Perhaps that was intentionally done by Anonymous who are simply trolling and seeing if they can get a reactionary internet crowd to send these people all kinds of hate mail because they never verified the accuracy of the list.
It sounds like the kind of thing they would do "for the lulz" based on previous exploits.
If they don't want to do it, then they can pay money instead. Charge based on what an hour of their time is worth.
I think if you have people have to spend a little time out in their community doing things like picking up trash, etc. that they'll be far less likely to do things like littering.
Either way, we need to come up with some solution as automation is going to put more and more people out of work. Either we can pay for a minimum income or we can pay the cost of dealing the crime and other social problems created by having no way for a lot of people to make a living. I'd argue it's better to give them some busy work and pay them enough that they don't need to turn to crime we'd need to pay to prevent and to incarcerate people who could otherwise be adding at least some value to society.
Why not compose the bureaucracy of only those people who aren't working and drawing the minimum income, in which case who cares if they mostly waste their own time. They weren't going to be doing anything productive anyway and they're not getting paid any more for it and if they do a shit enough job, you can just immediately get rid of everyone involved and start again because no one was actually hired to do it.
Almost no one sits on their money. If you put it in a bank, that bank is using it to create loans which are typically spent on some economic activity. The only time it makes sense to just sit on your money is if the economy is experiencing deflation and only then if you expect that any investment's return will be worse than the rate of deflation. We clearly don't have that problem.
I think a basic income is a good idea because it would allow us to get rid of other government programs and cut down on the bureaucracy in managing the various welfare, medicare, student loan, food stamp, etc. programs. Simply give everyone a fixed monthly amount and they can locally best determine what their own needs are or how it should be allocated. It's really just a market-based approach to the concept of a welfare-state.
I'm guessing that with a small fixed income it would also help cut down on a lot of other costs that society has to bear (homelessness, etc.) that are merely just cleaning up the mess and not actually solving it.
The usual object to this idea is that no one will want to work, but I would imagine that a stipulation that you're required to do so many hours of community service every week if not working would probably help balance things out a little bit. The only real impediment remaining to me is that we would need to be more strict about limiting immigration.
It seems interesting to think that it won't be too terribly far into the future when those people who have lost some part of their body through accident or illness will have replacements that are vastly superior to what you would have naturally. Soon the people with the typical number of legs, fingers, eyes, etc. are going to be the handicapped ones.
Or because it's off topic. If you already thing that Slashdot has enough social justice crap being posted, why bring it up in unrelated comment sections?
I'd like to think they had the sense to realize that standing up to threats to stifle speech and open discussion are far worse in the long run than any incident that might occur.
For as many threats as get thrown around by internet trolls or idiot tough guys, most have no actual weight behind them any more than some crazed loon talking about killing the president. Giving in to those tactics shows that they work and it only encourages other people to continue to use them.
If you don't stand up to the threats, you give the people making them (who are often powerless and incapable of acting on those threats) reason to continue making more.
Depending on the field, the jargon does allow more concise explanations in a limited space and the intended audience will probably be familiar with it and have no problems with the jargon. As long as the study design and statistical analysis are easy to understand, I don't think it's a problem.
But there are other disciplines where it seems like it's a competition to find the best purple prose and to say as little as possible with as many words as possible or obfuscate one's meaning so much that it's impossible to infer the author's real meaning. There's a reason that something like the postmodernism generator exists.
Take a look at the Sokal hoax for a good example of this. Some journal (and one that just has authors pay for publications) accepted an article that was utter nonsense by intent.
The environment in the vehicle is somewhat more self contained and even if you're venting in air from the outside, it should being going through an air filter (a lot of newer vehicles have a cabin air filter) to remove some the pollutants or other particulate matter that's being kicked up. Even though no car is completely sealed off and air tight, it would still be better than being outside and directly exposed. I suppose over a long enough commute, eventually all of the air initially in the car would be replaced with polluted air, but I don't know how long it would take for that to happen so it may not be an issue in the real world.
It depends on what percentage of his costs labor are as well as whether or not the higher salary allows him to choose better laborers. When you pay more money, you can be more discriminating in who you hire and will have a larger pool of applicants which are likely to be of a higher quality. If the higher wages allows him to have more productive employees it could well balance out, even if labor is a larger part of his cost.
I don't know how it will turn out, but it makes an interesting case study. Too many people argue about economics in terms of theoretical propositions or hypothetical situations. Here's someone actually trying it out in the real world and we can watch to see how it unfolds. I expect like anything, there will be some ups and downs and we'll learn what worked from the approach, what didn't, and what could have been done better.
All in all it sounds like we're supposed to drop everything, including our clothes, and go back to living in the trees, eating whatever grubs and berries we can forage.
Do we also need to go back to living in fear of our own shadows as well?
Come to think of it did we ever stop to begin with?
But you don't have to though as long as one other person does it and reports the results. I don't have time to fix bugs in a lot of the open source software that I use, but someone else does and I get the benefits of that at no cost to myself, and if I make any contributions, someone else can benefit from my work as well.
There's probably someone with either enough time on their hands or the predilection towards such things that they would do an audit and more than likely you'd get a small handful of people to independently perform the audit and submit fixes for issues or at least a report of something that appears off. It also benefits the manufacturer since they have people doing the auditing essentially for free and helps them to improve their software.
That sounds right up there with "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." in terms of predictions. Just because something is not possible today or is horrendously expensive does not mean that future advancements will make it cheap and commonplace.
That quote was made about 70 years ago when computers were in their infancy, kind of like commercial space flight is right now. My mind can not even comprehend what we might accomplish in the next 70.
Outside of drugs, the next biggest criminal enterprise is probably prostitution, which is yet another vice crime that shouldn't be illegal. As Carlin said, "Selling's legal. Fucking's legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?"
Once you eliminate those you're down to much lower profit margins and can't support the kind of massive gangs that trouble law enforcement so much. Even if they try to stick with the illegal drug business who would want to buy from them when you can get a better product from a legal source?
Also, you still need someone to work at the store that's selling the drugs. Seems like there are probably some out of work drug dealers that could handle a counter job and be tax paying citizens. If taxes are used to fund other organizations to help people get over their addictions, etc. that's additional jobs that are being created rather than having the revenues end up in the coffers of criminal enterprises while still leaving society with the cost of cleaning up the consequences.
The issues are a little muddier to me when it comes to using a character. I'd have no issue at all with someone taking an old Buck Rogers story and adapting it for film at this point, but using someone else's character to create new works is a little different, even more so if the owner of that character is still actively using them in the creation of new works.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate it is to use Mickey Mouse. I think Steamboat Willie or the other early cartoons should be in the public domain and freely accessible, but I don't think that entitles anyone to make a Mickey Mouse cartoon as Disney is still actively using the character and creating new works with the character.
Personally I think works should enter the public domain after ~25 years. However, let the copyright for a character exist for as long as works involving that character are being produced by the owner. The extreme example of why I feel that way is no one would probably like it if a character they were developing was stolen by someone else and used to spread a message the original author disagreed with, such as Mickey Mouse being used to promote white supremacist propaganda, an oil company using Captain Planet to tell kids that fracking is great, or some other example along those lines.
It's not an ideal situation as it does run into an issue of perpetual copyright assuming some owner wants to pump out some amount of crap to maintain that it's still being used. Perhaps a set term with paid extensions to ensure that people only maintain those copyrights if they actually intend on using the character or generating some profit from it with the rate increasing for each extension.
Firing a gun into the air for no reason at all is illegal within city limits. Firing a gun at a drone which is trespassing on your property apparently isn't, much like it's not illegal to fire a gun in self-defense within city limits.
Also, most game animals don't nest in urban areas, so you wouldn't get many people hunting in cities unless they really liked Pigeon, but there's so damned many of those you wouldn't even need a gun. There might be some other critters like squirrels or rabbits, but people usually set traps for those; however, I suppose some people do hunt them with small caliber rifles or high-power pellet guns.
The government would be better off decriminalizing all drugs and producing chemically pure versions and controlling the sale of those substances while investing the revenues in treatment programs. It won't eliminate addiction, but it will go a long way to reducing the amount of organized crime in this and other countries that make their profits off the back of illegal drug sales. That in turn would go a long way towards freeing up law enforcement who wouldn't have to devote nearly as much activity towards dealing with the gangs that run the illegal drug trades.
Darwin just wasn't aware of epigenetics, but that doesn't make him wrong. Like many other scientific theories, we do additional studies and and refine the theories when we find results that they fail to explain or results that contradict our hypotheses. This isn't something completely new, but we're just scratching at the surfaces of how it works.
Here's one particular study in the area that's particularly interesting. What the researchers found was that people who's grandparents had suffered through a famine had lower mortality rates for certain diseases. What we're learning is that our DNA has some feedback mechanisms to environmental responses and isn't just a simple matter of passing along traits through genes. It's some really fascinating stuff.
Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet? There's a lot of great technology we have today due to government investment. Granted they were hoping the research would lead to better ways to kill our enemies or to stop them from killing us, but we've got a lot of civilian use out of government investments into science and technology.
If anything, government needs to be more strict with publicly funded research and ensure that the results end up in the public domain rather than rotting while a patent expires or hidden behind a pay-walled journal.
You'd have a point if there weren't a company making a cheaply available $1 generic (and then pledging to do the same with several other drugs). But don't let that get in the way of your angry screed.
The power company and other utilities don't advertise their plans as "unlimited" though. The cellular carriers have backed away from their unlimited plans to some degree, but a lot of cable companies are still calling capped plans unlimited so it's still an issue.
The really creepy part is when someone's estate whores our their long-dead likeness to shill for products. Imagine a holographic Bill Hicks being used to advertise crap to people.
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Perhaps that was intentionally done by Anonymous who are simply trolling and seeing if they can get a reactionary internet crowd to send these people all kinds of hate mail because they never verified the accuracy of the list.
It sounds like the kind of thing they would do "for the lulz" based on previous exploits.
If they don't want to do it, then they can pay money instead. Charge based on what an hour of their time is worth.
I think if you have people have to spend a little time out in their community doing things like picking up trash, etc. that they'll be far less likely to do things like littering.
Either way, we need to come up with some solution as automation is going to put more and more people out of work. Either we can pay for a minimum income or we can pay the cost of dealing the crime and other social problems created by having no way for a lot of people to make a living. I'd argue it's better to give them some busy work and pay them enough that they don't need to turn to crime we'd need to pay to prevent and to incarcerate people who could otherwise be adding at least some value to society.
Make everyone not working do 10 hours of community service a week.
It might not even be a bad idea that everyone is taxed 50 hours of community service every year so people become more involved in their communities.
Why not compose the bureaucracy of only those people who aren't working and drawing the minimum income, in which case who cares if they mostly waste their own time. They weren't going to be doing anything productive anyway and they're not getting paid any more for it and if they do a shit enough job, you can just immediately get rid of everyone involved and start again because no one was actually hired to do it.
Almost no one sits on their money. If you put it in a bank, that bank is using it to create loans which are typically spent on some economic activity. The only time it makes sense to just sit on your money is if the economy is experiencing deflation and only then if you expect that any investment's return will be worse than the rate of deflation. We clearly don't have that problem.
I think a basic income is a good idea because it would allow us to get rid of other government programs and cut down on the bureaucracy in managing the various welfare, medicare, student loan, food stamp, etc. programs. Simply give everyone a fixed monthly amount and they can locally best determine what their own needs are or how it should be allocated. It's really just a market-based approach to the concept of a welfare-state.
I'm guessing that with a small fixed income it would also help cut down on a lot of other costs that society has to bear (homelessness, etc.) that are merely just cleaning up the mess and not actually solving it.
The usual object to this idea is that no one will want to work, but I would imagine that a stipulation that you're required to do so many hours of community service every week if not working would probably help balance things out a little bit. The only real impediment remaining to me is that we would need to be more strict about limiting immigration.
It seems interesting to think that it won't be too terribly far into the future when those people who have lost some part of their body through accident or illness will have replacements that are vastly superior to what you would have naturally. Soon the people with the typical number of legs, fingers, eyes, etc. are going to be the handicapped ones.
Or because it's off topic. If you already thing that Slashdot has enough social justice crap being posted, why bring it up in unrelated comment sections?
I'd like to think they had the sense to realize that standing up to threats to stifle speech and open discussion are far worse in the long run than any incident that might occur.
For as many threats as get thrown around by internet trolls or idiot tough guys, most have no actual weight behind them any more than some crazed loon talking about killing the president. Giving in to those tactics shows that they work and it only encourages other people to continue to use them.
If you don't stand up to the threats, you give the people making them (who are often powerless and incapable of acting on those threats) reason to continue making more.
Weren't you recently complaining in another thread about people posting sexist/racist comments?
If you're going to go around making bigoted and stereotypical remarks yourself, perhaps you shouldn't whine when other people do it.
Depending on the field, the jargon does allow more concise explanations in a limited space and the intended audience will probably be familiar with it and have no problems with the jargon. As long as the study design and statistical analysis are easy to understand, I don't think it's a problem.
But there are other disciplines where it seems like it's a competition to find the best purple prose and to say as little as possible with as many words as possible or obfuscate one's meaning so much that it's impossible to infer the author's real meaning. There's a reason that something like the postmodernism generator exists.
Take a look at the Sokal hoax for a good example of this. Some journal (and one that just has authors pay for publications) accepted an article that was utter nonsense by intent.
The environment in the vehicle is somewhat more self contained and even if you're venting in air from the outside, it should being going through an air filter (a lot of newer vehicles have a cabin air filter) to remove some the pollutants or other particulate matter that's being kicked up. Even though no car is completely sealed off and air tight, it would still be better than being outside and directly exposed. I suppose over a long enough commute, eventually all of the air initially in the car would be replaced with polluted air, but I don't know how long it would take for that to happen so it may not be an issue in the real world.
There's even a study to support such conclusions.
It depends on what percentage of his costs labor are as well as whether or not the higher salary allows him to choose better laborers. When you pay more money, you can be more discriminating in who you hire and will have a larger pool of applicants which are likely to be of a higher quality. If the higher wages allows him to have more productive employees it could well balance out, even if labor is a larger part of his cost.
I don't know how it will turn out, but it makes an interesting case study. Too many people argue about economics in terms of theoretical propositions or hypothetical situations. Here's someone actually trying it out in the real world and we can watch to see how it unfolds. I expect like anything, there will be some ups and downs and we'll learn what worked from the approach, what didn't, and what could have been done better.
All in all it sounds like we're supposed to drop everything, including our clothes, and go back to living in the trees, eating whatever grubs and berries we can forage.
Do we also need to go back to living in fear of our own shadows as well?
Come to think of it did we ever stop to begin with?
But you don't have to though as long as one other person does it and reports the results. I don't have time to fix bugs in a lot of the open source software that I use, but someone else does and I get the benefits of that at no cost to myself, and if I make any contributions, someone else can benefit from my work as well.
There's probably someone with either enough time on their hands or the predilection towards such things that they would do an audit and more than likely you'd get a small handful of people to independently perform the audit and submit fixes for issues or at least a report of something that appears off. It also benefits the manufacturer since they have people doing the auditing essentially for free and helps them to improve their software.
That sounds right up there with "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." in terms of predictions. Just because something is not possible today or is horrendously expensive does not mean that future advancements will make it cheap and commonplace.
That quote was made about 70 years ago when computers were in their infancy, kind of like commercial space flight is right now. My mind can not even comprehend what we might accomplish in the next 70.
Outside of drugs, the next biggest criminal enterprise is probably prostitution, which is yet another vice crime that shouldn't be illegal. As Carlin said, "Selling's legal. Fucking's legal. Why isn't selling fucking legal?"
Once you eliminate those you're down to much lower profit margins and can't support the kind of massive gangs that trouble law enforcement so much. Even if they try to stick with the illegal drug business who would want to buy from them when you can get a better product from a legal source?
Also, you still need someone to work at the store that's selling the drugs. Seems like there are probably some out of work drug dealers that could handle a counter job and be tax paying citizens. If taxes are used to fund other organizations to help people get over their addictions, etc. that's additional jobs that are being created rather than having the revenues end up in the coffers of criminal enterprises while still leaving society with the cost of cleaning up the consequences.
The issues are a little muddier to me when it comes to using a character. I'd have no issue at all with someone taking an old Buck Rogers story and adapting it for film at this point, but using someone else's character to create new works is a little different, even more so if the owner of that character is still actively using them in the creation of new works.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate it is to use Mickey Mouse. I think Steamboat Willie or the other early cartoons should be in the public domain and freely accessible, but I don't think that entitles anyone to make a Mickey Mouse cartoon as Disney is still actively using the character and creating new works with the character.
Personally I think works should enter the public domain after ~25 years. However, let the copyright for a character exist for as long as works involving that character are being produced by the owner. The extreme example of why I feel that way is no one would probably like it if a character they were developing was stolen by someone else and used to spread a message the original author disagreed with, such as Mickey Mouse being used to promote white supremacist propaganda, an oil company using Captain Planet to tell kids that fracking is great, or some other example along those lines.
It's not an ideal situation as it does run into an issue of perpetual copyright assuming some owner wants to pump out some amount of crap to maintain that it's still being used. Perhaps a set term with paid extensions to ensure that people only maintain those copyrights if they actually intend on using the character or generating some profit from it with the rate increasing for each extension.
Firing a gun into the air for no reason at all is illegal within city limits. Firing a gun at a drone which is trespassing on your property apparently isn't, much like it's not illegal to fire a gun in self-defense within city limits.
Also, most game animals don't nest in urban areas, so you wouldn't get many people hunting in cities unless they really liked Pigeon, but there's so damned many of those you wouldn't even need a gun. There might be some other critters like squirrels or rabbits, but people usually set traps for those; however, I suppose some people do hunt them with small caliber rifles or high-power pellet guns.
The government would be better off decriminalizing all drugs and producing chemically pure versions and controlling the sale of those substances while investing the revenues in treatment programs. It won't eliminate addiction, but it will go a long way to reducing the amount of organized crime in this and other countries that make their profits off the back of illegal drug sales. That in turn would go a long way towards freeing up law enforcement who wouldn't have to devote nearly as much activity towards dealing with the gangs that run the illegal drug trades.
Darwin just wasn't aware of epigenetics, but that doesn't make him wrong. Like many other scientific theories, we do additional studies and and refine the theories when we find results that they fail to explain or results that contradict our hypotheses. This isn't something completely new, but we're just scratching at the surfaces of how it works.
Here's one particular study in the area that's particularly interesting. What the researchers found was that people who's grandparents had suffered through a famine had lower mortality rates for certain diseases. What we're learning is that our DNA has some feedback mechanisms to environmental responses and isn't just a simple matter of passing along traits through genes. It's some really fascinating stuff.
Someone wants to make an argument that government investment into science and technology doesn't lead to anything useful on the internet? There's a lot of great technology we have today due to government investment. Granted they were hoping the research would lead to better ways to kill our enemies or to stop them from killing us, but we've got a lot of civilian use out of government investments into science and technology.
If anything, government needs to be more strict with publicly funded research and ensure that the results end up in the public domain rather than rotting while a patent expires or hidden behind a pay-walled journal.
You'd have a point if there weren't a company making a cheaply available $1 generic (and then pledging to do the same with several other drugs). But don't let that get in the way of your angry screed.
The power company and other utilities don't advertise their plans as "unlimited" though. The cellular carriers have backed away from their unlimited plans to some degree, but a lot of cable companies are still calling capped plans unlimited so it's still an issue.
The really creepy part is when someone's estate whores our their long-dead likeness to shill for products. Imagine a holographic Bill Hicks being used to advertise crap to people.