that still leaves 100 million codes to check. Were they using 10 million e-commerce sites?
What you are missing is that they don't have to guess a specific number, just a valid number. So if there are 9 unknown digits, and Bank of America has 10 million customers, it will, on average, only take 100 guesses to get a hit.
If the card hits verification even 10 times in the same minute from different sites it should be locked up.
That seems like a simple, obvious solution. But it is not. Millions of credit card numbers would be "locked up" everyday, causing massive inconvenience for the card holders. The crooks could also just spread out their attempts to keep below the threshold, so instead of making a lot of attempts with one CC number before moving to the next CC number on the list, they would sweep through the list, making a few attempts each.
Congress looking out for people rather than companies???
This doesn't collectively hurt companies. Bad reviews just shift revenue from one company to another. A fairer review process will likely help big corps, because they will face less pricing pressure from shoddy low-quality upstarts. There was no organized corporate resistance to this law.
Enforced reduction in religion has allowed technocratic elite to operate
Over the last 35 years, China has experienced faster economic growth than any other country in history. This demonstrates the strength of authoritarianism, as technocrats have been about to manage the country based on sound principles rather than what is democratically popular.
But things are rapidly changing, and beginning to show the downside of authoritarianism. Xi Jinping is sidelining the technocrats, stuffing the central committee with his cronies, encouraging "socialist thinking", and promoting a personality cult. The real test will come in 2022, when he is legally required to step down. Will he? Or will he insist on retaining power "for the good of the country"?
So a random email from a journalist landed in some PR drone's inbox. There were likely hundreds of other emails to deal with, and he or she spent 10 seconds writing a quick response while finishing a cup of stale coffee. You make it sound like this was an official statement of policy from Microsoft's Board of Directors, with BG himself consulted to help craft the appropriate response.
This is just amateur ambush journalism being use to provoke outrage from idiots.
The muslims in London conspired to drive up property prices by educating themselves, earning good salaries, and buying homes. They also conspired to destroy all the white owned restaurants by making way better food. This guy is their leader.
Does being a Muslim rule you out from also being a traditional American?
The first muslims arrived in Jamestown VA in the year 1619, aboard a Portuguese slave ship. That was a year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.
I was going to joke about Nguyen being as common as Smith, but according to wikipedia as much as 40% of the population have the surname. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is also very common in some areas of America. My daughter attended high school in San Jose, California, and about 20% of her graduating class were named Nguyen. They take up 12 pages in her yearbook. If so many people have the same surname, then it sort of defeats the whole purpose of having surnames in the first place, which was to disambiguate duplicate given names.
If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
Sure. Low-end manufacturing is not something where America has a competitive advantage.
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before
No. That is not at all what "my theory" is. That would only happen if the relative value of products was exactly the same. But that is not true at all.
because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc).
That is not true at all. The value of steel has gone way down. The value of cars has gone up.
What would happen to them is the same thing that happened to people that continued to weave by hand when automatic looms were invented. If you focus on the very things that machines excel at, you are not going to do well.
But they would only do poorly if there were OTHER THINGS that machines do relatively less well. If they did those things instead, they would benefit from the automation. Or do actually think people were worse off when automatic looms were invented? Because the situation is the same.
The difference is that the rate of automation is still increasing.
Nope. This is a myth. The rate of automation is slowing down. Most easily automated jobs are already automated. Most workers today work in services, which are proving harder to automate. So workers today will likely have more time to adapt.
Certainly! You can become such an expert yourself in FIVE MINUTES just by reading this webpage. That will give you 4 minutes and 55 seconds more expertise than most of the armchair economists on Slashdot. It will even make you smarter than Stephen Hawking (at least on the topic of economics, but maybe not on quantum physics).
I'd very much like to understand what kind of gainful employment the blue-collar workers of today and white-collar workers of tomorrow can look forward to
Did you read the webpage? If so, then you already know the answer.
But somehow I expect that you did NOT read it, so here is the answer: Imagine a world where the robots exist that can do ANY job currently done by humans. Furthermore, imagine that they are faster by a factor of ten, than any human, at every job. So they can make an apple pie ten times faster than humans. They can weave baskets ten times faster, etc.
Now imagine two workers, Abby the Apple Pie Maker, and Betty the Basket Maker. Before the robots came along, Abby made a pie everyday, and Betty made a basket everyday, and then they traded a pie for a basket. But now, with the robots, pies are only worth a tenth as much, and baskets are only worth a tenth as much, so obviously, Abby and Betty will both starve. Right?
But WAIT A SECOND, while the pies and baskets have each fallen in value by a factor of ten, a pie is still worth ONE basket. So Abby and Betty can just continue life as before. The robots changed nothing.
Of course this is a simplistic model, and real life is more complicated. In real life, the robots are going to be MUCH better at automating some tasks than others. But this makes things better. If the robot can make 10 pies in a day, but only 2 baskets, then a basket is worth 5 pies, and Abby can just switch to making baskets, and she and Betty will both be much better off. This is known as "Comparative Advantage". It is a basic concept taught in economics 101.
So as the robots take over more and more jobs, people will switch to the jobs that the robots are not necessarily bad at, but just less efficient at, and then trade the goods and services they produce for the goods and services that the robots produce. If you say "What if the robots are better at EVERYTHING?" then you should go back and read the webpage again, because you completely missed the point.
Now for the bad news: As robots take over, and more and more jobs are automated, we will almost certainly be better off. But there will be some "losers", and those losers will likely be the same sort of people that are currently losing: poorly educated unskilled workers in 1st world countries. These people are basically trying to compete with a servo motor, and and the motors are winning. We are not going to stop all technological progress because of these people (although we may slow it down for foolish political reasons), so what is the answer? We could try retraining them, but they already got 13 years of free education and failed to learn anything useful, so that is not hopeful. So the most likely scenario is to put them on some sort of welfare until we can get riot control robots perfected.
Given that you are offering $12/hr cash payment to evade taxes
Nonsense. I am paying MORE taxes. If I pay cash, then the cost of hiring that person is not a deductible expense. So I pay the taxes, not the worker. I am almost certainly in a higher bracket.
a. The federal, state, and local governments get nothing; you are ripping off your fellow citizens, all of them.
Hogwash.
b. The workers aren't getting credits towards Social Security so no retirement "safety net" for them.
They are illegals. They don't get benefits from these programs, so why should they pay into them?
c. The workers aren't getting credits for unemployment so no insurance when you fire them.
You don't "fire" day laborers. If I don't hire them, they walk three meters to the next van in the queue.
assumes that they can get a job every single day of the work week.
I am not assuming this. I am observing it.
And you're talking about six adults working full time for minimum wage sharing a 3 bedroom house
That is a lot better than picking tomatoes in Chiapas.
It doesn't take a genius, expert, or celebrity to understand these predictions
It also didn't take a genius to understand these exact same predictions when they were made in the 1700s, the 1800s, the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1980s. It also doesn't take an expert to see, with the benefit of hindsight, that all of those predictions were wrong. What DOES (apparently) take an expert, is to see that they are wrong this time too, for mostly the same reasons.
If you think that productivity improvements cause poverty, you are not an "expert".
Since when is common fucking sense way out of his expertise?
What he is saying is NOT common sense. Common sense would be believing that the current wave of automation will have similar effects as the many, many waves of automation that have occurred in the past: short term disruption, but higher productivity, wealth creation, and eventually higher living standards for nearly everyone.
Saying "this time is different" is not common sense, especially since there is plenty of evidence that this time is NOT different. Nearly everyone is benefiting from the current wave of automation. Billions of people are being lifted out of poverty in China and Africa. Only a tiny fraction of people are "losers": unskilled workers in rich countries. The other 95% of us are doing well.
You describe a queue of people seeking impoverished workers
Cash income of $12/hr is equivalent to roughly $15 hour regular payroll, since no taxes are taken out. That is equivalent to about $30k year. The last guy I hired said he and his wife shared a 3 bedroom house with 2 other couples, and they were all working. So 6*30k = $180k of household income. I would not call that "impoverished". Sure, $180k doesn't go far in SF, but most of these workers commute in from the East Bay, where living costs are much lower.
paying not enough to rent a room and buy meals and clothing
These workers are not homeless, they are well-fed, and they are wearing clothes. So they are obviously able to afford all of these things.
let alone medical care?
So we have homeless people because they refuse to accept jobs that don't offer medical benefits? Seriously?
Would this be someone who lives in a $200,000 shack
You are missing a zero. Facebook is in Menlo Park, where a 3 bedroom home is over $2M, and even studio apartments go for over $1M. I am happy to see Facebook helping these people. After their mortgage payment, some of these people have so little money left that they have to settle for a 5-series BMW instead of the 7-series that they truly deserve.
Maybe instead of giving her card to people with "Please Help" signs your friend ought to place some "Help Wanted" ads around town.
In the SF Bay Area there are "help wanted" signs in nearly every shop window. There were still plenty of homeless people begging on street corners. Anyone in SF who wants a job can have one in five minutes... including illegals. A few years ago there used to be a queue of Mexicans at Home Depot every morning looking for day labor. Today there is a queue of people seeking workers by 7am, and they need to offer at least $12/hr in cash.
Unemployment rate is tied to unemployment benefits.
Indeed. Many times when I have interviewed people, they have said they are available to start work on a specific date. When I ask why that date, they say that is the day their unemployment benefits expire.
If we pay people to not work, more people will not work.
If Amazon takes the money, then they're the seller. Full stop.
What if I buy it from eBay using Paypal? Then Paypal takes the money, so they're the seller. Full stop. Right?
Should eBay be vetting everything sold on their platform? Should Paypal be vetting everything bought or sold using their platform? What about Visa and MasterCard? Should they be vetting? If not, then what makes Amazon different?
often access to childporn on these sites is obtained by submitting your own original content, which was the main driver behind one of the recent largest abuses in The Netherlands
Take your blinders off. This happens because, and only because, of the illegality.
thus no children will be victimized by being used to make child porn.
Banning it makes this problem worse. If child porn was legalized and regulated, it could be made with cgi animation, adult actors posing as children, etc. There is no evidence that viewing child porn causes the consumer to commit more child abuse, and some evidence that it is preventative. In Japan, pedophiles can buy child-sized sex dolls, and although data is limited, it appears that this reduces their desire for real children by providing an alternative release.
Our treatment of pedophiles is based on knee-jerk populism, not scientific evidence. We often punish pedophiles just for seeking psychological help. It would be harder to design a dumber system even if we tried. We really should think of the children.
Slashdot Mirror
that still leaves 100 million codes to check. Were they using 10 million e-commerce sites?
What you are missing is that they don't have to guess a specific number, just a valid number. So if there are 9 unknown digits, and Bank of America has 10 million customers, it will, on average, only take 100 guesses to get a hit.
If the card hits verification even 10 times in the same minute from different sites it should be locked up.
That seems like a simple, obvious solution. But it is not. Millions of credit card numbers would be "locked up" everyday, causing massive inconvenience for the card holders. The crooks could also just spread out their attempts to keep below the threshold, so instead of making a lot of attempts with one CC number before moving to the next CC number on the list, they would sweep through the list, making a few attempts each.
That doesn't collectively hurt companies, since he will still spend his money on something else.
Congress looking out for people rather than companies???
This doesn't collectively hurt companies. Bad reviews just shift revenue from one company to another. A fairer review process will likely help big corps, because they will face less pricing pressure from shoddy low-quality upstarts. There was no organized corporate resistance to this law.
Enforced reduction in religion has allowed technocratic elite to operate
Over the last 35 years, China has experienced faster economic growth than any other country in history. This demonstrates the strength of authoritarianism, as technocrats have been about to manage the country based on sound principles rather than what is democratically popular.
But things are rapidly changing, and beginning to show the downside of authoritarianism. Xi Jinping is sidelining the technocrats, stuffing the central committee with his cronies, encouraging "socialist thinking", and promoting a personality cult. The real test will come in 2022, when he is legally required to step down. Will he? Or will he insist on retaining power "for the good of the country"?
So a random email from a journalist landed in some PR drone's inbox. There were likely hundreds of other emails to deal with, and he or she spent 10 seconds writing a quick response while finishing a cup of stale coffee. You make it sound like this was an official statement of policy from Microsoft's Board of Directors, with BG himself consulted to help craft the appropriate response.
This is just amateur ambush journalism being use to provoke outrage from idiots.
Did what for London?
The muslims in London conspired to drive up property prices by educating themselves, earning good salaries, and buying homes. They also conspired to destroy all the white owned restaurants by making way better food. This guy is their leader.
Does being a Muslim rule you out from also being a traditional American?
The first muslims arrived in Jamestown VA in the year 1619, aboard a Portuguese slave ship. That was a year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.
I was going to joke about Nguyen being as common as Smith, but according to wikipedia as much as 40% of the population have the surname.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is also very common in some areas of America. My daughter attended high school in San Jose, California, and about 20% of her graduating class were named Nguyen. They take up 12 pages in her yearbook. If so many people have the same surname, then it sort of defeats the whole purpose of having surnames in the first place, which was to disambiguate duplicate given names.
If I replace "robots" with "cheap foreign labor", can you explain why so many American manufacturers went out of business (or moved operations abroad) in the last few decades?
Sure. Low-end manufacturing is not something where America has a competitive advantage.
According to your theory, American companies should have been able to continue operating just as before
No. That is not at all what "my theory" is. That would only happen if the relative value of products was exactly the same. But that is not true at all.
because one ton of American steel was still worth exactly one American-made car (or etc).
That is not true at all. The value of steel has gone way down. The value of cars has gone up.
What would happen to them is the same thing that happened to people that continued to weave by hand when automatic looms were invented. If you focus on the very things that machines excel at, you are not going to do well.
But they would only do poorly if there were OTHER THINGS that machines do relatively less well. If they did those things instead, they would benefit from the automation. Or do actually think people were worse off when automatic looms were invented? Because the situation is the same.
The difference is that the rate of automation is still increasing.
Nope. This is a myth. The rate of automation is slowing down. Most easily automated jobs are already automated. Most workers today work in services, which are proving harder to automate. So workers today will likely have more time to adapt.
Can you find me such an expert?
Certainly! You can become such an expert yourself in FIVE MINUTES just by reading this webpage. That will give you 4 minutes and 55 seconds more expertise than most of the armchair economists on Slashdot. It will even make you smarter than Stephen Hawking (at least on the topic of economics, but maybe not on quantum physics).
I'd very much like to understand what kind of gainful employment the blue-collar workers of today and white-collar workers of tomorrow can look forward to
Did you read the webpage? If so, then you already know the answer.
But somehow I expect that you did NOT read it, so here is the answer: Imagine a world where the robots exist that can do ANY job currently done by humans. Furthermore, imagine that they are faster by a factor of ten, than any human, at every job. So they can make an apple pie ten times faster than humans. They can weave baskets ten times faster, etc.
Now imagine two workers, Abby the Apple Pie Maker, and Betty the Basket Maker. Before the robots came along, Abby made a pie everyday, and Betty made a basket everyday, and then they traded a pie for a basket. But now, with the robots, pies are only worth a tenth as much, and baskets are only worth a tenth as much, so obviously, Abby and Betty will both starve. Right?
But WAIT A SECOND, while the pies and baskets have each fallen in value by a factor of ten, a pie is still worth ONE basket. So Abby and Betty can just continue life as before. The robots changed nothing.
Of course this is a simplistic model, and real life is more complicated. In real life, the robots are going to be MUCH better at automating some tasks than others. But this makes things better. If the robot can make 10 pies in a day, but only 2 baskets, then a basket is worth 5 pies, and Abby can just switch to making baskets, and she and Betty will both be much better off. This is known as "Comparative Advantage". It is a basic concept taught in economics 101.
So as the robots take over more and more jobs, people will switch to the jobs that the robots are not necessarily bad at, but just less efficient at, and then trade the goods and services they produce for the goods and services that the robots produce. If you say "What if the robots are better at EVERYTHING?" then you should go back and read the webpage again, because you completely missed the point.
Now for the bad news: As robots take over, and more and more jobs are automated, we will almost certainly be better off. But there will be some "losers", and those losers will likely be the same sort of people that are currently losing: poorly educated unskilled workers in 1st world countries. These people are basically trying to compete with a servo motor, and and the motors are winning. We are not going to stop all technological progress because of these people (although we may slow it down for foolish political reasons), so what is the answer? We could try retraining them, but they already got 13 years of free education and failed to learn anything useful, so that is not hopeful. So the most likely scenario is to put them on some sort of welfare until we can get riot control robots perfected.
Given that you are offering $12/hr cash payment to evade taxes
Nonsense. I am paying MORE taxes. If I pay cash, then the cost of hiring that person is not a deductible expense. So I pay the taxes, not the worker. I am almost certainly in a higher bracket.
a. The federal, state, and local governments get nothing; you are ripping off your fellow citizens, all of them.
Hogwash.
b. The workers aren't getting credits towards Social Security so no retirement "safety net" for them.
They are illegals. They don't get benefits from these programs, so why should they pay into them?
c. The workers aren't getting credits for unemployment so no insurance when you fire them.
You don't "fire" day laborers. If I don't hire them, they walk three meters to the next van in the queue.
assumes that they can get a job every single day of the work week.
I am not assuming this. I am observing it.
And you're talking about six adults working full time for minimum wage sharing a 3 bedroom house
That is a lot better than picking tomatoes in Chiapas.
It doesn't take a genius, expert, or celebrity to understand these predictions
It also didn't take a genius to understand these exact same predictions when they were made in the 1700s, the 1800s, the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1980s. It also doesn't take an expert to see, with the benefit of hindsight, that all of those predictions were wrong. What DOES (apparently) take an expert, is to see that they are wrong this time too, for mostly the same reasons.
If you think that productivity improvements cause poverty, you are not an "expert".
doesn't decimate mean loss of 10%
That is what it means in Latin. That is not what it means in English.
Since when is common fucking sense way out of his expertise?
What he is saying is NOT common sense. Common sense would be believing that the current wave of automation will have similar effects as the many, many waves of automation that have occurred in the past: short term disruption, but higher productivity, wealth creation, and eventually higher living standards for nearly everyone.
Saying "this time is different" is not common sense, especially since there is plenty of evidence that this time is NOT different. Nearly everyone is benefiting from the current wave of automation. Billions of people are being lifted out of poverty in China and Africa. Only a tiny fraction of people are "losers": unskilled workers in rich countries. The other 95% of us are doing well.
You describe a queue of people seeking impoverished workers
Cash income of $12/hr is equivalent to roughly $15 hour regular payroll, since no taxes are taken out. That is equivalent to about $30k year. The last guy I hired said he and his wife shared a 3 bedroom house with 2 other couples, and they were all working. So 6*30k = $180k of household income. I would not call that "impoverished". Sure, $180k doesn't go far in SF, but most of these workers commute in from the East Bay, where living costs are much lower.
paying not enough to rent a room and buy meals and clothing
These workers are not homeless, they are well-fed, and they are wearing clothes. So they are obviously able to afford all of these things.
let alone medical care?
So we have homeless people because they refuse to accept jobs that don't offer medical benefits? Seriously?
Would this be someone who lives in a $200,000 shack
You are missing a zero. Facebook is in Menlo Park, where a 3 bedroom home is over $2M, and even studio apartments go for over $1M. I am happy to see Facebook helping these people. After their mortgage payment, some of these people have so little money left that they have to settle for a 5-series BMW instead of the 7-series that they truly deserve.
Maybe instead of giving her card to people with "Please Help" signs your friend ought to place some "Help Wanted" ads around town.
In the SF Bay Area there are "help wanted" signs in nearly every shop window. There were still plenty of homeless people begging on street corners. Anyone in SF who wants a job can have one in five minutes ... including illegals. A few years ago there used to be a queue of Mexicans at Home Depot every morning looking for day labor. Today there is a queue of people seeking workers by 7am, and they need to offer at least $12/hr in cash.
Unemployment rate is tied to unemployment benefits.
Indeed. Many times when I have interviewed people, they have said they are available to start work on a specific date. When I ask why that date, they say that is the day their unemployment benefits expire.
If we pay people to not work, more people will not work.
If Amazon takes the money, then they're the seller. Full stop.
What if I buy it from eBay using Paypal? Then Paypal takes the money, so they're the seller. Full stop. Right?
Should eBay be vetting everything sold on their platform? Should Paypal be vetting everything bought or sold using their platform? What about Visa and MasterCard? Should they be vetting? If not, then what makes Amazon different?
often access to childporn on these sites is obtained by submitting your own original content, which was the main driver behind one of the recent largest abuses in The Netherlands
Take your blinders off. This happens because, and only because, of the illegality.
thus no children will be victimized by being used to make child porn.
Banning it makes this problem worse. If child porn was legalized and regulated, it could be made with cgi animation, adult actors posing as children, etc. There is no evidence that viewing child porn causes the consumer to commit more child abuse, and some evidence that it is preventative. In Japan, pedophiles can buy child-sized sex dolls, and although data is limited, it appears that this reduces their desire for real children by providing an alternative release.
Our treatment of pedophiles is based on knee-jerk populism, not scientific evidence. We often punish pedophiles just for seeking psychological help. It would be harder to design a dumber system even if we tried. We really should think of the children.
TFS says state sponsored.
That is based on conjecture, not evidence.
That indicates it's more sophisticated then a few disgruntled Iranian hackers
Or it indicates that someone is trying to push an agenda.