Taxi driver is standing/cruising in a central-city party location. You live nearby, but most people come from the outskirts. He wants those customers, because they give him one high-price trip. For you, he will get the same money by hour, but he has to come back and look for the next customer. It's more convenient for him to pick long-distance customers.
We have existing taxi services that are actually quite good and regulated to the advantage of customers (for example, by law a taxi cannot refuse to drive you just because it's close by and he would prefer to wait for a higher fare customer). My hometown, Hamburg, is mentioned, and for all my life my experience with taxis there is that it is easy to get one, they are clean, drivers speak good german and know the roads, fares are transparent and fair and for years before Uber appeared, there were already Apps that allowed you to order a taxi to your current location with a few clicks.
I don't know the situation in the USA, but over here not many people even saw the need for something like Uber. If you "disrupt" something that works reasonably well, you are acting destructively.
Maybe Uber is cheaper, but it is not as transparent or fair with its various surcharges and basically auction system. I'd rather know I will spend 20â to get to the airport than leave it up to chance and maybe today I'm lucky and pay only 15 - or maybe 30, who knows? If you want cheap, most of Europe has pretty good public transport (from my house to the airport: just over 3â and only 10 minutes longer than by taxi).
And then Uber came in with arrogance and hubris and basically said "fuck you all" not just to the taxi companies but also to regulators, police and the law. Sorry, but we here don't share the american "all government is the evil spawn of Satan" attitude. Sure we bitch about tax laws and we think our politicians are corrupt, incompetent imbeciles, but we also value the rule of law and wouldn't want to live in the wild west. We don't think companies and people who break the rules are innovators, we think they are assholes.
But if they catch on, imagine the driver-distraction issues from trying to pilot a UAV while you're on the road.
Because the driver would have to pilot it, right? There is no such thing as an autonomous capability which would allow the drone to, say, fly up/ahead/somewhere for half a mile, take a bunch of pictures or use some sensors, transmit the result to the car computer which processes it and outputs a simple warning icon to the driver, right? Such things are completely unheard of.
In the case of save-and-rescue, you would have a second person in the car piloting the drone, that's so obvious it's a "doh".
and you no longer care how much any particular treatment cost because it is not your problem.
But the insurance company cares, and they have more experts and more negotiation power if they think it's too expensive.
The insurance company has a conflict of interest they need the bill to be high so that you need to buy the insurance in the first place.
Most stupid conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Their selling point is not that it's fucking expensive, their selling point is that you will sleep better knowing that it's not a problem you will have. Actually, at least in my country, lawyers and lawsuits aren't as insanely expensive as in the USA, and what I've had in the past 15 or so years since I got this was cheap enough that I could've paid myself. I pay them not because it's cheaper for me, but because it removes an uncertainty from my life.
They also try to weasel out of paying when you make a claim.
In 15 years, not one time have they even tried to weasel out. Not on this and not on any other insurances I have with them. That's why you pick a good insurance company, not the cheapest shitty one.
Sorry if your life experience has been so terrible, but don't judge the state of the world based on it.
When you get insurance, on average, you pay more than you would expect to pay if you didn't have insurance. You pay the actual cost, plus insurance company overheads, plus insurance company profits.
Of course. I don't have my insurances because it saves me money. I have them because in the chance that something really expensive happens to me, someone else will cover the bill. If my life is good and without problems, they will make a profit from me and I'm fine with that, because that's the deal. But if I get unlucky and the sky falls, they will save me, because that's the deal. That is how insurances work, and have always worked back from when the medieval european guild system invented the concept of "let's all pay a little bit so if one of us burns down, the pot will help him rebuild".
Some of the best laws, on the other hand, are fairly short and simple. They are just not too simple.
Since my job requires me to have some legal training (but I'm not a lawyer), I have read quite a lot of laws, and many of them in different versions. Many laws were simply better written fifty or eighty or so years ago than today. I don't know what it is, but laws of the past decade or two are just shitty in quality compared to much older laws. One part is that the older laws had time to evolve and have been changed and perfected over time, but it's not just that. I think long ago laws were written to actually be used. Today laws are written so the responsible politicians can smile at a TV camera and say they solved the problem.
Not sure if you can get it in the USA, but this exactly is the reason I have legal insurance. Just so you can't threaten my existence with a lawsuit. In my mind, if you can get it and don't, you are crazy.
I've published an e-book and worked on a 2nd (not yet published). The 2nd one I wanted the same. It should have been more than a book, with bells and whistles as you say.
I used iBooks, which has all these features built-in. I got them to work. Then I pulled most of them out again and made a simple book.
So if you are absolutely sure that the bells and whistles will actually give you something: Most ebook formats are basically HTML and they do support a subset of Javascript. Good luck getting it to run on more than one device, though.
Your best approach is probably what you already outlined: Make it an app written in whatever framework or programming language you want, because at that point what you are familiar with is the most important. There are probably make-your-own-interactive-story tools and such that provide a framework, but by my experience they are all too limited and if you can write code, you're better off writing code.
Seems like the solution there. Good track record, delayed disclosure. Bad track record, full disclosure. No track record, benefit of the doubt (good track record). Change response when required.
Who decides what the track record is?
Oh wait, even that discussion has been had a hundred times already. Why we go around in circles? Because we are human beings and we can't accept that someone simply has a different opinion, comes to a different conclusion even from the same facts. We think that if someone disagrees, one of us must be wrong, and most likely they.
But if everything has been said a thousand times, and smart people on boths sides of the debate still can't agree on a common position, then maybe that is just how it is and instead of repeating the same futile excercise again, we should simply accept that there are at least two positions, both equally solid even if we personally only agree with one of them.
The only time when outing the information immediately isn't a dick move is when the company has a prooven history of screwing the pooch. Otherwise consider it corporate espionage.
Old argument, made a thousand times. No need for redundancy.
In fact, everything you say has been said a hundred times, just as I already outlined. Likewise, the arguments pro and contra have been made extensively. I see no need to repeat the discussion. That was the point: If you want to discuss this topic, go to one of the many, many, many archived discussions, you will find everything you can come up with and one hundred other arguments there.
Now if you go back to what this was about (hint: Not your personal case) you will see that "lawnmower man" is metaphorical for people who are paid less than minimum wage. Mowing lawns was just one example because it's a typical neighbourhood kid job.
Old discussion, rehashed./. could use a "re-post my comment from 2002" feature.
There are two sides, and they will never reconcile. Some people think (based on past experience) that corporations generally won't take security seriously unless it impacts their business or their image, so only disclosure works. Other people think (based on past experience) that disclosure reads to the creation of exploit toolkits which leads to higher damage to more people and gives vendors not enough time to fix a problem. And a few especially delusional people think that a timer on disclosure and a few rules to make the whole thing "responsible" solves the unsolvable problem (it doesn't. Vendors will a good track record already fix quickly, vendors with a bad track record merely consider the delay additional time they don't have to do anything.)
And I think that pretty much sums it up, everything else is just elaboration.
This is a good example, actually. In the limit, the activity of mowing a lawn does not generate enough production of real wealth to fund its own existence.
Specifically, I mean this: the increased production of food, tools, etc. from the landscaped lawn combined with the reduction in costs of dealing with rodents, bugs, difficulty of travel, etc. you'd have if the lawn wasn't landscaped is not enough to pay a person "well" for that landscaping.
Go out and get a girlfriend.
After she has explained you the difference between Channel and Luis Vutton hand bags and why she wouldn't be seen dead with a $20 bag from WalMart, you will still not understand women, but you will understand that at least half the people in this world don't have an economics calculator in their head when they make buying decisions. Utility is not the only factor deciding whether something gets done or how much someone is willing to pay.
Now, you might argue that people may be willing to pay a landscaper excessively to maintain an image, etc. This may be possible for a time, but if you're paying them more than their efforts generate, you're going to deplete your savings and eventually have an issue.
It's called surplus money. Even normal people used to have some back when our economy was not a robbery case. Once all your needs are met and all your debts paid, when you have money left over, you could decide to simply spend it because you enjoy a mowed lawn. Not because it gives you any profit, just because you like it and you have the money to get what you like.
Which is good, because minimum wages are a bad idea, especially today.
Minimum wage is an absolute necessity, especially today. It ensures that there is a stopping point in the race to the bottom for jobs that are so simple, everyone can do them. For qualified jobs, there are natural stopping points - more and more people will drop out as the price goes lower, until only one person remains and he can say "pick me at this price or you have nobody". But for simple jobs, there will always be one other person offering to do it for one cent less.
The lower that cost the longer it will take to automate those jobs.
You live in the early 20th century, not the early 21st. There are enough jobs. The unemployment we have is not because there aren't. We have it because qualified people earn a pittance, because the fuckers at the very top are too greedy.
I'm lucky to earn well, being in IT and all that, but I can't afford to have a full-time servant in my house. Neither do I know anyone who has. But a hundred years ago, that was not so uncommon. Everyone in the upper class had at least one servant. Many people in the higher middle class had. Not just the filthy rich.
However, BI won't create your utopian vision of low-skilled people being able to live comfortable lives (though massive automation likely will) because the BI will have to be set low enough that living on BI alone is uncomfortable.
You don't understand basic income. The very point is that it should not be at starvation-level. That it should be sufficient for a simple, but acceptable life. It should be enough that someone who decides his talent is art or music can live on just the basic income comfortably enough to focus on this, until it brings money, even if that is many years in the future. And especially it should be enough that salaries need to be high enough to be worth your time, or you won't bother.
People who don't understand basic income regularily think that salaries will drop, because they don't need to cover basic existence anymore, only the difference to a slightly more comfortable life. In reality, it is widely expected that salaries will rise, because when you're not afraid to starve and live on the street, nobody sane shovels shit for a few bucks.
It isn't what revenue someone makes as a result of mowing lawns, but how much people with more money will pay willingly so as not to have to have a shite lawn.
Which directly depends on the revenue that they earn.
How much would Bill Gates offer if the alternative were to mow his own lawn?
Basically yes, except that the ridiculously-rich are a bad source of numbers on a scale where they don't give a fuck, just like the poor are a bad source for estimating the value of masterpiece artwork and diamond rings.
The difficulty in using this metric is that it doesn't work. Supply and demand set prices. If Bill Gates offers $1000 per hour, just because he can, someone will offer to do it for $999, and someone will offer to do it for $998, and so on, just to secure the job.
That is exactly why minimum wage was created, to ensure that there is a stopping point in the race to the bottom for jobs that are so simple, everyone can do them. For qualified jobs, there are natural stopping points - more and more people will drop out as the price goes lower, until only one person remains and he can say "pick me at this price or you have nobody". But for simple jobs, there will always be one other person offering to do it for one cent less.
I wonder why. Not because of the data breach, but because of the various analyses done that gave strong evidence that your chances of talking to an actual female on the site is pretty close to zero. After that got out, why would any man register an account there, even for free?
Maybe these are all women who are glad that the ratio is such, because it gives them better chances?;-)
a whole pile of minor jobs which are simply not economic
Why are they not economic? I challenge the base assumption. Why should a simple job such as mowing lawns be paid a starvation salary? Why can't someone who mows lawns for a living not make enough money for a simple life?
I will tell you why, the real reason: Because then the minimum-wage jobs would need to move upwards in salary. Someone who does something a little more qualified than mowing lawns would have to be paid slightly more. But that means the tier above that also needs to move up.
In other words: If you would cut out starvation salary jobs, and enforce minimum wage, all salaries would have to increase.
And now magic happens: People who couldn't afford to pay the cleaning lady or the lawnmower man a decent salary now can. Because they are making more money as well.
All this additional income will, of course, have to come from somewhere. There are two possible sources. One is inflation - which would create a self-reinforcing cycle because then you would have to raise wages to compensate for inflation. The other is less profits for those who own the companies, i.e. who make their money not out of salaries.
Guess who has in the past, is currently and will in the future spend millions and millions to both politicians and media to ensure that real minimum wage with no loopholes and exceptions doesn't happen.
Yes, the infrastructure needs to be built, but that was true for cash as well, it's just that now it exists.
But in fact, the largest part of the infrastructure - the network - already exists. I just came back from Sweden, and you can buy a card reader for your smartphone in local electronics stores. Don't remember the price, but given that PayPal and Amazon also offer such devices, my guess is somewhere in the area of 50 bucks. Transaction fees have fallen dramatically recently, and the one I checked right now - PayPal - offers you card transactions at the same fee as business accounts online take - 3.5%
So there's your overhead. 50 bucks is basically nothing if you distribute it over a year or so of sales. PayPal fees are high, probably as a local business you can get a better deal from your bank. One I googled quickly offers 5 cents per transaction, getting cheaper if you buy monthly bundles.
There isn't really anything that sets atheism apart from other religions.
Ah, you're playing the old "atheism is a religion" trick. Sorry, that has been soundly defeated a hundred times by many men much better than me, you can google their answers. The short answer is: That is total nonsense, in the same sense that vegetarian food is not just another form of meat.
Let's not. Their beliefs are not somehow less important than yours.
You are just going to completely ignore the point I am making about any kind of belief vs. specifically religious belief, yes? In such case, I'm wasting my time here, because we are talking about religion, not about "whatever you have in your mind".
What objective criteria have you used to to evaluate the peronsal beliefs of the worlds 7 billion people?
It is called logic, specifically inference. You do not need to observe every stone ever thrown from a bridge to make the general statement that due to gravity, stones thrown from a bridge will fall downwards.
It's not a metaphor at all - if Hockey is the thing that gives your life meaning and Hockey is the lens through which you see the world, then Hockey is your religion.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two.
By trying to refute it, you just proved my point.
If atheism were not a religion there would be something that distinguishes it from religion. What is this thing?
The absence of gods or other supernatural entities. Name a religion that has no supernatural assumptions whatsoever. Sorry, that excludes Buddhism (which believes in reincarnation and thus a soul independent of the material body).
What? There are more Buddhists than Atheists. How did you arrive at 1%?
Basic mathematics. You threw out the number of 3000 religions, I say maybe a dozen don't have gods, 12/3000 = 0.4 % < 1%
Venerating your ancestors is not worshipping a deity. A spirit is not a deity, believing that animals have souls is not the same as making them a deity. Believing in evil spirits is not the same as worshipping them.
That is the first good point you are making. True, veneration of ancestors is a multi-sourced credible starting point for many religions. However, you self-defeat with your last point, because Veneration of Ancestors is indeed considered a form of worship. The boundaries are - as with anything human - not fixed, but fluid. There is certainly a grey area between magical belief and religious belief. TBH, there is a lot of magical rituals still left in especially catholic mass. For a deeper understanding of the link between ancestor worship, magical belief and religion, I can recommend "The Golden Bough" by Frazer and "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Jaynce.
However, the fine delination of religion was not the point here. I am absolutely comfortable saying that specific belief X, which is largely magical and slightly religious, is bullshit. A lot of brilliant men were also devout christians, and I have no problem admiring them for their literary or scientific work, while considering their religious views bullshit. Human beings are not simple, and need to be seen in their complexity.
What you've done is restated your doctrines, made some naive assumptions, ignored evidence to the contrary, and declared yourself right. You sound more religious by the hour.
I repeat, you said "that excludes everybody" to my statement of "someone who considers religion bullshit". Such a someone exists. Whether or not he is right in his consideration was never the point. You are trying to weasel out of your misplaced all-quantor instead of admitting t
Typically, a Cashless Society has a lot of hidden overhead,
Cash has quite a bit of overhead by itself. Aside from the whole forgery problem, both coins and bills need refreshment cycles, they need to be manufactured, for small coins quite often at a higher cost than the face value.
Then there is the overhead of handling cash, which is quite considerable.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of cash, but as far as overhead is concerned, I'm not sure it is superior to electronic payment.
Like many middle managers, people in the police force are a victim to the technology panacea problem. Convincing salesmen tell them that this or that toy will solve all their problems and they believe it.
But the fact of the matter is, tools that really reduce your work by a large amount are invented once in a lifetime. You know, the wheel. The steam engine. That kind of stuff. The new product from Cool Tech Inc. is almost certainly not among them, no matter what they promise. It might be cool and super-useful, but if you think it will replace real, hard work, you are delusional.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a pricing problem.
Taxi driver is standing/cruising in a central-city party location. You live nearby, but most people come from the outskirts. He wants those customers, because they give him one high-price trip. For you, he will get the same money by hour, but he has to come back and look for the next customer. It's more convenient for him to pick long-distance customers.
And fuck /. and it's UTF support. That âÂis, of course, a Euro symbol - €
You don't need Uber for any of this shit.
Firstly, spending just one minute on Google to check the local taxi rules will help a lot.
Secondly, taxi Apps such as MyTaxi also allow you to rate the driver.
Yeah, poor "innovators".
Look, here is what really happened:
We have existing taxi services that are actually quite good and regulated to the advantage of customers (for example, by law a taxi cannot refuse to drive you just because it's close by and he would prefer to wait for a higher fare customer).
My hometown, Hamburg, is mentioned, and for all my life my experience with taxis there is that it is easy to get one, they are clean, drivers speak good german and know the roads, fares are transparent and fair and for years before Uber appeared, there were already Apps that allowed you to order a taxi to your current location with a few clicks.
I don't know the situation in the USA, but over here not many people even saw the need for something like Uber. If you "disrupt" something that works reasonably well, you are acting destructively.
Maybe Uber is cheaper, but it is not as transparent or fair with its various surcharges and basically auction system. I'd rather know I will spend 20â to get to the airport than leave it up to chance and maybe today I'm lucky and pay only 15 - or maybe 30, who knows? If you want cheap, most of Europe has pretty good public transport (from my house to the airport: just over 3â and only 10 minutes longer than by taxi).
And then Uber came in with arrogance and hubris and basically said "fuck you all" not just to the taxi companies but also to regulators, police and the law. Sorry, but we here don't share the american "all government is the evil spawn of Satan" attitude. Sure we bitch about tax laws and we think our politicians are corrupt, incompetent imbeciles, but we also value the rule of law and wouldn't want to live in the wild west. We don't think companies and people who break the rules are innovators, we think they are assholes.
A swarm of overhead drones is a wonderful way to telegraph your position to everyone miles around.
But if they catch on, imagine the driver-distraction issues from trying to pilot a UAV while you're on the road.
Because the driver would have to pilot it, right? There is no such thing as an autonomous capability which would allow the drone to, say, fly up/ahead/somewhere for half a mile, take a bunch of pictures or use some sensors, transmit the result to the car computer which processes it and outputs a simple warning icon to the driver, right? Such things are completely unheard of.
In the case of save-and-rescue, you would have a second person in the car piloting the drone, that's so obvious it's a "doh".
and you no longer care how much any particular treatment cost because it is not your problem.
But the insurance company cares, and they have more experts and more negotiation power if they think it's too expensive.
The insurance company has a conflict of interest they need the bill to be high so that you need to buy the insurance in the first place.
Most stupid conspiracy theory I've ever heard. Their selling point is not that it's fucking expensive, their selling point is that you will sleep better knowing that it's not a problem you will have. Actually, at least in my country, lawyers and lawsuits aren't as insanely expensive as in the USA, and what I've had in the past 15 or so years since I got this was cheap enough that I could've paid myself. I pay them not because it's cheaper for me, but because it removes an uncertainty from my life.
They also try to weasel out of paying when you make a claim.
In 15 years, not one time have they even tried to weasel out. Not on this and not on any other insurances I have with them. That's why you pick a good insurance company, not the cheapest shitty one.
Sorry if your life experience has been so terrible, but don't judge the state of the world based on it.
When you get insurance, on average, you pay more than you would expect to pay if you didn't have insurance. You pay the actual cost, plus insurance company overheads, plus insurance company profits.
Of course. I don't have my insurances because it saves me money. I have them because in the chance that something really expensive happens to me, someone else will cover the bill. If my life is good and without problems, they will make a profit from me and I'm fine with that, because that's the deal. But if I get unlucky and the sky falls, they will save me, because that's the deal. That is how insurances work, and have always worked back from when the medieval european guild system invented the concept of "let's all pay a little bit so if one of us burns down, the pot will help him rebuild".
Some of the best laws, on the other hand, are fairly short and simple. They are just not too simple.
Since my job requires me to have some legal training (but I'm not a lawyer), I have read quite a lot of laws, and many of them in different versions. Many laws were simply better written fifty or eighty or so years ago than today. I don't know what it is, but laws of the past decade or two are just shitty in quality compared to much older laws. One part is that the older laws had time to evolve and have been changed and perfected over time, but it's not just that. I think long ago laws were written to actually be used. Today laws are written so the responsible politicians can smile at a TV camera and say they solved the problem.
I call bullshit on that.
I live in Germany, a country famous for its tax laws so much that some lawyers say that by word count, half the tax laws in the world are german.
We had that before computers became widespread in the administration.
So look for another explanation.
Not sure if you can get it in the USA, but this exactly is the reason I have legal insurance. Just so you can't threaten my existence with a lawsuit. In my mind, if you can get it and don't, you are crazy.
I've published an e-book and worked on a 2nd (not yet published). The 2nd one I wanted the same. It should have been more than a book, with bells and whistles as you say.
I used iBooks, which has all these features built-in. I got them to work. Then I pulled most of them out again and made a simple book.
So if you are absolutely sure that the bells and whistles will actually give you something: Most ebook formats are basically HTML and they do support a subset of Javascript. Good luck getting it to run on more than one device, though.
Your best approach is probably what you already outlined: Make it an app written in whatever framework or programming language you want, because at that point what you are familiar with is the most important. There are probably make-your-own-interactive-story tools and such that provide a framework, but by my experience they are all too limited and if you can write code, you're better off writing code.
Seems like the solution there. Good track record, delayed disclosure. Bad track record, full disclosure. No track record, benefit of the doubt (good track record). Change response when required.
Who decides what the track record is?
Oh wait, even that discussion has been had a hundred times already. Why we go around in circles? Because we are human beings and we can't accept that someone simply has a different opinion, comes to a different conclusion even from the same facts. We think that if someone disagrees, one of us must be wrong, and most likely they.
But if everything has been said a thousand times, and smart people on boths sides of the debate still can't agree on a common position, then maybe that is just how it is and instead of repeating the same futile excercise again, we should simply accept that there are at least two positions, both equally solid even if we personally only agree with one of them.
The only time when outing the information immediately isn't a dick move is when the company has a prooven history of screwing the pooch. Otherwise consider it corporate espionage.
Old argument, made a thousand times. No need for redundancy.
In fact, everything you say has been said a hundred times, just as I already outlined. Likewise, the arguments pro and contra have been made extensively. I see no need to repeat the discussion. That was the point: If you want to discuss this topic, go to one of the many, many, many archived discussions, you will find everything you can come up with and one hundred other arguments there.
Now if you go back to what this was about (hint: Not your personal case) you will see that "lawnmower man" is metaphorical for people who are paid less than minimum wage. Mowing lawns was just one example because it's a typical neighbourhood kid job.
Old discussion, rehashed. /. could use a "re-post my comment from 2002" feature.
There are two sides, and they will never reconcile. Some people think (based on past experience) that corporations generally won't take security seriously unless it impacts their business or their image, so only disclosure works. Other people think (based on past experience) that disclosure reads to the creation of exploit toolkits which leads to higher damage to more people and gives vendors not enough time to fix a problem. And a few especially delusional people think that a timer on disclosure and a few rules to make the whole thing "responsible" solves the unsolvable problem (it doesn't. Vendors will a good track record already fix quickly, vendors with a bad track record merely consider the delay additional time they don't have to do anything.)
And I think that pretty much sums it up, everything else is just elaboration.
I wasn't talking about landscapers. I was talking about lawnmower men.
This is a good example, actually. In the limit, the activity of mowing a lawn does not generate enough production of real wealth to fund its own existence.
Specifically, I mean this: the increased production of food, tools, etc. from the landscaped lawn combined with the reduction in costs of dealing with rodents, bugs, difficulty of travel, etc. you'd have if the lawn wasn't landscaped is not enough to pay a person "well" for that landscaping.
Go out and get a girlfriend.
After she has explained you the difference between Channel and Luis Vutton hand bags and why she wouldn't be seen dead with a $20 bag from WalMart, you will still not understand women, but you will understand that at least half the people in this world don't have an economics calculator in their head when they make buying decisions. Utility is not the only factor deciding whether something gets done or how much someone is willing to pay.
Now, you might argue that people may be willing to pay a landscaper excessively to maintain an image, etc. This may be possible for a time, but if you're paying them more than their efforts generate, you're going to deplete your savings and eventually have an issue.
It's called surplus money. Even normal people used to have some back when our economy was not a robbery case. Once all your needs are met and all your debts paid, when you have money left over, you could decide to simply spend it because you enjoy a mowed lawn. Not because it gives you any profit, just because you like it and you have the money to get what you like.
Which is good, because minimum wages are a bad idea, especially today.
Minimum wage is an absolute necessity, especially today.
It ensures that there is a stopping point in the race to the bottom for jobs that are so simple, everyone can do them. For qualified jobs, there are natural stopping points - more and more people will drop out as the price goes lower, until only one person remains and he can say "pick me at this price or you have nobody". But for simple jobs, there will always be one other person offering to do it for one cent less.
The lower that cost the longer it will take to automate those jobs.
You live in the early 20th century, not the early 21st. There are enough jobs. The unemployment we have is not because there aren't. We have it because qualified people earn a pittance, because the fuckers at the very top are too greedy.
I'm lucky to earn well, being in IT and all that, but I can't afford to have a full-time servant in my house. Neither do I know anyone who has. But a hundred years ago, that was not so uncommon. Everyone in the upper class had at least one servant. Many people in the higher middle class had. Not just the filthy rich.
However, BI won't create your utopian vision of low-skilled people being able to live comfortable lives (though massive automation likely will) because the BI will have to be set low enough that living on BI alone is uncomfortable.
You don't understand basic income. The very point is that it should not be at starvation-level. That it should be sufficient for a simple, but acceptable life. It should be enough that someone who decides his talent is art or music can live on just the basic income comfortably enough to focus on this, until it brings money, even if that is many years in the future. And especially it should be enough that salaries need to be high enough to be worth your time, or you won't bother.
People who don't understand basic income regularily think that salaries will drop, because they don't need to cover basic existence anymore, only the difference to a slightly more comfortable life. In reality, it is widely expected that salaries will rise, because when you're not afraid to starve and live on the street, nobody sane shovels shit for a few bucks.
It isn't what revenue someone makes as a result of mowing lawns, but how much people with more money will pay willingly so as not to have to have a shite lawn.
Which directly depends on the revenue that they earn.
How much would Bill Gates offer if the alternative were to mow his own lawn?
Basically yes, except that the ridiculously-rich are a bad source of numbers on a scale where they don't give a fuck, just like the poor are a bad source for estimating the value of masterpiece artwork and diamond rings.
The difficulty in using this metric is that it doesn't work. Supply and demand set prices. If Bill Gates offers $1000 per hour, just because he can, someone will offer to do it for $999, and someone will offer to do it for $998, and so on, just to secure the job.
That is exactly why minimum wage was created, to ensure that there is a stopping point in the race to the bottom for jobs that are so simple, everyone can do them. For qualified jobs, there are natural stopping points - more and more people will drop out as the price goes lower, until only one person remains and he can say "pick me at this price or you have nobody". But for simple jobs, there will always be one other person offering to do it for one cent less.
I wonder why. Not because of the data breach, but because of the various analyses done that gave strong evidence that your chances of talking to an actual female on the site is pretty close to zero. After that got out, why would any man register an account there, even for free?
Maybe these are all women who are glad that the ratio is such, because it gives them better chances? ;-)
a whole pile of minor jobs which are simply not economic
Why are they not economic? I challenge the base assumption. Why should a simple job such as mowing lawns be paid a starvation salary? Why can't someone who mows lawns for a living not make enough money for a simple life?
I will tell you why, the real reason: Because then the minimum-wage jobs would need to move upwards in salary. Someone who does something a little more qualified than mowing lawns would have to be paid slightly more. But that means the tier above that also needs to move up.
In other words: If you would cut out starvation salary jobs, and enforce minimum wage, all salaries would have to increase.
And now magic happens: People who couldn't afford to pay the cleaning lady or the lawnmower man a decent salary now can. Because they are making more money as well.
All this additional income will, of course, have to come from somewhere. There are two possible sources. One is inflation - which would create a self-reinforcing cycle because then you would have to raise wages to compensate for inflation. The other is less profits for those who own the companies, i.e. who make their money not out of salaries.
Guess who has in the past, is currently and will in the future spend millions and millions to both politicians and media to ensure that real minimum wage with no loopholes and exceptions doesn't happen.
Yes, the infrastructure needs to be built, but that was true for cash as well, it's just that now it exists.
But in fact, the largest part of the infrastructure - the network - already exists. I just came back from Sweden, and you can buy a card reader for your smartphone in local electronics stores. Don't remember the price, but given that PayPal and Amazon also offer such devices, my guess is somewhere in the area of 50 bucks. Transaction fees have fallen dramatically recently, and the one I checked right now - PayPal - offers you card transactions at the same fee as business accounts online take - 3.5%
So there's your overhead. 50 bucks is basically nothing if you distribute it over a year or so of sales. PayPal fees are high, probably as a local business you can get a better deal from your bank. One I googled quickly offers 5 cents per transaction, getting cheaper if you buy monthly bundles.
There isn't really anything that sets atheism apart from other religions.
Ah, you're playing the old "atheism is a religion" trick. Sorry, that has been soundly defeated a hundred times by many men much better than me, you can google their answers. The short answer is: That is total nonsense, in the same sense that vegetarian food is not just another form of meat.
Let's not. Their beliefs are not somehow less important than yours.
You are just going to completely ignore the point I am making about any kind of belief vs. specifically religious belief, yes? In such case, I'm wasting my time here, because we are talking about religion, not about "whatever you have in your mind".
What objective criteria have you used to to evaluate the peronsal beliefs of the worlds 7 billion people?
It is called logic, specifically inference. You do not need to observe every stone ever thrown from a bridge to make the general statement that due to gravity, stones thrown from a bridge will fall downwards.
It's not a metaphor at all - if Hockey is the thing that gives your life meaning and Hockey is the lens through which you see the world, then Hockey is your religion.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two.
By trying to refute it, you just proved my point.
If atheism were not a religion there would be something that distinguishes it from religion. What is this thing?
The absence of gods or other supernatural entities.
Name a religion that has no supernatural assumptions whatsoever. Sorry, that excludes Buddhism (which believes in reincarnation and thus a soul independent of the material body).
What? There are more Buddhists than Atheists. How did you arrive at 1%?
Basic mathematics. You threw out the number of 3000 religions, I say maybe a dozen don't have gods, 12/3000 = 0.4 % < 1%
Venerating your ancestors is not worshipping a deity. A spirit is not a deity, believing that animals have souls is not the same as making them a deity. Believing in evil spirits is not the same as worshipping them.
That is the first good point you are making. True, veneration of ancestors is a multi-sourced credible starting point for many religions. However, you self-defeat with your last point, because Veneration of Ancestors is indeed considered a form of worship. The boundaries are - as with anything human - not fixed, but fluid. There is certainly a grey area between magical belief and religious belief. TBH, there is a lot of magical rituals still left in especially catholic mass. For a deeper understanding of the link between ancestor worship, magical belief and religion, I can recommend "The Golden Bough" by Frazer and "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Jaynce.
However, the fine delination of religion was not the point here. I am absolutely comfortable saying that specific belief X, which is largely magical and slightly religious, is bullshit. A lot of brilliant men were also devout christians, and I have no problem admiring them for their literary or scientific work, while considering their religious views bullshit. Human beings are not simple, and need to be seen in their complexity.
What you've done is restated your doctrines, made some naive assumptions, ignored evidence to the contrary, and declared yourself right. You sound more religious by the hour.
I repeat, you said "that excludes everybody" to my statement of "someone who considers religion bullshit". Such a someone exists. Whether or not he is right in his consideration was never the point. You are trying to weasel out of your misplaced all-quantor instead of admitting t
True, but:
Typically, a Cashless Society has a lot of hidden overhead,
Cash has quite a bit of overhead by itself. Aside from the whole forgery problem, both coins and bills need refreshment cycles, they need to be manufactured, for small coins quite often at a higher cost than the face value.
Then there is the overhead of handling cash, which is quite considerable.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of cash, but as far as overhead is concerned, I'm not sure it is superior to electronic payment.
This exactly.
Like many middle managers, people in the police force are a victim to the technology panacea problem. Convincing salesmen tell them that this or that toy will solve all their problems and they believe it.
But the fact of the matter is, tools that really reduce your work by a large amount are invented once in a lifetime. You know, the wheel. The steam engine. That kind of stuff. The new product from Cool Tech Inc. is almost certainly not among them, no matter what they promise. It might be cool and super-useful, but if you think it will replace real, hard work, you are delusional.