And I thought it was about driving prices down through streaming the lowest cost content they can get their hands on.
To me, this is the real problem, the big players have carved up the field and consumers are in a like-it or forget-it position. Kinda hard to get too worked up over entertainment, but I'm afraid of what this precedent means for other types of service providers (preferential treatment of certain data....)
No small player will ever start up, much like no independent TV station will ever start up. The market is full, and there's no room left for a tiny startup.
My point exactly, and zero rating (of data streamed from the big providers) puts yet another hurdle in place for even medium to large startups that want to compete in a given field.
To me, it means I will use my Netflix in an airport, when I never would have before. That's a change in usage patterns, it influences my choice of content providers. If another major player like HBO-Go were not included and I decided I would only keep one service: Netflix or HBO-Go, the one that is included on my cellphone plan for free has a huge competitive advantage.
Now - have you ever heard of MangoFlix? No, you haven't, because all these entrenched services have locked up deals with content providers, and now connectivity providers, making it impossibly expensive to start up a competitive service. You know, like a competitive service that actually streams a decent collection of Movies, and not just stale TV series and in-house produced content.
Exactly my sentiment, I don't need my town to become known as a mecca for low cost of living high wage jobs. So: I recommend Houston - try it, you'll love it! Plenty of jobs, high pay, good benefits, world class cancer treatment center in town (because they need it), it's a great place, and plenty of wonderful neighborhoods with low priced houses - as long as you don't need to breathe the air.
Agreed that we won't agree, but disagree that courts and fines aren't part of government. I've always viewed fines as a "behavior tax," so I suppose that's a fundamental difference - sure, you always have to pay a tax, unless you choose not to engage in the taxed activity - there's considerably grey area between fines and taxes.
Rolling back up several posts, how is paying less than a living wage not monopolistic, or at least collusive behavior? True free markets will degenerate to monopoly situations, including labor markets.
So, don't call it a tax break, call it a fine, and for every employee who gives you X hours a week, if you're not paying them enough to keep them off of government support, let's fine the employer for the difference, to cover the cost of government support required to keep that person working for them. Call 40 hours a full week, if you employ someone for 20 hours a week, pay them $6/hr, and expect the government to kick in another $360/week so this person can have food, shelter, healthcare, and transportation to work, let's say $75 of that becomes the responsibility of the company which is consuming this person's working hours.
Subsistence existence: $480/week (before taxes, in some cities), employer pays $120 for 1/2 of the employee's working hours, that's a $120 shortfall - fine 'em so the money can go toward the public assistance programs that are necessary to keep these people employable.
Or, tax them and give them a refund for good citizen behavior - it's all the same in the end.
Not that it's right, but the current reality of buying health insurance "on your own" is really crappy, we've been there, done that. Rates are astronomical, significantly higher than what the employee+employer pay in a large company situation, and that's when you have good health and no claims. Then we had a baby, and the birth went sideways and we ended up with $25K in ICU bills. The insurance (Blue Cross Florida) paid, and then raised mom's rates over $1000 per month - seems that they wanted to recoup their payout from in 2 years or less, not sure what they did with the near $100K in premiums we had paid into the system during the decades before that with essentially no claims. Other companies simply refused to insure. At that point, we went self-insured and just banked the $1000 per month instead. And the reality of being self-pay is that you pay a large multiple of the "negotiated rates" - if you push for self-pay discount, everyone is very understanding, they knock 10% off just for asking, when you point out that this same service last year was 80% less when paid by insurance they just shrug and tell you when the bills will be sent to collection.
There's more to the compensation picture than hourly rate - you can manage and buy your own benefits, but not for anything near the value that larger groups can.
So, then, the question becomes: should we have government? Well, I actually like having roads, sufficient police protection that I can sleep in a house with breakable glass windows with no iron bars, a financial structure that allows me to purchase food and shelter without having to grow / construct it myself. Yeah, overall, I think we're better off with government that meddles in the affairs of society and shapes behavior.
Oh, come on, you're talking about the broader market. This is/. where we like to point at extreme cases as examples of why the world is unjust, unfair, corrupt, and generally not as much fun as we had hoped it would be when we watched the captain say: "Engage!"
All in all, I do see more people apparently "stuck" in bottom-end economic situations, with less opportunity to "climb the ladder" than 30-50 years ago. Bottom-end housing today includes air-conditioning and twice the square footage of back then, bottom-end cars today out-perform (safety, handling, emissions and sometimes acceleration) the best of the best from 1965, bottom-end food choice seems more plentiful - if sometimes of questionable health value, and bottom-end healthcare (if you can get it) is quite a bit better, too. Even bottom-end neighborhoods seem to be safer to walk the streets, even at night. Then, we've got our bottom-end cellphone service and internet access that is better than what the top 0.01% had 50 years ago.
Happiness is relative. Relatively speaking, I'd like to spend less time working my job and more time with family, personal projects, travel, etc. That doesn't seem to have improved much in the last 50 years - would be nice if we at least had a viable option to do that without having to go full retirement from the workforce.
Sure, just like all the oil companies we have means they don't collude and price gouge. Most products are priced at what the market will pay, not what the product can be delivered to market for in the most efficient scenario.
Even Wal-Mart gouges, they drop their cost of goods as far as they possibly can, but they also raise prices as high as they dare in each individual store - thank you very much computerized inventory and price tracking.
>It's also worth noting here that a lot of people do want to work long hours to the degree that when they can't find full time work, they work multiple part time jobs.
I think you mean that a lot of people want more money than they can earn in their first job, so they find multiple part time jobs to make the money they think they want or need.
If you offer some people $60K/yr + benefits for working 40 hours a week, some of them will opt to instead work for $30/hr with no benefits at 2 jobs where they can work 60 hours a week in total. Lack of benefits means more immediate cash in pocket, and they'll think that they are making "more money overall" with the extra 20 hours a week. When they end up with $5K in extra expenses travelling to both jobs, $10K in medical bills and $20K in lost income while they can't work due to health problems, and then having their home foreclosed because they can't pay the mortgage they got based on all this extra income that unexpectedly disappeared, it's not really a good deal after all.
Only an idiot would turn down $100K/yr + benefits @ 40 hours a week vs $30/hr part time - through tax incentives (positive and negative) the government could make it more attractive for employers to offer jobs with benefits and good salaries (corporate tax credit for each employee earning more than a threshold amount, etc. etc.) but the way it is structured now, that's not happening.
The inventor is irrelevant in any major industrial venture. If a business sector is turning $1B/year of product (not profits), an invention that improves efficiency 1% is worth $10M/year. Investing $20M to implement the invention is a no-brainer, unless your stockholders demand instant gratification ROI quarterly. In any event, $10M payment to the inventor is in the noise, market variations will impact profits 10x that amount every year.
So, what happens if 1/2 the pin factories shut their doors, but the other 1/2 of the pin factories hire their workers part time and double their hourly wages?
The remaining factories still make the same profit, the workers still make the same salary, the world still gets the same pins at the same price, but 1/2 the factory owners are left scratching their heads for what to do that will pay as well as the pin business used to.
In the current system, 1/2 the factory owners AND workers are out on the street, and the other 1/2 of the factory owners are now making twice as much profit as they used to.
Something in-between the two would be more progress than either extreme, I think. But, we've been living the profit to the owners side of the extreme since WWII.
The wages to be paid are in the manufacture (not to mention design) and maintenance of the automatic drivers. If you have a fleet of 100 trucks, sure, you might eliminate "unskilled" drivers jobs, but the maintenance of the machines will actually increase o.k. - driver error induced maintenance will fall, but, basic wear and tear will be the same, and the automatic driver itself will be an important maintenance item.
Somebody has to keep the lenses clean, or at least fill up the tanks for the automatic lens cleaners, or design, build and maintain the systems that do it automatically.
I'd like to think that out of those 100 truck drivers who are working 60 hours a week, we might retrain 10 of them to work 30 hours a week at the skilled jobs related to automatic trucking, another 40 to work manufacture and maintenance 30 hours a week - so that the current crew that's working 60 hours a week can also work 30, and the other 50 can do something to benefit society besides piloting a big chunk of metal around in circles.
The place where capitalism is failing (in America) is keeping high levels of unemployment, simultaneous with long hours for those who are working.
Onboard FPGA? Depending on how big that it, that could explain the cost of the whole thing.
But, fancy stuff I'm talking about is real-world I/O - cameras, servos, things to provide the data to be crunched and act on the crunched data... I'm not sure there's a point to a small, low power consuming, high(ish) compute power board if all you're going to do is connect it to a keyboard, mouse, monitor and ethernet. Plenty of bigger, more powerful, commodity hardware doing that already.
$40M isn't bad for good information. Assuming the cost spread equally among households, this cost the average household something like $0.50. The average household's federal tax burden is somewhere in the $20,000 range (average, not median), I'd be very happy if $5000 of that $20,000 was spent on getting the right information to the right people to make the right decisions about how to spend the other $15,000 - and a report on CIA secret prisons seems like justifiably 1% of 1% of the information that should be gathered and shared appropriately.
The other important use of information (beyond spending allocation) is for policy making and maintaining our diplomatic position and posturing with the rest of the world, reports about secret prisons seem both to be important to that diplomatic position, and also important to control release of on the world stage.
Better that we would have no secrets at all, but if you do that all at once, noone will be happy with the result.
Could be worse, we could live in a country where they never would have put the report together in the first place. At least a few senators know what's going on here - it's even worse when the leadership is in the dark and has nothing but fiction to base their decisions on.
I see this doing on-board video processing in autonomous vehicles.... not sure that there's a particular cost sensitivity there to the GPU module, power weight and size much more than cost (at this level).
As for consumer applications that would be cost sensitive, this thing requires far too much fancy stuff around it to make it interesting, and all that stuff is still out of mass-market consumer price range, regardless if this board were free.
Slashdot Mirror
And I thought it was about driving prices down through streaming the lowest cost content they can get their hands on.
To me, this is the real problem, the big players have carved up the field and consumers are in a like-it or forget-it position. Kinda hard to get too worked up over entertainment, but I'm afraid of what this precedent means for other types of service providers (preferential treatment of certain data....)
No small player will ever start up, much like no independent TV station will ever start up. The market is full, and there's no room left for a tiny startup.
My point exactly, and zero rating (of data streamed from the big providers) puts yet another hurdle in place for even medium to large startups that want to compete in a given field.
To me, it means I will use my Netflix in an airport, when I never would have before. That's a change in usage patterns, it influences my choice of content providers. If another major player like HBO-Go were not included and I decided I would only keep one service: Netflix or HBO-Go, the one that is included on my cellphone plan for free has a huge competitive advantage.
Now - have you ever heard of MangoFlix? No, you haven't, because all these entrenched services have locked up deals with content providers, and now connectivity providers, making it impossibly expensive to start up a competitive service. You know, like a competitive service that actually streams a decent collection of Movies, and not just stale TV series and in-house produced content.
Exactly my sentiment, I don't need my town to become known as a mecca for low cost of living high wage jobs. So: I recommend Houston - try it, you'll love it! Plenty of jobs, high pay, good benefits, world class cancer treatment center in town (because they need it), it's a great place, and plenty of wonderful neighborhoods with low priced houses - as long as you don't need to breathe the air.
Agreed that we won't agree, but disagree that courts and fines aren't part of government. I've always viewed fines as a "behavior tax," so I suppose that's a fundamental difference - sure, you always have to pay a tax, unless you choose not to engage in the taxed activity - there's considerably grey area between fines and taxes.
Rolling back up several posts, how is paying less than a living wage not monopolistic, or at least collusive behavior? True free markets will degenerate to monopoly situations, including labor markets.
So, don't call it a tax break, call it a fine, and for every employee who gives you X hours a week, if you're not paying them enough to keep them off of government support, let's fine the employer for the difference, to cover the cost of government support required to keep that person working for them. Call 40 hours a full week, if you employ someone for 20 hours a week, pay them $6/hr, and expect the government to kick in another $360/week so this person can have food, shelter, healthcare, and transportation to work, let's say $75 of that becomes the responsibility of the company which is consuming this person's working hours.
Subsistence existence: $480/week (before taxes, in some cities), employer pays $120 for 1/2 of the employee's working hours, that's a $120 shortfall - fine 'em so the money can go toward the public assistance programs that are necessary to keep these people employable.
Or, tax them and give them a refund for good citizen behavior - it's all the same in the end.
Not that it's right, but the current reality of buying health insurance "on your own" is really crappy, we've been there, done that. Rates are astronomical, significantly higher than what the employee+employer pay in a large company situation, and that's when you have good health and no claims. Then we had a baby, and the birth went sideways and we ended up with $25K in ICU bills. The insurance (Blue Cross Florida) paid, and then raised mom's rates over $1000 per month - seems that they wanted to recoup their payout from in 2 years or less, not sure what they did with the near $100K in premiums we had paid into the system during the decades before that with essentially no claims. Other companies simply refused to insure. At that point, we went self-insured and just banked the $1000 per month instead. And the reality of being self-pay is that you pay a large multiple of the "negotiated rates" - if you push for self-pay discount, everyone is very understanding, they knock 10% off just for asking, when you point out that this same service last year was 80% less when paid by insurance they just shrug and tell you when the bills will be sent to collection.
There's more to the compensation picture than hourly rate - you can manage and buy your own benefits, but not for anything near the value that larger groups can.
Is government about anything else?
So, then, the question becomes: should we have government? Well, I actually like having roads, sufficient police protection that I can sleep in a house with breakable glass windows with no iron bars, a financial structure that allows me to purchase food and shelter without having to grow / construct it myself. Yeah, overall, I think we're better off with government that meddles in the affairs of society and shapes behavior.
You can give tax breaks in one area, and increase them in another, and remain revenue neutral.
Taxes aren't all about collecting money, they're mostly about modifying behavior - behavior is more tangible, and important, than money.
Oh, come on, you're talking about the broader market. This is /. where we like to point at extreme cases as examples of why the world is unjust, unfair, corrupt, and generally not as much fun as we had hoped it would be when we watched the captain say: "Engage!"
All in all, I do see more people apparently "stuck" in bottom-end economic situations, with less opportunity to "climb the ladder" than 30-50 years ago. Bottom-end housing today includes air-conditioning and twice the square footage of back then, bottom-end cars today out-perform (safety, handling, emissions and sometimes acceleration) the best of the best from 1965, bottom-end food choice seems more plentiful - if sometimes of questionable health value, and bottom-end healthcare (if you can get it) is quite a bit better, too. Even bottom-end neighborhoods seem to be safer to walk the streets, even at night. Then, we've got our bottom-end cellphone service and internet access that is better than what the top 0.01% had 50 years ago.
Happiness is relative. Relatively speaking, I'd like to spend less time working my job and more time with family, personal projects, travel, etc. That doesn't seem to have improved much in the last 50 years - would be nice if we at least had a viable option to do that without having to go full retirement from the workforce.
Sure, just like all the oil companies we have means they don't collude and price gouge. Most products are priced at what the market will pay, not what the product can be delivered to market for in the most efficient scenario.
Even Wal-Mart gouges, they drop their cost of goods as far as they possibly can, but they also raise prices as high as they dare in each individual store - thank you very much computerized inventory and price tracking.
>It's also worth noting here that a lot of people do want to work long hours to the degree that when they can't find full time work, they work multiple part time jobs.
I think you mean that a lot of people want more money than they can earn in their first job, so they find multiple part time jobs to make the money they think they want or need.
If you offer some people $60K/yr + benefits for working 40 hours a week, some of them will opt to instead work for $30/hr with no benefits at 2 jobs where they can work 60 hours a week in total. Lack of benefits means more immediate cash in pocket, and they'll think that they are making "more money overall" with the extra 20 hours a week. When they end up with $5K in extra expenses travelling to both jobs, $10K in medical bills and $20K in lost income while they can't work due to health problems, and then having their home foreclosed because they can't pay the mortgage they got based on all this extra income that unexpectedly disappeared, it's not really a good deal after all.
Only an idiot would turn down $100K/yr + benefits @ 40 hours a week vs $30/hr part time - through tax incentives (positive and negative) the government could make it more attractive for employers to offer jobs with benefits and good salaries (corporate tax credit for each employee earning more than a threshold amount, etc. etc.) but the way it is structured now, that's not happening.
The inventor is irrelevant in any major industrial venture. If a business sector is turning $1B/year of product (not profits), an invention that improves efficiency 1% is worth $10M/year. Investing $20M to implement the invention is a no-brainer, unless your stockholders demand instant gratification ROI quarterly. In any event, $10M payment to the inventor is in the noise, market variations will impact profits 10x that amount every year.
So, what happens if 1/2 the pin factories shut their doors, but the other 1/2 of the pin factories hire their workers part time and double their hourly wages?
The remaining factories still make the same profit, the workers still make the same salary, the world still gets the same pins at the same price, but 1/2 the factory owners are left scratching their heads for what to do that will pay as well as the pin business used to.
In the current system, 1/2 the factory owners AND workers are out on the street, and the other 1/2 of the factory owners are now making twice as much profit as they used to.
Something in-between the two would be more progress than either extreme, I think. But, we've been living the profit to the owners side of the extreme since WWII.
The new jobs aren't paying a living wage because they're not required to, whether by law or market.
Without employment laws, minimum wage in the US would resemble minimum wage in the far East.
If 50% of the workforce becomes unemployed, wouldn't it be nice if we could all work 7 hours a day, 3 days a week?
Or Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
Likely somewhere inbetween.
The wages to be paid are in the manufacture (not to mention design) and maintenance of the automatic drivers. If you have a fleet of 100 trucks, sure, you might eliminate "unskilled" drivers jobs, but the maintenance of the machines will actually increase o.k. - driver error induced maintenance will fall, but, basic wear and tear will be the same, and the automatic driver itself will be an important maintenance item.
Somebody has to keep the lenses clean, or at least fill up the tanks for the automatic lens cleaners, or design, build and maintain the systems that do it automatically.
I'd like to think that out of those 100 truck drivers who are working 60 hours a week, we might retrain 10 of them to work 30 hours a week at the skilled jobs related to automatic trucking, another 40 to work manufacture and maintenance 30 hours a week - so that the current crew that's working 60 hours a week can also work 30, and the other 50 can do something to benefit society besides piloting a big chunk of metal around in circles.
The place where capitalism is failing (in America) is keeping high levels of unemployment, simultaneous with long hours for those who are working.
Onboard FPGA? Depending on how big that it, that could explain the cost of the whole thing.
But, fancy stuff I'm talking about is real-world I/O - cameras, servos, things to provide the data to be crunched and act on the crunched data... I'm not sure there's a point to a small, low power consuming, high(ish) compute power board if all you're going to do is connect it to a keyboard, mouse, monitor and ethernet. Plenty of bigger, more powerful, commodity hardware doing that already.
He said "if you distribute to a cluster" everything else seems pointed at your average Bitcoin miner.
$40M isn't bad for good information. Assuming the cost spread equally among households, this cost the average household something like $0.50. The average household's federal tax burden is somewhere in the $20,000 range (average, not median), I'd be very happy if $5000 of that $20,000 was spent on getting the right information to the right people to make the right decisions about how to spend the other $15,000 - and a report on CIA secret prisons seems like justifiably 1% of 1% of the information that should be gathered and shared appropriately.
The other important use of information (beyond spending allocation) is for policy making and maintaining our diplomatic position and posturing with the rest of the world, reports about secret prisons seem both to be important to that diplomatic position, and also important to control release of on the world stage.
Better that we would have no secrets at all, but if you do that all at once, noone will be happy with the result.
Could be worse, we could live in a country where they never would have put the report together in the first place. At least a few senators know what's going on here - it's even worse when the leadership is in the dark and has nothing but fiction to base their decisions on.
Not everyone will be using them to mine Bitcoins.
What's the likely market place?
I see this doing on-board video processing in autonomous vehicles.... not sure that there's a particular cost sensitivity there to the GPU module, power weight and size much more than cost (at this level).
As for consumer applications that would be cost sensitive, this thing requires far too much fancy stuff around it to make it interesting, and all that stuff is still out of mass-market consumer price range, regardless if this board were free.
Goal: embarrass the most powerful nations on earth by doing things (with obvious military application) that they can't.
Oops, already done that with straight military power. Guess we've got to stick with geopolitical strategy for energy use dominance, then.
What % of GDP is being spent on today's races? Vs the 1960s?
I think by that measure, the current space race is about an order of magnitude short of the one in the 1960s.