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Comment Re:That makes me MAD! (Score 5, Informative) 304

Google has the right to it, because the government signed a sixty year lease handing it to them to use as they see fit.

That being said, it won't be long until you start seeing JP style coffin hotels start springing up. The main problem with bay area housing and the lunacy surrounding it is NIMBYism at its worst - the majority of places will build high density to handle surging populations and rising rents, but the city fragmentation (the 'bay area' is at least 30 mostly independent cities all packed together each with its own muni code and rules and housing authority) means no significant high density housing will ever get approved (tons of projects are shot down because the locals want to 'protect their own property values', which is a codeword for 'we dont want poor people living near our homes').

So instead we get horrible sprawl, horrible commutes, and the price-out of the support service economy since nobody can afford to be a barista on the peninsula. Google's solution here is to straight up build a company town because mountain view wouldn't let em start building high density apartment blocks

Comment Re:Poor life decisions (Score 5, Informative) 366

I'm quite comfortably making it in the Bay in the low six, but I have a unique deal on rent and live out in the burbs. Rents in the city are going for absurd amounts - a two bed apartment in the city rents for almost 4k/mo. Raising a family in the bay area is nearly unaffordable - the huge costs in rent and property trickle through to everything else. Childcare costs are colossal - there are few child care centers in the bay and all are hugely expensive because the people who work in the centers are themselves paying obscene rent.

If I were to buy a home here, I'd probably put about 65% of my take home income towards it each month. I could afford it and pay for all my other expenses, but there'd be nothing left to put into savings, so the only 'saving' I'm doing is building home equity. That's not 'poor' but not normally a financial situation associated with people making six digit salaries.

Comment That's obvious as hell for Japanese stuff (Score 1) 36

Manga in particular doesn't get published in the US until large groups of fans and translation groups put together their own scanlations and publish them. As with the old piracy nonsense, the 'pirated sales' are nonexistent because the sales would never have happened anyway - what random US fan that isn't JP-literate would buy a JP published manga unless they had read at least some of it first? How do they read it prior to it being scanned and translated ("pirated")?

If it weren't for the original pirates passing around photocopied manga and horrible quality 5-time-copied TV rips of shows on VHS way back in the 80s and 90s, the market would barely exist in the US.

Comment Of course not (Score 2) 449

Computers have evolved into an indispensable part of day to day life, so it's very obvious that it would stop being 'cool'. The automobile was conceptually a very cool thing in the turn of the 19th century, but they're just cars now. I think the comment here highlights some of the jackassery inherent in the question:

I lamented that the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics, and that the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have.

This is the sort of complaining that has no place on a 'news for nerds' site - if you want it, build it. If you can't build it, don't bitch that others haven't done it as quickly as you wanted. I don't think OP submitter was the one working on the VR judder problem or the high density screen refresh problem or any of that. This sounds like a bunch of dipshit 'enthusiast' friends from the 80s that only ever dipped a toe in the industry and didn't actually end up building anything they wanted over the thirty years of their careers

Comment Re: A UBI can actually foster more jobs (Score 4, Informative) 917

Bureau of Labor Statistics. http://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepr...

It's been the largest year over year increase because the recession produced the lowest nadir in entrepreneurship since the Great Depression. We're only just now getting back to 2005 levels, and per-capita we're still not anywhere close to normal historical levels. On top of that, small business employment among these smaller firms is low because business expansion is inherently risky; many of these businesses are simply self-employed persons, which is why the employment numbers for small firms is extremely low vis a vis historical trend.

Comment Re: Question about U.B.I. (Score 2) 917

That's a question that has literal libraries worth of books and papers written about it. Lots of factors - women having careers, Millenials choosing to not marry or have kids, families only having one kid because they feel like they can only afford that one kid's college education, etc etc. Your guess is as good as mine.

Comment Re:Or how about recruiting people that we have? (Score 1) 917

I didn't mention outsourcing in any way. What I'm saying is that a UBI that provides a steady income (enough to avoid homelessness and starvation) would encourage entrepreneurship among those who would otherwise be stuck at some dead end 9-5 office job in order to pay for childcare and make their rent. The 'casino level risk' you're talking about is inherent with being an entrepreneur, and the idea of 'try, and if you fail, get up and try again' is a core value in American capitalism. A UBI helps people who don't have rich parents accomplish the 'get up and try again' part.

The people who would sit on their asses with a UBI are the same people who pretend to have autism and get social security disability checks, i.e. they would amount to nothing anyway, and obsessing over punishing them is pointless.

Comment Re:Question about U.B.I. (Score 2) 917

Human reproduction rates are trending downwards across the developed world (i.e. anywhere a UBI would be introduced) due to cultural factors and enormous expenditures involved with raising children. There's plenty of food and plenty of space available in most of the advanced world, yet the population of Europe is shrinking and the US is only growing slightly due to immigration.

Comment A UBI can actually foster more jobs (Score 5, Interesting) 917

Entrepreneurship is at a low (especially among Millenials) because of low consumer confidence - people are afraid for their financial security because of their job insecurity and are afraid to take risks, especially when their various insurances can be jeopardized and they have ever increasing rents and bills. This sticks people into dead end jobs.

There will be a portion of people who sit on their asses with UBI on the dole, but anyone with even a hint of drive will strike out on their own and try to hit it big with whatever business idea they've been cooking up, knowing that there's a UBI safety net under them if the business happens to fail. Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of a capitalist country and is the only way people can avoid being turned into wageslaves, and anything that encourages entrepreneurship can help keep business competition thriving. I have complete faith that the additional economic activity from people who would go for the gold will sharply outbalance the people who end up sitting on their asses, who quite frankly wouldn't have done much other than sit at their dead end job anyway.

Comment How long has Podesta's email been compromised? (Score 4, Insightful) 269

I'm surprised John Podesta hasn't been given a security audit by the campaign. Audit as in, replaced phone/email/computers with securely vetted stuff + had a security contractor audit and harden his accounts with better passwords/2factor/cleaning out cross referenced credentials.

Comment Most are warehouse employees (Score 1) 44

Relevant quote

>“If you look at non-ops related employees — essentially everyone else — that growth rate, while strong, is below our revenue growth rate, so we are seeing some leverage,” he said.

Outside of Seattle, Amazon resembles the backend of Wal-mart more than anything else.

Comment It's never been about the specific tech (Score 4, Insightful) 108

A bad ad network is a bad ad network, whether they're sending out flash units, html5 units, or putting up billboards on a highway overpass. A middleman injecting malware doesn't care what the underlying tech is, they care about if the network vets their shit on delivery.

Nobody with a brain thought HTML5 was 'more secure' than Flash in of itself.

Comment I had sympathy for Gawker until the trial details (Score 5, Interesting) 284

At a high level, sure, money shouldn't give you the ability to completely shut down voices you don't like.

But at the trial, Gawker seemed to both not take the trial seriously (the infamous 4 year old line) and simply treated it like another story they'd post to get clicks. Denton and Daulerio seemed to think they were above the entire fray until the judgment, at which point they turned the entire other way and started trying to rouse sympathy from their readership. They mishandled their own defense to the point of comedy and made the jury entirely unsympathetic. It's hard for me to think they didn't bring this on themselves.

I hope Deadspin and Jalopnik find new homes, there are some good writers for those two sites.

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