Interesting Links for 05-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• These Are Some of the Most Amazing Views of Earth You'll Ever See
  (tags: earth space photography )
• Tesco petrol stations use face-scan tech to target ads
  (tags: technology faces advertising )
• Joe Cornish is up to direct Star Trek 3
  (tags: StarTrek )
• What happens when you look up Adam West in the phone book?
  (tags: batman )
• Something worth breaking

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Paying companies to pay workers is a better plan.

Simply because people feel psychologically better about themselves when they are being paid for a job. Levels of depression and stress are much, much lower and people have a much higher sense of self esteem.

Buying something, even something as simple as an apple or a beer feels emotionally better if you feel like you've earned it rather than it being given to you.

[naath]

We could legislate to force companies to pay the living wage without giving them money instead no?

[bart_calendar]

I would assume that's possible. I was just addressing Andrew's question.

[andrewducker]

We could do. That would, of course, mean that jobs which were worth less than that much to the company would cease to exist (if a job brings in £6.50/hr worth of value to a company, and they have to pay £8.80/hr in wages then there's no point them having the job).

[bart_calendar]

On the Adobe thing I'm shocked that 8675309 is not in the top 100.

When I was working in an office as a journalist (and honestly didn't give a shit if anyone hacked my work computer) that was what I used for everything.

[andrewducker]

Huh. I hadn't heard of that song before. Seems to have been massive in the US though.

[bart_calendar]

Huge in the US - to the point where people who accidentally get assigned that phone number have to put on their answering machines "No, jenny does not live here, loser" and generally don't answer their phones around the time that pubs get out.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=PaVOAAAAIBAJ&sjid=PvsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6320,11943

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'd be changing my phone number in that case!

[danieldwilliam]

I quite like the Labour Party scheme.

As a general tax payer I still pay about the same - the lost tax revenue should be offset by lower in-work benefit costs. Folk get a more politically and socially acceptable way of earning above the poverty line. Firms are free to decide if it makes sense for them to opt in or opt out.

There might be a bit of side admin saving. If paying the living wage takes many people out of the range of in-work benefits then they don’t need any admin support.

I take your point (implied in your gloss) that this is another layer in an already complex system of benefits, tax rebates and so on and it might make more sense to have a universal benefit but we’re a long way from that and the transition seems to me to be hard to manage.

[drplokta]

The mere fact that you save nearly as much in in-work benefits as it costs you to pay people more reveals what's wrong with the benefit system. It means that people who make more money get to keep almost none of it. If I ran the country, one reform I would make would be to legislate that everyone, rich and poor, gets to keep at least 40% of any money they make after income tax/NI/benefit withdrawal. As a helpful side-effect, this would completely ban cliff-edge benefit withdrawal -- earn 1p over this amount and lose 100% of the benefit. (However the first reform I would make would be to abolish the planning system and introduce local regulation of land use, instead of planning.)

[cartesiandaemon]

I'd be happy if it went below 40% for people who are already earning a lot of money[1], but I definitely agree with the idea that "working should get you money"; I don't get why political parties aren't all on board with this.

[1] It should stay above 0% though! Apparently Sweden took it too far, and there was a famous author who was self-employed, and for complicated reasons was actually taxes at MORE than 100% which isn't good for anyone. She still did stuff though.

[drplokta]

Political parties aren't all on board because it's very expensive. Assuming that the poorest people (with zero income) need enough money to survive, then ensuring that work pays means that you need to give people with moderate incomes a lot more money than they actually need. Which costs a lot.

The most popular password list from Adobe is terrifying - so easily guessable

[cartesiandaemon]

One thought is that sometimes there ought to be an explicitly lower security account option. Like, if I sign up to adobe website, I generally want to:

1. Download a pdf viewer or similar.
2. Pay my dues by pretending I care about their company and watching a few ads.
3. Not give them any personal information
4. If I have to sign up for an account to do this, have their website die in a self-immolating melt-down security-breach and laugh with shadenfreude.

So my prior for setting a good password is... low.

I'd rather say "here's my email address, I'm going to use this account once every two years, I don't want a username, I don't want a password, let me log in via a one-time email link, and don't let me enter any personal information -- if I want to do that, I can upgrade to a 'real' account then..."

Re: The most popular password list from Adobe is terrifying - so easily guessable

[andrewducker]

This is why I like Persona.

It logs you in by checking with your email provider that you are who you say you are. Which means that individual sites don't have a password for you at all!

https://login.persona.org/

Re: The most popular password list from Adobe is terrifying - so easily guessable

[cartesiandaemon]

Yes! I don't know the pros and cons, but can we please have ANY non-partisan cross-site log-in system?

The most popular password list from Adobe is terrifying - so easily guessable

[cartesiandaemon]

Apparently the adobe security was also ridiculous. I know NOTHING about password security, but I know you salt it and hash it!

I couldn't remember what ECB coding was, but the second hit on google after wikipedia was a stack overflow question, where the answer was "use anything other than that".