Slashdot Mirror

https://www.economist.com/grap...

MAY 20th will mark the end of “mental-health awareness week”, a campaign run by the Mental Health Foundation, a British charity. Roughly a quarter of British adults have been diagnosed at some point with a psychiatric disorder, costing the economy an estimated 4.5% of GDP per year. Such illnesses have many causes, but a growing body of research demonstrates that in young people they are linked with heavy consumption of social media.

According to a survey in 2017 by the Royal Society for Public Health, Britons aged 14-24 believe that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter have detrimental effects on their wellbeing. On average, they reported that these social networks gave them extra scope for self-expression and community-building. But they also said that the platforms exacerbated anxiety and depression, deprived them of sleep, exposed them to bullying and created worries about their body image and “FOMO” (“fear of missing out”). Academic studies have found that these problems tend to be particularly severe among frequent users.

What would be the public and government response be if these same symptoms were caused by something in our drinking water or in the air or in food?

Finance 501 taught me that GDP is the money supply times the velocity of money

Your education is incomplete. There are multiple ways to calculate GDP and they use several of them for official numbers to ensure some amount of consistency. In principle each method should give (roughly) equal results though in practice it isn't always so easy. The Economist has a decent article on how it generally is calculated.

Producers of luxury goods would be lost without Chinese travellers: their total annual spend abroad is twice that of Americans.

https://www.economist.com/chin... How are they managing to do this without GDP growing?

Communism "removed filth from society" mainly by putting filth in charge of society, where it committed the Holodomor and countless other crimes of murder, mass murder, torture, political repression, forced labor death camps, wrecking and ruining their societies and peoples. That is what you embrace? The most charitable thing we can say is you are morally confused. More likely is you are consumed by evil. You should repent.

real wages and the middle class have been in decline ever since

Median real income per capita has risen 51% since 1979. https://www.economist.com/grap.... Household wages have declined, but households have shrunk and government transfers have increased.

Yes of course, it's just the government responding to militants. That's why the populace is so understanding of the plight of the civilians caught in the crossfire, right?

Hint, they're not. For example, here's a bit about the Buddhist monks who are stoking prejudice and ethnic tensions: https://www.economist.com/news...

Public Lab is probably the best known - https://publiclab.org/. Here's how they describe themselves: Public Lab is a community where you can learn how to investigate environmental concerns. Using inexpensive DIY techniques, we seek to change how people see the world in environmental, social, and political terms.
I wrote an article about the DIY science community last year that tells you a bit more about how they and other "community science" outfits got started. (If the site asks you to subscribe just clear your cache).

Steady or declining CO2 emissions is only good news if we're in a steady state situation.

We're not.

Simply keeping anthropogenic CO2 and CH4 emissions steady is woefully insufficient. The "well below 2 degrees warming" goal of the Paris agreements is itself based on an assumption that we will be able to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere, requiring a technology we have yet to make feasible at scale.

We cannot afford to burn our currently known reserves of fossil fuels. We have to decarbonise our energy production as quickly as is humanly possible. That countries such as Australia are still granting fossil fuel exploration permits is, frankly, insane.

What happens when you Give Poor People Cash? They spend it on the things that it makes the most sense to them to spend it on. Things like livestock, tools, and housing repairs. Things like health care and education.

It's almost as though the idea that helping people is bad comes from miserable SOBs who are only ever happy when other people are miserable, too.

Europeans are basically freeloaders leeching off American R&D spending.

No we are not.

According to the economist the european union spent $275 billion in medical r&d compared to $366 billion spent by the USA in 2011. You would also need to add especially Switzerland, Norway and Russia spending if you are talking about europe as a continent. I do not think the magnitude of those numbers changed considerably in the last 7 years.

Concluding: Yes we thank the USA for spending more on R&D than we do, but we are also far from being freeloaders.

Actually, at run-time, we don't know how they're working. We do know how they're working at compile-time.

I saw these snippets in an article recently in The Economist (probably paywalled):

"The reason for this fear is that deep-learning programs do their learning by rearranging their digital innards in response to patterns they spot in the data they are digesting. Specifically, they emulate the way neuroscientists think that real brains learn things, by changing within themselves the strengths of the connections between bits of computer code that are designed to behave like neurons. This means that even the designer of a neural network cannot know, once that network has been trained, exactly how it is doing what it does. Permitting such agents to run critical infrastructure or to make medical decisions therefore means trusting people’s lives to pieces of equipment whose operation no one truly understands.

If, however, AI agents could somehow explain why they did what they did, trust would increase and those agents would become more useful. And if things were to go wrong, an agent’s own explanation of its actions would make the subsequent inquiry far easier. [...]

One of the first formal research programs to attempt to crack open the AI “black box” is the Explainable AI (XAI) project, which is being run by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [...]

The program does this by drawing on the assistance of a second neural network which has been trained to match the internal features of the agent doing the recognising (ie, the pattern of connections between its “neurons”) with sentences that people have written, describing what they see in a picture being examined. So, as one AI system learns to classify birds, the other learns simultaneously to classify the behaviour of the first system, in order to explain how that system has reached its decisions. [...]"

Separate note: In Neuromancer, the AI's come in pairs, Wintermute and Neuromancer. It would be interesting indeed if AI's going forward do come in pairs. Wouldn't be the first intelligence to operate in pairs.

All Hilary had to do was take him seriously and campaign properly (or at all) in the swing states.

... Seems they were pretty serious. The thing is ... no matter how much money you spend buying makeup for a pig, it's still going to be a pig.

This passes for argument? She's a pig, that's why she lost? How about she was, and is, hated. And why? What do people around her say?

Yet, among those who know Mrs Clinton, even critics praise her integrity. She is a politician, therefore self-interested and cynical at times—yet driven, they say, by an overarching desire to improve America.

I think the real reason everyone hates her is because negative ads work in politics. She's been in the political eye for 20 years, and for 20 years, republicans have been deathly afraid of such a conservative dem. Here's one article that touches on it:

For more than two years, Republicans did more than demonize her—they criminalized her, first through the Benghazi hearings (a congressional boondoggle if ever there was one), and later, by representing her use of a personal email server—a politically unwise decision, but one that resulted in not a single felony or misdemeanor charge—as a national emergency. It created a toxic environment and false narrative that may have led especially gullible voters to believe that Clinton, if elected, would face imminent impeachment, removal and imprisonment. In its pursuit of this scorched-earth project, the GOP was aided by mainstream journalists who covered the email story far out of proportion to its legal consequence; bad actors who exploited today’s fractured media environment; and the Russian government.

China is achieving great results with enlightened leadership and this cut in pollution is a shining success story.

Yep, I just can't wait for the next Trump Tweet announcing that he has declared himself, "President-For-Life", in the Idi Amin sense of the term. That would certainly fly well with the Hillary Clinton crew.

Who's to say the Times is wrong?

"I am!" . . .

. . . "Spartacus!"

The NYT is paywalled, which is just plain wrong. They should look at The Economist ( https://www.economist.com/ ) as a shining example. They have a free section for headline news, but a paid, subscription service for folk who want to dive deeper.

Our one-party democracy is worse.

The US has a two-party duopoly . . . and both the Democrats and the Republicans like it that way, and, barring an armed insurrection, it ain't no never gonna change.

This prevents alternative voices to be heard in Congress. Let's say that 10% of the voters in the US are concerned about clean air. Nation wide, a "Green" party would get 10% of the votes . . . and some seats in Congress to push for clean air. But with the current system, these votes get lost on the local level, where the "choice" is between a Democrat and a Republican.

Your local Democrat or Republican has obligations to, in no particular order: Big Unions, Big Pharma, Big Coal, Big Hollywood, Big Banks, Big Cars, Big Guns, Big Oil, Big Google (H1-Bs!), Big Facebook (more H1-Bs!), Big Fast Food, Big High Fructose Corn Syrup . . . and several other "Bigs" that I failed to mention.

The obligations to the ordinary American voter . . .

"Thank you for writing to your Representative in Congress! Your opinion is very important to us! We will see what our staff can do about your concern."

"Please donate to our campaign contributions! It's tax deductible!"

You've got an excuse to shut down social media because people post 'hate speech' on it, aka complaining about the bad effects of diversity.

See also Singapore, China etc. And it's coming to Europe too. After Merkel decided to let in anyone who arrived, Germany started to have a problem with racism - aka the natives bitching about the bad behaviour of the new arrivals.

The solution was to threaten social media companies with massive fines unless they remove 'hate speech' within 24 hours

https://www.economist.com/news...

"WHAT the hell is wrong with this country?" fumed Beatrix von Storch to her 30,000 Twitter followers on December 31st: "Why is the official police page in NRW [North Rhine-Westphalia] tweeting in Arabic?" The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force's multilingual new-year greeting a bid "to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men". The next day her tweet--and, for 12 hours, her entire account--vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch's defence: "Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs," she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.

Germany's memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi undergird its commitment to free speech. "There shall be no censorship," decrees the constitution. Even marches by Pegida, an Islamophobic and anti-immigrant movement founded in 2014, receive police protection. But the country of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust also takes a punitive attitude to what it deems "hate speech". Inciting hatred can carry a prison sentence of up to five years, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is available only in annotated form, and it is illegal to single out any part of the population for insult or other abuse that could "breach the peace". Irmela Mensah-Schramm, a Berlin pensioner who spray-paints over swastikas and other racist graffiti, is a national hero.

Reconciling these two convictions--for free speech and against hate speech--is becoming harder, particularly since Angela Merkel's refugee gambit in 2015. Opening Germany's borders to some 1.2m mostly Muslim migrants has fuelled the rise of nativist outfits like the AfD and Pegida. Racist propaganda and sensationalist reports (some, though not all, fake) of criminal and rapist immigrants have rippled across social media. In 2016, for example, the number of criminal investigations into online hate speech in Berlin rose by 50%. A number of the newcomers from the Middle East and Africa are anti-Semitic. Confronting such ills without encroaching too much on freedom of expression is tricky.

The most prominent example of the balancing act is the new Net Enforcement Law (NetzDG), of which Ms von Storch's and Ms Weidel's tweets were early victims. Inspired by the rise of fake news and a report suggesting that only a minority of illegal posts on social media were being removed within a day (and just 1% or so on Twitter), the law cleared the Bundestag last June and came into force on January 1st. It sets out 20 things defining a comment as "clearly illegal", such as incitement to hatred or showing the swastika. Once posts are flagged by users, a social-media firm has 24 hours--extended to a week in complex cases--to check and remove those that contravene the rules, or face a €50m ($60m) fine. In the first week, Facebook's over 1,000 German moderators have had to process hundreds of thousands of cases.

Overwhelmed by the volume and wary of incurring such huge fines, social-media firms are erring on the side of censorship. On January 2nd Titanic, a satirical magazine, joked that Ms von Storch would be its new guest tweeter. Two of the subsequent tweets mocking the AfD politician were censored. When Titanic republished them, its account was suspended for two d

You didn't miss anything.
BladeRunner2049 or wtf it was called was absolutely execrable.

My original comments at https://slashdot.org/comments....
I'm a huge Blade Runner fan. One could say it's seminal to my movie-going experience: I'm 50, so from the audience that snuck into theaters to see it (I was 15-16 when it released).

I found BR2049 merely ok. I think there was in fact a good film somewhere in there, but it takes a lot of work to sift it from the dross.

I'm not buying the OP's point that the 'tired old story' was what dragged this down. All of the things that really hurt this film were ALL directorial choices.
- pacing: Villaneuve is suffering George Lucas disease. He needs more people to stop telling him how brilliant he is and give him solid criticism. At 2:40 this thing could have easily been an HOUR shorter. Long, drawn out, frankly dull establishing shots were self-indulgent and just felt like you're watching someone show you the 100th slide of their family vacation. It's interesting at first, but ultimately you just DON'T CARE ANYMORE. It's not THAT cool.
- focus: part of the above, partly its own thing. Don't get me wrong, I've long since gotten past my Ridley Scott fandom (Prometheus? Fuck you Ridley I want my $ back), but a terrific choice he made in the first film is to spend relatively little focus on the tech of the era. Sure it's there, and he can't help but notice, but he's not obsessing over the flying cars, etc like BR2049 did.
- product placement: I don't give a shit if Peugot dumped a pile of $ at you. Stop shoving brands in my face. Better that they'd stuck with the Pan Ams and ATARI of the first film.
- the deafening soundscape: Jesus Christ my ears were nearly bleeding after that. Fire your sound man, immediately.
- pointless plots and characters: Why was Leto even IN this film? As a foil, he did literally nothing except kick a dog (a dog we didn't care at all about, btw, so pointless).
- enormous plot holes - the murder in the police station went rather more smoothly than I'd imagine it would; if replicants reproducing is such a earth-shattering thing why build them with ovaries, or even functional uteruses? I have to imagine engineering OUT the 'rag once a month' would (have been) advantageous to the utility of replicants generally?
- the flying car dogfight? Jesus. I don't know where they were going with Deckard (or why?), but if you're fleeing pursuit, here's hint: turn off the 100k-watt cabin lights that make you a lighthouse? Guns on police flying cars?

The Economist nails it https://www.economist.com/blog... [economist.com] - I'd have used the word ponderous, but bombastic works just as well.

First of all, which Bush?

It doesn't matter. Both of them substantially expanded the number of government jobs during their administrations.

Second, exactly what "private" (in your view) industry did he "socialize?"

All airport security was private contractors prior to 9/11. Then it became a part of DHS. More generally public sector payroll expanded greatly during their administration - more than most recent presidents except perhaps Clinton. Based on their actions it's not entirely irrational to say they are closeted socialists.

Third, are you seriously claiming that Bush (41 or 43) is a socialist?

Oh they try to pretend they aren't but it's actually pretty easy to argue that a lot of republicans are really socialists in denial about it. They want big government and if you mute their rhetoric their actions prove it. They never actually cut military spending, medicare spending, or social security which are the three biggest line items in the federal budget. In fact Bush 43 expanded medicare and every republican administration tries to make the military larger to pander to their base. So yeah, they kind of are a weird sort of socialist.

I suspect you were so focused on your too-clever jab (pro tip: Milwaukee local channel Fox6 != Fox News) that you skimmed over the very first line of your article:

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

Had you read on a bit more, you would have observed that the rankings in your article were based on 2015 statistics. Chicago's murder rate went up 65% in 2016, representing 22% of the country-wide increase in murders. That spiked it into the top 10 with bedfellows like New Orleans and Detroit.

Is the issuer worthy of trust regarding the exchange of these coins with oil at some undetermined time in the future?

Yes. Venezuela is trustworthy, and for good reason. They have huge overseas assets. They own Citgo, a refinery in the US. They own their own tankers, since many other shippers avoid shipping Venezuelan oil because of sanctions. These overseas assets can be seized in a debt default, which would shut off Venezuela's lifeline of oil revenue.

They may let their own people starve, but they will not default on international debt. If you bought Venezuela's dollar denominated bonds a year ago, you would now have a fantastic ROI.

Here is an article that explains it better than I did.

Most of the underclass (the 'hicks' and 'rubes') live in the inner core cities.

Nope. Poverty is actually widespread in rural areas.

There really isn't the infrastructure 'out here' for the helpless ignorant to live out here. There are pockets of poverty out in the countryside, but mostly there are people who could be judged more self-sufficient than the typical urban dweller.

Is that what you tell yourself? Or do you just listen to the wrong people?

nonsense, there are no more elite now than there ever was. there were always elite... there is only capitalism as it ever was, no neo-capitalism.

I prefer this to be an impudent thrashing, but fear naivety.

The elite is much more rarefied now. According to Oxfam, just eight men own as much as half the world. 'The Economist' shows how that number can be stretched to 98 billionaires. Either way, the concentration of wealth comes from a capitalism different from that of the post WWII. https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world. https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21715043-oxfams-headline-grabbing-comparison-has-some-flaws-are-eight-men-wealthy-half. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post%E2%80%93World_War_II_economic_expansion

This new form of capitalism is the reason manufacturing moved overseas; why it's not really the products, but the logos that are marketed now; why Greece was forced to borrow money from lenders who did not expect Greece to be able to pay the loans back. It's the great economic experiment Augusto Pinochet tried in Chile. It's what Obama did in response to the 2008 Great Recession. And it is the ultimate cause of that Great Recession.

The ideas of Fredrick Hayek, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and others in their school of thought are ubiquitous today, and the consequences have moved us from a relatively egalitarian "regimented capitalism" to a "new liberty" of power concentrated into the hands of a few private indivudals.

It's actually much more complicated. For Hayek, the marketplace knows more than anyone knows, more than anyone can know. I could go on but, needless to say, my own naivety is showing.

The UK's system is widely recognised as the most efficient, so the basic model - of single payer contracting with controlled hospitals - has a lot of efficiencies to offer in the American context. In the light of the news that the arrival of an Amazon distribution centre LOWERS the wages of warehouse workers, perhaps we will see this happen to doctors...

https://www.economist.com/news...

Reminds me of a pithy saying: being a democratically legitimate leader isn't entirely about being elected, it's about stepping down when someone else gets elected. We don't owe respect or legitimacy to elected leaders whose principle is one man, one vote, one time.

The Western world has been taken too many times by this. Elections are a necessary but not sufficient condition for democratic government.

There is no evidence for this. A business that raises wages is at a disadvantage to other businesses. If all are forced to raise wages, it's an even playing field. There is no evidence that raising minimum wage damages employment and mounting evidence that it helps.

NATO countries agreed to spend 2% of GDP on defense. That isn't outlandish, but few of them meet that, or even come close.

The true folly is putting yourself at risk of living under the rule of a foreign enemy that conquers you. Perhaps you should speak to some of the people still alive in Europe that remember how that worked out before you cheer the folly that refusing to provide for an adequate defense enables.

Military spending by NATO members - Does America contribute more than its fair share?

Ah, but I forget . . . Europe is headed for ruin anyway since it chooses not to control it borders, native Europeans are failing to reproduce in meaningful numbers, and the EU and many national governments are inviting in the foreign replacements for the European population which has little or no love for Europeans or their values. It turns out that you will live under foreign domination of those hostile to your values after all . . . just give it 30 years or so unless things change drastically, and soon.

Why would anyone expect the cost of natural disasters to do anything but go up? The price of everything is going up, from real estate to building materials to labor. Every time there is damage the cost of repair will be greater, sometimes much greater. Every year is probably going to be the most expensive. To claim (or imply) we had larger disasters than ever before is simply false, we've had bigger hurricanes, and worse wildfires.

While you are correct about rising costs, the jump from 214 billion to 300 billion is an almost 50% increase. This is well beyond inflation or GDP growth since 2005.

Numerous well researched sources claim that the frequency of natural disasters is increasing. E.g.
https://www.economist.com/blog...

Making money by treating people like shit doesn't make you successful in my book. It just makes you an asshole.

When a recession hits, the "asshole" CED will immediately lay off 10% of his workforce.

The "nice" CEO will delay and dither while his finances deteriorate, and eventually have to lay off 20-30%, or possibly go bankrupt.

Not putting off hard decisions out of empathy is one reason that psychopaths often make better leaders.

All the money my cousin got went up his nose and for lawyers to get him out of trouble.

He's broke now.

He's not an outlier. I see this time and time again, children of financially successful people get fucked up. Look at all the entertainment stars' kids who end up in rehab.

It's a well-known phenomenon known as "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations."

"THE Chinese have a saying, “Fu bu guo san dai,” or “Wealth never survives three generations.” America has its own version of this saying: “From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” As with most old proverbs, there is a grain of truth to this—and the new rich are searching for ways to avoid history's curse." -- The Economist (likely paywalled)

The tech industry should spread out. There is not all that much advantage to being nearby to other big tech.

There is the well-documented clustering effect, where companies in a particular industry tend to cluster in the close proximity.

The company I work for has a psychopath as a CEO/President.

Just because you don't like the guy doesn't mean he isn't an effective CEO. Being effective is not the same as being popular.

Psychopaths often make better leaders because they can ignore the emotions, look at the big picture, and make clear utilitarian decisions. This is especially true for military leadership, where a callous and aggressive push for victory will often result in far fewer casualties than cautious dithering.

Chanting does a lot of good. It really changes things, because the government really cares what you think.

See: Gandhi, MLK, John Woolman, Emmeline Pankhurst, Ned Ludd, and the "can't pay won't pay" chants that took down Margaret Thatcher - http://www.economist.com/node/...

I think that chanting is the most effective means we have to change society, second only to "having lots of money". (albeit a distant second).

In most countries corruption is illegal. In America, it is not.

Ha ha, no. In America it just isn't corruption if it isn't explicitly bribery with a clear quid pro quo agreement between the two parties. In America we have our own definitions for lots of words, some people call that "American exceptionalism."

it is fine, as the highly controversial Citizens United ruling said in 2010, for wealthy campaign contributors to expect that their dollars will buy “ingratiation or access” in governor’s mansions and statehouses

Surging house prices is a world-wide phenomenon, and they move somewhat in concert.

So, there's something more going on here. I think it has a lot to do with concurrently surging global central bank balance sheets. Finding a chart of "central bank balance sheets" (including the Fed, PBOC, ECB, and BOJ) should be informative.

Taipei can get above 37% and is very humid. Humidity never gets to 100% but it's dang hot and humid

http://www.taiwan.climatemps.c...

Humans have been living in conditions like this long before there was airconditioning.

Then again maybe that's the reason people decided to do the contemporary equivalent of an interstellar journey - a series of risky boat journeys across the pacific eventually reaching Hawaii

Sure a lot of people must have ended up dieing of thirst in the middle of the Pacific ocean but perhaps it was better than staying in a place where the climate was literally like ass.

http://www.economist.com/node/...
https://archive.fo/BSsEl

MAORI legend has it that Polynesians originated from a place called "Hawaiki". Where Hawaiki was located is a mystery. But the toings and froings of the Polynesians-arguably the greatest seafarers in history-have long intrigued researchers of an anthropological turn of mind, and two of them, Jean Trejaut and Marie Lin of Mackay Memorial Hospital in Taipei, think they know the answer to the riddle of Hawaiki: Taiwan.

This is not a total surprise. Linguistic evidence pointed that way already. But, in a study just published in Public Library of Science Biology, Dr Trejaut and Dr Lin nail the question down with that talisman of modern research, genetics.

Present day Taiwan has a population of 23m, but only 400,000 are descended from the island's original inhabitants (the majority of the population is descended from mainland Chinese who have settled there over the past 400 years). Those 400,000 speak-or, at least historically spoke-languages belonging to a group known as Austronesian, which is unrelated to Chinese, but includes the Polynesian tongues. Indeed, small though the aboriginal Taiwanese population is, it accounts for nine of the ten linguistic sub-families of Austronesian. Hence the supposition that Hawaiki might be Taiwan.

To check this out, Dr Trejaut and Dr Lin decided to look at variations in mitochondrial DNA. This is passed from mother to offspring without genetic admixture from the father, because it is found in the bodies of cells-including, crucially, egg cells-rather than in the cell nuclei where the rest of the genes reside. (Sperm jettison their mitochondrial DNA at fertilisation.) That makes tracing mutations through the generations easier than looking at those genes that get mixed up by sex.

In a study involving 640 people from nine Taiwanese tribes, Dr Trejaut and Dr Lin found three mutations shared by Taiwanese, Polynesians and Melanesians (who also speak Austronesian) which are not found in other Asians. So the mystery seems to have been solved at last. Where the Taiwanese came from, though, is a different question again.

Still regardless of whether the Polynesians came from Taiwan, the fact that Taiwan has been populated long enough for that to be possible shows that humans can exist just fine in an environment which is hot and humid. Hell even non Taiwanese like me can adapt to it.

Except the original justification for patents is so that the people who own the factories and printing presses have to pay the people who do the inventing or writing.

No copyright means the publisher keeps all the money and the author gets none. No patents mean the factory owner keeps the money and the inventor gets none.

Which used to happen in the US. E.g.

https://www.charlesdickensinfo...

In January 1842 Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine, traveled to the United States. Dickens wanted to see the sites, learn about the country and do research for a future series of articles.

While on tour Dickens often spoke of the need for an international copyright agreement. The lack of such an agreement enabled his books to be published in the United States without his permission and without any royalties being paid.

This situation also affected American writers like Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's works were published in England without his consent.

Dickens first realized that he was losing income because of the lack of national in international copyright laws in 1837 when The Pickwick Papers was published in book form. At times the novel was reprinted without his permission and sometimes even imitated.

Lobbying by people like Dickens and Poe is what created a system where the US respected the copyright of UK authors and vice versa. Before that if you bought a copy of a book by an author outside your country, the author got nothing. And Dickens was apparently driven crazy by people launching copies of his books with the endings changed!

Of course these days if you got rid of copyright and patents you'd find that the factories and printing presses would all be in China or some other low wage/minimal worker's rights jurisdiction.

IP now means even when an iPad is made in China, most of the value stays in the US

http://www.economist.com/node/...
https://archive.fo/UlRbF

The chart shows a geographical breakdown of the retail price of an iPad. The main rewards go to American shareholders and workers. Apple's profit amounts to about 30% of the sales price. Product design, software development and marketing are based in America. Add in the profits and wages of American suppliers, and distribution and retail costs, and America retains about half the total value of an iPad sold there. The next biggest gainers are South Korean firms like Samsung and LG, which provide the display and memory chips, whose profits account for 7% of an iPad's value. The main financial benefit to China is wages paid to workers for assembling the product and for manufacturing some inputs-equivalent to only 2% of the retail price.

Get rid of IP and you end up with a dystopia where no one invents anything, you've got no idea if the device you buy is genuine and the only people making money are the people who own the factories in China making the hardware. All the businesses in the US, UK and EU which depend on license fees disappear, and so do all the jobs.

And if you do invent something either you keep it a trade secret, or you hand it over to someone to manufacture. However if you do the later they don't need to pay you a penny! In fact allowing people who invent things to work with people who manufacture them without losing all rights is the original justification for copyright and patents. Trademarks are there so people can tell if they have a genuine device.

Also the GPL depends on copyright. If copyright didn't work, companies wouldn't need to release their changes back to the users. So all open source would disappear and each company would maintain an incompatible fork, keeping their changes from competitors.

Are doomed to repeat it. This will end badly, it's only a question now of who is the greater fool.

Damore's memo was just misogynist bullshit.

That's a very cheap claim to make without any reasoning.

It's been reasoned many times before. For example here are two rather well written articles about it:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-...

https://www.economist.com/news...

Now, the defenses in respnse to these articles involve giving huge amounts of benefit of the doubt to the point of ignoring almost everything implied or that follows from the arguments in the memo. That's one option I guess except that here's James Damore in his own words:

https://www.salon.com/2017/09/...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Jam...

https://mobile.twitter.com/Jam...

I think it's clear from these comments that my (and others) inferences about where the memo was coming from were actually correct.

Anyway bring on the -1 trollbait mods! If there's one thing James Damore supporters can't stand it's the free speech they claim to support.

And one more thing: if you actually support some varian of improving things for men, then don't support this guy and his bullshit about gender roles. If you've ever pointed out how few men there are in certain jobs here, then don't support Damore's bullshit about gender roles because that is enforcing that separation. If you've ever complained about how men often pursue dangerous, but well paid jobs (contributing to increase workplace deaths for men) then don't spport this gender role bullshit because that's where a lot of the pressure comes from.

IOW this bullshit is bad for men and women. If you're a man and not a feminist you should still not support it because its bad for you. This guy and his army of supportes are trying to coerce you into a mould whether you want to be in it or not via this enforcement of gender roles.

It should be your choice not theirs.

Yeah! I mean, it's not like we give billions of dollars to other industries like oil. Or have paid trillions of dollars in protecting those same interest abroad.

But it's not just oil. How about the $5.3 billion in improper subsidies for Boeing for the Dreamliner? Or that Boeing and Lockheed get billion dollar subsidies for launching absolutely nothing into space. Pork-barrel spending is never truer than in aerospace. How about the $20 billion we give to farmers to NOT GROW CROPS.

Do you know what Big Oil, Big Aerospace, and Big Agriculture all have in common? They are predominantly located in red states. Not that all subsidies are republican-related of course. $1T goes to medicare, medicaid, and ACA. $366B goes to safety net programs. Hell, $1.5B goes to the entertainment industry every year.

Personally, I'm very interested in the coming electrification of the auto industry and have invested my own money into it. It was a smart move. Anyone with half a head could see it coming a decade ago.

http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://nation.time.com/2011/04...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03...
https://www.economist.com/news...
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
https://www.cbpp.org/research/...

It's only a matter of time before someone does a Nintendo DS like clamshell design with the top screen as a screen and the bottom screen as a touchpad.

A clamshell with two displays, the bottom one as a keyboard seems like something which is worth experimenting with, even though I hate touch screen keyboards myself. It's actually a bit mysterious why touch typing on a mechanical keyboard is so much easier than on a touchscreen given that you're not looking at the keys.

Perhaps you could use haptic feedback to trick your fingers into thinking they're hitting keys either dead centre or a bit off so your muscle memory can calibrate. I remember reading about haptic feedback and how the holy grail was to be able to simulate fur. If you can do that you could probably simulate keys.

http://www.economist.com/node/...
https://archive.fo/O4197

When someone moves a finger over a sharp surface, typically both vertical and lateral forces are applied to the skin, says Dr Robles-De-La-Torre. Using a haptic interface called GRAB, which was developed by Carlo Alberto Avizzano and his colleagues at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy, the researchers showed that a realistic sensation can be created using skin-stretch alone, and leaving out the vertical forces. The device consists of a thimble on a motorised arm. Using the motors to apply short bursts of very precise resistance it applies slight lateral stretches to the skin of a fingertip passing over the thimble, giving the impression of a sharp edge.

The ultimate aim of this sort of research would be to find ways to simulate any kind of shape, sensation or texture, says Dr Robles-De-La-Torre. "The holy grail for me is to do fur," says Dr MacLean. There is a long way to go, but it should eventually be feasible, she says. One of the difficulties of simulating textures, says Dr Hayward, is that the sensation of texture depends on the interaction between the surface and tiny ridges in the skin at the fingertips. In theory, it should be possible to stimulate these ridges individually using micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology, but so far nobody has tried, says Dr MacLean.

Yeah. This is exclusively my thing and no one has else argued the same.

https://www.economist.com/news...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/...

If it's any consolation you're not the first country going down the populist road.

Yes, I really just link to goo.gl. Why? Because it's an Economist article, which sits behind a paywall.

The conventional way to post such a link is to post the link to the actual article, and then put in parentheses the alternate source.

So I instead funnelled the article through Pocket service -- a common way to break paywall -- so that most readers see an unpaywalled version of the story. Now, getpocket [dot] com wouldn't make much sense to others, but goo [dot] gl will make it clear to people that the link has been shortened.

I clicked the link and it sent me to a redirect to getpocket which sent me to a redirect to the Economist article https://www.economist.com/blog... .
So the article is still behind a paywall, but the click got there via two redirects, instead of linking there directly. I'm not sure what the advantage was.

OK, so let's say he did state what you claim. I don't see anything wrong with that. Facts and judgements are different things. You claim that Damore stated facts,

Wrong. Damore made claims, he did not state facts. He got way off into speculative territory, and stated theories as facts and then proceeded to make further specious speculations as to what the ramifications might be if they were correct.

Fortunately through the magic of the internet, someone else has also put in the legwork and done a better job than me anyhow.

Try here:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-...

https://www.economist.com/news...

And a contrarian opinion: "No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science":

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/eceRedirect?articleId=35903359

Written by "Debra Soh writes about the science of human sexuality and holds a PhD in sexual neuroscience from York University." The Globe and Mail leans centre-left from a Canadian political perspective. She also wrote a part in this quartet:

* http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/

I would have been very interested in reading it and would have upmodded

[Citation needed]

No seriously. The evidence makes no difference, if you go against the ideology of the troll-mod hivemind, you get downvoted.

but had you backed up your criticisms of his citations with research invalidating those papers, which weren't riddled with flaws, biases, etc, themselves, I would have been very interested in reading it and would have upmodded.

Interesting that he doesn't have to demonstrate that his papers aren't riddled with flaws, but I do. Hmm....

Anyway, I'm not going to waste my breath trotting out detailed, cited arguments to get trollmodded into oblivion as has happened before, so I'll leave you with these two articles which thoroughly take apart the manifesto:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-...

https://www.economist.com/news...

If you haven't put any effort into your thoughts, why should anyone listen to them?

Like I said I put in the legwork when this first blew up and I got exactly the same downmods as before. I'm not going to waste my time on that again.

Also, I can't find any quotes from Damore's piece on this story, you only seem to be quoting other Slashdot posters.

It wasn't the first story. The document was long, by the time I'd actually given it a thorough read, that thread was long past. It takes time to read a long thing and write down cogent arguments.

Fortunately through the magic of the internet, someone else has also put in the legwork and done a better job than me anyhow.

Try here:

https://www.quora.com/What-do-...

https://www.economist.com/news...

Downmods are nothing, anyhow.

Well, they aren't good for the quality of the discourse. So far my post has bounced from 2 to down to -1 up to 3 and back down to -1 again. Clearly there's a mod war going on over it.

The Economist posted the response Google should have sent to James Damore here:

https://www.economist.com/news...

It is far more eloquent than a typical Slashdot comment. If you're interested in this subject, and in seeing what in my opinion is the most thoughtful commentary on this subject, the above article is highly recommended.

Hotter by 0.02 degrees.. AND THE MARGIN OF ERROR IS 0.1 degrees.

Science! Learn it!

If you were a scientist you'd not be looking at individual temperatures but at trends: http://www.economist.com/node/...

Instead you make some claim of some arbitrary temperature the GP didn't mention (god knows in what relation to, he mentioned 12 different years). By the way the number you're looking for is +2.03 degrees, not 0.02 https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc...

But the real disappointment is that someone modded you up.

wow. Another idiot who knows NOTHING about this issue, but will speak about it at length.
Here, lets go to the TRIVIAL lies of yours. The Chinese gov, the CHinese oil companies, AND their academia say that they have pretty much hit peak oil and expect it to drop QUICKLY. They have exactly 3 choices which is 1) to militarily fight for ocean bottom that does not belong to them from the nations that I mentioned before, 2) import a lot more, which they are growing their imports, but absolutely do NOT want to do so, and 3) move off oil over to coal with EVs. The later is what the CHinese gov wants.
So, you claim that CHina is burning less coal, that new plants are replacing old one, and that they have turned on all of the pollution controls. Ok. Assume that is true? Then why is pollution getting WORSE, not better? about 85% of China's visible pollution comes from their coal plants and their not using pollution controls. If coal use REALLY dropped, then the air would actually clean up WRT all pollutions. If pollution control was turned on, then visible pollution will drop (regular unseen pollution such as SOx, NOx, etc would continue ). If new plants were replacing the old ones, then again, TOTAL pollution would drop. BUT, that is not the case
for the last couple of year, pollution improved slightly, but that was due to their economy dropping on the industrial side. Now it is picking up as the idiots in Europe try to cozy up to them like they did with Hitler
2016, along with 2017, saw major increases.
And here.

New plants are not being built and what few are simply replacing old ones?
Nope. Only the idiots make such wild claims.
China is the largest builder of new coal plants. Much of that will still go into china, but China continues to push this all over the world, in spite of their claiming to be on-board with paris accord. As was pointed out, Trump talks about restoring coal to America, but the fact is, that unless he gets MAJOR subsidies for coal, which has nearly zero chance of passage, we will not be building anything new. In fact, America's will continue to drop.

As to your personal hatred of America, whatever. Go live in China, Russia, North Korea, etc. Please, go have a good time.
But claiming that America is polluting the world, is total BS. We emit no mercury of any amount. It is Canada, Australia, Europe India, Russia and esp China that do all that.
SOX/NOx? America emits a fraction of that.
And as has been shown by OCO2, America's emission of CO2 is about right on to what we claim, while Europe's, South Korea, Japan's, China, etc are MUCH HIGHER. And for the last decade, America has dropped the most CO2 emission of all nations.

China has been through 4 straight year on year reductions in the amount of coal consumed while their energy generation has increased year on year.

I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but the real world strongly suggests they're wrong.

I'm a huge Blade Runner fan. One could say it's seminal to my movie-going experience: I'm 50, so from the audience that snuck into theaters to see it (I was 15-16 when it released).

I found BR2049 merely ok. I think there was in fact a good film somewhere in there, but it takes a lot of work to sift it from the dross.

I'm not buying the OP's point that the 'tired old story' was what dragged this down. All of the things that really hurt this film were ALL directorial choices.
- pacing: Villaneuve is suffering George Lucas disease. He needs more people to stop telling him how brilliant he is and give him solid criticism. At 2:40 this thing could have easily been an HOUR shorter. Long, drawn out, frankly dull establishing shots were self-indulgent and just felt like you're watching someone show you the 100th slide of their family vacation. It's interesting at first, but ultimately you just DON'T CARE ANYMORE. It's not THAT cool.
- focus: part of the above, partly its own thing. Don't get me wrong, I've long since gotten past my Ridley Scott fandom (Prometheus? Fuck you Ridley I want my $ back), but a terrific choice he made in the first film is to spend relatively little focus on the tech of the era. Sure it's there, and he can't help but notice, but he's not obsessing over the flying cars, etc like BR2049 did.
- product placement: I don't give a shit if Peugot dumped a pile of $ at you. Stop shoving brands in my face. Better that they'd stuck with the Pan Ams and ATARI of the first film.
- the deafening soundscape: Jesus Christ my ears were nearly bleeding after that. Fire your sound man, immediately.
- pointless plots and characters: Why was Leto even IN this film? As a foil, he did literally nothing except kick a dog (a dog we didn't care at all about, btw, so pointless).
- enormous plot holes - the murder in the police station went rather more smoothly than I'd imagine it would; if replicants reproducing is such a earth-shattering thing why build them with ovaries, or even functional uteruses? I have to imagine engineering OUT the 'rag once a month' would (have been) advantageous to the utility of replicants generally?
- the flying car dogfight? Jesus. I don't know where they were going with Deckard (or why?), but if you're fleeing pursuit, here's hint: turn off the 100k-watt cabin lights that make you a lighthouse? Guns on police flying cars?

The Economist nails it https://www.economist.com/blog... - I'd have used the word ponderous, but bombastic works just as well.

For a more comprehensive exploration of the merits and problems of government picking winners and losers, please read:

http://www.economist.com/node/16741043

Industrial policy remains controversial. Defined as the attempt by government to promote the growth of particular industrial sectors and companies, there have been successes, but also many expensive failures. Policy may be designed to support or restructure old, struggling sectors, such as steel or textiles, or to try to construct new industries, such as robotics or nanotechnology. Neither tack has met with much success. Governments rarely evaluate the costs and benefits properly.

But as I said, the tax rebate for BEVs is one of the better ways to do it and I think it has worked.