via Kara Jean "WalMart, which notoriously counsels its employees to use food stamps and other social programs to make up for the shortfall between the wage it pays and the minimum cost of staying alive ... After analyzing data released by Wisconsin’s Medicaid program, the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimates that a single 300- person Wal-Mart Supercenter store in Wisconsin likely costs taxpayers at least $904,542 per year"
The State of California is considering legislation that would fine businesses $6,000 per employee who has to turn to Medical, the state's version of Medicaid. The bill is especially targeted at WalMart, which notoriously counsels its employees to use food stamps and other social programs to make up for the shortfall between the wage it pays and the minimum cost of staying alive:
The amount of the fine is no coincidence.
A report released last week by the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, estimates that the cost of Wal-Mart’s failure to adequately pay its employees could total about $5,815 per employee each and every year of employment.
“Accurate and timely data on Wal-Mart’s wage and employment practices is not always readily available. However, occasional releases of demographic data from public assistance programs can provide useful windows into the scope of taxpayer subsidization of Wal-Mart. After analyzing data released by Wisconsin’s Medicaid program, the Democratic staff of the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimates that a single 300- person Wal-Mart Supercenter store in Wisconsin likely costs taxpayers at least $904,542 per year and could cost taxpayers up to $1,744,590 per year – about $5,815 per employee.”
via Russian Sledges "my Ph.D. isn’t worth a plugged nickel now" AND THAT CHANGED HOW, EXACTLY
One of my friends went to Harvard’s graduation ceremony last Thursday, and I asked him who the main speaker was (the speaker at my own ceremony, when I got my Ph.D. there, was Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn). When my friend replied, “Oprah Winfrey,” I about fell over. Oprah Winfrey? That peddler of woo, lachrymose feel-good guru, promoter of questionable science—she got an honorary doctorate of laws and gave the main speech?
I am appalled. Of all the substantive and non-wooish people Harvard could have lured with an honorary degree, they chose Oprah? Yes, I admire her work ethic and the determination that helped her attain superstardom by overcoming a horribly hard childhood and early life, but she’s still a symbol of attitudes that contravene the dictates of reason.
According to several accounts, her talk was just a string of platitudes—but of course nearly all graduation speeches are. The Reuters link above says this, for instance (but judge for yourself, as I’ve put the video below):
In a commencement address at the Ivy League school outside Boston, Winfrey told the graduates that they were bound to stumble no matter how high they might rise, but that “there is no such thing as failure — failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”
No it isn’t, because “life” is not trying to do anything to us. Lord! Ceiling Cat!
At any rate, at least one major news outlet saw this degree for what it is: a tacit endorsement of woo and antiscientific attitudes. At the Time Magazine “Ideas” site, rika Christakis and Nicholas A. Christakis note excoriate Winfrey and Harvard in a piece called “Oprah as Harvard’s commencement speaker is an endorsement of phony science”:
But Oprah’s particular brand of celebrity is not a good fit for the values of a university whose motto, Veritas, means truth. Oprah’s passionate advocacy extends, unfortunately, to a hearty embrace of phony science. Critics have taken Oprah to task for years for her energetic shilling on behalf of peddlers of quack medicine. Most notoriously, Oprah’s validation of Jenny McCarthy’s discredited claim that vaccines cause autism has no doubt contributed to much harm through the foolish avoidance of vaccines.
. . .But this vote of confidence in Oprah sends a troubling message at precisely the time when American universities need to do more, not less, to advance the cause of reason. As former Dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, pointedly noted in a blog post about his objections, “It seems very odd for Harvard to honor such a high profile popularizer of the irrational. I can’t square this in my mind, at a time when political and religious nonsense so imperil the rule of reason in this allegedly enlightened democracy and around the world.”
Indeed! What were the folks at Harvard thinking when they extended this invitation?
I am heartened, though, that the writers of the Time piece are both at Harvard, and were bold enough to speak out:
Erika Christakis, M.P.H, M.Ed., is an early childhood educator and Harvard College administrator. Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of medicine and sociology at Harvard University. The views expressed are solely their own.
Well, my Ph.D. isn’t worth a plugged nickel now. What if Chicago revokes my professorship?
If you want to see her Harvard speech, here it is. I can’t bear to watch.
Michael Birken lays out, in detail, a method for teaching a computer to draw arbitrary 8-bit images by playing Tetris, strategically deploying blocks of various colors to cause exactly the picture you want to emerge. The method is (as you'd imagine), starkly terrifying in its complexity, but the video speaks for itself.
The algorithm converts pixels from a source image into squares in the Tetris playfield, one row at a time from the bottom up. To generate an individual square, the algorithm assembles a structure consisting of a rectangular region fully supported by a single square protruding from the bottom. When the rectangular region is completed, its rows are cleared, leaving behind the protruding square. Three examples of the process appear below.
The algorithm can also generate multiple squares with a single structure as shown below.
During construction of a row, all of the squares produced by this method must be supported. In the images above, the generated squares are supported by the floor of the playfield. However, if an arbitrary row contains holes, it may not provide the support necessary for the construction of the row above it. The algorithm solves this problem by constructing a flat platform on top of the row with holes. In the animation below, a platform is built above a row comprising of a single red square. The platform is a temporary structure and inserting the final piece removes it.
These are from Dragon Quest IX, for the Warrior vocation. I really love this game, but this bothers me to no end (luckily in the game, the characters are completely customizable). And what’s worse is that all the other female outfits for the other vocations have pretty good designs, so this one’s ridiculousness is that much worse because it could have easily been good. Not only is it unnecessarily revealing (fucking panties), there are so many stupid details about it that make it that much worse (that collar would chafe, and that chain-mail skirt/drape/whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be would be more likely to trip than protect her). And then you look at the dude and see how many practical details he has, what with all that stuff on his shield, and the dents in his armor….it’s just so obvious that he was designed with actual thought to how his outfit would make sense for what he has to do, and he seems to have a history. But then it seems to me that the artist just thought about what he thought would look good on a female body, practicality be damned. She’s not a person with goals, she’s a mannequin. Ugghghhgghg blatant objectification just makes me really aggravated.
My usual instinct is to just stick the female character in a very similar outfit to the male character, so I tried challenging myself by using the elements of the design. Despite her helmet looking like Magneto’s helmet, I’m pretty satisfied with it. But maybe I just like warrior girls in pants.
On a closing note, I find it telling that my first impression of this game was not good, because this outfit was on the ads and the box art. I only got it on the recommendation of friends. I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise, which really should be something game designers should consider. >_>
Very nice! And hey, at least now she has an helmet!
sciencehabit writes "Millions of people first met their spouses through online dating. But how have those marriages fared compared with those of people who met in more traditional venues such as bars or parties? Pretty well, according to a new study. A survey of nearly 20,000 Americans reveals that marriages between people who met online are at least as stable and satisfying as those who first met in the real world—possibly more so."
One year ago, Zynga paid $180 million for OMGPOP, the creator of the wildly popular game Draw Something for iOS and Android. Zynga seems to have decided that was a $180 million mistake. After directly writing off up to $95 million of OMGPOP last October, it now appears that Zynga is completely shutting down the studio — among other divisions — in an attempt to save $80 million more.
As we reported earlier this afternoon, Zynga is laying off 520 employees, a full 18 percent of its global workforce, and reportedly shutting down offices in Los Angeles, Dallas, and New York. What we didn't realize is that OMGPOP is Zynga New York.
Now, OMGPOP's official Twitter account and some of its staffers are unsurprisingly tweeting that they're out of work, including community manager Joseph Alminawi and VP of outreach Ali Nicolas.
If you’re a beginner with a Raspberry Pi, things just got a whole lot easier.
We started this project with the premise that throwing people in at the deep end and making them jump hurdles, to mix my sporting metaphors, is a good way to get them to learn stuff. It is: but it can also put some people off, sometimes terminally. And we don’t want people to put their Raspberry Pi down in horror after five minutes. So with this in mind, we’d like to introduce you to NOOBS.
NOOBS is a way to make setting up a Raspberry Pi for the first time much, much easier. You won’t need network access, and you won’t need to download any special imaging software. Just head to the downloads page, grab a copy of the NOOBS zip file, and unpack it onto a freshly formatted 4GB (or larger) SD card. When you boot up for the first time, you’ll see a menu prompting you to install one of several operating systems into the free space on the card. The choice means you can boot the Pi with a regular operating system like Raspbian, or with a media-centre specific OS like RaspBMC.
The main OS selection menu.
Once you’ve installed an operating system, your Pi will boot as normal. However, NOOBS stays resident on your card, so by holding shift down during boot you can return to the recovery interface. This allows you to switch to a different operating system, or overwrite a corrupted card with a fresh install of the current one; it also provides a handy tool to let you edit the config.txt configuration file for the currently installed operating system, and even a web browser so you can visit the forums or Google for pointers if you get stuck.
Editing config.txt.
Viewing the forums in the Arora browser.
Thanks to Rob, Gordon, Dom and Floris (of BerryBoot fame), who together developed NOOBS from scratch in less than a month. Also, thanks to our army of volunteer translators for the localisation; and to the operating system maintainers, most notably Alex, for producing updated images in time for integration into the final zip file.
Our partners will be offering SD cards pre-installed with NOOBS in the near future, but until then please download, have a play, and let us know what you think.
Update, June 4: Carrie Anne Philbin from Geek Gurl Diaries has recorded a tutorial video showing you how to set up your own installation of NOOBS. Thanks Carrie Anne!
aesoteric writes "A man's backyard beer fridge in Australia has been busted interfering with the cellular network of major carrier Telstra. Engineers used an internally-developed software 'robot' to crawl log files from the network and sent a field team out to pinpoint the cause of the interference."
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is planning major changes within company management, AllThingsD reports. The changes would focus on making Microsoft a "devices and services" company, a focus Ballmer outlined in his shareholder letter in October.
"This is a significant shift, both in what we do and how we see ourselves - as a devices and services company," Ballmer wrote. "It impacts how we run the company, how we develop new experiences, and how we take products to market for both consumers and businesses."
This restructuring could impact Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment (Xbox) division, giving President Don Mattrick a larger role, the report says. Other top executives may see expanded responsibilities, including Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft's Servers and Tools division, and Tony Bates, president of the Skype communications division.
Last week, Nomura Equity Research analyst Rich Sherlund suggested Microsoft sell off its Xbox and Bing divisions, noting that shareholders may demand more influence in the company as they seek larger returns on their investments.
Sony, Microsoft's major console competitor, is currently considering an IPO of its entertainment division, following a proposition from Third Point LLC's Daniel Loeb.
Glass got its very first porn app today, but just a few hours after its launch, the service has already been pulled from Google’s Glassware hub. The app, called Tits and Glass, had been highly anticipated after news of its development hit last month, but Friday’s quiet revisions to Google’s Platform Developer Policies banning explicit material meant that the app, produced by adult publisher MiKandi, wasn’t long for the world. According to a post on the company’s website, the launch was still deemed a success, pulling in nearly 10,000 visitors to the Tits and Glass site, and racking up "a dozen" installs.
MiKandi says that it thoroughly vetted the developer policy to make sure it was adhering to Google’s terms, even double checking last week, apparently unaware of Friday’s changes to the developer policies, which in turn could likely have been spurred on by the press the company’s earlier announcement received. MiKandi is hoping to pivot and re-release the app tomorrow after making some changes, although the idea of a "porn app minus the porn" doesn’t exactly set our imaginations on fire.
Google might actually be fulfilling Julian Assange’s nightmares and turning into the Lockheed Martin of 21st century lobbying, having spent more than the military defense company on pushing issues in 2012, with a record $18.2 million that made it the eighth largest lobbyist in DC.* “The company that once had no use for Washington,” as The New York Times‘s Edward Wyett puts it in a profile of Google’s chief Washington lobbyist Susan Molinari, has a newfound use for lawmakers, not only as it battles anti-trusts suits with money, but also as chairman Eric Schmidt embarks on his new hobby as a part-time ambassador. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” Schmidt and Jared Cohen wrote in their book The New Digital Age, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” That’s a vision of the future highlighted over the weekend by Assange, another digital futurist, in a blistering Times op-ed as “an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world.” Google’s vision also, appropriately, includes making the right connections in the nation’s capital.
But in the long term, all those billions of dollars will also go toward Schmidt’s foreign policy visions, and Google’s attempts at worldwide domination outside of Washington. Along with his book, Schmidt has attempted (and so far failed) to broker diplomatic relations with foreign nations,visiting North Korea back in January and Myanmar in March. While he has managed to drum up publicity for The New Digital Age, threatening Kim Jong-un to use the Internet (or else!) hasn’t changed the country’s relationship with America. Money, however, speaks louder than Schmidt’s “humanitarian” words — and could lead to the type of geopolitical change he talks about in the book. Schmidt may hope to save countries from totalitarianism via Android equipped phones and Google Glass, but Assange sees the political vision differently: “… while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in ‘repressive autocracies’ in ‘targeting their citizens,’ they also say governments in ‘open’ democracies will see it as ‘a gift’ enabling them to ‘better respond to citizen and customer concerns,” Assange writes. “In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the ‘good’ societies closer to the ‘bad’ ones.”
Whether you fall on the Schmidt or Assange side of that future, Schmidt has one big advantage: lots and lots of money. That, along with the right people to peddle his views in DC, means our Google overlords are more powerful than ever before.
This originally appeared at The Atlantic Wire. More from our sister site:
On Instructables, Carleyy has concocted Easy Fried S’mores, a deep-fried take on a familiar summertime treat. She says, “S’mores are one of my favorite desserts. I make them in the microwave all the time! I decided to take it a step further…nd see how they would taste fried in cake batter.”
Unsplash is a simple site that posts 10 free high resolution images every 10 days. In addition to being free of charge, the images are free of copyright restrictions under a Creative Commons CC0 designation. Unsplash was created by ooomf, an online marketplace for creative talent.
"According to statistics provided to Wired by Nielsen, approximately 2 million women are tuning in to the show on average each week – about 42 percent of Thrones’ total 4.8 million viewers. While that isn’t quite half, it’s far closer than you’d expect for a show with a reputation for alienating ladies. Sure, some of HBO’s shows do better; True Blood and its muscled, shirtless male vampires earned a 52 percent female viewership for its average 4.6 million weekly watchers last season. But other critically acclaimed series have a far bigger gender divide; the 2.6 million viewers for Season 5 of AMC’s Breaking Bad were a mere 36 percent female."
"Its economy benefits from attracting foreign capital with low taxes—but it owes billions to the very countries who believe too much of their tax revenue is sheltered in Ireland."
When the US Senate called Apple on the carpet for using complex corporate structures to (legally) store billions of profits offshore, the collateral damage hit Ireland, which hosts subsidiaries that Apple and many other corporations use to avoid US corporate taxes.
The Irish government has been busy this week forcefully rebutting accusations that it is a tax haven. The country is in a tricky spot: Its economy benefits from attracting foreign capital with low taxes—but it owes billions to the very countries who believe too much of their tax revenue is sheltered in Ireland.
Irish officials are right that loopholes in the US tax code enable Apple’s avoidance, and that the country doesn’t meet the official international criteria for a tax haven. But Ireland has the second-lowest statutory corporate tax rate of advanced economies (12.5%, second-only to Switzerland, another country with a similar financial role), and some corporations chartered in Ireland don’t pay any tax there or anywhere. It even boasts an eponymous corporate tax avoidance strategy—the “Double Irish.”
Ireland’s tax policy isn’t an accident—it’s a calculated strategy to attract free-flowing capital to a small economy with few natural advantages, making it the place multinational companies go do to business in Europe without paying European taxes.
The problem is that when Ireland’s banks went under in 2010, it needed a €85 billion loan to stay afloat. But the countries lending it money, including Germany, France and the United States (through the IMF) were the same ones losing tax revenue to companies using Ireland’s tax jurisdiction as a stop on the global capital merry-go-round.
You don’t want your lenders mad at you. That’s especially true if you, like Ireland, have a debt burden north of 100% of GDP, and Europe is in a recession. Ireland launched a public relations offensive in 2011 to make sure that Europeans thought of it as a good citizen, and recently signed one of the first agreements with the US to exchange tax information. That cooperation already paid off this spring, when Ireland was granted a seven-year extension to pay back some of its bailout loans.
Ireland doesn’t want to this Apple flare-up to result in further changes to its tax policy when the EU meets in June to consider corporate tax reform. Irish politicians worry that if they change course now, the foreign companies that employ about 150,000 people in Ireland, or about 8% of the workforce, might pull up and run. It’s not clear just how many would leave if the country tightened tax enforcement, even if it just required payment at Ireland’s statutory rates, or if the US closed some of the loopholes in its tax code that allow Apple’s billions to get lost between the states.
As two financiers noted in a defense of Ireland’s tax practices, “Ireland’s young, adaptable and well-educated workforce is probably its single biggest attraction.” If the workforce is that competitive, Ireland should reap the benefits (in the form of corporate taxes) for the heavily-subsidized educational system that produced them. And if the competitive workforce isn’t what’s attracting multinational business, maybe it’s time to admit there’s a tax problem on the emerald isle.
Via Andy at Towleroad, Bill Maher said on his show Friday night that "pot is the new gay marriage. And by that, I mean it's the next obvious civil rights issue that needs to fall."
Sure.
That I find Bill Maher to be a colossal annoyfuck is not a secret, but, in fairness to him, in this case I'm merely singling him out as an example among many people (virtually all of whom are straight) who are talking about same-sex marriage in the US as if it's a done deal. As if it's time to move on to the next big civil rights issue, which is definitely something that matters to straight people!
Same-sex marriage has been legalized in 12 out of 50 states. And despite the fact that it looked to be a sure thing in Illinois, it wasn't. This is a fight that continues, and, in a lot of places, it's not going to get easier. At least not without some help from the Supreme Court, which is not even expected to provide the kind of help that federally legalizes same-sex marriage.
For same-sex couples in 38 states, same-sex marriage is still an "obvious civil rights issue."
Which is to say nothing of the couples in the 12 states with legal same-sex marriage who may still face clerks who refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses or justices who refuse to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies or other pushback that requires legal intervention and communicates a pointed reminder that changing the law doesn't magically enact culturally equality.
That takes time and vigilance. Not pretending everything's solved yayayayayay let's move on wheeeeeeee!
For fuck's sake.
[Note: Legalized weed is an important issue for a number of reasons, most notably the vast number of healthcare applications and reducing the number of lives ruined by the garbage nightmare that is the war on drugs. Whether legalizing weed is itself an important issue isn't, however, the topic of this thread. Casual indifference to the incomplete campaign for marriage equality is.]
The BBC Trust today responded to a complaint the broadcaster favored iOS devices when it comes to adding features to its catch-up on demand iPlayer service for Android phones. This complaint was rejected because the Trust found “no evidence” to suggest iOS had been “unfairly favored.”
Instead of pro-Apple favouritism, the Trust found a series of quite logical reasons why Android lagged iOS when new features were added to iPlayer, mostly surrounding the “complexity and expense” of developing for Android.
Most Android users chose the platform for reasons other than a large selection of great apps, so they behave as you’d expect: they neither demand nor respect app quality, and that’s generally reflected in the apps. Everyone gets what they want… mostly.
An extremely vocal minority of Android users think they represent the whole, and they express intense, childish entitlement and resentment against developers who choose either not to develop an Android app or to give advantages to their iOS app. This minority demands equality for their platform with the intensity, victimhood, and entitlement you’d expect as if it was a civil rights issue.
Fortunately, it’s not.
I’m building a new app this summer, and no matter how much people badger me, I won’t go near Android this time. Their promised support and demand never panned out. I’ve learned my lesson: no matter what the vocal minority says, the rest of the market won’t back them up. It’s simply not worth it for this iOS developer to waste any time on an Android port. Your mileage may vary.
Shakesville.