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Comment Re:Actually, H1-B visas (Score 1) 392

You use an H1B when you want the best guy, not when you want some low-cost faceless drone.

So now you get the "best guy" for the cost of a faceless drone plus some nominal administrative overhead. That's still much cheaper than having to get a "best guy" by a more conventional route, such as enticing the top staff of your competitors to come work for you with higher pay.

Moreover, you focus on a single case. However, in aggregate, there is no doubt that increasing the supply of workers for a particular field will lower the average salary paid for everyone. So companies can hire everyone at lower salaries.

Comment Re:and... (Score 1) 196

Personally, if I have to divide up five children between two parents, I don't consider 2.5 to be an acceptable answer.

Acceptable to you or not, that's how it would be done physically.

Your acceptable solution involves a discrete math system. That's fine, but the safety of those children still shouldn't magically depend on whether you allocated them as Python ints or floats.

Comment Re:and... (Score 1) 196

In the real world, 5 / 2 == 2.5. This is true whether the operands are integers or floats.

In some discrete math systems, 5 / 2 == 2.

A language has no way to really know what kind of problem you are working on and which calculation would be more appropriate. Python 2 made the assumption that if you fed in two integers, then you were working in a discrete math system. This turns out to not usually be the case, and was a source of surprise and bugs for many people. (Python 2's division was modeled after C, which is still problematic, but at least C's division behavior is lexically determined by its static typing system, so it's usually somewhat less surprising. However, it would have been more clear if C had based its decision on the type being *assigned* to.)

With Python 3's implementation, it's always explicitly clear which kind of math you're doing. If your problem's math system depends on the types of the operands and you need to do type checking, then so be it. At least it's clear what's going on.

Comment Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto (Score 2) 138

WTF is wrong with KB meaning 1024 bytes?

If it were just KB, that would only be somewhat annoying and confusing, like US vs imperial pints.

But when you introduce binary MB and GB they all have to be mixed, and it becomes absolutely infuriating. It makes doing the math to figure out how much stuff will fit on a drive almost as hard as using Roman numerals.

You're basically changing the radix of your numbers depending on their magnitude, for no good reason. (Disk drives have never had any capacity factor physically based on any power of two.) That's just stupid.

I can't fathom why some people get so angry because they think that drive manufacturers are trying to cheat them out of a couple of percent capacity, when it's been common knowledge for decades. But for some reason these same people don't mind having to break out a calculator to help them do what would often otherwise be trivial mental arithmetic.

Comment Re:lets just agree completely with what he said (Score 2) 381

unless you are seriously going to rewind the clock to 1970 and only allow distribution and playback of analog, concrete media,

I fondly remember my collection of concrete records. They had a uniquely gravelly sound that can't be duplicated by any digital technology. Sadly, I eventually got rid of them all because they were just too damned heavy to lug around.

Comment Re:opposite of brilliant (Score 1) 712

Make all the apples-to-monster-trucks comparisons you want

And you can make all the false choice assertions you want. It doesn't mean that we can't work to pull ourselves out of the dark ages and stop burning dirt and spewing its byproducts into the air.

if you, personally, aren't limiting your own electricity use, not only are you not serious about the environment, you don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to telling other people how they should be getting their power.

I have been limiting my use. So it looks like I'm justified in telling you that you ought to be working towards getting a better source of power, not just spouting off about the status quo being inevitable.

Comment Re:OH LOOK A TROLL HEADLINE (Score 1) 676

Just think how much you could save for yourself if you could keep 67% of your Federal income tax - and all your SSI/FICA payments - over the course of working 35-40 years... And that savings would survive to your estate/inheritors, not just disappear like SSI does, once you die.

Only if one of the financial crises that happens every couple of decades doesn't wipe you out.

The main problems are:
A: Most people don't save money without being forced.
B: Most people don't know how to invest.
C: Even if you know how to invest, you can still lose your shirt.
D: Irrespective of the above intractable problems, saving money and investments means nothing more than shifting bit patterns on some hard drives. It doesn't in any way solve the problem of supporting an millions of idle and ailing retirees over ever-expanding lifetimes. Any saved "assets" will get devalued in the markets to reflect that reality.

So your scenario does not do anything at all to address the problem of what to do with retirees in the real world, other than let a good fraction of them die in a gutter.

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