If he couldn't get a job making 75% of what he was making
Yeah, because being specialized in microchips is an easily transferable skill. I bet, by that logic, that most rocket scientists are leeches as soon as their labs move.
When you're given about 5 months to move, *while* the economy is down, and cannot afford to wait more until it goes back up because you need the money right now to pay a premium for the new one in a place where you have to wait several months to get a contractor due to the huge influx of people (and pay more to those contractors than you would under normal conditions), things get way outside optimal. You're basically stepping from the 4th-sigma of the left tail of the Gaussian distribution directly to the 4th-sigma of the right tail. So, yeah, you lose money, the hope being you lose less than you would otherwise.
People who are near retirement would probably be better off holding on to their home and retiring earlier than planned rather than taking what is potentially the loss of one or more years' income in a single hit.
By close I mean about 10 years from. They did the math and concluded him finding another, local, lower paying, 50+years-old-accepting, IT job, so as to keep their former house, would result in a higher financial loss on the long run. They'd end up retiring in a much worse condition right when health-related bills increase exponentially.
And that, mind, under Obamacare reasoning. It's shaping to become even more prescient under the proposed Trumpcare if that goes all the way into being approved.
And Intel. The husband of a friend of mine (and his family with him) were forcibly moved several States over so as to keep his job when they closed several offices all around the US, causing them to sell their former home for a fraction of it's value and purchase a new one, smaller, and for an inflated price due to the huge influx of people there stressing the local house market.
The alternative offered? To "quit" his job and lose severance and other benefits.
Why he (and them) complied? Because he's near retirement age and doing anything else would be end-of-life economic suicide.
As for all the former employees who "quit", that certainly looked amazing on the responsible executives' resume. Not to mention the bonuses due to all the cost savings etc.
Check Luke 14:13-14. Done? Now, read Matthew 7:1-3 again. When you're done, let's merge both by referring to Proverbs 21:13. Harsh, eh?
Americans have a very weird concept of what Christianity is all about. Assuming it's true, most will have a very... interesting... experience once Judgment Day arrives.
Actual third world here. 40 years old and $18k income. I usually purchase ebooks when they're reasonably priced, meaning about $10 or less. When they cost $150 (or $39 for an article) because they're Harvard-library-priced, yeah, I pirate it. Also: when there's no ebook version (I love the underground movement that scans old out-of-print books); or when there is but it isn't sold to my region for some reason; or when it's priced higher for my region.
So, why are you spending money on an Internet connection and on a computing device, when you could have donated them to charity? Also, why are you using your free time here, instead of going to a homeless shelter to teach them? And have you opened up your home for them so that they have a better place to live?
Given your reference to God, let me point you to Luke 18:10-14 and Matthew 7:1-3. It's interesting how many Christians forget those verses and similar ones exist.
And what about setting things up so that drivers aren't charged a penny, money goes directly from the user to the driver, and the user is charged a percentage on top of what he paid to the driver?
Here in Brazil the vast majority of Uber drivers are so because the recession the country is going through destroyed the companies they worked for and they've been unemployed for several months without perspective of becoming employees again for a long time. It has literally saved many people from foreclosure and from being ejected given there's no barrier to entry: just take your car and go earn money.
If this rule sticks, guess who will be back in the queue for non-existing jobs?
I'm Brazilian too, but I don't know enough about labor law so as to figure this out, and I'm curious.
Suppose Uber changed it's system so that they charged drivers directly for use of the driver version of their app instead of charging drivers a percentage of each run. As in, I want to drive for Uber, I enter the App Store or the Play Store, and I find I can subscribe to it for, let's say, $1.000 BRL (about $300 USD) per month, with the first month free. In this scenario, Uber is literally selling an app and an associated service of locating people.
Would this fly? Or even in this case would drivers be considered employees?
the current hub of innovation exists in the western world. GMT -7 -- GMT +1.
Here in Brazil (we're GMT -5 to -1) successive governments have tried half arsed ways to improve technological prowess, without much luck due to corruption and an absolutely insane tax regime. Even so, many companies and businesses got built to provide services and software development to customers in 1st world countries.
If the absurdly huge US tech giants were to begin feeling that "investing" in having Brazil, and probably Uruguay, Argentina and Chile too get their shit together so as to become good places to establish software development operations in sync with US time zones, I'm sure they'd be able to pressure these countries into doing whatever is needed for them to become workable.
I deeply dislike Trump, but I cannot deny this might turn out to be a great opportunity for us around here. It's just a matter of our politicians not being as dumb as they usually are and presto, jackpot.
Of course many countries let you do so! For example, you can easily walk uninvited from New York to Pennsylvania, then to West Virginia, then to Kentucky, then to...
Should all these countries start requiring visas for people to walk from one into the other, and border patrols so as to make sure people have theirs in hand?
You do know that UBI is a libertarian proposal from the 1940's, right? And that left-wingers were opposed to it until very recently, as they thought it'd hamper the will of the proletariat to get up in arms and make a revolution, right?
I'm impressed with people who see the absurd level of technological advancement humanity pulled off in mere 400 years of the scientific method, and think "gee, we'll never surpass nature's trial and error process!!!"
Come on. Unless you think in Biblical time scales, what we did so far was many, MANY orders of magnitude faster than nature managed to do in any equivalent time frame. Human engineering is astoundingly fast. We fly over nature's rate of problem solving. 400 years and we're on the brink of creating artificial brains. Whether it takes us 40 years or 400 more, it's still an eye blink compared to the alternative.
It's simple. Do you know how, once we applied human brain power over the problem of flying we managed, in a matter of decades, to become better at flying than nature ever did in hundreds of millions of years of natural selection? Well, what do you think will happen now that we're focused on making AI better than brains? As in, better than any brains, including ours?
AI is catching up to human abilities. There's still a way to go, but breakthroughs are happening all the time. And as with flying, it won't take thousands of centuries of research and development until we make that happen. It'll take decades.
And once that happens, bye, bye, relevance of human brains for problem solving. AI will have solved it before you managed to articulate the problem.
The problem is that AI is becoming faster at learning the new job opportunities than people are, thereby gulping them before people even were there to be replaced. And this speed is growing. You cannot beat an exponential growth with a linear one, or even with just slightly slower growing exponential one.
A few hosts offer pay-as-you-go models for both storage, CPU usage and bandwidth so you can host anything you want and pay almost nothing or a lot, but still something fair. One I like a lot, targeting technical folk in particular (no wizards for anything: you get a shell account, a BSD jail, an SSH account, and move from there) is NearlyFreeSpeech.net. As the name implies they also have almost no content restriction, the only one being that it must be legal under US law.
I guess I should point out I have no relationship with them other than the fact I host a few Wordpress sites with them.
Because it costs several billion dollars to create the whole infrastructure needed to make any of these things at an industrial scale, while the infrastructure for Li-Ion one is already in place and can be cheaply adapted to new improvements on the already proven technology. Besides, Li-Ion has the "advantage" of forced obsolescence, requiring user to purchase new ones for their devices every few years.
Down the line it might be worth it to invest in these new technologies, particularly if some new technology appears that requires such massive power densities and speeds and there's huge demand for it, as was the case with electric cars and the new battery tech they require. Right now however the economics of scale, coupled with the potential lower long term profits, don't favor investing in it.
From the Books and Media section of the Vatican Observatory Foundation's website:
"Intelligent Life in the Universe: Catholic belief and the search for extraterrestrial life", Br. Guy Consolmagno, SJ
Originally published by the Catholic Truth Society in London, and long out of print, this pamphlet outlines what we know about the search for intelligent life, both how we search and why we search, and what it can mean for Catholics and our understanding of our faith.
I've read originally, in handwriting, the punctuation used to come below the quotation mark, both forming what nowadays would be considered a single character. When people transitioned to print, there was no easy way to do that, so some began placing the punctuation before the quotation mark, others began placing the quotation mark before the punctuation, and over time either style became the standard in print. Most countries went for quotation-then-punctuation. The USA went for punctuation-then-quotation. And that's it. There's no right or wrong option there, just an arbitrary usage that eventually became normative.
By the way, if we were to do it "right", as in, to become historically accurate, we should ask the Unicode Consortium to provide us ligature version of the different end-quotation marks with the different punctuations available, then have word processors replace them when typed, as they sometimes do when you type three dots and those get replaced by the single ellipsis symbol. Maybe those already exist? After all, there's no technological reason for keeping them separate anymore.
In none of which you'd end a sentence with a preposition.
Yes, you do. This has been a standard feature of English language for centuries, until prescriptive grammarians hell bent on adapting English to Latin began saying it shouldn't be done. Ignore that nonsense. Ending sentences with prepositions is one of the beautiful features of English, and one I, as an English as second language speaker, use as much as I can, as it provides for compact sentences that remain fully intelligible.
Yes, I was referring to my previous quote. Thanks for finding it, I wouldn't have been able to find it on my own.
To elaborate: both my old quote and my previous answer don't contradict each other. "Low speed, low memory, low power, battery-based devices" are one of the "cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources". In other words, my old quote ("case in which...") is a set, of which my previous answer ("low speed, low memory...") is a subset. And "smartphones" is a subset of "low speed, low memory...".
Ah! And I forgot to mention! I have an old EeePC, the first one, 600 MHz CPU version, running a trimmed down version of Windows XP SP-3. In it I also use hosts based ad blocking by means of Spybot S&D 1.6.2 and SpywareBlaster hosts blocking. I haven't powered up that machine in about two years though, so it's most certainly outdated.
Therefore, as you can see, I'm consistent in my opinions, and also truthful to my word.
Can you please provide the research links? I'm certainly interested.
Slashdot Mirror
If he couldn't get a job making 75% of what he was making
Yeah, because being specialized in microchips is an easily transferable skill. I bet, by that logic, that most rocket scientists are leeches as soon as their labs move.
When you're given about 5 months to move, *while* the economy is down, and cannot afford to wait more until it goes back up because you need the money right now to pay a premium for the new one in a place where you have to wait several months to get a contractor due to the huge influx of people (and pay more to those contractors than you would under normal conditions), things get way outside optimal. You're basically stepping from the 4th-sigma of the left tail of the Gaussian distribution directly to the 4th-sigma of the right tail. So, yeah, you lose money, the hope being you lose less than you would otherwise.
People who are near retirement would probably be better off holding on to their home and retiring earlier than planned rather than taking what is potentially the loss of one or more years' income in a single hit.
By close I mean about 10 years from. They did the math and concluded him finding another, local, lower paying, 50+years-old-accepting, IT job, so as to keep their former house, would result in a higher financial loss on the long run. They'd end up retiring in a much worse condition right when health-related bills increase exponentially.
And that, mind, under Obamacare reasoning. It's shaping to become even more prescient under the proposed Trumpcare if that goes all the way into being approved.
This is exactly how Reddit did it.
And Intel. The husband of a friend of mine (and his family with him) were forcibly moved several States over so as to keep his job when they closed several offices all around the US, causing them to sell their former home for a fraction of it's value and purchase a new one, smaller, and for an inflated price due to the huge influx of people there stressing the local house market.
The alternative offered? To "quit" his job and lose severance and other benefits.
Why he (and them) complied? Because he's near retirement age and doing anything else would be end-of-life economic suicide.
As for all the former employees who "quit", that certainly looked amazing on the responsible executives' resume. Not to mention the bonuses due to all the cost savings etc.
Shareholder capitalism is an illness.
Don't feel sorry for these people.
Check Luke 14:13-14. Done? Now, read Matthew 7:1-3 again. When you're done, let's merge both by referring to Proverbs 21:13. Harsh, eh?
Americans have a very weird concept of what Christianity is all about. Assuming it's true, most will have a very... interesting... experience once Judgment Day arrives.
Welcome to the third world.
Actual third world here. 40 years old and $18k income. I usually purchase ebooks when they're reasonably priced, meaning about $10 or less. When they cost $150 (or $39 for an article) because they're Harvard-library-priced, yeah, I pirate it. Also: when there's no ebook version (I love the underground movement that scans old out-of-print books); or when there is but it isn't sold to my region for some reason; or when it's priced higher for my region.
God help us all.
So, why are you spending money on an Internet connection and on a computing device, when you could have donated them to charity? Also, why are you using your free time here, instead of going to a homeless shelter to teach them? And have you opened up your home for them so that they have a better place to live?
Given your reference to God, let me point you to Luke 18:10-14 and Matthew 7:1-3. It's interesting how many Christians forget those verses and similar ones exist.
Some people had Z80 expansion boards for their Apple IIe so as to run CP/M in them.
And what about setting things up so that drivers aren't charged a penny, money goes directly from the user to the driver, and the user is charged a percentage on top of what he paid to the driver?
Here in Brazil the difference can be 3 times or more. Taxi is very expensive. Uber makes it casual.
Here in Brazil the vast majority of Uber drivers are so because the recession the country is going through destroyed the companies they worked for and they've been unemployed for several months without perspective of becoming employees again for a long time. It has literally saved many people from foreclosure and from being ejected given there's no barrier to entry: just take your car and go earn money.
If this rule sticks, guess who will be back in the queue for non-existing jobs?
I'm Brazilian too, but I don't know enough about labor law so as to figure this out, and I'm curious.
Suppose Uber changed it's system so that they charged drivers directly for use of the driver version of their app instead of charging drivers a percentage of each run. As in, I want to drive for Uber, I enter the App Store or the Play Store, and I find I can subscribe to it for, let's say, $1.000 BRL (about $300 USD) per month, with the first month free. In this scenario, Uber is literally selling an app and an associated service of locating people.
Would this fly? Or even in this case would drivers be considered employees?
Remember the wall?
I know of a brick wall. No idea about a fire wall though. ;-)
the current hub of innovation exists in the western world. GMT -7 -- GMT +1.
Here in Brazil (we're GMT -5 to -1) successive governments have tried half arsed ways to improve technological prowess, without much luck due to corruption and an absolutely insane tax regime. Even so, many companies and businesses got built to provide services and software development to customers in 1st world countries.
If the absurdly huge US tech giants were to begin feeling that "investing" in having Brazil, and probably Uruguay, Argentina and Chile too get their shit together so as to become good places to establish software development operations in sync with US time zones, I'm sure they'd be able to pressure these countries into doing whatever is needed for them to become workable.
I deeply dislike Trump, but I cannot deny this might turn out to be a great opportunity for us around here. It's just a matter of our politicians not being as dumb as they usually are and presto, jackpot.
No country just let's you walk in uninvited.
Of course many countries let you do so! For example, you can easily walk uninvited from New York to Pennsylvania, then to West Virginia, then to Kentucky, then to...
Should all these countries start requiring visas for people to walk from one into the other, and border patrols so as to make sure people have theirs in hand?
You do know that UBI is a libertarian proposal from the 1940's, right? And that left-wingers were opposed to it until very recently, as they thought it'd hamper the will of the proletariat to get up in arms and make a revolution, right?
Conservatives: always illiterate.
I'm impressed with people who see the absurd level of technological advancement humanity pulled off in mere 400 years of the scientific method, and think "gee, we'll never surpass nature's trial and error process!!!"
Come on. Unless you think in Biblical time scales, what we did so far was many, MANY orders of magnitude faster than nature managed to do in any equivalent time frame. Human engineering is astoundingly fast. We fly over nature's rate of problem solving. 400 years and we're on the brink of creating artificial brains. Whether it takes us 40 years or 400 more, it's still an eye blink compared to the alternative.
And afterwards things will accelerate even more.
It's simple. Do you know how, once we applied human brain power over the problem of flying we managed, in a matter of decades, to become better at flying than nature ever did in hundreds of millions of years of natural selection? Well, what do you think will happen now that we're focused on making AI better than brains? As in, better than any brains, including ours?
AI is catching up to human abilities. There's still a way to go, but breakthroughs are happening all the time. And as with flying, it won't take thousands of centuries of research and development until we make that happen. It'll take decades.
And once that happens, bye, bye, relevance of human brains for problem solving. AI will have solved it before you managed to articulate the problem.
The problem is that AI is becoming faster at learning the new job opportunities than people are, thereby gulping them before people even were there to be replaced. And this speed is growing. You cannot beat an exponential growth with a linear one, or even with just slightly slower growing exponential one.
A few hosts offer pay-as-you-go models for both storage, CPU usage and bandwidth so you can host anything you want and pay almost nothing or a lot, but still something fair. One I like a lot, targeting technical folk in particular (no wizards for anything: you get a shell account, a BSD jail, an SSH account, and move from there) is NearlyFreeSpeech.net. As the name implies they also have almost no content restriction, the only one being that it must be legal under US law.
I guess I should point out I have no relationship with them other than the fact I host a few Wordpress sites with them.
Where is the end product? Why isn't it available?
Because it costs several billion dollars to create the whole infrastructure needed to make any of these things at an industrial scale, while the infrastructure for Li-Ion one is already in place and can be cheaply adapted to new improvements on the already proven technology. Besides, Li-Ion has the "advantage" of forced obsolescence, requiring user to purchase new ones for their devices every few years.
Down the line it might be worth it to invest in these new technologies, particularly if some new technology appears that requires such massive power densities and speeds and there's huge demand for it, as was the case with electric cars and the new battery tech they require. Right now however the economics of scale, coupled with the potential lower long term profits, don't favor investing in it.
Oh, really? Do tell.
From the Books and Media section of the Vatican Observatory Foundation's website:
"Intelligent Life in the Universe: Catholic belief and the search for extraterrestrial life", Br. Guy Consolmagno, SJ
Originally published by the Catholic Truth Society in London, and long out of print, this pamphlet outlines what we know about the search for intelligent life, both how we search and why we search, and what it can mean for Catholics and our understanding of our faith.
Download Now (1.5MB PDF) Suggested Donation $5.00
Isn't that an Americanism, i.e. optional?
I've read originally, in handwriting, the punctuation used to come below the quotation mark, both forming what nowadays would be considered a single character. When people transitioned to print, there was no easy way to do that, so some began placing the punctuation before the quotation mark, others began placing the quotation mark before the punctuation, and over time either style became the standard in print. Most countries went for quotation-then-punctuation. The USA went for punctuation-then-quotation. And that's it. There's no right or wrong option there, just an arbitrary usage that eventually became normative.
By the way, if we were to do it "right", as in, to become historically accurate, we should ask the Unicode Consortium to provide us ligature version of the different end-quotation marks with the different punctuations available, then have word processors replace them when typed, as they sometimes do when you type three dots and those get replaced by the single ellipsis symbol. Maybe those already exist? After all, there's no technological reason for keeping them separate anymore.
In none of which you'd end a sentence with a preposition.
Yes, you do. This has been a standard feature of English language for centuries, until prescriptive grammarians hell bent on adapting English to Latin began saying it shouldn't be done. Ignore that nonsense. Ending sentences with prepositions is one of the beautiful features of English, and one I, as an English as second language speaker, use as much as I can, as it provides for compact sentences that remain fully intelligible.
Yes, I was referring to my previous quote. Thanks for finding it, I wouldn't have been able to find it on my own.
To elaborate: both my old quote and my previous answer don't contradict each other. "Low speed, low memory, low power, battery-based devices" are one of the "cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources". In other words, my old quote ("case in which...") is a set, of which my previous answer ("low speed, low memory...") is a subset. And "smartphones" is a subset of "low speed, low memory...".
Ah! And I forgot to mention! I have an old EeePC, the first one, 600 MHz CPU version, running a trimmed down version of Windows XP SP-3. In it I also use hosts based ad blocking by means of Spybot S&D 1.6.2 and SpywareBlaster hosts blocking. I haven't powered up that machine in about two years though, so it's most certainly outdated.
Therefore, as you can see, I'm consistent in my opinions, and also truthful to my word.
Can you please provide the research links? I'm certainly interested.