Because that's when the sprayer pilots are ready and willing to fly.
3 years ago, they heli-sprayed for mosquitoes in my neighborhood, zero notice to me. Maybe they informed the commercial scale beekeeper who lives about a mile away, maybe not. Helicopters were flying from about 7 to 10 am, three days in a row. Haven't seen them spray since then.
I just hit on that "hourly deposit of UBI" idea, and I think it could be a real winner for helping the hopeless/clueless to manage their funds. If UBI is $12K/yr, that's $1.37 per hour, or ~$33/day. Anybody who is flat broke, but has UBI, should have enough money for basic nutrition within 6 hours, kill all the specially handled SNAP, food banks, etc. No matter where they are, within 24 hours they can afford bus fare to somewhere that they can afford shelter for the night. It makes all people capable of being self-sufficient.
Yeah, $12K is on the high side, I don't think we could launch UBI at that rate, but in 2016 dollars, that would seem to be a good place for it to end up once it's fully implemented. Let $15K net be the tax starting point - once you earn $3K per year of your own money, income taxes start at 30% of everything over that $3K, so net $15K per person and down is zero income tax, zero paperwork. Earn $30K/year from your employer(s), pay back $8100 of UBI, and net $33,900. Earn $43K per year, and you are at break-even, net $43K per year - after taxes. Earn $75K per year, net $65,400K/yr effective tax rate 12.8%. Earn $129,000 per year, net $103,200 - effective tax rate 20%. I don't know if the 30% number is high or low, I'd advocate putting it wherever it would be revenue neutral with the current tax system, and keeping it flat - all the way up.
Children might become eligible for UBI upon completion of high school, or GED, or age 25 - whichever comes first. Would take a nice load off of families paying for university, or help kids that don't need college to get a real life started while they're only earning dirt.
Healthcare is a whole different kettle of fish - obesity is really expensive, we should do more to dis-incentivize it - in cave man days, if you were too fat you were too slow and got eaten, there's your incentive. Hopefully we can find something a little more humane for today.
Wouldn't you rather dump all the "benefits" and double your paycheck?
Sure, who wouldn't, and that's why it's a problem. If everyone got double the paycheck and no benefits, some would be a little better off and most would be worse. Ever pay COBRA? How about doing your own 401(k) matching and putting away your own social security savings? Now, how about the families who have the breadwinners killed or disabled, do they just become street people, or are we raising income tax to make up that social benefit? (Hint: they cost everyone more as street people, at least until they are killed.)
"Businesses rarely see (or even look) beyond near term returns."
If they're publicly held, they can't, since by law their first obligation is to their shareholders. Blame the fact that Wall Street looks for short-term profits at the expense of long-term viability
I do.
"That's why we have taxes, to ensure that all competing businesses do make those investments and reap the future profits, or at least don't go down in bankruptcy because society has fallen apart and can't afford their goods or services anymore."
No, we have taxes to run the government.
Well, I include in government:
Highways
Schools
Municipal water and sewer
Police
Fire
EMS
and healthcare (though the US does a crappy backhanded job of that)
And the level of taxation doesn't particularly jibe with whether the government "runs society" or not; mostly it jibes with spending, which may or may not be beneficial; roads and schools are a benefit to all, but there's all sorts of good evidence that welfare spending has been primarily harmful, having become a way of life rather than a safety net.
I think the current welfare system is a cluster* and needs to be revamped. I think it could be revamped as UBI, strip away all the "need based, stick our noses deep in your personal finances and make you account for every $5/week" and just acknowledge: live, eligible citizen - here's your check. If you make enough money to pay income tax, you can decline the checks and apply them towards your income tax responsibility. But, at any time, if you should need the money, you should be able to log on to a website and turn it on - deposited into your account... hourly even would be a possibility today, so when a junkie needs another fix, all they have to do is wait 6 hours or so and they can afford another one. You can go on and on about persons who are incapable of administering their own funds and restricting their funds towards housing and food, etc. etc. but, basically, kill the department of social security and all of their crap. Rehire 10% of them to administer UBI and let the 90% find meaning in their lives with the TSA or something equally befitting their disposition.
I'm not sure what to think of that, it seems somewhat horrifying.
Oh, it is... but if you like Qt and Open Source it's still a good thing, it means that they are entering the arena where they can compete with alternatives that have been horrifying for decades.
Companies don't offshore profits due to loopholes; they offshore 'em due to high taxes that make this the obvious course
So, I think we're sort of on the same page here... but if the loopholes didn't exist, the profits wouldn't be offshored. What you're saying is that if taxes were lower, companies would just pay them instead of locking up their cash overseas. I think taxes would have to be very very low for corporations to do that instead of exploiting the offshoring option - if there's an option to hold money tax free, corporations are going to take it, even if the alternative tax is only something like 5%. They'll only pay that tax if there's a clear profitable advantage in doing so (pay 5% tax, make 110% return within 3 months).
Businesses rarely see (or even look) beyond near term returns. It is exceptionally rare for a corporation to look at society and say: "if we invest 20% of our profits in infrastructure and healthcare for these people, they will prosper and return more than that to us in profits 5 years from now." That's why we have taxes, to ensure that all competing businesses do make those investments and reap the future profits, or at least don't go down in bankruptcy because society has fallen apart and can't afford their goods or services anymore.
Why are there so many cons all of a sudden? I think QT is great, but an API doc is fine, I don't see any reason to go to a conference. Not just QTCon, Nodevember, Abstractions (well, that one looks kind of cool), etc, etc. GoToConf, Powershell conf, Gluecon, Agile Dev West andEast......wtf who enjoys going to these?
People who work with people - not people who actually do things with the tools. Not saying that people people are unimportant, quite the contrary, they indicate a level of development that goes beyond application engineers and consultants and reaches into higher level decision making.
Ever get told "you will use tool X on this project" by someone who had no idea what the real differences between tool X, Y and Z are? People people at work.
...the largest gathering of end-user open developers at the most fancy venue in the centre of Berlin. There are 13 tracks of talks discussing everything...
A) it's not a "little language," it's an API - just like every other major development environment.
B) good APIs (including Qt) are not "little," they're more extensive than the language they're implemented in.
C) The major complaint I hear leveled at Qt/KDE et. al. is that they're "bloated" - they run the meta-object compiler (little language) first and then compile all that plus your code in C++ and the resulting product is "bloated." Well, if you're trying to target $3 ST-Micro chips, it may be a bit bloated, but if you can afford at least a Raspberry Pi for your execution platform, Qt fits and runs just fine. "Big" projects (10Kloc) recompile after a full clean on my 3 year old laptop in 15 seconds or less.
D) I get to compare/contrast the Qt/Creator dev environment with Microsoft C#/Visual Studio daily. Compared to Studio, Creator is freakin' light weight, lightning fast and compact. Back c2010, Creator was "ahead" of Visual Studio as a developer friendly environment to work in, with Studio only really better in the debugger department. Today's Creator debugger beats Studio's 2010 debugger, but MS has invested a lot in Studio lately, and it shows - it's great when it's working, but bloat doesn't even begin to describe the developer experience for Visual Studio installation and updates.
I agree that retaining business is a big issue, but I don't think that cutting their taxes is the answer. You can cut their taxes to zero - subsidize them even, and they will still offshore due to labor cost differentials.
Right now, we've got loopholes that encourage the "offshoring of profits" which is just insanity in my book, not only do you lose the tax on the profits, but now the money is overseas and won't be brought back into the country unless it's "worth paying taxes on it first." Watching PC CEOs dance around describing that issue is pretty hilarious, but also just sick that our legislators have let the situation persist.
As long as 90% of his attention grabbing speech points are brushed off as "just kidding, we won't really do that", then, yeah, I'm fine with DT. But, it leaves you wondering what he really will do, and I'd rather not be "that country" on the world scene that everyone thinks is a threat to their sovereignty and security. Also, given his background, I'd expect even more blatant tax cuts and loopholes for the super wealthy and corporations than we already have. Not much different from any other candidate, when you get down to it.
I'm say to say that I don't feel we've got any kind of choice this cycle. HC at least has the DNC legacy crew, you might expect 4 more relatively boring years of big business slowly tightening their grip on power. DT would be a wildcard, with a history of gambling, bankruptcy and shoot-from-the-hip speechwriting... maybe appealing on some levels, but not what I want as a national figurehead. BS talked a great line, but I'm afraid if he won the office it would be Jimmy Carter 2.0. The rest of the Republican lineup were each more corrupt or inept than the previous. It just leaves me feeling like: can't we do better? Aren't there any business leaders who don't lead a reality TV show lifestyle who might be interested in the office? Aren't there any competent senators or governors between the age of 40 and 55 who might make a presentable candidate? Apparently not.
Bespoke design: somebody sketched out exactly what features the phone should have and the phone was designed to accommodate those, and only those features. Although bespoke usually gets applied to custom projects for one-off customers, it can also be applied to any design "made to order" - even if the production quantities are in the millions.
Contrasting with an "a la carte" or modular design where you can get your product with any combination of a number of options: the Burger King "have it your way" method - 531,441 possible ways to make a whopper, most of them unpalatable.
We're not electing HC or DT, we're electing their staff, their group of advisers, speech writers, and policy makers - neither of them is competent to execute even 1% of the office on their own cognition.
Fun fact, by the time you reach 60 years of age, in a high power posting like SecState, you have learned to filter - a lot, otherwise you'd be completely incapable of retaining any of the important stuff. Senility is already setting in, but if you've learned to cope with it, you've got a good repetoire of pat answers for the unimportant stuff. Maybe she remembers the briefing, maybe she was "multitasking" when it was given, in the greater scheme, it was one of a hundred such "important trainings."
We really should be considering people in their 40s and 50s for the office of President, electing a 70 year old just means the country will be run by his staff.
I see "modular smartphones" in the same light as "modular laptop PCs" of 15-20 years ago. It looks cool on paper, until you think about the implications of actually carrying one of these things. It will always end up in a compromised design, bulkier and less well integrated, and more expensive than a bespoke integrated counterpart. Now, the bespoke phone can't upgrade to a 24Gigapixel camera, or a laser bar code scanner, or whatever foolishness without a complete re-design, but if you're making product for a market of 100s of thousands of units in a particular configuration, a modular design will never "win."
Most people don't fit into niche markets, most people actually want the same thing as everybody else - as cheaply as possible.
I'm thinking that if this is proven to be a functional drive system, some accounting will find a way to make it not create energy from nothing.
As for the big bang, there are some interesting extensions to Einstein's theories positing that the speed of light is not a universal, never changing constant throughout time and space. If light traveled 60x faster at the time/place of the big bang, things make more sense - at least to some cosmologists.
You won't violate the laws of physics on the abyssal plain, but you will see things that challenge previously held conceptions, like that all life derives from solar energy input. Methane seeps supporting complex communities changed the perception of what might be lurking under Titan's ice sheets.
If the EmDrive pans out to work anything near as promised, it will either be explained by a new perspective on known laws, or a minor modification of them - it's not going to shatter the fundamental understanding of everything known to-date... but it could change the understanding of what is possible going forward.
KNOWN LAWS are boring the way that the explored surface of the earth is boring. Been there, seen that, have a pretty good handle on what it means. Now, take a trip to the abyssal plain and you might learn something, maybe something that changes everything. Boring is relative (and, I'm sure there's an Einstein joke about relatives are boring, or not in the case of Elsa...)
It's also possible that there are no new physics here, just an example of a misunderstood corner case of existing physics...
Build it, test it, see what happens. Until it's proven (and I mean really proven, not just dismissed) false, it would seem to be worth the research investment.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that's when the sprayer pilots are ready and willing to fly.
3 years ago, they heli-sprayed for mosquitoes in my neighborhood, zero notice to me. Maybe they informed the commercial scale beekeeper who lives about a mile away, maybe not. Helicopters were flying from about 7 to 10 am, three days in a row. Haven't seen them spray since then.
I have a full and manly mustache, which is waxed every day. I also use lavender oil to keep it redolent.
If that's working for you, by all means keep it up,
If your social circle lets the likes of FM and BR influence their impressions of your facial hair, you could find a better crowd to hang out with.
Accordingly, Flash Gordon will now be played instead of Bohemian Rhapsody.
I just hit on that "hourly deposit of UBI" idea, and I think it could be a real winner for helping the hopeless/clueless to manage their funds. If UBI is $12K/yr, that's $1.37 per hour, or ~$33/day. Anybody who is flat broke, but has UBI, should have enough money for basic nutrition within 6 hours, kill all the specially handled SNAP, food banks, etc. No matter where they are, within 24 hours they can afford bus fare to somewhere that they can afford shelter for the night. It makes all people capable of being self-sufficient.
Yeah, $12K is on the high side, I don't think we could launch UBI at that rate, but in 2016 dollars, that would seem to be a good place for it to end up once it's fully implemented. Let $15K net be the tax starting point - once you earn $3K per year of your own money, income taxes start at 30% of everything over that $3K, so net $15K per person and down is zero income tax, zero paperwork. Earn $30K/year from your employer(s), pay back $8100 of UBI, and net $33,900. Earn $43K per year, and you are at break-even, net $43K per year - after taxes. Earn $75K per year, net $65,400K/yr effective tax rate 12.8%. Earn $129,000 per year, net $103,200 - effective tax rate 20%. I don't know if the 30% number is high or low, I'd advocate putting it wherever it would be revenue neutral with the current tax system, and keeping it flat - all the way up.
Children might become eligible for UBI upon completion of high school, or GED, or age 25 - whichever comes first. Would take a nice load off of families paying for university, or help kids that don't need college to get a real life started while they're only earning dirt.
Healthcare is a whole different kettle of fish - obesity is really expensive, we should do more to dis-incentivize it - in cave man days, if you were too fat you were too slow and got eaten, there's your incentive. Hopefully we can find something a little more humane for today.
Wouldn't you rather dump all the "benefits" and double your paycheck?
Sure, who wouldn't, and that's why it's a problem. If everyone got double the paycheck and no benefits, some would be a little better off and most would be worse. Ever pay COBRA? How about doing your own 401(k) matching and putting away your own social security savings? Now, how about the families who have the breadwinners killed or disabled, do they just become street people, or are we raising income tax to make up that social benefit? (Hint: they cost everyone more as street people, at least until they are killed.)
"Businesses rarely see (or even look) beyond near term returns."
If they're publicly held, they can't, since by law their first obligation is to their shareholders. Blame the fact that Wall Street looks for short-term profits at the expense of long-term viability
I do.
"That's why we have taxes, to ensure that all competing businesses do make those investments and reap the future profits, or at least don't go down in bankruptcy because society has fallen apart and can't afford their goods or services anymore."
No, we have taxes to run the government.
Well, I include in government:
And the level of taxation doesn't particularly jibe with whether the government "runs society" or not; mostly it jibes with spending, which may or may not be beneficial; roads and schools are a benefit to all, but there's all sorts of good evidence that welfare spending has been primarily harmful, having become a way of life rather than a safety net.
I think the current welfare system is a cluster* and needs to be revamped. I think it could be revamped as UBI, strip away all the "need based, stick our noses deep in your personal finances and make you account for every $5/week" and just acknowledge: live, eligible citizen - here's your check. If you make enough money to pay income tax, you can decline the checks and apply them towards your income tax responsibility. But, at any time, if you should need the money, you should be able to log on to a website and turn it on - deposited into your account... hourly even would be a possibility today, so when a junkie needs another fix, all they have to do is wait 6 hours or so and they can afford another one. You can go on and on about persons who are incapable of administering their own funds and restricting their funds towards housing and food, etc. etc. but, basically, kill the department of social security and all of their crap. Rehire 10% of them to administer UBI and let the 90% find meaning in their lives with the TSA or something equally befitting their disposition.
I'm not sure what to think of that, it seems somewhat horrifying.
Oh, it is... but if you like Qt and Open Source it's still a good thing, it means that they are entering the arena where they can compete with alternatives that have been horrifying for decades.
Companies don't offshore profits due to loopholes; they offshore 'em due to high taxes that make this the obvious course
So, I think we're sort of on the same page here... but if the loopholes didn't exist, the profits wouldn't be offshored. What you're saying is that if taxes were lower, companies would just pay them instead of locking up their cash overseas. I think taxes would have to be very very low for corporations to do that instead of exploiting the offshoring option - if there's an option to hold money tax free, corporations are going to take it, even if the alternative tax is only something like 5%. They'll only pay that tax if there's a clear profitable advantage in doing so (pay 5% tax, make 110% return within 3 months).
Businesses rarely see (or even look) beyond near term returns. It is exceptionally rare for a corporation to look at society and say: "if we invest 20% of our profits in infrastructure and healthcare for these people, they will prosper and return more than that to us in profits 5 years from now." That's why we have taxes, to ensure that all competing businesses do make those investments and reap the future profits, or at least don't go down in bankruptcy because society has fallen apart and can't afford their goods or services anymore.
Why are there so many cons all of a sudden? I think QT is great, but an API doc is fine, I don't see any reason to go to a conference. Not just QTCon, Nodevember, Abstractions (well, that one looks kind of cool), etc, etc. GoToConf, Powershell conf, Gluecon, Agile Dev West andEast......wtf who enjoys going to these?
People who work with people - not people who actually do things with the tools. Not saying that people people are unimportant, quite the contrary, they indicate a level of development that goes beyond application engineers and consultants and reaches into higher level decision making.
Ever get told "you will use tool X on this project" by someone who had no idea what the real differences between tool X, Y and Z are? People people at work.
...the largest gathering of end-user open developers at the most fancy venue in the centre of Berlin. There are 13 tracks of talks discussing everything...
Oh, I see, it's dead already ;-)
A) it's not a "little language," it's an API - just like every other major development environment.
B) good APIs (including Qt) are not "little," they're more extensive than the language they're implemented in.
C) The major complaint I hear leveled at Qt/KDE et. al. is that they're "bloated" - they run the meta-object compiler (little language) first and then compile all that plus your code in C++ and the resulting product is "bloated." Well, if you're trying to target $3 ST-Micro chips, it may be a bit bloated, but if you can afford at least a Raspberry Pi for your execution platform, Qt fits and runs just fine. "Big" projects (10Kloc) recompile after a full clean on my 3 year old laptop in 15 seconds or less.
D) I get to compare/contrast the Qt/Creator dev environment with Microsoft C#/Visual Studio daily. Compared to Studio, Creator is freakin' light weight, lightning fast and compact. Back c2010, Creator was "ahead" of Visual Studio as a developer friendly environment to work in, with Studio only really better in the debugger department. Today's Creator debugger beats Studio's 2010 debugger, but MS has invested a lot in Studio lately, and it shows - it's great when it's working, but bloat doesn't even begin to describe the developer experience for Visual Studio installation and updates.
Q) haters gonna hate.
Qt is in a lot of places that people wouldn't suspect.
I agree that retaining business is a big issue, but I don't think that cutting their taxes is the answer. You can cut their taxes to zero - subsidize them even, and they will still offshore due to labor cost differentials.
Right now, we've got loopholes that encourage the "offshoring of profits" which is just insanity in my book, not only do you lose the tax on the profits, but now the money is overseas and won't be brought back into the country unless it's "worth paying taxes on it first." Watching PC CEOs dance around describing that issue is pretty hilarious, but also just sick that our legislators have let the situation persist.
As long as 90% of his attention grabbing speech points are brushed off as "just kidding, we won't really do that", then, yeah, I'm fine with DT. But, it leaves you wondering what he really will do, and I'd rather not be "that country" on the world scene that everyone thinks is a threat to their sovereignty and security. Also, given his background, I'd expect even more blatant tax cuts and loopholes for the super wealthy and corporations than we already have. Not much different from any other candidate, when you get down to it.
I'm say to say that I don't feel we've got any kind of choice this cycle. HC at least has the DNC legacy crew, you might expect 4 more relatively boring years of big business slowly tightening their grip on power. DT would be a wildcard, with a history of gambling, bankruptcy and shoot-from-the-hip speechwriting... maybe appealing on some levels, but not what I want as a national figurehead. BS talked a great line, but I'm afraid if he won the office it would be Jimmy Carter 2.0. The rest of the Republican lineup were each more corrupt or inept than the previous. It just leaves me feeling like: can't we do better? Aren't there any business leaders who don't lead a reality TV show lifestyle who might be interested in the office? Aren't there any competent senators or governors between the age of 40 and 55 who might make a presentable candidate? Apparently not.
Bespoke design: somebody sketched out exactly what features the phone should have and the phone was designed to accommodate those, and only those features. Although bespoke usually gets applied to custom projects for one-off customers, it can also be applied to any design "made to order" - even if the production quantities are in the millions.
Contrasting with an "a la carte" or modular design where you can get your product with any combination of a number of options: the Burger King "have it your way" method - 531,441 possible ways to make a whopper, most of them unpalatable.
We're not electing HC or DT, we're electing their staff, their group of advisers, speech writers, and policy makers - neither of them is competent to execute even 1% of the office on their own cognition.
Fun fact, by the time you reach 60 years of age, in a high power posting like SecState, you have learned to filter - a lot, otherwise you'd be completely incapable of retaining any of the important stuff. Senility is already setting in, but if you've learned to cope with it, you've got a good repetoire of pat answers for the unimportant stuff. Maybe she remembers the briefing, maybe she was "multitasking" when it was given, in the greater scheme, it was one of a hundred such "important trainings."
We really should be considering people in their 40s and 50s for the office of President, electing a 70 year old just means the country will be run by his staff.
I see "modular smartphones" in the same light as "modular laptop PCs" of 15-20 years ago. It looks cool on paper, until you think about the implications of actually carrying one of these things. It will always end up in a compromised design, bulkier and less well integrated, and more expensive than a bespoke integrated counterpart. Now, the bespoke phone can't upgrade to a 24Gigapixel camera, or a laser bar code scanner, or whatever foolishness without a complete re-design, but if you're making product for a market of 100s of thousands of units in a particular configuration, a modular design will never "win."
Most people don't fit into niche markets, most people actually want the same thing as everybody else - as cheaply as possible.
I don't care how you get the spaces in there, my editor does "smart spacing" for me, just as long as the saved file has spaces, not tabs.
One calorie Tab soda would be a good logo for tabs in files: 1 as in: only good for use in a single editor.
I'm thinking that if this is proven to be a functional drive system, some accounting will find a way to make it not create energy from nothing.
As for the big bang, there are some interesting extensions to Einstein's theories positing that the speed of light is not a universal, never changing constant throughout time and space. If light traveled 60x faster at the time/place of the big bang, things make more sense - at least to some cosmologists.
You won't violate the laws of physics on the abyssal plain, but you will see things that challenge previously held conceptions, like that all life derives from solar energy input. Methane seeps supporting complex communities changed the perception of what might be lurking under Titan's ice sheets.
If the EmDrive pans out to work anything near as promised, it will either be explained by a new perspective on known laws, or a minor modification of them - it's not going to shatter the fundamental understanding of everything known to-date... but it could change the understanding of what is possible going forward.
KNOWN LAWS are boring the way that the explored surface of the earth is boring. Been there, seen that, have a pretty good handle on what it means. Now, take a trip to the abyssal plain and you might learn something, maybe something that changes everything. Boring is relative (and, I'm sure there's an Einstein joke about relatives are boring, or not in the case of Elsa...)
It's also possible that there are no new physics here, just an example of a misunderstood corner case of existing physics...
Build it, test it, see what happens. Until it's proven (and I mean really proven, not just dismissed) false, it would seem to be worth the research investment.
These guys have a good potential handle on some of the things that don't line up with Einstein:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...