Slashdot Mirror

The CRN article says,

[Editor's note: Cisco Wednesday disclosed plans to lay off up to 5,500 employees in a restructuring plan that it will implement this quarter. A Cisco spokesman said, "Today we disclosed the correct number and you’re off by 8,500 roles." He refused to answer the question of whether additional cuts are planned for the foreseeable future.]

Also a Wall Street Journal article says the number is 5,500.

http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-euro...
Sigh.
I do wonder what'd have happened if they'd continued with maemo/harmattan, and put decent effort into it, rather than leaping to Microsofts side and tanking the stock price further.

Older doctors don't always do a great job of keeping up with best practices and the latest methods.

OTOH, having a competent older doc around is often a life saver. Experience counts in this field.

Same as in engineering. It's useful to have an adult in the room at times.

Because I hear about all of those physician layoffs that are happening and how they are being replaced with over seas workers and young kids out of college.

There are substantial efforts to replace physicians with RNs and other lower paid workers. Some appropriate, others not so much. Some physician jobs like radiology face possible competition from off shore radiologists in places like India with lower wages since that job does not require the presence of the patient.

And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40...

Umm, that is a thing too. My wife works in a practice where the oldest doctor was trained in an earlier era and much of his training is not considered obsolete. And it shows in his work. Older doctors don't always do a great job of keeping up with best practices and the latest methods.

In June, Google announced that it would acquire Webpass, an urban ISP that delivers ethernet drops rather than requiring cable or DSL modems. WebPass has fiber connections throughout its various cities ("San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, San Diego, Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Chicago, and Boston") and connects the last mile with a wireless connection to the customer's rooftop using point-to-point radios.

This is mentioned in TFA as well:

Google Fiber last month bought Webpass Inc., a company that beams internet service from a fiber-connected antenna to another antenna mounted on an apartment building. The company serves roughly 820 buildings in five cities.

Webpass already offers 100+mbps (up and down!) for $46/mo ($550/y or $60/mo) at the residential level, and I'm under the impression the speed is actually bottlenecked by the ethernet switching and cabling within each participating building rather than the wireless signal; they support up to 1Gbps using this model.

Precisely given the tensions of the time, that or the perfect excuse for an US first strike that then some called for since the soviets' radar also would be jammed.

It's the circles you each travel in (on Facebook)... you see what your friends post, like, etc.

Check this out:
http://graphics.wsj.com/blue-f...

If nobody wanted it, their sales last month wouldn't have been 267,258 units (GM) / 215,268 units (Ford) vs. just an estimated 3,300 units (Tesla). Those two brands also wouldn't own one-third of the entire market between them, versus 0.2% of the market for Tesla.

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html

The truth of the matter is that at the prices they're being sold for, most people want a Ford or GM far more than they want a Tesla.

This will all swap back around in September, when the iPhone 7 debuts.

Apple's annual product bump gets smaller every year, as Apple continues to lose market share to Android and even Microsoft. How much does that suck?

And apparently Apple has run out of ideas.

1. They unload Win10 on the world, only partially designed, and sucker us into doing their product testing. Then, the add more and more complexity with unnecessary "features" that are mere click bait.

2. Then, the declare it's the last of the "Windows" line (unlikely, and a stupid claim by an executive without credibility to assert it.)

3. Now, they plan to get rid of productive employees. Why? "Bottom line" or, as Jack Welch said, early in his career at GE CEO, "the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder return on investment." Then, two years ago, after retirement, he admits in Forbes' magazine that his was "...the dumbest idea in the world."

4. And Microsoft is joining the cadre of companies with "great (aka overpaid) CEOs" (usually self-proclaimed) who produce poor results over the long-term (see http://www.wsj.com/articles/be...).
They're about to fall off a cliff...and they think they're on solid ground. Mark my words.

That source also says that it sells 900m a year. If it debuted in 1967, that was 49 years ago. 900m*49 = 44.1b. I think it's much more likely that 400b was a typo and supposed to be 40b. 400b would be about 259 Big Macs sold every second of every day for 49 years.

Follow the first search result (or direct paywalled link) for a WSJ article from 2013 about the 300 billionth burger estimate.

What's low about this is that the primary source they cite is Gawker.

Trump blasts Obama, hopes Russia can find 'missing' Clinton emails
The many problems with Donald Trump's call for Russia to spy on Hillary Clinton
Trump Says He Hopes Russia Can Access Clinton's Emails
Trump Asks Russia to find Clinton's missing emails in Doral [Florida] Appearance

"A century ago, there would be a battle that wiped out the next village, you'd never even hear about it."

Huh? Maybe in the remote parts of Africa or some other place that was still stuck in the stone age. Maybe. In the parts of the worlds actually living in the (early) 20th century not so much.

Just to add to that, a century ago, about 30% of the people in the US had telephones and the first coast to cost long distance call was made. Intercontinental telegraph lines already connected North America, South America and Europe. In many cities, theaters showed hour-long newsreels during the day (commercial TV stations wouldn't show up for another 15 years or so). Newspapers and radio were everyday sources of information for everyone.

Also, a century ago was 1916. WWI was in full swing. There were millions of refugees trying to escape the war and 17 milllion people died before it was over. Because of the scale and horror of it all, people were extremely attentive to things like the next village over being wiped out.

Since the rest of the thread seems to have devolved into a lot of name calling, here is some results from 5 minutes of google searching:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/go...

http://ogleearth.com/2012/07/c...

In short, the restriction is not specifically on GPS, it's on mapping services in general. So they can use GPS to determine your location, but they're not allowed to show the details of the location you are at in high detail. Since you can see a (not very useful) map in Pokemon Go i guess it falls under the restriction? Either that or Niantic/Alphabet/Google wasn't willing to take the time to differentiate between requests to the map DB from Pokemon Go vs requests from Google Maps.

On the other hand the jitteryness of the location reported by GPS that you observed may or may not have been due to GPS jamming by North Korea:
http://www.reuters.com/article...

It has nothing to do with GPS or GLONASS. It's because Pokemon Go (like Ingress) uses Google Maps data, and Google Maps data is less specific in South Korea due to national security restrictions. (2, 3, and this Reddit thread about why Ingress doesn't work in South Korea)

Since Pokemon Go features are tied to map data on roads, landmarks, and buildings, and South Korean maps don't have that data, Pokemon Go doesn't work... except in Sochko, which as a quirk of the grid system is exempt from the data granularity restriction.

Just a reminder, that the US seems on track to surrender its control of the Internet to an "International Body" — despite some lawmakers trying to prevent the Administration from doing it.

Countries like this — and even worse ones, where citizens' access is already tightly controlled or where "hate speech" is illegal — will now have more say over how the Network is run.

(If you were going to reply pointing out, FBI's attempt to unlock a dead terrorist's iPhone is "just as bad" — don't...)

Allow me to point out that this order is not issued from the Executive branch. It is from the Judiciary branch. Nothing to do with little tyrants elsewhere. Brazil is one of the most democratic countries in the world.

Just a reminder, that the US seems on track to surrender its control of the Internet to an "International Body" — despite some lawmakers trying to prevent the Administration from doing it.

Countries like this — and even worse ones, where citizens' access is already tightly controlled or where "hate speech" is illegal — will now have more say over how the Network is run.

(If you were going to reply pointing out, FBI's attempt to unlock a dead terrorist's iPhone is "just as bad" — don't...)

Those people have two basic choices- starve to death or steal the money from the rich.

False dilemma. We are importing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants today, because — we are told — we must fill jobs, that Americans, allegedly, "just will not do"... Am I supposed to sympathize with your hypothetical "starving unemployed", who'd rather rob me, than take an honest job, which an illegal immigrant is happy to take?

History has shown us, starving people WILL rob & kill the wealthy to survive.

Has it shown us this? Citations?

But stipulating for a second it has... Your idea is to stave off such murders and robberies by paying off all of the potential robbers in advance? Is that, how you you'd advise all blackmail victims to react?.. What was that about surrendering an important liberty for the sake of temporary security — and losing both and deserving neither?.. Do you recall?

But, fine, since you are — refreshingly as well as commendably — not wrapping yourself in the flag of fake charity, let's discuss the hard cold numbers. Since waging the "War on Poverty" over 50 years ago, we've spent well over $20 trillion tax-dollars (inflation-adjusted) on various poverty-fighting programs. That's well over $400 billion per year on average in today's dollars. We are also losing about $200 billion each year to crime and crime-fighting.

Now, how much of a crime-increase will the complete abolition of the government's anti-poverty efforts cause? Even if it flat-out doubles the crime-rate — thus doubling the crime-related costs — we'll still save about $200 billion every year. But, of course, the crime will not "double" — just as it did not halve, when we started this ill-fated "war". If anything, it increased back then...

Which society do you want to live in?

I want a society, where criminals are harshly prosecuted and the innocents aren't compelled to pay them off, thanks for asking.

You are certainly correct this is a straw man argument, but not really in the way you describe. The US government (federal, state, local) spends just over $400 billion on welfare per year, and $1.2 trillion on pensions and social security (94% of that on SS). That only comes to half the $3 trillion figure, and certainly not all of this would go away. I'd say its reasonable 2/3 of it would go away, leaving $2 trillion of the author's figures left over. Take away another $500 billion by removing children from the calculations, and you still have $1.5 trillion of increased government payments.

Then comes the real problem with the author's argument. No one claims everyone's net income would increase by $10k per year, just that they would all get a $10k check. We already have a progressive federal income tax, so it would be easy to adjust the brackets to ensure only the needy would receive an increased net income from UBI.

To simplify math, lets say 1/3 get $10k extra income, 1/3 pay the same in extra taxes that they get in UBI payments, and 1/3 pay for the lower third. Considering the top 40% of earners already pay 97% of federal income taxes, this wouldn't be much of a change in the status quo.

So now we are down to $500 billion in extra costs, which is a much more realistic figure. The federal government collects $2.4 trillion in income taxes, so the 50% of households and companies which pay any incomes taxes today would need to pay 20% more. I pay a little over $30k per year in federal income taxes, so this would mean almost $6500 in extra taxes for me personally.

But I would get something for this money. Reduced crime is hard to quantitatively measure, but removing the minimum wage would significantly impact the costs of basic services. If my food, daycare, house/lawn care, haircuts, etc. dropped by just 10% that would save me $6000 per year so this would be a wash for me.

These figures are all obviously very rough, but they at least show UBI is not as drastically unrealistic as this article suggests. It may still not work, but it is a very reasonable alternative to a future where technological disruptions make the status quo impossible to maintain.

Gavin Belson, HBO Silicon Valley: "It's weird - they always travel in groups of five, these programmers. There's always a tall skinny white guy, a short skinny Asian guy, a fat guy with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair and then an East Indian guy. It's like they trade guys until they all have the right group."

Is it heart breaking to program a robot to do your job? Because that happens much more than H1B replacements.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-new-generation-of-robots-for-manufacturing-1433300884

"[The new robots] are nimbler, lighter and work better with humans. They might even help bring manufacturing back to the U.S...."

All the money in the world couldn't get me to a third-world country like India. The honor killings, mobs murdering people suspected of eating beef, thousands being tortured and executed on suspicion of being a witch, 80% of their rivers choked with raw, untreated sewage, rampant corruption, modern slavery, and their prime minister is a nutter are all things I try to avoid.

And yet did any of the executives cut their salaries, stock options and bonuses to help out?

Four executives had their salaries cut to $1 for the year 2012. As far as I can tell this was a gesture to make the workers happier since the plan was to cut worker salaries or else close down the company.

I'm not a real expert but I pulled together a whole bunch of supporting links for this post:

https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3899851&cid=44095175

The supporting link for the $1 per year salary is now a dead link, so I Googled up one for you that still works:

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/04/09/hostess-cuts-four-executives-pay-to-1-after-big-july-raises/

How dare those greedy people in labor want living wages, that were probably 1/50th of what the CEO made, instead of being content living in poverty!

They can want whatever they want to want. However, the company was not profitable and after the second bankruptcy they were out of investors to pump in more money to keep running at a loss. Their one chance to keep the company alive was to cut their biggest expense: pay and benefits to the giant unionized staff. The BCTGM didn't yield (twice! they didn't yield twice!) and Hostess shut down.

Now instead of an unprofitable company employing around 19K workers, it's a profitable company employing 1170 workers. It's fewer workers than before, but those workers know the company isn't going to go bankrupt and lay them all off. And since the company is able to operate now with that number of workers, it makes no sense to wish they would hire 19K workers anyway when they don't need 94% of them. You might just as well wish that Apple Computer start hiring tens of thousands of people to use hand tools to carve MacBooks out of aluminum blocks rather than using computer-controlled milling machines to do it.

Now that that pesky democracy thing has been nipped in the bud, the Democratic party is doing the right thing. Supporting their masters....
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/...

Trump is the Iron Fist. Clinton is the Iron Fist in the velvet glove. I'm voting Trump, at least he honest about who he is.

I just wish Trump would send all the niggers back to Africa. Any who have college degrees, and any black men over the age of 30 who have never been convicted of a crime are "black folk" and wouldn't count as niggers for purposes of the mass deportation. Our cities would BLOSSOM without the oppression of nigger crime, our states and schools would benefit without the expenses of nigger welfare and nigger prosecutions, property values would raise, inner cities would be attractive places to live again like they were under Jim Crow, and we all would be better off. Speaking of schools - without all the niglets filling up the dumb classes our teachers could concentrate on teaching a good curriculum. Plus without niggers Obama would probably never have been elected.

Niggers keep complaining about how much they don't like it here, okay - back to Africa with you! Maybe the local warlord in an African shithole third-world nation will treat you better? Because that's what niggers accomplish when niggers run things without "white racism". Don't like Africa? Maybe Haiti is for you! Yes what a great place, Haiti. The French took a prosperous nation called Haiti and fucking HANDED it OVER to the niggers and it went to shit in short order. Niggers just can't scale up to anything larger than a tribe. We took them out of the jungle and that was a mistake, so it's time to send them back. Then they can spend another several thousand years never advancing beyond primitive tribal existence, never inventing anything, never making discoveries.

What about this? http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/...

If Hillary opposes it where is she?

Now that that pesky democracy thing has been nipped in the bud, the Democratic party is doing the right thing. Supporting their masters....
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/...

Trump is the Iron Fist. Clinton is the Iron Fist in the velvet glove. I'm voting Trump, at least he honest about who he is.

It's more likely that Microsoft's two billion dollar investment in Dell has something to do with this.

Nixon was driven from office, Carter just lost an election.

John Kerry earned the disdain of peers. America was lucky not to be stuck with such a mediocrity as president. Bush was a better student (by a nose) and likely better read as well.

Given the feckless foreign policy under Kerry's watch the US had a better Chief Executive and Commander in Chief in Bush.

If the Democrats hadn't blocked Bush administration reform efforts the financial melt-down could probably have been avoided. Where do you think ol' John Kerry was voting there? With his party perhaps?

Bush and Kerry are opposites - Bush pretended to be less than he was, and Kerry pretended to be more than he is.

Sorry, link: http://www.wsj.com/articles/pa...

We've seen IPOs dry up.

I would offer Twilio's IPO as a counter example.

As a physician practicing in a US state (Oregon) where oral contraceptive pills are available behind the counter, I'm all for expanding access to contraception. Nothing quite has made otherwise young, promising women be overwhelmed in my practice than unplanned pregnancy (combined with flaky partners). OCP's are available here without a prescription, but require a consultation from a pharmacist. This isn't free, but where they make sure you don't have any of the various risk factors for having a stroke or blood clot on estrogen-containing contraceptives.

I'm also in favor of expanding access to more effective forms of contraception, like the subdermal implant (sold as Nexplanon in the US), and IUD. I'm pretty puzzled, however, about how one would implement an app to jab the implant in your arm. It's not hard to do (see this video), but clinicians have to get special certification from the manufacturer to do it. (This is to avoid the Norplant debacle of inadequately trained people putting the rods in a little too deep, making eventual removal challenging.) I do love the idea of having etonorgestrel rods and lidocaine hooked up to a smartphone app, however.

Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal predicted the exit of the UK from the EU last February. This is an article worth revisiting to understand the psychology behind yesterday's vote, and how the same psychology may make Trump the next U.S. president.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/tr...

This article lays it out pretty well.

Uh... http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...

In both cases shooters were stopped or shot (second one committed suicide after being stopped) within minutes - by police officers.
In both cases, response time was under the national average.

In neither case civilians (as in not security officers) didn't stop it.
Nor did non-security military personnel stop it, though some were killed while trying to do that while unarmed.
Nor did the security of the location, which is NOT a gun-free zone, as gun-free zones don't come with armed guards around them and at various locations across the "zone" - deter either of the shooters.

As for the 89th and 720th - that is their job there. When they are not deployed, they are the base security.
I.e. They carry guns.

The point is - neither do civilians with guns stop mass shooters, nor does increased security deter them.
These are insane people we're talking about.

In fact, there are more cases of unarmed civilians (21, out of 160 incidents, 2000-2013) stopping mass shooters, than there are cases of armed civilians doing that (5 - one of them a security guard at that church).
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/o...

Sorry. Neither facts nor logic support "Yosemite Sam" approach to citizen security.

But less than 1/5 Linkedin. http://www.wsj.com/articles/mi...

In addition to the other replies, the FBI has stated that the statistics on justifiable homicides may have issues, as the data for the Uniform Crime Reporting Program is self reported by state and local police departments, which have differing standards for reporting. Some do not require reporting of justifiable homicides. http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/w... From the WSJ article: "...it isn’t required that agencies submit justifiable homicide data—submitted as the Supplementary Homicide Report—to participate in the program. This makes the largest database of justifiable homicides in the U.S. very incomplete. Among the missing states is New York, which had 684 killings in 2012. The third-most populated state, which likely had a number of justifiable homicides, doesn’t report justifiable homicide data, according to the FBI. Data from other highly populous states are missing or compromised as well. Agencies from Florida don’t follow Uniform Crime Reporting guidelines when submitting justifiable homicide data and Illinois only submits limited data. Various other agencies at multiple levels don’t submit justifiable homicide data for other reasons, resulting in fewer than half of the 18,000 agencies contributing this information."

Theranos' results are wildly inaccurate. They also refused to let the FDA or anyone else see the results of their own tests.

In fact, Republicans stand for the status-quo. i.e., standing for big oil, big gas, big electricity or big (insert your favorite lobbying group here).

Is that why a Republican President (along with Republican-dominated Congress) allowed the fuck-ups like Enron, MCI, and Lehman Brothers to collapse, while a Democratic one bailed out GM, Chrysler (not the first one), and AIG?

The web has created millions of jobs

Citation? Seems pretty high, considering the brick-and-mortar enterprises either defunct or mortally wounded as a result of it.

Not part of the thread, but I'll chime in anyway. You said:

Each inflection point where the population growth rate increased was a point when prosperity suddenly increased. It's why population grows as food prices fall.

And that is quite obviously true, historically.

You also said:

Today, the average American family spends about 11% of our money on food and 3% on clothing.

Elsewhere, you've pointed out that it requires the labor of approximately 1% of the population to feed the rest, and this number has been dropping radically for 100 years. You've been making a pretty good case that the basis for the cost of anything, anywhere, is the cost of human labor. Now, there's such a thing as a strawberry picking machine. A prototype, but operational in fields today, not just a laboratory curiosity. We are rapidly approaching the point where it requires zero human labor to feed the entire population. 797 tonnes of wheat harvested in 8 hours takes 6 guys. Plus spectators. How long before those 6 drivers are no longer required? That leaves only the labor of the supply chain that builds and runs the equipment, which is also rapidly automating. When the last drop of labor is squeezed out of the food supply chain, does that result in unbounded population growth? A gigantic explosion of new people?

Your interlocutor has been trying to point out a new fact. Regardless of ongoing technological development, population is plateauing across the developed world. In Japan, the US, Canada, and most of Western Europe, native population growth is, in fact, a negative number. There is no growth. None. Without immigration, population in the US would be declining. Population in Japan IS declining. Japan hit the zero point more than a decade ago, in 2004, and has been negative every year since, with one lone (lonely?) exception. Attempts at explanation include the psychological as well as the economic, but regardless of the reason(s), it is happening.

So despite new CPUs, despite new combine harvesters, despite new berry-picking robots destined to reduce the cost of staple foods and luxury foods alike, population is only growing everywhere those technologies are not.

It seems history is no longer an adequate guide to economic and population expectations.

Hey, I thought you might be interested in this

The FDA was involved at the demand of the Theranos to validate their test tubes, not the Edison technology. And Theranos limited the tests to herpes until they would get the thumbs up from fhe FDA.

Watch the fucking interview she explains that part in details in the first few minutes, including the inspection in the summer.

http://www.wsj.com/video/full-...

If you think it's easy to get something approved by a federal agency you're unaware of all the tedious, expensive and endless hoops they make people jump through. It's not just a pass/fail inspection, it's a grueling process that takes forever. Taking one element of this and spinning it as "FDA thinks that..." is ridiculous, and as you will see there's absolutely no one from the FDA who went on the record to support that statement.

Appears pretty relevant to the rest of us.

If you believe you can talk for "the rest of you" there's no wonder you can't tell what the issue is.

If you haven't done so, watch the interview. She calmly explains things point by point. If after watching this interview you still believe they're a bunch of crooks making false claims and getting caught lying, there's nothing more I can do to make you understand.

http://www.wsj.com/video/full-...

Even on the limited number of tests designed to work with this new method, they stopped using that prototype a while ago.

And just when would that be? Because the FDA reports that they were using Edison devices in June 2015, and those limited number of tests were the ones whos results were invalidated for all of 2014 and 2015.

So please, provide a source for when they "stopped using that prototype." Because I'm thinking they stopped when CMS told them to in 2016, and Theranos went into deperate survival mode.

Yeah total bullshit.

After all, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services haven't proposed pulling Theranos's license (and hence qualification to do tests that can be reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid), and haven't proposed banning the Theranos founders from running a lab for two years. Oh, wait, they did. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04...

After all, the company didn't just throw out all the results done on their machines in 2014 and 2015. Oh, wait, they have. http://www.wsj.com/articles/th...

You not only need society's permission but its active support to run any kind of business without having to have your own personal army of thugs.

The government's role is to protect me from violence and help me enforce fair contracts. It must not be allowed to dictate, what services can be offered, by whom, at what price, etc. That it increasingly does so, is an obvious violation of our liberties.

Dunno about him, but I much prefer a strong state

Yep, Statists gonna State...

over which I have democratic control in the form of my vote

Yeah? And how is it working out for you? When a business needs government's permission to offer you their service? Do you have "democratic control" over Internet-service provision, for example? Are you happy with the government's ability to shut down Uber and Lyft? With the government, that can demand your cell-phone data from your cellular provider — and get it, or else the provider may run into difficulties renewing its license? With the police, who can confiscate your life savings on suspicion of tax-dodging, or simply because you have "too much" cash on you?

Is this the "strong state" you clamor for? Yeah, I know, let's all go raise awareness — that will surely help our strong, but benevolent and kind-hearted rulers realize the errors, nay, imperfections of their ways.

The freedom to pursue happiness is oh-so overrated...

The average citizen is well aware that their vote is meaningless.

Hence, they get the government that they deserve.

You forget the scrubbing of the voter registration that is happening constantly - in which case, we're getting the government that the government thinks we deserve. Sound about right?

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/ne...

So Greece laying about the budget deficit when joining EU was not Greece fault?

Isn't it true that Stefanos Manos (former Greece minister of finance) said " the Greek national railway was so poorly run and its public employees so overpaid that it would be cheaper for the state to shut down the railway entirely and give every customer taxi fare to their destination." ?

Isn't it true that Tassos Giannitsis (former minister of labor) said "When I told my colleagues in the cabinet about the reforms I was proposingâ"which mind you were not the toughest availableâ"the attitude I got was that I was spoiling the party, They were, like, âeverything is going great right now, why are you bothering us with a problem that may implode in a decade?"

Isn't it true that "the retirement age for Greek jobs classified as "arduous" is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on" and "the Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland's"

The last thing especially is a breathtaking reading. Greeks should not point fingers at anyone until they admit that they screwed up themselves too. Sure it was the upper class that screwed you, the little people. But who voted them in?

Strawberry picking robot: http://www.wsj.com/articles/robots-step-into-new-planting-harvesting-roles-1429781404