Do people not understand how insulting it is to call people in poorer nations who work hard to build a better lives for themselves and their families by making the crap you buy "slaves" is? Am I the only one who gets annoyed by this?
The people who work at amazon warehouses are slaves too. Being a slave is about being abused in a working environment. It has nothing to do with racism.
They make the crap, make slave wages, amazon flys it over and makes all the $$$. You should get excited about that.
They’re rental slaves. Anyone living paycheque to paycheque is. If your employer didn’t pay you anything but provided you with everything you and your family needed, with nothing left over so you have nothing to support you if you quit, that would be slavery. This is the same thing. Does it make you feel better to pretend it’s not true?
They pay just enough to survive, but not enough to plan for the future, improve your position in life, or be finacially stable enough to be a thoughtcrime troublemaker.
NOx/SOx emissions specifically. People repeat that statistic a lot and mix it up between noxious particulate emissions and climate-changing CO2 emissions. To be clear, cars emit far more CO2 than the largest container ships.
Our favorite globalist progressive companies with all the right virtue signalling about diversity, move jobs to country with fewer laws everytime something gets unionized. They do it for our safety.
Yeah with the demand for unpaid overtime I get as a developer its essentially slave labor. Like ask your dentist to work 140 hours a week for a 40 hour check, see what happens lol.
The industry has gotten so abusive over time its not worth working in it anymore. The amount of discrimination is harrowing. You would think black people cannot code for the level of discrimination in the industry. I know there are black coders but if you went into a typical employer you would be hard pressed to find anyone besides male Asian or European coders.
Companies like this hire based on how much they suspect they can push the employee to produce beyond what they need to pay them.
Recent immigrants are fertile territory. They don't know the laws really and are just so happy to have a job in the new country etc. They will put up with a lot of unpaid overtime.
It's classic divide and conquer strategy. The peasants are too distracted fighting about idiocy like whether a drug is republican or democrat. Meanwhile the billionaire's are carving up our assets to distribute to themselves.
Own nothing (rent it from us) and be happy with your new life as a serf.
Yeap, and other wedge issues including masks, vaccines, vegetarianism, climate change, abortion, and guns. The billionaire, rent-seeking parasite class owns both parties through hedged corruption (campaign "$upport") as Gore Vidal said: "There is only one party, the Property Party, with two wings: Democrat and Republican."
Student debt, credit card debt, wages not keeping up with inflation, automation reducing jobs, lack of universal healthcare (more than M4A), trying to look like a millionaire without savings, razor blade-business model products, increasing costs of living, and less new housing.
It's also interesting that the "sharing economy" encourages greater spending on rentals: Lime, Bird, ZipCar, and so on.
The only consideration pro renting is whether it's a cheaper lifecycle total cost than owning.
If I had not bought a house, I would have no savings. Yay inflation. Jobs don't pay enough and social security won't be there when you need it.
Anyone that is thinking of depending of govt for your long term financial stability, should consider if the most important vulnerable years in their lives, should depend on random govt employees and funds invested in politicians friends scams.
Well, yeah, Nokia WAS a conglomerate that made all kinds of things like paper, electricity generation, cables, rubber boots, tyres, PC clone computers, and whatnot. But in the early 1990'ies all the rest were spun off and since then Nokia has been focused on the telecom business.
This is not correct. Nokian Tyres was spun off Nokia already in 1988, it was listed in 1995 and Nokia sold its remaining shares in 2003. Nokian Tyres is still listed in Helsinki stock exchange.
Currently Nokia is focusing on mobile networks and patent licensing.
Maybe, but maybe not. The only thing that has stopped us from having all our jobs replaced 50 years ago by some machine is that humans work for cheap, often cheaper than it would cost to service that would be burger flipping machine. It might still be cheaper in the future to hire an actor than to hire a technician who can produce an equivalent deep fake along with the costs of providing these hardware resources. It was one thing when we were crafting entire worlds out of practical effects vs CGI, but this is literally CGI on one individual. Even today, CGI isn't always cheaper than practical effects, and sometimes big shoots still use practical effects.
Why sign a kid, when a 3d artist, a psychologist, and a writer, working in tandem with an economist and a publicist will get you much better results?
If you sign the kid, you still need the artist, the psychologist, the writer, the economist and the publicist in any case. Why would they not simply go all the way and cut out any potential name and likeness disputes?
OK, if the kid is an athlete, fine, I get that. EA has to do that now. But if I just want to create a bubble gum pop idol. my incentive is to be greedy and not share with anyone if possible.
AI technologies, with a little help from specialists like psychologists ensuring the product is addictive, make it possible for me to be greedy. It's happening in porn now, and if it's happening in porn, it'll happen everywhere else soon enough.
Not just blue screen but these new AI actors would do things that no real human being could do. One reason why Game of thrones had only 8 seasons is because crew got bored and kids grew up.
With deepfakes you can have peter pan like actors who will not age or even reverse age. everyone will have 8 pack abs and 36D busts (or whatever audience likes). In fact there could be A/B testing of how actors should look and behave.
Next obvious step is people like me volunteering to be that "extra" behind the key actor and engage in a bidding war. All I have to do is give my body scan and one of the zombies killed by Rick in walking dead could be me.
Bulbs did not replace candles, they created possibilities that candles could not.
Whilst the main concept itself is subject to local legal variations, the idea of contractors being able to make their jobs more accessible and more affordable to the average homeowner resonates around the world. What Kanda aims to do is to take this legal restriction minefield away from the contractors, so they can continue to do what they do best, whilst offering their customers an affordable payment plan. Securing a lien when doing smaller work, such as fitting a boiler or rewiring a house, is not ideal when you want to get paid as soon as the job is done. If the customer instead arranges finance with us, the payment can be immediately paid out and the contractor can continue on with their business without worrying if they will get reimbursed. Finally, the concept of fronting the money for the materials arises from the fear of the contractor not getting paid at all; if the job isn't paid for, at least the contractor won't be out of pocket. With us, the money is secured before the job starts. They don't need to worry about being out of pocket from a customer refusing to pay or being unable to pay.
Most tradespeople are professionals, running professional businesses. Whilst your tradesperson might have gone on a bender with the cash last time, that wouldn’t be possible with Kanda. The money doesn’t get to the tradesperson until they’ve completed the job and the customer signs off on it. Then they can go on all the benders they want, they’ve done the work and it’s now their money. Whilst many jobs are still done in cash, the average person doesn’t have sufficient cash in their account to pay for larger outlays, such as a boiler, but could afford it on a monthly payments. What happens in that case? They just don’t get a new boiler, despite needing one? No, they look for an alternative payment option. Kanda offers the tradespeople that option, to offer monthly payment options to their customers, with zero risk to their own business. Finally, in terms of taxes, surely the income tax only applies on profit, with material costs subtracted. But regardless of that, paying tax on a job and getting income, versus not getting the job and not getting any income is surely better. $500 after tax is better than $0 because the customer can’t use you. And when your competitor is offering monthly plans, all of your customers will go to them to get their work done instead
You are talking about union construction workers here. They are only used on commercial jobs mostly.due to the price. All the good trade people work commercial and get paid well. Residential is left with people that can't get the good union jobs mostly.
I understand the desire to avoid paying tax by taking cash, but is it common that a tradesperson is paying 50% income tax? I only have a US resident's perspective, but that rate seems very high.
stormqloud seems to have a bit of an axe to grind, so it's worth taking their words with a grain of salt.
Someone earning 60K USD in Canada (~75K CAD) would have a marginal income tax rate ranging from 27% to 38%, depending on their province. If they're a contractor, they'd have access to a bunch of deductions against their expenses. They could further use an RRSP to shelter their income, or at least defer taxes to future years with lower income, thus driving their average tax rate down.
The USA, the second highest bracket for federal (greater than $160,000) is 32%, then you have the 15.3% self-employment tax (social security + medicare), that alone is 47.3%. The minimum state income tax in most states will push you over 50%, but at $160,000 in California, that would be an additional 9.3%, so 56.3% total. Of course, we're ignoring credits but I assume $160,000 for a contractor in SF is pretty regular.
Fwiw, those are marginal rates and you deduct the “employer half” of self-employment taxes.
So a (filing single) contractor making 160,000 in California would pay more like $60k in total taxes (which is still 37.5% effective).
But given the number of UK folks for this topic, the “Social Security” and FICA amount (~15%, so nearly half of “tax”) is effectively similar to National Insurance.
Sorry, I thought I put marginal in there (that's why I mentioned brackets). There was lots of stuff I omitted like the SALT deduction. But I lumped all that stuff into "credits". For those reading, if you are paying 50% in tax in the US, you're probably doing something wrong even if all the marginal rates add up to that.
Are you an expert in international legal environments for contractors, or are you just assuming that because it's difficult in your jurisdiction (also, tbh, your arguments in that sense are not that persuasive either), it's difficult all over the world?
Such a lie. Western people (mostly the US, but Europeans also) pollute by FAR the most per person. Whatever China pollutes is mostly _also_ for western people, because they produce most of our crap.
Leftist extremism doesn't exist. Look how many years they spent telling us Islam is a religion of peace and calling every islamic attach on society a lone wolf attack.
Cognitive dissonance. Populations doesn't know what to think anymore if they think at all.
I have the soldering iron that is based off, the TS100, and it's really useful. The CPU lets you regulate temperature, and it has features like lowering the temperature when you don't move it for a bit. That's what the CPU is there for, it's really just a microcontroller. Good luck making a (minimally decent) soldering iron without one for temperature control.
I think this is likely to be down to the different expectation/requirements of people who use their soldering iron a few times in 30 years, compared to people who have theirs hot most or every day.
I bet your soldering iron is fine for everything you want it to do. I also be it won't let you work with tiny SMD components or reattach micro usb connectors out at the drone field where you damaged it in a crash...
There are some cheap DC-powered soldering irons in a similar form factor which use a dial and potentiometer to set the temperature and an op-amp for temperature regulation. No processor in sight. Apparently they work reasonably well.
Does it give you a digital display of the temperature (in Celsius or Fahrenheit, configurable)? Does it sleep if not moved? Can it run off a battery pack and monitor the power of said battery pack to safely shut off?
Not everyone needs those features. If you do or want them, the moment you add even the simplest logic, you are better off getting a microcontroller already. No reason to bother with discrete logic chips anymore.
I have used for many years a standard soldering iron (not even a soldering station) with zero logic whatsoever. It worked, but nowadays I prefer to be able to set the exact temperature I want, to the degree. And to be able to monitor if the iron is able to handle the thermal mass I'm trying to solder.
Desktop soldering irons have had sleep features for years -- the temperature relaxes when you put it in the holder (or after it's been in the holder for a while) to reduce tip oxidation, but keep it warm-ish so it'll be back to soldering temperature very quickly when you pick it back up. These are based on a processor, you just don't have access to it as a user, so the timeout and temperature are set by the factory and that's it.
There are plenty of soldering irons with a digital display, which allows you to calibrate the temperature response using a simple two-point process, rather than back-and-forth twiddling of the gains of a couple of opamps on the old analog stations. Those were such a pain to calibrate, few folks bothered, and the temperature setpoint on the dial grew increasingly fictional with age. The digital ones are based on a processor, but often the UI is so terrible (two buttons, three digits of 7-segment display) there could be more features back there but nobody would use them.
When OLED displays got cheap, that changed things. You can now have high-res text without a huge screen, and finally give someone all the knobs they'd want. Timeouts extend tip life. Calibration is really good and easy. Momentary boost mode for large joints without having to change the setpoint. It's the features you'd find in a thousand-dollar Pace station, in a sub-hundred-dollar portable iron, because all the complexity is in software.
And, bonus, since it runs off random DC, you can use any laptop brick you have sitting around, or batteries. They're extremely popular with RC hobbyists for field repairs as a result, and when running from battery you need another feature -- low-input shutdown, so you don't accidentally overdischarge the battery, which can damage it. Yet another feature that costs $0 once the hardware is there.
I like that it's small and I can just plug it to USB-C charger that's on my table. I also have a bigger soldering station, but it takes valuable space on the table.
For quick soldering jobs it's faster to just use pinecil, instead of setting up soldering station on the table.
I don't care much for electronic control. Apparently it has a bunch of features, but I don't use any of those.
Lower the temperature or turn off when not moved for some time, better temperature control via PIDs, set a voltage cutoff when running off battery packs...
It's almost like buying products from slaves in Asia and transporting them across the ocean is bad for the planet and the citizens of the planet.