trprog

There is nothing uniquely American about extreme aggression towards people holding differing views. Although the current state of American society isn't great it can get so so much worse. A couple of examples.

1) The Cultural Revolution (China) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

Several hundred thousand to maybe a few million people were killed, often at the hands of angry mobs, for not being the right kind of communist, for not being communist enough or for just not being friends with the right people. A person could be accused by someone who didn't like them with zero evidence of any wrongdoing and still the victim would lose their home, all of the belongings and potentially their life. This lasted from the mid 60 until the mid 70s.

2) Something current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Saudi_Arabia

Religious minorities do not have the right to practice their religion. Non-Muslim propagation is banned, and conversion from Islam to another religion is punishable by death

teenagers are handed an electronic doll to care for for a day or two

Not surprised this had the opposite effect. It completely misses what is, in my opinion, one of the most dramatic aspects of being a parent. It doesn't end until you die.

Many parents have a baby that destroys the parent's sleep schedule for so long that it feels like it will never end. Then there is worrying about your child reaching important feeling development milestones, worrying about your child's ability to make friends and to survive bullies, where will they go to school? "how can those shoes be too small? We just bought them!" etc etc. A child is a never ending stream of things to worry about.

Any bozo who has been provided with the most basic baby care instruction can take care of a baby for 48 hours. Simply knowing that there is a fixed period in time at which it is over makes it manageable.

You are thinking of the problem in a sciencey, evidence based way. In particular for illiterate, uneducated people there is often a huge weight given to superstition and traditional/existing ways of doing things even in the face of evidence.

It is a surprisingly hard nut to crack, sometimes even among literate educated people. If it weren't a lot of religious extremism and bigotry would not exist.

Of course it would be simpler and easier but who is going to pay for it?

Cambodia is a nation of around 15 million people and a large proportion of them are affected by iron deficiency. You are talking about trying to get skillets/ingots into the hands of hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions.

Even cutting the cost of each item by $1 reduces the overall cost to either the organization(s) running the program or the poor people of Cambodia by hundreds of thousands of dollars. The organizations running this program and the poor of Cambodia aren't sitting on an infinite pot of money.

So a company pays a higher cost - but only has to deal with one contract, which saves them effort elsewhere.

They have fewer contracts at any given time but also the contracts can last longer.

If I directly hire people to clean an office, when they don't want to do it anymore I need to find other people to do it. Selecting people, negotiating, getting payments set up with accounting etc. Its a distraction from more important stuff so I want to do this as rarely as possible.

If I hire a company/agency/middleman they can replace people without me having to even be aware its happening. At the point "keep the office clean" is essentially solved. Its possible I will never need to think about office cleaning ever again and I can get on with running my business.

That's no way to witch hunt.

Why not both? A possible timeline...

Machines replace lots of humans meaning the permanent disappearance of a large number of jobs.

Wages fall as competition for the available jobs increases.

Social services are slashed to reduce government expenditure.

Those still able to find work cling to their job despite falling salaries virtually until death for fear of having to join the vast sea of unemployed people struggling to survive.

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I am not necessarily suggesting that this is probable however mass unemployment due to automation and people working well into old age are in no way mutually exclusive.

In developing countries you are generally dealing with a user pays medical system. So they don't care if you require extensive medical care as you pay for it.

But I guess it's easy to erroneously conflate Apple's device security with iCloud security.

You might be overthinking it. I get the feeling that many people think of "online" as some sort of magical place where they are shielded from the consequences of their own behavior.

As they say, if you owe the bank $100 you have a problem. If you owe the bank $100 million the bank has a problem.

The statement says the band members were told they did not have to acquire work visas because they “were in no way going to earn money from it or receive any form of payment.”

“They confiscated our cellphones and we were denied the possibility of contacting our families and loved ones,” the statement reads. “Around 10:30 p.m., two prison officers frisked us, handcuffed us and brought us to jail in a police car. We spent the night in jail and had been escorted there as though we were three criminals.”

Unnecessarily heavy handed for what sounds like a simple misunderstanding.

The control agents who did a quick check on the concerts we informed them of noticed that two of the venues were asking for entry fees and this was enough to convince them that we needed work visas

Pretty thin evidence of any wrong doing on the part of the three individuals involved. Someone else is getting paid so you need a work visa, enjoy your night in jail.

It won't grow for me

It will depend on your specific fund but the funds already in there should be invested in some way. If they aren't doing a terrible job the money will grow even without you putting more in.

Super funds only make sense when you have more people paying into them than withdrawing.

It feels a bit like you might be confusing the difference between a pension fund and a super fund. A super fund only pays out to you what you put in (plus hopefully profits from having your money invested). Provided the fees they charge cover the fund's running costs it doesn't matter if there are more people withdrawing than paying in. You only get your own money back, they aren't a ponzi scheme where old investors are paid out with money from new investors.

Super funds being a business still need to make a profit to pay investors, wages, brokers, and building associated costs and lawyers

You might want to research some low cost funds. There are lots but as a starting point https://www.ingdirect.com.au/rates-and-fees/superannuation-f... This sort of thing will likely cost you much less than whatever you accountant is charging you to oversee your self managed fund.

Although you cannot access the superannuation fund until you turn 80

This is incorrect. You can access your super from 65 no matter what. You can also access it earlier under some specific circumstances.

https://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/super/accessing-your-supe...

The first thing you learn about US visa is that it doesn't guarantee US admission

It is worth noting that this is true of every country. A visa does not guarantee entry. Your entry is ultimately at the discretion of the immigration/border officers.

Firing for mistakes can make sense in the context of a small company that has to pay enough to rectify the mistake that it significantly impacts the budget. If this cost needs to be recouped, it is only fair that it be recouped from the salary preserved by terminating the responsible party.

What was the fired person doing? Presumably they were performing required work otherwise the company wouldn't have been paying them in the first place.

That means you know need to pay to replace which costs more than keeping an existing employee. Or you could divide their responsibilities among the remaining employees but if you thought you could do that you would have already laid them off without waiting for them to mess something up.

heh, fair point. Command economy advocates aside nobody is saying the free market sucks :)

That is until the free market goes against what I want. Then the free market sucks!

I'm not sure anyone is saying that the free market sucks. People are saying that there is no free market in some sectors and that, in the absence of a reasonably efficient free market, the least worst alternative is regulation.

This science branch seems to attract charlatans.

It seems like it is incredibly difficult to perform conclusive research around nutrition, human growth etc without violating a bunch of ethical standards. The relative inability to perform research that comes to solid conclusions combined with the fact that food is something that people make purchasing decisions around every day (ie there are lots of $'s involved) creates huge scope for dubious ideas and ethically dubious businesses to thrive.

Anyone who doesn't own a mobile/cell phone?

I don't really know what the job market is there for software development though

There is a lot more work in Glasgow it seems. We are considering moving and I get the odd email from some Scottish recruiters I spoke too. Thus far I think virtually 100% of the jobs they have sent my way have been based in Glasgow.

prospect buys your product/service- success!

I suspect tying payments to actual user actions, in particularly the user buying something, is the best solution. Affiliate marketing essentially. Its easy to verify and very tough to profitably game so the company running the ads can pay their ad network/publishers/marketing staff with confidence.

Ultimately the advertiser doesn't really care how many impressions (or whatever) they get. They care how many people buy their thing or take some specified action.

I suspect the big roadblock is that some ad networks, publishers and marketeers don't particularly want there to be a concrete ungameable metric that requires them to produce ads that actually move product. If you are counting views or clicks it is easier to look like you are succeeding than if you are only counting people who actually get their wallet out.

this man had kept this skull he'd found in a cave and then took it across the world

It still had dirt inside of it

This is probably because I am Australian but this jumped out at me. Australia is free of many parasites, pests, diseases etc that are common in the rest of the world. This is maintained by very strict border controls.

The idea of anyone transporting some random object containing dirt into the country and not having customs officers through a fit is a shock.

I don't like this guy.

Why?

Similarly, the complete removal from the earth of nuclear weapons could potentially make the world much more dangerous. Without the threat of nuclear annihilation conventional war between large nations becomes more conceivable.

It would take more time than a nuclear exchange but it is possible to inflict comparable levels of destruction through conventional warfare if you have multiple nations sending millions of humans into battle as part of a war that drags on.

Don't diabetics already have testing tech that works off tiny pinpricks?

Yep. Labs can do more comprehensive tests that some diabetics get done periodically but home testing kits work via a finger prick.

Although the medium is new the idea of publishing stuff that misrepresents other people's position is nothing new. Here is a relatively modern example from the very early 20th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of...

And although the term has a very tinfoil hat connotation "false flag operations" have also been a thing for millennia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag Even young children understand the logic of "I will do a thing and try to make it look like someone else did it."

But it also creates an environment where you can't ever actually know what any group thinks.

You never could really. At best you could get a vague approximation that was hopefully not inaccurate in any way that would bite you in the ass.

Its all about spending your energy preparing for more likely damaging events. In Australia little attention gets paid to earthquakes but fire safety standards and preparation are no joke, especially in the country.

Maintaining fire breaks and doing controlled burns are a big part of life for a lot of country people. Its not entirely uncommon for people to have backup generators and a pump specifically so they can still pump water in the event of a fire and power has been lost. Many homes that are surrounded by bush sit on their own little island of barren ground that has been cleared of virtually all vegetation.

It freaks out me out seeing TV shows from the US in particular where they have houses surrounded by trees with trees literally hanging over the house. The road leading out also has a beautiful canopy of trees right against the side of the road. They look like deathtraps to me but presumably they don't live in a walk-in tinderbox like some parts of Australia.

I'm not sure about cheap labor

Cheap labor is possibly relevant. Salaries and the cost of living are dramatically lower in Malaysia so apparently large numbers of Malaysians work in Singapore, often illegally, while essentially commuting from Malaysia.

Having a large pool of cheap possibly undocumented labor would certainly seem to make getting repetitive unskilled tasks done easier and cheaper.

Unless they are in a soundproof room somewhere you still have the problem of background noise coming through the speakers. One of the great benefits of automated or prerecorded messages is that they have no background noise.