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If by that, you mean "union", then I doubt it. You'd never get enough support from the folks that are still getting paid very well (like me, who lives in Ohio), and aren't being outsourced. There's no business case to do that for anything but level 0 and 1 helpdesk jobs, and not even all of those.

Read TFA:
"Cengage...had outsourced accounting services earlier in the year"
"The layoffs affected workers across IT, including networks, desktop support, database administration, developers, data warehouse and other systems."

Also have a look at this, which lists the 33 jobs most likely to be outsourced...noting that many of them pay quite well indeed. Or did. They probably don't anymore.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/sta...

To put it all in context, you may want to consider the quantity of jobs being outsourced - which is in the millions:
http://www.statisticbrain.com/...

it's not being greedy to actually want non-stagnant wages

Non-farm business sector real compensation per hour is up 2.7% since 2014, after a long plateau due to the recession and formerly high unemployment rate, which is now down to 5%.

CEO pay is down over 30% (as a ratio with average worker pay) since 2000 though.

Mississippi is a beautiful state!
Mississippi has spacious country living as well as big urbanized cities, if that's what you like.
Mississippi has warm kind people.

That all may be true, but it doesn't change that Mississippi is dead last of all states in education, child poverty and health care. And by "dead last", I mean 50th out of 50. The bottom. Of the barrel.

So if you don't mind stupid, poor and sick, Mississippi is for you.

http://djournal.com/news/missi...

http://msbusiness.com/2014/09/...

http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...

And how is this different from "a senior whitehouse official" calling bibi a chickenshit and have it published in the Atlantic? http://www.theatlantic.com/int...

Every time a governing body gets involved, things get more complicated

Every time a governing body is lacking, things get more complicated. And then one emerges anyway.

The question always ends up being: in whose interest do those with effective governorship act?

I promise you,

Donate $10/month and I promise you Paradise.

it really is possible for people to cooperate with each other to achieve this.

Do you mean "cooperate" or "compete"? Democratic government is a form of cooperation, you realise? one citizen, one share.

This isn't an anti-enterprise post, just an anti-anti-government one. Pure ideology (e.g. "free market!" and "command economy!") is for modellers, storytellers and fanatics. The modeller knows they're simplifying the problem. The storyteller knows they're making things up completely. The fanatic, unfortunately, realises neither.

From someone who was 10 years old and was inspired by this speech that is oft forgotten and belittled in the bejeweled halls of anti-government fanatics like some of todays right wing sudo nazis and especially assholes that spout anti-government nonsense. They really need to have their motives and agendas closely scrutinized by the electorate again. What we need is someone like a Kennedy again to step forward and roast these assholes over the coals in public debate the way Nixon was exposed in 1960.

Great leaders inspire great things for mankind, the current group of anti-government leaders are an oxymoron! To quote Mr. Trump's most used bit of bullshit leadership technique, we all need to say in one voice "YOUR ALL FUCKING FIRED!" The way we did with Nixon if we ever catch on to what these so called business people are really up to with a blatant attempt to buy another Presidency the way they did with Reagan. Do they really think people are that stupid all of the time? Not that the rest of the Republican ticket is any better this time around either, yes they had once had a real leader in Lincoln, but how the once great in spirit have all fallen to the allure of the coin!

It is not the time to hold back on the future and live in an oil and blood soaked past. I can only pray that soon a time will come when someone again inspires the cooperation ventures like space exploration, a change to a real environmental economy, with the technology to eliminate waste and most of all great science ventures in all the fields that made landing on the moon possible!

Politics is being abused by those who have lead by deliberately inciting economic terror and other tactics like the ones used by Dick Chaney and Co. Even George Bush senior is finally starting to realize the real problems that these money driven assholes are creating for the economy and the world in the long term. At least the not so great actor Ronald Reagan, who became a president and asked Mr Gorbachev to "tear down that wall" admitted that it was economically important to do science right and it was this that made us great, even as his supporters ripped and tore up Nasa!

Unfortunately what I envision happening instead is a secret state visit to the international space station by both Putin and someone like Jeb or Trump to carve up the world economy in secret as they nuke the Chinese and a few other states that get in the way of their friend's enterprises. Dick Chaney can tag along, I am sure him and a few others will all be doing something in the background to oversee the talks!

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

or here:

http://www.epi.org/blog/inequa...

Reading his statements, it's clear he was absolutely DELUSIONAL about the effort and skills required to do what he claimed he would do... even worse than Donald Trump.

Go through the comments that followed his recent article in The Atlantic (don't bother reading his statement). Everybody but him (and I maybe TWO random commentators) could see how glaringly irrational and fraught with obvious flaws his whole idea was:

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

about left/right????

I only mentioned "left" (not "right") because THEY are the ones currently pushing speech codes, complaining that any speech they dislike is "hate speech" that must be suppressed, showing up at speeches and rallies (by many different speakers of many different political stripes) to shout-down the speakers, hijack the microphones, etc.

As for it being "hypocritical" - well you seem to like to troll using that accusation but you seem not to know what the word means. I should not need to cite left wing suppression of speech when it's in the news on a nearly daily basis and is all over the web and is currently the subject of another active thread RIGHT HERE ON SLASHDOT. How about liberal rag Slate DEFENDING speech codes. Even the ACLU has had to recognize the plague of liberal speech suppression on the campus. Here's the left-leaning The Atlantic defending the suppression of free speech. It's happening in all the formerly Judeo-Christian nations as they become more secular and more left-wing as can be seen at The Telegraph

The following actual or publicly-thought-of-as right-of-center people have been attacked while speaking at public events by leftists wielding pies: William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, G. Gordon Liddy, Anita Bryant, Rupert Murdoch, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz. While pie attacks have been used by leftists against other leftists for not being left enough, I have never heard of a right-winger attacking a left-winger with a pie on stage in an attempt to shut-down the speech of the left-winger.

Of course there are also the incidents where people like Condoleezza Rice, first black female Sec of State was disinvited to speak. How about this: list of stuff leftists have banned from various colleges? Here is a Harvard Crimson editorial in favor of junking free speech in favor of "social justice". If you are so inept that you cannot ferret-out even a tiny bit of evidence from the publicly-available tidal wave of evidence that the left is responsible for most of the speech suppression these days then you are the last person who should be labeling other people as trolls - apparently simply because they disagree with you (Making yourself an example of the phenomena)

Please cite the most recent 5 examples of a US College or University event where a left-of-center speaker was shut down (speech blocked/microphone seized/Pies thrown/etc) by a bunch or college Republicans or TEA Partiers. Please cite any occasions in the past 20 years when any right-leaning group has demanded a left-leaning speaker be shut up (and please exclude those very few cases where such a plea was made as part of a call for balance AFTER left-wingers successfully block right-leaning speakers) on a university campus. The university USED to be the place where all speech was welcome. This is no longer the case

You seem to be under some illusions about the working conditions of University professors. Most of your professors are adjuncts, working part time for less than minimum wage.

You're upset because your professor didn't contact you way before the first class to tell you what the expectations were? Guess what? The University probably hadn't even gotten around to hiring her yet. And even if they had, they reserved the right to say "just kidding" and cancel it at the last minute.

You want someone to blame for the poor quality of your education? It's not your professors. It's the "dooshbags" they are working for.

I am sorry to hear that you are out an extra $50 for the cost of a new textbook. Your professor, who makes about $20,000 a year by working at three different schools with no benefits, no job security and no support from their employer, knows what that feels like.

You seem to be under some illusions about the working conditions of University professors. Most of your professors are adjuncts, working part time for less than minimum wage.

You're upset because your professor didn't contact you way before the first class to tell you what the expectations were? Guess what? The University probably hadn't even gotten around to hiring her yet. And even if they had, they reserved the right to say "just kidding" and cancel it at the last minute.

You want someone to blame for the poor quality of your education? It's not your professors. It's the "dooshbags" they are working for.

I am sorry to hear that you are out an extra $50 for the cost of a new textbook. Your professor, who makes about $20,000 a year by working at three different schools with no benefits, no job security and no support from their employer, knows what that feels like.

This is the worst possible thing to do, not just for the basic liberties. The Atlantic published an article explaining why.

We can't cocoon people and then let them out into the world. This is elementary-school treatment at a University Level.

The B-52 is kept around because it costs less to operate

Except it also costs more to operate than the B-1:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/sta...

its also devilishly expensive to operate, having more than twice the per-flight-hour cost of the B-52.

Completely wrong. The B-1 is actually LESS EXPENSIVE to operate than the B-52, while possessing greater capacity:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/sta...

Citation Needed

The evidence I've seen is that a strong safety net increases business startups because people are less afraid of what will happen when they fail, which most of them will do.

Here's a few sources for my view:

http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20...

Is anyone using any transcontinental copper any more? I would also assume that if it is possible to tap deep-sea FO cable, that they have done the same already.

I'd like for someone who lays down FO for commercial work to chime in on the feasibility of either a passive or active tap of such deep-sea cable.

Here is an article on current undersea cable eavesdropping, according to it fibre cables are currently being monitored.

I would have flagged the submission "notthebest", but I can't comb /. 24/7.
WSJ and the NYT makes it hard to see full stories and should be banned.

Also, we should see more from sites like the Guardian and the Atlantic, the latter of which still has Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" available.

It appears that most all of the articles about this is linking to the WSJ article, but at least they are not the WSJ site. Here's a Reuters post.

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

> From the article:

Which one? And which page is that on?

Because I'm not seeing that phrase in the PDF:

* http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.0362...

Nor in the main article:

* http://www.theatlantic.com/sci...

Oh wait, some in the highest levels of government have been portraying Assange's "actions" (aka journalism, somewhat sloppy journalism but journalism all the same) as "aiding our enemies (terrorists)". Congressman Peter King stated that Wikileaks should be designated as a terrorist organization. Others have suggested he should "vanish", still others have said he should be prosecuted for espionage, material support of terrorism, aiding the enemy or a number of other charges.

http://www.washingtontimes.com...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://www.theguardian.com/med...
http://www.theatlantic.com/int...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

You base it on the fact that the costs of basic necessities is a greater percentage of a working income than it ever has been.

No it isn't. Basic necessities cost a lot less today than they ever have!

20 years ago, a working man could pay for his rent with one week's salary. Now on the average it costs 2 weeks or more... and that's before you've paid for other necessties such as food, utilities, and car payments and gasoline.

Housing cost is about the only thing that has gone up on average in people's budgets, and that hasn't doubled -- it's gone from about 23% to 32% in the past century or so. Meanwhile, we pay a tiny fraction of what we used to on necessities like food and clothing.

And if you want to talk about the poor, well, yeah, they still pay a higher percentage on food for example than rich people. But the poorest 20% pay on average about 16% of their budget on food today -- 100 years ago, the AVERAGE household (including poor, rich, and middle class) spent about 42% of its budget on food alone!

Yes -- rent costs have gone up, and that's a problem. But the costs of almost all other necessities has spiralled down, for poor as well as rich.

You base it on the fact that the costs of basic necessities is a greater percentage of a working income than it ever has been.

No it isn't. Basic necessities cost a lot less today than they ever have!

20 years ago, a working man could pay for his rent with one week's salary. Now on the average it costs 2 weeks or more... and that's before you've paid for other necessties such as food, utilities, and car payments and gasoline.

Housing cost is about the only thing that has gone up on average in people's budgets, and that hasn't doubled -- it's gone from about 23% to 32% in the past century or so. Meanwhile, we pay a tiny fraction of what we used to on necessities like food and clothing.

And if you want to talk about the poor, well, yeah, they still pay a higher percentage on food for example than rich people. But the poorest 20% pay on average about 16% of their budget on food today -- 100 years ago, the AVERAGE household (including poor, rich, and middle class) spent about 42% of its budget on food alone!

Yes -- rent costs have gone up, and that's a problem. But the costs of almost all other necessities has spiralled down, for poor as well as rich.

It is a strange comment. After all, as was pointed out in The Atlantic, as of 2009 most Chinese still did not have running water. So it may be a stretch to say a US$205 phone is, "almost a burner."

Source: http://jamesfallows.theatlanti...

"Make it a high-school graduation requirement," Emanuel said. "They need to know this stuff."

I recall a moment in college when I was standing in the ruins of classic Rome with a friend of mine, reading to him a sign in one of the structures indicating where Julius Caesar was stabbed, and having him ask me, "Who's Julius Caesar?" Smart guy, graduated from college in three years, and has been a middle school science teacher ever since.

A central problem with our K-12 educational system has been too many cooks, i.e. politicians, in the kitchen. The central message they have been preaching without ceasing has been "More, more, more," and schools continue to suffer. Schools have become bloated with educational mandates that keep adding to the curriculum, and expect it sooner. For example, 25 years ago, my kindergarten classroom met for a half-day three days a week, where we learned our ABC's, learned how to count from 1-10, and otherwise drew crude drawings with crayons and played on the playground. Now every kindergartner needs to know how to read. The Finns still enjoy play time, and who has the better test scores? And don't get me started on Algebra expectations...

If we really want students to succeed, we need to give them room to grow by relaxing curricula standards, not adding more to them. If a smart guy can get through college and succeed in life not knowing who Julius Caesar was, does he need to know how to program a computer?

In my personal opinion, beyond the 8th grade, I think the only class every student should be required to take by law nationally is Civics. The care and maintenance of our nation depends on it. Leave the rest up to the states, and let national benchmarks like the ACT and SAT serve as a common metric students can measure themselves by.

How much is not suffering from allergies, not having to clean up so much, not getting lung cancer worth to you?

Given that European air quality is generally much worse than US air quality, it seems like Europeans are not doing it right:

http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...

http://ideas.time.com/2013/10/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

I know it's hard to see your viewpoint from the US (which I assume you're from), but many in Europe do indeed feel that we're being bombarded. Near where I live in the UK and even London, I feel like a stranger in my own country, where whites are nearly a minority. Multi-culturalism has failed, and bringing more immigrants in will not make things better.

I'm scared that these quotas won't stop coming. Instead of the variety in the races, in the long run, we'll only have a single EU race, where the original cultures are lost and where there's no white skin, or black skin anymore (the latter is less likely as they're coming into the EU not vice versa). I also think that some cultures are less advanced than others and that the less advanced ones may dominate over time, and set us all back decades or even centuries. Africa's population is set to quadruple apparently (here's an article and the source), and that would be the final nail in the coffin if we were just as open then.

There is an alternative, and that is to let a billionaire look after them as he's promised to buy them an island and give them the essentials including education. He just needs the governments' permission.

The FBI has an awful lot of previous form when it comes to pretending to have scientific evidence that doesn't really exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...
https://www.wsws.org/en/articl...

etc., etc. ad nauseam.

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

Probably not. Because he's probably not a paranoid moron with no ability to asses threats.

"asses threats"? That's only after they send him to jail and bubba decides he is his new girlfriend.

Even when Germany was losing though, he kept doubling down on genocide, dedicating resources to the killing that could have been used for the war effort. It was that much more important to him.

See Timothy Snyder's latest work, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101903452).

You can find a decent summation here along with an insightful interview with the author: http://www.theatlantic.com/int...

Probably not. Because he's probably not a paranoid moron with no ability to asses threats.

Its not computers, magnet schools, charter schools, teacher pay, higher taxes or any of those even when statistics sometimes hint at showing otherwise.

All of these things could have impacts, for instance computer usage has a bell curve effect at the low and high ends achievement suffers but there's a middle ground where grades actually improve. Teacher pay that is too low leaves you with incompetent or money-stressed teachers who are poorly focused on the students.

The commonality is involved parents who help their kids when struggle, demand they toe the line when they get hardheaded, and have expectations for success. Its just not politically correct to say so because parent involvement lines up so closely with racial lines. Not exact, but close enough.

It's unfortunate, but that is apparently not actually true. In the study I just linked, involved parents did not have any statistically significant impact on their kids, punishing bad grades had no impact, rewarding good grades had no impact, helping your children with homework had no impact. Also observed was that parental involvement did not actually line up on racial lines. Hispanic parents were as involved as Asian parents, for example, despite the Asian children outperforming the Hispanic children.

The things they found that actually helped? Reading to your young children and having positive role models (especially when the parents associate with other educated adults who are successful). Interesting results.

Senator Wyden has been pretty vociferously against mass surveillance, on repeated occasions.

Some examples:
http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfro...

I think his campaign is irresistible to everybody. You cannot look away. If you are uninterested in politics, you must look (in horror) because he may be your president. If you are interested in politics, you must look because he's the Republican frontrunner. If you are uninterested in party politics but interested in the political process, you must look because the existence of his campaign at all is fascinating.

I enjoyed this article in The Atlantic about his campaign. He's wrecking havoc in the Republican party. They can't stop him and they can't support him. It's glorious.

Ever since I learned about Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" published in The Atlantic and available online on their site, I have felt that The Atlantic has been doing a good job.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=...
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

TBF the deep South certainly does still have problems as evidenced by a number of indicators such as this but the Yankees aren't clean as their driven snow either. Sometimes I think their desire to run down a flag is a manifestation of closet racism. They come down on the South to cover their own guilt, just like some guy who bashes gays online but is really uncertain over his own sexuality.

And then there is this question: "What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines?"

People have been asking this question for literally 150 years or so. Even if we restrict our horizon to things published in the last month, there's quite a bit. Do we need another take on this? And from... Tim O'Reilly?

factory machines that don't need humans to run them, and many other changes the 1950s and 1960s futurists didn't expect to see

No, this is exactly what they expected to see. The main thing they were wrong about is that they expected to see it within 20 years.

Citation needed. From what I remember on Uber's own website, they claim to do background checks of drivers. That doesn't sound like opposition to me.

Sure: http://www.cnet.com/news/ubers-background-checks-dont-catch-criminals-says-houston/

Uber performs in-house background checks, but they oppose municipalities that require police background checks (which is the requirement in most areas for taxi services). There is concern that Uber's in-house checks aren't very thorough, and that they aren't looking very hard as to not have to fail so many applications, or more likely because a tougher background check is more expensive to process (fingerprints, etc). Not that even police background checks are perfect, mind you, just that they're going to catch more than Uber's in-house checks. Plus I suspect there's an element of municipalities not trusting Uber to run these checks in the first place.

And yes, taxi companies do more complete background checks, at least in more areas.

So while taxi companies check a prospective driver's fingerprint records against a database that theoretically (more on that in a minute) includes a person's complete criminal history in the United States, Uber background checks use a database that can only go back seven years for some information.

Anyhow, this is one area where Uber is inflexible. They seem generally disinterested in working with governments beyond getting their existing business plan approved, especially on anything where implementing a regulation would increase costs.

You still haven't said what anti trust violations Apple is guilty of.

Well, these are just some of the ones they've been found guilty of, which you can read about in the judge's opinion when he found them guilty (you could have googled it yourself, you know):

http://assets.nationaljournal....

Bullet points here:

http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...

43% of Women With Children Leave Their Jobs

This looks like it is all in fun.

Until ISIS decides to set off a truck bomb on the street where these women live.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. The Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.

What ISIS Really Wants

I think maybe it's time they make a comeback, when things like this are afoot: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/wisconsin-seven-day-work-week/398189/

I mean the ones served "in passing". It just seems so counter-intuitive that someone would open a page to read an article or see pics and then ignore that thing and go read or watch the ad and click on it and remember any of it, let alone actually buy something.

I don't have AdBlock in one of the four browsers I run (Sandboxied Chrome -- the others are Sandboxied FF with no flash, non-Sandboxied FF with Noscript, and non-Sandboxied Chrome that I only use for 3-4 sites), and don't remember seeing anything remotely relevant or interesting, except for a couple of youtube ads, or ads for goods I already found and bought on Amazon. And I have clicked on an ad and bought something a number of times when I was searching for the item on Google, in the mindset of wanting to buy. Though I often end up going to Amazon and buying the item there.

Facebook in that sense seems the worst, no one is in a mindset to buy, they are just looking to score a bit of interesting info or pic from "friends". Imagine watching porn and seeing an ad on the side for 15% off for iphone cases. Well you most likely wouldn't even see the ad.

Anyway that's one datapoint. The 1st google search on "do web ads work" gives this ("A Dangerous Question: Does Internet Advertising Work at All?") http://www.theatlantic.com/bus.... Prob. another case where Betteridge's law holds.

Humans make mistakes also.
Computers Are Getting Better Than Humans at Facial Recognition If computers are better at identifying enemy targets than humans, why wouldn't you want a computer to pick the target? Isn't one of the selling points of autonomous cars that they'll lead to fewer accidents compared with human drivers?

http://www.theatlantic.com/bus...

Interesting enough, many of the states that suck really hard at the federal government tit are states that really really hate the federal guvmint and those socialist taxes that interestingly enough - provide them wit a lot of money.

It's really too bad they don't refuse all that money. They'd be able to build a self sufficient economy based on free market principles, and possibly no taxes at all. This would prove the failure of the liberal economic agenda - but those folks were always a bit hypocritical it might seem.

Like Oklahoma - They've done pretty well lately.

And in addition the summary praises FIFA for

one thing FIFA realized that Microsoft didn't is that if you want girls to play your sport, you don't take away their ball!

Well they didn't try to take away the ball but tried it on the non-skimpy shorts and succeeded on the natural gras.
Now if that sets a standard on what the author of the summary expects from companies to do to entice women to come to IT ......

Haven't found a copy of the study yet but I did find this map supposedly from the paper, which already right there doesn't just wave red flags, it applies for a zoning permit to make a factory for automated red-flag-waving robots. Compare it to a map of coal power generation - they don't match up at all.

Without having the paper, I don't know what screwy thing they're doing with the data, but there's clearly something they're doing screwy with the data.

The problem stems from the currency. The EU consists of sovereign states that are not bound together as tightly as states in the U.S., but their economies are now coupled by the Euro.

Can you imagine if places like South Carolina and Mississippi had to pay California back all the money they receive in federal funding from California taxpayers? They'd have to throw up their hands and start using Confederate dollars again.

People will still want to pass on their knowledge. Parents will have the responsibility of doing so - using computer aided approaches no doubt. If Sesame Street can achieve it without trying too hard... http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...