Except that's rapidly becoming non-viable, since over the past few decades, they've succeeding in capturing most of the money that exists and sequestering it so it's out of reach of the other 99% of us. Soon they'll have to find another approach if they want to continue capturing the money supply as they have been doing.

She's just upping her game, trying to become the worst American president in history. But she'll find that there's a lot of fierce competition for that title. Can she make it? Stay tuned ...

I see that the "Comment:" edit widget for this message does have the Hanzi and marked 'u' and 'o' characters missing. So the damage is done after you hit the Submit button. There's no excuse for this. None of those characters have any special meaning to the code, and text containing them can't do any damage to anything. If damage happens, it's the fault of the crappy software handling the text, not the fault of the creator of the text. The right thing to do is to correct the crappy software. Damaging the text is simply idiotic, and interferes with the main reason (communication between literate people) that Unicode was invented.

(And we might note that a significant fraction of the users of the Internet now consists of people who communicate via Hanzi text, or Arabic or any of the hundreds of other character sets that humanity uses to communicate. Damaging those folks' texts to avoid fixing your crappy software is a good way to tell them that you don't want them communicating with other people. This is rapidly becoming a commercially untenable position for people trying to "attract eyes" on the Net. ;-)

Hmmm ... That tempts me to try a test using a couple of file names on this machine that are two of the names for a Mandarin-English dictionary: .html and Ptnghuà.html (and also Pu3Tong1Hua4.html for systems that can only accept ASCII ;-). Those names aren't in any sense obscure or tricky; they're strings you'd expect to see in online discussions of text handling in various languages. If you can't handle at least these trivial Chinese strings, you've failed pretty badly. Of course, they look findin this Comment: panel, and will likely survive the Preview button.

Let's see how /. handles them ...

Nope; the 3 Hanzi characters didn't show at all, and only the à showed correctly in the second name. But both everything looks correct in this second editing widget. This proves that /. hasn't damaged the actual text in the Preview. Let's see what happens when I try to post it ...

I tried that and got a virus, and now every time I pass through a McDonalds, the car automatically maneuvers through the drive through, generating a "referral" fee for the virus writer. You have to order SOMETHING so you don't look like an idiot. Do you KNOW how many McDonalds there between Greensboro, NC and Charlotte? A lot, I will tell you that. I've gained 20 pounds in the last week.

Win 3.x would pre-emptively multitask DOS windows if you had a 386. It was one of its touted features. (There may have been a setting to turn this off and on, it may have been off by default). Personally during this period I used DESQview (or however it was capitalized) as a multitasker.

Windows 3.0/3.1 would pre-emptively multitask DOS windows if running on an 80386.

So did the Acorn Archimedes (the computer the ARM CPU was originally made for). RiscOS even had things like anti-aliased fonts by then, and certain user interface concepts that didn't show up elsewhere until Mac OSX came out.

However, the PC and Microsoft was already massively entrenched, and the news was huge - finally the computers most people actually used at work were going to catch up with the Mac, Amiga, Archimedes and other machines.

But anyone could tell that Windows was going to be huge. The PC was already dominant and Microsoft was already nearing monopoly position in the PC market (and IBM compatibles at the time had fallen in price such that they were price competitive with the Amiga) and the upgrade path for most people was not to buy a whole new computer but just add Windows.

I remember the news at the time. It was huge. Finally, the PC that nearly everyone was using was catching up to the Mac, Archimedes, Amiga etc.

So they're saying that they have such monitoring/protection, but members who aren't explicitly paying extra for such monitoring/protection aren't being protected from identity theft in any way?

Somehow, I don't find this surprising. But I'm a bit surprised that they'd admit it so blatantly and openly.

(Actually, I'm a bit dubious about their implicit claim to have such monitoring/protection already. But it's fairly common for companies to make such claims for PR purposes, without bothering to actually implement what they're claiming to supply until something like this hits them. Maybe they had another similar incident happen sometime in the past, and are finally getting around to doing something about it?)

(And what exactly does "identity threat protection" mean? Google doesn't seem to have any matches for that phrase, and automatically replaces it with "identity theft protection", which doesn't sound like the same thing at all. ;-)

Raising minimum wage *past a certain point* won't help anyone. If you've ever done basic calculus you will have come across the concept of oprimization - in the abstract for instance, finding where the derivative of a function that's some sort of concave-down curve crosses zero.

The minimum wage will be like that. If you graphed the spending power of the minimum wage people (their income minus their expenses) it will probably be some kind of curve. Starting from zero, the graph will slope upwards, until you hit a peak, and then it will slope downwards as the increased labour cost exceeds the benefit of higher wages.

We are probably somewhere to the left of this optimal point. The increase LA is making probably will move people closer to the optimal point. Increasing the minimum wage to $100/hr will move you to a point far to the right of the point at which the first derivative of the graph crosses zero.

Most farms are highly mechanised and the cost of labour makes up only a tiny part of the cost. (My dad's ex's family are farmers, and farms employ a tiny fraction of the number of people than they did even just 40 years ago).

That assumes 100% of the cost of a product is labour costs.

In reality this is not true. In your example, the wage might go from $60/day to $120/day, but the product will go from $60 before to $80 after. Competition will mean many businesses take lower profits rather than pass on the entire price increase, and virtually no products are 100% labour cost. While wages cannot be raised infinitely, there will be an optimal point, and I suspect we are well below that optimal point as other cities have already demonstrated.

Only if 100% of that product's cost is labour.

In reality this is rarely true, and competition means that businesses often can't pass on all of the cost increase - what it'll mean is businesses will make a little less profit, prices will increase by less than the increase in the minimum wage, and more people will have some sort of disposable income they can now spend on discretionary items. So sales increase.

Certainly you can't raise wages infinitely, and at some point you'll hit a peak, but I suspect we are a long way below that peak.

Heh; I think you've got it. ;-)

This is one of the favorite "language peevery" examples that get discussed often in (English) language forums (or fora if you prefer ;-). The confusion about any purported difference goes back to before there were any actual English dictionaries, and probably 99% of the world's native speakers of English treat them as synonyms. The few that don't can't hardly agree about what their "correct" usages should be. But that doesn't stop such people from harrassing the rest of us about our "misusage". Mostly, it's just a thing they can feel superior about, while the rest of us casually ignore them.

It is a bit curious to see such peevery pop up in a discussion in which General Relativity pretty much rules. Trying to make a strict distinction between distance and time in such discussions is mostly just funny, as well as a signal that the writer lacks understanding of something important to the discussion. But language peevery is rarely based on reality; it's more about some small crowd's attempts to impose strict rules on a language with many dialects and hundreds of millions of speakers.

Now let's all join in singing a round of "Farther along" ... (in which the phrase clearly refers to time. ;-)