Santa Clara County was one of the main areas settled by refugees from the Vietnam War. That was over 40 years ago. Those refugees now have US-born adult children and grandchildren. So that Vietnamese guy in the next cubicle is most likely a native born US citizen.
Santa Clara County has a Chinese community that dates back to the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and a Hispanic community that goes back centuries before that.
deregulation tanked the economy and destroyed what little they had in their 401ks.
This is the exact opposite of what actually happened. If you kept your 401k you benefited from climbing valuations, record corporate profits, and the highest overall P/E in history.
The problem in our economy is that owners of capital (such as people with 401k accounts) are getting a bigger and bigger slice of GDP, while labor's share is shrinking.
The only way your 401k could have been "destroyed" is if you invested it all in Venezuelan bonds.
RTFA. This is not caused by H1-Bs. Salaries for tech workers have gone up, and according to TFA they are "thriving". Tech salaries are up 32% after adjusting for inflation.
What TFA is talking about is everyone else. People that work in Sunnyvale grocery stores, or San Jose car dealerships, or Palo Alto restaurants. It is workers in the non-tech economy that are doing poorly, and those people aren't competing with H1-Bs.
Licensed brothels in Europe and Latin America require ID cards, have regular health inspections, and the working women are interviewed periodically by both health professionals and law enforcement without a manager present. I have a hard time seeing how the abuses you describe could happen there. Why is Australia's system so dysfunctional?
That's where the lesser of two evils doctrine in US elections got reiterated to the American public.
One solution is ranked choice voting, which was used in Maine on Nov 6th. A few voters were confused, and counting the ballots was slow, but it is clearly an improvement over plurality voting. Hopefully it will catch on nationally.
Another improvement is the nonpartisan primaries used in California state (but not federal) elections. Only the top two proceed to the general election, regardless of party. So in some liberal districts the general election is blue-on-blue. This system tends to encourage moderates over wing-nuts, and California is slowly becoming less dysfunctional.
The Russians leaked the fact that Hillary colluded with the DNC to cheat Bernie out of the nomination. So they "leaked" the truth. Maybe instead of targeting the Russians we should focus on cleaning up our own sleazy institutions, starting with the DNC. If the DNC was seen as less corrupt, they might even help their party win a few elections in the heartland.
He gave his weakness away when he said he wanted more “Democracy”
The countries most likely to get into wars are neither dictatorships nor democracies, but those in between. "Partial democracies" often have leaders that believe they can gain from war and often have nationalistic populations that can be easily inflamed. They usually have some censorship so citizens don't hear the other side of the issues, but not enough to keep a lid on nationalistic excess.
There are named major players in AI research that are definitely not democracies
If you saw some of the nationalistic riots in China over the Diaoyu rocks you might consider that a good thing. China has 30 million excess young men with no hope of getting a GF or finding a wife. Excess unattached young men has never been good for social stability. Muslim countries have the same issue, but because of polygamy rather than sex selective abortions.
So fire the people for whom it went down or remove the privilege of working from home. Problem solved.
Right. Just fire 40% of your workforce. Then just hire replacements, and spend a year rebuilding your business while working with the new employees, and expending enormous amounts of expensive management bandwidth to figure out which of them are unproductive, and then fire them and iterate again.
If some people can work from home while others can't, you will build resentment. Also, the "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" phenomena will mean that the people coming to the office and interacting with management everyday will be tuned into office politics and get promoted, while the remote people will be the first to get laid off. So the incompetent lazy people move up, and the self-motivated get pruned.
"Work-from-home" first became a big fad in the 1990s. Can you name a single company that adopted that policy and is still in business? They all either died or went back to using a regular office. I doubt you can even name a single successful company that stuck with telecommuting for more than 5 years.
Because the government has no business knowing if children are being sold for child porn
Pedophilia is a medical condition as well as a crime. By over-criminalizing it, we push it into the shadows, make it harder to treat and increase the number of victims. In Japan, pedophiles can buy childlike sex dolls. There is strong evidence that these dolls provide a satisfactory outlet for many pedophiles, and reduces their desire to prey on real children. These dolls are illegal in America, and can only be ordered on the dark web. Do you think that makes sense?
... or if murders are being set up.
Most of the murders arranged on the dark web are between drug gangs. This is a direct result of their activities being illegal, and thus very profitable but with no access to legal processes of dispute resolution.
Alcohol prohibition in the 1920s also led to plenty of murders. The solution was fewer restrictions on what citizens could do, not more.
I'm sure people would love to see children or women being raped in the open.
Because that is what always happens when governments reduce censorship?
No. Only a tiny fraction of their budget is spent on science.
If they can find clever ways to get more science funded with the budget they have they should.
This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they do. Most of their budget is spent on bloated, wasteful, and politicized contracts for hardware that has nothing to do with "science".
If you actually think the SLS has any hope of generating "profits" that can be redirected to planetary science, you are completely delusional.
You should not be surprised. This is the dark web. If backups are made, they can be subpoenaed.
I can't trust someone to make backups and store them safely, I probably would not I trust him host my server.
You are missing the point. His customers are looking for someone they can trust to NOT make backups.
Anyway, good luck to Daniel and his customers. As long as we have overreaching governments grasping for power, we need the anonymity and secrecy of the dark web. Hopefully someday their activities can be done openly.
No. Blockchains have legitimate uses. However the app described in TFA isn't one of them.
A blockchain is basically distributed trust. If I don't trust you, you don't trust me, and there is no 3rd party that we mutually trust, then a blockchain is useful because it allows a publicly authenticated transaction.
For the app described in TFA, a blockchain is pointless. There is already a centralized authority (the game publisher) who can just run a normal DB on their server to keep track of the tokens.
Courts have decided (wrongly IMO) that you can not only sell your own hosting of someone else's FOSS, you can slap your own logo on it and resell it as your own closed source solution
What court decided this? Please provide a citation or a link to the decision.
When NASA is getting into the space tourism business, and possibly running lotteries, it is time to stop and ask some questions. Is this really something the government should be doing?
Rather than branching out into new and weirder lines of business, perhaps we should consider leaving space tourism and launch services to private businesses, and refocus NASA on science and exploration. You know, those non-profitable things that deserve to be supported by the taxpayers.
Sure, they contribute back bug fixes to the core product but they often don't contribute back functional additions.
But if they switch to someone else's product, you won't even get the bug fixes.
My company uses many FLOSS products, and for most of them we wouldn't even have considered them if they were closed source. With FLOSS, you can try the product for free, you can look at the source when the documentation is weak, there are usually good online forums to ask questions, and the danger of an orphaned product is less.
For most of these products, we contribute nothing back, but we don't cost them anything either. But we do pay for some support, submit a few patches and add to the online knowledge base.
These companies closing their products may find that a small slice of a big thing was better than a big slice of nothing.
I tried work from home. I often had 6 beers down by lunchtime, and the quality of my work showed it.
This is not that uncommon. I worked for a company a decade ago that tried "work from home". For about 20%, productivity went up. For about 40% it stayed about the same. But for the other 40% it declined, in many cases to zero.
I remember a conference call where one employee had to interrupt the call several times to yell at her kids to keep the noise down. It turns out she was using "work from home" to cancel her daycare and take care of her kids on company time. She was back working at the office the following week.
Work-from-home can work, but not for everyone, or even for most people, and it requires good managers to determine who should work from home and who should not, and to keep tabs on productivity. Oh, and "good managers" are hard to find, and for many jobs, productivity is notoriously hard to measure.
I wish GitLab the best of luck, but they do not yet have a proven track record, and they are treading down a well worn path that has mostly led to failure.
The American taxpayer should never be in the business of enriching for profit companies.
ALL of the options on the table are made by for-profit companies. The lead contractor for SLS is Boeing.
Those companies should be required to sell to the US at cost + a % of overhead
NO!! This is the problem, not the solution. This incentivizes companies to add bloat and additional expense any way they can.
provided they meet deadlines and cost estimation projections.
This DOES NOT WORK. Contractors make a low ball bid, and then requirements change, and they ask for outrageous additional payments, for work to be done in strategically chosen congressional districts. Since the "sunk cost" fallacy does not apply to government contracts, the new expenses are approved slice by slice until you typically end up three times over budget. Delay is also incentivized, since it leads to more opportunities to tack on expenses.
There is a long, long track records of "cost plus" leading to dismal results. To hold it up as some sort of ideal alternative to a competitive market for launch services is just idiotic.
SLS should be cancelled. The sooner the better.
If Boeing wants to continue it on there own dime, so they can bid against Space X for launch services, that is fine. Probability of them doing that: 0%. They aren't that stupid when they are spending their own money.
It's time to start actively creating misinformation on one's social media presence. Since we can't protect our personal information from these Big Brother wannabe's, we have to at least degrade its reliability, and therefore its value.
This is what I do too. To mislead them, I only visit websites I don't like, and I only buy things I don't want.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't conflate "white" with US-born.
... and don't conflate "brown" with foreign.
Santa Clara County was one of the main areas settled by refugees from the Vietnam War. That was over 40 years ago. Those refugees now have US-born adult children and grandchildren. So that Vietnamese guy in the next cubicle is most likely a native born US citizen.
Santa Clara County has a Chinese community that dates back to the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and a Hispanic community that goes back centuries before that.
deregulation tanked the economy and destroyed what little they had in their 401ks.
This is the exact opposite of what actually happened. If you kept your 401k you benefited from climbing valuations, record corporate profits, and the highest overall P/E in history.
The problem in our economy is that owners of capital (such as people with 401k accounts) are getting a bigger and bigger slice of GDP, while labor's share is shrinking.
The only way your 401k could have been "destroyed" is if you invested it all in Venezuelan bonds.
they tend to live far away from the property they own
What is the basis for this factoid? Do you have any evidence that landlords tend to live "far away" from their properties?
That doesn't make sense, since it is much easier to manage property that is close by, nor has it been my experience as either a renter or rentee.
RTFA. This is not caused by H1-Bs. Salaries for tech workers have gone up, and according to TFA they are "thriving". Tech salaries are up 32% after adjusting for inflation.
What TFA is talking about is everyone else. People that work in Sunnyvale grocery stores, or San Jose car dealerships, or Palo Alto restaurants. It is workers in the non-tech economy that are doing poorly, and those people aren't competing with H1-Bs.
Any distributed system is only as secure as its least secure node.
This is not true in general, and certainly is not true for distributed blockchains.
Licensed brothels in Europe and Latin America require ID cards, have regular health inspections, and the working women are interviewed periodically by both health professionals and law enforcement without a manager present. I have a hard time seeing how the abuses you describe could happen there. Why is Australia's system so dysfunctional?
I own a drone (DJI Mavic). I worked with helicopters when I was in the military. They have WAY more down time than drones.
So your argument is completely backwards. If you need reliable deliveries, go with the drone.
That's where the lesser of two evils doctrine in US elections got reiterated to the American public.
One solution is ranked choice voting, which was used in Maine on Nov 6th. A few voters were confused, and counting the ballots was slow, but it is clearly an improvement over plurality voting. Hopefully it will catch on nationally.
Another improvement is the nonpartisan primaries used in California state (but not federal) elections. Only the top two proceed to the general election, regardless of party. So in some liberal districts the general election is blue-on-blue. This system tends to encourage moderates over wing-nuts, and California is slowly becoming less dysfunctional.
Basically, it's not just cheating that kept Bernie out of the Whitehouse. America has a ruling class.
Yes, it is pathetic how the Koch brothers were able to just buy the presidency for Jeb Bush.
The Russians leaked the fact that Hillary colluded with the DNC to cheat Bernie out of the nomination. So they "leaked" the truth. Maybe instead of targeting the Russians we should focus on cleaning up our own sleazy institutions, starting with the DNC. If the DNC was seen as less corrupt, they might even help their party win a few elections in the heartland.
He gave his weakness away when he said he wanted more “Democracy”
The countries most likely to get into wars are neither dictatorships nor democracies, but those in between. "Partial democracies" often have leaders that believe they can gain from war and often have nationalistic populations that can be easily inflamed. They usually have some censorship so citizens don't hear the other side of the issues, but not enough to keep a lid on nationalistic excess.
There are named major players in AI research that are definitely not democracies
If you saw some of the nationalistic riots in China over the Diaoyu rocks you might consider that a good thing. China has 30 million excess young men with no hope of getting a GF or finding a wife. Excess unattached young men has never been good for social stability. Muslim countries have the same issue, but because of polygamy rather than sex selective abortions.
So fire the people for whom it went down or remove the privilege of working from home. Problem solved.
Right. Just fire 40% of your workforce. Then just hire replacements, and spend a year rebuilding your business while working with the new employees, and expending enormous amounts of expensive management bandwidth to figure out which of them are unproductive, and then fire them and iterate again.
If some people can work from home while others can't, you will build resentment. Also, the "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" phenomena will mean that the people coming to the office and interacting with management everyday will be tuned into office politics and get promoted, while the remote people will be the first to get laid off. So the incompetent lazy people move up, and the self-motivated get pruned.
"Work-from-home" first became a big fad in the 1990s. Can you name a single company that adopted that policy and is still in business? They all either died or went back to using a regular office. I doubt you can even name a single successful company that stuck with telecommuting for more than 5 years.
Because the government has no business knowing if children are being sold for child porn
Pedophilia is a medical condition as well as a crime. By over-criminalizing it, we push it into the shadows, make it harder to treat and increase the number of victims. In Japan, pedophiles can buy childlike sex dolls. There is strong evidence that these dolls provide a satisfactory outlet for many pedophiles, and reduces their desire to prey on real children. These dolls are illegal in America, and can only be ordered on the dark web. Do you think that makes sense?
... or if murders are being set up.
Most of the murders arranged on the dark web are between drug gangs. This is a direct result of their activities being illegal, and thus very profitable but with no access to legal processes of dispute resolution.
Alcohol prohibition in the 1920s also led to plenty of murders. The solution was fewer restrictions on what citizens could do, not more.
I'm sure people would love to see children or women being raped in the open.
Because that is what always happens when governments reduce censorship?
Reductio ad absurdum
What I want to know is why is there 2.4 km distance that must be traversed. Is the idea to transfer between hospitals in a city?
The summary specifically says this is a typical distance for transferring between hospitals.
Does it take too long to get a helicopter pilot into the air?
So your point is that they shouldn't waste money on a $500 drone, when a mere $1.5M helicopter can do it for only $1000 an hour?
NASA's business is doing science.
No. Only a tiny fraction of their budget is spent on science.
If they can find clever ways to get more science funded with the budget they have they should.
This is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what they do. Most of their budget is spent on bloated, wasteful, and politicized contracts for hardware that has nothing to do with "science".
If you actually think the SLS has any hope of generating "profits" that can be redirected to planetary science, you are completely delusional.
I find it quite surprising, as well
You should not be surprised. This is the dark web. If backups are made, they can be subpoenaed.
I can't trust someone to make backups and store them safely, I probably would not I trust him host my server.
You are missing the point. His customers are looking for someone they can trust to NOT make backups.
Anyway, good luck to Daniel and his customers. As long as we have overreaching governments grasping for power, we need the anonymity and secrecy of the dark web. Hopefully someday their activities can be done openly.
So... are we done with blockchain yet?
No. Blockchains have legitimate uses. However the app described in TFA isn't one of them.
A blockchain is basically distributed trust. If I don't trust you, you don't trust me, and there is no 3rd party that we mutually trust, then a blockchain is useful because it allows a publicly authenticated transaction.
For the app described in TFA, a blockchain is pointless. There is already a centralized authority (the game publisher) who can just run a normal DB on their server to keep track of the tokens.
Courts have decided (wrongly IMO) that you can not only sell your own hosting of someone else's FOSS, you can slap your own logo on it and resell it as your own closed source solution
What court decided this? Please provide a citation or a link to the decision.
When NASA is getting into the space tourism business, and possibly running lotteries, it is time to stop and ask some questions. Is this really something the government should be doing?
Rather than branching out into new and weirder lines of business, perhaps we should consider leaving space tourism and launch services to private businesses, and refocus NASA on science and exploration. You know, those non-profitable things that deserve to be supported by the taxpayers.
Sure, they contribute back bug fixes to the core product but they often don't contribute back functional additions.
But if they switch to someone else's product, you won't even get the bug fixes.
My company uses many FLOSS products, and for most of them we wouldn't even have considered them if they were closed source. With FLOSS, you can try the product for free, you can look at the source when the documentation is weak, there are usually good online forums to ask questions, and the danger of an orphaned product is less.
For most of these products, we contribute nothing back, but we don't cost them anything either. But we do pay for some support, submit a few patches and add to the online knowledge base.
These companies closing their products may find that a small slice of a big thing was better than a big slice of nothing.
I tried work from home. I often had 6 beers down by lunchtime, and the quality of my work showed it.
This is not that uncommon. I worked for a company a decade ago that tried "work from home". For about 20%, productivity went up. For about 40% it stayed about the same. But for the other 40% it declined, in many cases to zero.
I remember a conference call where one employee had to interrupt the call several times to yell at her kids to keep the noise down. It turns out she was using "work from home" to cancel her daycare and take care of her kids on company time. She was back working at the office the following week.
Work-from-home can work, but not for everyone, or even for most people, and it requires good managers to determine who should work from home and who should not, and to keep tabs on productivity. Oh, and "good managers" are hard to find, and for many jobs, productivity is notoriously hard to measure.
I wish GitLab the best of luck, but they do not yet have a proven track record, and they are treading down a well worn path that has mostly led to failure.
Now multiply that by 1,000,000 and you get "Mars".
Sure. But we can go even further than that. Even if we want to pay for space colonies, Mars is a dumb place to put them.
When we finally move out of earth's gravity well, it makes no sense to go back down to the surface of another planet.
O'Neill Cylinders assembled from dismembered near-earth asteroids, or from mines on the moon, would make WAY more sense.
The American taxpayer should never be in the business of enriching for profit companies.
ALL of the options on the table are made by for-profit companies. The lead contractor for SLS is Boeing.
Those companies should be required to sell to the US at cost + a % of overhead
NO!! This is the problem, not the solution. This incentivizes companies to add bloat and additional expense any way they can.
provided they meet deadlines and cost estimation projections.
This DOES NOT WORK. Contractors make a low ball bid, and then requirements change, and they ask for outrageous additional payments, for work to be done in strategically chosen congressional districts. Since the "sunk cost" fallacy does not apply to government contracts, the new expenses are approved slice by slice until you typically end up three times over budget. Delay is also incentivized, since it leads to more opportunities to tack on expenses.
There is a long, long track records of "cost plus" leading to dismal results. To hold it up as some sort of ideal alternative to a competitive market for launch services is just idiotic.
SLS should be cancelled. The sooner the better.
If Boeing wants to continue it on there own dime, so they can bid against Space X for launch services, that is fine. Probability of them doing that: 0%. They aren't that stupid when they are spending their own money.
Apple has that giant glass "Heaven's Gate" building.
$5B/$1T = 0.5% of Apple's market cap.
It's time to start actively creating misinformation on one's social media presence. Since we can't protect our personal information from these Big Brother wannabe's, we have to at least degrade its reliability, and therefore its value.
This is what I do too. To mislead them, I only visit websites I don't like, and I only buy things I don't want.