And regarding the 30 hour work week? I'd love to have that, and a sabbatical every few years. But your claim that it would be cost effective is nonsense. You think a college education is so cheap in the US because professors have those benefits?
So your argument is that college is expensive in the US because college professors don't work 40+ hours a week, 50 weeks a year, and do all of their ongoing training on their own time, outside of that?
For one thing, you would lose the moral high ground of being able to say you were doing it for the good of your people, not just for the profits of selling the knockoff.
That depends entirely on the price. Why can't they sell it at a reasonable price for the good of the people in other countries too?
Part of the fun of hunting is physics in action. You have a possibly moving prey X meters away. You need to know the wind, hold the gun steady, lead the prey, and know the drop of a bullet. If you just take a picture, that could be a complete miss from bullet drop. If you just take a picture, you could have missed with a bullet because the prey was moving.
So it sounds like what is needed is a more sophisitcated instrument that will only capture a well framed photo of the animal if you aim your shot appropriately, according to the measured physical and environmental factors that would guide a well-aimed bullet.
I hope you realize just how far apart these cities are and how little there is to be seen in between. I suppose 3G till take the edge off the many hours of drudgery.
At least consider taking 395 for the North-South portion.
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming.
But it will never see the light of day because it is genuinely innovative, rather than an rehash of previous ideas that is easily marketed thanks to technological stats.
How do you call your insurance company if your lost wallet was also your phone?
Okay, granted, there are various solutions to all of these problems. The point is that the existence of the problems at all undermines the supposed logic of these schemes.
At the end of the day, phones cost much more than cards. Insuring a phone likely costs more than a card. Heck, I let my physical credit card insurance lapse years ago!
Also, there are plenty of ways to commit credit card fraud without access to either a card or a phone. iWallet likely adds to those vectors.
*loses wallet* "Hello [$Bank]? Yes, I lost my wallet, can you cancel my card and send me a new one? A few days and it will arrive in the mail? Excellent!"
*loses phone* *logs into Apple ID from any computer* *cancels card link to lost/stolen phone* *connects card to new phone* *continues life as normal, with minimum disruption to card access*
Emphasis added.
How do you buy the new phone if your lost phone was also your wallet?
I would imagine that the iWallet could be remotely revoked.
Sure. Say you reach for your iWallet to buy a coffee and realize that you left it at the news stand 10 minutes earlier. Fortunately, you have the ability to remotely disable access to your accounts. So, you just pull out your smart phone and. ..ruh-roh!
Meanwhile, the clerk at the news stand sees that your iWallet has been left behind. Being an honest sort, he decides to try to reunite the device with its owner by calling. ..ruh-roh!
I think the point is the double-edged-sword of integrating everything in to a single device. Even if your accounts are safe, leaving your wallet on the counter would also mean losing things that you would never normally have removed from your pocket/bag in the first place.
The young programming students I've dealt with seem no more or less comfortable with programming than any other young programmers from other generations (and I go back a while).
Well there you have it -- you are obviously too old to truly understand their specialness!
School uniforms can have another really useful benefit - they reduce the differences between kids in a good way. Allowing kids to wear their own clothes to school fuels the kind of hierarchical society in schools where the haves and the have nots are distinguished by their dressing.
This is only partially true. For instance, in America schools are economically stratified, so school uniforms themselves are a status symbol. Then, unless uniforms are strict and completely comprehensive, items like shoes and winter coats undermine uniformity. Finally, there are plenty of things other than clothes that can be used as status symbols and any attention taken away from clothing become focused on these other items.
Besides, if a kid comes from a home where the parents are too busy or careless to keep their kids clothes clean and in good repair, it shows just as easily in a uniform.
Or take a look at the South Korean and Japanese systems for a counter example. Uniforms are the norm and kids are well behaved. I grew up in a developed country where uniforms were also the norm, and though the education system was not on par to a developed country one, we certainly knew how to behave (and they certainly knew how to add fractions and read after finishing HS, guarantees that we cannot make in the US.)
Well, I went to school in Australia where we wore uniforms and none of these patterns were evident. Kids (even some of the Korean and Japanese immigrant students) were pretty similar to Americans (where I also attended high-school) in their attitudes towards education and discipline.
Of course, Australian society is much more similar in its cultural norms to America than it is to the developed East Asian countries. It is broader societal attitudes, not dress-codes, that are actually at play.
I can assure you that taking an American kid and dropping him into a school system where shirt and tie are mandatory will a) not change his attitude towards education or discipline and b) not necessarily expose him to a more rigorous educational experience than he experienced in the US. At the time, it was still fairly typical for Australians to leave school after the 10th grade, whereas in America a college degree was already considered mandatory if you wanted to make a decent living.
I actually preferred wearing a uniform. However, if we really want to teach our children better, how about we start by abandoning magical thinking about quick fixes to deeply embedded societal ills.
I'd rather the people who have the hunting impulse most strongly exercise it responsibly, trying to suppress strong biological impulses completely usually results in them coming out sideways to the detriment of everyone involved.
Gimme a break. There is no "biological impulse" to stalk and kill living things. The relevant biology only cares about what nutritional inputs it is receiving.
Hunting is a cultural artifact practiced by a tiny minority of humans. Most people with access to a grocery store happily use it and never look back.
If the challenge of tracking wildlife has an appeal, no killing is required to enjoy it.
On the other hand if you do not want the stuff then don't buy it. I would like it if a store sent me coupons for stuff that I want to buy. How do they do that and not send me coupons for stuff I don't want to buy? They data mine and try to figure out my purchase tendancies. So by data mining they are sending fewer useless coupons and more useful coupons. Sure they get it wrong sometimes. Just because I buy a lot of diapers does not mean that I have kids; it could mean that I am giving them to a single mothers' support group. Data mining is not an exact science it just reveales tendancies.
Advertisers are working as hard as they can to manipulate your "wants" to their advantage at the expense of a) their competitors but also b) your ability to control your spending habits.
Manipulation of perception solely for selling luxury* items is one thing. And I'm opposed to that idea. OTOH, what Target, et al are doing here is anticipating what you will buy, regardless of where you might buy it from, and sending incentives to shop with them. Is this manipulating your perception? yes. If you lose the battle of will, does this have adverse effect on you? very likely not.
You argue as though Target is solely in the business of stocking things that you a) really need and b) will provide for those needs while providing you with the maximum value. Neither is true. This is about figuring out what pavlovian stimuli they can use to empty your bank account into theirs.
Target or Walmart do not have any hostile intent. They just want to sell you stuff.
Yeah, buts let's just parse out the term "sell" a bit. They want you give them the maximum amount of your money in exchange for the least amount of value. Its not about finding out what you need/want, because they could just ask you that. Its about manipulating your perception of your own desires so that you "want" to buy as much as possible of the highest margin possible goods.
We run into this ALL the time here at work. Since we're working with cutting edge software that even the developers don't entirely understand we can often say "It'll take an hour" and then it winds up taking 2 days. Or we'll say it'll take 2 days and we're done in an hour.
These problems are typical of software development and just about any other job I have had that didn't involve rote repetition.
I don't think this is the problem with fracking. They have dropped thousands of these wells, so the process is not "cutting edge". Granted, they are dealing with highly variable conditions, but again, there is plenty of history to go on.
The problems with fracking (two of them, anyway) are a) doing things incompetently that could theoretically be done in a safe manor and b) doing things that are so difficult that likely to result in failure even when done competently.
"Thirty years ago, U.S. producers made 80 percent of what the country consumed, according to the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, an industry trade group. Now it is about 65 percent."
I wonder what percentage of what is made in the US is just corn-based junk-food, and how has that percentage increased in the last 30 years.
IOW, we still make 65% of what we consume, but an increasing percentage of this is devoted to turning industrialized calories into poop, as opposed to creating products that require and promote useful activities.
Public companies are obligated (by law) to maximize profit.
A combination of legal and logical responsibilities motivates public companies to maximize shareholder value. "Shareholder value" is not rigidly synonymous with "profit". Even if it was, if Apple loses sufficient sales due to poor publicity, they must change their ways or be in violation of your "law".
Not only is it completely ineffective to hand a signed petitions to some Apple store manager in an attempt to influence the working conditions of an internationally traded public company in China, it also gives a pass to every other computer company who uses Foxconn.
You pick the biggest, baddest of the bunch and sucker punch him. Is it sporting? No. Does it get results? Maybe, maybe not. But it sure feels good.
People who love Apple products are clearly willing to pay a premium. Apple's labor costs are moot in every respect except their own over-stuffed bank accounts. Apple doesn't yet believe that the number of additional units they might sell by foreswearing cheap labor will make up for the few extra dollars they will spend. Picking on them (even unfairly -- or even better unfairly) disrupts this calculation. Enough negative publicity can motivate them to make a change.
And if it Apple changes, the others will fall in line. Ain't it great to back an innovator?
Science fiction can also distort perception of what science is (or will soon be) capable. Some examples that come to mind include interstellar travel and terraforming. This can become problematic when people assume that scientists can make problems go away (climate change) or we can just move to the moon, space stations or beyond to escape the problems that we refuse to confront. When people have been watching all this magic on teevee their entire lives, they can get the wrong idea about how achievable things are in real life (or at least within a useful time frame).
The short answer is no to both. You couldn't actually manufacture most of the components for electronic equipment in the civilized world any more, because the whole supply chains are in china, and your price would skyrocket because the difference in labour costs is a factor of 20 or so. Sure, when you talk about foxconn assembly that's a small portion of the total cost of an iPhone, but if you talk about every component doing that, it would be a nightmare.
It already is a nightmare. The difference is whether we live the "nightmare" of higher costs for gizmos, or the nightmare of using slave labor to keep those prices down.
Slashdot Mirror
And regarding the 30 hour work week? I'd love to have that, and a sabbatical every few years. But your claim that it would be cost effective is nonsense. You think a college education is so cheap in the US because professors have those benefits?
So your argument is that college is expensive in the US because college professors don't work 40+ hours a week, 50 weeks a year, and do all of their ongoing training on their own time, outside of that?
For one thing, you would lose the moral high ground of being able to say you were doing it for the good of your people, not just for the profits of selling the knockoff.
That depends entirely on the price. Why can't they sell it at a reasonable price for the good of the people in other countries too?
Part of the fun of hunting is physics in action. You have a possibly moving prey X meters away. You need to know the wind, hold the gun steady, lead the prey, and know the drop of a bullet. If you just take a picture, that could be a complete miss from bullet drop. If you just take a picture, you could have missed with a bullet because the prey was moving.
So it sounds like what is needed is a more sophisitcated instrument that will only capture a well framed photo of the animal if you aim your shot appropriately, according to the measured physical and environmental factors that would guide a well-aimed bullet.
I hope you realize just how far apart these cities are and how little there is to be seen in between. I suppose 3G till take the edge off the many hours of drudgery.
At least consider taking 395 for the North-South portion.
Somewhere right now their is a young guy sitting somewhere who has an idea in the back of his head which will become the next great innovation in gaming.
But it will never see the light of day because it is genuinely innovative, rather than an rehash of previous ideas that is easily marketed thanks to technological stats.
People value what they can measure.
How do you call your insurance company if your lost wallet was also your phone?
Okay, granted, there are various solutions to all of these problems. The point is that the existence of the problems at all undermines the supposed logic of these schemes.
At the end of the day, phones cost much more than cards. Insuring a phone likely costs more than a card. Heck, I let my physical credit card insurance lapse years ago!
Also, there are plenty of ways to commit credit card fraud without access to either a card or a phone. iWallet likely adds to those vectors.
*loses wallet*
"Hello [$Bank]? Yes, I lost my wallet, can you cancel my card and send me a new one? A few days and it will arrive in the mail? Excellent!"
*loses phone*
*logs into Apple ID from any computer*
*cancels card link to lost/stolen phone*
*connects card to new phone*
*continues life as normal, with minimum disruption to card access*
Emphasis added.
How do you buy the new phone if your lost phone was also your wallet?
I would imagine that the iWallet could be remotely revoked.
Sure. Say you reach for your iWallet to buy a coffee and realize that you left it at the news stand 10 minutes earlier. Fortunately, you have the ability to remotely disable access to your accounts. So, you just pull out your smart phone and. . .ruh-roh!
Meanwhile, the clerk at the news stand sees that your iWallet has been left behind. Being an honest sort, he decides to try to reunite the device with its owner by calling. . .ruh-roh!
I think the point is the double-edged-sword of integrating everything in to a single device. Even if your accounts are safe, leaving your wallet on the counter would also mean losing things that you would never normally have removed from your pocket/bag in the first place.
The young programming students I've dealt with seem no more or less comfortable with programming than any other young programmers from other generations (and I go back a while).
Well there you have it -- you are obviously too old to truly understand their specialness!
I know the feeling.
"Hey, lets make another Facebook, only more betterer!"
School uniforms can have another really useful benefit - they reduce the differences between kids in a good way. Allowing kids to wear their own clothes to school fuels the kind of hierarchical society in schools where the haves and the have nots are distinguished by their dressing.
This is only partially true. For instance, in America schools are economically stratified, so school uniforms themselves are a status symbol. Then, unless uniforms are strict and completely comprehensive, items like shoes and winter coats undermine uniformity. Finally, there are plenty of things other than clothes that can be used as status symbols and any attention taken away from clothing become focused on these other items.
Besides, if a kid comes from a home where the parents are too busy or careless to keep their kids clothes clean and in good repair, it shows just as easily in a uniform.
Or take a look at the South Korean and Japanese systems for a counter example. Uniforms are the norm and kids are well behaved. I grew up in a developed country where uniforms were also the norm, and though the education system was not on par to a developed country one, we certainly knew how to behave (and they certainly knew how to add fractions and read after finishing HS, guarantees that we cannot make in the US.)
Well, I went to school in Australia where we wore uniforms and none of these patterns were evident. Kids (even some of the Korean and Japanese immigrant students) were pretty similar to Americans (where I also attended high-school) in their attitudes towards education and discipline.
Of course, Australian society is much more similar in its cultural norms to America than it is to the developed East Asian countries. It is broader societal attitudes, not dress-codes, that are actually at play.
I can assure you that taking an American kid and dropping him into a school system where shirt and tie are mandatory will a) not change his attitude towards education or discipline and b) not necessarily expose him to a more rigorous educational experience than he experienced in the US. At the time, it was still fairly typical for Australians to leave school after the 10th grade, whereas in America a college degree was already considered mandatory if you wanted to make a decent living.
I actually preferred wearing a uniform. However, if we really want to teach our children better, how about we start by abandoning magical thinking about quick fixes to deeply embedded societal ills.
I'd rather the people who have the hunting impulse most strongly exercise it responsibly, trying to suppress strong biological impulses completely usually results in them coming out sideways to the detriment of everyone involved.
Gimme a break. There is no "biological impulse" to stalk and kill living things. The relevant biology only cares about what nutritional inputs it is receiving.
Hunting is a cultural artifact practiced by a tiny minority of humans. Most people with access to a grocery store happily use it and never look back.
If the challenge of tracking wildlife has an appeal, no killing is required to enjoy it.
On the other hand if you do not want the stuff then don't buy it. I would like it if a store sent me coupons for stuff that I want to buy. How do they do that and not send me coupons for stuff I don't want to buy? They data mine and try to figure out my purchase tendancies. So by data mining they are sending fewer useless coupons and more useful coupons. Sure they get it wrong sometimes. Just because I buy a lot of diapers does not mean that I have kids; it could mean that I am giving them to a single mothers' support group. Data mining is not an exact science it just reveales tendancies.
Advertisers are working as hard as they can to manipulate your "wants" to their advantage at the expense of a) their competitors but also b) your ability to control your spending habits.
Manipulation of perception solely for selling luxury* items is one thing. And I'm opposed to that idea. OTOH, what Target, et al are doing here is anticipating what you will buy, regardless of where you might buy it from, and sending incentives to shop with them. Is this manipulating your perception? yes. If you lose the battle of will, does this have adverse effect on you? very likely not.
You argue as though Target is solely in the business of stocking things that you a) really need and b) will provide for those needs while providing you with the maximum value. Neither is true. This is about figuring out what pavlovian stimuli they can use to empty your bank account into theirs.
Target or Walmart do not have any hostile intent. They just want to sell you stuff.
Yeah, buts let's just parse out the term "sell" a bit. They want you give them the maximum amount of your money in exchange for the least amount of value. Its not about finding out what you need/want, because they could just ask you that. Its about manipulating your perception of your own desires so that you "want" to buy as much as possible of the highest margin possible goods.
Not hostile?
We run into this ALL the time here at work. Since we're working with cutting edge software that even the developers don't entirely understand we can often say "It'll take an hour" and then it winds up taking 2 days. Or we'll say it'll take 2 days and we're done in an hour.
These problems are typical of software development and just about any other job I have had that didn't involve rote repetition.
I don't think this is the problem with fracking. They have dropped thousands of these wells, so the process is not "cutting edge". Granted, they are dealing with highly variable conditions, but again, there is plenty of history to go on.
The problems with fracking (two of them, anyway) are a) doing things incompetently that could theoretically be done in a safe manor and b) doing things that are so difficult that likely to result in failure even when done competently.
Will the US now use it's hard won influence to make China better, or was that all bullshit?
Or will "competitive pressure" make the US worse.
"Thirty years ago, U.S. producers made 80 percent of what the country consumed, according to the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, an industry trade group. Now it is about 65 percent."
I wonder what percentage of what is made in the US is just corn-based junk-food, and how has that percentage increased in the last 30 years.
IOW, we still make 65% of what we consume, but an increasing percentage of this is devoted to turning industrialized calories into poop, as opposed to creating products that require and promote useful activities.
What might those few people be able to contribute to society if they actually enjoyed the same connectedness as their urban comrades?
What might our urban comrades contribute to society if they got off the damned internet once and a while?
Public companies are obligated (by law) to maximize profit.
A combination of legal and logical responsibilities motivates public companies to maximize shareholder value. "Shareholder value" is not rigidly synonymous with "profit". Even if it was, if Apple loses sufficient sales due to poor publicity, they must change their ways or be in violation of your "law".
Not only is it completely ineffective to hand a signed petitions to some Apple store manager in an attempt to influence the working conditions of an internationally traded public company in China, it also gives a pass to every other computer company who uses Foxconn.
You pick the biggest, baddest of the bunch and sucker punch him. Is it sporting? No. Does it get results? Maybe, maybe not. But it sure feels good.
People who love Apple products are clearly willing to pay a premium. Apple's labor costs are moot in every respect except their own over-stuffed bank accounts. Apple doesn't yet believe that the number of additional units they might sell by foreswearing cheap labor will make up for the few extra dollars they will spend. Picking on them (even unfairly -- or even better unfairly) disrupts this calculation. Enough negative publicity can motivate them to make a change.
And if it Apple changes, the others will fall in line. Ain't it great to back an innovator?
Science fiction can also distort perception of what science is (or will soon be) capable. Some examples that come to mind include interstellar travel and terraforming. This can become problematic when people assume that scientists can make problems go away (climate change) or we can just move to the moon, space stations or beyond to escape the problems that we refuse to confront. When people have been watching all this magic on teevee their entire lives, they can get the wrong idea about how achievable things are in real life (or at least within a useful time frame).
The short answer is no to both. You couldn't actually manufacture most of the components for electronic equipment in the civilized world any more, because the whole supply chains are in china, and your price would skyrocket because the difference in labour costs is a factor of 20 or so. Sure, when you talk about foxconn assembly that's a small portion of the total cost of an iPhone, but if you talk about every component doing that, it would be a nightmare.
It already is a nightmare. The difference is whether we live the "nightmare" of higher costs for gizmos, or the nightmare of using slave labor to keep those prices down.