Aptly named because there are so few of them people claim to see and typically turn out to be nothing more than fanciful imagination.
Look at something like Twitter which was one of those companies and had a huge IPO valuing the company at tens of billions of dollars. They've never really been able to make money and the stock has continued to dwindle over the months. Many of the unicorns are like this, valued far in excess of what they can actually hope to profit. Everyone thinks they're buying the next Google, but most of it is just hype driven by the early investors so they can cash out during the IPO.
Get a service, get millions of users, and get the fuck out before it collapses.
This is the core problem. Everything comes down to ad-hominems.
What else can I say about someone who I have a low opinion of though? I suppose I could phase it less harshly and say that I don't think they are very good people, and then qualify all of that with examples, but what does that really change? You, who considers them a member of your tribe will just find a way to dismiss the evidence or rationalize the bad behavior or make other excuses for it.
Kinda like you just did to me.
I don't ever recall calling you an SJW or accusing you of something like that and if I have, it's something that I realize does not lead to healthy thinking or discourse. At most I've stated that I expect you'd identify yourself as a feminist, but like many other things it's an overloaded term and has almost become a bit of a pejorative. You post a lot of other things where we're in agreement and I suspect that we have more beliefs in common than not, even though I suspect our reasoning for arriving at those beliefs are different.
I'll concede that I have called people that in the past. I stopped a while back because I realized it is counter-productive. Even so, I'd point out that when I did, it was because the person was following MRA ideology. Unlike Social Justice Warriors, Men's Rights Activists are an actual organized group with a number of web sites, conferences and books on the subject.
SJW as I understand it is just a placeholder for what much of modern feminism has become. Couldn't you make the same argument that calling someone an SJW simply means that they subscribe to third-wave feminist philosophy and then further point out the large number of web sites, conferences, books, etc. on the subject? I think both groups have some legitimate points to be made, but the problem is that they've been taken over by crazy idiots who are very counter-productive.
I think the anti-feminist caricature of feminism is that, but not the mainsteam or even radical feminist movements. This goes back to what I was trying to get at. People say feminism is awful because of feminists like Anita Sarkeesian, but then rebut some imaginary arguments which show they have no idea what her actual opinions are. All they know is what the anti-feminists told them, they don't even watch the videos and then answer the actual points being made.
But I have watched a few of her videos and while she does have some good points, eventually she drifts off into patriarchy theory, which is utter nonsense when looking at modern western societies. Feminism incorporated too much nonsense with no empirical basis and has drown or driven out the rational members of the group. Take a look at someone like Warren Farrell who was a longtime feminist, but then the fringe element of the group has essentially driven him out or famously protested him speaking because he doesn't buy into the patriarchy theory nonsense. There are plenty of others just like him who might call themselves feminists, but the majority (or in some cases the noisiest contingent that shapes public perception) of other people who call themselves feminists don't feel the same.
Just because you agree with some points that a person makes doesn't mean you have to defend everything they say because it somehow invalidates the points you agree with. There are particular positions where I agree with Donald Trump and others where I agree with Bernie Sanders, but that doesn't mean I have to defend the things I dislike about them or argue against anyone who thinks they're not a good candidate. Much like labeling people in order to put them in a certain mental box is counter-productive, so to is trying to defend someone just because you feel as though you're on the same team, which is just another aspect of human behavior that we do out of habit. I don't think you're a bad person for doing it, just one th
People probably assume that because you seem to defend useless idiots who happen to be "feminists" quite often. I remember the Brianna Wu interview quite specifically, and then there was some other thread where you decided you needed to stick up for Randi Harper. Both of them are awful people and if you didn't somehow feel like you belonged to the same tribe, you wouldn't bother defending them.
I think the term SJW is worthless as its just a convenient way for people to label someone and group them in with other people they dislike and then hate by association, which is really the same kind of behavior that they accuse modern feminism of, making it a bit funny. However, you've done the same and accused people of being an MRA, which is really just the feminist version of SJW, a nice label they can hang on someone so they can accuse them of all kinds of other things that they may or may not believe in.
I recall modding you up before because you say things that I find to be insightful or informative, but for most people here, modern feminism has become a cruel jape. It's been taken over by the kind of people who get called SJWs a lot and you sticking up for them doesn't make anyone like them more. All it does is tell those same loud idiots that they have people who will back them and they should keep doing what they're doing. It's akin to if most people supported the Westboro Baptist Church instead of mocking them for the lunatics they are. People defending their actions just means more people are going to act that way and if you don't toss out the rot from within a movement, it will eventually overtake it. Look at what happened with the Catholic church, the covered up pedophilia for so long that they ended up with a disproportionate amount of pedophiles in their ranks because those people knew they could get away with their actions because someone else would hush it up or make excuses for the behavior.
You can be a feminist without being an "SJW" but it means you can't give free passes to bad behavior, terrible arguments, or any person just because they also claim to be a feminist. Otherwise you can't be surprised when a majority of people don't want to associate with you for wearing that same label or start making assumptions that you're just as bad as the awful people you've been defending.
He probably picked her because he thinks it will give him more pull in California, which it won't. She's tried to run for office in California before and failed. He she actually be successful in her tenure as HP's CEO she likely would fare better politically, but when getting fired makes the company's stock jump over 6% on just that news alone, it's pretty obvious you did a shit job.
Perhaps more interesting though is that several weeks ago there was also a rumor going around that Cruz had an affair with the woman who's now Fiorina's campaign manager. I didn't really go anywhere, but the person who reported on it was the same one who broke the Edwards scandal previously. Carly might have put the squeeze on him in order to stay silent and was always his guaranteed choice of VP whether it did him any good or not.
However, it doesn't really matter. Cruz only has appeal to the bible-belt crazy wing of the Republican party. People were so caught up in the narrative about how the Republican party disliked Trump that they forgot that the party doesn't like Cruz either.
"Too expensive" or "overqualified" are not valid reasons for an H1-B, nor is "not a good fit" for that matter. This is a program designed for the case where "we couldn't find anyone with the skills we needed at all" kind of cases. They could easily fix the system, by allowing as many H1-B visas as a company would like, but increasing the cost for every time a new one is created. Give them a 10 year life span and don't require holders to remain at the same company. It immediately provides a market based solution where companies are only going to be willing to get an H1-B worker when they really can't find any talent within the country or need someone who's so insanely skilled that the extra cost is worth it from their perspective.
Communism doesn't work because central planning doesn't work. The jobs that people had weren't useful so their system eventually collapsed. The reason why a UBI is proposed is that it's a market-based solution that allows people to spend the money on the things they need, rather than being limited by some government aid program.
If a person is currently on food stamps and has their car break down, the food stamps don't help them at all. With a UBI to replace the other welfare programs, the recipients can make the best decisions for their own personal needs without the need for government bureaucracy trying to run dozens of separate programs. This is about reducing government inefficiency when it comes to providing a social safety net.
The article is light on the kind of information that would explain what's going on, but I'd guess that once you get just about anything down to the nano-scale it doesn't behave in quite the same way as it normally would in larger quantities. However, it sounds like it's the magnesium oxide coating over the gold nano-wire that's corroding as that's what the gel is coating is interacting with and given the last part of the summary that states the gold could be replaced with nickle makes me think it's not the gold that's the special sauce. Maybe it was just a matter of using gold resulted in the least corrosion for the magnesium oxide layer surrounding the gold nano-wire, but now that the gel is being used the gold isn't necessary.
explaining to people why the latest and greatest software has less functionality than the previous versions.
That one's really easy. Google doesn't make as much money from third parties using their infrastructure so they'll naturally remove the useful functionality or limit it to something that only they themselves can access. The same happened with Twitter where third party developers made all of these wonderful apps and Twitter clients, but they didn't make Twitter any money or actively hurt their ability to make money so Twitter put a kibosh to them.
If your business is depending on third party code that you have no control over, you're in a very precarious position. You might want to consider moving to OpenStreetMap where you have the freedom to write on maintain your own code and avoid the problem entirely. If you're reliant on a third party you're completely at their mercy unless you have some contract and they're naturally going to have their own best interests at heart and not care about what's best for you.
Then it just becomes a game to control or rig that system as well. Astroturf accounts already tend to build up a large post history that has nothing to do with shilling for a product before they start doing it, so I don't think what you're proposing would solve the problem. Only you as a consumer can take the necessary steps to safeguard yourself from being conned. Anything else is just putting faith in a system that's probably easier to abuse or game than you expect.
There's a broken window fallacy if I've ever seen one. I would say that anyone spreading misinformation for hire is creating negative value because someone else has to clean up all the mess they make. Are you going to claim that the shills and trolls hired by people like the Koch brothers are also providing something more worthwhile than software developers? If software developers make another shitty social network or pointless app, I can ignore it completely without problem, but when paid idiots spew nonsense it becomes potentially harmful to me should others believe in it and act wrongly based on that misinformation.
Buddhism originated in India, but Zen was founded in China (although Zen is the Japanese name for it), not Japan which didn't bring it over until several hundred years later, although there were other schools of Buddhism in Japan prior to the introduction and spread of Zen.
It's the government. When you're used to $500 hammers, a $1 million phone hack hardly matters. Part of the cost could simply be that whatever was done would make it obvious how the hack works so it's really only a one-time sale for the person doing the hacking.
But considering that the hacked device yielded no useful information, I think the only statement that the FBI has made is that they're fucking idiots.
Money is just a proxy used and isn't the problem. There are some historians that claim barter economies never really existed prior to the user of currency. Rather, small tribes tended to just mentally keep track of value owed to each other. The system worked because the groups were small and everyone knew everyone else. As civilizations grew larger, those assumptions no longer held true so societies started developing currencies to represent value so that individuals who didn't know each other well could still trade.
The real problem is that as society advances, there are fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled labor. Why I prefer a UBI to your supposed better ways of organizing resources is that central planning doesn't work for shit in the real world at a large scale. A UBI is just a way of taking advantage of allowing individual actors in a market to make their own best decisions rather than some organizer trying (and typically failing) to decide how it should work.
Money isn't a problem. The issue is that there are a growing number of people who can't provide sufficient value to society or increase the total wealth of the world in any reasonable manner. So unless you want to kill those people or let them starve (and good luck doing other without spending a lot of money to achieve that outcome) the only alternative is to take advantage of the fact that increased productivity makes it rather cheap to support the basic needs of people and give them an income from which they can subsist.
At that point, I think we need to let them starve or die. As harsh as that may sound, if someone is so much of a fuck up that they can't survive when given the resources to get by with no requirements on your end other than being alive, it's time to let nature run its course. If someone's too mentally diminished to make decisions like that for themselves, they already belong in a separate care facility, not out in society.
However, the argument also ignores another facet of human nature: man is a creature of infinite want. A UBI is about satisfying human needs, but people are still going to want things. What you'd likely see is a lot of people working part time jobs (10 hours / week) or joining the so-called gig economy to generate a small amount of supplemental income to cover those wants.
Most people overlook the other side of the equation which is "what is the cost to me for society to contain individuals who don't have basic needs met?" which is not zero. No city is happy with homeless people pissing in the streets, criminals who burgle or engage in other crimes, and a perpetual cycle of poverty which can be difficult to escape.
I'd rather eat a bit of an extra tax hit to have someone smoking weed and playing video games in some dumpy apartment in a place where the rent is dirt cheap enough for the bums to live than in my neighborhood breaking into my apartment so they can sell my stuff in order to buy food. In the later case people naturally end up paying for security (police forces) and detention for criminals that are every bit as expensive as giving people enough to subsist on their own.
The biggest obstacle to a basic income plan is that immigration needs to be strictly enforced and a lot of the country has some wild hair up their ass that makes them think borders are just a suggestion. Otherwise if you're absolutely opposed to complete freeloading, just add community service requirements for anyone who's not working to earn their basic income. It doesn't require much aptitude to pick up trash in a park or some other simple chores that typically need doing. If they want more than subsistence, they can get part time work for extra spending money,
It's even worse than that. The PS2 was far and away the most successful console of its generation. It killed of Sega's Dreamcast early on and only later did Nintendo release their own console which did not sell well and Microsoft was only making their first foray into the console market so their sales were also quite low. The PS2 only sold as well as it did because the competition was exceptionally weak.
I'm fairly sure the subsequent generations have had more total combined sales over the lifetime of the machines, but no one company has been in such a dominant position as Sony was with the PS2. If they wanted to make a fair comparison they'd need to combine Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo Wii sales together and compare them against total sales from other console generations to establish a trend.
Wikipedia has some quick information available and is probably good enough for the sake of argument:
VGChartz, a website that tracks sales for consoles and video games lists the current (8th) generation sales at: 73.5 million. That's tracking a bit below the previous generation (~230 million total projected based on current sales) for industry-wide sales, which probably is largely due to Nintendo's Wii U cratering hard to the extend that they're abandoning it already, so perhaps there will be an uptick when they release a new system. I think that portables have also grown a lot more as well (and this is excluding smartphones) so that could be eating into the consoles a bit as well.
For servers it's not just about processing power, but also about energy requirements. The newer Intel chips typically have better performance per watt even if the overall maximum performance hasn't changed that much. That means less cost because the servers aren't drawing as much power and also less spent on cooling as well.
It's probably not worth replacing 5 year old servers if they suit your needs just fine, but eventually it will be more cost-effective over the long run to upgrade to more efficient processors simply because when the performance remains fixed, the Moore's law suggests the power consumption and or cost decreases.
I suppose if you have people walking around behind your desk it's a potential problem, but as most people usually have desks up against a wall or some kind of divider, it's not likely to be a problem. But even if, for the sake of argument, we're in some kind of open floor plan hell, those fans probably don't have enough power to recreate a Marilyn Monroe photograph. You'd probably need a really heavy load just to get them to ruffle clothing at all, and at that point the noise from them would be driving the other poor souls in open floor plan office hell bonkers and no one would want to go anywhere near you.
Why not just wear a glove on the hand that's holding the compressed air? You could probably get away with using an oven mitt or a pot holder in a pinch. Seems like a simpler solution than keeping a tub of warm water around.
Where are people buying iPhones that cost 20% more than where they are available for purchase elsewhere? Also, who's going to rationalize that instead of returning it and getting it from the cheaper source?
Who really cares though? Does anyone have such a connection to Jackson or Hamilton to care about their ouster? As an aside, I've always found it somewhat ironic for Jackson to be featured on the $20 given his positions on the American central banking system that he removed while in office, which was only later reestablished as the Federal Reserve under Wilson. Jackson didn't appear on the $20 until after that time, perhaps as some kind of cruel jape, but I don't know.
Talking about demographics and limiting it to skin color seems to miss the point. America was a country founded on the ideas of freedom and liberty for all, even though it took quite a while to attain that in fact, and in some ways still isn't there. A strive for equality before the law seems to be an embodiment of American values and something that should constitute large majority demographically. Thinking that I (or anyone else) can't identify with someone like Tubman or the leaders of the civil rights movements because of sex or skin color seems rather misguided. You wouldn't tell a little black girl that she couldn't look up to Ben Franklin because he was an old white dude and doesn't reflect her demographics would you?
I wouldn't mind mixing a few other bills up as well. I'm of the opinion that we could boot Grant from the $50 for Teddy Roosevelt who in addition to being a general badass also exhibited many other traits or characteristics that I feel symbolize the idea of America and the values for which we as a country should strive.
Really the only reason to care is that a person is more concerned with the people doing this for the wrong reason (i.e. so that they can act like they're so great because diversity, etc.) instead of because Tubman and others (Dr. King obviously comes to mind) epitomize some of the ideals on which this country was founded and that make it great. Opposing a reasonable solution just because the people pushing for it are doing so for the wrong reasons doesn't make anyone a better person and smacks of being a moral crusade of its own.
Yes, but you don't get a claim good karma just for following the laws. I followed the traffic laws today and didn't blow through any intersections, etc. but that doesn't mean I should go around bragging about what a great person I am. We're not going to celebrate you for paying your taxes, so let's not toot Apple's horn for fulfilling their obligations.
I'm sure they release this information in the hopes that idiots take the bait and Apple gets some good press, but if they want praise for being virtuous they'll need to go beyond the requirements. Recycle more waste than you contribute into the system because even though it costs them to do so and there is no one to force them to do it, they still do it anyways and we can start talking.
Businesses rarely behave altruistically and typically when they appear to be acting that way it's for the sake of good publicity to market themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Aptly named because there are so few of them people claim to see and typically turn out to be nothing more than fanciful imagination.
Look at something like Twitter which was one of those companies and had a huge IPO valuing the company at tens of billions of dollars. They've never really been able to make money and the stock has continued to dwindle over the months. Many of the unicorns are like this, valued far in excess of what they can actually hope to profit. Everyone thinks they're buying the next Google, but most of it is just hype driven by the early investors so they can cash out during the IPO.
Get a service, get millions of users, and get the fuck out before it collapses.
This is the core problem. Everything comes down to ad-hominems.
What else can I say about someone who I have a low opinion of though? I suppose I could phase it less harshly and say that I don't think they are very good people, and then qualify all of that with examples, but what does that really change? You, who considers them a member of your tribe will just find a way to dismiss the evidence or rationalize the bad behavior or make other excuses for it.
Kinda like you just did to me.
I don't ever recall calling you an SJW or accusing you of something like that and if I have, it's something that I realize does not lead to healthy thinking or discourse. At most I've stated that I expect you'd identify yourself as a feminist, but like many other things it's an overloaded term and has almost become a bit of a pejorative. You post a lot of other things where we're in agreement and I suspect that we have more beliefs in common than not, even though I suspect our reasoning for arriving at those beliefs are different.
I'll concede that I have called people that in the past. I stopped a while back because I realized it is counter-productive. Even so, I'd point out that when I did, it was because the person was following MRA ideology. Unlike Social Justice Warriors, Men's Rights Activists are an actual organized group with a number of web sites, conferences and books on the subject.
SJW as I understand it is just a placeholder for what much of modern feminism has become. Couldn't you make the same argument that calling someone an SJW simply means that they subscribe to third-wave feminist philosophy and then further point out the large number of web sites, conferences, books, etc. on the subject? I think both groups have some legitimate points to be made, but the problem is that they've been taken over by crazy idiots who are very counter-productive.
I think the anti-feminist caricature of feminism is that, but not the mainsteam or even radical feminist movements. This goes back to what I was trying to get at. People say feminism is awful because of feminists like Anita Sarkeesian, but then rebut some imaginary arguments which show they have no idea what her actual opinions are. All they know is what the anti-feminists told them, they don't even watch the videos and then answer the actual points being made.
But I have watched a few of her videos and while she does have some good points, eventually she drifts off into patriarchy theory, which is utter nonsense when looking at modern western societies. Feminism incorporated too much nonsense with no empirical basis and has drown or driven out the rational members of the group. Take a look at someone like Warren Farrell who was a longtime feminist, but then the fringe element of the group has essentially driven him out or famously protested him speaking because he doesn't buy into the patriarchy theory nonsense. There are plenty of others just like him who might call themselves feminists, but the majority (or in some cases the noisiest contingent that shapes public perception) of other people who call themselves feminists don't feel the same.
Just because you agree with some points that a person makes doesn't mean you have to defend everything they say because it somehow invalidates the points you agree with. There are particular positions where I agree with Donald Trump and others where I agree with Bernie Sanders, but that doesn't mean I have to defend the things I dislike about them or argue against anyone who thinks they're not a good candidate. Much like labeling people in order to put them in a certain mental box is counter-productive, so to is trying to defend someone just because you feel as though you're on the same team, which is just another aspect of human behavior that we do out of habit. I don't think you're a bad person for doing it, just one th
People probably assume that because you seem to defend useless idiots who happen to be "feminists" quite often. I remember the Brianna Wu interview quite specifically, and then there was some other thread where you decided you needed to stick up for Randi Harper. Both of them are awful people and if you didn't somehow feel like you belonged to the same tribe, you wouldn't bother defending them.
I think the term SJW is worthless as its just a convenient way for people to label someone and group them in with other people they dislike and then hate by association, which is really the same kind of behavior that they accuse modern feminism of, making it a bit funny. However, you've done the same and accused people of being an MRA, which is really just the feminist version of SJW, a nice label they can hang on someone so they can accuse them of all kinds of other things that they may or may not believe in.
I recall modding you up before because you say things that I find to be insightful or informative, but for most people here, modern feminism has become a cruel jape. It's been taken over by the kind of people who get called SJWs a lot and you sticking up for them doesn't make anyone like them more. All it does is tell those same loud idiots that they have people who will back them and they should keep doing what they're doing. It's akin to if most people supported the Westboro Baptist Church instead of mocking them for the lunatics they are. People defending their actions just means more people are going to act that way and if you don't toss out the rot from within a movement, it will eventually overtake it. Look at what happened with the Catholic church, the covered up pedophilia for so long that they ended up with a disproportionate amount of pedophiles in their ranks because those people knew they could get away with their actions because someone else would hush it up or make excuses for the behavior.
You can be a feminist without being an "SJW" but it means you can't give free passes to bad behavior, terrible arguments, or any person just because they also claim to be a feminist. Otherwise you can't be surprised when a majority of people don't want to associate with you for wearing that same label or start making assumptions that you're just as bad as the awful people you've been defending.
He probably picked her because he thinks it will give him more pull in California, which it won't. She's tried to run for office in California before and failed. He she actually be successful in her tenure as HP's CEO she likely would fare better politically, but when getting fired makes the company's stock jump over 6% on just that news alone, it's pretty obvious you did a shit job.
Perhaps more interesting though is that several weeks ago there was also a rumor going around that Cruz had an affair with the woman who's now Fiorina's campaign manager. I didn't really go anywhere, but the person who reported on it was the same one who broke the Edwards scandal previously. Carly might have put the squeeze on him in order to stay silent and was always his guaranteed choice of VP whether it did him any good or not.
However, it doesn't really matter. Cruz only has appeal to the bible-belt crazy wing of the Republican party. People were so caught up in the narrative about how the Republican party disliked Trump that they forgot that the party doesn't like Cruz either.
"Too expensive" or "overqualified" are not valid reasons for an H1-B, nor is "not a good fit" for that matter. This is a program designed for the case where "we couldn't find anyone with the skills we needed at all" kind of cases. They could easily fix the system, by allowing as many H1-B visas as a company would like, but increasing the cost for every time a new one is created. Give them a 10 year life span and don't require holders to remain at the same company. It immediately provides a market based solution where companies are only going to be willing to get an H1-B worker when they really can't find any talent within the country or need someone who's so insanely skilled that the extra cost is worth it from their perspective.
Why it's what we're doing here of course, because we have a site that's healthy and positive, so healthy and positive is what our site doing.
I imagine they'll be about as healthy and positive as Fox News is fair and balanced.
Communism doesn't work because central planning doesn't work. The jobs that people had weren't useful so their system eventually collapsed. The reason why a UBI is proposed is that it's a market-based solution that allows people to spend the money on the things they need, rather than being limited by some government aid program.
If a person is currently on food stamps and has their car break down, the food stamps don't help them at all. With a UBI to replace the other welfare programs, the recipients can make the best decisions for their own personal needs without the need for government bureaucracy trying to run dozens of separate programs. This is about reducing government inefficiency when it comes to providing a social safety net.
The article is light on the kind of information that would explain what's going on, but I'd guess that once you get just about anything down to the nano-scale it doesn't behave in quite the same way as it normally would in larger quantities. However, it sounds like it's the magnesium oxide coating over the gold nano-wire that's corroding as that's what the gel is coating is interacting with and given the last part of the summary that states the gold could be replaced with nickle makes me think it's not the gold that's the special sauce. Maybe it was just a matter of using gold resulted in the least corrosion for the magnesium oxide layer surrounding the gold nano-wire, but now that the gel is being used the gold isn't necessary.
explaining to people why the latest and greatest software has less functionality than the previous versions.
That one's really easy. Google doesn't make as much money from third parties using their infrastructure so they'll naturally remove the useful functionality or limit it to something that only they themselves can access. The same happened with Twitter where third party developers made all of these wonderful apps and Twitter clients, but they didn't make Twitter any money or actively hurt their ability to make money so Twitter put a kibosh to them.
If your business is depending on third party code that you have no control over, you're in a very precarious position. You might want to consider moving to OpenStreetMap where you have the freedom to write on maintain your own code and avoid the problem entirely. If you're reliant on a third party you're completely at their mercy unless you have some contract and they're naturally going to have their own best interests at heart and not care about what's best for you.
Then it just becomes a game to control or rig that system as well. Astroturf accounts already tend to build up a large post history that has nothing to do with shilling for a product before they start doing it, so I don't think what you're proposing would solve the problem. Only you as a consumer can take the necessary steps to safeguard yourself from being conned. Anything else is just putting faith in a system that's probably easier to abuse or game than you expect.
There's a broken window fallacy if I've ever seen one. I would say that anyone spreading misinformation for hire is creating negative value because someone else has to clean up all the mess they make. Are you going to claim that the shills and trolls hired by people like the Koch brothers are also providing something more worthwhile than software developers? If software developers make another shitty social network or pointless app, I can ignore it completely without problem, but when paid idiots spew nonsense it becomes potentially harmful to me should others believe in it and act wrongly based on that misinformation.
Not the OP, not my pun.
Buddhism originated in India, but Zen was founded in China (although Zen is the Japanese name for it), not Japan which didn't bring it over until several hundred years later, although there were other schools of Buddhism in Japan prior to the introduction and spread of Zen.
It's the government. When you're used to $500 hammers, a $1 million phone hack hardly matters. Part of the cost could simply be that whatever was done would make it obvious how the hack works so it's really only a one-time sale for the person doing the hacking.
But considering that the hacked device yielded no useful information, I think the only statement that the FBI has made is that they're fucking idiots.
Money is just a proxy used and isn't the problem. There are some historians that claim barter economies never really existed prior to the user of currency. Rather, small tribes tended to just mentally keep track of value owed to each other. The system worked because the groups were small and everyone knew everyone else. As civilizations grew larger, those assumptions no longer held true so societies started developing currencies to represent value so that individuals who didn't know each other well could still trade.
The real problem is that as society advances, there are fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled labor. Why I prefer a UBI to your supposed better ways of organizing resources is that central planning doesn't work for shit in the real world at a large scale. A UBI is just a way of taking advantage of allowing individual actors in a market to make their own best decisions rather than some organizer trying (and typically failing) to decide how it should work.
Money isn't a problem. The issue is that there are a growing number of people who can't provide sufficient value to society or increase the total wealth of the world in any reasonable manner. So unless you want to kill those people or let them starve (and good luck doing other without spending a lot of money to achieve that outcome) the only alternative is to take advantage of the fact that increased productivity makes it rather cheap to support the basic needs of people and give them an income from which they can subsist.
At that point, I think we need to let them starve or die. As harsh as that may sound, if someone is so much of a fuck up that they can't survive when given the resources to get by with no requirements on your end other than being alive, it's time to let nature run its course. If someone's too mentally diminished to make decisions like that for themselves, they already belong in a separate care facility, not out in society.
However, the argument also ignores another facet of human nature: man is a creature of infinite want. A UBI is about satisfying human needs, but people are still going to want things. What you'd likely see is a lot of people working part time jobs (10 hours / week) or joining the so-called gig economy to generate a small amount of supplemental income to cover those wants.
Most people overlook the other side of the equation which is "what is the cost to me for society to contain individuals who don't have basic needs met?" which is not zero. No city is happy with homeless people pissing in the streets, criminals who burgle or engage in other crimes, and a perpetual cycle of poverty which can be difficult to escape.
I'd rather eat a bit of an extra tax hit to have someone smoking weed and playing video games in some dumpy apartment in a place where the rent is dirt cheap enough for the bums to live than in my neighborhood breaking into my apartment so they can sell my stuff in order to buy food. In the later case people naturally end up paying for security (police forces) and detention for criminals that are every bit as expensive as giving people enough to subsist on their own.
The biggest obstacle to a basic income plan is that immigration needs to be strictly enforced and a lot of the country has some wild hair up their ass that makes them think borders are just a suggestion. Otherwise if you're absolutely opposed to complete freeloading, just add community service requirements for anyone who's not working to earn their basic income. It doesn't require much aptitude to pick up trash in a park or some other simple chores that typically need doing. If they want more than subsistence, they can get part time work for extra spending money,
It's even worse than that. The PS2 was far and away the most successful console of its generation. It killed of Sega's Dreamcast early on and only later did Nintendo release their own console which did not sell well and Microsoft was only making their first foray into the console market so their sales were also quite low. The PS2 only sold as well as it did because the competition was exceptionally weak.
I'm fairly sure the subsequent generations have had more total combined sales over the lifetime of the machines, but no one company has been in such a dominant position as Sony was with the PS2. If they wanted to make a fair comparison they'd need to combine Xbox 360, PS3, and Nintendo Wii sales together and compare them against total sales from other console generations to establish a trend.
Wikipedia has some quick information available and is probably good enough for the sake of argument:
7th (Xbox 360) generation sales: 270.56 million
6th (PS2) generation sales: 210.13 million
5th (PS1) generation sales: 145.22 million
VGChartz, a website that tracks sales for consoles and video games lists the current (8th) generation sales at: 73.5 million. That's tracking a bit below the previous generation (~230 million total projected based on current sales) for industry-wide sales, which probably is largely due to Nintendo's Wii U cratering hard to the extend that they're abandoning it already, so perhaps there will be an uptick when they release a new system. I think that portables have also grown a lot more as well (and this is excluding smartphones) so that could be eating into the consoles a bit as well.
For servers it's not just about processing power, but also about energy requirements. The newer Intel chips typically have better performance per watt even if the overall maximum performance hasn't changed that much. That means less cost because the servers aren't drawing as much power and also less spent on cooling as well.
It's probably not worth replacing 5 year old servers if they suit your needs just fine, but eventually it will be more cost-effective over the long run to upgrade to more efficient processors simply because when the performance remains fixed, the Moore's law suggests the power consumption and or cost decreases.
I suppose if you have people walking around behind your desk it's a potential problem, but as most people usually have desks up against a wall or some kind of divider, it's not likely to be a problem. But even if, for the sake of argument, we're in some kind of open floor plan hell, those fans probably don't have enough power to recreate a Marilyn Monroe photograph. You'd probably need a really heavy load just to get them to ruffle clothing at all, and at that point the noise from them would be driving the other poor souls in open floor plan office hell bonkers and no one would want to go anywhere near you.
Why not just wear a glove on the hand that's holding the compressed air? You could probably get away with using an oven mitt or a pot holder in a pinch. Seems like a simpler solution than keeping a tub of warm water around.
I'm afraid it's simulations all the way down.
Where are people buying iPhones that cost 20% more than where they are available for purchase elsewhere? Also, who's going to rationalize that instead of returning it and getting it from the cheaper source?
Who really cares though? Does anyone have such a connection to Jackson or Hamilton to care about their ouster? As an aside, I've always found it somewhat ironic for Jackson to be featured on the $20 given his positions on the American central banking system that he removed while in office, which was only later reestablished as the Federal Reserve under Wilson. Jackson didn't appear on the $20 until after that time, perhaps as some kind of cruel jape, but I don't know.
Talking about demographics and limiting it to skin color seems to miss the point. America was a country founded on the ideas of freedom and liberty for all, even though it took quite a while to attain that in fact, and in some ways still isn't there. A strive for equality before the law seems to be an embodiment of American values and something that should constitute large majority demographically. Thinking that I (or anyone else) can't identify with someone like Tubman or the leaders of the civil rights movements because of sex or skin color seems rather misguided. You wouldn't tell a little black girl that she couldn't look up to Ben Franklin because he was an old white dude and doesn't reflect her demographics would you?
I wouldn't mind mixing a few other bills up as well. I'm of the opinion that we could boot Grant from the $50 for Teddy Roosevelt who in addition to being a general badass also exhibited many other traits or characteristics that I feel symbolize the idea of America and the values for which we as a country should strive.
Really the only reason to care is that a person is more concerned with the people doing this for the wrong reason (i.e. so that they can act like they're so great because diversity, etc.) instead of because Tubman and others (Dr. King obviously comes to mind) epitomize some of the ideals on which this country was founded and that make it great. Opposing a reasonable solution just because the people pushing for it are doing so for the wrong reasons doesn't make anyone a better person and smacks of being a moral crusade of its own.
Yes, but you don't get a claim good karma just for following the laws. I followed the traffic laws today and didn't blow through any intersections, etc. but that doesn't mean I should go around bragging about what a great person I am. We're not going to celebrate you for paying your taxes, so let's not toot Apple's horn for fulfilling their obligations.
I'm sure they release this information in the hopes that idiots take the bait and Apple gets some good press, but if they want praise for being virtuous they'll need to go beyond the requirements. Recycle more waste than you contribute into the system because even though it costs them to do so and there is no one to force them to do it, they still do it anyways and we can start talking.
Businesses rarely behave altruistically and typically when they appear to be acting that way it's for the sake of good publicity to market themselves.