If UBI is only for adults, then having children reduces available funds per person in that family. Likely this is the optimum choice, as it means that UBI can scale up to any degree without directly incentivizing increasing the number of offspring.
If UBI is per human, then having children increases UBI benefits, and creates the same type of "have-kids" incentive for any family that can drive the cost of raising the kids down far enough that it falls under whatever UBI is.
What happens with the latter circumstance is that the amount of UBI becomes a lot more critical; if it's more than needed to raise a kid, then having kids equates to earning more money, so there has to be a practical ceiling on UBI or we'll just create more problems. That ceiling means that the degree to which UBI can benefit citizens is capped. Inasmuch as automation is very likely to remove the opportunity to work for many, that's a serious concern.
Well, here's the thing. Climate change is climate change. It doesn't respond to "president" or "senate", it responds to ameliorative, neutral and aggravating action.
The smart move is to ameliorate; regardless of the degree of change that may or may not be coming down the pike, the environment we have had, land, air and ocean, is the one we are most prepared to cope with, and it is very clearly changing.
Trump's chosen to back away from ameliorative action. That's not smart. It's poor leadership.
Until these devices can do speech-to-text and home control and local resource interaction (your PC, basically) without going out on the net, there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Closest so far is MyCroft. It's modular, it's open source, and so it has the potential to be as good as we want to make it.
Get used to it. It's all heading that way and it will make more and more sense as they continue to move in that direction.
Well, as it heads that way, I will keep choosing my computing hardware, both portable and not, based on computing power, connectivity, and display quality, while completely ignoring how "slim" the freaking thing is.
No. The smaller the object, the closer it has to be to us to block the light. The possibility I am describing is that the objects or clouds are fairly close to us. Not in the system with the star. On this end, it wouldn't take much at all. And yes, space is mostly empty, so it's not something you're likely to see much of, is my guess. Emphasis on guess.
Also, wasn't suggesting an asteroid belt. Was pointing out that an asteroid belt is an instance of lots of small bodies in space, therefore, we know that's a possibility -- lots of small bodies in space. Light doesn't go through rock, so this possibility allows for periodic dimming.
Another thing one can see if one is into astronomy are various clouds of gasses, some of them quite opaque, and many of them topologically irregular. Look at the horsehead nebula, for instance.
There's natural stuff out there. It moves around, and it can be opaque. We know this. It's pretty much the rule. When you hear hoofbeats, you should think "horse", not zebra, at least until you can see if the thing has stripes or not. Especially if all you've ever seen are horses, over and over.
In other news, DJI sales dropped off to near nothing, and the company filed for bankruptcy today. The unexplained failure of customers to buy an intentionally crippled product was cited as the primary reason for the company's failure.
Angry stockholders had to be prevented from physically assaulting the corporate board, who were seen running to their limousines behind heavy security.
First, as to its general appearance, it's fun and playful, and (duh) highly reminiscent of comics, which can truly be an art form. This would be enough, but also:
Second, the letters are highly distinct from one another, so it's quick to comprehend. That actually makes it a good idea to use.
Third, it annoys the heck out of fashionistas, and that just makes me smile. Nothing makes the self-important highlight their phony-balony more than a completely unimportant issue where they've stupidly jumped on the bandwagon and now don't know how to get off.
To try and justify their position, they make up utter nonsense like "Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death." That's not an analysis; that's pompous, hyperventilating argle-blargle.
The danger is in the ideas expressed. The ideas are carried by recognition: Not which recognizable symbols, just the recognition of an association between the symbol and the idea. It doesn't matter if the symbol is a swastika, Ye Olde Englife Font, or a happy puppy. If the idea is "let's gas anyone we don't like", there is your problem. Not the stupid font.
The "blame the font" stupidity is the same kind of thinking that says "guns are the problem." No, guns aren't the problem. The problem is that society is sick, specifically because education has failed to socialize the population well enough, and if you take away guns (or fonts, etc.) you will not have solved the problem, you're just moving the goalposts. In a circle.
To solve a problem you have to address it at its source. Fonts (guns, drugs, sex, etc.) are not the source. That should be obvious if you just rub a couple of wet brain cells together for a second or two. If you attack the symptoms, you're just engaging in a round of whack-a-mole. The moles are still there. Your satisfaction that your latest particular mole is down is not in any way indicative that a solution has been found. You want to solve the mole problem, you need to blow up the machine that's popping them up.
To belabor the point even further, if all text was written in a nice, safe font with round edges and well-behaved descenders, these ideas would still exist, still flourish, and would still be communicated just as well. Ergo: fonts are not where a smart person would look for problems. Because they aren't the problem.
A field of large bodies or dense gasses passing in front of the star might produce an erratic dimming.
...and a field of much smaller bodies closer to us passing along the line of sight would also do it. We know of at least one such field here: The asteroid belt; and there is the theory of the Oort cloud. Saturns rings probably qualify also. Regions of greater and lesser density are not a stretch for such fields. Some other broken-up large object or other cloud of small bodies is a perfectly reasonable candidate for the observed dimming. The closer said cloud might be to us, the smaller the objects could be and still block significant amounts of light.
I'm intrigued by the "alien megastructure" idea, but the suggestion that "we have come up with no other possible explanations" is nonsense. It's just the media doing what the media always does: making money off of shading ideas. Pun intended.
Why would I charge at home at night? If I share at work, my job may pay for it.
Well, let's put it this way. If your job is currently happy to pay for your gasoline or diesel right now, then yes, I expect they'll be happy to pay for your electrons instead (especially as it will cost them less, at least until the driving infrastructure taxation catches up.)
If they don't, however, I think you can most likely look forward to feeding an electron vending machine your money, assuming there are charging facilities provided.
She was a bit dejected when I informed her that LCD screens don't use less energy displaying black vs. white, since black is merely produced by blocking the light, and that the only way to save power was to turn the brightness on her laptop down.
If her phone was using an emissive LED tech, such as the Galaxy S7's OLED display (and a fairly long list of others), a black screen does use less energy.
It's only LCD displays with LED backlights that behave as you describe.
The new Mac Pro doesn't need space for drives, it needs space for SSDs.
The read/write/lifetime considerations for SSDs and spinning storage are still different. For pro machines, one can reasonably assume that writing to storage may be a big deal. Plus, you can put a lot of things into a drive bay besides drives. Plus, you have a drive bay, you can put SSD or spinning media in there (or many other things.) Choice! If you have internal slots for SSDs... well, then that's all you have.
IO is different too compared to when the cheese grater design was invented.
It's different in that there are more options. It's not different in that one doesn't need what one had before. So for a reasonable design, add I/O. By all means. Who's going to argue against more capability? That'd be dumb. But don't be throwing out things that are still widely in use. You know, like.... headphones. Ethernet. HDMI.
it's actually all you need now as long as you are OK with one of those USB-C adapters.
Now, see, there's that again. No, I don't want a bunch of adapters. I don't want extra stuff cluttering everything up. I want the ports. The trashcan is crippled because everything ends up flung on one's desk, power supplies, drives, etc. It's awful. We need to move away from that. And it's not like this stuff is expensive, or like drivers need to be written. Apple should just do it right and quit trying to tell us stupidity = courage.
Seriously, what is the case for auto-playing? Does anyone like that?
Advertisers like it.
We, speaking of the majority, variously known as "the product" or "the victim", depending on how honest one is being at any particular moment, don't count. Because we, again speaking of the majority, will continue to return to sites that abuse us in this fashion.
I highly recommend a local blacklist. When a site does this, slap a 127.0.0.1 into your hosts file for the site name. This will prevent the site from ever loading into your browser again via normal links.
Or, you can keep going back. And they'll keep abusing you.
But surely states can impose fairness restrictions on in-state connections. i.e. if a computer in Fort Worth seeks to reach a computer in Dallas, the State of Texas (assuming they would want to) could regulate neutrality, no?
They may be able to, but the feds will likely be able to stick their hands in as well. For instance, you call your local neighbor on your phone, connecting only through local telephone exchanges, if there's a federal statute about what you're doing (say, selling pot), then (among other things) the feds claim jurisdiction because you used "an instrument of interstate commerce", or IOW, something that could have enabled you to do whatever it was in an interstate fashion.
This is one of the underlying reasons for the assertion that the feds have inverted the meaning of the commerce clause (which says they have the authority to regulate commerce "among the several states", not "within the several states") and are therefore acting in an constitutionally unauthorized manner.
So bottom line, the feds can apply their rules and make them stick. Even if whatever it is happens only within the confines of a single state.
It's no big deal to do. Here, we have plug-ins pretty much everywhere we park for more than a few minutes (and even in some of those places.) The reason is because we have to plug in our car's electric heaters for our oil pans and batteries in the winter months, or odds are the cars won't be able to start after a day at work, or sitting overnight or for more than a few hours anywhere. Businesses inevitably have plug-ins all across their employee parking lots, the hospital lot is fully populated with them, etc.
In cities and towns, I suspect that instead of parking meters, you'll just see a bunch of charging posts. You'll probably still have to put quarters in them. Or dollars. Don't think of it as an inconvenience to do: think of it as a new way to get money out of people parking. Then all of a sudden the rise of the appropriate infrastructure becomes obvious and inevitable. Nothing gets infrastructure built like the lure of income.
All I really have to say to that is I don't consider internally non-upgradable desktop machines to be anything I could describe with "great" other than greatly undesirable. And that's what the trashcan design is to me: a machine that's frozen in its capacities as soon as I buy it, short of littering my desk with power warts, easily stolen / damaged drives, an external PCI cage, and a nest of unwanted cables. Which kind of obviates that "neat small cylinder" idea pretty thoroughly. Not to mention being a security nightmare.
If you like the cylinder design, that's all you and of course that's fine. But I don't. I find it appallingly short-sighted and 100% unwanted.
Fortunately, my bought-cheap-off-EBay 2009-era 12/24 core, 64 GB, 3 GHz-ish Mac Pro tower is humming right along. So I can hold off a while yet before having to go the hackintosh route. So really, we're both happy, eh?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a practical question: Why didn't you read, or understand, the summary?
This is a critical question.
If UBI is only for adults, then having children reduces available funds per person in that family. Likely this is the optimum choice, as it means that UBI can scale up to any degree without directly incentivizing increasing the number of offspring.
If UBI is per human, then having children increases UBI benefits, and creates the same type of "have-kids" incentive for any family that can drive the cost of raising the kids down far enough that it falls under whatever UBI is.
What happens with the latter circumstance is that the amount of UBI becomes a lot more critical; if it's more than needed to raise a kid, then having kids equates to earning more money, so there has to be a practical ceiling on UBI or we'll just create more problems. That ceiling means that the degree to which UBI can benefit citizens is capped. Inasmuch as automation is very likely to remove the opportunity to work for many, that's a serious concern.
Well, here's the thing. Climate change is climate change. It doesn't respond to "president" or "senate", it responds to ameliorative, neutral and aggravating action.
The smart move is to ameliorate; regardless of the degree of change that may or may not be coming down the pike, the environment we have had, land, air and ocean, is the one we are most prepared to cope with, and it is very clearly changing.
Trump's chosen to back away from ameliorative action. That's not smart. It's poor leadership.
Until these devices can do speech-to-text and home control and local resource interaction (your PC, basically) without going out on the net, there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy.
Closest so far is MyCroft. It's modular, it's open source, and so it has the potential to be as good as we want to make it.
Well, as it heads that way, I will keep choosing my computing hardware, both portable and not, based on computing power, connectivity, and display quality, while completely ignoring how "slim" the freaking thing is.
Troll, eh? Lordy, this place has really fallen to the morons. Facts in, troll out.
It'd be funny if it wasn't so sad.
You're confused. Marriage has nothing to do with procreation.
Procreation is the result of having sex, which can be, and is, done both in and outside of marriage.
Marriage is a social statement carrying government sponsored benefits, like being able to visit your spouse in the hospital.
There are plenty of married couples with no kids; plenty of unmarried people with kids; plenty of gay folks with kids, both natural and adopted.
"We'll only use your social security number for your retirement account. Honest injun. We swear." ...
Not unless you're running on an 80286, it doesn't. Probably not even then.
No. The smaller the object, the closer it has to be to us to block the light. The possibility I am describing is that the objects or clouds are fairly close to us. Not in the system with the star. On this end, it wouldn't take much at all. And yes, space is mostly empty, so it's not something you're likely to see much of, is my guess. Emphasis on guess.
Also, wasn't suggesting an asteroid belt. Was pointing out that an asteroid belt is an instance of lots of small bodies in space, therefore, we know that's a possibility -- lots of small bodies in space. Light doesn't go through rock, so this possibility allows for periodic dimming.
Another thing one can see if one is into astronomy are various clouds of gasses, some of them quite opaque, and many of them topologically irregular. Look at the horsehead nebula, for instance.
There's natural stuff out there. It moves around, and it can be opaque. We know this. It's pretty much the rule. When you hear hoofbeats, you should think "horse", not zebra, at least until you can see if the thing has stripes or not. Especially if all you've ever seen are horses, over and over.
Dateline 2018:
In other news, DJI sales dropped off to near nothing, and the company filed for bankruptcy today. The unexplained failure of customers to buy an intentionally crippled product was cited as the primary reason for the company's failure.
Angry stockholders had to be prevented from physically assaulting the corporate board, who were seen running to their limousines behind heavy security.
My shelves are replete with PS1 and PS2 games, a few PS3 games. All Sony needs to do to get my money is:
1) Make sure the next console can play them, and
2) Make sure that I can buy game disks that can sit on the shelves next to them that will never, ever require "the cloud" or "authorization" to run.
They're not going to do that, though, because greed has blinded them. And consequently, they're not going to get my money.
Also: Eventually, emulators will appear that can run those games on general purpose hardware. When that happens, Sony's opportunity will be over.
Comic Sans is wonderful. Three reasons.
First, as to its general appearance, it's fun and playful, and (duh) highly reminiscent of comics, which can truly be an art form. This would be enough, but also:
Second, the letters are highly distinct from one another, so it's quick to comprehend. That actually makes it a good idea to use.
Third, it annoys the heck out of fashionistas, and that just makes me smile. Nothing makes the self-important highlight their phony-balony more than a completely unimportant issue where they've stupidly jumped on the bandwagon and now don't know how to get off.
To try and justify their position, they make up utter nonsense like "Typography can silently influence: It can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death." That's not an analysis; that's pompous, hyperventilating argle-blargle.
The danger is in the ideas expressed. The ideas are carried by recognition: Not which recognizable symbols, just the recognition of an association between the symbol and the idea. It doesn't matter if the symbol is a swastika, Ye Olde Englife Font, or a happy puppy. If the idea is "let's gas anyone we don't like", there is your problem. Not the stupid font.
The "blame the font" stupidity is the same kind of thinking that says "guns are the problem." No, guns aren't the problem. The problem is that society is sick, specifically because education has failed to socialize the population well enough, and if you take away guns (or fonts, etc.) you will not have solved the problem, you're just moving the goalposts. In a circle.
To solve a problem you have to address it at its source. Fonts (guns, drugs, sex, etc.) are not the source. That should be obvious if you just rub a couple of wet brain cells together for a second or two. If you attack the symptoms, you're just engaging in a round of whack-a-mole. The moles are still there. Your satisfaction that your latest particular mole is down is not in any way indicative that a solution has been found. You want to solve the mole problem, you need to blow up the machine that's popping them up.
To belabor the point even further, if all text was written in a nice, safe font with round edges and well-behaved descenders, these ideas would still exist, still flourish, and would still be communicated just as well. Ergo: fonts are not where a smart person would look for problems. Because they aren't the problem.
I'm intrigued by the "alien megastructure" idea, but the suggestion that "we have come up with no other possible explanations" is nonsense. It's just the media doing what the media always does: making money off of shading ideas. Pun intended.
Oh, I see where your problem lies. It's:
It's a story about a shepherd who majored in animal husbandry.
Until they caught him at it.
Still, she has the right idea, and likely the tech will get into her hands eventually.
Well, let's put it this way. If your job is currently happy to pay for your gasoline or diesel right now, then yes, I expect they'll be happy to pay for your electrons instead (especially as it will cost them less, at least until the driving infrastructure taxation catches up.)
If they don't, however, I think you can most likely look forward to feeding an electron vending machine your money, assuming there are charging facilities provided.
If her phone was using an emissive LED tech, such as the Galaxy S7's OLED display (and a fairly long list of others), a black screen does use less energy.
It's only LCD displays with LED backlights that behave as you describe.
Pretty sure the death will all be in the other direction. Copyright is big business. Big.
If you want it changed, you have to get after legislators, and possibly even the US constitution, presuming your concerns are US-centric.
Low-level violations won't do it, and large scale central violations such as these are pretty much doomed from day one.
The read/write/lifetime considerations for SSDs and spinning storage are still different. For pro machines, one can reasonably assume that writing to storage may be a big deal. Plus, you can put a lot of things into a drive bay besides drives. Plus, you have a drive bay, you can put SSD or spinning media in there (or many other things.) Choice! If you have internal slots for SSDs... well, then that's all you have.
It's different in that there are more options. It's not different in that one doesn't need what one had before. So for a reasonable design, add I/O. By all means. Who's going to argue against more capability? That'd be dumb. But don't be throwing out things that are still widely in use. You know, like.... headphones. Ethernet. HDMI.
Now, see, there's that again. No, I don't want a bunch of adapters. I don't want extra stuff cluttering everything up. I want the ports. The trashcan is crippled because everything ends up flung on one's desk, power supplies, drives, etc. It's awful. We need to move away from that. And it's not like this stuff is expensive, or like drivers need to be written. Apple should just do it right and quit trying to tell us stupidity = courage.
Advertisers like it.
We, speaking of the majority, variously known as "the product" or "the victim", depending on how honest one is being at any particular moment, don't count. Because we, again speaking of the majority, will continue to return to sites that abuse us in this fashion.
I highly recommend a local blacklist. When a site does this, slap a 127.0.0.1 into your hosts file for the site name. This will prevent the site from ever loading into your browser again via normal links.
Or, you can keep going back. And they'll keep abusing you.
They may be able to, but the feds will likely be able to stick their hands in as well. For instance, you call your local neighbor on your phone, connecting only through local telephone exchanges, if there's a federal statute about what you're doing (say, selling pot), then (among other things) the feds claim jurisdiction because you used "an instrument of interstate commerce", or IOW, something that could have enabled you to do whatever it was in an interstate fashion.
This is one of the underlying reasons for the assertion that the feds have inverted the meaning of the commerce clause (which says they have the authority to regulate commerce "among the several states", not "within the several states") and are therefore acting in an constitutionally unauthorized manner.
So bottom line, the feds can apply their rules and make them stick. Even if whatever it is happens only within the confines of a single state.
look here
It's no big deal to do. Here, we have plug-ins pretty much everywhere we park for more than a few minutes (and even in some of those places.) The reason is because we have to plug in our car's electric heaters for our oil pans and batteries in the winter months, or odds are the cars won't be able to start after a day at work, or sitting overnight or for more than a few hours anywhere. Businesses inevitably have plug-ins all across their employee parking lots, the hospital lot is fully populated with them, etc.
In cities and towns, I suspect that instead of parking meters, you'll just see a bunch of charging posts. You'll probably still have to put quarters in them. Or dollars. Don't think of it as an inconvenience to do: think of it as a new way to get money out of people parking. Then all of a sudden the rise of the appropriate infrastructure becomes obvious and inevitable. Nothing gets infrastructure built like the lure of income.
All I really have to say to that is I don't consider internally non-upgradable desktop machines to be anything I could describe with "great" other than greatly undesirable. And that's what the trashcan design is to me: a machine that's frozen in its capacities as soon as I buy it, short of littering my desk with power warts, easily stolen / damaged drives, an external PCI cage, and a nest of unwanted cables. Which kind of obviates that "neat small cylinder" idea pretty thoroughly. Not to mention being a security nightmare.
If you like the cylinder design, that's all you and of course that's fine. But I don't. I find it appallingly short-sighted and 100% unwanted.
Fortunately, my bought-cheap-off-EBay 2009-era 12/24 core, 64 GB, 3 GHz-ish Mac Pro tower is humming right along. So I can hold off a while yet before having to go the hackintosh route. So really, we're both happy, eh? :)