Stack Overflow's annual developer survey the most used operating system was Windows with 45.8% of respondents, and MacOS and Linux split the rest pretty evenly.
They still haven't fixed it. My partner works for the federal government. She was bumped up to a new pay scale and suddenly stopped being paid for 2 months. When she did start getting paid it was at the old level and she hasn't received the missing 2 months salary yet. She had to open three separate cases to 1) receive the missing pay, 2) have her pay scale updated in the system, and 3) receive the difference between her old salary and new salary for however long they continue to pay her at the old rate.
One of her coworkers hasn't been paid in almost 6 months.
"Working" in the political arena has a flexible meaning. They "work" in terms of, yes, they collect money.
However, they always collect way less money than the people who made the initial promises said, because the people who were making the promises always assume that if they tax wealth at 75%, their income will be 75% of the current tax base, at the time the wealth tax is proposed and/or passed. The problem is, if you make staying within your tax zone suddenly cost, say, literally 3 billion dollars (and that's the sort of thing we're talking about here), then you just gave the wealth a 3 billion dollar incentive to leave before your tax can come into effect, and the end result is the tax base is much smaller than was anticipated.
So they don't "work" in the sense that they will not collect anything near what the advocates promise they will, and they also chase the wealth away, which, for all the rhetoric about inequality and such, isn't necessarily a good thing for a polity. Generally when people want "equality", they want their wealth level to be raised, not to attain "equality" by lowering the average wealth level. Chasing, say, Jeff Bezos out of the country, along with whatever bits of Amazon he decides to take with him, is not going to be a net gain for the US, just as one example.
They also "work" in the sense that the Gini coefficient probably will indeed go down, so advocates can claim success. But it may not be what you were looking for.
(Also, for the record, I am neither particularly celebrating nor particularly condemning anything or anyone here. This is just how the incentives line up. You can't wish incentive structures away. Effective law takes incentives into account and harnesses them for the desired result. Generally, solving the Big Problems requires something other than the most obvious, direct approach, because there's a selection effect; if the most obvious, direct approach solved the problem, we wouldn't have it.)
> then you just gave the wealth a 3 billion dollar incentive to leave before your tax can come into effect
You can impose tax on leaving bigger than 3 billion dollars effectively removing leaving incentive.
Also you are assuming they are fluid and actually can leave and stay wealthy somewhere else, which is likely not the case for most of the wealth on the planet.
"You can impose tax on leaving bigger than 3 billion dollars effectively removing leaving incentive."
In the US, the country in question, you'd have some constitutional problems with that plan. That's a bad thing; you need this wealth confiscation to be clearly legal, because you have incentivized billions of dollars worth of legal expenditure to prevent it from happening. (There's those nasty incentives again.)
Also, it turns out that demonstrating to the entire world that you'll just take whatever you want, whenever you want, and punish anyone who tries to protect themselves from that, doesn't exactly incentivize a healthy business environment or encourage the kind of investment you need to create the wealth that you need to bring inequality down by bringing most people up. People need predictability to make plans for the future; this sort of thing extremely strongly incentivizes even shorter term planning than we sometimes get, because nobody knows whether you're going to come along and take most of their stuff tomorrow, or even retroactively. It's not a good plan to create a wealth-producing society.
It's really, really easy to "solve" the wealth inequality problem by simply destroying all (or almost all) wealth, everywhere. It's been done in several countries in the past century. It's not usually the solution people want when they're talking about wealth inequality... oh, they might take a small hit in spite if they knew it was really going to stick it to those "wealthy fat cats", but for the most part, people expect the end of "wealth inequality" to increase their own wealth, not destroy it.
"Also you are assuming they are fluid and actually can leave and stay wealthy somewhere else, which is likely not the case for most of the wealth on the planet."
It is the case for the sort of wealth we are talking about, though. Yes, you can indeed tax the lower and lower-middle classes very hard, because they tend to be unable to move. Not exactly a "wealth" tax anymore, though, is it? Billionaires can move wealth. After all, if we're talking a 75% confiscation rate, it's worth it to move overseas even if they take a 50% bath. Billions of dollars worth of incentives cover a lot of things.
You are sooo right. I hate when people make a promise to change a system by changing one variable and pretending that all the other related variables will not change at all. Tax the rich is just a soundbite. There are lots of ways to close tax loopholes. We need to raise taxes by creating the right incentives.
I know this is a hawkish view, but certain individuals have so much wealth and political influence that it's not so far fetched to consider them like a hostile sovereignty that has effective regulatory capture of the the countries they exist in. People generally don't like to be treated like serfs. The taxes will eventually stick, or there will be trouble.
It has nothing to do with whether or not the job is hard. I've worked retail, food service, and landscaping jobs through high school and university. I know those jobs aren't easy.
The difference is that those jobs require workers to be present throughout the day in order to get work done. As a software developer I could probably cut my hours per day and produce the same amount of output. As a waiter my productivity (and earnings) was dependent on customers showing up to the restaurant. If I only worked 6 hours instead of 8, or 4 days instead of 5, then I served fewer customers and earned fewer tips.
Do they? Retail is definitely subject to fairly predictable rush periods. All the while I was working at an electronics retailer, where my job was as much to educate or guide as sell, I wondered why we didn't have "sales hours" that were fully-staffed, and in between, some sort of remote assistance, where we would be on-call to help people out through video calls. When half your job is simply pointing people to items, why actually be there? And for the people who want to know about products, like the gentleman who wants to buy a full home theater set-up, shouldn't we be fresh and ready for them, not dragging after 8 hours of telling people where power cords are?
And, of course, we're paid the same or more, as we're making the company the same amount of money, if not more.
There is certainly room for innovation that makes sense for productivity AND for worker morale. But the people making the decisions are risk-averse and don't have to deal with the downsides of their heel-dragging.
There's an easy solution when workers are required to be present... don't make all the employees work at the same time. Need more hours of productivity? Hire more people.
Also, as a waiter, your wages should not be paid by the customers. Tips are bullshit, and the rest of the world knows this. You should be paid a fair hourly wage.
>There's an easy solution when workers are required to be present... don't make all the employees work at the same time. Need more hours of productivity? Hire more people.
And now you've increased overhead and labor costs for these companies significantly while reducing the pay of the average worker (are cashiers going salary now?) I don't see how that works for anyone.
> No one has said anything about harassing Blizzard employees. What on Earth are you talking about?
> Too bad. They should be dreading this event. Blizzard have publicly fucked up in a very big way, and now the people that represent Blizzard are going to have to deal with that.
What do you think the Blizzard employees are going to "have to deal with" if not harassment at BlizzCon?
Why would it be harassment? I imagine they're going to have to deal with protests. They're going to have to deal with how to manage the many people who show up to the event who are visibly pro-Hong Kong without damaging their Chinese interests. They will have to deal with difficult questions, interrupted talks and a hostile audience.
None of this is harassment. You can't just use the word "harassment" any time someone challenges you or says something you don't like.
> What do you think the Blizzard employees are going to "have to deal with" if not harassment at BlizzCon?
They will have to deal with negative publicity and people not liking their events, and refusing to buy their games, therefore causes them to be less successful?
Why shouldn't they deserve to receive negative financial impact, as a company, for doing stuff that pisses off customers?
Smaller dogs don't need as long usually. They have shorter legs so it's more of a workout for them to walk around the block than it is for larger dogs. Just think about how many times their little legs have to step to keep up with one of your steps. Obviously there is some breed variance as well.
I have two German Shepherd dogs. They're getting older (9.5 years) but we've found that their ideal is two 45 minute walks. My partner takes them for a 45 minute walk in the morning and I take them for a 45 minute walk in the afternoon when I get home from work. We're fortunate to have a large backyard as well, so I also throw the ball for them after the afternoon walk until they lay down in the grass and don't want to play anymore.
The third google link is to an article on PetaPixel [0] with just as much detail as this and a very similar headline "How I Lent My $4,500 Camera Kit for $95 and Had It Stolen", from October 2018. The author here clearly didn't google anything about KitSplit, or if they did weren't convinced by the existing documentation of bad behaviour. I'm not sure why this new article would be any different.
History - pre litter boxes they were put out for the night. Plus their role has long been "grainery guard" and rats have caused major health problems. Even if cats aren't actively hunting them barring toxoplasmosis their scent scares mice. They auto-domesticated because agriculture made massive food reserves and the ones who didn't have the "Furless quadrupeds who constantly walk like angry bears, are about ten times your mass, have claws the size of your head and kill far bigger things! Run away!" sensible response to humans like most animals and had a reducded scatter distance which let them raid our grainery raidera were favored.
The fact of the matter is we have long /wanted/ their response be to kill all the scurrying rats and tiny birds weren't exactly a concern compared to not dying.
Because, along with birds, cats kill a lot of rodents. Rodents both carry disease and eat stored human food. Thus humans have, historically, been better off with cats around, and may in fact still be better off.
If a rat comes in my garden I can kill it. If a cat comes in my garden regularly, sprays on everything, shits where my kids play ... then legally (UK) it seems there's very little I can do; I don't see why.
Cats are trash for rodent control. They spend too much time playing with their 'food' and not enough time actually killing it. Dogs are much better at killing rats yet we don't let dogs roam around outside willy nilly.
Most rodent control in the modern era comes from modern building techniques and materials, as well as waste disposal networks, that keep rodents out of our buildings and away from human sources of food. Go to a neighborhood with well maintained buildings but no cats and you'll find fuck-all rodents. Go to a neighborhood with run down buildings and a million cats, and you'll find a billion rodents.
And cats leave gory corpses of small animals in front of doorways. At least, they do whenever they're actually doing their supposed job of killing rodents. In practice it's enough corpses to make a mess but not enough corpses to actually hamper the rodent population.
The excuses made for cats seem to nearly always be characterized by a lack of critical thought. Saying that is probably considered controversial, but so is the toxoplasmosis hypothesis.
I was trying to answer "Dogs are much better at killing rats yet we don't let dogs roam around outside willy nilly.", but I was not as precise as I could be in retrospect.
The objective function that most human beings use is not "what animal kills rodents most efficiently", but "what animal kills rodents most efficiently and poses little harm to human beings most of the time". In my experience, most stray cats will likely run away from children and most stray cats will likely not initiate attacks against children. On the other hand, most stray dogs are more likely to do both of those things. As a result, cats get a pass for being less efficient rodent killers than dogs because they are also less likely to harm human beings.
> The objective function that most human beings use is not "what animal kills rodents most efficiently", but "what animal kills rodents most efficiently and poses little harm to human beings most of the time".
See, I disagree. I do not believe that killing rodents is a serious consideration for most modern cat owners. There are cheaper, more efficient and lower maintenance methods of exterminating rodents than cats. Most cat owners own their cat as a pet and think nothing of letting it terrorize the neighborhood birds because it's cute. Talk of rodent extermination is a post-hoc justification for their behavior.
Oh, I agree with that: most people who have cats have them for companionship, and they don't think about the things that said choice externalizes. However, the same can be said for people who have dogs for companionship. Some dogs routinely lunge at people passing by. In addition, despite the best efforts of those who walk their dogs, there are smears of dog feces on sidewalks. Both situations are examples how keeping a dog has externalities.
Cats are for killing birds - that's their niche. No more wrong than birds doing what birds do.
And face it, every bird pair has half a dozen chicks each year. Next year the bird population is about the same. That means, most new birds are going to die in the first year. Cats are just a part of that.
Domestic cats are an invasive species. They're not a natural part of the food chain, they're not doing any good by killing or even eating what they kill, they just do it for fun. They basically have no predators because they live where we live, and we chase off or kill predators.
There were some 500 species of cat, spread all over the world, when humans arrived. You cannot find a niche where cats are 'invasive'. How they kill, and what they eat or don't eat, is entirely up to the cat, not some misplaced human emotion about right and wrong.
Well, he said he's an empty nester now. So...