Ironically, I large stay away from complex CSS. But "mobile-ready" largely is complex CSS and Javascript and three other things, for breakpoints and responsiveness.

I don't care if my site ranks last when you Google on your smartphone. If I didn't design it to be mobile-friendly, your mobile device is welcome to stay away.

But this sounds much like it would be punished in general, even when the visitory is searching using his desktop computer. And that's just wrong.

You cut down the interesting part. That it's not just about rounding. It's a about domain knowledge that tells you what to round in which context and how (i.e. how many significant digits does a good answer have?).

That's not a very easy task, and it's not solved by simply rounding everything somehow.

I understand that.

But I'm one guy running a website, not a company with budget for a web-designer. My content is now being punished not for its content, but for its presentation.

And what if my website isn't intended for a mobile audience at all? I'll readily admit I'm stuck 10 years in the past with my web design, but a few of my sites are intentionally not built for mobile because the content they have is not intended for mobile and if you told me you're using your phone to access the site, I'd get a puzzled look and say "but why?".

Can I set a "X-intentionally-not-designed-for-mobile: true" header?

I watched this some days ago (/. isn't the place to read things first anymore) and came away half impressed and half underwhelmed.

The speech recognition part is nice, and that's understating it a lot given the complexity of the topic. That for a demo they'd use examples they made sure work nicely is a goven. That it can understand fairly complex, disorganized questions is really cute. No, seriously, on this I am impressed.

But it is clearly still very far from human. It lands smack middle in the uncanny valley. It becomes incredibly clear when it talks about population numbers and lists them down to the last digit. Not only is that typical computer-ish, it's also vastly less useful than a human who would tell you "about 80 million".

When I ask my personal assistant device how long it'll take to get to city X, I'm not interested in an answer that says "3 hours, 57 minutes, 48 seconds". I want to hear "4 hours", because we humans understand it's an estimate anyways and a few minutes more or less doesn't matter anyways.

Then again, when I'm building a bomb and ask my phone for the recipe, I'd like to have exact numbers. Again, a human would understand that in this situation, "about 200 grams" is not an ok answer.

This intelligence is still missing, and it's crucial.

Not at all.

The point is not in this. I could've used their income easily. The point is that the inequality is so crazy. What do you think is the combined net worth of the poorest one billion people? Do you think it is less, equal or more than the top 10 ?

Now remember that by numbers, we are comparing 10 people to the combined population of three USAs. Find a justification that would survive five minutes of philosophical debate.

I'm all for income inequality. I like to earn more than other people because I studied, I know my stuff, I can work hard and constantly learn. I like to be rewarded for being good at what I do.

But the rate of inequality is just crazy.

I'm ok with me earning 5 times as much as someone else. I'm also ok with someone better than me earning 5 times as much as I do.

But 500 times? You must be kidding.

Stop being silly.

It's pure propaganda to make this about employee law. He could have had taxes overdue or not paid his utility bills, it's absolutely the same thing. He didn't pay a bill that he knew about and it killed his company. Balancing your budget is what the CEO (in bigger companies CFO) job is about. He didn't do his job and now he's trying to put the blame elsewhere.

If one of the top-10 richest people in the world would distribute half of his personal wealth to the poorest one billion, it would be a months salary for each of them.

We can easily provide a comfortable life to 6 billion people. Maybe not iPads and diamond rings, but definitely clean water and a house.

Depends on what you measure. If you measure economy by the usual statistics, it looks good on paper, absolutely. But if you measure by what people get from it, the picture is much less clear. 15% of our children are below the poverty line. 35% of single mothers and fathers are. That's ashaming for an allegedly rich country.

You're an imbecile. If their interest would've been to reduce the deficit, there would have been one hundred other ways to do it.

They like to create the impression it's all based on numbers and economy and so on, but it's all bullshit. The reality is that it's a philosophy. Benefits to unemployed people are cut not because it's necessary to save the economy (one bank's bonus payouts is equal to those savings). It's done because of the assumption that unemployed people are lazy and need to be forced more strongly. Basically, all of this is the brain-child of one top CEO, it's even named after him (Harz), and he's a victim to the assumption that everyone in the world is like him. As a CEO he lives in a cut-throat world of ambitious people, so to him everyone who is not successful must be lazy.

There's a lot more in this direction, but the point is that all these failures of the social system that create a lot of misery and poverty were intentionally created in order to protect the profits of international export companies. Note: Profit of companies. Not of people. That is what's wrong with it. If you need to change things to save people, then it's a noble thing to do what is hard to do. But to sacrifice the people for the artificial constructions of economic law is ethically wrong.

No, that only brough the whole globalization thing home. The real issue is that everything is made in China these days for cents per hour.

But one day, all these chinese people will want to buy all this nice stuff, too. This economy simply isn't sustainable.

But here's the point: The loss was far from unexpected. From what I read, it was absolutely clear that he owed the people he layed off a severance package and he simply didn't pay it. They went to court and made him pay. Nothing unexpected there at all. He should have figured these payments into his restructuring plan, expected and budgeted them.

Lower education, more crime, less infrastructure, more corruption. Still sure it's a good move?

The company was not in trouble because of employee laws. All this is the fallout of a "restructuring", which is just the bullshit bingo word for mass layoffs, which in turn were the result of the company being in trouble.

If your attempt to save your troubled company didn't work because you didn't take into account the effects of your actions, then that is 100% your fault. It's not like these are secret laws only told to you after the fact.

There is no such thing as an unregulated economy. That's just the bullshit bingo word for "company-friendly regulations".

I call bullshit.

So you think the american system is better, where due to lack of such laws, basically everyone has a short-term contract because if you can fire everyone with little consequences on short notice, that is what you have.

Look, I am one of those "hard working Germans across the Rhine". Our government spent the past 20 years or so slowly dismantling the social systems and employee protections that our fathers and grandfathers had spent and risked their lives establishing (I'm not joking, one of my grandfathers was a union secretary, killed by the Nazis for his efforts).

The result is that maybe on paper unemployment is lower, but several million people spend their days in low-pay (I can't even say "minimum wage", because we freaking don't even have that!), temporary jobs. Literally temporary: They hold contracts saying that on day X, they will be out of a job unless their employer offers them an extension. You don't even have to fire them, how convenient.

As a result, average income has dropped, spending on culture and arts is dropping constantly, life expectancy has stopped to rise despite better medicine, and by some statistics a quarter of the population is in a constant state of insecurity because losing your job can snowball into losing your home and everything else because wages are so low you can't build up reserves.

Sorry, I'd rather live in a world where people around me are not in a constant state of fear and stress.