You'd need one hell of a placebo to ensure that participants weren't sure if they got MDMA or not. Could placebo effect even really work in a case like this where the noticeable effects of the drug are quite substantial.
Because of the price point of PC systems, there seems to just be far fewer twits like that.
I don't know about that. I tried out a few different MOBAs a few years back and even though they're all on the PC, there were plenty of idiots being jackasses in chat or doing other things to ruin the game for everyone else. Maybe that's just a consequence of those games typically being free to play and having very little in the way of hardware requirements though.
I think Blizzard might have gotten it right with hearthstone where you can only communicate with your opponent through a set number of emotes, none of which involve fucking their mother or hoping they die in a fire. I never really got into the game (it's basically a card game like Magic the Gathering only online) but I didn't ever have to deal with someone being an absolute cancer nugget.
Left-wing politics won't fix anything. Government housing projects (you know those things people refer to as "the projects" in such an endearing manner) has been an incredible disaster and rent control is something that pretty much every economist agrees is a terrible idea.
Left-wing politics has good intentions, but their implementations of those intentions often have the opposite effects. It's the same thing with post-secondary education where subsidizing it has driven up costs and all manner of rules and regulations have led to administrative bloat. Then they guarantee anyone who can sign their name on the line student loans they can't be defaulted on.
The restaurant industry isn't even in a slump, so your premise is bad as well. Their own figures are indicating that they'll be growing, even adjusted for inflation. They had a dip during the recent recession, when a lot of industries did, but also bounced back quite quickly.
And market forces were not enough in that case, either, else we'd never have needed the Civil Rights Act and related legislation.
The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with striking down Jim Crow era state government laws that made it impossible for market forces to exist. When you had state-mandated segregation, how the hell can a market function? If the law says it was illegal to allow white and black people to ride in the same train car (this is the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case) then how can the market offer an integrated solution?
You can't blame the free market for failing to do something when the government has made it illegal for the market to even try. Nor do I think its entirely fair to assume everything will be fixed as quickly as you would like it and which I don't think government policy can do any better than the market. Former slaves and their children would have started with next to nothing, especially considering that in many states it was illegal to teach them to read. It may well just take generations to build up the human capital necessary to see blacks on the same footing as whites. That's just the reality of the situation, and it's quite clear that state governments spent a good deal of time making it far more difficult for black people to succeed. You can't fault the market for that.
They really should stop subsidizing farmers though. The U.S. spends billions of dollars on farm subsidies that keep prices artificially high while at the same time spending billions of dollars on food stamps because some people can't afford food. It's utter madness to be doing both at the same time. The original justifications for having farm subsidies are no longer relevant and most of the subsidies aren't going to small family farms, but to corporations or those who don't need them.
Every person also sees reduced prices. Look at the tech sector where the race to the bottom has made computers affordable for almost everyone in western countries and now with smart phones in places like Africa that traditionally did not have many computers for the average person.
Reduction in prices means that people will increase consumption, and I suspect that there are a lot of people in a country who could benefit from eating better. This is a country with over a third of the population being obese, and a 6% (and increasing) rate of severe or morbid obesity. Finding ways to reduce the cost of non-processed food and to bring it to more people is a good thing.
A five percent yearly increase in prices is supposed to be good for the economy.
Find me an economist that believes that. Five percent yearly inflation (its not goods getting more expensive, but money losing its value. Further if you assume a race to the bottom, costs should be dropping everywhere, not just as Whole Foods, but also with their suppliers.) means that your currency will lose half its value in only 14 years. Even people who are in support of an inflationary monetary policy would want 5%.
Yeah, maybe there's something useful in TFA, but I'm not really inclined to go looking based on what was in the summary. At no point, did the person being quoted actually say anything of substance. It's just buzzword soup with a dash of new technologies thrown in. Five years ago they would have said practically the same words, but just talked about utilizing the cloud instead of AI.
I'm also a little skeptical of any study published by a company looking to sell you what the study has just claimed to be great. That doesn't mean its a complete sham, but how hard did they look for other explanations why some companies are more successful than others?
These stupid young men understand that the only thing that matters is passing along their jeans to the most desirable, genetically perfect mate and diamonds are a means to that end.
I don't know what the hell diamonds have to do with it, I just drop off my old jeans at Goodwill or some similar store if I want to pass them on to someone else.
You don't need to make modifications to GPL software to make use of it. Someone could conceivably use GIMP to make money by selling the work they create using it or hiring out their labor to others who want something created. Hell, you could run a huge business and use LibreOffice instead of Word and never contribute back to it. I think that's what the previous poster was getting at.
They're already intrinsically worthless or nearly so. Lab made diamonds are going to be indistinguishable from natural ones to any casual observer (and probably many trained ones as well) and far less expensive. The only thing keeping diamond mining afloat is their use a gemstone and a clever bit of marketing by the diamond companies to convince stupid young men that they need to fork over thousands of dollars for something that can be made for a few dollars in a lab.
It's also a good thing that they can leapfrog over those things. If they had to develop landlines, motorways, and all of the same other types of infrastructure to get to where most western countries are at, they'd never catch up. It also lets them build some expertise that they can export which is going to go a long way towards helping them economically. I would assume that drone delivers will eventually make economic sense even in markets where alternatives exist and are inexpensive, but right now it's not enough to justify the investment to roll it out on a wide scale.
In the metric system 1 liter of water weighs exactly 1 kilogram (yes a kilogram measures mass, but we're on Earth's surface so it's also weight), so it's easy to convert between volume and weight. However, the same is not true when dealing with fluid ounces and ounces, hence the desire to just switch the U.S. to the metric system.
I think beer would be a little more difficult. A 6-pack of beer probably would be about the smallest unit amount you'd want to deliver. 1 fluid ounce of water is about but not exactly 1 ounce (can we just switch to the metric system already) and a lot of American beers are pretty fucking close to water anyhow, so the beer comes out at around 4.7 pounds and a bit more extra weight depending on whether its in glass or cans. Most large pizzas won't get much above 2 pounds unless they're loaded with toppings.
That makes it a lot more difficult to drone deliver beer simply because of the extra weight. Also, if the beer gets dropped it's going to be completely ruined, as even cans would be likely to rupture with a fall from the heights that a drone would need to fly to avoid buildings, trees, etc. On the other hand if a Dominoes pizza gets dropped, no one would be able to tell the difference.
Most coupons expire and are destroyed upon use, so it's quite clear that they don't like like other traditional currencies in a lot of ways. A person could still trade a $10-off coupon for something else, so there are some similarities, but I don't think you took the time to think about why coupons might not be currency, whereas something like Burger King's crypto coin might meet that definition more easily.
If you want to know why most coupons have that small print of being worth some tiny fraction of a cent, you may want to look into the history of trading stamps. The quick answer is because of various state laws, so nation-wide chains will add that to coupons in order to comply with century old laws that exist in certain states. Some of these laws were also later applied to coupons as well once they became more popular and widely used, hence the same tiny fraction of cash value.
The inability to use the coupons elsewhere would defeat the purpose of a currency.
While the ease of use of a currency is why people use it in place of something else, you wouldn't get very far in the United States trying to pay with Euros, yet they are still no doubt currency. The same applies with U.S. dollars in many other parts of the world, but you won't argue that U.S. dollars aren't a currency for that reason. The issue is that these crypto coins are just accepted in far fewer places, so they lack the same utility as most currencies. The only advantage they possibly hold though is the guarantee of being redeemable for a Whopper (or whatever other products they may be good for) and if Burger King were to refuse to do that their value would collapse quickly. However, if other businesses also start accepting them as a form of payment, then they become much more like the Euro, the U.S. dollar, or other various government issued currencies in terms of utility.
Sure it's a currency. It's value is tied to the Whopper (or some other goods at their stores) and as long as Burger King will honor in trade for a Whopper them they hold value.
Otherwise they hold no more or less value than paper dollars outside of most people being willing to accept dollars. The ultimate value of a dollar is that governments require payment of taxes using them so everyone eventually needs some. Otherwise I am no more obligated to accept dollars for something in trade than I am to accept Burger King's currency. But if I were selling a car, I could choose to accept payment in the form of some number of these crypto coins just as easily. If I then trade them with someone else for a TV, they are functionally no different than currency other than these coins may be pegged to the Whopper, so these are more like a gold (or other commodity-backed) currency than most government fiat currencies that exist.
There also probably isn't a whole lot of trust in this currency at this point so I don't think it will be used for large transactions and holders may have to trade them to others unfavorably compared to other currencies due to their more limited utility.
It's so awful it just might work. I mean if you listen to anyone, whatever candidates are running are somehow the worst the party has every fielded. I can't wait another decade or so when whoever we have is so bad that people are looking back favorably on Trump.
That's so much porn you can't even possibly look at most of it. If you wanted to test Amazon's "unlimited' storage, why not just randomly generate various files. You could probably have a computer make shitty modern art paintings much faster than you could curate a 1 petabyte porn collection, and you still get to test out how much you can store on Amazon's cloud storage service before they pull the plug. And when they invariably do, you won't lose your porn collection.
Your argument appears to be that the state would not otherwise collect property tax from the employee houses.
Those houses may not exist yet. Even if you assume Apple hires 50 people from Iowa, it isn't as though the companies at which those employees used to work suddenly have no need of their labor, which means you're pulling in some number of new people to the state. Assuming 20 new homes are built in the area, that's another $2,756 per home (based on info from this website). Those employees are also going to spend money in the state which results in sales tax being collected. At some point if you bring in enough people other new industry is going to spring up to support the demands of those consumers. I don't know how much new industry 50 people produces, but it's not zero.
seems odd to assume that 100% of the employees will only own properly if Apple hires them. It also assumes that 100% of the employees would otherwise spend no money and generate no sales tax. Interesting math.
How about we instead assume most of these people would have other jobs and are just switching to work for Apple and thus would have very little impact on the state and local economy.
Again, these employees have to come from somewhere and even if they're already in Iowa, the companies they are leaving are going to need to replace them. Either that means drawing in existing laborers from out of state or retaining recent graduates just entering the workforce who would have gone elsewhere for employment. I suspect there's going to be a mix of those things happening.
You also ignore the possibility that the state is actually getting more money in property taxes after Apple starts using the land. It's also possible they're getting less and they're spending more than just $19.6 million because they would be losing property tax revenue. That needs to be accounted for as well, so it's quite difficult to determine how the state shakes out on the deal until you know exactly what terms were agreed to there.
That's some really bad math. If you read the story, Apple is only getting $19.6 million back in the form of a refund on state sales tax. That's what the state is actually spending or paying to Apple.
The other benefits are the state not collecting some part or all property taxes from the land Apple will be building on. They really only spend the difference between what they collect now and what they'll get from Apple, and may still come out ahead if Apple ends up paying at a reduced rate (what land is zoned for affects the property taxes in most states) that is still in excess of what the state collects now. It's also necessary to factor in income tax for the permanent jobs as well as from the construction jobs that go into it, property tax from the houses that these employees will live in, as well as sales tax as a result of additional spending that results from that income.
Better yet don't call it autopilot. Even if you try to explain it, there are plenty of fools who won't get it. Call it "drive assist" and people might be a little less foolish. Some assholes will still misuse it, but you can't stop someone hellbent on stupidity.
I would imagine that they'll label it in some way just because I can't imagine vegetarians or vegans objecting to eating it. Otherwise if it's molecularly the same, who cares if it came from a factory where it was grown artificially or if some critter carried it around before having it shorn off. As long as it still tastes good (some meat isn't just the muscle, but also the intramuscular fat) I'll eat it. If it eventually means I can get a great cut of steak for $2 at the market because this is cheaper than feeding an actual cow, I think it would go a long way towards being able to supply more of the world with protein.
Have the considered it's not a state actor but a rich media mogul who's causing the accidents to extend his media empire? If only there were dashing British secret agent to stop this dastardly villain's evil plans.
I've had a recently use a product that was designed by so-called UI experts and it was a pile of hot garbage. I'd rather have people who are connected to the product and understand how it's going to be used than some UI expert that slaps their idea of some buzzword style of design that doesn't even produce a UI that's bad as a matter of taste, but as a matter of making useful information harder to get at and using up space for things no one cares about or asked for.
It's not bad to bring in a security expert when security is critical or if the company doesn't have a good system in place, then by all means hire someone and let them specialize or lead that part of development, but make sure they understand the end-users' needs and aren't making things a pain in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd need one hell of a placebo to ensure that participants weren't sure if they got MDMA or not. Could placebo effect even really work in a case like this where the noticeable effects of the drug are quite substantial.
Because of the price point of PC systems, there seems to just be far fewer twits like that.
I don't know about that. I tried out a few different MOBAs a few years back and even though they're all on the PC, there were plenty of idiots being jackasses in chat or doing other things to ruin the game for everyone else. Maybe that's just a consequence of those games typically being free to play and having very little in the way of hardware requirements though.
I think Blizzard might have gotten it right with hearthstone where you can only communicate with your opponent through a set number of emotes, none of which involve fucking their mother or hoping they die in a fire. I never really got into the game (it's basically a card game like Magic the Gathering only online) but I didn't ever have to deal with someone being an absolute cancer nugget.
Left-wing politics won't fix anything. Government housing projects (you know those things people refer to as "the projects" in such an endearing manner) has been an incredible disaster and rent control is something that pretty much every economist agrees is a terrible idea.
Left-wing politics has good intentions, but their implementations of those intentions often have the opposite effects. It's the same thing with post-secondary education where subsidizing it has driven up costs and all manner of rules and regulations have led to administrative bloat. Then they guarantee anyone who can sign their name on the line student loans they can't be defaulted on.
The restaurant industry isn't even in a slump, so your premise is bad as well. Their own figures are indicating that they'll be growing, even adjusted for inflation. They had a dip during the recent recession, when a lot of industries did, but also bounced back quite quickly.
And market forces were not enough in that case, either, else we'd never have needed the Civil Rights Act and related legislation.
The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with market forces and everything to do with striking down Jim Crow era state government laws that made it impossible for market forces to exist. When you had state-mandated segregation, how the hell can a market function? If the law says it was illegal to allow white and black people to ride in the same train car (this is the famous Plessy v. Ferguson case) then how can the market offer an integrated solution?
You can't blame the free market for failing to do something when the government has made it illegal for the market to even try. Nor do I think its entirely fair to assume everything will be fixed as quickly as you would like it and which I don't think government policy can do any better than the market. Former slaves and their children would have started with next to nothing, especially considering that in many states it was illegal to teach them to read. It may well just take generations to build up the human capital necessary to see blacks on the same footing as whites. That's just the reality of the situation, and it's quite clear that state governments spent a good deal of time making it far more difficult for black people to succeed. You can't fault the market for that.
They really should stop subsidizing farmers though. The U.S. spends billions of dollars on farm subsidies that keep prices artificially high while at the same time spending billions of dollars on food stamps because some people can't afford food. It's utter madness to be doing both at the same time. The original justifications for having farm subsidies are no longer relevant and most of the subsidies aren't going to small family farms, but to corporations or those who don't need them.
Reduction in prices means that people will increase consumption, and I suspect that there are a lot of people in a country who could benefit from eating better. This is a country with over a third of the population being obese, and a 6% (and increasing) rate of severe or morbid obesity. Finding ways to reduce the cost of non-processed food and to bring it to more people is a good thing.
A five percent yearly increase in prices is supposed to be good for the economy.
Find me an economist that believes that. Five percent yearly inflation (its not goods getting more expensive, but money losing its value. Further if you assume a race to the bottom, costs should be dropping everywhere, not just as Whole Foods, but also with their suppliers.) means that your currency will lose half its value in only 14 years. Even people who are in support of an inflationary monetary policy would want 5%.
Yeah, maybe there's something useful in TFA, but I'm not really inclined to go looking based on what was in the summary. At no point, did the person being quoted actually say anything of substance. It's just buzzword soup with a dash of new technologies thrown in. Five years ago they would have said practically the same words, but just talked about utilizing the cloud instead of AI.
I'm also a little skeptical of any study published by a company looking to sell you what the study has just claimed to be great. That doesn't mean its a complete sham, but how hard did they look for other explanations why some companies are more successful than others?
These stupid young men understand that the only thing that matters is passing along their jeans to the most desirable, genetically perfect mate and diamonds are a means to that end.
I don't know what the hell diamonds have to do with it, I just drop off my old jeans at Goodwill or some similar store if I want to pass them on to someone else.
You don't need to make modifications to GPL software to make use of it. Someone could conceivably use GIMP to make money by selling the work they create using it or hiring out their labor to others who want something created. Hell, you could run a huge business and use LibreOffice instead of Word and never contribute back to it. I think that's what the previous poster was getting at.
They're already intrinsically worthless or nearly so. Lab made diamonds are going to be indistinguishable from natural ones to any casual observer (and probably many trained ones as well) and far less expensive. The only thing keeping diamond mining afloat is their use a gemstone and a clever bit of marketing by the diamond companies to convince stupid young men that they need to fork over thousands of dollars for something that can be made for a few dollars in a lab.
It's also a good thing that they can leapfrog over those things. If they had to develop landlines, motorways, and all of the same other types of infrastructure to get to where most western countries are at, they'd never catch up. It also lets them build some expertise that they can export which is going to go a long way towards helping them economically. I would assume that drone delivers will eventually make economic sense even in markets where alternatives exist and are inexpensive, but right now it's not enough to justify the investment to roll it out on a wide scale.
This sounds great. Now even the people in Cologne get to live in East Germany.
In the metric system 1 liter of water weighs exactly 1 kilogram (yes a kilogram measures mass, but we're on Earth's surface so it's also weight), so it's easy to convert between volume and weight. However, the same is not true when dealing with fluid ounces and ounces, hence the desire to just switch the U.S. to the metric system.
I think beer would be a little more difficult. A 6-pack of beer probably would be about the smallest unit amount you'd want to deliver. 1 fluid ounce of water is about but not exactly 1 ounce (can we just switch to the metric system already) and a lot of American beers are pretty fucking close to water anyhow, so the beer comes out at around 4.7 pounds and a bit more extra weight depending on whether its in glass or cans. Most large pizzas won't get much above 2 pounds unless they're loaded with toppings.
That makes it a lot more difficult to drone deliver beer simply because of the extra weight. Also, if the beer gets dropped it's going to be completely ruined, as even cans would be likely to rupture with a fall from the heights that a drone would need to fly to avoid buildings, trees, etc. On the other hand if a Dominoes pizza gets dropped, no one would be able to tell the difference.
If you want to know why most coupons have that small print of being worth some tiny fraction of a cent, you may want to look into the history of trading stamps. The quick answer is because of various state laws, so nation-wide chains will add that to coupons in order to comply with century old laws that exist in certain states. Some of these laws were also later applied to coupons as well once they became more popular and widely used, hence the same tiny fraction of cash value.
The inability to use the coupons elsewhere would defeat the purpose of a currency.
While the ease of use of a currency is why people use it in place of something else, you wouldn't get very far in the United States trying to pay with Euros, yet they are still no doubt currency. The same applies with U.S. dollars in many other parts of the world, but you won't argue that U.S. dollars aren't a currency for that reason. The issue is that these crypto coins are just accepted in far fewer places, so they lack the same utility as most currencies. The only advantage they possibly hold though is the guarantee of being redeemable for a Whopper (or whatever other products they may be good for) and if Burger King were to refuse to do that their value would collapse quickly. However, if other businesses also start accepting them as a form of payment, then they become much more like the Euro, the U.S. dollar, or other various government issued currencies in terms of utility.
Sure it's a currency. It's value is tied to the Whopper (or some other goods at their stores) and as long as Burger King will honor in trade for a Whopper them they hold value.
Otherwise they hold no more or less value than paper dollars outside of most people being willing to accept dollars. The ultimate value of a dollar is that governments require payment of taxes using them so everyone eventually needs some. Otherwise I am no more obligated to accept dollars for something in trade than I am to accept Burger King's currency. But if I were selling a car, I could choose to accept payment in the form of some number of these crypto coins just as easily. If I then trade them with someone else for a TV, they are functionally no different than currency other than these coins may be pegged to the Whopper, so these are more like a gold (or other commodity-backed) currency than most government fiat currencies that exist.
There also probably isn't a whole lot of trust in this currency at this point so I don't think it will be used for large transactions and holders may have to trade them to others unfavorably compared to other currencies due to their more limited utility.
It's so awful it just might work. I mean if you listen to anyone, whatever candidates are running are somehow the worst the party has every fielded. I can't wait another decade or so when whoever we have is so bad that people are looking back favorably on Trump.
That's so much porn you can't even possibly look at most of it. If you wanted to test Amazon's "unlimited' storage, why not just randomly generate various files. You could probably have a computer make shitty modern art paintings much faster than you could curate a 1 petabyte porn collection, and you still get to test out how much you can store on Amazon's cloud storage service before they pull the plug. And when they invariably do, you won't lose your porn collection.
Your argument appears to be that the state would not otherwise collect property tax from the employee houses.
Those houses may not exist yet. Even if you assume Apple hires 50 people from Iowa, it isn't as though the companies at which those employees used to work suddenly have no need of their labor, which means you're pulling in some number of new people to the state. Assuming 20 new homes are built in the area, that's another $2,756 per home (based on info from this website). Those employees are also going to spend money in the state which results in sales tax being collected. At some point if you bring in enough people other new industry is going to spring up to support the demands of those consumers. I don't know how much new industry 50 people produces, but it's not zero.
seems odd to assume that 100% of the employees will only own properly if Apple hires them. It also assumes that 100% of the employees would otherwise spend no money and generate no sales tax. Interesting math.
How about we instead assume most of these people would have other jobs and are just switching to work for Apple and thus would have very little impact on the state and local economy.
Again, these employees have to come from somewhere and even if they're already in Iowa, the companies they are leaving are going to need to replace them. Either that means drawing in existing laborers from out of state or retaining recent graduates just entering the workforce who would have gone elsewhere for employment. I suspect there's going to be a mix of those things happening.
You also ignore the possibility that the state is actually getting more money in property taxes after Apple starts using the land. It's also possible they're getting less and they're spending more than just $19.6 million because they would be losing property tax revenue. That needs to be accounted for as well, so it's quite difficult to determine how the state shakes out on the deal until you know exactly what terms were agreed to there.
The lawyer who got paid for the last two years was a fucking genius though.
That's some really bad math. If you read the story, Apple is only getting $19.6 million back in the form of a refund on state sales tax. That's what the state is actually spending or paying to Apple.
The other benefits are the state not collecting some part or all property taxes from the land Apple will be building on. They really only spend the difference between what they collect now and what they'll get from Apple, and may still come out ahead if Apple ends up paying at a reduced rate (what land is zoned for affects the property taxes in most states) that is still in excess of what the state collects now. It's also necessary to factor in income tax for the permanent jobs as well as from the construction jobs that go into it, property tax from the houses that these employees will live in, as well as sales tax as a result of additional spending that results from that income.
Better yet don't call it autopilot. Even if you try to explain it, there are plenty of fools who won't get it. Call it "drive assist" and people might be a little less foolish. Some assholes will still misuse it, but you can't stop someone hellbent on stupidity.
I would imagine that they'll label it in some way just because I can't imagine vegetarians or vegans objecting to eating it. Otherwise if it's molecularly the same, who cares if it came from a factory where it was grown artificially or if some critter carried it around before having it shorn off. As long as it still tastes good (some meat isn't just the muscle, but also the intramuscular fat) I'll eat it. If it eventually means I can get a great cut of steak for $2 at the market because this is cheaper than feeding an actual cow, I think it would go a long way towards being able to supply more of the world with protein.
Have the considered it's not a state actor but a rich media mogul who's causing the accidents to extend his media empire? If only there were dashing British secret agent to stop this dastardly villain's evil plans.
I've had a recently use a product that was designed by so-called UI experts and it was a pile of hot garbage. I'd rather have people who are connected to the product and understand how it's going to be used than some UI expert that slaps their idea of some buzzword style of design that doesn't even produce a UI that's bad as a matter of taste, but as a matter of making useful information harder to get at and using up space for things no one cares about or asked for.
It's not bad to bring in a security expert when security is critical or if the company doesn't have a good system in place, then by all means hire someone and let them specialize or lead that part of development, but make sure they understand the end-users' needs and aren't making things a pain in the ass.