To extend the plumber analogy, prospective employers will frequently look for plumbers with specific experience in copper pipe, rigid PVC pipe, or flexible PEX pipe, as though fragmenting the plumbing space in this fashion has any bearing on whether or not the result will conform to building codes, ensure that all the drains and faucets work as expected, and generally solve any fluids transport problems that may come up without having to push the calendar to the right.
Most people look up the local business listings, pick anyone advertised as "plumber", and call to make a service appointment. Or they use a general contractor that already has a list of approved subs. Master plumbers don't have to answer little trick questions about brazing copper or about finding lead pipes in an old building. People somehow trust them to know what their job is, and do it.
Rarely, one might encounter an unreliable plumber. They might not get paid, and any other plumber is usually able to fix their botched jobs without hurting the budget much. Review sites exist to track building-trades business reputations.
But the analogy breaks, because no one trusts software and IT folks to do their jobs competently. The default assumption is that we are all know-nothing hacks who could destroy the company with one keystroke. All our knowledge is assumed to be tightly siloed, and does not transfer between similar technologies. C++ people can't do Rust or Go. Java people can't do C#. Desktop people can't do the cloud. Back-end people can't do UI. CMMI people can't be Agile.
Instacart also manages to "lose" the meat products out of our orders somewhere between store and front door. And all they do is refund the price of the items.
So then you have to go out to the grocery store yourself anyway.
I doubt that the 17% who quit were working in jobs that they liked.
If a employer's job requires a "work or die" sword of Damocles dangling over laborers' heads to be filled, perhaps it shouldn't exist.
The New Testament Bible aphorism from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," has been used by many to incentivize work, including John Smith of Jamestown colony and V.I. Lenin of the Soviet Union. It is an aphorism borne by a world of scarcity, where all available labor is not only required, but must also be allocated wisely. It isn't just "work or die", but "if you won't help, we all might die."
In a world of excess, wherein machines supply most of the labor required to produce the necessities, that becomes counterproductive. If everyone must work to eat, but no person can work as efficiently as a machine, and there isn't enough discretionary work to go around, then that game of economic musical chairs ends when someone starves because someone didn't want their hedges trimmed into topiary, or they didn't want to upgrade to the fused basalt railings on their luxury yacht. If the machine-owners can't spend the profits from their machines fast enough, people cannot afford to buy what the machines produce.
This may be a generational thing, but I prefer my workplaces to be for work, and my playgrounds to be for play, without blurring the lines between them.
Leaving work at 5 pm is the goal. Clock out. Go. Be free.
If I want a social club, it will be a separate organization. People staying at the office after hours is indicative of a toxic work culture (unless those folks always come in just as late on the other end of the workday). An effort to design a workplace as having the appearance of fun strikes me as disingenuous, at best, and at worst is a signal that the company is, as David Brent put it, "'aving a larf", at the expense of the investors.
Do not make your offices fun. Levity and gravitas can co-exist, but at work, the latter should have the greater weight.
They would still have to maintain it, but they wouldn't need to add features. If they coded it well enough in the first place, that could be one person putting in 8 hours a month on the highest-priority issues in the backlog.
EPUB is a container format. It's basically an encapsulated multi-page website with some metadata. The marginal effort for a web browser is unpacking the files with a ZIP library and deciding how going from chapter001.html to chapter002.html works inside the existing UI. If you don't want to think much about the latter, render each page exactly as if it were downloaded from an online website, and use the forward and back buttons to step along the built in reading order.
I actually wonder why all web browsers don't support it natively.
This makes no sense to me. EPUB is basically HTML in a ZIP container with mandatory included files. If you already have a full-blown web browser, and a ZIP library at hand, naively rendering EPUB pages by unzipping to temp files and tweaking the URI resolver is an easy addition. If you already have a full-blown web browser that already renders EPUB pages better than a lot of EPUB-specific reader programs, removing that support is doing work to reduce functionality.
Ultrasonic/cavitation humidifiers create water droplet mists without a heated element. A piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer membrane vibrates faster than the speed of sound in water, and cavitation bubbles form that throw mist droplets into the air when they implode at the surface.
Propylene glycol (0.042 Pa-s) and glycerin (1.412 Pa-s) are more viscous than water (0.001 Pa-s). But glycerol is essentially non-volatile below 310K, and the vapor pressure of propylene glycol is less than 1% that of water. But if you're not depending on heat-vaporizing the carrier solution, you could add water to make it cold-mistable by ultrasonic cavitation. Both of the usual bases are miscible in water. Your cold-mist e-juice would not be compatible with regular vaporizers.
Maybe an impeller recirculating the fluid through a venturi could also lower the local pressure enough to help induce cavitation. I'm not sure how a laser would help, though.
Hospitals could also use hand controls made of metal with a high copper or silver content, or foot pedals. Maybe also autoclave-able interface boards, or disposable single-use plastic covers.
Too many medical devices are designed to be operated by fingers, rather than a foot. Touchscreens help the problem of hand-transferred contamination, but that is the wrong problem to fix. The problem is that hands are being forced to touch things unnecessarily. No one cares about what feet touch, because feet don't touch patients, and shoe-clad feet can step through a shallow disinfecting bath if necessary.
I'd rather have the AC system dehumidify outside air, then reheat it before blowing it on the inside of the windshield. Most car HVAC systems make AC and heat mutually exclusive.
Dry hot air to heat the windshield above the dew point avoids the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" choice of cold dry air to keep the inside from fogging up versus hot humid air to keep the outside from fogging up.
It's not a matter of temperature sensing on the windshield, but humidity sensing in the cabin air.
A really advanced Star Trek interface would use holo/replicator tech to materialize physical knobs, switches, and sliders in a user-defined configuration as they activated the console.
The "fire in a crowded theater" metaphor is always mentioned in a discussion of free speech. It's like Godwin's Law. I'm tired of it.
You can say anything. But if the thing you say carries consequences beyond the utterance, the freedom of speech does not immunize that sayer from assuming responsibility for those consequences.
It's not about what happens afterward. It's about not removing someone's voice, for fear of what they might say with it.
8chan is not required to support freedom of speech; it's not the government. It is itself free to pick and choose who is allowed to use its platform. My opinion is that it should not engage in content-based censorship, because no one should. Once you start doing that, there's no ethically clear place where the line between acceptable and unacceptable should lie. If you can make a case for banning neo-Nazis and Boko Haram and Sinaloa Cartel and such, you can also make a case for banning people who put pineapple on pizza or ketchup on hot dogs, with the argument variables set to different values.
Information is not the dangerous thing, nor misinformation. When someone is recruited and turned into a soldier via online image boards, using the exact same psychology as state-based militaries around the world--dehumanizing the xeno, and propagandizing them as an existential threat to the in-group identity tribe--that isn't the fault of the medium. It is the responsibility of the recruiter, the propagandist.
The rightful answer to speech with undesired consequences is not censorship, but counter-propaganda, and to some extent psychological hardening of the whole populace, by encouraging skepticism, critical thought, and formation of individual identity and self-image over group identities.
The former is a more active measure that unfortunately requires a bloody-minded relentlessness combined with unending tolerance for nonsense. Imagine a Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate that lasts literally forever, and the toll that would surely take on Nye. Now sub in a pants-on-head flat-earther time-cube woo-woo troll for Ham. No one person could take it. And that's why when these fools show up, the thought-terminating cliches have to be countered with thought-provoking dissent. If you see bullshit, call bullshit.
And the latter is something that probably has to happen in young people, coming with a side effect of making them less governable, and harder to convince of anything. Resistance to radicalization over the Internet would directly translate to more difficult military recruiting, drops in the strength of religious affiliations, and harder political campaigns. Not exactly popular among those loving god and country.
It's probably easier to just censor the things the state doesn't want people to say, and just trust that they will stop with the threshold line in the correct place.
That's just it. They require you to say how much it was worth when you got it.
But they really have no way to know whether you are lying. As a result, people lie about the value of traded goods, or art, or land properties, or unlisted financial instruments, to reduce the amount of income tax they purportedly owe. This is a major tax-evasion (not avoiding) and/or money-laundering loophole employed by the rich, especially when employing art and real estate, which may be justifiably non-comparable to similar goods due to uniqueness.
A law-obeying person would liquidate enough of the subjective-value goods to pay income tax at the maximum withholding rate at the time of receipt, and send that amount to the IRS at the end of the quarter, then claiming a refund from that amount with their return at the end of the year.
A practical, law-breaking person would just keep their mouth shut about it, and allow the IRS to claim it was income that had value, and only pay taxes on it (or dispute the amount demanded) if the IRS actually demanded an amount.
The enforcement on Bitcoin-holders is not to raise revenue in any meaningful sense. It is to discourage use of cryptocurrencies as a means of tax evasion--probably because middle-class people could make use of it. With respect to the means employed by the rich to evade and avoid taxes, an equivalent effort would likely return 1000 times greater rewards.
The problem there is that meat doesn't come in dollars; it comes in kilograms.
If you are paid in meat, you get something like 100 kg of pre-formed frozen ground beef patties. That doesn't have a dollar value unless you can find a buyer for it. Which is pretty easy to do if it's a commodity.
So let's try a more broken example. You get paid in sandstone triangular prisms machined to be 31 mm on the two longer sides, 19 mm on the short side, and 9mm in height. These then have a square(-ish) hole drilled in them, slightly off center, and then the sides are grooved, and the faces engraved. These triangles are called fubaar.
Fubaar have no fixed exchange rate with the dollar. For a job, you are paid 1000 fubaar. The value of a fubaar is very stable. One has been able to purchase the traditional formal attire of Barbazia for exactly 5 fubaar, for over 800 years. But you can't buy much with them on the international market except quuxfruit--which bruises easily, and smells like durian crossed with feet after four days.
At the end of the year, I could report that I earned 1000 fubaar since last year, and mail about 250 of them to the treasury. It's not my problem if the government can't convert them to dollars. They can go buy quuxfruit with it. But the treasury won't take anything but dollars. My only recourse is to say the fubaar represent $0 in income, because they really are essentially worth $0, having no inherent value.
The problem is that the gov't is levying taxes in dollars on income that is not dollars, and exporting the inconvenience of conversion to those least able to get a good conversion rate. Congress has the enumerated power to regulate the value of foreign coin. Why not use it? The Treasury also has the ability to accept foreign coin. For a good length of US history, much commerce was conducted in Spanish silver dollars, not US-minted coin. Those were acceptable for payment of taxes.
Removing the higher-taxed brackets, and the slow creep of inflation, which has pushed lower-earners into higher brackets, and made more people subject to AMT, has made income tax less progressive over time. The introduction and removal of tax-advantaged loopholes, that are only exploitable above a certain level of income, has made the progressiveness of the tax more volatile and harder to assess.
Focusing on how much the wealthy pay, as a proportion of all taxes paid, is rolling up the progressiveness of the tax code with the income inequalities that already exist. Why do you rob banks? That's where the money is. Why do you tax the rich? They're the ones who can afford to pay.
I really don't see why income tax can't be defined as a polynomial equation in a single variable (for gross income) and an additional constant, equal to median income for the previous year. With a floor function to obviate negative taxes.
The tax can be zero up to the median income, ramp up quickly to an inflection point at about 30% for the dollar at 3x median income, then increase at a decreasing rate to asymptotically approach 100% for infinite income. For the purposes of argument, I'll say that the dollar at 100000x median income would be taxed at 90%.
As long as it's a continuous and increasing function--after the first "median income" amount of one's income--every additional dollar of gross income is still a positive amount of additional net income. Only the winners pay. It's always worth something to increase your gross income. It could also be a viable strategy to reduce your own taxes by spending a lesser amount on increasing median income--i.e. pay your below-median workers more money.
It would not. An import tax reduces imports, but also reduces exports by a greater amount. An export tax on real estate transfers to foreign persons, cash or cash-equivalents, luxury goods, artwork, and technology--such as engineering documents and diagrams, manufacturing machinery, and firmware source code--would also not solve it, but it would bite a bigger chunk out of the problem.
Imports are paid for by exports. The US is currently paying for the manufacturing that it exported with dollars and documents. It could be paying with cars, and airplanes, and espresso machines, and in-sink garbage disposals, and novelty CNC lathes for engraving wooden pencils and chopsticks, and rapid refrigeration devices for single canned beverages, and maybe even non-imaginary 8K OLED television sets. If you make the specific exports that produce the most internal economic activity the cheapest way to pay for imports, increases in imports would encourage more exports.
If you're covering a trade deficit with cash, that impacts the same currency you use to conduct domestic trade--you're giving the trade partner leverage over your whole economy. What you really want to do is make a note spent in your own country buy far more than the same note spent elsewhere, so that the notes stay in the country, and the goods and services get exported instead. But you also want the rest of the world to have high demand for your currency, so that you can bring in a lot of imports, or go on lots of cheap tourist vacations. So devaluing your currency is not the best option.
But if you had, say, a 50% tax on foreign money transfers, if someone were to buy a $1 doodad from Elbonia, they would have to pay $2 for it in cash--$1 for the importer, and $1 for the tax. But they could also pay for it by purchasing a $1 doohickey locally and trading that for the $1 doodad, avoiding the tax, and keeping the $1 circulating in the domestic economy, and the Elbonian money circulating in Elbonia. Instead of taxing the trade itself, tax imbalanced trades and trade deficits.
Of course, any real-world implementation would be politicized to Hell and back, and chock full of loopholes, but it works just fine between imaginary countries.
Only to the extent that the relationship between race and culture is causative rather than correlative.
If forced at gunpoint to trust one person in my supply chain, I would instantly choose the Taiwanese-American in San Jose over the mainland-Chinese in Shenzhen, every time. Likewise, I think exactly the same Indian employee will be more productive if physically transplanted to Silicon Valley and surrounded by assimilated Indian-Americans than if set up in an office in Bangalore surrounded at all times by other Indians and Indian businesses. And equally likewise, I have noted a large difference in my own work productivity doing similar tasks under different employers, or even in different work groups under the same employer.
So it isn't even national culture, racial culture, or regional culture, but also corporate culture. Breaking news on the Obvious Channel: social apes found to be heavily influenced by their peers.
Ancestor post was obliquely referring to the oft-reported tendency of mainland-Chinese manufacturers to try to cheat their customers. They have been caught copying protected or trade-secret IP, counterfeiting, substituting cheaper out-of-spec parts, and inserting hidden hardware backdoors. Outside of China, engineering/construction companies tend to import Chinese subcontractors rather than use any local labor. That's all just PRC-Chinese business culture. If you pluck individual employees out of a Chinese firm, and hire them into a multinational based out of another country, they will be perfectly fine, aside from the slightly elevated possibility that PRC intelligence will aggressively recruit them as an asset to steal exploitable business secrets. If you can manage to pull everyone they care about out of the reach of the PRC, they will likely be a great investment for you.
Clearly, the national-political-business culture of mainland PRC China is hostile to businesses that have significant interests outside of China. The government there is racist, controlling, and mercantilist-protectionist, and the businesses with a physical presence have to fit in to that culture in order to exist, along with the traditional system of guanxi social capital. It makes them difficult to work with, but as long as the price is right, it's still worth it to try. You just don't give them access to any secrets, and make sure your QA department is full of no-nonsense hardasses. And as mentioned elsewhere in this topic, that means you may have to measure total mass and moment of inertia around multiple rotational axes in order to find any unauthorized modifications that might expose you to company-bankrupting liability in your business culture. You can't "trust, but verify"; you might just have to check every unit of every shipment.
As for culture culture--wushu martial arts, the action movies including it, silk, noodles, jadeite carvings, fine porcelain, traditional architecture, religions, herbalism, the woo-woo pseudo-religion attached to the medicine traditions, etc.--Chinese culture is indisputably great, especially considering that it's what's left after the PRC government tried to annihilate most of it as part of their revolution.
Pure water boils at 100 ºC, in an environment at standard temperature and pressure, with sufficient vapor bubble nucleation sites.
If you're a cook, you don't really need to know all that, because you either live up in the mountains (at lower pressure) or you don't. You either have hard water (with more dissolved ions) or you don't. And your pots are never scrubbed perfectly clean.
Suppose that in a few centuries, stairs will have to account for different numbers of legs, or wheels, or different foot types, or varying amounts of gravity, or track gauge, or crystal habit, or effect on convection and ventilation, or whether classical Earth-standard humans will ever be expected to use them.
If you smash a salt crystal with a hammer, all the resulting pieces end up with equal charges of anions and cations, so were any ionic bonds really broken?
That covalent bonds are broken seems obvious if you ditch the paper and cut through a sheet of long-chain polyethylene. The scissors don't just stop if they're about to break a polymer chain.
As another member of society, I think you need to rethink your position on what it means to be a burden on society.
You are not a burden just by not having a "productive job, paying your own way". You are a burden if you deny people their essential human dignity, by forcing them to conform to your vision of what they should be in order to eat. You are a burden if you take for yourself a surplus and do not use it to supply those with a dearth. You are a burden if you lie, cheat, steal, and assault. You are a burden if you do not respect and appreciate the hundreds of people working in harmony who helped each other to ensure you survived to adulthood with enough education to write your own opinions.
If all you do is sit on a couch with a cannabis vape and a game console, you're no burden to me. Some people keep house cats, and have no problem feeding them without getting much of anything in return. A "non-productive" human may yet do something. It might not be great, but could be at least marginally useful, if we allow them the time for their calling to mature and motivate them to action. Or they could just be a dud for their entire life. I don't really need to make a monkey dance in order to throw it a nut.
I don't particularly need you to take care of yourself. I may even be willing to pitch in with others to take care of you, on the conditions that you first do no harm to others, and then that you give back in whatever way you feel you are able. But that generosity only extends as far as what I think you may need. If you want something extra, you're going to need to give a little more before you get it.
We are way past the era of "no work; no eat" edicts. Thanks to our machines, we don't have a labor problem any more; we have an information problem. The systems in place for connecting creators with consumers, to everyone's mutual benefit, have never been entirely adequate, and haven't scaled very well to a world of 7.6 billion people.
Most people look up the local business listings, pick anyone advertised as "plumber", and call to make a service appointment. Or they use a general contractor that already has a list of approved subs. Master plumbers don't have to answer little trick questions about brazing copper or about finding lead pipes in an old building. People somehow trust them to know what their job is, and do it.
Rarely, one might encounter an unreliable plumber. They might not get paid, and any other plumber is usually able to fix their botched jobs without hurting the budget much. Review sites exist to track building-trades business reputations.
But the analogy breaks, because no one trusts software and IT folks to do their jobs competently. The default assumption is that we are all know-nothing hacks who could destroy the company with one keystroke. All our knowledge is assumed to be tightly siloed, and does not transfer between similar technologies. C++ people can't do Rust or Go. Java people can't do C#. Desktop people can't do the cloud. Back-end people can't do UI. CMMI people can't be Agile.
It's madness.