Here in BC the government cut income taxes by 25% and have been making up the shortfalls from hydro so prices are really going up. They also want to build a new large damn on the Peace river for liquifying natural gas for export (they think they're going to make a fortune exporting gas) which will jack up our prices and flood a lot of nice farmland. We have some ideal country for solar which combined with hydro would help the load as it produces best in the summer when the reservoirs are low but the first test just started and wind hasn't even been looked at.
Easier is more the word then stronger, someone posted the supplemental treaty that Sweden has with the USA up the page. http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
Canada illegally* extradited Marc Emery to America for the minor crime of selling seeds. I'm sure Sweden would illegally extradite Assange. *Canadian law only allows extraditing when the illegal act is roughly equivalently illegal in Canada including sentencing. 5 years in prison is not equal to the $100 fine he would have got here. Of course we have a law and order government so breaking the law to enforce it is fine. Funny enough during the time he was in jail, his crime was legalized in Seattle where he was tried.
The whole point of the argument was that as robots improve they will displace more and more jobs without creating sufficient new ones
People have been saying that about automation for centuries now, and they just keep being wrong.
Actually they've generally been right. The Luddite period was the beginning of 80 years of chronic underemployment, generations of people with horrible lives of poverty. The saving grace was expansion, stealing other peoples land and resources and giving it away to the poor and the capitalists, think of the States, expanding west throughout the 19th Century, giving the poor land to be not so poor with millions of people coming from Europe, tons of resources that were easily harvested and used to create jobs. I recently read that 6 million Italians came to America at the end of the 19th century, they came because their were no jobs where they lived. Once that came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century, workers started to be removed from the workforce, kids first, put into school. This is still happening with more and more education being required for most any jobs, people are expected to spend close to 1/3rd of their life in school now. Many women also were taken out of the workforce about the same time with the idea that they would stay home and be homemakers. When that didn't work, well there were windows to break, we call them world wars. The first WW consumed a lot of labour, and after we fixed the windows there was a major depression so we had another war which also employed a lot of people replacing windows. Afterwards we've had to fall back on cold wars and various other wars including the current war on terror, all basically breaking and fixing windows (or stockpiling them) to avoid the unemployment that comes with automation. How many people are employed in the various security fields needed by the war on terror? And is this really a positive way to employ people? Soon we can all be employed at jobs like airport security or plain old informants. Then there is removing people by jailing them (1% of adult Americans currently in jail) and declaring them unemployable afterwards. Also creates security type jobs
The problem is when person B has something that person A wants or needs (food) but person A has nothing that person B wants. With an army of robots, person B won't need anything from person A. This has happened before, think of the Luddites, 80 years or so of chronic unemployment, no social net so legally all you could do was starve or work at a poor house for a bowl of porridge a day and the sentences were harsh if you stole something like a loaf of bread. It also happened around the turn of the last century, money was spread around a bit more, children taken out of the work force and put in school (this is still happening with increasing education needed for any job) and women taken out of the work force and made into homemakers. Now we're back to putting people back in jail, 2 million just in the States and also have segregation (whole class of people with limited rights called felons) so they can't ever work again, nor vote for change. Even the old standby of war is becoming robotized and otherwise automated so can't even employ people as cannon fodder or cannon builders anymore.
Depends on who you are and who the people using the reservoir are. If you're a regular or poor person, especially brown with an Arab sounding name, well the book will be thrown at you so hard it'll knock your head off. If you're running a successful mining company and it's just a bunch of brown (or red) skinned poor people using the reservoir for water and the government was saving money by not inspecting that big tank, well even when it breaks the worst that will happen is you have to re-incorporate as a different company after much finger pointing.
That's a bit unfair. The Kinja commenting system is for all Gawker Media sites, not just Jezebel. Images in comment sections seems to be on at all the GM sites, so I'm not sure an individual site can turn them off or not
Which is why they're talking about switching software provider etc.
From what I hear, many cable packages include paying ESPN and therefore the NFL. Same with many ISPs, they pay for ESPN and get the money from subscribers and now cell phone providers are offering streaming football.
On the other hand, perhaps it's like the neutrino. fusion (or fission, I forget) equations didn't work out so as a fudge the neutrino was invented, a super small particle that didn't interact with normal matter. I'm sure it was met with derision by a certain group, an imaginary particle that could travel through the Earth, how ridiculous and obviously the idea of fusion was wrong in some fundamental way. Well eventually the neutrino was observed, mostly matching up with theory (it was actually more complex, coming in a few flavours) and now we have neutrino observatories buried deep under the Earth.
It's amazingly hard not to pay them. You have to carefully pick where you live (property taxes supporting the local team and federal government passing special laws for them) and any content you consume (many cable packages include paying for ESPN which shovels money at the NFL and possibly even some cell plans include ESPN). Easiest is to move away from N. America and if American, revoke your citizenship if you really don't want any of your money going to the NFL.
Not good enough, there will be big chunks of rock with viable microbes inside. Easy way would be to use the tractor beam to crash into Jupiter. more effective but harder, crash into the Sun.
because the conclusions of Silent Spring are somehow invalid and pesticides are so safe you could just gobble them up willy nilly?
Yes, the conclusions of Silent Spring *are* invalid. Rachel Carson was a left-wing nut job. And DDT actually is safe to eat. Read how the inventor went around the country eating a teaspoon (or was it a tablespoon?) of it at each speech. Did it kill him? No. Did he get cancer? No. DDT is safe and eliminating it costs about 1 million human lives every year because we can't control the mosquitoes spreading disease.
Where the fuck does this mis-information come from? The only legal use of DDT is for controlling disease vectors, eg killing mosquitoes. Of course it doesn't work very well anymore as due to indiscriminate use allowed the mosquitoes to build up tolerance to DDT. And George Burns proved that smoking is harmless, smoked cigars and lived till a 101.
Even a gamma burst won't hurt those microbes living miles deep in the Earth. Sterilization through lots of heat seems like the only thing that'll end life on and in the Earth.
An example of science that hasn't changed much is the observation (shadows and geometry) by one of those Greeks that the Earth is a sphere of around 25,000 miles in circumference. We've refined it but the basic science has stood up quite well. Probably some of our current science will be the same, refined but basically right.
The fixed election dates aren't set in stone (constitution says within 5 years) and there are already rumours of a spring election. It's not like Harper follows the law. Don't know if left wing is the best description of the Greens. Really trying to pigeon hole politics into 1 axis is such an oversimplification but good for propaganda purposes, it's amazing how the Americans have subverted the meanings of political groups and too many Canadians watch American TV etc.
I wonder how many people who find this behavior appalling want to give the government that behaves this way even more money and power?
HOW THE HELL DO YOU THINK THEY GOT THE POWER AND RESOURCES TO BEHAVE LIKE THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?!?
Selling drugs and weapons has been one popular way for government to raise money to behave this way. To think that cutting out the money to government would stop them shows a lack of knowledge of how these things work, the 3 letter agencies will be the last to get defunded and they're the best at self-funding
The ideal solution would probably be a BBC-type system in more countries, particularly for local news. The BBC is funded by a special television tax paid by viewers. So perhaps if everyone in Spain had to pay $50 a year per internet-connected device, that would work.
This is probably the best system as long as the government can't influence the public system. Here in Canada we have the CBC which does excellent journalism. The problem is that it is financed out of general funds and our current government hates them due to their breaking stories about corruption, unfair electioning and such so they keep cutting their budget and it is really starting to show.
You also have to remember that the US claims to be a Constitutional Republic which of course means that if the people and the several States (3/4s) decide to pass a Constitutional Amendment making the country communist, well that's part of freedom and democracy.
Well the other guy was one of the politicians who enabled the S&L crisis of the early '80's and tried his hardest to pass laws making sure those bankers did not go to jail. (They actually did go to jail back then). Both parties are in thrall to the bankers because they're in thrall to money and the banks represent money.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in BC the government cut income taxes by 25% and have been making up the shortfalls from hydro so prices are really going up. They also want to build a new large damn on the Peace river for liquifying natural gas for export (they think they're going to make a fortune exporting gas) which will jack up our prices and flood a lot of nice farmland.
We have some ideal country for solar which combined with hydro would help the load as it produces best in the summer when the reservoirs are low but the first test just started and wind hasn't even been looked at.
Easier is more the word then stronger, someone posted the supplemental treaty that Sweden has with the USA up the page.
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...
Canada illegally* extradited Marc Emery to America for the minor crime of selling seeds. I'm sure Sweden would illegally extradite Assange.
*Canadian law only allows extraditing when the illegal act is roughly equivalently illegal in Canada including sentencing. 5 years in prison is not equal to the $100 fine he would have got here. Of course we have a law and order government so breaking the law to enforce it is fine.
Funny enough during the time he was in jail, his crime was legalized in Seattle where he was tried.
The whole point of the argument was that as robots improve they will displace more and more jobs without creating sufficient new ones
People have been saying that about automation for centuries now, and they just keep being wrong.
Actually they've generally been right. The Luddite period was the beginning of 80 years of chronic underemployment, generations of people with horrible lives of poverty. The saving grace was expansion, stealing other peoples land and resources and giving it away to the poor and the capitalists, think of the States, expanding west throughout the 19th Century, giving the poor land to be not so poor with millions of people coming from Europe, tons of resources that were easily harvested and used to create jobs. I recently read that 6 million Italians came to America at the end of the 19th century, they came because their were no jobs where they lived.
Once that came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century, workers started to be removed from the workforce, kids first, put into school. This is still happening with more and more education being required for most any jobs, people are expected to spend close to 1/3rd of their life in school now. Many women also were taken out of the workforce about the same time with the idea that they would stay home and be homemakers.
When that didn't work, well there were windows to break, we call them world wars. The first WW consumed a lot of labour, and after we fixed the windows there was a major depression so we had another war which also employed a lot of people replacing windows. Afterwards we've had to fall back on cold wars and various other wars including the current war on terror, all basically breaking and fixing windows (or stockpiling them) to avoid the unemployment that comes with automation.
How many people are employed in the various security fields needed by the war on terror? And is this really a positive way to employ people? Soon we can all be employed at jobs like airport security or plain old informants.
Then there is removing people by jailing them (1% of adult Americans currently in jail) and declaring them unemployable afterwards. Also creates security type jobs
The problem is when person B has something that person A wants or needs (food) but person A has nothing that person B wants. With an army of robots, person B won't need anything from person A.
This has happened before, think of the Luddites, 80 years or so of chronic unemployment, no social net so legally all you could do was starve or work at a poor house for a bowl of porridge a day and the sentences were harsh if you stole something like a loaf of bread.
It also happened around the turn of the last century, money was spread around a bit more, children taken out of the work force and put in school (this is still happening with increasing education needed for any job) and women taken out of the work force and made into homemakers.
Now we're back to putting people back in jail, 2 million just in the States and also have segregation (whole class of people with limited rights called felons) so they can't ever work again, nor vote for change.
Even the old standby of war is becoming robotized and otherwise automated so can't even employ people as cannon fodder or cannon builders anymore.
Depends on who you are and who the people using the reservoir are.
If you're a regular or poor person, especially brown with an Arab sounding name, well the book will be thrown at you so hard it'll knock your head off.
If you're running a successful mining company and it's just a bunch of brown (or red) skinned poor people using the reservoir for water and the government was saving money by not inspecting that big tank, well even when it breaks the worst that will happen is you have to re-incorporate as a different company after much finger pointing.
To quote an AC up the page. http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
That's a bit unfair. The Kinja commenting system is for all Gawker Media sites, not just Jezebel. Images in comment sections seems to be on at all the GM sites, so I'm not sure an individual site can turn them off or not
Which is why they're talking about switching software provider etc.
From what I hear, many cable packages include paying ESPN and therefore the NFL. Same with many ISPs, they pay for ESPN and get the money from subscribers and now cell phone providers are offering streaming football.
On the other hand, perhaps it's like the neutrino. fusion (or fission, I forget) equations didn't work out so as a fudge the neutrino was invented, a super small particle that didn't interact with normal matter.
I'm sure it was met with derision by a certain group, an imaginary particle that could travel through the Earth, how ridiculous and obviously the idea of fusion was wrong in some fundamental way.
Well eventually the neutrino was observed, mostly matching up with theory (it was actually more complex, coming in a few flavours) and now we have neutrino observatories buried deep under the Earth.
It's amazingly hard not to pay them. You have to carefully pick where you live (property taxes supporting the local team and federal government passing special laws for them) and any content you consume (many cable packages include paying for ESPN which shovels money at the NFL and possibly even some cell plans include ESPN).
Easiest is to move away from N. America and if American, revoke your citizenship if you really don't want any of your money going to the NFL.
Not good enough, there will be big chunks of rock with viable microbes inside. Easy way would be to use the tractor beam to crash into Jupiter. more effective but harder, crash into the Sun.
because the conclusions of Silent Spring are somehow invalid and pesticides are so safe you could just gobble them up willy nilly?
Yes, the conclusions of Silent Spring *are* invalid. Rachel Carson was a left-wing nut job. And DDT actually is safe to eat. Read how the inventor went around the country eating a teaspoon (or was it a tablespoon?) of it at each speech. Did it kill him? No. Did he get cancer? No. DDT is safe and eliminating it costs about 1 million human lives every year because we can't control the mosquitoes spreading disease.
Where the fuck does this mis-information come from? The only legal use of DDT is for controlling disease vectors, eg killing mosquitoes. Of course it doesn't work very well anymore as due to indiscriminate use allowed the mosquitoes to build up tolerance to DDT.
And George Burns proved that smoking is harmless, smoked cigars and lived till a 101.
Even a gamma burst won't hurt those microbes living miles deep in the Earth. Sterilization through lots of heat seems like the only thing that'll end life on and in the Earth.
An example of science that hasn't changed much is the observation (shadows and geometry) by one of those Greeks that the Earth is a sphere of around 25,000 miles in circumference. We've refined it but the basic science has stood up quite well.
Probably some of our current science will be the same, refined but basically right.
The fixed election dates aren't set in stone (constitution says within 5 years) and there are already rumours of a spring election. It's not like Harper follows the law.
Don't know if left wing is the best description of the Greens. Really trying to pigeon hole politics into 1 axis is such an oversimplification but good for propaganda purposes, it's amazing how the Americans have subverted the meanings of political groups and too many Canadians watch American TV etc.
No government wants an informed public, especially during elections.
I wonder how many people who find this behavior appalling want to give the government that behaves this way even more money and power?
HOW THE HELL DO YOU THINK THEY GOT THE POWER AND RESOURCES TO BEHAVE LIKE THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?!?
Selling drugs and weapons has been one popular way for government to raise money to behave this way. To think that cutting out the money to government would stop them shows a lack of knowledge of how these things work, the 3 letter agencies will be the last to get defunded and they're the best at self-funding
The ideal solution would probably be a BBC-type system in more countries, particularly for local news. The BBC is funded by a special television tax paid by viewers. So perhaps if everyone in Spain had to pay $50 a year per internet-connected device, that would work.
This is probably the best system as long as the government can't influence the public system. Here in Canada we have the CBC which does excellent journalism. The problem is that it is financed out of general funds and our current government hates them due to their breaking stories about corruption, unfair electioning and such so they keep cutting their budget and it is really starting to show.
Wonder what the atmospheric pressure was at the time? We always assume that the atmosphere has been consistent but I've never seen any research on it.
Well doing the Bellamy would fit into the current fascist direction of America and now a days it's probably a ceremonial firearm.
Even weirder, the kids are forced (if only through peer pressure) to swear allegiance to the flag on a daily basis.
You mean how Woodrow Wilson screwed the Ukraine?
You also have to remember that the US claims to be a Constitutional Republic which of course means that if the people and the several States (3/4s) decide to pass a Constitutional Amendment making the country communist, well that's part of freedom and democracy.
Well the other guy was one of the politicians who enabled the S&L crisis of the early '80's and tried his hardest to pass laws making sure those bankers did not go to jail. (They actually did go to jail back then). Both parties are in thrall to the bankers because they're in thrall to money and the banks represent money.
I thought the death penalty only applied to those with less then 5 digits salary.