As someone who has never seen an established business that does not take credit cards of some sort, I have to say: it is far too easy and tempting, for some, to puff up with pride and look down your nose at someone for failing to exercise an option that doesn't really exist.
There's loads of them. Market stalls in the UK still rarely accept anything other than cash for example. The reason the option doesn't exist is because the costs in a shop that only accepted cash would be higher because they would lose so many customers who didn't want to pay with cash. If the few people who wanted to shop somewhere that didn't accept credit cards or debit cards were willing to pay a price premium then shops to service that niche would exist.
What your suggesting is the opposite of a free market response (which doesn't automatically make it a bad idea). That somehow shops should be forced to separate out payment processing costs so that people paying with cash aren't "subsidising" card users, however I expect most shops would simply put in place an equal fee for paying with cash or outright refuse to accept cash because the majority of customers don't want the complexity it comes with.
In short you seem to be equating the lack of availability of a specific service to a failure of the free market, when in fact it is a clear example of the free market in action.
Your confusing minimum wage laws with a specific countries implementation of them which is a pretty big mistake for someone so quick to judge others as being fooled. Many countries have minimum wage laws with specific exceptions for apprenticeships for example.
If the minimum wage was removed and companies began employing people for $1 an hour, with the state invariably making up the rest of what they need via benefits or dealing with the effects of deprivation, it wouldn't be in the best interests of the country. What you seem to have missed is that when there is a state willing to support people without sufficient income then it makes sense for the state to stop companies from employing people at wages that are only viable with government subsidy.
It will take very little time to train the doctor to sling burgers and fries. That's the crux of the problem.
It isn't, in my opinion. We aren't going to need more burger flippers, in fact we'll need less as we increase the efficiency of manual tasks and/or automate them. One of the main reasons why it'll take so long for doctors to be replaced by computers isn't even that computers can't do the job (computerised diagnostics are already very effective) it's that people expect and want to see a well trained meatbag:) We agree on everything else you say though and they're the more important points.
Experiments in Europe with 35 and 38 work hours failed and were rolled back to nearly 40 yours or even more.
The UK has plenty of 37.5 hour jobs, it's probably the closest thing we have to a 'standard' working hours. We also get a minimum of 28 days holiday a year, have a higher minimum wage and get free healthcare. I don't mean to imply the UK is perfect, or the US terrible, but suggesting that Europe has 'experimented' with treating workers remotely well and failed is misleading at best.
Yet there were new jobs. As someone else pointed out, the amount of potential work is limitless. Although few of us work in any of the jobs that existed 200 years ago, we still have jobs.
Actually, if you look at youth employment it's pretty clear that 'we' don't have jobs. Even the people who do aren't benefiting from the increase in productivity which became detached from wage increases around 30 years ago.
I'm always cynical about any view of doom based on extrapolation. We've seen again and again that we adjust. If there was one slightly different aspect of the current issue it is that the rate of change is vastly increased and the level of expertise is much higher now. When cars led to stablehands losing jobs they probably didn't have to do any training to move into another role. When miners lost their jobs to automation a couple of weeks of training was probably about all they needed to get into another role (actually in the UK we are still feeling the impact of those job losses). When doctors, who spend 5+ years studying and training, get largely replaced by machines then how long will it take them to retrain into a role that a computer still can't do (biochemist perhaps)?
The average level of a job worth employing a human over a machine for is increasing rapidly. The level and quality of education of the population isn't. We aren't preparing the youth of today to all be particle physicists and genetic research post-doctorates so why expect that everyone is going to be able to do something that a machine can't do better and cheaper in just a few years time.
Because we have no economic framework that could accommodate such a situation. It doesn't matter if machines can do all the work is there is no means to ensure access to their produce. Economics as we practice now is entirely centered around the labor market: People work for wages, use the wages to buy things, and producing those things pays wages back to the workers. Money circulates, everyone gets fed and clothed.
You're right. We don't and part of the issue is that any effective change needs to be international or at least in line with other nations behaviours. Our current system is based on governments earning revenue from taxing income and that means they focus on policies that maximise income. Maybe moving some of that tax onto company revenues would change the equation and it's also much harder to dodge.
I saw Kodak as an example of this, in Fortune I think, where companies involved in making film and printing with thousands of employees are replaced by firms like Instragram with tens of employees. This isn't a bad thing: People chose to give up physical film, but it sure does suck from a taxation perspective in our current system.
Re:Isn't this the ultimate goal?
on
If I Had a Hammer
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you do away with minimum wage, things could be even cheaper, and people could actually compete with machines.
And achieve what? Have people doing boring repetitive work that could easily be automated for $3 an hour because it would cost $3.10 for a machine to do it. Then next year $2.90 because the machines got cheaper? With the state having to top that income up a liveable amount. It's a race to the bottom and it isn't sustainable or desirable.
Even if machines did 100% of the work done by humans 150 years ago, we'd still have plenty to do.
A thousand times this. Maybe we're finally reaching the point where the number of people required to work for private organisations is flat-lining or falling (big maybe) but there's still so much we don't know and so many people starving or just lonely in the world.
It's frustrating how just about no one is discussing exactly that, because it's clearly the point of the topic. Personally I don't see the issue. It takes a pretty short sited kind of mind to think that things can't change, which seems to be the naive assumption of the article. Once cars are de facto driving themselves with people required to sit there watching there will invariably be a push to make it legal for cars to be fully autonomous (especially as that will be doubly important for seniors no longer able to drive and disabled people). If we assume that self-driving cars are as safe or safer than normal cars (which they'd have to be for them to take off anyway) then what would end up happening is the companies building them would buy themselves insurance and 'passengers' would be covered by that rather than having their own insurance.
The problem with libertarian views, and a lot of criticism of libertarian views is based on incorrectly judging the extent of changes required. If we removed all the net neutrality laws but at the same time removed all the laws, contracts etc that grant government monopolies to companies maybe the increase in competition by ISPs (which are often severely limited in the US) would mean that you wouldn't need the laws.
Do I think that we should remove net neutrality? Probably not because it is such a fundamental and important benefit to society, but I'd consider it more seriously if we could provide a thriving and competitive market where I could be confident I could choose an ISP offering it.
No it isn't. You'll still be paying for it, whether it is via being exposed to more adverts or paying more for a netflix subscription. Additionally, it means that it will be far harder for new companies to enter the market because they'll either have to pay massive amounts for user bandwidth costs or offer substandard service. This gives the current providers a more protected position and means they can increase charges without worrying about being disrupted.
Quickest way to kill this? Google, Facebook and Twitter all bring in a policy saying that they won't pay providers who want to do this and providers doing this must pay them (at the same rate they charge) for all of their bandwidth their customers use or be blocked.
Actually the vast majority of the argument you can make for tablets over consoles you can make for tablets over PCs. There's a reason why the biggest screen in my house is in the living room and not a bedroom or office. Now, I'm waiting to see how steam boxes turn out instead of jumping on the next gen but don't assume that outside of the relatively hardcore gamer demographic that PC gaming is going to better out of this trend than consoles.
Looking at the data in 5-year increments tells a different story then looking at it in 50 year increments tells a different story then looking at it in 500 year increments, tells a different story then looking at it in 5000 year increments and on and on and on.
And if you look at it in 100 year increments then anyone who died less than 50 years ago would be alive; which is a pretty good indication of why when you're looking at something that has only happened in the last hundred or so years you shouldn't amalgamate data over vastly larger periods.
What you're suggesting is as equally dumb as leaving as boiling a pan of water and letting it cool over an hour from 100 degrees to 30 then turning the burner on full power and then after 30 seconds when the water is back up to 40 degrees saying "the water is cooling".
All well and good, however from what I've seen so far 99.9% of the issue with things on snap chat being shared beyond the senders intent are where the recipient saves a copy. If you present the data to a user un-encoded at any point, barring you being able to restrict the device they are using (and even then if they have a camera), then they will still be able to do that.
More than half of us do a lot of things that doesn't every news item related to them should be on/.; I travelled in a car today but I don't want to see every car 'news' story on here;)
All that said, I think this story is a good one for/. the fact that some extremely valuable items were seized and destroyed without discussion with the owner at customs is stuff that matters.
I think the school did exactly the right thing - deny that WiFi is harmful (the truth), but take it away anyway in order to appease these people.
Unless there were expensive consequences to leaving the WIFI there, for example a very expensive lawsuit, then no I don't think they did the right thing. Removing the WIFI is a tacit admission that concerns about WIFI are valid. All the parents, friends of parents, children etc all know that a school took WIFI out of classrooms because of concerns about cancer. I agree that sometimes very minor (pointless) concessions can be justified on compassionate grounds, however I think this kind of concession isn't as minor as you do.
It's a sorry state of affairs that 'how' we say something is important rather than only 'what' we say
Not really. The fact that it benefits an argument for it to be delivered clearly and politely isn't a bad thing unless you think a society in which such things are valued at all is a desirable outcome. What's sad is the people who occasionally have something worth sharing but are so completely unable to understand the need to be polite that they can't share it effectively.
Anarchists want an end to use of violence to get what you want.
Stop trying to redefine it. Anarchy is an incredibly vague notion, it means "without rulers", nothing more or less. Some 'anarchists' may believe that this will lead to less violence. Some may believe that it will better suit them. It doesn't really matter what motivates them because the term anarchist doesn't define it.
The vast majority of terrorist acts aren't perpetrated by groups looking for chaos; they have defined goals or believe they are at 'war' with the target. There might be some groups out there that just bomb stuff for shits and giggles but given the comparative rarity I say we wait until we've dealt with the rest first.
I agree with you. Though to be fair, it's probably a smarter waste of money to spend it on making your grid harder to break than some of the security nonsense billions is already being spent on.
It strikes me that probably the single biggest achievement of the security services has been to make it either too hard, or seem too hard, to get a group of like minded individuals together without the government being aware of them. Sure 20 individuals with time, money, expertise and planning could probably cause massive damage to the American economy via targeting the grid. Getting 20 individuals together and planning it without someone in the security services noticing? Not so easy.
Just look at the mess that European colonialism has made of India and Africa
Don't forget Canada and Australia... Oh wait, they don't fit your message.
America is populated by European colonial descendants (and the few natives who survived) as are most of the other first world ex-colonial countries. Which makes sense because, unlike in the middle-east, Africa, South America, South East asia where a small ruling elite of Europeans ran things then vanished at a time of conflict, the people and many of the people administering the country were one and the same.
Answer this question: Is there any data that you want to be **completely unavailable** to law enforcement with **proper warrant**?
Conversations with your lawyer are completely unavailable even with a proper warrant. We have an amendment specifically allowing me to refuse to answer questions that could incriminate me (in the US at least). Finally, if someone came up with a device that could read minds would you be in favour of the government being able to use it on people if they had a 'proper warrant'? Because currently any information in my head is completely unavailable unless I choose to disclose it (though it is a criminal offence to withhold it).
There were people smarter than you hundreds of years ago who knew that neither the military or law enforcement need to be able to use all means, so though you may think they do, that says far more about your inability to keep a rational perspective than any real security needs.
Slashdot Mirror
There's loads of them. Market stalls in the UK still rarely accept anything other than cash for example. The reason the option doesn't exist is because the costs in a shop that only accepted cash would be higher because they would lose so many customers who didn't want to pay with cash. If the few people who wanted to shop somewhere that didn't accept credit cards or debit cards were willing to pay a price premium then shops to service that niche would exist.
What your suggesting is the opposite of a free market response (which doesn't automatically make it a bad idea). That somehow shops should be forced to separate out payment processing costs so that people paying with cash aren't "subsidising" card users, however I expect most shops would simply put in place an equal fee for paying with cash or outright refuse to accept cash because the majority of customers don't want the complexity it comes with.
In short you seem to be equating the lack of availability of a specific service to a failure of the free market, when in fact it is a clear example of the free market in action.
Your confusing minimum wage laws with a specific countries implementation of them which is a pretty big mistake for someone so quick to judge others as being fooled. Many countries have minimum wage laws with specific exceptions for apprenticeships for example.
If the minimum wage was removed and companies began employing people for $1 an hour, with the state invariably making up the rest of what they need via benefits or dealing with the effects of deprivation, it wouldn't be in the best interests of the country. What you seem to have missed is that when there is a state willing to support people without sufficient income then it makes sense for the state to stop companies from employing people at wages that are only viable with government subsidy.
It isn't, in my opinion. We aren't going to need more burger flippers, in fact we'll need less as we increase the efficiency of manual tasks and/or automate them. One of the main reasons why it'll take so long for doctors to be replaced by computers isn't even that computers can't do the job (computerised diagnostics are already very effective) it's that people expect and want to see a well trained meatbag :) We agree on everything else you say though and they're the more important points.
Which is the same thing people far more notable than you were saying 100 years ago, 200 years ago etc etc.
The UK has plenty of 37.5 hour jobs, it's probably the closest thing we have to a 'standard' working hours. We also get a minimum of 28 days holiday a year, have a higher minimum wage and get free healthcare. I don't mean to imply the UK is perfect, or the US terrible, but suggesting that Europe has 'experimented' with treating workers remotely well and failed is misleading at best.
Actually, if you look at youth employment it's pretty clear that 'we' don't have jobs. Even the people who do aren't benefiting from the increase in productivity which became detached from wage increases around 30 years ago.
I'm always cynical about any view of doom based on extrapolation. We've seen again and again that we adjust. If there was one slightly different aspect of the current issue it is that the rate of change is vastly increased and the level of expertise is much higher now. When cars led to stablehands losing jobs they probably didn't have to do any training to move into another role. When miners lost their jobs to automation a couple of weeks of training was probably about all they needed to get into another role (actually in the UK we are still feeling the impact of those job losses). When doctors, who spend 5+ years studying and training, get largely replaced by machines then how long will it take them to retrain into a role that a computer still can't do (biochemist perhaps)?
The average level of a job worth employing a human over a machine for is increasing rapidly. The level and quality of education of the population isn't. We aren't preparing the youth of today to all be particle physicists and genetic research post-doctorates so why expect that everyone is going to be able to do something that a machine can't do better and cheaper in just a few years time.
You're right. We don't and part of the issue is that any effective change needs to be international or at least in line with other nations behaviours. Our current system is based on governments earning revenue from taxing income and that means they focus on policies that maximise income. Maybe moving some of that tax onto company revenues would change the equation and it's also much harder to dodge.
I saw Kodak as an example of this, in Fortune I think, where companies involved in making film and printing with thousands of employees are replaced by firms like Instragram with tens of employees. This isn't a bad thing: People chose to give up physical film, but it sure does suck from a taxation perspective in our current system.
And achieve what? Have people doing boring repetitive work that could easily be automated for $3 an hour because it would cost $3.10 for a machine to do it. Then next year $2.90 because the machines got cheaper? With the state having to top that income up a liveable amount. It's a race to the bottom and it isn't sustainable or desirable.
A thousand times this. Maybe we're finally reaching the point where the number of people required to work for private organisations is flat-lining or falling (big maybe) but there's still so much we don't know and so many people starving or just lonely in the world.
It's frustrating how just about no one is discussing exactly that, because it's clearly the point of the topic. Personally I don't see the issue. It takes a pretty short sited kind of mind to think that things can't change, which seems to be the naive assumption of the article. Once cars are de facto driving themselves with people required to sit there watching there will invariably be a push to make it legal for cars to be fully autonomous (especially as that will be doubly important for seniors no longer able to drive and disabled people). If we assume that self-driving cars are as safe or safer than normal cars (which they'd have to be for them to take off anyway) then what would end up happening is the companies building them would buy themselves insurance and 'passengers' would be covered by that rather than having their own insurance.
Not sure if emotionally stunted whiny cunt or troll...
The problem with libertarian views, and a lot of criticism of libertarian views is based on incorrectly judging the extent of changes required. If we removed all the net neutrality laws but at the same time removed all the laws, contracts etc that grant government monopolies to companies maybe the increase in competition by ISPs (which are often severely limited in the US) would mean that you wouldn't need the laws. Do I think that we should remove net neutrality? Probably not because it is such a fundamental and important benefit to society, but I'd consider it more seriously if we could provide a thriving and competitive market where I could be confident I could choose an ISP offering it.
No it isn't. You'll still be paying for it, whether it is via being exposed to more adverts or paying more for a netflix subscription. Additionally, it means that it will be far harder for new companies to enter the market because they'll either have to pay massive amounts for user bandwidth costs or offer substandard service. This gives the current providers a more protected position and means they can increase charges without worrying about being disrupted.
Quickest way to kill this? Google, Facebook and Twitter all bring in a policy saying that they won't pay providers who want to do this and providers doing this must pay them (at the same rate they charge) for all of their bandwidth their customers use or be blocked.
Actually the vast majority of the argument you can make for tablets over consoles you can make for tablets over PCs. There's a reason why the biggest screen in my house is in the living room and not a bedroom or office. Now, I'm waiting to see how steam boxes turn out instead of jumping on the next gen but don't assume that outside of the relatively hardcore gamer demographic that PC gaming is going to better out of this trend than consoles.
And if you look at it in 100 year increments then anyone who died less than 50 years ago would be alive; which is a pretty good indication of why when you're looking at something that has only happened in the last hundred or so years you shouldn't amalgamate data over vastly larger periods.
What you're suggesting is as equally dumb as leaving as boiling a pan of water and letting it cool over an hour from 100 degrees to 30 then turning the burner on full power and then after 30 seconds when the water is back up to 40 degrees saying "the water is cooling".
All well and good, however from what I've seen so far 99.9% of the issue with things on snap chat being shared beyond the senders intent are where the recipient saves a copy. If you present the data to a user un-encoded at any point, barring you being able to restrict the device they are using (and even then if they have a camera), then they will still be able to do that.
More than half of us do a lot of things that doesn't every news item related to them should be on /.; I travelled in a car today but I don't want to see every car 'news' story on here ;)
/. the fact that some extremely valuable items were seized and destroyed without discussion with the owner at customs is stuff that matters.
All that said, I think this story is a good one for
Unless there were expensive consequences to leaving the WIFI there, for example a very expensive lawsuit, then no I don't think they did the right thing. Removing the WIFI is a tacit admission that concerns about WIFI are valid. All the parents, friends of parents, children etc all know that a school took WIFI out of classrooms because of concerns about cancer. I agree that sometimes very minor (pointless) concessions can be justified on compassionate grounds, however I think this kind of concession isn't as minor as you do.
Not really. The fact that it benefits an argument for it to be delivered clearly and politely isn't a bad thing unless you think a society in which such things are valued at all is a desirable outcome. What's sad is the people who occasionally have something worth sharing but are so completely unable to understand the need to be polite that they can't share it effectively.
Stop trying to redefine it. Anarchy is an incredibly vague notion, it means "without rulers", nothing more or less. Some 'anarchists' may believe that this will lead to less violence. Some may believe that it will better suit them. It doesn't really matter what motivates them because the term anarchist doesn't define it.
The vast majority of terrorist acts aren't perpetrated by groups looking for chaos; they have defined goals or believe they are at 'war' with the target. There might be some groups out there that just bomb stuff for shits and giggles but given the comparative rarity I say we wait until we've dealt with the rest first.
I agree with you. Though to be fair, it's probably a smarter waste of money to spend it on making your grid harder to break than some of the security nonsense billions is already being spent on.
It strikes me that probably the single biggest achievement of the security services has been to make it either too hard, or seem too hard, to get a group of like minded individuals together without the government being aware of them. Sure 20 individuals with time, money, expertise and planning could probably cause massive damage to the American economy via targeting the grid. Getting 20 individuals together and planning it without someone in the security services noticing? Not so easy.
Don't forget Canada and Australia... Oh wait, they don't fit your message.
America is populated by European colonial descendants (and the few natives who survived) as are most of the other first world ex-colonial countries. Which makes sense because, unlike in the middle-east, Africa, South America, South East asia where a small ruling elite of Europeans ran things then vanished at a time of conflict, the people and many of the people administering the country were one and the same.
Conversations with your lawyer are completely unavailable even with a proper warrant. We have an amendment specifically allowing me to refuse to answer questions that could incriminate me (in the US at least). Finally, if someone came up with a device that could read minds would you be in favour of the government being able to use it on people if they had a 'proper warrant'? Because currently any information in my head is completely unavailable unless I choose to disclose it (though it is a criminal offence to withhold it).
There were people smarter than you hundreds of years ago who knew that neither the military or law enforcement need to be able to use all means, so though you may think they do, that says far more about your inability to keep a rational perspective than any real security needs.