels about a male character by directing the cameraman to do a long, slow scan up the male's body, which a male director would not think to do, since he doesn't classify ogling males as entertainment. A female director could still direct "male gaze" shots because she's got a hundred years of past movies to study; "female gaze" shots she would have an instinct for.
But also, in general, any group that's been discriminated against becomes automatically the smart hire, because they have to be "twice as good to go half as far".
Well said. I post to/. every time programming as a job comes up, to relate my experience that the great career was having IT as your second skill. I got a CPSC degree and all, but after my Engineering degree, and for nearly all my career, my title was Engineer. (Waterworks and sewer stuff - GIS mapping, construction mgmt, etc.)
I had a far safer job because I was much harder to replace; very few have dual skills for some reason. Division-of-labour is great, and I'm sure that full-time programmers are way better programmers than I; but we really need far more dual-skill people in the business, interfacing between the customer dept and the IT department. The hardest thing to get right is the specs.
SF writer Harry Harrison had a character in a novel that valued all human hours - janitorial and CEO - the same, justify that system. (I'm pretty sure it was one of the later Stainless Steel Rat books.)
The character points out that the huge majority of society's wealth is actually common property - the intellectual property that starts with the lever, the wheel, and fire, going on up through metallurgy and electronics - is long past patent dates, mostly has unknown inventors.
The existing way of using that is to let anybody use it for free, not just at the time they're messing about inventing the next improvement, but forever, for generations after (say) Ford leveraged 1000 years of progress in making things out of metal and developing heat-engines, to make the Ford family rich.
Viewed that way, suddenly the notion that the 5th generation Fords owe a lot more taxes than the rest of us, as society's closest-approach to fairly charging them for use of common intellectual property, seems a lot more moral than "theft by moochers". The existing system lets Mark Zuckerberg mooch all the intellectual property he wants from everything from the development of fabric, bronze and wheat to the development of HTML, add on another 0.1% new creativity, and keep the lot.
You can invent some scheme to charge society's most-successful leveragers of our common property - physical/environmental, human-infrastructural, and IP - for the shoulders-of-giants upon which they built, or you can just use the existing "progressive taxation" system, which has tradition going for it and seems to work.
The real problem with UBI Is that it takes a *lot* of said money, and it may just not be there. It's going to take a lot of experiments and scaling-up to develop something with the positives of UBI and doesn't go broke.
Slashdot Mirror
https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
"In 1942, the Spanish dictator General Franco moved Spain onto Central European Time to follow Nazi Germany." ...and they remain there today. That is, Spain is West of Greenwich, but on the time zone one East of Greenwich. And its a 2013 article about this costing productivity, but they remain there today.
I recently caught an article by Max Read about how much of the Internet is "fake" in the sense that the readership is actually bots defrauding those paying for the ads:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer...
I bring up this topic because it strikes me that the people paying for all these sites may soon demand to know how many verifiable human beings are actually in the audience.
5 years ago, much less 20, you wouldn't have caught me saying that a lot of the web should be not locked behind paywalls exactly, but require proof-of-individual-humanity at least. And that would in practice lead to "proof" via credit card. Now I'm ready to cave on that anyway.
I'd rather live in a society that has cops; rather drink in a bar that has bouncers. I'd rather talk in a space where threats of violence result in not only permanent expulsion, but the same legal consequences as saying the same thing to my face. (An assault charge. Mere threats are an assault. Hence the term "assault and battery" if actual contact occurs.) Right now, assault is a crime IRL but not on the Internet, in any practical sense.
And I think that 99% of this crap would stop if the commentators all knew that the threatened person could find out where they live and send over cops with an assault charge.
I have an appalling habit, of comments on news columns. It's pointless, I know, it's identical to shouting at the TV, but there you go. (It started with /. in the 90s) I notice that the NYT and WaPo, which require a sign-up to comment, almost never have harsh language, much less threats. I used to comment at The Atlantic, which did not...and now The Atlantic has shut down the whole comment system, since they were just providing a chat room that was mostly used by angry people, the thoughtful ones having been chased out of the bar with no bouncers.
versus the comment-count on more articles nearby that arguably fit the "news for nerds" description much better. It used to be rare to see a /. post so failed that the comment-count was two digits. Now it's common. 47 comments on "most powerful GPS", 26 on "200 million smartphones". I don't think the current /. crowd cares much about those kind of stories any more.
But here we are with 300+ on a sociological/political topic. The vast majority of them negative. More of a pile-on than a discussion worth reading, I got bored quickly. (Though the story of the guy who had to pretend to be "Alice" was great. I notice none of the pile-on gang replied to *that* post with some claim it was a flawed study that proved nothing. Switching claimed gender and getting an utterly different experience immediately, strikes me as a very clear scientific study, particularly as it is repeated with every class by the professor, semester after semester, and the outcome is, classic science here, reliably replicable)
The stated numbers suggest 4 ugly notes per day, per person - enough to make me drop my landline if they were phoned to me. Speaking of women just walking away from a medium, as I read through this topic, I couldn't find a post that was clearly from a woman. Maybe there were lots of posts by women slashdotters who happened not to mention it, but I frankly doubt it. I think there are barely any women at all reading this or commenting on it, and any that are, are reticent to mention their gender. How much time am I going to want to spend on a forum like that? It has more limited participation than friendlier ones, fewer points of view.
For anybody who wants another point of view, my big Xmas present this year was running into the excellent and funny prose of journalist Laurie Penny, who wrote a "long read" on her decade of experience with social media and being a huge magnet for online abuse:
https://longreads.com/2018/03/...
Slashdot is just becoming a poor place to read any discussions of technology news, and a great place to read a pile-on about politics, but not about real politics like tax rates or industrial regulation or public programs; just the endless, tedious "my group is hard done by" bickering of politics-as-two-sports-teams. Got bored with that on USENET in the 1990s.
I now spend fewer minutes per week on slashdot than I used to spend per day. It's a shame.
There was an omission in the original article that I see continued here: why can't the "boss" tell that it has been automated, that the employee is not busy? I put "boss" in quotes because it's clear these people do not HAVE any boss at all, if there's nobody tracking their day closely enough to spot complete inactivity for months on end.
This actually raises a question of a second person not doing their own job: the boss clearly is not. A real boss understands the jobs below her well enough to take them over, if slowly and with documentation at hand. At the very least, they see their staff every day or nearly, ask them about specific issues at least once a week, sit down for a half-to-one-hour chat every month. If this is a professional enough staff position to be programming their work, they are not sweeping floors, they are doing complex "symbolic analysis" (i.e. screen work) that should require constant adjustment and correction to the corporate mission.
A good boss would have detected declining time spent on the original tasks, and slipstreamed in more work gradually, the drop to zero-hours would never have happened. NB: This increased work is the more usual phenomenon, resulting in the tragicomical loading of huge amounts of work onto a single position that is never given increased pay. They just eventually leave and get to forever tell the story of how it took 3 people to replace them. THAT'S a common story!
So the story should not have been about the undersupervised employees who have no responsibility to do their boss's job for them. The headline should be "Supervisors so clueless they don't know their employees have automated everything."
It's really interesting to me that the article writer and much of slashdot are not jumping on the "boss" thing - it suggests that supervision of IT staff is routinely this detached and clueless. Much depends on employees being willing, out of pride or whatever, to do more work for the same money, voluntarily. Which usually happens.
Thank you for warning me off. I was rather tempted by the Prime thing because of Jack Ryan, though I don't buy enough through Amazon to make it worthwhile otherwise. Combining TV shows with free delivery is certainly a bizarre, counterintuitive bundling, but it might have worked.
I guess I'll have to do without. Or look up this "piracy" stuff of which you speak.
Mostly, though, I've just been discovering all the TV I missed over many years that is now in box sets at my library. When it's easy for me to buy content without paying for a bundle of other stuff, I'll start buying.
"55 years" is practically identical with the time that "women's liberation" first became a common term. If it takes 55 years of pressure to get ONE Nobel awarded, it's not a very big effect.
She might be a "token" of course, in the Jackie Robinson sense: if there's a pervasive tendency to dismiss a group, that dismissal is highlighted when a particularly un-dismissable talent comes along, and you kind of have to recognize them, however late.
If there was a Nobel in Physics awarded to a woman every five years, when less than 20% of physicists are women, that would be a strong indicator. (17% of Cornell physics grad students are women). This is pretty much the opposite, being way under 17% of the recent Nobels.
It's cool to see this news come out today, when even Canadian Conservatives are reluctantly admitting admiration for Chrystia Freeland and her calm, don't-get-insulted renegotiations of NAFTA. She did indeed give up some concessions to Mr. Trump's horrors of the Canadian Dairy Industry. Under NAFTA, they were allowed access to only 3.25% of the Canadian dairy market. Under the new agreement, they will have access to a bigly 3.6%. No wonder Mr. Trump has hailed it as "historic".
I don't mean that a privately-made map is inherently public, of course, just that almost the only people who found it worthwhile to map were governments. Better put would be "inherently of low value, but to large numbers of people so that cheap access for everybody was the only way to pay for it".
A map has huge value when you need to find someplace new, but the huge majority of travel is to already-known locations. Cab drivers are an exception, but consider London, where "The Knowledge" required for cab drivers, is a memorized map learned on the job.
So there are very few indeed private companies mapping - the paper maps of your town for decades were just purchased data from the city government, sold for a tiny fraction of what it cost the city to make, because the city had to map every pipe and street anyway to maintain them. Indeed, to know where the heck the property lots were. (Land titles are generally a higher level of government, but where I worked, the Province had an agreement with the City to let the City map all lots inside its borders and provide that to Provincial Land Titles).
Google changed that with their cool car-with-8-cameras mapping, but generally also buys the City data because it's sold so cheaply - and is maintained every year, whereas you can see on the Google maps that the photos are only refreshed after multiple years.
For non-commercial use, City data is mostly free these days - "open data" initiatives became common years ago and they post up files in ESRI's "shape file" format (ESRI is the Microsoft of GIS, their formats are like MS office formats). There are also free standards like "KML" files.
Bottom line, there is no reason to let any private companies take over this space. The government mapping efforts have not ceased; the "value added" from information about business and services is *easily* exceeded by the OSM editing described here: people who live there will always have an advantage at highlighting local interests. (Also, the value of a location depends on who likes it, not "who pays google" to flag it.) The streetview is one of those features that's more cool than actually useful.
OSM is available for your phone, by the way, and works almost identically to google: uses your GPS to just show the map around you. Give it a try!
"They"? If you don't live in a democracy, it's "they" and you should probably leave for a place that has it.
If you do live in a democracy, it's "WE", and you should use your vote. All the problems you describe affect your entire neighbourhood. Get organized and all vote.
I can't remember the details now. (In particular, I cannot remember the date or who drove me home) But I can recall these kinds of bugs where you put in the "print" statement after every line, and figure, NOW it will be revealed... ...and the bug goes away. And I gradually removed print statements and brought the code back to not-inspected, and the bug stays gone.
Your REAL nightmare would be to have it come back at that point, it would start to feel like the X-files. (It's close to that in Ellen Ullman's nighmarish novel, "The Bug")
I never had it go THAT far, but I did "cure" some bugs by looking for them, having them disappear without me knowing what part of the search process changed something in the non-Print-statements and made it go away, then wondered for ages what the hell had really gone wrong...usually every time I used the program for years, still feeling mistrustful and often double-checking it.
Flu pandemic is one of the three "not ridiculously unlikely" emergencies our building picked for its "Emergency Preparedness" considerations. Basically, if something has a 1% chance per year of happening or better, then we'd include it. That came down to major earthquake, 100-year storm, and this, all of which can disrupt basic services and even food supply.
The movie "Contagion" shows a fairly realistic depiction of how such a pandemic could go, and food supplies do run short at one point, the army is handing out MREs, and not enough everywhere.
When I took training for it at work (running a water treatment plant) years back, they point out that it isn't about that many dying, or even that many being sick: it's how many people are home with sick kids and other relatives, how many SAY they are because they're terrified to leave the house. So we trained up all the office staff to be able to (basically, with supervision) run the plant so that even if we were at 25% (plant-experienced) staffing, we could keep the water on. Electrical and gas utilities have similar strategies. Grocery chains and private trucking companies do not, to my knowledge.
Can we round up all the journalists who cannot keep "energy" and "power flow" straight? Actually, find out which ones actually understand the notion of "first derivative", and to be really squishy-soft generous, they'd only have to get examples of change-over-time, which are most of them in journalism. Economics is riddled with them, and then there's climatology.
Anyway, round 'em all up and redirect them to a more appropriate profession, perhaps shoe sales or real estate development. Because if you can't understand that "five gigawatts" is a rate of energy flow (per second) and cannot be combined with the words "per day", you should not be writing for newspapers.
Oh, and you can't comment on climatology issues in any way unless you can explain "second derivative" clearly, and not just with time-based examples. This would not rule out lots of people on the other (wrong) side of the debate from myself, but it would mean at least the debates were not hopelessly stupid.
... from the usual "political correctness" complaint, which is somebody with a regular appearance on a major newspaper page, TV or radio show, complaining to an audience of millions that they are being "silenced". ( https://www.theguardian.com/us... )
On a practical note, if these millions are "unsilenced", how I am supposed to find time to listen to them? I can only listen to each of even one million people every month, if I spend 18 hours a day listening to each for two seconds.
Basic research! Nothing more likely to "fail" in the commercial sense, and so hated by free market companies that hate risk (all of them); nothing more likely - longer term - to come up with the big finds that create whole new economic sectors.
Their "ARPAnet" idea wasn't even supposed to make money, that's the funny bit.
With just a little luck, some of this research will end up creating whole new economic opportunities, which will result in a few people becoming billionaires, who will probably, with tiresome regularity, turn out to be libertarians who don't believe government can do anything useful and attempt to pay no taxes.
Ah, those public bureaucrat-scientists struggling for grants: America's true Job Creators.
(Juuuust kidding, of course. America's real job creators are consumers: without people putting butts in seats of the restaurant, neither the cooks&waiters, nor the restaurant owner, nor his banker, have any jobs.)
It is great to be prepared for natural disasters, flu epidemics, and so on, and that's a great list. A dramatist would say your list is prep for a "Man vs Nature" story.
The hedgies in this story, however, are concerned with Man vs Man.
They really think that the downtrodden masses will rise up against them. The discussion was not about food, shelter, solar power: it was about "angry mobs" and security guards.
This comes up but rarely in history ... mobs of the poor, if they aren't as poor as Les Miserables, on the brink of starving, just aren't your security problem. For a poor person in extremis, "expend more energy, taking a risk on violence against those with more resources, including resources for violence", is almost never a good idea.
The vastly more realistic scenario from history is found in Rebecca Solnit's "A Paradise Built in Hell" about improv disaster response to 1906 San Francisco, another earthquake in Mexico City, Halifax 1917, London during the Blitz, 9/11, Katrina and Sandy. In every case, people responded by helping others with ingenuity and generosity, not turning into destructive mobs. And in every case, the Authorities assumed they'd turn into destructive mobs and sent troops out into the streets to "keep order". Mostly, innocent people got shot by panicky, trigger-happy army troops, regular police not being enough for the fears of the politicians. (With New Orleans, it was complicated by the troops just being back from Iraq. They did not see dark-skinned civilians as people to Serve and Protect.)
By far the best security advice to give these rich people is to not make that mistake. By far their best security strategy, given history, is to stockpile HUGE amounts of food, clothing, medical supplies, shelters, energy, and make friends with six doctors to come bring their families when things get tense.
Then give it away. Soon you will be surrounded by a thousand "guards" who will remain grateful and loyal even should the supplies get short.
It's both funny and pathetic that he could have laid out that case, shown all the histories, had all the facts on his side, and not made a dent in their mindset. I really don't think their minds are capable of going there. They see regular people as an enemy of sorts, to be defeated - all the time, not just after the giant meteor strike.
There, I have now doubled the number of times that "France" has been mentioned in a discussion that includes extravagant statements about the unaffordability of nuclear power, how it only survives by huge subsidies.
None of these people ever explain how France has not gone broke, relying on it for 75% of power generation for over 40 years. The power utility has separate books, so you're presumably including a vast nuclear-wing conspiracy to steal trillions from French taxpayers, decade after decade, right-wing and left-wing governments alike keeping the dread secret... of the money smuggled over to the electrical utility to fake up a profit.
Or we could go with Occam's and figure they really produce power with nukes at about a mid-range price for Europe, far cheaper than Germany and Belgium:
https://1-stromvergleich.com/e...
As for safety and all that, this is France, fercrissake; they take to the streets in crowds of black masks, smashing windows, in support of disgruntled train drivers: ...so I really think they would have called their government on the malfeasance if there had been any with nuclear reactors.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
It totally blows me away how aggressively Americans preserve their lack of interest in other countries. The fact that something worked somewhere else never makes any impression on them. Everybody else has universal health insurance? Still can't actually work. (On the right.) France runs the country on nukes since Disco was cool? It's still technically and financially impossible. (On the left.)
...and the story "The Gang" which was autobiographical, not fictional. Ellison joined a juvenile street gang in the 1950's (think West Side Story) just to get background for writing about them. The initiation involved a knife-fight. Keep in mind Ellison was 5'2".
He got a 7-inch height upgrade being played by a 24-year-old James Caan in the 1964 "Alfred Hitchcock Hour" teleplay he wrote himself. With the gang leader played by none other than Walter Koenig. Both men appeared in B5 over thirty years later.
I did assume that google would not miss any opportunity for revenue. But I don't think your story invalidates the assumption unless your "town building" was a restaurant building in a town. Locating public buildings enhances googles value, but google has little hope of getting every town to pay, so I can see where public buildings would get in free.
I spent most of my career building GIS maps for Calgary, Canada, for the water & sewer systems; our whole asset-management strategy was based on a GIS map/database of all infrastructure. (Some screen snaps: http://brander.ca/work.html )
It was like the sun coming out when I found open-source GIS solutions in PostGIS and QGIS about 2013, and it freed me from the "ESRI jail", wherein for large corporate mapping, ESRI is the 800-lb gorilla of the market, and all its data formats are proprietary and impenetrable. That was when I found OSM, and the salient feature to me is this:
* For a building to be named in Google, the business has to pay Google.
* For a building to be identified on OSM, somebody has to like that business enough to type it in. It just needs one fan.
That's it. One serves the google accounts payable dept, one serves the general public. Really, if the map is good enough to find routes and get you there, the actual map service is a wash, and this feature is critically important.
Current WH staff setting up their own private accounts after the election to use for White House business was not a notable issue. It went away in a few days.
https://www.politico.com/story...
The Bush WH staff using a private server for WH communications during the sell-job for the Iraq War in 2002-2003, and then wiping the server, deleting 22 million emails rather than hand any over to the government records office, was not an issue. It went away in a few days at the time, and again in a few days during the 2016 election when Newsweek magazine attempted to revive the story:
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/0...
No, I am not waving my arms around crying conspiracy. The press really did harp on the HRC email story, some 30X as much coverage as "issues" got; but the thing is, people kept clicking on the stories; and not changing channels; and the press responds to that.
I really don't understand it and don't have a theory for why Americans are so fascinated with the slightest wrongs done by Democrats (I mean, FIVE investigations of Clinton firings in the WH travel office??) and so uninterested in the most jaw-dropping things done by the right, but they just are. I think Al Franken had it right, that the only press bias is a "sell eyeballs to advertisers" bias and the unfairness of it all must be laid at the feet of The People themselves. Truly, Americans have the government they deserve.
Here's my two "greatest hits" on that score:
1) Nixon's collusion with a foreign power (S. Vietnam) to ruin the 1968 Peace Talks to deny Democrats a win during the election campaign was called treason by some who became aware of his calls to them via CIA wiretaps:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0... ...20,000 Americans died in the ensuing four years. (NB: Might have happened either way; but Nixon's *intent* was to extend the war.)
2) Eight news organizations paid to have the Florida ballots carefully and repeatedly recounted and found that Gore won no matter how you counted hanging chads and dimples and all that:
https://www.consortiumnews.com... ...the Washington Post put that story on page a10 and it was gone in a few days. I was actually unaware of it, and I'm a news junkie.
So that's what will happen to this story too. I don't know why it works this way with American news, but it does.
Both those links come from Jon Schwarz' eye-opening history in The Intercept last December: ...where Schwarz dryly notes that: ...and I'm sure that's part of it. But the news media can't control stories all THAT well. People really do just look away after a few days, from Republican malfeasance, all the way up to torture. Heck, Democrats look away from it, including Obama looking the other way on torture.
https://theintercept.com/2017/...
"For their part, the elite print and broadcast media accepted the right’s critique that they were – as huge profit-driven corporations naturally tend to be – horribly liberal. "
So this is nothing, and will be gone in a few days. QED. I'm willing to lay money on it if anybody is skeptical.
Your "properly constructed roads" is a "No True Scotsman" dodge. Roads that carry only local car traffic (i.e. roads that primarily exist to provide access to the houses along it, little or no "pass through" traffic) are built to standards that cause that level of traffic to wear them out in about 40 years. Building them to last longer would be a waste of money because the extra is being spent 40 years before it is needed, at interest cost. (Another 19-year-old 2nd-year engineering student in my class was aghast, why don't we just build all roads to last 200 years? The prof asked him if he was serving the public trust by asking them for 3X as much money, or building "monuments to engineers" on somebody else's dime? And yes, spending 3X as much to get 5X as long-lasting a road is a fail, because it's all spent up front, and money has a time-value.)
But cities (this is not yet apparent in much of North America) go on for hundreds of years and those roads will require many re-pavings. Right now, so many roads in America are on their first paving that was paid for by the purchase of the house (developer had to build the road to sell the subdivision and added the cost of pipes and roads to the house-price), and governments have yet to truly face up to the long-term maintenance cost of asphalt. So instead of keeping the road up, they let them run downhill into bad surface - potholes, cracks - and America is a much shabbier-looking place than it was in the 1960s. When they finally face up to it, the cost of this marvelous free public gift to anybody who owns a car may finally stimulate some taxes or fees that target the beneficiaries of public money, not everybody.
For some reason, this made me think that it would be like the whole nation was conveyor belts, just step on and go anywhere. Obviously, this is is true of any nation with roads, but the "free" thing makes a psychological difference: you spend money to go places you have a need to go, but if it's free, you might wander anywhere aimlessly, like a man out for a walk.
The conveyor belt image sent me over to my Heinlein collection to carefully re-read the start of "The Roads Must Roll", confirming what I'd suspected: Heinlein never mentions payment. The entrance to the Road lacks all toll-booths or other mentions of payment. Indeed, how could there be when he describes that you can get on anywhere, just step on the outer 5MPH strip going by, and work your way inward to faster strips if you aren't travelling locally. There are, however, many paragraphs expended clarifying that the whole economy is dependent on them, and they re-designed all their cities around them.
I think Mr. TANSTAAFL actually proposed that moving mechanical roads would be like the asphalt roads they replaced: just free for all to use. The same concept of "public road" that every government ever had to maintain (at great public expense, your city streets department is likely more expensive than either water or sewer) just had the cost of maintaining mechanism tacked on. They already had to up the roads budget 500% to install and maintain asphalt instead of dirt decades ago, this is just the same increase again as society became another 500% richer from the "Douglas-Martin Sunpower screens" and so forth.
Pigeonholing Heinlein as a libertarian, or militarist, or whatever, was never wise; the guy had his opinions, but his imagination that roamed over all sorts of ideas always ruled over that when he had an idea he couldn't resist.
Computers are a commodity for me, like 99.99% of their purchasers. We have no meaningful option to switch from Intel, because the Genius of the Free Market (tm) took away all our alternatives one-by-one, as we watched the last three decades of open, fair competition. Now the great winner of the Free Market competition, presumably the best of the best, has failed us. And we must wait (no option) for them to fix their failure.
The bigger picture for me is that I don't want to buy one of their computers in the meantime. Why would I? They're all damaged goods, it's as if they were still selling the e-coli lettuce and asking us to just take extra care eating it.
With the first two bugs, I'd heard that, ummm... coffee lake (?) by late this fall might have fixes out of the factory. But not these next eight? When exactly should I buy?
The 'when' question arises if you look back over a few years of my /. posts and see how many have the basic subject of "Moore's Law is over, at least on the desktop", where my 2013 purchase of an i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz × 12 is still hard to beat by more than about 30% - and the chip model, if not my purchase, is already over 5 years of age. I'm mainly wanting a new machine because by this point there's a new bus, faster memory and SSD, though even all that still won't give me a whole doubling of performance.
So I have the option to just wait - what? Will another year do it now? For "Latte Lake"? (I made that up.)
For Intel, it cuts both ways; this has to be holding up other sales, but also, when they have bug-free hardware to sell us again, surely there will be a big burst of replacements. Hard to imagine a stronger economic pressure...except for that dratted "monopoly" status that makes them pretty insensitive to all user pain and pressure.
Because a "good alignment" has the one clear definition but "good movie" does not?
Perhaps a female director could clarify for me how a female character feels about a male character by directing the cameraman to do a long, slow scan up the male's body, which a male director would not think to do, since he doesn't classify ogling males as entertainment. A female director could still direct "male gaze" shots because she's got a hundred years of past movies to study; "female gaze" shots she would have an instinct for.
But also, in general, any group that's been discriminated against becomes automatically the smart hire, because they have to be "twice as good to go half as far".
Well said. I post to /. every time programming as a job comes up, to relate my experience that the great career was having IT as your second skill. I got a CPSC degree and all, but after my Engineering degree, and for nearly all my career, my title was Engineer. (Waterworks and sewer stuff - GIS mapping, construction mgmt, etc.)
I had a far safer job because I was much harder to replace; very few have dual skills for some reason. Division-of-labour is great, and I'm sure that full-time programmers are way better programmers than I; but we really need far more dual-skill people in the business, interfacing between the customer dept and the IT department. The hardest thing to get right is the specs.
SF writer Harry Harrison had a character in a novel that valued all human hours - janitorial and CEO - the same, justify that system. (I'm pretty sure it was one of the later Stainless Steel Rat books.)
The character points out that the huge majority of society's wealth is actually common property - the intellectual property that starts with the lever, the wheel, and fire, going on up through metallurgy and electronics - is long past patent dates, mostly has unknown inventors.
The existing way of using that is to let anybody use it for free, not just at the time they're messing about inventing the next improvement, but forever, for generations after (say) Ford leveraged 1000 years of progress in making things out of metal and developing heat-engines, to make the Ford family rich.
Viewed that way, suddenly the notion that the 5th generation Fords owe a lot more taxes than the rest of us, as society's closest-approach to fairly charging them for use of common intellectual property, seems a lot more moral than "theft by moochers". The existing system lets Mark Zuckerberg mooch all the intellectual property he wants from everything from the development of fabric, bronze and wheat to the development of HTML, add on another 0.1% new creativity, and keep the lot.
You can invent some scheme to charge society's most-successful leveragers of our common property - physical/environmental, human-infrastructural, and IP - for the shoulders-of-giants upon which they built, or you can just use the existing "progressive taxation" system, which has tradition going for it and seems to work.
The real problem with UBI Is that it takes a *lot* of said money, and it may just not be there. It's going to take a lot of experiments and scaling-up to develop something with the positives of UBI and doesn't go broke.