Slashdot Mirror

This rant at the Economist argues that most of the West is facing a labour shortage. Then we hear this. Someone's going to end up with egg on their face... https://www.economist.com/fina...

https://www.economist.com/demo...

Actually, no, the solution to the actual problems being proposed is more spending.

America spends more per student on education than any other country in the world except Norway. If money was the solution, the problems would have been fixed long ago.

Before anyone claims that is because we spend too much on rich kids while poor kids do without, I will preemptively point out that this is not true. America's school funding is a lot more progressive than many assume.

[remedial knowledge of the subject].

Australia in particular has a minimum wage of $18.93 AUD, which is also indexed to inflation. Speaking of inflation, Australia's rate is less than 2%.

The old saw that more wages for poor workers leading directly to high rates of inflation was never anything but a pile of elitist bullshit.

... first class flying is dying off. I don't want to get the cavity search, have to deal with the TSA cattle gates in the major airports, have to lose my Swiss Army knife because I forgot to empty my pockets at home or fly on a schedule that maximizes an airlines economy class booking. And now I don't want DHS to sell my travel itinerary to my competitors so they can front run my business deals.

I'll take a charter flight from a private airport with no surveillance, on my own schedule. Without having to share my travel plans. And I can prop my hunting rifle up in the seat next to me.

The world will be a much better place after America falls...

/quote>
Actually, no:
https://www.economist.com/euro...

Yet we still hear calls for socialist ideas ringning loud and clear.

Well, The Economist thinks that this is yet another thing that we can blame on The Millennials:

Millennial Socialism: https://www.economist.com/lead...

America is the greatest example of how poor people can become very rich through hard work and honesty. There is massive economic mobility, regardless of your race,

This is no longer the case. America now has much less economic mobility than Europe.

I don't see any sign that demand for smartphones is in any way lacking or declining.

Then you aren't paying attention. We hit peak smartphone in 2017. Unit sales in 2018 were slightly lower.

There are 5.5B adults on the planet, and 4B of them already have smartphones. Nearly all sales are replacements and upgrades, not new users. Most phones are in service for 3 years or more, and that is increasing.

A critical detail.

Over the next ten years, just normal automation. Factory jobs, some agricultural work. A few percent each year.

In about ten years time self driving vehicles will become mainstream. And many other easily automated tasks. At that point 25% may become reasonable over the next few decades.

In some 50..100 years after that computers will be able to program themselves. They will then no longer need humans at all.

But the good news is that bureaucracies will continue to grow regardless of any attempt at automation. 50 years ago there were typing pools and clerks balancing ledgers by hand. All those jobs gone but bureaucracies just grow and grow. So soon, everyone will be a bureaucrat whose job it is to regulate everybody else. As predicted by Parkinson long ago.

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

(A classic, well worth reading.)

Ah well... I still got plenty of copy/paste left from the last time that happened. Cause it's infinite.
Unlike mod points.
Anyway...

This "bring down thousands of pages" line is a shot at bullshiting ignorant Americans (and maybe Brits too) - cause Netherlands is a civil law country.

As such, one ruling of a court is nothing but one ruling by that court.
It changes no laws, nor does it affect other cases anywhere in the land. Or the world.
A precedent will get you no more than a cup of coffee. Provided you have the money to pay for it.

See... Most of the world DOES NOT use a legal system created for illiterate lords who've inherited their lands from their illiterate dead parents, along with the job to dispense justice to local peasants.
Nor the legal system which came out of that one, only now judges were illiterate local strongmen with guns, somewhere out on the "frontier".
A system where a "hanging judge" makes the law, the rest of the state be damned.
Most of the world thinks that's kinda stupid.

https://www.economist.com/the-...

Although common-law systems make extensive use of statutes, judicial cases are regarded as the most important source of law, which gives judges an active role in developing rules.
For example, the elements needed to prove the crime of murder are contained in case law rather than defined by statute.
To ensure consistency, courts abide by precedents set by higher courts examining the same issue.

In civil-law systems, by contrast, codes and statutes are designed to cover all eventualities and judges have a more limited role of applying the law to the case in hand.
Past judgments are no more than loose guides.
When it comes to court cases, judges in civil-law systems tend towards being investigators, while their peers in common-law systems act as arbiters between parties that present their arguments.

Oh an BTW...
If the "law firm" is called MediaMaze and if it specializes in "Online reputation management", "Online PR" and "right to be forgotten"...
It's a PR firm.
And they are selling their spiel, hoping that either someone at Google will fall for it - or for free publicity for themselves, and possibly some illiterate potential clients from the US and UK.

This "bring down thousands of pages" line is a shot at bullshiting ignorant Americans (and maybe Brits too) - cause Netherlands is a civil law country.

As such, one ruling of a court is nothing but one ruling by that court.
It changes no laws, nor does it affect other cases anywhere in the land. Or the world.
A precedent will get you no more than a cup of coffee. Provided you have the money to pay for it.

See... Most of the world DOES NOT use a legal system created for illiterate lords who've inherited their lands from their illiterate dead parents, along with the job to dispense justice to local peasants.
Nor the legal system which came out of that one, only now judges were illiterate local strongmen with guns, somewhere out on the "frontier".
A system where a "hanging judge" makes the law, the rest of the state be damned.
Most of the world thinks that's kinda stupid.

https://www.economist.com/the-...

Although common-law systems make extensive use of statutes, judicial cases are regarded as the most important source of law, which gives judges an active role in developing rules.
For example, the elements needed to prove the crime of murder are contained in case law rather than defined by statute.
To ensure consistency, courts abide by precedents set by higher courts examining the same issue.

In civil-law systems, by contrast, codes and statutes are designed to cover all eventualities and judges have a more limited role of applying the law to the case in hand.
Past judgments are no more than loose guides.
When it comes to court cases, judges in civil-law systems tend towards being investigators, while their peers in common-law systems act as arbiters between parties that present their arguments.

Oh an BTW...
If the "law firm" is called MediaMaze and if it specializes in "Online reputation management", "Online PR" and "right to be forgotten"...
It's a PR firm.
And they are selling their spiel, hoping that either someone at Google will fall for it - or for free publicity for themselves, and possibly some illiterate potential clients from the US and UK.

What "The Economist" thinks:

https://www.economist.com/lead...

Is this the same peer review that couldn't detect outright fraud in the social sciences?
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/10/06/another-set-of-fake-papers-takes-aim-at-social-sciences-nether-regions

Or maybe you also believe canine rape exists.

Germany is a civil law country. As in civil-ized.
A single court case in a Podunk German town is nothing but a single court case in a Podunk German town.
Thus, a country doesn't get turned upside down every time a senile judge in Lower Bumfuck forgets his meds.

https://www.economist.com/the-...

Although common-law systems make extensive use of statutes, judicial cases are regarded as the most important source of law, which gives judges an active role in developing rules.
For example, the elements needed to prove the crime of murder are contained in case law rather than defined by statute.
To ensure consistency, courts abide by precedents set by higher courts examining the same issue.

In civil-law systems, by contrast, codes and statutes are designed to cover all eventualities and judges have a more limited role of applying the law to the case in hand.
Past judgments are no more than loose guides.
When it comes to court cases, judges in civil-law systems tend towards being investigators, while their peers in common-law systems act as arbiters between parties that present their arguments.

One of the best books is The World in 2019, which is published by The Economist Newspaper Limited (TENL).

TENL is unafraid to state the truth, as suggested by bold reports in TENL's popular journal, "The Economist". Recent reports in this journal have correctly stated that differences in culture and genetics produce differences in behavior among different ethnic or racial groups.

Get more info about this issue.

One of the best books is The World in 2019, which is published by The Economist Newspaper Limited (TENL).

TENL is unafraid to state the truth, as suggested by bold reports in TENL's popular journal, "The Economist". Recent reports in this journal have correctly stated that differences in culture and genetics produce differences in behavior among different ethnic or racial groups.

Get more info about this issue.

Folks don't realize how heavily the US Government subsidized their lives in the 50s, 60s and 70s...the government ain't paying anymore

Actually, city governments heavily subsidize low-density housing for the affluent, wasting land on single-family residential homes that could be used for apartments which house more people, bring in more tax revenue per acre, and require less infrastructure per person. Inefficient zoning is why housing is in such short supply and expensive, why cities have so much traffic, and why cities have budget problems. It's all a big mess, and government is the problem. Yes, much of it started after WWII, with government-backed mortgages and the mortgage interest deduction, but these subsidies continue to exist to this day.

And property taxes assessed on the value of the land perversely incentivize people to come out in droves to oppose anything that can raise the value of their properties. For example, relaxed height limits, minimum setbacks, maximum floor area ratios, and minimum parking requirements--these things all attract NIMBYs like flies to a feast. It's all one big, fantastic mess.

There's an interesting quirk in human psychology that makes negative facts and news seem more salient than positive ones. For media that thrives on reader attention (and that's both new and old media), this naturally leads to more emphasis on the negative.

I think this is a bias worth noting and pushing back on. The world is pretty far from perfect, but there's also huge helpings of good news all around us.

• Continuing the trend, nearly 70M people in dire poverty gain access to electricity
• Extreme global poverty continues its decline, although it's getting harder to make progress on that front
• The US death rate from cancer continues its steady yearly drop. Cumulatively, this has prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths
• The pack of criminals who made a wholesale business of taking sex slaves in war lost their last city
• The world continues its steady march towards universal literacy. You can't embed pictures in /. (for reaaaalllly goatse reasons) but the figures here are really striking
• The Long Peace continues for another year, meaning millions of lives impacted
• Cigarette smoking, a leading cause of totally preventable death, fell to its lowest rate in the US
• Automobile deaths per vehicle mile continued to drop

Most of these (Daesh not withstanding, but threw them in just because they were really vile) follow the same pattern: slow but steady progress. It's hardly clickbait -- in fact these are not even specific events you can point to, they are trends seen on the scale of decades. And on the scale of decades, the world is consistently becoming a less-bad place.

From the linked article...
"One of China's elite prisons has become overcrowded with political prisoners..."

From https://freedomhouse.org/blog/...
If there is one thing that the Chinese government would most like us to overlook, however, it is the ferocious suppression of political dissent.

Headline speaks for itself
https://www.economist.com/chin...

Do you need more, or are you a Chinese troll?

With Trump in the White House who wants to live?

Suicides went up the most among elderly rural males. In other words, Republicans. These people should be the happiest with Trump.

America is an outlier here. Worldwide suicide rates have declined more than 29% since 2000.

I want to see a cite, preferably more than one, for "Productivity is higher in areas with more job churn".

Here you go:

1. Labor market flexibility boosts productivity

2. Go for the Churn

The area with the highest job hopping rate, due to California's ban on non-compete contracts, is Silicon Valley. No where are else are developers more productive or better paid.

Churn is good. Good for workers. Good for companies. Good for national economies.

Get the fuck out of California once in a while to see how normal people live. We're not all rich assholes

Once you correct for living expenses, California has the highest poverty rate of any state.

He gave his weakness away when he said he wanted more “Democracy”

The countries most likely to get into wars are neither dictatorships nor democracies, but those in between. "Partial democracies" often have leaders that believe they can gain from war and often have nationalistic populations that can be easily inflamed. They usually have some censorship so citizens don't hear the other side of the issues, but not enough to keep a lid on nationalistic excess.

There are named major players in AI research that are definitely not democracies

If you saw some of the nationalistic riots in China over the Diaoyu rocks you might consider that a good thing. China has 30 million excess young men with no hope of getting a GF or finding a wife. Excess unattached young men has never been good for social stability. Muslim countries have the same issue, but because of polygamy rather than sex selective abortions.

Oklahoma is hurtling off of a fiscal cliff, and it's entirely self-inflicted. They must be getting desperate.

https://www.csmonitor.com/Busi...
https://www.economist.com/unit...

Clothing is almost entirely made by machines.

You appear to be misinformed on this, or your claim was unclear. If you're speaking of manufacturing textile cloth, i'm pretty sure that is extensively automated. But (nearly?) all clothes that we buy today are still sewn by human hands.

Here are a couple of sources (from last year, couldn't find anything newer on a quick search):
https://www.economist.com/scie...
https://www.fastcompany.com/30...

The UK has no law outlawing jaywalking. The history of the law, passed as a result of pressure from motor car manufacturers to allow them to blame pedestrians for accidents, is unimpressive. It has an alarming tendency to be used in a racist way by police e.g.

https://www.economist.com/demo...

makes the point more strongly. Indeed the underlying assumption that pedestrians aren't capable of rational thought is extraordinary. The fact that it is the law in ISRAEL is even weirder (a friend got done for it).

We need higher density and more housing. The only way to solve this problem is to increase the supply; the ONLY reason this problem exists is because of lack of housing in places people want to live.

Indeed. Lack of housing in the most productive cities is a major drag on the economy, and also a major cause of inequality.

Lower income people are locked out of the cities with the best job opportunities and best pay. Meanwhile, soaring property values enrich the people who are already well off. Liberal NIMBYism may be responsible for even more of the growth in inequality than regressive conservative tax "reform".

That's not a new or particularly unheard of strategy. Some right wing groups in recent elections have sent out mailers with the wrong election date and/or voting information on them to unfavorable demographics to suppress the vote. One of the less subtle forms of voter suppression, which is a class of activity that should be treated much more harshly by the law and subsequently law enforcement, but the US has done somethings to earn its dips into the flawed democracy status such as in the Economists' index.

If it makes you feel better, the historical methods for cheating in US elections tended to be a lot more blatant, including some of the stuff that we were chiding other countries for no so long ago.

There is plenty of evidence.

check this one out, then:
Spiderweb Shawl and Cape

Most businesses won't employ people with a criminal record

For most jobs, a criminal record is not correlated with job performance.

Employers would be better if if they focused on things that DO matter. For instance, improper capitalization in social media posts, especially either all caps or all lower case, is correlated with poor employment outcomes.

The Bay moves exponentially faster in the hiring process.

Indeed. My company is in SV (San Jose) and if a candidate interviews well, we try to make a job offer before they leave the premises. If we wait, many of them, especially the best of them, will already be working somewhere else by the time we call them back.

We rarely bother calling references, or doing background checks, because both are mostly a waste of time. Good references don't mean much, and having a criminal record is not correlated with job performance.

This article tells us how far the surveillance state has already gone.
https://www.economist.com/brie...

Here's an AI doing something "useful"

Since the spring of 2017, the information has been used to rank citizens’ “trustworthiness” using various criteria. People are deemed trustworthy, average or untrustworthy depending on how they fit into the following categories: 15 to 55 years old (ie, of military age); Uighur (the catalogue is explicitly racist: people are suspected merely on account of their ethnicity); unemployed; have religious knowledge; pray five times a day (freedom of worship is guaranteed by China’s constitution); have a passport; have visited one of 26 countries; have ever overstayed a visa; have family members in a foreign country (there are at least 10,000 Uighurs in Turkey); and home school their children. Being labelled “untrustworthy” can lead to a camp.

And your identity card will contain your "reliability status"

Next, the records associated with identity cards can contain biometric data including fingerprints, blood type and DNA information as well as the subject’s detention record and “reliability status”.

How shall we gather the information? This is way beyond Orwellian.

To complete the panorama of human surveillance, the government has a programme called “becoming kin” in which local families (mostly Uighur) “adopt” officials (mostly Han). The official visits his or her adoptive family regularly, lives with it for short periods, gives the children presents and teaches the household Mandarin. He also verifies information collected by fanghuiju teams. The programme appears to be immense. According to an official report in 2018, 1.1m officials have been paired with 1.6m families. That means roughly half of Uighur households have had a Han-Chinese spy/indoctrinator assigned to them.

Have a cellphone?

Because the government sees what it calls “web cleansing” as necessary to prevent access to terrorist information, everyone in Xinjiang is supposed to have a spyware app on their mobile phone. Failing to install the app, which can identify people called, track online activity and record social-media use, is an offence. “Wi-Fi sniffers” in public places keep an eye, or nose, on all networked devices in range.

Don't have a phone? How you'll be tracked.

In Hotan and Kashgar there are poles bearing perhaps eight or ten video cameras at intervals of 100-200 metres along every street; a far finer-grained surveillance net than in most Chinese cities. As well as watching pedestrians the cameras can read car number plates and correlate them with the face of the person driving. Only registered owners may drive cars; anyone else will be arrested, according to a public security official who accompanied this correspondent in Hotan.

Wondering about controlling weapons?

In butchers and restaurants all over Xinjiang you will see kitchen knives chained to the wall, lest they be snatched up and used as weapons. In Aksu QR codes containing the owner’s identity-card information have to be engraved on every blade.

Historically, those who created the most value for society typically obtained the most purchasing power. Today though, it seems like too many are getting too much purchasing power, much more than the value they provide, and others not getting enough. The Economist had a story on this, "The question of extractive elites". Other key words to google are "rent-seeking."

Millenials have runaway education, medical and housing costs. Follow the money to figure out why. Naturally they think capitalism is broken.

Also, with the financial sector, something has to be done to rein it in. There's an interesting debate at the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, about "Cleaning vs Leaning" - letting the financial sector involve itself in (very lucrative to it) excesses, then sticking the society with the externalities (i.e. the bill). The Federal Reserve is wondering whether its role should be to clean up ("Clean") or try to prevent in the first place ("Lean"). You can think of factories polluting - they keep the profit, they dump the effluent so those around the factory incur the costs. Ditto with the financial sector.

The problem with relying on "Distributors" to distribute purchasing power is that they accrue too much power and they are merely human - easily corruptible. The society then grows around that source of profit, like a plant grows to sun. Instead of growing around people seeking purchasing power by providing value to society. See how much power politicians have to today, and how hard they try to get tax money, to spend as they believe with help their re-election chances the most. Distributors will distribute purchasing power to those with the best lobbyists, not those who create the most value for society.

Nice try but no.

They can do that already... it’s called public transportation.

Public transit use is declining in almost all developed countries. People abandon it for better alternatives as soon as options are available. Driverless ride sharing will be the next nail in the coffin.

scholarworks.umass.edu
www.economist.com
www.nbcnews.com
www.ehs.org.uk
etc, etc.

Australia has gone 26 years without a recession because their economy is based on mining iron and coal for sale to China.

And did that happen because of magic? Or did someone in charge recognise the changing global landscape and respond to it?
If is was magic, then when the magic ran out , surely the growth should have too? Or maybe smart people used smart policy to stay ahead of the game?

Sorry pal, that's tubs to you. (or at least I thought it was, till I checked and saw that we've gotten over our margarine kick and are trailing western Europe in butter consumption) https://www.economist.com/site...

What seems to be driving the massive cost increase is that free care is increasing, government payments are capped, and the surviving health care providers are squeezing the last handful of us who can still pay the bills.

Nope, it's because of the insane profits. Your healthcare is expensive because you have the worst possible system.

This is not even controversial, you pay more and receive less than other western countries because so much of what you pay goes to make the healthcare companies lots and lots of money.

It is a good movie. Some movies are ruined by silly dialog, but A Quiet Place has no dialog (other than a few whispers).

Well, "The Economist" sure liked it:

A new take on the talkies: “A Quiet Place” is high-concept horror at its best.

John Krasinski transforms a B-movie conceit into a smart, nerve-shredding film.

https://www.economist.com/pros...

But if someone is looking for some Disney Candy for simple minds . . . I wouldn't send them to see Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" . . .

How about freeing up some of that $7.5B?

That's what Microsoft paid for GitHub.

. . . but why did Microsoft buy GitHub . . . ?

The Economist has an interesting opinion on this:

https://www.economist.com/the-...

Microsoft assures users the service is safe under its stewardship, but many are wary. When Mr Ballmer spoke of developers, he had a specific sort in mind: those using Microsoft’s tools to build projects for Microsoft products. He once called open-source Linux a “cancer”, which would spread uncontrollably. In a sense, his words proved prophetic: today, open-source software is everywhere, from websites to financial markets to self-driving cars. Under Mr Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has embraced open-source development. In buying GitHub it hopes to gain the trust of developers it once spurned. But some wonder if the change is complete, or if Microsoft will use its newly bought dominance of open-source hosting to push its own products. Alternatives to GitHub—some themselves open-source—wait in the wings. If it is not careful, Microsoft may find the developers it just paid so much to reach slipping from its grasp.

The Dividend is a unique solution. It's similar to a Universal Basic Income and a social insurance (like Social Security Retirement Pensions, Disability Insurance, or Unemployment), as well as to a Keynesian stimulus (that $300 check you got back in 2009 when Obama signed a huge stimulus into law to halt the recession).

It's not global, but national; yet the protections against damage from structural change and the maximization of gains from such structural change allow us to take full advantage of global trade and labor movement. This is fundamental in Nordic nations, and is studied extensively.

It's really weird being an economist because you basically just have to sound like one to qualify. Economists are well-aware of this fact.

You work 40 hours. You trade that labor for things. You can get a limited amount of stuff in trade--that's purchasing power.

Food. Housing. Clothing. Your car. High-speed Internet. Healthcare. These are things for which you need buying power.

Lowering the cost of goods and services means your purchasing power extends further: instead of choosing between a car and healthcare, you can have both.

Literally nothing else is standard-of-living except what you can buy for your time worked.

You forgot to mention that while some goods can be bought more cheaply you also see your wages fail to keep pace as has been the case since the 70's. It's a race to the bottom wage wise so it's not nearly as rosy a picture as you paint. Moreover economists agree that they duped us and the impact was far worse than estimated. Opps, their bad but our loss.

Citations:

http://prospect.org/article/de... https://www.economist.com/node...

Nationwide salaries haven't kept up with housing prices by less than 10%... /yawn
https://www.economist.com/grap...

"Jobs that didn't prefer white males in the 70s? Jesus F. Christ, that's a bold lie right there."

You are flat out wrong. Affirmative Action ring a bell?

"Adjusted to inflation, housing prices are up by over 100% compared to income since the 70s."

And they're still less than 10% up compared to nationwide salaries
https://www.economist.com/grap...

"There was a less competitive workspace, the US never had hyperinflation,"

15% unemployment where I lived..."less competitive"?!" We had double digit inflation for three years...home loans were up to 18.45% according to freddiemac (http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/pmms30.html)

Power Supply - $2 each in bulk. Or the students can use their cell phone chargers.
SD Card for File System - $2 each in bulk for 2GB SD cards.
Keyboard - $2 each at Goodwill
Display - $5 at Goodwill, or free from Craigslist if you carry them away
Network infrastructure - How many schools don't have Wifi?
curriculum - Free from Khan Academy

When you have a poor school ...

This is mostly a myth. School spending in America is far more progressive than you think. There are state and federal programs to level funding disparities, and in most states poorer students get more funding than richer students. Schools in poor communities have big problems, but money isn't the root cause.

The Economist magazine has useful articles.

Indeed. I subscribe to The Economist, and consider it the best news magazine available. I learn new things every week.

"1843" is fluff. They sent me several free issues trying to get me to subscribe, but I didn't see a single article that I wanted to read. TFA confirms that I am not missing anything.

It surprises me that the two publications can be so different in quality, yet come from the same organization.

1843 Magazine is a bi-monthly cultural magazine published by the Economist Group. The Economist began publication in 1843. Unfortunately, managers there are apparently not aware that 1843 is a misleading title.

Andrew Smith, the author of the article Slashdot is reviewing, seems to have no deep knowledge of technology, and no serious interest in learning. He just wants to write about it. He reminds me of Walter Isaacson, who wrote about Steve Jobs of Apple.

The Economist magazine has useful articles.