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wildgift

357 karma · joined August 27, 2011

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wildgift··on White House predicts all truck, taxi, and delivery drivers will be wiped out
I wouldn't say it's a "whole other discussion" when the changes are causing the unemployment.

When globalization was pushed, the government passed laws to help retrain workers. Maybe it was just a band-aid, but, it was something.

Perhaps the government should intervene to direct some of the automation toward producing free housing.

wildgift··on White House predicts all truck, taxi, and delivery drivers will be wiped out
Secretaries still exist, but the job's divided into two broad categories. Receptionists, who don't make much, and executive secretaries who make middle class salaries. The latter do well because they assist people who are powerful. They generally need college-level writing skills, a diplomatic personality, and some management skills.
wildgift··on Walmart Labs: Why we run an open source program
True. I think most people want the lowest price for a specific branded product. They start off by deciding, more or less, on getting a certain level of perceived quality, and then finding low prices. The price is secondary to making the decision to purchase a product.

As far as making a "social statement" - buying most recognizable or branded products is a kind of social statement. If it weren't, we wouldn't have such a diverse selection of cars, clothes and laptops.

wildgift··on I Owe It All to Community College
Those are called "price controls."
wildgift··on I Owe It All to Community College
I think the answer is "sell the house and move somewhere cheaper."
wildgift··on I Owe It All to Community College
LOL, so true. I'm starting to get the same feeling about Georgists. They're in a bubble of their own making, in denial about their own reality, and prone to making up new definitions for common words, making it difficult to communicate. It makes me a little sad, because I'm sympathetic to their cause, and read a bunch of articles from their writers around fifteen years ago.
wildgift··on I Owe It All to Community College
At LATTC everyone knew about financial aid. It was the default situation. I haven't been there, but I've been to CC in a low income community, and the assumption was that you'd get financial aid. Being middle class, middle aged, and not qualifying, I had to quietly explain that my personal income was past the limit, etc. I didn't want to stick out.

The problem these schools have is related to people lying to get financial aid, and then dropping out, never to be heard from again. If you get rid of the price, and school is free, all this fraud would end. (The fraud would happen elsewhere in the system.)

wildgift··on I Owe It All to Community College
At the school my partner went to, LA Trade Tech, it seemed like most students got financial aid. There were multiple offices involved in doing all the paperwork involved (in a multi-story building, too). The school was located in an area where the household income was around $25k per year, and many people worked at the minimum wage. It seemed absurd to me that they had to jump through so many hoops to get a few hundred dollars of aid.
wildgift··on Software patents are crumbling, thanks to the Supreme Court
If a single wealthy person is, non-anonmously, going to be allowed to electioneer, that's actually the price that should be paid for restrictions on associations.

People can judge the message by the speaker. When billionaiare Meg Whitman ran for office, her ads were on every single commercial break. She still lost. People saw through her.

When you have a multitude of associations, you can't tell who is saying what, and it creates confusion.

wildgift··on Software patents are crumbling, thanks to the Supreme Court
The rules were limited to corporations, associations and unions. Individuals were not restricted in this type of speech. Citizens United was a nonprofit corporation.
wildgift··on Software patents are crumbling, thanks to the Supreme Court
The issue was who made the political speech and whether it was electioneering (promoting a candidate). Before CU, corporations, associations, and unions could not spend their money on buying ads or air time to do electioneering.

I think the point of this law was to control the effect of money on politics. If these independent expenditures (IEs) were restricted, then campaign spending would be done through the campaign.

Campaign donation limits would further decrease the influence of the wealthy and organizations on elections. Again, these limits exist specifically for this purpose.

These laws just dealt with the obvious: money has a huge influence on how much speech you have, and the only way to make speech more equal is to put restrictions on how much money you're allowed to spend on speech. The laws were limited to political speech during elections.

Furthermore, there is a distinction between personal and commercial speech and election speech, and election speech is more tightly regulated, and always has been. Our system is supposed to be one-person-one-vote, and likewise, the restrictions on speech are used to try and achieve one-person-one-voice in elections.

Citizens United was a bad decision because it extended the general personal free speech rights to election-related speech by corporations, associations, and unions.

It's led to the creation of associations that accept donations, and then produced electioneering materials and buy media as IEs.

I work for the AFL-CIO union, and the leaders at the national level happen to think that Citizens United was a bad decision, as well. They've issued statements about it.

wildgift··on Hallucinogen in ‘magic mushrooms’ might have helped smokers quit
The main problem with his posts is that he's equating opiate addiction with psilocybin use. These are two different drugs, and the latter is being used as part of smoking addiction therapy.

There's some irony to the fact that his anecdotes are about a nurse, who is someone who probably administers opiates as part of a pain treatment therapy.

wildgift··on Hallucinogen in ‘magic mushrooms’ might have helped smokers quit
As I understand it, things like schizophrenia are primarily hereditary, and the trauma pushes you over the edge. So, people with a family history of schizophrenia or related conditions shouldn't do these drugs.
wildgift··on Hallucinogen in ‘magic mushrooms’ might have helped smokers quit
If psilocybin can be used to get people to stop smoking, drinking, or using heroin, it could seriously reduce healthcare costs.

People in the drug underground use it to treat OCD and depression. I've heard of people saying they use it once or twice a year to "stop worrying so much" or "to get my head straight." What kind of addictive drug motivates people to want to break the law annually to take a drug just one time?

wildgift··on Hallucinogen in ‘magic mushrooms’ might have helped smokers quit
Also, this story is about treating addiction with psilocybin.

Perhaps it could be used to treat opiate addiction.

wildgift··on Gooey: Turn command line programs into GUI applications
I'm doing an application that runs scripts for a REST API. Using Django REST API to build the service.
wildgift··on Gooey: Turn command line programs into GUI applications
There are tools, at least on Unix, to add guis to command lines. gtkdialog and zenity are the ones I've seen.

You need to write a shell script that runs commands to display the gui, and then execute the command.

wildgift··on “In a typical year the OpenSSL project receives about US $2000 in donations”
They could join another nonprofit.
wildgift··on “In a typical year the OpenSSL project receives about US $2000 in donations”
I think it's a good idea. Cert prices vary, and there are reasons for it, and companies would rather pay for stability than save money.
wildgift··on A decentralized anonymous marketplace
I think the relationship is desirable, which is why some people will pay a higher price to have a relationship with a vendor, with the understanding that if s transaction goes wrong, the vendor won't balk at fixing the problem. There might also be an expectation that one party or other will extend credit for a few days.

In contrast, there are touch-and-go relationships all the time, like at convenience stores. You can't have the exchange without being present for the entire transaction, because neither party trusts the other.

wildgift··on The worst thing about CoffeeScript
This is also a problem with javascript. Javascript should do automatic variable shadowing but also throw a warning.
wildgift··on US Army Studying Replacing Thousands of Grunts with Robots
Mobile car bombs? Is that what these are, ultimately?
wildgift··on Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
What about "howto". There's already a vast culture of writing howto pages.

    howto curl
    howto cc
    howto network
wildgift··on Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
Yes. Geek culture isn't about being a bro. When I think about "bros" I think about guys who party, and then let someone else do the work. It's about power disguised as being carefree. Geek culture is about a kind of unification of mind and action. It's also about creativity within traditions.
wildgift··on Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
Also a Big Lebowsky reference.
wildgift··on Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
It's not that simple. I think it originated in surfer culture, as a kind of appropriation of Black American culture to call each other brother and sister. In the 90s, on the west coast, it was common among white hippies, deadheads and surfers to call each other "brah."

That said, I don't know where African Americans got it from, but labor unions used the terms brother and sister going back to their beginnings in the 1800s. So it may have been copied from that.

Anyway, I think it migrated from surfer culture to fratboy culture. There, it acquired a tinge of elitism and sexism, because... well, frats are elitist and sexist.

wildgift··on Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
I saw the name, and thought it was web pages for "bros". Right off the bat, that seemed like an idiotic idea. It's right up there with "let's make tv shows about white people."

Then when I read the short description, I wasn't impressed.

I read the page anyway. Again, interesting idea, but the joke was carried on in the example, and that pretty much killed it for me.

wildgift··on Bro pages: like man pages, but with examples only
I thought the name was stupid. "Bro" brings up a lot of negative stereotypes about guys.
wildgift··on How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
Please. I know activists like the Google bus protesters. I'd call them protest enthusiasts, and usually less than half work for professional activist outfits. Most have regular jobs and just love to protest.

The "astroturf" is fwd.us and peers.org are pure astroturf. You can't even get a political position out of them until their lobbyists have written the legislation and tried to insert it into some bill.

wildgift··on How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages
Rather than barriers - create talent tiers, and have professional associations control the tiers and education.
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