Rich people pay more, poor people pay less (or nothing). That's the way taxes work.
No. It's not. For example, you buy food, you pay the costs - that includes the salaries of the people at the grocery store, the produce truck driver, the service people involved at every stage, the land taxes, the fuel taxes... everything that food costs is in the price. Including, and this is the critical fact, the taxes on every factor. You're poor, the cucumber costs you $1. You're rich, the cucumber costs you $1. Both pay in equal share into the (huge) taxation that underlies the cost of that food item, and every other food item, and fuel, and etc. The cucumber, or more accurately, all purchased food in general, has a huge tax load added to its cost. Which no one gets out of.
The actual difference in who gets taxed what is basically in income tax and a few other taxes. But a very large amount of taxation is hidden in payment transfer for almost all goods and services.
Say you pay a plumber $100. He's in a 30% tax bracket. You're in what you've been told is the "0% tax bracket." You think you're going to get $100 worth of plumbing work? No. You're not. You're going to get, at best, $70 worth of plumbing work, because the plumber is only going to get to keep $70. Your other $30 went right to the government.
You see? There is no "poor people pay no taxes." That's just nonsense for the math-impaired (most everyone, near as I can tell.) Poor people pay taxes all the time - that is, the things they have to buy are taxed at a distance - but it's just the same in actual dollar effects as if you took the money right out of their pockets.
UBI is going to pay for basic accommodation, food and other necessities.
The thing is, $1000 here in rural Montana and $1000 in silicon valley or urban New Jersey are completely different levels of support.
I am all for the idea of UBI, but the fact of the gross imbalance of actual cost of living across the country tells me that there's a lot more to fix before it could even remotely achieve its goals.
The program that is presently being tested in Canada is not UBI. It incorporates means-testing, graduated payouts, and classing, none of which are components of UBI.
Because of this, the results will reveal absolutely nothing about UBI. They will provide information about a standard welfare system.
Any claim that this is a UBI trial and that the results reveal information about UBI is roughly equivalent to feeding people bananas, asking them what they think, and declaring that the results describe people's opinions on watermelon.
I handle interruptions by petting whichever cats show up or giving the lady of the house the hugs she deserves when she ghosts by (one reason why she deserves them is that she carefully doesn't try to engage my attention verbally when I'm working.) Neither of which minor activities derail my train of thought. They just make my environment that much more conducive to doing what I am trying to do. Because, you know, happy.
Other than that, when I work, the social media is shut down, the phone is in "airplane mode", and the doorbell doesn't get answered. I am, as you might suspect, very productive under these conditions. I keep coding hours 100% separated from other types of work hours, such as jawing with those who have contracted my services, etc.
There is nothing better than working in your own lab, in your own home, with full control over the chaos that wants to intrude, choosing your own working hours, managing noise levels, doing breaks and feedings as desired instead of as permitted, etc. Nothing. Nothing comes even close.
I'm aware of the meeting. I'm not at all clear on what it is they will produce, other than it may be more expandable than the 2013/2014 model series, but I'm sure I'll still be running OS X in a year or so; I will certainly be interested to see what reality arises from their mea culpa.
Can you even accept the possibility that gender bias could even partially be responsible for what is being observed?
I have zero problem accepting that possibility.
However, I find it absurd that some people have trouble accepting the possibility that inasmuch as women do approach things differently than males do in the general case, that this might very well affect the solutions they come up with, again, in the general case.
The first sign that political correctness has gone too far is when you see adherents ignoring facts right in front of their nose.
For all I know, the women's solutions are better because of this, and the stats brought to light here are because men can't see that - because the thinking isn't the same.
But to assume that the sexes produce identical results when presented with identical problems... that actually seems more suspect to me than any claim of inherent equality.
Best tech support person ever worked for me - over thirty years - was female. By far. Because she, naturally I believe, brought compassion to the phone and she knew what she was doing right down to the last nut and bolt.
Equality of opportunity is a wonderful idea, and I'm all for it. And for reaping the results of the best outcome.
But presuming equality of capability because tits vs. danglies... that's just stupid. No one should do that. And you know what that is? It's bias.
I've been running OS X for years. My current hardware is a mac pro ca. 2009, a 12/24-core, 64 GB, 3 GHz, quad-drive, 8-monitor setup. It's newish to me, I bought it used last year, (finally) replacing, in 2016, a 2008 8-core I purchased new in 2008. Apple's current mac pros are not of interest to me. Not even slightly.
So the thing is, over the years, for this platform, I've bought a lot of OS X based software. I bought it thoughtfully for the most part, and so most of it remains useful to me.
So as far as suddenly developing an itch for Windows (or linux) goes for my daily driver... nope. It's simply not practical.
This occurred, it seems to me, because the system was in fact highly reliable, none of my Apple machines ever had a hardware failure, and as that software pile grew, the "I'm invested" hooks got in deeper and deeper. It's not even that the application software is the same as (or even better than) it would be under Windows - sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't - it's just the fact that it's already there, I already paid for it, and I see no reason to do that again. I do very much like that I can open a terminal and hammer away at what amounts to a very familiar *nix environment. That seems to me to be one of the major differentiators vs. Windows. Not linux, linux is (obviously) a comfy *nix environment, but linux's graphics environment (no standard, OS-supported GUI) deters me from developing for it, so, it's not in the running to be my desktop, even if I could get over all that already-purchased software. OS X and Windows are both fully adequate graphics platforms for developing the kind of applications I work on, so that's where my interest remains.
Today, Apple doesn't sell a computer I would buy, but, there's always EBay. Apple's Mac Pro platform didn't turn into something of no interest to me until 2013 or 2014 if you go by hardware actually shipping. So there are about four years left for me to... "upgrade"... to. And in that time, Apple may finally come with a tower design I'm willing to buy into again. And my current machine seems quite capable and fast to me, so I'm not feeling any real pressure.
I expect my software will keep working just the same, Windows will continue to not run it, and so Apple it will continue to be, one way or another.
It doesn't hurt that I can open a VM with Windows and/or linux any time I need to (and I do need to, because I build win/osx cross platform software, and our web servers are all linux machines, so there are reasons to have a working linux image on my desktop as well.) I just never have to leave OSX to do that, which is damned convenient (VMWare FTW.)
When your only hammer is Python, all problems begin to look like they take huge amounts of memory via a parasitic interpreter, and can only be solved in trillions of low level compute cycles.
And I say that as a huge fan of Python. But I would never let it be my only hammer, or make the ludicrous claims in TFS (nor does TFS give me any reason to spend time with TFA.)
Finally: You can usually spot unqualified-in-c / c++ programmers by the claims they make about c / c++ that are based upon their own incompetence in and/or with these languages. A good c / c++ programmer isn't all that common, because, yes, these languages are demanding of significant skill levels, and such skill levels are rare. That's why the padded rooms of strongly typed and prophylactically declarative languages became so prevalent: To keep you from hitting your thumb. And in so doing, everyone else's thumb. However, those highly skilled people are still out there, thumbs intact.
Because you can sell copies of music tracks at sub-dollar impulse purchase prices and still make a profit anyway. Sadly, that is not true for many other kinds of creative works.
Well, it might be, but the only way to find out is to try it. And all I see are ridiculously steep prices. It doesn't make me take a black hat approach – IMHO, piracy is ethically bankrupt – but I won't pay those prices. So I don't see a lot of new movies until they're quite old, resulting in them landing in the group that a reasonably priced streaming service will include.
$10 / month for lots of not-all-that-new content is okay with me. $10 / movie is not. But $1 to stream a new movie once? Sure, I think I'd bite that biscuit quite regularly. As it stands, they get nothing from me. That's a loss no matter how you try to account for it.
The UK enjoys a really interesting market position if it wants to be the only nation in the region that makes, exports, and supports DRM-breaking tools
I predict that if the UK were to do this, then all future villains in entertainment media produced outside the UK would have strong British accents. All of them.
Also, the UK is whole-heartedly chasing the power-mad 1%-er's dream of citizen repression just as hard as we are here in the US. So I don't think there's any chance at all that they would do this.
DRM's not going away. DRM is the sugar in the authoritarian's tea.
I drive on highways with 55-65 MPH speed limits, just like everyone for the last 50 years, with cars built for those speeds.
From time to time, I drive a 2016 corvette on Montana highways with 80 mph speed limits. It is fair to say that the car loafs along. It was absolutely built for these speeds, and speeds considerably higher. I often reach those higher speeds. [Um. Allegedly. Cough.] Many other models are built with similar capabilities. The highways here are well designed for those speeds. Even many of the secondary roads here are pretty good for them, though not as good.
Methinks you are thinking well inside your own box. Poorly. Which makes me raise my eyebrows at your assertion that you are a physicist. That may be unfair; many people are notably vertical in their strengths. But still, my eyebrows are raised.:)
We can also (if we are honest) observe that progress, and the potential it unleashes in many cases, is not all that closely linked with what's commercially available or common around the time of the fundamental invention. In the first decade after lasers were invented, for instance, there was no significant commercial application. When the integrated circuit was invented, it wasn't much to look at and functionally speaking, for decades, it was outright pitiful compared to ICs today. We're still dealing with developing a full understanding of how neurons do what they do. In laser parlance, in 2017 we are yet pre-laser, and anyone who tries to tell us that lasers can't do X at this point should be considered, at most, a hand-waver in the grips of a fit of profound hubris.
WRT the subject at hand - intelligence and consciousness resulting from information processing - nature has, fortunately enough, provided numerous models at various levels. So we know it can be done at least one way - neural-like systems. Sure, it's obviously not easy. Brains use very small, very complicated, and very difficult to understand computing elements.
But achieving a manufactured intelligence is also obviously highly interesting and to many, highly desirable. Assuming only that our technological progress doesn't actually halt due to some unrelated factor (war, asteroid, runaway climate, alien invasion, etc.), there are many reasons, all supporting one another very, very well, to assume that we will "get there from here." Not the least of which is there are many (sub-)reasons to presume that will be a great deal of economic leverage in such technology.
And, perhaps most relevant to you, there are no known physics related reasons to presume that we won't get there eventually. As you should know very well. If one is (or multiple are) discovered - for instance, should it be determined at some point in the future that brains use some heretofore unknown physics mechanism(s) to do what they do - then we may quite suddenly be on different grounds in terms of ultimate practicality. But there isn't even a hint of this as yet. It definitely appears to be chemistry, electricity, and topology all the way down as far as brains go. That stuff, we can do. Larger and clumsier and perhaps even slower... perhaps even only as emulation... yet we can do it. We just don't know exactly what to do. Yet.
The expectation is that the salaried position is a 40 hr/wk position.
If you treat your employees only as a measurable commodity, entering into no acknowledgment of their worth, individuality, and personal potential, while attempting to mine every second of their time like a greedy, annoying crow, or worse, if you attempt to sit on those things and repress who they are, then your employees will not be loyal. This is inevitable.
When the first even nominally better opportunity (which might not even be better on grounds of pay, since everything else at your place sucks so bad) and they'll be gone. Because you made them hate you.
Which you deserved.
Sane employment is pleasant, goal seeking and reward-rich. For everyone. Not based on counting drops of sweat and screaming when the count is short. Balance liberty against compassion in tension as you encourage your employees to chase your goals and their goals. Otherwise you run the risk of just turning out to be considered another reviled prick.
I've run several very successful businesses. I'm not guessing here. Happy people do better work. Period.
But the advent of flat-screens has pretty much turned it into a standing-room-only enterprise. Erected a barrier to the laydown, as it were. It's hard on some of us. So to speak.
Yep. Hey, you know what's great? Talking to people. Sex. Building models. Organizing one's rock/stamp/severedhead collections. Writing code. Playing with the cat/dog/cockatrice. Martial arts. Photography. Reading. Taking courses. Exercising. Working out a sane budget. Listening to music. Playing music. Sewing. Legos. Fooling with hardware. Home improvements. Giving the domicile a good once-over at the ultra-picky level, just for the fun of it. Putting the yard in tip-top order. Walking the canine or the cat. Visiting Rome, Paris or Venice (while pretending to be Canadian, of course.) Or just going to see a friend. You know, in person, not with that phone-tumor. Taking a walk, preferably somewhere you haven't been or really love. Etc. Lots and lots of etc.
Television... I just can't bring myself to call that "great." The couch, it really does make for potato generation.
you maintain that anyone from any other country in the world has a right to live in the U.S., but U.S. citizens have no right to live in any other country?
No. However, I maintain that Trump's wall is one of his stupidest ideas.
That's English for "Trump's wall is one of his stupidest ideas", BTW.
Which is not to say that most of his other ideas aren't stupid, because they really, really are. But the wall is special. Like Trump. Short-bus special. Profoundly without merit while at the same time comprising a financial boondoggle of titanic proportions, at the very same time when the country's actual useful infrastructure (not in any way to be confused with border "walls") needs money and effort.
So without regard to political party
Oh, yes. Completely without regard to political party. Just in regard to Trump and any bewildered sycophant who thinks building that wall is anything but a complete waste of time, effort and money.
Also, I like vegetables. So I'm rather appreciative of the workers who pick them. No matter where they come from. I like tacos, too. I would not be in the least bit offended by a taco truck on every corner. Especially if they offered a nice selection of vegetables, but, you know, either way, really.
U.S. citizens have no right to live in any other country
Hmmm. That's a very... interesting... postulate. Let me guess: you live in one of the states that has legalized pot, and you just got back from a test run of every heavy-hitting variety offered, is that it? Did you know that at some taco stands, I've been able to buy Fritos? FRITOS! Lovely, crispy corn chips! And Soda! MMMMMM! Don't Bogart that joint, my friend. Pass it over to Juan.
Yes, exactly what I was thinking: "blocking pirate sites violates free speech" may be an archaic form of Spanish meaning "fuck your wall, you tangerine-faced moron."
I confess it's been a while since I refreshed my fluency in Spanish. But still.:)
However, like everything, if a technology comes along to supplant it, in this case, the cost of greener alternatives is lower than coal, it'll simply dwindle and fade over time, with absolutely no need for liberals trying to regulate the crap out of it.
This flawed argument ignores the incontrovertible fact that allowing coal to continue to provide energy on equal terms with other energy supplies rather than pressuring the market to switch to less environmentally damaging sources of energy would do real and substantial harm to us all. The bottom line is: the less energy produced from burning coal and supplied instead from less polluting resources, the better off the world is.
So in fact, there is a need for it to have the crap regulated out of it in a context where it can be replaced with (considerably) less polluting energy sources, which is exactly where we are today.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It's not. For example, you buy food, you pay the costs - that includes the salaries of the people at the grocery store, the produce truck driver, the service people involved at every stage, the land taxes, the fuel taxes... everything that food costs is in the price. Including, and this is the critical fact, the taxes on every factor. You're poor, the cucumber costs you $1. You're rich, the cucumber costs you $1. Both pay in equal share into the (huge) taxation that underlies the cost of that food item, and every other food item, and fuel, and etc. The cucumber, or more accurately, all purchased food in general, has a huge tax load added to its cost. Which no one gets out of.
The actual difference in who gets taxed what is basically in income tax and a few other taxes. But a very large amount of taxation is hidden in payment transfer for almost all goods and services.
Say you pay a plumber $100. He's in a 30% tax bracket. You're in what you've been told is the "0% tax bracket." You think you're going to get $100 worth of plumbing work? No. You're not. You're going to get, at best, $70 worth of plumbing work, because the plumber is only going to get to keep $70. Your other $30 went right to the government.
You see? There is no "poor people pay no taxes." That's just nonsense for the math-impaired (most everyone, near as I can tell.) Poor people pay taxes all the time - that is, the things they have to buy are taxed at a distance - but it's just the same in actual dollar effects as if you took the money right out of their pockets.
The thing is, $1000 here in rural Montana and $1000 in silicon valley or urban New Jersey are completely different levels of support.
I am all for the idea of UBI, but the fact of the gross imbalance of actual cost of living across the country tells me that there's a lot more to fix before it could even remotely achieve its goals.
The program that is presently being tested in Canada is not UBI. It incorporates means-testing, graduated payouts, and classing, none of which are components of UBI.
Because of this, the results will reveal absolutely nothing about UBI. They will provide information about a standard welfare system.
Any claim that this is a UBI trial and that the results reveal information about UBI is roughly equivalent to feeding people bananas, asking them what they think, and declaring that the results describe people's opinions on watermelon.
I handle interruptions by petting whichever cats show up or giving the lady of the house the hugs she deserves when she ghosts by (one reason why she deserves them is that she carefully doesn't try to engage my attention verbally when I'm working.) Neither of which minor activities derail my train of thought. They just make my environment that much more conducive to doing what I am trying to do. Because, you know, happy.
Other than that, when I work, the social media is shut down, the phone is in "airplane mode", and the doorbell doesn't get answered. I am, as you might suspect, very productive under these conditions. I keep coding hours 100% separated from other types of work hours, such as jawing with those who have contracted my services, etc.
There is nothing better than working in your own lab, in your own home, with full control over the chaos that wants to intrude, choosing your own working hours, managing noise levels, doing breaks and feedings as desired instead of as permitted, etc. Nothing. Nothing comes even close.
Orwell was an optimist.
Yes, thank you.
I'm aware of the meeting. I'm not at all clear on what it is they will produce, other than it may be more expandable than the 2013/2014 model series, but I'm sure I'll still be running OS X in a year or so; I will certainly be interested to see what reality arises from their mea culpa.
I have zero problem accepting that possibility.
However, I find it absurd that some people have trouble accepting the possibility that inasmuch as women do approach things differently than males do in the general case, that this might very well affect the solutions they come up with, again, in the general case.
The first sign that political correctness has gone too far is when you see adherents ignoring facts right in front of their nose.
For all I know, the women's solutions are better because of this, and the stats brought to light here are because men can't see that - because the thinking isn't the same.
But to assume that the sexes produce identical results when presented with identical problems... that actually seems more suspect to me than any claim of inherent equality.
Best tech support person ever worked for me - over thirty years - was female. By far. Because she, naturally I believe, brought compassion to the phone and she knew what she was doing right down to the last nut and bolt.
Equality of opportunity is a wonderful idea, and I'm all for it. And for reaping the results of the best outcome.
But presuming equality of capability because tits vs. danglies... that's just stupid. No one should do that. And you know what that is? It's bias.
I've been running OS X for years. My current hardware is a mac pro ca. 2009, a 12/24-core, 64 GB, 3 GHz, quad-drive, 8-monitor setup. It's newish to me, I bought it used last year, (finally) replacing, in 2016, a 2008 8-core I purchased new in 2008. Apple's current mac pros are not of interest to me. Not even slightly.
So the thing is, over the years, for this platform, I've bought a lot of OS X based software. I bought it thoughtfully for the most part, and so most of it remains useful to me.
So as far as suddenly developing an itch for Windows (or linux) goes for my daily driver... nope. It's simply not practical.
This occurred, it seems to me, because the system was in fact highly reliable, none of my Apple machines ever had a hardware failure, and as that software pile grew, the "I'm invested" hooks got in deeper and deeper. It's not even that the application software is the same as (or even better than) it would be under Windows - sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't - it's just the fact that it's already there, I already paid for it, and I see no reason to do that again. I do very much like that I can open a terminal and hammer away at what amounts to a very familiar *nix environment. That seems to me to be one of the major differentiators vs. Windows. Not linux, linux is (obviously) a comfy *nix environment, but linux's graphics environment (no standard, OS-supported GUI) deters me from developing for it, so, it's not in the running to be my desktop, even if I could get over all that already-purchased software. OS X and Windows are both fully adequate graphics platforms for developing the kind of applications I work on, so that's where my interest remains.
Today, Apple doesn't sell a computer I would buy, but, there's always EBay. Apple's Mac Pro platform didn't turn into something of no interest to me until 2013 or 2014 if you go by hardware actually shipping. So there are about four years left for me to... "upgrade"... to. And in that time, Apple may finally come with a tower design I'm willing to buy into again. And my current machine seems quite capable and fast to me, so I'm not feeling any real pressure.
I expect my software will keep working just the same, Windows will continue to not run it, and so Apple it will continue to be, one way or another.
It doesn't hurt that I can open a VM with Windows and/or linux any time I need to (and I do need to, because I build win/osx cross platform software, and our web servers are all linux machines, so there are reasons to have a working linux image on my desktop as well.) I just never have to leave OSX to do that, which is damned convenient (VMWare FTW.)
Punitively taxing progress in order to protect the buggy whip.
Yeah, this is sure to work out for the best.
I call them annoying. And there's this.
FTFTFS
Yep. And as long as people keep buying $10 movies, they'll keep doing that.
And I'll keep not giving them my money.
See how that works? :)
Nah, only if you're still stuck in base ten. You only need four fingers (and 8 gets you to a byte!) for hexadecimal. Plus carry and overflow bits. :)
Octal was for people who hadn't learned their digits up to F.
When your only hammer is Python, all problems begin to look like they take huge amounts of memory via a parasitic interpreter, and can only be solved in trillions of low level compute cycles.
And I say that as a huge fan of Python. But I would never let it be my only hammer, or make the ludicrous claims in TFS (nor does TFS give me any reason to spend time with TFA.)
Finally: You can usually spot unqualified-in-c / c++ programmers by the claims they make about c / c++ that are based upon their own incompetence in and/or with these languages. A good c / c++ programmer isn't all that common, because, yes, these languages are demanding of significant skill levels, and such skill levels are rare. That's why the padded rooms of strongly typed and prophylactically declarative languages became so prevalent: To keep you from hitting your thumb. And in so doing, everyone else's thumb. However, those highly skilled people are still out there, thumbs intact.
Well, it might be, but the only way to find out is to try it. And all I see are ridiculously steep prices. It doesn't make me take a black hat approach – IMHO, piracy is ethically bankrupt – but I won't pay those prices. So I don't see a lot of new movies until they're quite old, resulting in them landing in the group that a reasonably priced streaming service will include.
$10 / month for lots of not-all-that-new content is okay with me. $10 / movie is not. But $1 to stream a new movie once? Sure, I think I'd bite that biscuit quite regularly. As it stands, they get nothing from me. That's a loss no matter how you try to account for it.
I predict that if the UK were to do this, then all future villains in entertainment media produced outside the UK would have strong British accents. All of them.
Also, the UK is whole-heartedly chasing the power-mad 1%-er's dream of citizen repression just as hard as we are here in the US. So I don't think there's any chance at all that they would do this.
DRM's not going away. DRM is the sugar in the authoritarian's tea.
From time to time, I drive a 2016 corvette on Montana highways with 80 mph speed limits. It is fair to say that the car loafs along. It was absolutely built for these speeds, and speeds considerably higher. I often reach those higher speeds. [Um. Allegedly. Cough.] Many other models are built with similar capabilities. The highways here are well designed for those speeds. Even many of the secondary roads here are pretty good for them, though not as good.
Methinks you are thinking well inside your own box. Poorly. Which makes me raise my eyebrows at your assertion that you are a physicist. That may be unfair; many people are notably vertical in their strengths. But still, my eyebrows are raised. :)
We can also (if we are honest) observe that progress, and the potential it unleashes in many cases, is not all that closely linked with what's commercially available or common around the time of the fundamental invention. In the first decade after lasers were invented, for instance, there was no significant commercial application. When the integrated circuit was invented, it wasn't much to look at and functionally speaking, for decades, it was outright pitiful compared to ICs today. We're still dealing with developing a full understanding of how neurons do what they do. In laser parlance, in 2017 we are yet pre-laser, and anyone who tries to tell us that lasers can't do X at this point should be considered, at most, a hand-waver in the grips of a fit of profound hubris.
WRT the subject at hand - intelligence and consciousness resulting from information processing - nature has, fortunately enough, provided numerous models at various levels. So we know it can be done at least one way - neural-like systems. Sure, it's obviously not easy. Brains use very small, very complicated, and very difficult to understand computing elements.
But achieving a manufactured intelligence is also obviously highly interesting and to many, highly desirable. Assuming only that our technological progress doesn't actually halt due to some unrelated factor (war, asteroid, runaway climate, alien invasion, etc.), there are many reasons, all supporting one another very, very well, to assume that we will "get there from here." Not the least of which is there are many (sub-)reasons to presume that will be a great deal of economic leverage in such technology.
And, perhaps most relevant to you, there are no known physics related reasons to presume that we won't get there eventually. As you should know very well. If one is (or multiple are) discovered - for instance, should it be determined at some point in the future that brains use some heretofore unknown physics mechanism(s) to do what they do - then we may quite suddenly be on different grounds in terms of ultimate practicality. But there isn't even a hint of this as yet. It definitely appears to be chemistry, electricity, and topology all the way down as far as brains go. That stuff, we can do. Larger and clumsier and perhaps even slower... perhaps even only as emulation... yet we can do it. We just don't know exactly what to do. Yet.
If you treat your employees only as a measurable commodity, entering into no acknowledgment of their worth, individuality, and personal potential, while attempting to mine every second of their time like a greedy, annoying crow, or worse, if you attempt to sit on those things and repress who they are, then your employees will not be loyal. This is inevitable.
When the first even nominally better opportunity (which might not even be better on grounds of pay, since everything else at your place sucks so bad) and they'll be gone. Because you made them hate you.
Which you deserved.
Sane employment is pleasant, goal seeking and reward-rich. For everyone. Not based on counting drops of sweat and screaming when the count is short. Balance liberty against compassion in tension as you encourage your employees to chase your goals and their goals. Otherwise you run the risk of just turning out to be considered another reviled prick.
I've run several very successful businesses. I'm not guessing here. Happy people do better work. Period.
Yeah, sex on TV is okay. If you don't fall off.
But the advent of flat-screens has pretty much turned it into a standing-room-only enterprise. Erected a barrier to the laydown, as it were. It's hard on some of us. So to speak.
Yep. Hey, you know what's great? Talking to people. Sex. Building models. Organizing one's rock/stamp/severedhead collections. Writing code. Playing with the cat/dog/cockatrice. Martial arts. Photography. Reading. Taking courses. Exercising. Working out a sane budget. Listening to music. Playing music. Sewing. Legos. Fooling with hardware. Home improvements. Giving the domicile a good once-over at the ultra-picky level, just for the fun of it. Putting the yard in tip-top order. Walking the canine or the cat. Visiting Rome, Paris or Venice (while pretending to be Canadian, of course.) Or just going to see a friend. You know, in person, not with that phone-tumor. Taking a walk, preferably somewhere you haven't been or really love. Etc. Lots and lots of etc.
Television... I just can't bring myself to call that "great." The couch, it really does make for potato generation.
No. However, I maintain that Trump's wall is one of his stupidest ideas.
That's English for "Trump's wall is one of his stupidest ideas", BTW.
Which is not to say that most of his other ideas aren't stupid, because they really, really are. But the wall is special. Like Trump. Short-bus special. Profoundly without merit while at the same time comprising a financial boondoggle of titanic proportions, at the very same time when the country's actual useful infrastructure (not in any way to be confused with border "walls") needs money and effort.
Oh, yes. Completely without regard to political party. Just in regard to Trump and any bewildered sycophant who thinks building that wall is anything but a complete waste of time, effort and money.
Also, I like vegetables. So I'm rather appreciative of the workers who pick them. No matter where they come from. I like tacos, too. I would not be in the least bit offended by a taco truck on every corner. Especially if they offered a nice selection of vegetables, but, you know, either way, really.
Hmmm. That's a very... interesting... postulate. Let me guess: you live in one of the states that has legalized pot, and you just got back from a test run of every heavy-hitting variety offered, is that it? Did you know that at some taco stands, I've been able to buy Fritos? FRITOS! Lovely, crispy corn chips! And Soda! MMMMMM! Don't Bogart that joint, my friend. Pass it over to Juan.
Yes, exactly what I was thinking: "blocking pirate sites violates free speech" may be an archaic form of Spanish meaning "fuck your wall, you tangerine-faced moron."
I confess it's been a while since I refreshed my fluency in Spanish. But still. :)
This flawed argument ignores the incontrovertible fact that allowing coal to continue to provide energy on equal terms with other energy supplies rather than pressuring the market to switch to less environmentally damaging sources of energy would do real and substantial harm to us all. The bottom line is: the less energy produced from burning coal and supplied instead from less polluting resources, the better off the world is.
So in fact, there is a need for it to have the crap regulated out of it in a context where it can be replaced with (considerably) less polluting energy sources, which is exactly where we are today.
They don't release equivalent levels of carbon, though. Natural gas releases quite a bit less carbon for equivalent units of energy produced.