Perhaps it's a cutting-age incendiary device and the details are restricted by the Korean military.
I'll never buy anything Samsung again - they're actually below Sony on my list. I've had two expensive Samsung products fail on me very early (TV after 3 years, phone after 1), and many of my friends have similar experiences across their product lines (lets not forget about the washing machines with a habit of "rapid unscheduled disassembly").
They just don't seem to have durability or quality as part of their corporate culture. Sucks, but there certainly are viable alternatives.
Pay a proper wage and this "labor shortage" will disappear immediately.
Are "immediately" and "instantly" not synonyms to you?
Changes don't happen fast for skilled work, and increasingly all work is skilled work. In the US anyway, the skilled trades are unionized or regulated such that you can't claim you're qualified to work on your own without a lengthy apprenticeship. Sure, semi-skilled construction workers could be motivated to "extend their skills", and in a couple of years we'd see the effect. Of course, there are only so many apprentice slots available, so the change will be slow even so.
It's even more locked-down in parts of the EU, where you choose your trade in high school and are mostly locked into it.
Bricklaying pays better than semi-skilled work, so it's not like there's some sizable pool of bricklayers (or plumbers, or electricians, or welders, etc) doing other work because wages are too low - that's the job they've spent years learning.
You seem to have this job confused with unskilled work where people just need to show up and start working. There are few such jobs left in America.
is more than just a 'skilled trade'. It is actually hard.
Seems easy compared to memorizing the US electrical code (hundreds of pages of dense technical info), as needed to be an electrician in the US. All the skilled trades are hard, that's what the "skilled" part means, though I guess it's a spectrum.
The solution to high commodity prices is high commodity prices. Real estate bubbles always pop, bankrupting most speculators, so there's even some justice. Meanwhile, when prices spike lots of new construction is incentivized, which is great if there's an actual shortage and those new houses will eventually be occupied.
There is a big flaw with this. When the effort is to minimize the human worker, then anyt effort that increases jobs is by definition a failure.
The has been to minimize the human worker for 400 years. There's little evidence this time is different (but there is a little). New jobs replace the old ones, because people consume more, and have for 400 years.
Aside from the growing problem of a minimum IQ seemingly needed to be employable at all, there's no doubt people will keep wanting to consume more as their current consumption inevitably gets cheaper. There's always work that no one has yet discovered how to automate, and change isn't overnight. But that "all the remaining jobs require some smarts" problem is a bad one, I think.
Yes, yes, automation removes categories of jobs. But then it creates new categories. There's no evidence yet that "this time it's different", except for one data point: people with an IQ below about 85 are effectively unemployable now, and that will rise to include more people over time. That's the pending crisis: automation is now primarily affecting the people who are hardest to retrain - in fact, it's not clear that there will ever be non-makework jobs for those affected, nor that charity will prevent deep psychological/social issues (as most people feel the need to contribute to society in some useful way).
Sure, over the next couple of centuries. Of course, almost all jobs that people were doing a century or two ago are automated now.
Real-world infrastructure isn't the internet. Manufacturing facilities may have 25-year replacement cycles (but them, that's almost all automated already). Construction equipment and techniques change similarly slowly. Humans a resistant to change in their daily activities, and most still prefer a human cashier, meaning generations to fully automate that job even if we had the tech already.
The rest of your post falls of into "lizard people are secetly running the world" territory. No, most businesses have no interest in killing off their customers (Oracle, maybe).
Oh? Pay more and a crowd of new people will instantly become journeyman bricklayers, having completed training and years of apprenticeship? You have a shallow and simple-minded view of things, I'd say.
More than that, bricklaying and masonry in general is a skilled trade, and there's a deep labor shortage in the skilled trades, especially construction-related, that's really limiting new construction. We're sending everyone off to college with the expectation of a white-collar job these days, and very few are going to be looking at jobs like bricklaying at any (reasonable) pay.
By "most places" you of course mean "1% of places where everyone is dogpiling in, while 99% of places are cheap". Lot of land out there, even near cities.
You seem to be stretching the definition of Nazi a bit far. About half the people at the Alt-Right march in Charlottesville were some sort of "white nationalists", but were any of them neo-Nazis? Pretty sure none of them were actual Nazis unless George Soros put in a surprise appearance.
What you should be asking is "why did the other half show up, willingly associate with white nationalists when they weren't themselves"? The answer of course is you and those just like you: you've abused terms like racist and Nazi so much that no one one the right (outside of DC) cares anymore if you call them that. "Why not march with racists and Nazis - I'll be called a Nazi racist anyway, so there's no downside in making common cause".
A dangerous new political coalition is forming and it's your fault.
Not so much liberals as progressives: when your whole political ideology is founded on complaining about minor issues, it's not that far fetched to get blamed for any sort of over-protectiveness or obsessive avoiding of minor harm. This used to be the provenance of the right-wing religious whackos, and still is in some parts of America, but for the most part there's been a generational shift over to progressives being America's over-worriers and moral scolds.
Now if only there were a party for classic liberals!
Hey, I was in several traffic jams that were the result of either Obama or Hillary (as they were visiting town, and freeways were closed for hours etc) - as good a reason as any to hate a politician, if you ask me.
A quick look at the biomass of multi-cellular animals will show you how pro-survival intelligence is: humans are outmassed by our food animals, but that's about it.
If the environment changes for, say, a bear, all it can to is generate random bears in hopes one will be better adapted. Intelligence allows adaption within a lifetime, which is incredibly pro-survival. Also, the simple ability to mentally model an action and see if it kills you before trying it is very pro-survival.
How many social justice cult meetings do you have to go to before you can't add 1 + 1 and get 2 any more?
Somewhere under Communist rule -- Poland I think? -- "1 + 1 = 2" was an actual political protest sign. It was the only form of protest you could get away with, but the view of reality you were required to adopt in public was so twisted that "1 + 1 = 2" was understood as protest.
Post-modernism is just the modern evolution of Communism, and the social justice cult is directly driven/puppeted by post-modernism. Key post-modernist ideas include "competence is a myth" (any difference in outcomes is a result of social inequity, because of course competence is a myth), and "logic is a tool of the oppressors". Any idea, really, to help build a totalitarian state, but those two are the most pernicious.
If you double the amount of money everyone has and earns overnight, what happens? Does anyone's standard of living go up? The number of units of currency people have isn't the point, but the purchasing power.
What we consume is what we produce (net of trade imbalance). No shuffling of money about will change the total amount of stuff (good and services and anything else we produce) there is to go around - if we want to raise everyone's standard of living we have to collectively produce more goods and services.
Technology enables exponential growth in productivity, which is great, but when it comes at the cost of number of people working productively, it's neutral at best. Handing money to the unemployed does nothing for average standard of living, and does nothing for the psychological health of those who can find work. It's a temporary measure at best (which is great for temporary unemployment, but that's not what we're talking about).
I think $8/hour labor is just demeaning to the workers and to society, and should be stopped for that reason.
I hear this a lot. I seriously doubt that anyone saying it has teenage children. When you do, the value of that low-paying first job will be self-evident.
Mussolini was a fascist. Hitler was a fascist. Stalin was a Fascist. Saddam Hussein was a Fascist.
You don't understand what "fascist" means. There are many kinds of totalitarians. Hitler was a fascist; Stalin was a communist; Saddam was an old-school dictator.
Everything you say above is true generally of totalitarians, not specific to fascists. It's an important distinction, because it reminds us that there is both a totalitarian left and a totalitarian right.
In order to support UBI the taxation will need to be increased significantly. This means the rich need to pay more and business need to stop hiding profits with tax shelters. We may need to move to a system were business revenue instead of profit is taxed.
Ah, so a sales tax? Definitely a familiar and well-understood model. And, as a VAT rather than a sales tax, it's been shown to work at scale. Pity it's both regressive and unconstitutional in the US.
I think you're mostly repeating what I said, but just for clarity: jobs where someone wants or needs to consumer the good or service produced - the sort of paying jobs that exist in an ideal economy, with no makework or supports.
Money is always a distraction from real economic questions. There are lots of ways to hand people money, but that rarely solves the real problems. People need what money buys.
The real problem here is, again, what sort of useful, productive work can someone with an 80-90 IQ do when all the current jobs they do are automated away? (And for that matter, the significant number of unemployed with sub-85 IQ today, who largely have no remaining employment prospects.) We better find an answer, as the current answer (the oyx/opiate addiction epidemic) is dystopian.
I don't think that's a relevant question anymore. Your assumption is that every citizen is required to work because there is a job that needs to be done by every citizen for the benefit of society. When we start seeing things like automation what that does is it lowers the number of jobs that need to be done because some jobs
Also going towards the wrong question. Everyone who can be employed (in a real, non-makework job) acts to the benefit of society, because that job represents some product or service that someone else wants or needs. So, the more people work, the better off we all are. Also, most people (and almost all men) have a psychological need to be productive in some way, and society goes to a bad place when there are no jobs for them.
So, the right question is, what kind of useful, productive work can most people do as automation replaces jobs. The focus of that question is jobs that currently require only a low IQ. That's the key question we need to solve as a society, as those are the jobs mostly likely to be automated away (repetitive tasks requiring no abstraction), and the people hardest to re-train.
There's no obvious answer, but we damn well better find the answer anyway.
Why would you assume I don't work at Google? Do you believe anyone not intending career suicide would admit that work for Google when discussing this topic?
I'm not saying either way, but there's a good reason/.ers rarely reveal their employer.
Any "aspersions" come from Google's quota policy, not the author. He's specifically trying to change that part.
But hen, it's obvious you never glanced at his paper. It's mostly a well-cited survey of the scientific literature, with minimal opinion. At no point was he "complaining that diversity" anything: you just made up that libelous BS. Are you structurally incapable of discussing the issue without resorting to straw men and insults? You realize that means you have no argument, and are just going on emotion, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Strangely silent about the battery
Perhaps it's a cutting-age incendiary device and the details are restricted by the Korean military.
I'll never buy anything Samsung again - they're actually below Sony on my list. I've had two expensive Samsung products fail on me very early (TV after 3 years, phone after 1), and many of my friends have similar experiences across their product lines (lets not forget about the washing machines with a habit of "rapid unscheduled disassembly").
They just don't seem to have durability or quality as part of their corporate culture. Sucks, but there certainly are viable alternatives.
Pay a proper wage and this "labor shortage" will disappear immediately.
Are "immediately" and "instantly" not synonyms to you?
Changes don't happen fast for skilled work, and increasingly all work is skilled work. In the US anyway, the skilled trades are unionized or regulated such that you can't claim you're qualified to work on your own without a lengthy apprenticeship. Sure, semi-skilled construction workers could be motivated to "extend their skills", and in a couple of years we'd see the effect. Of course, there are only so many apprentice slots available, so the change will be slow even so.
It's even more locked-down in parts of the EU, where you choose your trade in high school and are mostly locked into it.
Bricklaying pays better than semi-skilled work, so it's not like there's some sizable pool of bricklayers (or plumbers, or electricians, or welders, etc) doing other work because wages are too low - that's the job they've spent years learning.
You seem to have this job confused with unskilled work where people just need to show up and start working. There are few such jobs left in America.
is more than just a 'skilled trade'. It is actually hard.
Seems easy compared to memorizing the US electrical code (hundreds of pages of dense technical info), as needed to be an electrician in the US. All the skilled trades are hard, that's what the "skilled" part means, though I guess it's a spectrum.
The solution to high commodity prices is high commodity prices. Real estate bubbles always pop, bankrupting most speculators, so there's even some justice. Meanwhile, when prices spike lots of new construction is incentivized, which is great if there's an actual shortage and those new houses will eventually be occupied.
There is a big flaw with this. When the effort is to minimize the human worker, then anyt effort that increases jobs is by definition a failure.
The has been to minimize the human worker for 400 years. There's little evidence this time is different (but there is a little). New jobs replace the old ones, because people consume more, and have for 400 years.
Aside from the growing problem of a minimum IQ seemingly needed to be employable at all, there's no doubt people will keep wanting to consume more as their current consumption inevitably gets cheaper. There's always work that no one has yet discovered how to automate, and change isn't overnight. But that "all the remaining jobs require some smarts" problem is a bad one, I think.
Yes, yes, automation removes categories of jobs. But then it creates new categories. There's no evidence yet that "this time it's different", except for one data point: people with an IQ below about 85 are effectively unemployable now, and that will rise to include more people over time. That's the pending crisis: automation is now primarily affecting the people who are hardest to retrain - in fact, it's not clear that there will ever be non-makework jobs for those affected, nor that charity will prevent deep psychological/social issues (as most people feel the need to contribute to society in some useful way).
That this automation of almost all jobs is coming
Sure, over the next couple of centuries. Of course, almost all jobs that people were doing a century or two ago are automated now.
Real-world infrastructure isn't the internet. Manufacturing facilities may have 25-year replacement cycles (but them, that's almost all automated already). Construction equipment and techniques change similarly slowly. Humans a resistant to change in their daily activities, and most still prefer a human cashier, meaning generations to fully automate that job even if we had the tech already.
The rest of your post falls of into "lizard people are secetly running the world" territory. No, most businesses have no interest in killing off their customers (Oracle, maybe).
Oh? Pay more and a crowd of new people will instantly become journeyman bricklayers, having completed training and years of apprenticeship? You have a shallow and simple-minded view of things, I'd say.
More than that, bricklaying and masonry in general is a skilled trade, and there's a deep labor shortage in the skilled trades, especially construction-related, that's really limiting new construction. We're sending everyone off to college with the expectation of a white-collar job these days, and very few are going to be looking at jobs like bricklaying at any (reasonable) pay.
By "most places" you of course mean "1% of places where everyone is dogpiling in, while 99% of places are cheap". Lot of land out there, even near cities.
No, those are neo-Nazis. Actual Nazis are quite old these days, and don't get out much, but there are a few Hitler Youth still around.
You seem to be stretching the definition of Nazi a bit far. About half the people at the Alt-Right march in Charlottesville were some sort of "white nationalists", but were any of them neo-Nazis? Pretty sure none of them were actual Nazis unless George Soros put in a surprise appearance.
What you should be asking is "why did the other half show up, willingly associate with white nationalists when they weren't themselves"? The answer of course is you and those just like you: you've abused terms like racist and Nazi so much that no one one the right (outside of DC) cares anymore if you call them that. "Why not march with racists and Nazis - I'll be called a Nazi racist anyway, so there's no downside in making common cause".
A dangerous new political coalition is forming and it's your fault.
Not so much liberals as progressives: when your whole political ideology is founded on complaining about minor issues, it's not that far fetched to get blamed for any sort of over-protectiveness or obsessive avoiding of minor harm. This used to be the provenance of the right-wing religious whackos, and still is in some parts of America, but for the most part there's been a generational shift over to progressives being America's over-worriers and moral scolds.
Now if only there were a party for classic liberals!
Hey, I was in several traffic jams that were the result of either Obama or Hillary (as they were visiting town, and freeways were closed for hours etc) - as good a reason as any to hate a politician, if you ask me.
Cure your peanut allergy with this weird trick invented by a Melbourne mom! Big pharma hates her.
A quick look at the biomass of multi-cellular animals will show you how pro-survival intelligence is: humans are outmassed by our food animals, but that's about it.
If the environment changes for, say, a bear, all it can to is generate random bears in hopes one will be better adapted. Intelligence allows adaption within a lifetime, which is incredibly pro-survival. Also, the simple ability to mentally model an action and see if it kills you before trying it is very pro-survival.
How many social justice cult meetings do you have to go to before you can't add 1 + 1 and get 2 any more?
Somewhere under Communist rule -- Poland I think? -- "1 + 1 = 2" was an actual political protest sign. It was the only form of protest you could get away with, but the view of reality you were required to adopt in public was so twisted that "1 + 1 = 2" was understood as protest.
Post-modernism is just the modern evolution of Communism, and the social justice cult is directly driven/puppeted by post-modernism. Key post-modernist ideas include "competence is a myth" (any difference in outcomes is a result of social inequity, because of course competence is a myth), and "logic is a tool of the oppressors". Any idea, really, to help build a totalitarian state, but those two are the most pernicious.
If you double the amount of money everyone has and earns overnight, what happens? Does anyone's standard of living go up? The number of units of currency people have isn't the point, but the purchasing power.
What we consume is what we produce (net of trade imbalance). No shuffling of money about will change the total amount of stuff (good and services and anything else we produce) there is to go around - if we want to raise everyone's standard of living we have to collectively produce more goods and services.
Technology enables exponential growth in productivity, which is great, but when it comes at the cost of number of people working productively, it's neutral at best. Handing money to the unemployed does nothing for average standard of living, and does nothing for the psychological health of those who can find work. It's a temporary measure at best (which is great for temporary unemployment, but that's not what we're talking about).
I think $8/hour labor is just demeaning to the workers and to society, and should be stopped for that reason.
I hear this a lot. I seriously doubt that anyone saying it has teenage children. When you do, the value of that low-paying first job will be self-evident.
Mussolini was a fascist. Hitler was a fascist. Stalin was a Fascist. Saddam Hussein was a Fascist.
You don't understand what "fascist" means. There are many kinds of totalitarians. Hitler was a fascist; Stalin was a communist; Saddam was an old-school dictator.
Everything you say above is true generally of totalitarians, not specific to fascists. It's an important distinction, because it reminds us that there is both a totalitarian left and a totalitarian right.
In order to support UBI the taxation will need to be increased significantly. This means the rich need to pay more and business need to stop hiding profits with tax shelters. We may need to move to a system were business revenue instead of profit is taxed.
Ah, so a sales tax? Definitely a familiar and well-understood model. And, as a VAT rather than a sales tax, it's been shown to work at scale. Pity it's both regressive and unconstitutional in the US.
I think you're mostly repeating what I said, but just for clarity: jobs where someone wants or needs to consumer the good or service produced - the sort of paying jobs that exist in an ideal economy, with no makework or supports.
Money is always a distraction from real economic questions. There are lots of ways to hand people money, but that rarely solves the real problems. People need what money buys.
The real problem here is, again, what sort of useful, productive work can someone with an 80-90 IQ do when all the current jobs they do are automated away? (And for that matter, the significant number of unemployed with sub-85 IQ today, who largely have no remaining employment prospects.) We better find an answer, as the current answer (the oyx/opiate addiction epidemic) is dystopian.
I don't think that's a relevant question anymore. Your assumption is that every citizen is required to work because there is a job that needs to be done by every citizen for the benefit of society. When we start seeing things like automation what that does is it lowers the number of jobs that need to be done because some jobs
Also going towards the wrong question. Everyone who can be employed (in a real, non-makework job) acts to the benefit of society, because that job represents some product or service that someone else wants or needs. So, the more people work, the better off we all are. Also, most people (and almost all men) have a psychological need to be productive in some way, and society goes to a bad place when there are no jobs for them.
So, the right question is, what kind of useful, productive work can most people do as automation replaces jobs. The focus of that question is jobs that currently require only a low IQ. That's the key question we need to solve as a society, as those are the jobs mostly likely to be automated away (repetitive tasks requiring no abstraction), and the people hardest to re-train.
There's no obvious answer, but we damn well better find the answer anyway.
Why would you assume I don't work at Google? Do you believe anyone not intending career suicide would admit that work for Google when discussing this topic?
I'm not saying either way, but there's a good reason /.ers rarely reveal their employer.
Any "aspersions" come from Google's quota policy, not the author. He's specifically trying to change that part.
But hen, it's obvious you never glanced at his paper. It's mostly a well-cited survey of the scientific literature, with minimal opinion. At no point was he "complaining that diversity" anything: you just made up that libelous BS. Are you structurally incapable of discussing the issue without resorting to straw men and insults? You realize that means you have no argument, and are just going on emotion, right?