vfrogger
vfrogger on Hacker News
Apples to Oranges. Not even close to the same thing. If Physical Property were treated the same way as Intellectual Properties, no one would have any neighbors, because only the first person to build a house is allowed to own a house. Intellectual Property is all about who is allowed to replicate an existing work into additional instances of existence, where as Physical Property is all about not having your existential instance of a work taken from you.
I don't know, I don't believe Europe is really doing a bang up job of preventing suicide either, but I will admit that I don't know much about the situation, I'm just hypothesizing.
I just did a quick google search on church affiliation and suicide rates (to bring this back to the original article and my hypothesis), here's an interesting study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry on the topic:
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.16...
So at least one study seems to support the hypothesis (interesting that it also showed increased substance abuse, which was also discussed as one of the culprit's of the higher death rate for white men).
I fail to see how our primate ancestors ability to socialize outside of church somehow disproves that removing a large social component in modern American life could lead to less social support.
Because I'm suggesting that there might be less community support today than in the past because fewer people today attend church which historically has been a major source of social interaction within a community? I fail to see how this is a ridiculous hypothesis. It might not be true, but ridiculing someone for their hypothesis instead of addressing the hypothesis itself doesn't speak well to your own level of maturity.
I don't think you can tie this to economics alone. After all, blacks and hispanics have been feeling the economic pressures as well.
Suicide, drug use, and alcoholism have deeper cultural ties. I have no idea what those ties are, but it likely won't be fixed by a 4% annual increase in wages.
I can't help but wonder if perhaps this increase in self destructive behavior is due to an increase in secularism. Blacks and Hispanics are more religious than whites, and with that religiosity comes greater church attendance which likely brings greater community support (a generalization, I know, but I'm guessing that this is probably more true than not).
meh, if it's a single developer, asking native apps for every platform on a donation ware doesn't seem fair to me.
excellent point. I do suppose that being an accomplice to murder probably carries a less severe punishment than hiring a hitman and being the mastermind behind it. I'm not a big fan of the death penalty in general, and wish it wouldn't be used in today's society. But claiming that this guy is "innocent" seems to be a bit of a stretch to me. It's amazing how one-sided the articles I've read about this have been.
Thanks for the link. There's some VERY suspect behavior by this guy. Is it beyond a shadow of a doubt? I don't know, but lying that the boss was running an errand to another employee the morning after he was murdered certainly seems to align closer to the "hitman's" side of the story. Now couple that with another employee being told by the boss that he was going to run the hotel if this guy got fired for embezzlement, and you have a motive, the guy lying about his boss's whereabouts after the murder, and the hitman stating that they split $4000 taken from the bosses car, and they both had well over $1000 in cash their possession when they were arrested. Honestly, it sounds like the only evidence that this guy is innocent is that another convict said that the hitman bragged about "setting the guy up". That is one heck of a setup if true.
While I generally agree with you. I have seen adwords tests where extremely minute changes in wording caused statistically significant increases in conversion. The biggest had to do with a campaign with the word "seeds". For whatever reason, changing the plural seeds to a singular seed doubled conversion.
I don't understand why people say that IOS is more usable than android. Android phones tend to have a much better "phone" usability in my mind. For instance, I can go to my recent calls on an android device and just swipe to the right to send a text to someone. In IOS, I have to click the i icon to go to that contact, click send a message, then click the phone number. Or the built on "swype" keyboard on my old note 2 is much better than the default apple keyboard on my current i6+. Really, the only thing that I would call noticeably better on my iphone over my note 2 is the camera functionality.
This is great news, if only for the reason that there will be more Chris Farley GIF's on the internet.
Serious Slow Clap guys. To do this as a web app is really impressive. Great UI. Only recommendation would be to have a library of prebuilt commonly used components, similar to balsamiq, but I'm sure you are aware of them.
So you're saying this thing would have better results if it were built in Amsterdam :)
OK, I'll retract my statement about the study starting after the minimum wage was put in place, it looks like that isn't true. Furthermore, I will admit that the results have been replicated in other studies.
After researching more into the subject I have come to the following conclusion:
Raising Minimum Wages marginally has no effect on employment rates, only when the increase in pay can be tolerated by employers by absorbing the increased cost by increasing prices, reducing higher paid employee's wages, reducing employee turnover costs, and reducing profitability.
The end result is a smattering of higher priced goods, lower paid managers, and less incentive to start a business relying on low skilled workers. Also, you can throw in some lower job turnover as well, since the cost of losing your job is greater.
Of course, the next question is, when is "marginal", no longer "marginal"? Is it $15/hr, $20, $50? At some point, alternative methods to manual labor will become cheaper (such as dropping $100k upfront for a burger making robot). Once we hit that point, things will get ugly fast.
Perhaps the other studies were "better" and not as flawed in their methods (starting a study after the minimum wage was put in place to see if there was a decrease in employment leading up to the wage increase is a huge flaw, and then failing to address why NJ had so fewer employees per restaurant is another related big flaw). However, if these other studies take into consideration these components, they would be very interesting. However, if they are actual copies of the previous methodology, then I'm not interested in them.
A few years ago I actually read the experiment regarding the NJ fast food workers and the PA fast food workers shortly after NJ passed a minimum wage. I saw it consistently being brought up in conversations regarding minimum wage, which is very interesting to me for some reason.
So this is the report that was supposed to show that minimum wage increases don't affect employment rate (infact, they actually might improve it), however, when you look at the data presented within the study itself, you find that indeed, the NJ employment rate seemed to increase, and the PA employment rate seemed to decrease slightly. However, when you look at the number of employees per fast food restaurant, you'll see that the NJ restaurants started at a much lower number per restaurant than the PA restaurants, and then that employees per restaurant metric raises up by the end of the study but it never reaches the same number as the PA restaurants.
What that study actually seemed to show to me, is given the ample notice that business owners had about the minimum wage increase, they thinned out their workforce. Then the minimum wage increase came (the study actually started shortly after the increase had already been put in place, I believe), and the business owners realized they over thinned out the workforce, hired a few more people to get to the right number which was still less than the PA number with lower labor costs.
And since we don't exist in a vacuum, once a business owner realizes their store in NJ can run on 18 people, why should they run their store in PA with 20? It could probably make due with 19.
However, no one ever brings up the point that per restaurant, NJ never had as many employees as PA, essentially stating that PA was using more employees to accomplish the same job as NJ, which is exactly what you would expect to happen from an increase in labor cost.
Instead, everyone only focuses on the jobs added/lost during the short time of the study. It's like I'm the only person in the world who actually looked at the data in the report, instead of just reading the author's findings. Very Frustrating to consistently seeing this study shown as proof that minimum wage doesn't affect employment numbers.
I was really hoping this article was about how to get fireworks added back to the adobe creative suite.
It'd be nice to just embed the youtube video demoing the editor right on the homepage. I had no clue what your value proposition was until I clicked the learn more link (which was not obvious) and then clicked to watch the youtube video, and it's kind of lame that I have to leave your site to see why your site is good. Just my .02
I took one programming class my Freshman year in college, and dropped Computer Science as my major because even though it was an Intro to Programming class, I felt like I was the only person in the computer lab that was actually programming for the first time.
It infuriated me working for half a day on an assignment and then watching these other kids come into the lab, knock out the assignment in 20 minutes and laugh about how easy the assignment was.
After college, I taught myself how to build websites, which led to javascript, then PHP, then databases. Teaching myself on real world projects was enjoyable because there was no comparison to anyone next to me, it was just me trying to figure out how to get something to work. And when it worked, that felt great, not horrible because it took me 10 times as long as someone else.
I just finished the book "abundance" by Stephen H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. They discuss Vertical Farms at length, and many other future technologies that show immense promise at revolutionizing the world. Great Read. Highly Recommend.
I noticed a different flavor of this same logic with edited DVD's back in the 2000's. In Utah, there was a thriving edited DVD rental business during this time. Essentially, Mom and Pop shops would buy a DVD, take out the sex, language, and violence, and rent the edited version.
Hollywood complained that these companies were illegally making copies, so the mom and pop rental stores started to include the original copy as well with the edited copy, to prove that they were not making illegal copies.
Ultimately, all of these companies were put out of business because the courts ruled that just because you bought a DVD, you don't have the rights to modify it because it causes "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies". I find it interesting that the issue was harming the creative artistic expression, not financial at all, since, they were not pirating the films, so in truth, Hollywood was selling more DVD's since people who wouldn't normally watch a movie with 75 f-words in it, might actually watch the edited version.
Of course, in today's world, there's not many products that we can buy that did not have artistic expression involved in building that product. My house was artistically designed by an architect, if I don't like the kitchen, would I offend his artistic expression by remodeling? My phone was definitely "designed", but maybe I don't like showing off the apple logo on the back, so I put a cover on it, am I offending the artistic expression? If I'm not able to modify a product, do I really own it at all?
In college I had a sociology class where the professor had studied happiness in marriage. He ran a survey asking how happy people were with their marriage. 5 years later, he ran a follow up survey to people who said in the first survey that they were unhappy in their marriage and the only reason they would not get divorced was because of (children, religious doctrines, etc).
He was shocked to find, that of these marriages that were the least happy, something like 20% went ahead and got a divorce anyways, but, of the other 80%, their happiness scores were no different from the general population.
Moral of the story, perhaps people are a little too quick to pull the plug on a marriage.