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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.

AI and robots will take a lot of jobs. But there will be more jobs created as a result.

Agreed. The whole fear of AI and robots seems to have little basis in evidence and seems more like linear extrapolation run amok.

Consider farming. Today, very few people are actual farmers.

Quite a lot of people are actual farmers. About 31% globally or around a billion people globally. Where your statement is correct is in rich industrialized countries which are comparatively automated but even then it is only a relative statement. In the US there are currently several million farm workers which isn't a trivial number even today. The most labor intensive farming has (like other industries) moved to locations with cheap labor when possible while industrialized economies utilize quite a lot of automation very much like manufacturing. The industry is growing even while it's share of total employment falls. The automation is exactly what enables these economies to do something other than mostly just farming.

You probably don't actually know a person who has ever plowed or harvested a field.

Not only do I know people who have done those things I have both friends and family that own farms and I live in an area where farms are common.

The jobs aren't going away because people here are being replaced by better technology, the jobs are going away here because people are being replaced by workers in other countries who can work for less.

One is not mutually exclusive of the other. It's not exactly a golden age in emerging economies either.

Continuing high rates of unemployment worldwide and chronic vulnerable employment in many emerging and developing economies are still deeply affecting the world of work, warns a new ILO report.

In fact, some companies are insourcing back to the first world because of robotics. There won't be many jobs to go along with it though:

the two new factories (the other will be in the US) will produce about 1m [shoes] (...) The new Adidas factory will have about 160 staff, a fraction of the number required to make the same number of shoes in Asia.

So 160 people to produce 500.000 shoes if that was 1m total, double that if it was 1m each. That's thousands of shoes per employee per year. I just checked one of the bigger online banks here in Norway, 310 employees and 380,000 customers that's more than a thousand per employee. And we're constantly improving the systems to do more with less. For a long time getting more people into the economy has been driving it, like adding another ground level to the pyramid makes it taller.

I'm not so sure that it will always be that way, at some point we might run into other resource limitations and having less people means there's actually more for each because robots do the work but like you need land to grow food, so the more people the more land you need. The more people, the more waste, the more pollution, the more housing, the more traffic and so on. If you think really far into the the future maybe it's better to have fewer humans and a large robot staff to support them.

Of course I'm not doing to ask anyone to give up on the right to have kids, but many countries in Europe are below replacement numbers and maybe then it wouldn't be such a big deal.

That long term unemployment number is as a percentage of unemployed people, per the link you posted. The department of labor (the bureau of labor statistics) calculates unemployment with a national household survey:

http://www.bls.gov/bls/unemplo...

The world bank unemployment numbers (which are actually gathered by the international labor organization) are just a regurgitation of the BLS numbers above, which you'd know if you'd bothered at all to investigate the numbers you are quoting above.

See:

http://data.worldbank.org/indi...

(look at the metadata for the source)

http://www.ilo.org/dyn/lfsurve...

(each country has it's own source, methodology, etc).

Valid complaints would be that the numbers reported don't include the homeless (although those estimates are gathered elsewhere), you don't understand the report, or that it conflicts with your personal opinion.

Manufacturing jobs are not going over sees, they're disappearing completely.

Let's look at a source that considers more than just US employment (page 8):

Industrial employment hardest hit

â Total global employment in industry declined slightly in 2009, which is a major divergence from the historical annual growth rate of 3.4 per cent over the period from 2002 to 2007. Employment in agriculture grew in 2009, which also represented a divergence versus historical trends.

Does a growth rate of over 3% annually in manufacture employment sound to you like the jobs are "disappearing completely"?

This doesn't necessarily invalidate your broader point, but Spain does, in fact, have an extremely inflexible labor market. The World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Competitiveness Report ranked Spain’s labor market 134th out of 142 countries. For example, under a policy originally introduced during the Franco era, a company must pay a laid-off long-term worker 1.5 months of salary for every year he's been employed at the company.

Germany also has severance pay. But I'm afraid your information is outdated. Spanish laws set severance pay to 20 days' wage per year of employment limited to at most 12 months' wage. Also, that Global Competitiveness Report ranks Spain as a whole at 36th place (improvement from previous years).

Spain is now mostly paying for its own mortgage bubble and unstable economic structure endorsed by government since early 1990s.

This doesn't necessarily invalidate your broader point, but Spain does, in fact, have an extremely inflexible labor market. The World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Competitiveness Report ranked Spain’s labor market 134th out of 142 countries. For example, under a policy originally introduced during the Franco era, a company must pay a laid-off long-term worker 1.5 months of salary for every year he's been employed at the company.

Germany also has severance pay. But I'm afraid your information is outdated. Spanish laws set severance pay to 20 days' wage per year of employment limited to at most 12 months' wage. Also, that Global Competitiveness Report ranks Spain as a whole at 36th place (improvement from previous years).

Spain is now mostly paying for its own mortgage bubble and unstable economic structure endorsed by government since early 1990s.

I didn't mean to generally relate homeschooling to child labor. I should have written "Some of the parents that opt for homeschooling prefer ...".

From Compulsory education and child labour: historical lessons, contemporary challenges and future directions:

There is a growing recognition that child labour elimination and the achievement of universal basic education are interrelated challenges – that one cannot be achieved without the other.

In a seminal study, Myron Weiner (1991) accords compulsory education the principal role in eliminating child labour, past and present.

the employment of children in any work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful.

From Wikipedia citing The International Labour Organization.

So we're not talking about teenagers sweeping the floor in a factory after school.

Seems to me that these kids need something to do, they are actually into accomplishing something (playing for the higher score I guess), it's just that their motivation is screwed up.

Of-course many people have addictive personalities, if it weren't for the games, they might have been into addictive drugs, but again, they need something to do.

I looked up the labour laws in South Korea, here is something to note

Article 62 (Minimum Age and Employment Permit)

        (1)A person under the age of 15 shall not be employed as a worker. However, this shall not apply to a person with a employment permit issued by the Minister of Labour.
        (2)The employment permit referred to in paragraph (1) may be issued at the request of the person himself only by designating the type of occupation in which he is engaged, provided that such employment will not impede compulsory education.

Article 63 (Prohibition of Employment)

Female wokers and those who are under 18 shall not be employed for any work detrimental to morality or health. The prohibited type of work shall be determined by the Presidential Decree.

Article 64 (Minor Certificate)

For each minor worker under 18, an employer shall keep at each workplace a copy of the census register testifying to his age and a written consent of his parent or guardian.

(and there is more there).

Also they have a minimum wage law there as well, it's over 4 bucks per hour.

Given that there is also compulsory education, (which I think has to do with teacher unions, that want to secure their positions) and it is a very 'heated' and competitive environment, in a way that requires very high marks to be able to get a job apparently, there is obviously too much stress.

This type of education process combined with these types of labour laws are aimed at producing workers, employees, not businessmen, not owners of business.

I think if South Korea wants to give more opportunities to its young people, to reduce this stress and increase entrepreneurship and independence, they need to allow people to opt out of the compulsory education process and to allow people to hire minors as apprentices and they need to wave all sorts of regulations, starting with the minimum wage.

There has to be a way for a business to advertise to kids younger than 15, maybe 11-12, to get kids interested in what the business is doing and to allow the kids to get experience in that business (even if this means they don't get paid much and they have to forgo the compulsory education).

I think we are creating robots, not individuals with this compulsory education and pressure to get highest scores on exams rather than allowing people to experiment with their interests in different types of businesses early on. I think the kids who are into these games are actually goal oriented and they are suppressed and depressed by the system, they could be entrepreneurs, but they are robbed of that chance.

Are you truly this ignorant? Germany doesn't treat their workers like shit? Germany's trade surplus is due far more to wage suppression than productivity. Indeed, this fact was pointed out to me initially by a German friend, and then I found tons of places that back it up; here's a quick sampling of references that mention it:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/Assets/onaran2.pdf
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inst/download/akyuz.pdf
http://www.alternet.org/economy/154231/german_economic_striving_at_the_expense_of_workers_and_neighbors_will_backfire

Please mod parent down for talking nonsense.

2007 ILO report: "...measured as value added per hour worked, Norway has the highest labour productivity level (US$ 37.99), followed by the United States (US$ 35.63) and France (US$ 35.08)." Norway and France both have 37.5-hour work weeks and several times as much average annual paid leave/holidays as the USA.

It would be nice. The Internationa Labor Organization is a "specialized agency" of the United Nations but isn't actively fighting, union style, for a standardized minimum wage

It would be nice. The Internationa Labor Organization is a "specialized agency" of the United Nations but isn't actively fighting, union style, for a standardized minimum wage

It's just military costs. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

No, it's not. But that 'whoosh' sound you hear is the point of the argument going over your head. 900 billion over 8+ years (which can be calculated to the penny) vs. an estimated total loss of 1-3 trillion from a single event.

Yes, you cannot account for every penny -- because it's not a single entity that was lost or suffered losses, but literally thousands. Example. The report notes that Canada ALONE suffered 3.5 billion in losses from tourism as a result of 911. Read the entire report. It's on the global hotel and tourism industry. You cannot get exact numbers on this. You can get well researched estimates.

It is not a valid argument you make by dismissing the 911 cost estimates by saying they are not calculated the same as the war costs.

Its a jungle of titles and the correct use of them have eluded many corporations. Norway as a nation had its job titles so out of sync its bureau of statistics could not make head or tails of what people where doing. They just recently adapted the ISCO-08. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/isco88/index.htm

Just curious, what is the lethal dosage for dioxin? (During the Viktor Yushchenko case, one press report (was it AP?) said that the lethal dosage is not known since no one has actually died from it.)

I'm not an expert in toxicology, but a quick google search turned up the following.

"The LD50 for dioxin is 0.02 mg/kg of body weight for a rat and 0.001 mg/kg of body weight for a dog, i.e. the rat is twenty times more tolerant than the dog.

The assessment of how a human system would react is not straightforward estimation from the animal tests. However, the animal test gives an idea of the level of the toxic effects."

I'd like a citation for this, because I'm extremely skeptical that executive pay would be able to skew the statistics so heavily. There just aren't that many super-highly compensated executives out there to make a difference.

You're right to be suspicious, as the "76 cents on the dollar" canard is based on straight up sophistry. It ignores the issue of experience (number of years worked) and, most importantly, completely ignores the issue of overtime. In the U.S., men worked 72,174 hours per week to 61,597 for women. (Stats are from the International of Labor Organization)

But even those stats don't tell the whole story. Women outnumber men in part time jobs, but men take the lead when it comes to full time employment. And when it comes to overtime, it's no contest whatsoever. More than 3x as many men put in 60+ hour weeks than women.

If Mary has three years more experience than Ann, puts in an average of 10 hours more per week than Ann, and is 9 times as likely to be killed or injured on the job as Ann - of course Mary would expect to paid more than Ann. Except when I say "Ann" I mean the average woman and by "Mary" I mean the average man.

Men get paid more...because men work more. It's that simple.

How many "Proper Jobs" are there compared to rural workers, forced labor and even child labor in India? How many jobs that are being off-shored there have these benefits? My friend just returned from India after being laid off with only severance and a 401k to get him back to the states. Organized labor sounds like Union Shops in the US and depending on how you read the 2000 statistics less than 10% of India is unionized right now.

You are missing the point.
Article is about keyboards because they were able to get into a keyboard factory.

Almost every other product made in China is produced in same or similar conditions.
Watches, toys, badges, shoes, paperclips, playing cards, cocktail umbrellas, T-shirts, marbles, glasses or iPods...

All of them are built in conditions reminiscent of slave labor.
At least to middle-class westerners.

According to International Labour Organization they are making about 180 RMB less per month than construction workers. (228.76 U.S. dollars = 1 564.53466 Chinese yuan according to Google)
Or about 620 RMB less than someone working in education.

To many, that is a sweet deal and a well paid indoor job that you do sitting on your ass.
Anyone who has a problem visualizing something like that - next weekend, get up at 4 AM, pick up a shovel and go outside and dig some ditches until sundown.
It should down on you quite quickly how assembling keyboards for 60 cents an hour may seem like a great career opportunity.

while i've never heard of E'Prime Aerospace, but if you want to look at an example of privatization hurting society, then look up info on water privatization in El Salvador. i first read about this issue about 5-6 years ago (when the water supply was first privatized), but the problem doesn't seem to have gotten any better over the years.

other examples of this include India, where the World Bank is also pushing the government to privatize Delhi's water supply, as well as Pakistan, where the WTO and other IFIs are pushing for privatization of health care against the protest of doctors and other medical professionals. Pakistanis have also recently been swindled by foreign investors when Pakistan Steel Mill was privatized at far below the market price. likewise, there is strong public opposition against the privatization of Pakistan's Oil & Gas Development Company. however, all of this is just the latest episode in a string corrupt privatization dealings by the Pakistani dictator which has cost the Pakistani people over $23.8 billion in national income and domestic resources.

another example of the harm of privatization can be seen in post-soviet Russia, where the privatization of national assets have made a handful of people disgustingly rich while the rest of society bears the cost of this ransacking of public infrastructure and lack of industry regulation.

it just seems ridiculous to me that public assets should be auctioned off to the rich at 1/1000th their market value while public institutions like schools, hospitals, transportation infrastructure, etc. remain chronically underfunded. and certain things like the water supply and other public utilities serve a more important purpose than creating lucrative profits for transnational conglomerates, especially in countries where people can barely afford to eat.

(*) Nearly, meaning it actually did 'kill' him several times on the way to the hospital by inducing multiple heart attacks.

Oh, you mean alarmist organizations like the WHO? My point stands, safety standards were enacted because of Silent Spring and we are better off for the standards. These are not just product labels, but safe use standard operating procedures (look at one yourself). Look, DDT largely was being applied incorrectly in the early 1900's. This shouldn't be surprising since the chemicals being used were developed during wartime and represented new technology. As anyone on Slashdot should know, standards usually lag behind new technology. Furthermore, no one "shut the door" on DDT use -- It IS currently being used to fight malaria (see above WHO document). In fact DDT has been used so frequently in countries like Africa there are populations of DDT-resistant mosquitoes (another justification for the development of genetically modified mosquitoes). And, for your information, I have slept under a bed net in Kenya and Tanzania and I have spent a year of my life fighting a mosquito-borne virus that at one point had me unconscious for an extended period of time. No one in my family has died from malaria but you point is mute because DDT is used (it was great while it lasted), its efficacy is failing, and an alternative is needed. Again, Silent Spring has improved pesticide safety and has nothing remotely in common with the outbreak of malaria and "death of millions".

You'll note, from this article:

Since when are 60 hour work weeks the norm? They're around, but last I knew, most people are working a standard 40 hours.

Since about 2000. The trend had already been going on but the stock crash of the late 90's and 9/11 really put the screws to everyone. People in the US now put in as many or more hours than anyone in the world. The declining earning power is something that's been going on since 1970 or so. Salaried workers at big dumb companies have been hit very hard, with many not taking vacation time for years. If you don't go along with it, you are not a team player and will soon get a vacation without end.

Here and here are more recent studdies. Things have not gotten better. Some 22% of US workers are pulling more than 48 hours a week. Want to guess what percentage of the population is self employed or on salary? The situation was well parodied by The Onion, but the situation is not very funny to anyone who wants a family.

What this all shows is that the US economy lacks real competition and is dominated by a small number of large firms who can treat their employees as they please. The rise of the "service sector" with it's franchises and the decline of manufacturing are both cause and symptoms and trading with China is a dissaster we will all regret.

Since when are 60 hour work weeks the norm? They're around, but last I knew, most people are working a standard 40 hours.

Since about 2000. The trend had already been going on but the stock crash of the late 90's and 9/11 really put the screws to everyone. People in the US now put in as many or more hours than anyone in the world. The declining earning power is something that's been going on since 1970 or so. Salaried workers at big dumb companies have been hit very hard, with many not taking vacation time for years. If you don't go along with it, you are not a team player and will soon get a vacation without end.

Here and here are more recent studdies. Things have not gotten better. Some 22% of US workers are pulling more than 48 hours a week. Want to guess what percentage of the population is self employed or on salary? The situation was well parodied by The Onion, but the situation is not very funny to anyone who wants a family.

What this all shows is that the US economy lacks real competition and is dominated by a small number of large firms who can treat their employees as they please. The rise of the "service sector" with it's franchises and the decline of manufacturing are both cause and symptoms and trading with China is a dissaster we will all regret.

Thailand already has basic education covered. Thailand's adult literacy rate is male 95%, female 91%. For children, it is 98%. See here. By your own definition, that would potentially allow Thai children to greatly benefit from the OLPC.

Yeah, yeah, I know, methane {CH4} is not what causes the smell in farts -- that's caused by hydrogen sulphide and thiomethanol {CH3SH}. Methane is a paraffin and you wouldn't expect it to smell. However, I also know that not many people know that. So I was just going for a cheap "funny" mod. It's not even karma whoring, really, because funny mods don't help your karma {though "overrated" ones do harm it, so it's not all that cheap}.

BTW, to view pages from EnvironmentalChemistry.com without advertisements, turn off JavaScript {which will get around their christian banner-block ban redirection attempt} so you get a "javascript is required" warning; then use view -> page style -> no style.

...have committed a schoolboy logical error in assuming that that is universally true

No he hasn't. Unions are a form of Socialism at the micro scale. For a macro version, look to Italy, France, and Spain where they unemployment rate is much higher than say the US and UK.

But don't take my word for it. Have fun with these data sets from LOBORSTA http://laborsta.ilo.org/

Repeat after me. SOCIALISM SUCKS!

2,000 people is nothing. These are young people that have volunteered to do such a job, and are willing to die fo what they believe in be it right or wrong. I've talked with a Marine truck driver that was proud that his group of people were of the highest death rate due to reconicence of dead vehicles.

103,000 people die annually at work each year http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inf/pr/20 05/36.htm

So, the military is not a very bad choice of a hazardous job. Especially compared to policemen, cab drivers, and watermen.

Now, being that the poor Iraqis that we "liberated" from the evils of Saddam, they are much worse off. Gas there has gone up something like 8 fold. Electricity and food are issues. For the first time in over 100 years their deathrate has exceeded their birthrate. Their children then have birth defects due to using fun toys like armor piercing rockets that have depleted uranium (aka, gulf war sickness here in the US). They have lost on order of 30,000 people directly by being killed http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

I don' think your anymore of an argumentative dick than I am, but you just have much fewer data.

"We need to make the patent office follow the law as it stands."

I thought so too, but from what I understand, the EPO is outside the law. (There is even a story going around how the CEO of the EPO physically assaulted on of his co-workers, and nothing could be done against it--that's how much the EPO is outside the law.)

So how could the EPO be made to follow the law?

I started looking for French statistics, and the documentation describing their methods is in French (which I don't speak), but one of the numbers reference an ILO definition of unemployment. The ILO is a UN organization, so I went to the ILO labor statistics web site to find more, hoping that they would provide unemployment statistics for multiple countries using the same methodology.

It appears that by the ILO standard, someone must have taken a specific action to find employment within the last four weeks to be considered unemployed. While this doesn't include "discouraged workers" and it could be argued that this doesn't accurately represent the true unemployment rate of a country, it is useful for comparing one country to another (which is what we're doing in this discussion).

Looking at the 2002 numbers (the last year they had complete data for the countries listed), we have:

5.1% United Kingdom
5.8% United States
8.7% Germany
8.9% France

Germany and France appear to have gone up significantly (to around 10%) in 2003, but the United States apparently did not supply data to the ILO for that year.

At any rate, if I have illusions about the comparative unemployment rate between the United States and western European countries, apparently the United Nations suffers from the same illusions.

'Economic Security for a Better World' (ILO -International Labour Organization)
(5.49MB PDF)

password: universe

Fire has never caused a steel structure to spontainously collapse before this.

Ahem...

http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/safew ork/hazardwk/fire/fir01.htm

http://www.mutualbox.com/a_building_fire_and_struc tural_f.htm

I don't necessarily agree it's the "work ethic" as people here in the US typically work over 40 hrs (laborsta.ilo.org) and take far less vacation time than other countries. This may in fact be dissolving the basic "family unit" which traditionally has helped guide us through to maturity and success.

With our techshare diminishing and our workload increasing I think we are the ones who are becoming mindless robots.

Also I heard an interesting thought from an old interview with Isaac Asimov on PBS - He mentioned that the modern idea of "education" has become something that you "finish" or "complete" rather than pursue throughout your life.

I didn't really provide a defense for "Bush's" economy? It's not even his economy. The President has very little to do with the way the economy runs. The President has the most influence on foriegn policy (I'm sure you could go on and on about this too. Bush lied! Bush lied!). You're just a pissed off liberal who didn't get his way in Florida.

There was no doubletalk and the only statement I made that I could have, but did not, backed up with facts was the following.

The entire world is in an unemployment slump and the U.S. is nearly a point under the world average (not bad if you ask me, regardless of what party holds power).

Here is a link for some facts. We are in a slump.

As for my "feeler", that's exactly what it was. You came back with exactly what I suspected. You're a very angry person who has a very narrow view of the world.

• In terms of cost, any productivity advantage the US worker has is vastly overwhelmed by the wage differences across different countries.

• In terms of cost, any productivity advantage the US worker has is vastly overwhelmed by the wage differences across different countries.

Link

I really doubt the International Labour Organization would bother with a comprehensive study of discrimination against Morrocan migrant workers working in Spain if there weren't quite a few working there.

The fact is, much like migrant Palestinians working in Israli underwear factories, the Morrocans provide an endless and inexpensive labour force to the Spanish industry. The reason why you weren't able to get a work visa is that you're an American, which means they have to worry about the inevitable fact that you will piss and moan when they step all over your basic rights.

Remember, you're an American which means that you're FAR from average. Sometimes being the biggest and the strongest has its drawbacks.

That's why you use lubricant! It's no longer just for the bedroom. I've pulled a huge mess of lubricated cable with a single Cat 5 cable.

Actually, under Russian socialism, workers were paid a wage. Not necessarily a particularly good one, but that's better than Russian capitalism is managing.

There are a great many millionaires in India. There are just a hell of a lot more poor people. Iraq? Well, a computer is not much use when the occupying forces *still* haven't got the electricity working in your area yet. But in the past they were a well educated country - I have worked with an Iraqi scientist. The second man to pay his own way into space was a South African. As for Tokyo and Hong Kong - where the hell did you get the idea they were poor?

Give me an example of no way out?

Ever heard of subsistence farming? You spend all day trying to scratch a living. If the crop fails, you're in trouble. It's hard to get an education if there is no free school available and your family needs you to help in the fields or there will not be enough food.

It doesnt matter where you are, if you are smart you'll take advantage of what you have, and find ways around what you dont have.

Bullshit. Absolute utter bullshit. Only if you are lucky enough to be born in a country with free education and some form of welfare state does that apply, and even then not equally. If there is no free education, if you have to work every hour of the day just to get enough to live on, then there is no other way out. Are you trying to claim all those people on the breadline in the third world are just bone idle?

What makes you think a kid in Africa or China cant pick up a book on C++, then go to an internet cafe and practice programming so he can get a job?

Are you absolutely insane? Possibly if the Chinese kid lives in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangdong, and has the money to spend on the cafe. But what if you live in a village in Western China? Where do you get the book from? Where is the internet cafe? Especially if the government has just shut most of them down. Same with Africa. Possibly fine if you're in Accra , but what if you're in ha Konote?

to live in the USA you have to be the smartest hardest working person in the world.

Firstly, the US only work the longest hours of any western industrial nation. You work less hours than Hong Kong-China. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand all report working more than the US. You work for less time than the Koreans. Look up the original report rather than US media misunderstandings. Secondly - well, duration does not equal quality. And finally, yes, the French have it easier. That's because the French decided to have it easier. That's because they value their free time more than their bank balance - they go on strike to get better working conditions, not more money (and boy, do they go on strike). They work fewer hours, they're a bit poorer, but they are a damn sight happier than you. I'd rather be a happy cheese munching surrender monkey in Paris than a miserable cheese munching desk monkey in Wisconsin. If you are spending all your time working to get the money to buy consumeables and you are still miserable, when there are people with less money who are far happier, have you considered that they might actually be the smarter ones?

Yes, there is - Burma!

It took a little poking around, but I found an explanation of how this thing works... looks like deuterium gets them a longer wavelength that travels through the atmosphere better.

Whatever the reasons are, I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that thing while it's fueled. Raw flourine is incredibly nasty stuff, and the hydrogen flouride exhaust is really awful, too... it dissolves in water to form hydrofluoric acid, which is reactive enough to eat glass (you have to keep it in teflon bottles). I hope they're not discharging it into the atmosphere!

Per capita income of 96% of Nambia: $85.

No, it's naive for MS (and you) to think the country could afford the software -- after all things like feeding your kids and education are a little more important than a shiny new wordprocessor with an oh-so-happy clippy piece of doodoo, wouldn't you say?

24% urban unemployment; 14% in rural areas.
$1755 per capita income; however 96% of the population earn $85.

That means each copy of office would only take as long for a Nambian to pay for as a Westerner would pay for house.

They could pay for it sooner, but CDs aren't quite as sustaning as food.

See more stats here

No one is saying that only free software is good -- but dammit think!

On 1. it may or may not be intended to mislead. It's an interesting question. I'll bet that it has to refer to part-time jobs though (then we get into definition of a part-time job!).

On 2. I have absolutely no clue. Another great question. I started to look at Eurostats which seems to have a hell of a lot of data if only I could find the time to access it. Interestingly it give the euro-zone countries an 8.5% unemployment rate as compared to the overall (15 member state) 7.8% rate.

There is data from the International Labor Organization that breaks down by country unemployment rates (again, calculated in seemingly different ways!) which shows that some heavily unionized countries (Sweden, Luxembourg) have low un-employment etc. Here's their (up to 1999!) US figures for comparison. Anyway, it's a tricky business, but I can't help suspect that French trade-union members live a better life than US casual/part-time workers!

On 1. it may or may not be intended to mislead. It's an interesting question. I'll bet that it has to refer to part-time jobs though (then we get into definition of a part-time job!).

On 2. I have absolutely no clue. Another great question. I started to look at Eurostats which seems to have a hell of a lot of data if only I could find the time to access it. Interestingly it give the euro-zone countries an 8.5% unemployment rate as compared to the overall (15 member state) 7.8% rate.

There is data from the International Labor Organization that breaks down by country unemployment rates (again, calculated in seemingly different ways!) which shows that some heavily unionized countries (Sweden, Luxembourg) have low un-employment etc. Here's their (up to 1999!) US figures for comparison. Anyway, it's a tricky business, but I can't help suspect that French trade-union members live a better life than US casual/part-time workers!

http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/ent/p apers/grameen.htm

"In 1995-96 there were 77 fatal injuries per 100,000 fishermen, making it the most dangerous occupation by a significant margin (the next closest was mining and quarrying at 23.2 per 100,000)".

You can read more about the huge safety problem in the fishing industry here.

There are many examples where IT problems lead to stress in the workplace. /. is filling up with anecdotes of them. Blame the bosses and clueless management is a common theme, and I'll agree.

I've seen IT workers completely depressed because management stupidly imposed quotas and thresholds to measure their productivity. This leads to further complaints from the people they are supposed to be supporting, because the race is to close trouble tickets fast, not fix the problem, or tackle the core of the problem. This leads to a worsening situation spiraling out of control. Management was happy because the statistics showed an ever increasing level of complaints, with a shorter and shorter response time to close out the cases. Average time to open and close a major network failure was 7 minutes, which was completely fictitious.

I didn't last very long there, before I became too depressed by my poor performance. Even though I was the highest level of network support, only taking the cases nobody else could solve, I was still expected to close each case in under 7 minutes. These were cases like building wide outages, dead trunks, replacing burned out equipment. Management had its head up its ass the whole time, and turnover was close to 100% every 6 months. They accounted for the high turnover rate as poaching by other high tech companies.

Slashdotters will agree, 1 in 10 depressed workers would be a low count. Perhaps they are only looking at the workers who have been diagnosed by a professional therapist as severely clinically depressed. A link to a summary of the original study leaves a few too many questions.

Been there, still recovering,
the AC