chimi

Companies are people, legally speaking, but I see your point. See ours: Imagine yourself as a company and the same debt equation applies.

Companies, like you, need tools to produce goods and maintain their operations. You, if you're a programmer, need a computer. You don't have $1000 to buy one, but you have a credit card. You know, you can bill your hours out at say, $100/hr writing code. You need to write code for 10 hours to pay for the machine, but you don't have $1000 to buy the machine.

So you put $1000 on a credit card at 20% interest, buy the computer and then bill 100 hours on it @ $100 / hr = $10,000 in just one month.

You incurred a little bit of debt, bought something worth a lot, but worth a lot more to you because you can leverage that tool to make more money than it cost to buy the tool.

Think of debt as leverage. It's a little bit of money pressing down on a lever to lift more money into your pocket.

If you only use that leverage to buy assets that help you make money (fairly easy) or increase in value at a rate greater than the interest rate (difficult, risky, speculative), then your net worth will continue to grow.

That college degree in a practical field like engineering is an asset because you will leverage it to earn more money over your lifetime than you would without that degree. Compare this to a degree in the proverbial "basket weaving." You, in your lifetime, will never weave $400,000 worth of baskets you'd need to pay for that University of Chicago degree. That degree is a liability that will follow you, perhaps your entire life and might make your life worse than it would be had you never gotten it at all. You'll resent that degree so much you refuse to work because every penny goes to some bank that sold you a worthless piece of paper for $400,000.

That's not what Wikipedia says [1]:

> During the Great Depression, New York had as many as 30,000 cab drivers. With more drivers than passengers, cab drivers were working longer hours, which led to growing public concern over the maintenance and mechanical integrity of taxi vehicles.

Have you re-written history to support Uber's lawlessness?

If the reality is the law was created to protect passengers, then Uber is actually repeating the same mistakes of history. People are hurt. Laws are passed. People are less hurt. People forget why the law was passed. People break the law. People get hurt again. Same thing as the great depression itself, which caused a glut of cabs and then after the 2008 crash, Uber saves the day by doing exactly the same thing: Creating too many cabs such that each cab doesn't make enough money anymore and consumers are at risk and if cars weren't built so much better now than the 1930's perhaps even more so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City#1930...

Edit: I see arby's link below. I can see how violence contributed to the medallion system. I still think the use of law in that case is justified to quell the unrest. Yes, perhaps we could have put the violent cabbies in jail too, but would that be better for society than regulation designed to balance the supply / demand curve?

Uber has upset that balance and now we have to write a bunch more laws to regulate Uber, which just seems like a step backwards for those doomed to repeat history.

Debt as an investment is fine. If you are investing in your future with your education, okay, but that requires the education be practical. It must have a value greater than its cost. That is not true for most education and thus we are not investing in our future as a society with this debt.

I'd rather the debt we incur as a society be spent on infrastructure and engineers than wicker baskets. Wicker baskets don't last very long. Roads and bridges do. Engineers do.

Throughout history, every time loans are invented to pay for something, the price skyrockets. House, Cars, Education... except credit cards. What credit cards did is flatten the salary curve, filling the gap between where salaries should be if they increased as much or more than inflation and the cost of living, with debt.

Debt is a powerful tool when used correctly, but most people are unskilled in tool use, financial equations and themselves thus, debt is a Market for Lemons.

Consumers do not know what they are buying. They are buying cash and paying for it with future income.

People are generally more optimistic about their futures and irrationally excited about what they consume.

The banks have been allowed to sell cash with impunity. We have to stop that. We're just cooking the books as an entire society.

Global Dimming is caused by pollution emitted into the air. This has caused a decline in the Pan Evaporation rate. Meaning, less water is evaporating now than decades prior.

My concern is, if we stop polluting the environment and the global dimming is stopped, then climate change will get much worse.

Global Dimming might explain why the climate hasn't changed as much as some would expect.

How is this different from Jira, or remote worker software that periodically captures your screen to be sure you're actually writing code and not grabbing a coffee?

The amount of surveillance I've seen lately is scary. We had a new policy come down from on-high that said we can't bring laptops to meetings anymore because whatever the folks upstairs were using to track us said there were too many emails being sent by people who were scheduled in outlook as being in a meeting.

I'm required to go to these pointless meetings and also required to get all my points done by sprint close, almost always requiring lots of overtime, that I can't track. I have to fill out timesheets, but I can't put more than 8 hours a day even though I work 14, but yet if I'm out of the office for half a day for a dentist appointment, I can only report 4 hours even though I skip lunch almost every day to rework some story the BA's got wrong because they didn't really care what the business wanted.

And if we don't meet the sprint deadline, all hell breaks loose and the bosses ask why the developers are losing productivity when the system is 1000x bigger now but you require us to put the same points on stories as when there was no code written, no other systems to integrate with, no regression tests to execute. And don't even think about working on automated testing because that's not a deliverable. No, you need to retest those 100 scenarios manually. Then the business says, "Oh wait, we forgot about this scenario." Recode, Retest, Re-architect the system to track more data, rebuild all the forms, reports, audit logs, on and on...

But I have to care and all the mistakes made up stream from me are on my back to solve and I don't even get to record how long it actually takes?

Frankly, if you're waiting my table and I need more water, you should bring me more water.

If surveillance helped me meet my customer demands better, then by all means, watch me like a hawk. If it's just there as automated paperwork for the project manager then buzz off.

I never created an account there. I tried a couple times to add a comment or answer a question or ask a question and everything I wanted to do required more points than I had. I had no time or interest in building cred, just so I could help someone out or get help.

All the industries are competing to be the one by which you display your worth to society. The order as I see it is: House, Car, Clothes, Phone. Jewelry goes in there somewhere.

Each of these products is trying to convince you of their value, excess value really, so you will spend your money on them, yet the expense of the product isn't worth much. You need a house to protect you from the weather and other people. After having done that, the rest is extravagance. Jewelry is absolutely no value. If you can call, text, and browse the internet, you're good. If a car gets you from A to B and doesn't need a lot of maintenance, that's sufficient.

I remember a Sex in the City scene where Carrie was talking about her $40,000 worth of shoes.

Beyond providing the basics, these products aren't worth more except for their display of wealth.

Meanwhile, we destroy the planet a little more each day to prove we are worth mating.

You'd think the "commit suicide" lesson would just be "perform any of the prior taught skills not well enough."

Imagine if you see all transactions made with this $100 bill.

What do you do with a boss, who, when you aren't submissive responds with, "You like your job here, right?"

Okay, now I get it. I missed that part of the article. That's the arrogance. I like the ideas in a lot of these articles, I just don't have time to read them all. I miss the old days of tldr's.

That's almost worse because the videos they are showing you are ones the general masses have clicked on and gotten sucked into.

i did the same! I had to explicitly search for videos and click from there.

I also fixed the video in place so I could scroll through comments of howto videos to see if any of the commenters had corrections or improvements to the methodologies without losing the video content itself. It does that on mobile by default, but not on a desktop.

I get similar videos recommended to me on computers I've never watched similar videos on before. They track you by more than your computer. I've had videos recommended to me on my computer that were interests of friends who had visited me at my house and watched youtube on their phones and the same has happened when I went to their house. I would be recommended videos within their set of interests.

You really have no control over what google knows about you or who they think you are. you can't change browsers, computers, or even your location to get away from them.

My understanding is that the Anthropocene is definable because human gas emissions have created a visible layer in the rock strata that will be evident for millions of years. Geological time from now, there will be a black line in the rocks that will include the toxic chemicals coming from our industrial processes and tail pipes.

By some back of the napkin calculations I did once, I found that a couple billion years is enough for the tectonic plates to have completely recycled themselves into the mantle, erasing any structures built on them.

> They might cause some significant harm to their sanity.

Is that possible?

The drug counselor at my college, when asked by someone in the audience at a presentation he was giving about drug history, which drug would be the least harmful to use if someone wanted to, said immediately, "LSD."

A collective gasp was let out by the crowd, especially considering he'd just said earlier it would take smoking 15 pounds of marijuana in 30 minutes to OD on it. That seemed pretty darn safe.

If any of the Shark folks are reading, I'm looking for a remote job. I have an ILife robot and tell my friends all the time about features I'll be implementing into it with my own hacks just like the ones iRobot is suing you for -- and some that are even better.

Except for perhaps the automatic dust bin emptying, these "features" should all be firmware upgrades customers get for free with hardware they have already bought and could implement themselves if iRobot would treat their hardware like the computer that it is with software that can be modified and loaded onto it.

I should be able to do that myself, but you want me to have to buy more hardware from you at an even higher price than the existing robot I already have.

If I want to add software to my phone or my laptop or my desktop computer, I don't have to buy a new phone.

Your robot is supposed to be helping me clean up the world, not create more junk just because you don't want to let me upload new software to something I already own and is just fine.

Your robots not being able to remember where they left off before the bin was full just goes to show you aren't innovative enough. It's an obvious feature. No one thinks it makes sense to have to retrace steps you've already made and only get to go farther on the next go around because the bin didn't get too full this time.

This is absurd. Using our courts of law to distract your competition is an abuse of our justice system.

If you want to win the robot war, do your jobs better -- don't make the courts do your dirty work.

I think intent matters a lot. If you lie to me to take something from me because you want it, that's worse than lying to me in order to prevent me from going somewhere you know someone is waiting to take something from me.

I would never thank you for lying to me like a scammer would. I might thank you for lying to me like a parent would though.

Intent matters. Why you are lying to me is more important than the lie itself in my opinion.

It is legal to discriminate on IQ as long as you apply it to everyone equally.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-court-ruled-you-can-be-too-...

Stoicism seems to help me the most. Marcus Aurelius is my hero. Someone who had all the power in the world to indulge, yet said not me. I wish we had leaders like him today.

Says the research. In response to your point a few posts up about explaining correlations with IQ being the parents influence, IQ is also correlated to social mobility.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3248886/

"Childhood IQ and achieved education level were significantly and independently associated with upward mobility between the ages of 5 and 49-51 years. Only education was significantly associated (positively) with upward social mobility between 5 and 25 years, and only childhood IQ (again positively) with upward social mobility between 25 and 49-51 years. Childhood IQ was significantly negatively associated with downward social mobility. Adult height, childhood housing conditions, adverse events in childhood and sex were not significant determinants of upward or downward social mobility in this cohort."

The problem is, it's impossible to know if they are accurate without doing everything the computer was coded to do for you.

This is why Microsoft is the better long-term play: Backwards compatibility -- their commitment to the investment of labor. If you build your software on Apple, there almost certainly will come a point in the future where your code will cease to work.

Microsoft has made a commitment to backward compatibility. It's such a huge benefit. I have code that has continued to run, untouched, for decades. I don't have to upgrade my development environment. I don't have to buy a new laptop to run the latest xcode. I never have to worry that my years of investment into my own software platform will be worthless three years from now or require unknown amounts of recoding to work.

This is not true of Apple, Ruby, or almost any open source project.

I want to continue moving forward all the time. I loathe the requirement to go back and redo what I'd already done and works. It wastes my time, my money, and my confidence in my vendor.

I don't take it as an insult. I am angry, self-assured and righteous. You made a statement of fact.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it. It's very difficult to get across tone in written speech. It's what italics are for.

If I say something to myself in my head as I am typing it or just before and the word is emphasized when I say it to myself, then I use italics.

That's what they are for.

I didn't say he said they were inferior, I said he said they were so different that it's impossible to even communicate with them. You assumed.

And no, I don't look down on everyone else, but I certainly do look down on some. People who play zero sum games -- or worse. People who take from others with deception. Con artists. Scammers. Lots of corporations.

I don't think we are all the same. I don't think we are all equal.

I think we make choices and some people choose to make the world a better place and some people choose to make their world a better place at the expense of the world.

Instead of fighting against people like that, we reward them with national leadership positions and corporate leadership positions. We throw money at them, when we should throw them in jail.

you've already constructed that barrier between you and them in your language toward them and describing them as though they aren't you they are different from you, according to you.

You are saying you agree that all people are equal, except for people who think some people are more equal than others.

It seems to me from the article that it's exactly the way you frame people that is a detriment to us all working together to prevent us all from dying horrible deaths in a venus like environment of our own creation.

We are self-destructing precisely because we separate ourselves by ideology, geography, mythology, language.

We describe humans as a "cancer" on the planet, what is our chemotherapy? All humans aren't cancer. The meek will inherit the earth, or so it is said. The opposite of the meek are the corporations especially those like WeWork that grow fast in their own selfish benefit without benefiting the body.

We need a way to remove those cancerous humans without killing all humans.

There are no laws that say, "You are not allowed to serve yourself at the expense of the planet." Corporations used to be required to have a mandate of public good.

Is our capitalistic drive better for the planet? Is technology more harm than it is good? Are Luddites on to something?

It really isn't profitable to sacrifice yourself. We need to make it so that doing without is rewarded. We need to change our philosophy of good. The supercar driver gets mates more than the pedestrian on the sidewalk.

Peacocking works. It's bred into us. We have to overcome our biology. We have to intentionally evolve ourselves into a better species, a more conscious, rationally longterm thinking society. Not one that is rewarded on 90 days out, but one that is rewarded on 90 years out.

We almost need to eradicate DNA as the mechanism by which we propagate.

I don't know how we can fight against that. I suppose we are by not having children. In a way, we are almost too smart. I think at some point, IQ hurts our chances to have offspring and I wonder why that is?

It seems if intelligence was a good thing, then you'd be more likely to mate if you had more of it, but that's not what the statistics indicate.

You can be too smart for your own good. I think humans are too smart for their own good. They are only smart enough to cause trouble -- existential trouble.

This is pervasive in society right now. It's rampant in politics, advertising, dating... and it seems to be getting worse not better. It's almost like we don't have time to evaluate honesty. Politicians win, not because they will answer a question honestly, but because they will repeatedly deflect and they get away with it.

Why do we allow it?

You might also be interested then in Reactance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactance_(psychology) Another example is where a product is banned like phosphate containing detergents which causes the market to go out and buy it all up.