People like you are always saying socialism doesn't work
UBI is NOT "socialism".
Here is the definition of socialism: Government ownership of the mean of production.
That is what socialism is. That is the only thing it is.
Does UBI involve government ownership of factories, tools, or capital? No, it does not. Ergo, it is not "socialism".
Government run pensions are not "socialism". Unemployment benefits are not "socialism". Depending on your political views, those may be good things, or they may be bad things, but they are not "socialism".
Sorry for going off on a rant here, but socialism is an important concept, and it is a useful word with no obvious alternative. We should not dilute its meaning by using it for all kinds of tangential concepts.
We don't know if it "worked" or not. No results have been published yet. The experiment was defunded for political reasons that may have no bearing on whether it was working or not.
That is what I do. Four people in my family, and we all share one Prime account and password. I don't know if we are breaking any rules.
If you mark everything for you as a gift, then it shouldn't affect her product recommendations.
Another solution is to just ignore the recommendations, which are usually stupid anyway. If I just ordered a new coffee maker, I don't need recommendations for six other coffee makers.
My wife is Chinese and we watch a lot of Chinese movies. So we get flooded with recommendations for French movies, because "obviously" we like "foreign films".
Are there really many people that order so infrequently? I just checked my order history, and my family and I placed 87 Amazon orders last year. That is about twice a week on average. In addition, we watched 124 Amazon videos.
I can understand people like my mom, who has never ordered anything on-line ever. But once you get past that, and you see the convenience and vastly greater selection available, why would you ever give that up?
I worked part time as a machinist while I was in college. I got to be pretty good with lathes and vertical mills, and even learned G-code before I learned Fortran.
The most awe inspiring machine shop I ever saw was onboard a ship. They had every tool you could ever dream of, and could repair anything, or even build entire assemblies from raw sheets and blocks of metal. Today, it is likely all replaced by one 3D printer.
And I sense here that the business plan is to ship robots at home that will do the assembly for you:
Or IKEA could just provide an assembly area, with helpful robots available. So you checkout, wheel your cart to the assembly area, the robot assembles your furniture, and then you load the ready-to-go furniture into your van or pickup.
This will not only be convenient, but also promote political harmony, since Democrats shop at IKEA while Republicans drive pickup trucks, so they will need to learn to cooperate.
A big container ship will have a crew of about 25. Of these, only 3 or 4 are directly involved in steering the ship: The captain, and a couple of deck officers, all of whom have other duties as well. And, as you said, they aren't paid much. So I don't see how this could possibly generate "ridiculous amounts of revenue" as claimed by TFA.
Then why not buy/acqui-hire any one of the many startups building this kind of thing?
It is cheaper to just start their own project, and headhunt the skills from the startups, or from Google.
Designing something like the TPU is not difficult. It is basically just a slimmed down power-efficient GPU without the G. Just lots of parallel 8-bit multipliers repeated across the die over and over.
My prediction: Within 5 years, every new cell phone will have a built in dedicated matrix multiplication engine for AI.
Walmart was/still is like that. Unionize? They'll close the whole store and rebuild it across town!
That is not why union votes fail at Walmart. If a Walmart store unionized, the workers would be better paid and have better working conditions, but they would also be DIFFERENT PEOPLE. For $15 per hour, Walmart could hire a different class of workers from what they get now for $10 per hour. My local Walmart has elderly employees, an employee in a wheelchair, and two workers that appear to be siblings with Down's Syndrome. Walmart has created productive employment for these people by scraping the bottom of the workforce barrel. Higher wages will push these people out. By voting against the union, they are not as dumb as you think they are.
this! I don't see why the system allowed someone to call me without first revealing their identity first!
Because the carriers have no incentive to fix the system, and politicians have no reason to change the regulations because voters don't seem to care.
I would be more willing to vote for someone who promised to require the telecoms to fix spoofing and robocalls. But there clearly are not many people who feel the same, or it would be a winning political issue.
Most likely there are people who see the job very differently from the author. For everyone paid less or fired for being slow, there is someone else willing to hustle, and getting paid more.
I have nothing against their culture. However, I have something against them forcing it onto me.
Bullcrap. Nobody is being "forced" to adopt immigrant culture. I live in San Jose, California, one of the most diverse cities in the world. Never, not once in 20 years, has anyone "forced" their culture on me.
Within walking distance of my house, there is a mosque, a synagogue, a buddhist temple, and the largest gurdwara in North America. Number of times I have been "forced" to go to any of them: 0.
They usually keep the bots and fire the humans during slumps.
It is not that simple. Automation leverages rather than just replacing human labor, and no factories are 100% automated.
Let's say there are two factories with equal output. The first has 100 human workers. The second has 50 human workers and 50 robots. What happens in a recession when demand falls? The robots are a sunk cost, and cannot be "fired". So a worker in the automated second factory has twice the marginal value to his employer as a worker in the first factory.
Result: People that work with automation will keep their jobs, while people doing fully manual work will lose theirs.
I suppose it would be highly rude to suggest they hire Syrian, Libyan, and other refugees... AC
Would you rather have a robot for a co-worker, or a Syrian? Personally, I would pick the Syrian so we could share falafels and tahini for lunch, but most Eastern Europeans feel differently. Non-white immigration is deeply unpopular there, even more so than in Western Europe where immigration has created a major political backlash.
and they drop out after never showing up, you get to keep the money!
There have been legislative proposals to reduce or ban student loans to students at schools with excessive dropout rates.
There have also been proposals to reduce or ban student loans at schools with excessive student loan default rates.
Another reform proposal is to reduce the taxpayer funded Sallie Mae repayment guarantee from 100% to 80-90% to ensure that lenders have some skin in the game.
It surely can be when academic success leads to the maintenance or reinforcement of disparities.
Why are "disparities" important? If every household in a neighboorhood earns $30k per year, is that better than a neighborhood where some households earn $30k and others earn $60k?
People who attend Ivy League schools earn more than their non -Ivy counterparts
C!=C. Students that are accepted by Ivy League schools but choose to enroll elsewhere, do just as well as those that do enroll. So the evidence is that these schools are not better at educating, but just good at attracting applicants and filtering admissions.
Ignoring the danger of advertising delivered malware
What does that have to do with tracking? I see WAY more misbehaving ads when I am in Incognito mode, so tracking appears to reduce malware.
They know you are interested in a new widget. They know you have seen it advertised for âX. So now they know that you want it, and what you think the going rate is for it
They also know that I didn't buy at that price, so they have an incentive to offer me a better deal.
That's like saying that despite good locks and alarm, someone might still break in, so I'll leave the front door open with a sign saying "free stuff inside".
Your analogy makes no sense. What do the "locks and alarm" represent? What is the "break in"? Is that supposed to be a metaphor for the tracking? If so, that is not a threat, but something they are already doing openly. What is the "free stuff"? Is that a metaphor for my browsing history? If so, then you are just making a circular argument: Giving away my browsing history is bad because it may result in disclosure of my browsing history. Huh?
Facebook and friends are collecting far too much data on you, more than enough to impersonate your identity.
How does my browsing history allow them to impersonate me in any harmful way?
Identity theft can be done with a SSN and DOB. Mine have been exposed several times in data breaches that had nothing whatsoever to do with tracking by Google or Facebook.
However, the issue is that most people don't know how or when to disable tracking.
Nearly everyone I know understands what Incognito mode is, and they understand that they should use it when searching for porn, or communicating with their KGB case officers.
Incognito mode doesn't guarantee that you won't be tracked, but I have never seen an ad that appears to be related to my Incognito browsing.
What kind of person -wants- to be shown advertising at all, much less targeted?
You are going to see advertising whether you want it or not. I run an adblocker, but some ads slip through, and I don't run it on all sites. So, since I am going to see the ads anyway, I prefer them to be relevant.
Now let's turn it around: What is the downside to being tracked? I don't see any.
Slashdot Mirror
People like you are always saying socialism doesn't work
UBI is NOT "socialism".
Here is the definition of socialism: Government ownership of the mean of production.
That is what socialism is. That is the only thing it is.
Does UBI involve government ownership of factories, tools, or capital? No, it does not. Ergo, it is not "socialism".
Government run pensions are not "socialism". Unemployment benefits are not "socialism". Depending on your political views, those may be good things, or they may be bad things, but they are not "socialism".
Sorry for going off on a rant here, but socialism is an important concept, and it is a useful word with no obvious alternative. We should not dilute its meaning by using it for all kinds of tangential concepts.
You'd think Google would get the picture and provide some sort of built-in ad management/protection in Chrome.
An advertising company blocking competing ads would likely attract plenty of attention from anti-trust authorities.
If only it was UBI, it would have worked.
We don't know if it "worked" or not. No results have been published yet. The experiment was defunded for political reasons that may have no bearing on whether it was working or not.
Why not just use her account to place your orders
That is what I do. Four people in my family, and we all share one Prime account and password. I don't know if we are breaking any rules.
If you mark everything for you as a gift, then it shouldn't affect her product recommendations.
Another solution is to just ignore the recommendations, which are usually stupid anyway. If I just ordered a new coffee maker, I don't need recommendations for six other coffee makers.
My wife is Chinese and we watch a lot of Chinese movies. So we get flooded with recommendations for French movies, because "obviously" we like "foreign films".
... in six months when they make another order.
Are there really many people that order so infrequently? I just checked my order history, and my family and I placed 87 Amazon orders last year. That is about twice a week on average. In addition, we watched 124 Amazon videos.
I can understand people like my mom, who has never ordered anything on-line ever. But once you get past that, and you see the convenience and vastly greater selection available, why would you ever give that up?
I worked part time as a machinist while I was in college. I got to be pretty good with lathes and vertical mills, and even learned G-code before I learned Fortran.
The most awe inspiring machine shop I ever saw was onboard a ship. They had every tool you could ever dream of, and could repair anything, or even build entire assemblies from raw sheets and blocks of metal. Today, it is likely all replaced by one 3D printer.
And I sense here that the business plan is to ship robots at home that will do the assembly for you :
Or IKEA could just provide an assembly area, with helpful robots available. So you checkout, wheel your cart to the assembly area, the robot assembles your furniture, and then you load the ready-to-go furniture into your van or pickup.
This will not only be convenient, but also promote political harmony, since Democrats shop at IKEA while Republicans drive pickup trucks, so they will need to learn to cooperate.
A big container ship will have a crew of about 25. Of these, only 3 or 4 are directly involved in steering the ship: The captain, and a couple of deck officers, all of whom have other duties as well. And, as you said, they aren't paid much. So I don't see how this could possibly generate "ridiculous amounts of revenue" as claimed by TFA.
Then why not buy/acqui-hire any one of the many startups building this kind of thing?
It is cheaper to just start their own project, and headhunt the skills from the startups, or from Google.
Designing something like the TPU is not difficult. It is basically just a slimmed down power-efficient GPU without the G. Just lots of parallel 8-bit multipliers repeated across the die over and over.
My prediction: Within 5 years, every new cell phone will have a built in dedicated matrix multiplication engine for AI.
The unions created the rust belt, so holding them up as some magic solution to the region's economic problems is absurd.
or large swaths of the Southern United States?
The South has lower unemployment than the national average.
Walmart was/still is like that. Unionize? They'll close the whole store and rebuild it across town!
That is not why union votes fail at Walmart. If a Walmart store unionized, the workers would be better paid and have better working conditions, but they would also be DIFFERENT PEOPLE. For $15 per hour, Walmart could hire a different class of workers from what they get now for $10 per hour. My local Walmart has elderly employees, an employee in a wheelchair, and two workers that appear to be siblings with Down's Syndrome. Walmart has created productive employment for these people by scraping the bottom of the workforce barrel. Higher wages will push these people out. By voting against the union, they are not as dumb as you think they are.
this! I don't see why the system allowed someone to call me without first revealing their identity first!
Because the carriers have no incentive to fix the system, and politicians have no reason to change the regulations because voters don't seem to care.
I would be more willing to vote for someone who promised to require the telecoms to fix spoofing and robocalls. But there clearly are not many people who feel the same, or it would be a winning political issue.
are people that lazy to find another job?
Most likely there are people who see the job very differently from the author. For everyone paid less or fired for being slow, there is someone else willing to hustle, and getting paid more.
I have nothing against their culture. However, I have something against them forcing it onto me.
Bullcrap. Nobody is being "forced" to adopt immigrant culture. I live in San Jose, California, one of the most diverse cities in the world. Never, not once in 20 years, has anyone "forced" their culture on me.
Within walking distance of my house, there is a mosque, a synagogue, a buddhist temple, and the largest gurdwara in North America. Number of times I have been "forced" to go to any of them: 0.
They usually keep the bots and fire the humans during slumps.
It is not that simple. Automation leverages rather than just replacing human labor, and no factories are 100% automated.
Let's say there are two factories with equal output. The first has 100 human workers. The second has 50 human workers and 50 robots. What happens in a recession when demand falls? The robots are a sunk cost, and cannot be "fired". So a worker in the automated second factory has twice the marginal value to his employer as a worker in the first factory.
Result: People that work with automation will keep their jobs, while people doing fully manual work will lose theirs.
I suppose it would be highly rude to suggest they hire Syrian, Libyan, and other refugees... AC
Would you rather have a robot for a co-worker, or a Syrian? Personally, I would pick the Syrian so we could share falafels and tahini for lunch, but most Eastern Europeans feel differently. Non-white immigration is deeply unpopular there, even more so than in Western Europe where immigration has created a major political backlash.
and they drop out after never showing up, you get to keep the money!
There have been legislative proposals to reduce or ban student loans to students at schools with excessive dropout rates.
There have also been proposals to reduce or ban student loans at schools with excessive student loan default rates.
Another reform proposal is to reduce the taxpayer funded Sallie Mae repayment guarantee from 100% to 80-90% to ensure that lenders have some skin in the game.
It surely can be when academic success leads to the maintenance or reinforcement of disparities.
Why are "disparities" important? If every household in a neighboorhood earns $30k per year, is that better than a neighborhood where some households earn $30k and others earn $60k?
People who attend Ivy League schools earn more than their non -Ivy counterparts
C!=C. Students that are accepted by Ivy League schools but choose to enroll elsewhere, do just as well as those that do enroll. So the evidence is that these schools are not better at educating, but just good at attracting applicants and filtering admissions.
Ignoring the danger of advertising delivered malware
What does that have to do with tracking? I see WAY more misbehaving ads when I am in Incognito mode, so tracking appears to reduce malware.
They know you are interested in a new widget. They know you have seen it advertised for âX. So now they know that you want it, and what you think the going rate is for it
They also know that I didn't buy at that price, so they have an incentive to offer me a better deal.
Do I have to take over your life or is it proof enough if I just destroy the one you have now?
My tracking data gives you the ability to do neither.
If you have a list of websites that I have visited, how are you going to use it to "destroy my life"?
That's like saying that despite good locks and alarm, someone might still break in, so I'll leave the front door open with a sign saying "free stuff inside".
Your analogy makes no sense. What do the "locks and alarm" represent? What is the "break in"? Is that supposed to be a metaphor for the tracking? If so, that is not a threat, but something they are already doing openly. What is the "free stuff"? Is that a metaphor for my browsing history? If so, then you are just making a circular argument: Giving away my browsing history is bad because it may result in disclosure of my browsing history. Huh?
Facebook and friends are collecting far too much data on you, more than enough to impersonate your identity.
How does my browsing history allow them to impersonate me in any harmful way?
Identity theft can be done with a SSN and DOB. Mine have been exposed several times in data breaches that had nothing whatsoever to do with tracking by Google or Facebook.
However, the issue is that most people don't know how or when to disable tracking.
Nearly everyone I know understands what Incognito mode is, and they understand that they should use it when searching for porn, or communicating with their KGB case officers.
Incognito mode doesn't guarantee that you won't be tracked, but I have never seen an ad that appears to be related to my Incognito browsing.
What kind of person -wants- to be shown advertising at all, much less targeted?
You are going to see advertising whether you want it or not. I run an adblocker, but some ads slip through, and I don't run it on all sites. So, since I am going to see the ads anyway, I prefer them to be relevant.
Now let's turn it around: What is the downside to being tracked? I don't see any.