> For what it's worth, a lot of people like myself consider Snopes a source of leftist propo, not truth.
Is this more "reality has a known liberal bias" sarcasm? Or as you saying the entire concept of objective truth is leftist propaganda?
692 karma · joined June 24, 2014
Is this more "reality has a known liberal bias" sarcasm? Or as you saying the entire concept of objective truth is leftist propaganda?
If the bet turns sour, you close the fund. The idea is that you grow the fund and take your two and twenty while your bets are winning, and you keep your prior years' two and twenty after your fund collapses.
It's an example of Libertarian paradise syndrome; where you want all the comforts of modern civilization with none of the obligations.
This experiment has never been done, but I think we could probably agree on the outcome of this thought experiment: In the absence of any other social programs, the net effect of EITC would be higher employment and lower (employer paid) wages as the demand for labor is (somewhat) elastic, and employers and labor will settle on a lower clearing price for hourly labor at a higher employment level.
I also agree that many welfare programs have a negative impact on work and personal income, as many social services have cliffs that reduce a recipient's net income if their wage income goes over a certain amount. That's not necessarily bad; some people do not have the option of meaningful work, a problem that many think will be exacerbated by automation. If we start actually seeing the 42% unemployment rates that were recently promoted by Trump, then tying social services to income would be devastating.
You're going to need a citation for... employers seeking lower wages? And that these lower wages are subsidized by government benefits?
The citation would be nearly every company, ever. So start with Walmart and work your way down, I guess.
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/files/Taxpayers-and-Walm...
tl;dr: Taxpayers pay $5/hr in benefits to allow the employees of Walmart to be paid a wage under the poverty line.
== EDIT ==
You would agree that rent subsidies flow to landlords, and mortgage tax deductions flow to sellers, right? Why would you not understand that wage subsidies flow to employers?
You are absolutely right, in the absence of a reasonable minimum wage, this is exactly what happens.
The rule of law depends on the redistribution of wealth. Courts, public defenders, police, regulators, juries don't magically appear out of nowhere.
Therefore, it seems obvious that if you are absolutely opposed to the redistribution of wealth, you are therefore absolutely opposed to what most people would consider civilization: rule of law, education, public services, etc.
Do you agree that being part of a functional modern western civilization is impossible without the redistribution of wealth (paying taxes, serving on juries)?
The purpose of automation is humanitarian in the same way that politicians serve the needs of their constituents, and police protect their communities.
While I reap the positive benefits of all of the above, there are plenty of marginalized people who are harmed by exactly the same forces.
In the gap between theory and reality, there's a lot of misery.
Brilliant! I'm sure that startups will flourish in an environment where there is no functioning government. What I don't understand is why the movie Mad Max didn't show a vibrant startup community with flowing rivers of lattes and soylent, rather than the human misery that comes from the absence of rule of law, retirement, and health care.
Serious question, do you really want to live in a world devoid of "redistribution of wealth", where life is cheap, the working class is treated like disposable trash, and treatable illnesses are a death sentence?
What would it take to convince you that the wealthy contributing some of their riches back to society is the foundation for a functioning civilization?
I completely agree with you. I personally have a Netflix account, and do not subscribe to other services.
My point is that right now, today, this very instant in time, Netflix is not primarily differentiated on technology, but on having content that their subscribers want; that online video distribution is now a commodity.
Actually, the original success involved putting DVDs in mailboxes.
> I remember being astonished at watching a Netflix movie on my iPhone (when I was still an iPhone user) while riding a train in 2011'ish.
Right, but you're going to be equally astonished in 2017 if you don't get the same level of service from Prime Video, Hulu, HBO GO, YouTube Red, et. al. And in 2019 a YC company will offer a one-click media publishing company that will allow any random joe on the planet to publish a DRM-protected movie available through a world-wide CDN with a pay-per-view payment system.
In 2011 tech was a major differentiator, today not so much. Netflix is moving with the times, that's why they are offering original content instead of being content to provide a good platform to stream other people's IP.
> This answer is in the same category as "Actually, Google is an ads company". That is to say, it makes a plausible case but ultimately wrong.
https://qz.com/607378/were-live-charting-googles-first-alpha... (tl;dr: the overwhelming majority of google's revenue comes from ads)
Actually, they are a media company. Their "edge" is in content creation and licencing deals. They might have been first-to-market for mass-scale streaming, but streaming video technology is a commodity, and they know that they will live or die by the desirability of their media catalog.
> Netflix for example, is completely at the mercy of Amazon.
Amazon and Netflix were symbiotic for years, as Netflix was a headline corporate customer, and I'm sure they received preferential pricing. And given the quality of Netflix's engineering team, I would be very surprised if they don't have a plan to migrate by the expiration of their contract if necessary.
== gratuitous shilling below ==
For Christmas I got a new CPU/motherboard combo with a Samsung 960 EVO SSD, and it's ludicrously fast, decently cheap, and a noticeable improvement over my old (heh) SATA SSD.
http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/product/co...
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}Well, if you're going to try to build a mechanism to hold the mainstream media accountable, you'll really need to create a standard on when a summarization is inaccurate.
If the media was reporting on, "a ban on travelers from majority Muslim countries by a president who has promised his supporters a ban on Muslims" would that still be misleading? And if opponents of the ban called it a "Muslim ban", would media outlets be allowed to report on that fact?
For the record, I've seen NYT and BBC call this a "travel ban", "Trump's ban" and in quotes designed to indicate attribution "'Muslim ban'". All of these seem reasonable and factual.
Your thoughts?
== EDIT ==
A headline that reads simply "muslim ban" shouldn't be considered fake news (in my opinion), so long as it provides a full explanation of the ban and who is affected.
It is an editorializing title, but there's a massive difference between editorializing and fabrication. I believe calling something "fake news" should be reserved for publications that create falsehoods out of whole cloth. (e.g. "warehouse full of votes cast by illegal immigrants found")
New Jersey. But it's fairly universal behavior.
> Is there no place to report such behavior to? The manufacturer?
The manufacturer is at the mercy of the dealers. Do you really think it's in the best interests of auto manufacturers to have their customers bent over a barrel on surprise fees and gouged on maintenance? There have been a number of attempts for auto manufacturers to make things less shitty for customers (Scion, Saturn, etc.) but at the end of the day, these attempts were not in the dealer's interest, and failed.
Can confirm, agreed on a price, the dealer wanted $3,500 for a pinstripe at the last minute. Had to walk, went to another dealership 40 miles away, got an agreement on the original deal negotiated with the original dealer, new dealer didn't have the car in stock, so the car I wanted to buy in the first place was shipped 40 miles to the new dealer. And I watched the new dealer's salesman peeled off the $3,500 pinstripe with his fingers before I'd take possession of the car.
Then after all the paperwork was signed, and I handed over a check for the full purchase price of the car, the new dealer refused to hand over the keys until I paid a $500 etching fee, and the saleperson re-etched the VIN in the car windows over the top of the VIN already etched in the car windows.
Fuck dealers.
Eyeballing that case, it looks like it might have the length to accommodate a modern GPU, but it doesn't have the width for a double-slot GPU, much less any room for airflow across it.
> the general layout and airflow is great, and could easily be adapted for a different model with support for longer cards or even three way GPUs.
My problem with current ATX/ITX is that it was designed before PCI cards consumed more power and generated more heat than the CPU. An ideal solution would allow a 160+mm clearance on the obverse side of the GPU card (allowing the "wind tunnel" cooling system to be replaced with a tower cooler with 120mm fans, and a dedicated exhaust out the back of the case for each GPU.
It would require a redesign of motherboards, cases, and GPU cards, so I'm not holding my breath. I think it's more likely that at some point we'll see cases with integrated watercooling loops, and the user would simply plug in the CPU and GPU blocks.
Cooling a mini-itx board with a 14mm processor with <90W TDP is not a unsolved problem. But the standard ATX motherboard layout assumes most of the head will be generated by the processor, and that's simply not true today. A dual GPU setup for gaming or ML might generate 5 to 10 times the heat generated by the processor, and there's literally a couple centimeters for airflow between the two cards.
When I see an innovative design that maximizes airflow across the GPU(s), preferably one that involves removing the stock "windtunnel" cooler and replacing it with massive "tower" passive radiators and 3x 120mm temperature controlled case fans blowing cool air across them, then I'll be impressed. (note that this would require either a new motherboard design or using pci ribbon extenders)
If these guys can solve this problem, get buy-in from publishers, and provide revenue to support good journalism while solving the problem of needing many subscriptions to multiple news sites, perhaps they deserve their 30% vig.
But if they are successful, it's more likely that someone will come along, do the same thing, and only charge 2%.
Yes, that is exactly what we want them to do when faced with criminal activity within their organizations and a non-functioning whistleblower program.
> Does anyone else think this Snowden as a hero stuff is a bit much?
Given that he risked death or life imprisonment to expose criminal activity in the organization he (indirectly) worked for, then no, the "hero" stuff is not a bit much.
If someone is a hero for risking their lives on a battlefield on the other side of the planet to "protect our freedoms", someone should also be considered a hero for putting their life at risk to protect the freedom of the American people from tyranny.
Now, if you disagree, you could say that his life or freedom was never at risk (it was), or that the government programs weren't unconstitutional (they were unconstitutional), or that the whistleblower program was a working alternative (it wasn't). But as long as you accept the basic facts of the situation, you really should consider him a hero.
Property holders would feel the tax burden, decreasing the net revenue from rent, and decreasing property values.
Rents are already at "market rates", and property values adjust to reflect the return on renting property. There might be some short-term price fluctuations as property owners try to maintain their existing margins, but an efficient market for real estate will stabilize rents close to the existing prices. The real losers would be those who purchased real estate assets expecting a consistent future return.
cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act cough
That was purchased pretty cheaply, and industries affected by copyright(books, movies, music, software, software) are a decent chunk of the economy.
American governments are not capable of running efficient programs because to a zeroth approximation Americans keep electing politicians that not only promise that government can't do anything right, but also work to ensure it.