The EU has achieved its prime goal with great success. Maybe you should look up what that goal was, what life was like pre-EU, and why so many countries want to join.
Good summary. One, Facebook-specific thing, I would add: Zuckerberg appeared in person before the EU parliament but has flatly refused all demands to appear before the UK parliament. He clearly feels that, as CEO of a multi-billion dollar multi-national company, he can safely ignore most national governments; but the EU parliament (representing 27 European countries) cannot be so easily brushed off.
Real GDP is the net of domestic output minus price changes, ie inflation. Look into how our inflation measurements have been contorted over the years and you'll see how it's "grossly" under-reported, thus GDP is overstated.
In addition, the usefulness of GDP is oversold. GDP is used as a "magic number" (bigger must be better, right?), but in reality it's not the best measure of how well an economy is performing.
The cause of homelessness has nothing to do with the cost of housing.
I don't know why this is tagged as "Insightful". If you think the affordability of living space has no connection whatever to people being able to get somewhere to live then you just haven't been paying attention. Where I live property prices (and rents) have been rising significantly above the rate of inflation (and well above any rises in general income levels) for a long time now. It's not the only cause of homelessness, but it's certainly a contributing factor.
PGP is broken now? It's only had fairly infrequent and minor issues over time. If this is broken now, then it's the final sign that anyone who thinks computers can be secured is wrong. If you want something secure, write it down in a notebook. It'll be about 100x more secure than putting it on a computer simply by not being networked. Even if someone steals and reads your notebook it's better than someone having it on their phone (or PGP, now I guess) for the ENTIRE WORLD to come along and steal. Computers are great for games, everything else is debatable.
PGP is not broken. The way a few bad email clients are using it is broken. If you are not using Thunderbird you are safe with PGP. While S/MIME is comprised in every email client except modern Outlook, KMail, and mutt.
If you are using Thunderbird and you have disabled loading remote content in messages (which you should be doing anyway) then this issue (which relies on automatic execution of embedded remote URLs) won't affect you. HTML emails are the real problem here.
Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.
The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.
I know this was tagged as "funny", but it's disturbingly close to the truth. At a recent Flat Earth Convention (yes, really) the folks seemed to genuinely believe they were doing legitimate science to "prove" that the earth isn't round. They regard folks who do actual peer-reviewed science as part of some "conspiracy by the elite" and therefore not to be trusted.
In this modern age of hold your hand safety features, why exactly doesn't this thing have a seat weight sensor?
Because putting a sensor in for every idiotic thing idiots can do isn't exactly financially viable, and an idiot sensor doesn't exist.
Plus, all you'll do is breed a better idiot as a result.
Well even applying the 80/20 rule, ensuring that there is somebody in the driver's seat when the car is moving should be a priority. In the UK, even my 8 year-old car alerts if there's a passenger sitting in the backseat who is not wearing a seat belt; it's not difficult to do.
When I buy stuff, I tend to usually go with the cheapest supplier.
While that approach is, to a point, understandable, it is also increasingly part of the problem. Basically we live in a world where too many people, as Oscar Wilde said, know "the cost of everything and the value of nothing".
Retail price wars have led to excessive downward cost pressure all the way along the supply chain; pressure to meet an arbitrary retail sale price, without any regard to the realistic costs of production. The easiest way for companies to square that circle is to slash employee terms and conditions.
We all love a bargain, but we often ignore the fact that there is a real human cost behind those "cheap" goods and services.
The introduction of Automatic Teller Machines led to an increase in human tellers, as well as business.
I don't know where you do your banking, but where I live ATMs have dramatically reduced the number of human tellers. Personal customers are pushed to use ATMs for both withdrawals and lodgments; even inside bank branches. To see a human teller you have to either be a business (with a significant cash turnover) or a high net-worth personal customer (that the bank wants to keep sweet).
But that's the problem. You can say, "Well, that's not Agile", but so many attempts to do Agile wind up like this. If the method seems to create problems in implementing it, it's not a good method.
In my experience the problem is not with the method, but with people assuming that because it's "agile" you can just come in one Monday morning and say "Hey, we're agile now!", like in the Dilbert cartoon. First, you have to pick which agile approach you are going to adopt, e.g. Scrum, Kanban, XP; there is no generic "agile". Then, you have to make the people and organisation investments to adopt your chosen approach properly. You can't blame the method because some development shops don't do the necessary groundwork, skill up their people, etc. and then say "oh, it doesn't work". If you don't put the structures and skills in place up front, then chaos will ensue. Garbage in, garbage out. It's the same for any method.
I've worked in development shops that put the investment into setting up well for their chosen agile method and consequently have got excellent results with it. But, like most things in life, if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.
I have seen weeks where the entire 40 hours were all Agile/Scrum related meetings. This meant that there was no significant coding done whatsoever.
Then you weren't doing either agile or scrum. The only routine "meeting" should be the daily scrum; 15 minutes max - what did we complete yesterday, any problems (team blockers) that need to addressed, what are the priorities for today? If you are not spending 90%+ of your time working on producing the software, then you're doing it wrong.
In all of my IT work, I have never understood why some managers think that calling meetings will enhance productivity, and if that doesn't work, call more meetings. I don't know if this is incompetence, or an issue with ego. Either way, it hamstrings actual productivity.
Traditional management types really don't like agile because - budgets and time-sheets aside - there is not much for them to do. The team manages itself on a day-to-day basis; the scrum master is a facilitator, not a manager. And the staples of traditional management - like meetings, powerpoints and progress reports - are either eliminated or kept to the absolute minimum necessary. As a result, I've seen cases where traditional project managers deliberately set out to sabotage agile projects to show that "agile doesn't work".
But mainly whenever I've heard people say "agile is crap", what they have really been doing is this. I've worked on many well run agile projects that were both successful and good places for developers to work.
Yes, but we effectively have zero consumer liability for fraud.
That means little in reality. Plenty of fraud is for small amounts that slip by without the consumer bothering to inquiry about an $8 charge on their card. For big charges involving identity theft, the burden is on YOU to prove the transactions were fraudulent, and even if you are successful, you may spend hundreds of hours, and have your credit ruined for years.
Pick your poison; not sure I want EU-styled consumer liability based on a PIN code alone.
So here are the choices:
1. Security based on a PIN that is under my full control, and can be changed if compromised.
2. The American way: Security based on my SSN and DOB, which are unchangeable, and have already been compromised a dozen times.
Golly, that is a tough decision.
And in Europe all cards are Chip-and-PIN, and therefore cannot be skimmed. So a fraudster would have to have your actual card as well as your PIN.
You need medicine research to be funded by the goverment. Because the companies just said "Ain't no money in it."
Capitalism is a great system as long as there are profit motives, but falls far short where quality and safety are most important, profits be damned.
Sadly a lot of the research leveraged by big pharma is already publicly (i.e. taxpayer) funded. The idea that the pharma companies need to make huge profits in order to fund R&D is a convenient myth; it's all about generating short-term shareholder value. These days big pharma companies are more concerned with mergers and acquisitions than investing in research.
Passwords continue to be one of the weaker points in online security. A hacker may phish a target's password and log into their account, or take passwords from one data breach and use them to break into accounts on another site.
So the solution is to remove the passwords and replace it with something unchangeable if hacked. You know, whatever hash they use to store the immutable personal characteristics like fingerprints and retinal scans and brain wave Fourier transforms and voice print hash can never be hacked, not in a lifetime of the person. Yeah, sure.
Not to mention that, legally speaking, in many countries passwords are protected by your right to silence. Biometrics typically aren't; you can be legally compelled to provide a fingerprint, say, to unlock an account or a device.
And the whatever is larger is 10 million Euros. Please imagine being a sole proprietor faced with doing business in an environment where a single mistake would lead to a 10 million Euro fine. Oh, I get to rely on the well known compassion of bureaucrats.
The actual legislation on the fines and penalties says _up to_ 10 million (or 2% of turnover if greater than 10 million) for a lower level infringement, and _up to_ 20 million euro (or 4% of turnover if greater than 20 million) for a higher level infringement.
The key phrase is "up to"; "up to" 10 million can be $50, $100, $500, or $1000. There are 10 specific criteria for assessing seriousness of the breach and the appropriate the size of the fine, including the type of data exposed, the number of people affected,and whether the breach was deliberate or due to negligence. So it is is simply not true to say that fines start at 10 million euro; the aim is to make the penalties stiff enough to make people take data security and privacy seriously, not put them out of business (unless they become a serious serial offender).
After taking my corporate training on the European privacy law, I can say that only multinationals will have the legal departments and resources able to so much as keep a copy of their user's email addresses. I am concerned that I'm going to have to suspend email support for my side apps. I really really can't pay a 10M Euro fine for the $100 a year I make in app sales to Europe. I don't have a dedicated privacy officer; there's only me writing apps. My apps don't even collect any data, but I do give out my email address so people do write me.
If that's what you want. Only large multinationals able to make software that keeps track of a user's private data; that's what you are getting in Europe.
The maximum fine under GDPR is 4% of annual turnover; so in the unlikely event that that you were ever prosecuted your fine would be $25 (based on your $100 business). If you are simply replying to user emails, GDPR is unlikely to impact you at all. Even if you are maintaining a register of your customers, GDPR in essence just means (a) only holding personal data that is absolutely required for the business relationship, (b) ensuring your customers know what data you are holding and consent to it, (c) keeping the data secure (and reporting any security breaches), and (d) deleting the data if they stop being customers.
The General Data Protection Regulation will be enforced in the EU very soon.
It is a regulation that is specifically aimed at protecting the data of natural persons.
Here is the text in english if you want to read it
There will be enormous conflicts between the GDPR and this law passed by the US congress.
It might take a while to fight this out in courts but i think this will probably lead to a ban of personal data transfer from european companies to any USA owned entity in a few years.
This point cannot be overstated. And it's not just about email. Many European businesses have been moving to cloud-based hosting for at least some of their line-of-business applications. Under GDPR these businesses will now be open to direct enforcement action by both regulators and their own customers ("data subjects" in GDPR terms). Depending on the nature of the GDPR violation, the penalties can include a fine of up to 4% of annual turnover. So expect US-owned cloud providers to lose a lot of business if the Cloud Act stands.
I share your criticism of Facebook employees, but at what point do they cry about being special and unique, warranting a "snowflake" insult? Your pejorative loses meaning when you don't even attempt to use it in context.
Well when I read that many Facebook employees seem to think that the company should step up its war on leakers and hire employees with more “integrity” I had to laugh. Apparently the business practices are not the problem; what they want are more colleagues who "don't ask, don't tell".
Certainly, we aren't running out of fresh water as a species. However, the fresh water isn't where the people are, and the infrastructure planning to adjust for fluctuations in historical rainfall patterns is lagging greatly.
The problems are likely technically solvable, but may be so expensive that they will serve displace populations (negative growth in mega cities). I don't think 5B people will die of thirst by 2050, but I can certainly imagine that 5B people wouldn't live where they might have been if it weren't for water issues.
I don't think it's that simple. There is basically the same amount of water in the ecosystem, but the human population is growing dramatically and our water usage (per head) has been growing steadily over the last 50 years, especially in the developed world. Fifty years ago most of the domestic water uses we take for granted now - e.g. dish washers, central heating systems, power showers - either didn't exist or weren't available to most of the population. And the use of water in industrial processes has increased hugely as well.
As the population increase doesn't look like slowing (or reversing) any time soon, we are going to have to look critically at the ways we use water.
Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?
This misses the point; companies are embracing automation (and "increased productivity") as a way of getting people off the payroll and the pension scheme. Who is going to pay people to retire in their 40s and 50s? Who is going to pay people an income they can live on for working part-time? Even today in the UK there are millions of people on "zero hours" contracts which do not guarantee them any work (and therefore any pay) in any given week/month. These people are technically not unemployed, but they have to rely on welfare to survive.
A future where we all somehow live lives of comfort and leisure while machines do all the work is a utopian fantasy.
The idea that technology will magically create vast numbers of new jobs to compensate for the ones lost - the so-called luddite fallacy - doesn't work in a world where employers are deploying automation specifically to reduce their expensive human head count.
Can someone who really uses RSS feeds shed some light on it's benefits for a mass market? Is there any? I find RSS doesn't really fit into any internet habits I currently have. I've never really used RSS other than trying it out a few times and I never found it to be helpful in anyway. I'm sure there are lots of people who love RSS. Not being one of them I'd like to hear the positives from someone who actually uses it regularly.
Why do I use it? It allows me to aggregate new posts from a bunch of different sites and home in on stuff I'm particularly interested in; e.g. QuiteRSS can tag articles about development languages and tools I use (using keywords or regular expressions that I specify) making it easy to quickly see new articles about, say, python. There's a lot of new content published every day and a good RSS reader makes that "fire hose" more manageable.
Slashdot Mirror
The EU has achieved its prime goal with great success. Maybe you should look up what that goal was, what life was like pre-EU, and why so many countries want to join.
Good summary. One, Facebook-specific thing, I would add: Zuckerberg appeared in person before the EU parliament but has flatly refused all demands to appear before the UK parliament. He clearly feels that, as CEO of a multi-billion dollar multi-national company, he can safely ignore most national governments; but the EU parliament (representing 27 European countries) cannot be so easily brushed off.
Real GDP is the net of domestic output minus price changes, ie inflation. Look into how our inflation measurements have been contorted over the years and you'll see how it's "grossly" under-reported, thus GDP is overstated.
In addition, the usefulness of GDP is oversold. GDP is used as a "magic number" (bigger must be better, right?), but in reality it's not the best measure of how well an economy is performing.
The cause of homelessness has nothing to do with the cost of housing.
I don't know why this is tagged as "Insightful". If you think the affordability of living space has no connection whatever to people being able to get somewhere to live then you just haven't been paying attention. Where I live property prices (and rents) have been rising significantly above the rate of inflation (and well above any rises in general income levels) for a long time now. It's not the only cause of homelessness, but it's certainly a contributing factor.
PGP is broken now? It's only had fairly infrequent and minor issues over time. If this is broken now, then it's the final sign that anyone who thinks computers can be secured is wrong. If you want something secure, write it down in a notebook. It'll be about 100x more secure than putting it on a computer simply by not being networked. Even if someone steals and reads your notebook it's better than someone having it on their phone (or PGP, now I guess) for the ENTIRE WORLD to come along and steal. Computers are great for games, everything else is debatable.
PGP is not broken. The way a few bad email clients are using it is broken. If you are not using Thunderbird you are safe with PGP. While S/MIME is comprised in every email client except modern Outlook, KMail, and mutt.
If you are using Thunderbird and you have disabled loading remote content in messages (which you should be doing anyway) then this issue (which relies on automatic execution of embedded remote URLs) won't affect you. HTML emails are the real problem here.
FFS, where did I put my popcorn!
We're going to need industrial quantities of popcorn for this one! :-)
Search for 'flat earth', 'vaccine autism', 'creation science', 'labor economics', 'sociology' etc etc.
The thing they have in common? The people involved wouldn't know science if it bit them on the ass. Instead they grind axes.
I know this was tagged as "funny", but it's disturbingly close to the truth. At a recent Flat Earth Convention (yes, really) the folks seemed to genuinely believe they were doing legitimate science to "prove" that the earth isn't round. They regard folks who do actual peer-reviewed science as part of some "conspiracy by the elite" and therefore not to be trusted.
In this modern age of hold your hand safety features, why exactly doesn't this thing have a seat weight sensor?
Because putting a sensor in for every idiotic thing idiots can do isn't exactly financially viable, and an idiot sensor doesn't exist. Plus, all you'll do is breed a better idiot as a result.
Well even applying the 80/20 rule, ensuring that there is somebody in the driver's seat when the car is moving should be a priority. In the UK, even my 8 year-old car alerts if there's a passenger sitting in the backseat who is not wearing a seat belt; it's not difficult to do.
When I buy stuff, I tend to usually go with the cheapest supplier.
While that approach is, to a point, understandable, it is also increasingly part of the problem. Basically we live in a world where too many people, as Oscar Wilde said, know "the cost of everything and the value of nothing".
Retail price wars have led to excessive downward cost pressure all the way along the supply chain; pressure to meet an arbitrary retail sale price, without any regard to the realistic costs of production. The easiest way for companies to square that circle is to slash employee terms and conditions.
We all love a bargain, but we often ignore the fact that there is a real human cost behind those "cheap" goods and services.
The introduction of Automatic Teller Machines led to an increase in human tellers, as well as business.
I don't know where you do your banking, but where I live ATMs have dramatically reduced the number of human tellers. Personal customers are pushed to use ATMs for both withdrawals and lodgments; even inside bank branches. To see a human teller you have to either be a business (with a significant cash turnover) or a high net-worth personal customer (that the bank wants to keep sweet).
But that's the problem. You can say, "Well, that's not Agile", but so many attempts to do Agile wind up like this. If the method seems to create problems in implementing it, it's not a good method.
In my experience the problem is not with the method, but with people assuming that because it's "agile" you can just come in one Monday morning and say "Hey, we're agile now!", like in the Dilbert cartoon. First, you have to pick which agile approach you are going to adopt, e.g. Scrum, Kanban, XP; there is no generic "agile". Then, you have to make the people and organisation investments to adopt your chosen approach properly. You can't blame the method because some development shops don't do the necessary groundwork, skill up their people, etc. and then say "oh, it doesn't work". If you don't put the structures and skills in place up front, then chaos will ensue. Garbage in, garbage out. It's the same for any method.
I've worked in development shops that put the investment into setting up well for their chosen agile method and consequently have got excellent results with it. But, like most things in life, if you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.
I have seen weeks where the entire 40 hours were all Agile/Scrum related meetings. This meant that there was no significant coding done whatsoever.
Then you weren't doing either agile or scrum. The only routine "meeting" should be the daily scrum; 15 minutes max - what did we complete yesterday, any problems (team blockers) that need to addressed, what are the priorities for today? If you are not spending 90%+ of your time working on producing the software, then you're doing it wrong.
In all of my IT work, I have never understood why some managers think that calling meetings will enhance productivity, and if that doesn't work, call more meetings. I don't know if this is incompetence, or an issue with ego. Either way, it hamstrings actual productivity.
Traditional management types really don't like agile because - budgets and time-sheets aside - there is not much for them to do. The team manages itself on a day-to-day basis; the scrum master is a facilitator, not a manager. And the staples of traditional management - like meetings, powerpoints and progress reports - are either eliminated or kept to the absolute minimum necessary. As a result, I've seen cases where traditional project managers deliberately set out to sabotage agile projects to show that "agile doesn't work".
But mainly whenever I've heard people say "agile is crap", what they have really been doing is this. I've worked on many well run agile projects that were both successful and good places for developers to work.
Yes, but we effectively have zero consumer liability for fraud.
That means little in reality. Plenty of fraud is for small amounts that slip by without the consumer bothering to inquiry about an $8 charge on their card. For big charges involving identity theft, the burden is on YOU to prove the transactions were fraudulent, and even if you are successful, you may spend hundreds of hours, and have your credit ruined for years.
Pick your poison; not sure I want EU-styled consumer liability based on a PIN code alone.
So here are the choices: 1. Security based on a PIN that is under my full control, and can be changed if compromised. 2. The American way: Security based on my SSN and DOB, which are unchangeable, and have already been compromised a dozen times.
Golly, that is a tough decision.
And in Europe all cards are Chip-and-PIN, and therefore cannot be skimmed. So a fraudster would have to have your actual card as well as your PIN.
You need medicine research to be funded by the goverment. Because the companies just said "Ain't no money in it."
Capitalism is a great system as long as there are profit motives, but falls far short where quality and safety are most important, profits be damned.
Sadly a lot of the research leveraged by big pharma is already publicly (i.e. taxpayer) funded. The idea that the pharma companies need to make huge profits in order to fund R&D is a convenient myth; it's all about generating short-term shareholder value. These days big pharma companies are more concerned with mergers and acquisitions than investing in research.
Passwords continue to be one of the weaker points in online security. A hacker may phish a target's password and log into their account, or take passwords from one data breach and use them to break into accounts on another site.
So the solution is to remove the passwords and replace it with something unchangeable if hacked. You know, whatever hash they use to store the immutable personal characteristics like fingerprints and retinal scans and brain wave Fourier transforms and voice print hash can never be hacked, not in a lifetime of the person. Yeah, sure.
Not to mention that, legally speaking, in many countries passwords are protected by your right to silence. Biometrics typically aren't; you can be legally compelled to provide a fingerprint, say, to unlock an account or a device.
And the whatever is larger is 10 million Euros. Please imagine being a sole proprietor faced with doing business in an environment where a single mistake would lead to a 10 million Euro fine. Oh, I get to rely on the well known compassion of bureaucrats.
The actual legislation on the fines and penalties says _up to_ 10 million (or 2% of turnover if greater than 10 million) for a lower level infringement, and _up to_ 20 million euro (or 4% of turnover if greater than 20 million) for a higher level infringement.
The key phrase is "up to"; "up to" 10 million can be $50, $100, $500, or $1000. There are 10 specific criteria for assessing seriousness of the breach and the appropriate the size of the fine, including the type of data exposed, the number of people affected,and whether the breach was deliberate or due to negligence. So it is is simply not true to say that fines start at 10 million euro; the aim is to make the penalties stiff enough to make people take data security and privacy seriously, not put them out of business (unless they become a serious serial offender).
After taking my corporate training on the European privacy law, I can say that only multinationals will have the legal departments and resources able to so much as keep a copy of their user's email addresses. I am concerned that I'm going to have to suspend email support for my side apps. I really really can't pay a 10M Euro fine for the $100 a year I make in app sales to Europe. I don't have a dedicated privacy officer; there's only me writing apps. My apps don't even collect any data, but I do give out my email address so people do write me. If that's what you want. Only large multinationals able to make software that keeps track of a user's private data; that's what you are getting in Europe.
The maximum fine under GDPR is 4% of annual turnover; so in the unlikely event that that you were ever prosecuted your fine would be $25 (based on your $100 business). If you are simply replying to user emails, GDPR is unlikely to impact you at all. Even if you are maintaining a register of your customers, GDPR in essence just means (a) only holding personal data that is absolutely required for the business relationship, (b) ensuring your customers know what data you are holding and consent to it, (c) keeping the data secure (and reporting any security breaches), and (d) deleting the data if they stop being customers.
The General Data Protection Regulation will be enforced in the EU very soon. It is a regulation that is specifically aimed at protecting the data of natural persons. Here is the text in english if you want to read it There will be enormous conflicts between the GDPR and this law passed by the US congress. It might take a while to fight this out in courts but i think this will probably lead to a ban of personal data transfer from european companies to any USA owned entity in a few years.
This point cannot be overstated. And it's not just about email. Many European businesses have been moving to cloud-based hosting for at least some of their line-of-business applications. Under GDPR these businesses will now be open to direct enforcement action by both regulators and their own customers ("data subjects" in GDPR terms). Depending on the nature of the GDPR violation, the penalties can include a fine of up to 4% of annual turnover. So expect US-owned cloud providers to lose a lot of business if the Cloud Act stands.
Grow up, snowflakes.
I share your criticism of Facebook employees, but at what point do they cry about being special and unique, warranting a "snowflake" insult? Your pejorative loses meaning when you don't even attempt to use it in context.
Well when I read that many Facebook employees seem to think that the company should step up its war on leakers and hire employees with more “integrity” I had to laugh. Apparently the business practices are not the problem; what they want are more colleagues who "don't ask, don't tell".
So, that means Conservative news will be eliminated & Liberal lies will be emphasized. Got it!
Care to cite some actual verifiable evidence to support this? Or are you just making groundless assertions (which is what "fake news" is all about)?
I teleported home one night
With Ron and Sid and Meg
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
And I got Sidney's leg.
Dismissed as bullshit alarmist crap
[Snip]
Certainly, we aren't running out of fresh water as a species. However, the fresh water isn't where the people are, and the infrastructure planning to adjust for fluctuations in historical rainfall patterns is lagging greatly.
The problems are likely technically solvable, but may be so expensive that they will serve displace populations (negative growth in mega cities). I don't think 5B people will die of thirst by 2050, but I can certainly imagine that 5B people wouldn't live where they might have been if it weren't for water issues.
I don't think it's that simple. There is basically the same amount of water in the ecosystem, but the human population is growing dramatically and our water usage (per head) has been growing steadily over the last 50 years, especially in the developed world. Fifty years ago most of the domestic water uses we take for granted now - e.g. dish washers, central heating systems, power showers - either didn't exist or weren't available to most of the population. And the use of water in industrial processes has increased hugely as well.
As the population increase doesn't look like slowing (or reversing) any time soon, we are going to have to look critically at the ways we use water.
Well as more and more jobs are taken by AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans?
Currently people work well in the 60's and even 70's and work 40 hours a week with a mere 2 weeks of vacation. OK so people retire in the 40's and 50's or change the work week to 32 hours, etc. Why not embrace the increase in productivity instead of fearing it or worse impede its inevitability?
This misses the point; companies are embracing automation (and "increased productivity") as a way of getting people off the payroll and the pension scheme. Who is going to pay people to retire in their 40s and 50s? Who is going to pay people an income they can live on for working part-time? Even today in the UK there are millions of people on "zero hours" contracts which do not guarantee them any work (and therefore any pay) in any given week/month. These people are technically not unemployed, but they have to rely on welfare to survive.
A future where we all somehow live lives of comfort and leisure while machines do all the work is a utopian fantasy.
Well as more and more jobs are taken by AI-driven automation, the bigger question is how many jobs will be left for humans?
The idea that technology will magically create vast numbers of new jobs to compensate for the ones lost - the so-called luddite fallacy - doesn't work in a world where employers are deploying automation specifically to reduce their expensive human head count.
Well when you considering that "Flying Insects Have Been Disappearing Over the Past Few Decades, Study Shows" and that "Even Common Species Are Becoming Rare", this may not such good news after all.
Can someone who really uses RSS feeds shed some light on it's benefits for a mass market? Is there any? I find RSS doesn't really fit into any internet habits I currently have. I've never really used RSS other than trying it out a few times and I never found it to be helpful in anyway. I'm sure there are lots of people who love RSS. Not being one of them I'd like to hear the positives from someone who actually uses it regularly.
I use QuiteRSS; it's how I got to this article.
Why do I use it? It allows me to aggregate new posts from a bunch of different sites and home in on stuff I'm particularly interested in; e.g. QuiteRSS can tag articles about development languages and tools I use (using keywords or regular expressions that I specify) making it easy to quickly see new articles about, say, python. There's a lot of new content published every day and a good RSS reader makes that "fire hose" more manageable.