528 karma · joined April 13, 2012
> Tesla’s drop came as the German EV market in January grew more than 50 per cent year on year, pushing its market share down from 14 to 4 per cent.
So to answer your question, it seems like people don't mind buying new electric vehicles. They just have a problem with Tesla in particular.
> A Nordic official briefed on the investigation said conditions on the tanker were abysmal. “We’ve always gone out with the assumption that shadow fleet vessels are in bad shape,” the official said. “But this was even worse than we thought.”
The last thing Russia wants is to draw attention to the boats it's using to keep its economy afloat. These seamen really didn't know what they were doing.
Imagine you are trying to debug an issue with user creation.
In the last example, you would have to look up everywhere `createUser` is being called, and follow the code path through several different scattered files until you find your issue.
In the original code, you can simply look up `createUser` and you have the complete code flow in front of you.
But I'm not sure we can talk about a central point in Capital. Capital is a description of a system based on private commodity production, for exchange. It has many points, and one of them is the one you mention about the inevitable replacement of the capitalist mode of production with communism, and it comes at the end of Vol 1. Funnily enough, I believe it's the only point he asserts without arguments, and it's, as we know, thoroughly wrong.
If I had to highlight one important point from Capital, I think Marx's explanation for why the mass poverty of workers is an inescapable necessity for the capitalist mode of production would get my vote (chapters 4, 5, 6 of volume 1). It's an argument he was the first to develop, and that many people still refuse to acknowledge.
You are very right to point out that Capital does indeed predict many phenomena that we see today. In general, Capital holds up as a description of how the capitalist mode of production works.
> It is often said that the nature of Force itself is unknown and only its manifestation apprehended. But, in the first place, it may be replied, every article in the import of Force is the same as what is specified in the Expression: and the explanation of a phenomenon by a Force is a mere tautology. What is supposed to remain unknown, therefore, is really nothing but the empty form of reflection-into-self, by which alone the Force is distinguished from the Expression — and that form too is something familiar. It is a form that does not make the slightest addition to the content and to the law, which have to be discovered from the phenomenon alone. Another assurance always given is that to speak of forces implies no theory as to their nature: and that being so, it is impossible to see why the form of Force has been introduced into the sciences at all. In the second place the nature of Force is undoubtedly unknown: we are still without any necessity binding and connecting its content together in itself, as we are without necessity in the content, in so far as it is expressly limited and hence has its character by means of another thing outside it.
- G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, § 136
From the Wikipedia article about GDPR [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
Btw, unlike parent comment, I had a great experience with the restore and couldn't be happier with the decision to go with backblaze.
I think that the point of the article is to demonstrate that a country's power and wealth doesn't translate into good lives or more wealth for its citizens. The statistics you brought up demonstrate that very nicely too.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
OktoberFest London 2015 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/shopping-and-consumer-news/1...
Jabberwocky (I had tickets to this) http://www.nme.com/news/music/various-artists-2392-1244501
I remember at least another one which was cancelled on the day due to overcrowding which I can't seem to find right now.
It would be great if someone ported org mode out of emacs. I've tried the Sublime Text org mode package[0] but it's still too bare to be useful. Does anyone know of an alternative way to use it?
It's not Amazon I want to throw under the bus. They did what any rational player would do in their situation. What I want to throw under the bus is the situation itself, aka, how we organise our world.
You're very right about this, it was wrong of me to describe the purpose of the operation as being that of making someone rich. The purpose is to maximise profits for the employer – which can lead to extreme wealth or poverty, depending on your success. Besides, in order to appreciate how shit a situation is for someone it is irrelevant to know whether someone else is profiting from it. So thanks for pointing that out.
> Working a job tends to make people better off [...] It's strictly better for the homeless to have one more job opportunity, than one fewer.
I think this is wishful thinking. The article actually points out that this is not true: getting this job actually made the situation worse for a lot of them.
> but are you prepared to provide them yourself?
As a pauper myself, I am not. I don't have the resources to do so.
> to criticize those who do something positive
As I tried to show before, good intentions was not what motivated Amazon to offer jobs to these people. Also, leaving someone worse off than before is not what I would call a positive outcome. So this cannot be my position.
> By demonizing companies that offer jobs to poor people or the homeless,
I definitely did not mean to demonise Amazon. I pointed out in my last comment that this was a feature of our world, not a feature of a particular company. That's the saddest thing of this whole story: Amazon acted completely rationally, and it's easy to see how it almost had no choice but to use up these homeless people and then throw them away. Not because it's evil, but because that's what's required of it as a company. If Amazon stops churning out profits, it won't be a company for much longer.
> you're committing the fallacy called the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics.
Nitpick: what you call the Copenhagen Interpreation of Ethics is not a fallacy, there's no logic involved here since it relates to people's moral values. It's a phenomenon at best. But once again, the point was not to say that Amazon is evil; the point is to say this world is broken.
The reason Amazon hires any worker, homeless or not, is to extract a profit from their work. It's entirely possible that it offers the exact same conditions as other workers, but to describe it as benevolence is naive at best.
Amazon has a huge surge in orders during the christmas period, and it struggles to find enough workers to keep up with demand. This article makes it clear that this was a scheme aimed at coping with the seasonal surge. It has nothing to do with Amazon wanting to see homeless people better off.
I would just like to take a moment to wonder at the shitness of our world where the best we can do for those who have been deprived of everything is to ask them to break their backs so the extravagantly wealthy can make a bit more money.
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[1] This article has a pretty decent write-up of what it's like to work for Amazon: https://angryworkersworld.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/welcome-t...
Regarding c), I believe a communist would say that in a state-less and money-less society, it is not possible to appropriate wealth in the abstract (there are no means to do it). So it's not the motivation for profit that is abolished, it's the possibility of profit itself.
It sounds like Otto isn't aimed at devops people at all. It's aimed at the poor (in the material sense) developers who have to churn out 10 Wordpress sites a year to make a living wage and don't want to spend half their time figuring out how the permission system works.
I doubt it too. But it's not completely impossible: if a doubling of your employees salary means they increase their productivity three-fold, it might even increase your total profits (of course this depends on what the surplus rate was to begin with). The point is, since profits come from the surplus rate, which depends on productivity, increased salaries can in some cases lead to higher profits.