At some point you can't pay a person's health costs as there's no cure for entropy. At a certain point people will have to accept that they're going to die and the best that can be done is to make them comfortable, or as much as is possible. It doesn't make much sense for society to bear the cost of treating cancer for someone who is in their 80's. If that person has a bunch of money saved up and wants to try to use it to prolong their life, that's their own business, but at some point no amount of money will be able to impede death.
If we're going to move towards a basic income and universal health care, we have to be pragmatic about it. A basic income based off of the current government spending on social programs is certainly possible, but it's going to be a subsistence income and it likely means moving or finding a roommate (or several) if you want to subsist in the more expensive parts of the country. Health care costs in general could be brought to manageable levels if the population as a whole were healthier. The dysfunctional system in place is only partially to blame.
A quick Google search turned up a news article from several years ago that indicated cooking fires (of which the leading type are grease fires) result in roughly 480 deaths per year at that time and presumably there are many injuries as a result as well.
I couldn't find any statistics or news articles providing a figure for battery related deaths or injuries, but I suspect it's not as many, though I have heard multiple stories about batteries in electronic cigarettes causing injuries, though it's believed that in some part this is due to improper use of the device. Also, in past reports about battery fires, people have reported the device getting uncomfortably warm before the battery erupted (it doesn't really explode) and destroyed the device. Even if you had it on you, if you were awake and not intoxicated, you would probably notice and be able to remove the device from your person before being hurt.
Your odds of either injury are very low, but for an arbitrary individual it's far more likely that they will be injured as a result of a grease fire than as a result of a battery fire.
That's unlikely given that the U.S. tax rate is far worse than the Irish rate and it would cost Apple far less to leave the money in Ireland even when (even without the ruling the loophole Apple was exploiting would only last until 2020) they're not getting the sweetheart rate they have in the past.
If the government heavily subsidizes them, then they are in fact cheaper from the prospective of the energy industry. Whether you agree with the government doing that or not, you're an utter fool not to take the money because if you don't, a competitor will.
I think it would be better if Google just marked content according to category (or allowed the video makers to self-designate) and tell the advertisers exactly what kind of content their ad is going to be displayed over. If I'm an organization interested in soliciting donations for child victims of war, I might actually want to advertise on videos that were flagged for being violent due to depictions of war. There's no end of companies that wouldn't mind advertising their more adult products against videos of a similar theme either.
Content creators (at least the bigger ones) are probably better of finding their own sponsors. Who cares about losing a few hundred dollars from Google if you can get a company to pay you a few thousand to personally thank them for sponsoring your content at the start of your next several videos. I'll take a 10 second thank you message at the start of a video if it means I don't have to load some extra crappy ad before the video. The content author can just throw some tits and explosions in at the end to guarantee there's no pre-video ad now as well.
I have to question some of the information you present or conclusions you draw. If we look at actual data from the WHO (presented on Wikipedia) we see that while countries like Italy have a much lower per capita consumption (6.7 liters) compared to the U.S. (9.2 liters) many of the Eastern European countries, and really most of Europe in general has a much higher consumption. Scandinavian countries are rather mixed with Finland (12.3 liters) being high on the list (comparable to France at 12.2), but Norway being quite low (7.7 liters), and Sweden being the same as the use (9.2 liters) which falls below most of Europe.
Most people would have to be consuming more than 2-3 drinks per month based on the data or you'd have some severe outliers that are getting utterly wasted regularly in order to drag the numbers upward. I suspect that more people in Europe consume more alcohol, but it tends to be in more moderate amounts as you describe. Although Americans consume less, I suspect that many of them tend to do so in larger volumes in more sporadic instances, which is obviously less good from a health perspective. However, Norway and Iceland have some of the lowest consumption overall, but I don't know much about their drinking cultures so it could be that many abstain or drink less than typical or their drinking is mostly limited to occasional instances of getting soused.
From the sounds of things, the company itself didn't really have a clue what they made either. Being the "Credit Karma of LinkedIn" makes it sound like they were dealing in fertilizer if anything.
Did you even read the comic? It's certainly not original, but it's a riff on the joke in that your typical engineer would complain about the arbitrary nature of the scale and how its meaningless without some unit of measure (completely true), whereas the clever fellow will gladly capitalize on that in order to sell someone something that's meaningless, but perceived as better.
It fits because the discussion isn't that batteries are getting better, merely that we're taking something that already exists and changing the way we label it in such a way that people perceive it as better.
Unless you're going to only play older games one ones that aren't very graphically intensive at low resolutions, I don't think this would work well unless they also sell a module with a discreet GPU. Otherwise you'll just be using the integrated Intel graphics, which aren't going to cut it for a lot of games. It would still make a nice HTPC box though as it's got an HDMI port on it according to HP's site.
They all probably contain some piece of legalese in the product license or EULA indicating that it is illegal to use them for purposes of terrorism (famously the iTunes EULA contains an agreement not to use the software to develop nuclear weapons) or in extreme cases the government may even forbid sale to that country if the actors are state-sponsored.
I suppose it's more difficult in the case of Twitter since they're a service instead of a product. Once someone comes into possession of a walkie talkie there isn't some magical switch that can revoke the original sale and dispossess the offending individuals. Even with phones you're limited to what a carrier who's not in your jurisdiction will do for you and it also supposes that you can pin-point a particular device without more information. Once again Twitter fails this to some degree as even though direct messaging is possible, it's typically easy to identify the bad people because of a large volume of public activity that's being broadcast as widely as possible. Not only that, but the service also naturally tracks other accounts that follow or rebroadcast those messages as a core part of the service.
All of that said, I don't personally believe Twitter should be legally responsible for ISIS, even if they don't have some kind of clause to indemnify themselves or if the nature of their product makes it physically possible or relatively easier for them to identify undesirable parties when compared to alternative means of communication. Holding them directly responsible for any act would require proving them to be complicit in facilitating the act and proving that the act could not have occurred without the use of Twitter. That's a tenuous gambit at best and such a legal ruling would establish precedent for all manner of other shaky cases while at the same time fly in the face of other rulings that have gone against cases based on a chain of argument and logic far more sound.
I think they get more scrutiny (and in some ways deserve it) because they're one of the companies that always talk about doing progressive things and being good for the environment, diversity, etc. You could also argue (probably rightly) that they get additional scrutiny just because they're the top company as well, but they were also one of the companies that made a big deal about all of their efforts and want to talk about their social responsibility.
If they want to do all of that for marketing or as part of their branding then they also have to live up to the expectations. No one forced them to embrace those ideals, so I don't really have a problem if anyone wants to take Apple to task for failing to live up to them.
I don't think the content creators are going to care. Streaming pays absolute shit according to most accounts. I suppose one could always argue that they're not going to make any money from streaming, but it might connect new people to their music who buy a concert ticket, but at the same time streaming is going to erode album sales which artists typically made little (or perhaps even lost) money on with the assumption that touring would make up for it.
Artists are part of the market as well and if the streaming services are going to compete (having a single player isn't terribly good for consumers either) they'll offer artists exclusivity deals and the artists will be more than happy to take them since the regular pay is abysmal. I think the ideal solution is artists moving away from the labels and self-publishing and distributing their own music. They stand to make a lot more selling their albums digitally at a much lower cost (say $5 or less) as it results in more sales and even though the overall revenue may be lower, the artist's profit is likely to be greater.
Sounds like a case of sour grapes. I don't really understand how this benefits Spotify as it doesn't improve the service in any way that I can see, and such a move likely makes it worse for users for petty business reasons that have nothing to do with the users.
It's also a tenuous link at that. If his battery had been low from shooting video of birds in a park we wouldn't blame this death on bird-watching. This sounds like distracted driving and linking this to one particular game reeks of fishing for a headline and horrible click bait.
Can we attribute more deaths to Pokemon Go with further stretches; e.g., what if someone gets into an accident because they were tired due to staying up late to play Pokemon Go? Or better yet, they're a programmer working on some military software and their lack of sleep leads to the injection of a critical fault into the software which later makes it seem as though the country is under attack leading to global conflict. Pokemon Go is going to cause World War 3!
Indeed. They could have gotten around the problem completely by calling their game something else (Capsule Beasts, Pouch Mutants, etc.) and changing any graphics that were identical or too similar to the Nintendo games'. There's nothing that says that they can't make a similar game (and really there's already plenty of Pokemon knock-offs over the years) and release that instead. They still probably could have gotten a lot of support from the fan community or maybe even started their own series.
You can't just leave them as people aren't content to sit on the street and starve. They're far more likely to turn to begging, crime, or any other number of things that have a large societal cost. It's likely cheaper to subsidize them being worthless than it is to pay for the added police, prison, and social services costs associated with such individual's otherwise.
However, you can't expect everyone to be content with that payment and not be an even larger drain on society. I think that the solution to these individuals is a section of the country that's physically separated from the rest of the country where these people are placed and left to their own devices. Give them some basic resources and let them figure it out by cultivating their own food.
If you can't be content to exist completely at the behest of the rest of society, society should have no qualms with tossing you out if you fuck that up.
Based on your figures, that amounts to ~$1.47 trillion if we use the 2010 census data. Social Security, Medicare (and similar health programs), and other safety net programs accounted for a little over $2.18 trillion in 2015.
At that rate you could pay adults 18 and over $700 per month and children under the age of 18 $350 per month and break even assuming you eliminated those other programs. I'd suggest that all payments to children be deferred until they hit 18 otherwise you'll get some idiots acting like baby farms so they can get more money. $350 per month over 18 years comes out to about $75,000 which is enough to afford a 4 year college education for most people.
There may be some other reasonable changes such as a more graduated rate that slowly increases over time, such that people who have just turned 18 are only getting a small payment closer to $400, whereas older individuals are getting over $1000 as they're far less likely to be able to work full time and probably have increased medical expenses.
Slashdot Mirror
We've already seen this happen with the guy who was dubbed the underwear bomber. A Dutch passenger jumped the attacker and detained him.
Sounds like a very expensive tiger-repelling rock.
At some point you can't pay a person's health costs as there's no cure for entropy. At a certain point people will have to accept that they're going to die and the best that can be done is to make them comfortable, or as much as is possible. It doesn't make much sense for society to bear the cost of treating cancer for someone who is in their 80's. If that person has a bunch of money saved up and wants to try to use it to prolong their life, that's their own business, but at some point no amount of money will be able to impede death.
If we're going to move towards a basic income and universal health care, we have to be pragmatic about it. A basic income based off of the current government spending on social programs is certainly possible, but it's going to be a subsistence income and it likely means moving or finding a roommate (or several) if you want to subsist in the more expensive parts of the country. Health care costs in general could be brought to manageable levels if the population as a whole were healthier. The dysfunctional system in place is only partially to blame.
A quick Google search turned up a news article from several years ago that indicated cooking fires (of which the leading type are grease fires) result in roughly 480 deaths per year at that time and presumably there are many injuries as a result as well.
I couldn't find any statistics or news articles providing a figure for battery related deaths or injuries, but I suspect it's not as many, though I have heard multiple stories about batteries in electronic cigarettes causing injuries, though it's believed that in some part this is due to improper use of the device. Also, in past reports about battery fires, people have reported the device getting uncomfortably warm before the battery erupted (it doesn't really explode) and destroyed the device. Even if you had it on you, if you were awake and not intoxicated, you would probably notice and be able to remove the device from your person before being hurt.
Your odds of either injury are very low, but for an arbitrary individual it's far more likely that they will be injured as a result of a grease fire than as a result of a battery fire.
That's unlikely given that the U.S. tax rate is far worse than the Irish rate and it would cost Apple far less to leave the money in Ireland even when (even without the ruling the loophole Apple was exploiting would only last until 2020) they're not getting the sweetheart rate they have in the past.
If the government heavily subsidizes them, then they are in fact cheaper from the prospective of the energy industry. Whether you agree with the government doing that or not, you're an utter fool not to take the money because if you don't, a competitor will.
I think it would be better if Google just marked content according to category (or allowed the video makers to self-designate) and tell the advertisers exactly what kind of content their ad is going to be displayed over. If I'm an organization interested in soliciting donations for child victims of war, I might actually want to advertise on videos that were flagged for being violent due to depictions of war. There's no end of companies that wouldn't mind advertising their more adult products against videos of a similar theme either.
Content creators (at least the bigger ones) are probably better of finding their own sponsors. Who cares about losing a few hundred dollars from Google if you can get a company to pay you a few thousand to personally thank them for sponsoring your content at the start of your next several videos. I'll take a 10 second thank you message at the start of a video if it means I don't have to load some extra crappy ad before the video. The content author can just throw some tits and explosions in at the end to guarantee there's no pre-video ad now as well.
Why do people give Pocket (or any other) Chrome app full read/write access to google.com?
Why do people install 15 different toolbars in their browsers?
Why do people click links in emails claiming to be from the IT administrator that are poorly formatted and full of spelling errors?
Why do people respond to emails claiming to be from the prince of Nigeria and send the person banking and personal information?
The answer is that people are just really fucking stupid sometimes, or maybe even most of the time.
I have to question some of the information you present or conclusions you draw. If we look at actual data from the WHO (presented on Wikipedia) we see that while countries like Italy have a much lower per capita consumption (6.7 liters) compared to the U.S. (9.2 liters) many of the Eastern European countries, and really most of Europe in general has a much higher consumption. Scandinavian countries are rather mixed with Finland (12.3 liters) being high on the list (comparable to France at 12.2), but Norway being quite low (7.7 liters), and Sweden being the same as the use (9.2 liters) which falls below most of Europe.
Most people would have to be consuming more than 2-3 drinks per month based on the data or you'd have some severe outliers that are getting utterly wasted regularly in order to drag the numbers upward. I suspect that more people in Europe consume more alcohol, but it tends to be in more moderate amounts as you describe. Although Americans consume less, I suspect that many of them tend to do so in larger volumes in more sporadic instances, which is obviously less good from a health perspective. However, Norway and Iceland have some of the lowest consumption overall, but I don't know much about their drinking cultures so it could be that many abstain or drink less than typical or their drinking is mostly limited to occasional instances of getting soused.
From the sounds of things, the company itself didn't really have a clue what they made either. Being the "Credit Karma of LinkedIn" makes it sound like they were dealing in fertilizer if anything.
Did you even read the comic? It's certainly not original, but it's a riff on the joke in that your typical engineer would complain about the arbitrary nature of the scale and how its meaningless without some unit of measure (completely true), whereas the clever fellow will gladly capitalize on that in order to sell someone something that's meaningless, but perceived as better.
It fits because the discussion isn't that batteries are getting better, merely that we're taking something that already exists and changing the way we label it in such a way that people perceive it as better.
Unless you're going to only play older games one ones that aren't very graphically intensive at low resolutions, I don't think this would work well unless they also sell a module with a discreet GPU. Otherwise you'll just be using the integrated Intel graphics, which aren't going to cut it for a lot of games. It would still make a nice HTPC box though as it's got an HDMI port on it according to HP's site.
The whole region will be a series of ghost towns second time around
I think they'd fill up rather quickly, just with the loads of previously homeless people that seem to gather in the area.
They all probably contain some piece of legalese in the product license or EULA indicating that it is illegal to use them for purposes of terrorism (famously the iTunes EULA contains an agreement not to use the software to develop nuclear weapons) or in extreme cases the government may even forbid sale to that country if the actors are state-sponsored.
I suppose it's more difficult in the case of Twitter since they're a service instead of a product. Once someone comes into possession of a walkie talkie there isn't some magical switch that can revoke the original sale and dispossess the offending individuals. Even with phones you're limited to what a carrier who's not in your jurisdiction will do for you and it also supposes that you can pin-point a particular device without more information. Once again Twitter fails this to some degree as even though direct messaging is possible, it's typically easy to identify the bad people because of a large volume of public activity that's being broadcast as widely as possible. Not only that, but the service also naturally tracks other accounts that follow or rebroadcast those messages as a core part of the service.
All of that said, I don't personally believe Twitter should be legally responsible for ISIS, even if they don't have some kind of clause to indemnify themselves or if the nature of their product makes it physically possible or relatively easier for them to identify undesirable parties when compared to alternative means of communication. Holding them directly responsible for any act would require proving them to be complicit in facilitating the act and proving that the act could not have occurred without the use of Twitter. That's a tenuous gambit at best and such a legal ruling would establish precedent for all manner of other shaky cases while at the same time fly in the face of other rulings that have gone against cases based on a chain of argument and logic far more sound.
Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.
I think they get more scrutiny (and in some ways deserve it) because they're one of the companies that always talk about doing progressive things and being good for the environment, diversity, etc. You could also argue (probably rightly) that they get additional scrutiny just because they're the top company as well, but they were also one of the companies that made a big deal about all of their efforts and want to talk about their social responsibility.
If they want to do all of that for marketing or as part of their branding then they also have to live up to the expectations. No one forced them to embrace those ideals, so I don't really have a problem if anyone wants to take Apple to task for failing to live up to them.
Maybe he did mean loose as if your lose your job, you might have to turn your family loose if you can't afford to feed them anymore.
I don't think the content creators are going to care. Streaming pays absolute shit according to most accounts. I suppose one could always argue that they're not going to make any money from streaming, but it might connect new people to their music who buy a concert ticket, but at the same time streaming is going to erode album sales which artists typically made little (or perhaps even lost) money on with the assumption that touring would make up for it.
Artists are part of the market as well and if the streaming services are going to compete (having a single player isn't terribly good for consumers either) they'll offer artists exclusivity deals and the artists will be more than happy to take them since the regular pay is abysmal. I think the ideal solution is artists moving away from the labels and self-publishing and distributing their own music. They stand to make a lot more selling their albums digitally at a much lower cost (say $5 or less) as it results in more sales and even though the overall revenue may be lower, the artist's profit is likely to be greater.
Sounds like a case of sour grapes. I don't really understand how this benefits Spotify as it doesn't improve the service in any way that I can see, and such a move likely makes it worse for users for petty business reasons that have nothing to do with the users.
It's also a tenuous link at that. If his battery had been low from shooting video of birds in a park we wouldn't blame this death on bird-watching. This sounds like distracted driving and linking this to one particular game reeks of fishing for a headline and horrible click bait.
Can we attribute more deaths to Pokemon Go with further stretches; e.g., what if someone gets into an accident because they were tired due to staying up late to play Pokemon Go? Or better yet, they're a programmer working on some military software and their lack of sleep leads to the injection of a critical fault into the software which later makes it seem as though the country is under attack leading to global conflict. Pokemon Go is going to cause World War 3!
Just make them body temperature, and maybe give them a pulse?
Sure, if you're into that kind of thing.
Indeed. They could have gotten around the problem completely by calling their game something else (Capsule Beasts, Pouch Mutants, etc.) and changing any graphics that were identical or too similar to the Nintendo games'. There's nothing that says that they can't make a similar game (and really there's already plenty of Pokemon knock-offs over the years) and release that instead. They still probably could have gotten a lot of support from the fan community or maybe even started their own series.
You can't just leave them as people aren't content to sit on the street and starve. They're far more likely to turn to begging, crime, or any other number of things that have a large societal cost. It's likely cheaper to subsidize them being worthless than it is to pay for the added police, prison, and social services costs associated with such individual's otherwise.
However, you can't expect everyone to be content with that payment and not be an even larger drain on society. I think that the solution to these individuals is a section of the country that's physically separated from the rest of the country where these people are placed and left to their own devices. Give them some basic resources and let them figure it out by cultivating their own food.
If you can't be content to exist completely at the behest of the rest of society, society should have no qualms with tossing you out if you fuck that up.
Based on your figures, that amounts to ~$1.47 trillion if we use the 2010 census data. Social Security, Medicare (and similar health programs), and other safety net programs accounted for a little over $2.18 trillion in 2015.
At that rate you could pay adults 18 and over $700 per month and children under the age of 18 $350 per month and break even assuming you eliminated those other programs. I'd suggest that all payments to children be deferred until they hit 18 otherwise you'll get some idiots acting like baby farms so they can get more money. $350 per month over 18 years comes out to about $75,000 which is enough to afford a 4 year college education for most people.
There may be some other reasonable changes such as a more graduated rate that slowly increases over time, such that people who have just turned 18 are only getting a small payment closer to $400, whereas older individuals are getting over $1000 as they're far less likely to be able to work full time and probably have increased medical expenses.
There are two things you can now upgrade after purchase in Apple laptops; Jack and Shit.
I heard that they were removing the jack on their products so it looks like you'll only be able to upgrade the shit.