If everyone were completely anonymous, I believe that would likely be an impediment to free speech. Because at some point, credibility is required.
Which is why historically -- and today -- people use pseudonyms, which can be more durable (and thus accrue reputation and credibility), but still not necessarily tied to a real-world identity.
Anonymity is not "an impediment to free speech." Complete anonymity can make it difficult to evaluate the quality of the speech, but it does not impede speech. Pseudonyms can solve that problem in many cases.
I have faith in people's intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think most people will see through baseless accusations, and not simply react to them with revulsion. If I were accused anonymously of pedophilia, with no further details, I would simply ignore the accusation, and I think most people would.
But that's not the only issue. This thread seems to be about high profile situations, but it's the ones that don't get much media attention which are the issue. When you go to apply for a job, and your prospective employer Googles your name, and they see a comment that implies you're a pedophile -- do you think they will just ignore it? Or, if you're trying to get a contract with a client, and the same thing happens, will they just ignore it?
Probably many will. But for others, you'll be "tainted." They won't confront you about it, but if they were on the fence about hiring you -- guess what? They'll just go to someone else who doesn't have a pedophile comment.
I'm not saying that we should be trying to suppress speech. But the idea that everyone's just going to ignore an inflammatory comment about your reputation is nonsense -- particularly when it comes to something like pedophilia in our current social climate. There's just about nothing worse than being accused of that today, and it's one of those "secretive" crimes that even if you try to stamp out, people will still have doubts about you.
Any organization that's looking to hire you or include you may easily decide it's "not worth the risk." And, frankly, they'd probably be right from a legal standpoint these days.
A system which could somehow suppress false accusations runs the danger of being perverted into suppression of any criticism of the powerful. I would rather have no suppression at all than take that risk.
Normally, I'd agree with you. But all it takes is one false accusation to get ANY traction anywhere, particularly involving pedophilia, and your career could be completely ruined. If the police and/or media decides to investigate -- even if it proves to be baseless -- you're screwed. No matter how many retractions and recantings and whatever are issued, most people will never see them. A headline that reads: "Nice well-known guy arrested on charges of pedophilia" is front-page material... the fact that charges were ultimately dropped a few weeks later will be buried near the end of the paper -- if anyone bothers to note that at all. The damage has been done, and with the internet's "permanent recall," good luck when anyone who ever wants to have a business or personal relationship with you Google's you.
I'm not saying I have a good answer to this problem. But for all the people who complain about Europe's implementation of the "right to be forgotten," it does seem like there needs to be some sort of correcting mechanism to allow defamation to your reputation (even if couched in "accused" and "alleged" but ultimately false) to fade away over time. And for pedophilia -- that kind of "bell just can't be unrung."
If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public. Ten years ago, the Internet hipsters in places like Salon, Slate and even Slashdot itself sneered at the whole concept. Readers, they opined, would never give up the rich smell of the leather-bound editions they never bought, curled up beside the baronial fireplaces they didn't have, to read on a small screen.
I'd never claim to predict what the general public will do, but as someone who has a collection of thousands of books, I tried out e-books, and I have absolutely no interest in them. PDF copies of books -- sometimes. "E-books" as reflowing text, often badly formatted, with illustrations messed up? No thank you.
I will say that I read very little ephemeral fiction, though -- and for people who read that stuff, I completely understand the attraction to e-books. I can understand how e-books function as "disposable" books. For me -- I rarely buy a book unless I actually intend to keep it. If I want a book for a week, I'll take it out of a library.
And if I intend to keep a book, I usually buy it because I want to be able to refer back to it. E-readers and e-book tools just lack the kind of consistent layout I'm used to with physical books. I can thumb through a paperback and have a clear memory of "yeah -- the passage was about 3/4 the way through, and there was a diagram on the upper left corner, with the passage opposite..." I can often locate the passage in a matter of seconds.
I can't do that with a typical e-book. For books I ever want to refer back to, I'd prefer a stable pagination and layout. Not saying everyone has to want this -- but it's what I find works for me. (And yes, obviously you can put electronic "bookmarks" and comments in e-books, but often you don't realize what you want to refer back to until long after you've read the book... also "marking up" the book is often much easier with a physical pencil/pen or highlighter.)
Today, e-books already account for over 30% of all books sold. Consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine.
I'd be somewhat cautious about the conclusions you're drawing. Paper books sales hit their low point in 2012 -- they've been growing again since. E-book sales seem to have hit a plateau since 2013 and haven't grown much since. (Some studies even suggest a slight decline in sales, but it depends on whose stats you believe.)
Yes, lots of people use e-books. But do "consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine," or are there significant numbers of consumers who don't really like them or have tried them and decide not to convert? Or is it more like what I said above about myself -- people who like to buy "disposable" books like them, but others have doubts?
I don't know what the long-term trend is going to be. Certainly I think some form of electronic book is here to stay. I have had scanned PDFs of books I frequently refer to on my computer for over 15 years. Those are useful to me. But e-books? I have absolutely no desire to buy them... and at least the trend in the past 2-3 years suggests that e-books have at least hit a temporary "wall" in their adoption process.
What's nonsense is locking civil time to atomic time. There would be no need for leap seconds if civil time simply remained linked to astronomical time, as it was for millenia.
Sorry, but what the heck are you talking about? Your "solution" makes no sense given the need for accurate timekeeping today. Astronomical time varies significantly with the earth's rotation all the time by various amounts of milliseconds (see here for an illustration of that variance since modern UTC standards were adopted).
The "length of a day" is simply nowhere near precise enough for modern applications. It worked to lock civil time to astronomical time when an error of a few milliseconds here and there wouldn't make a difference -- you could just reset all your clocks. But now much of our timekeeping software dealing with civil time works on machines where a few milliseconds here and there will screw things up all over the place.
Are you at all aware of the mess things were before the modern UTC standards were adopted? They tried to make corrections on an order of milliseconds on a regular basis, and it was annoying as all hell. That's why they proposed only altering the standard clocks when the collective error accumulated to closer to a second -- the shift could then easily take place.
What exactly do you think you're proposing here? That seconds will just be arbitrary lengths for civil time, varying on a daily or weekly basis to track the earth's variance in rotation? Or we keep the second constant, but that we make daily or weekly corrections somehow? Or what?
Modern technology needs civil time to be consistent. And it needs to be precise because there are far to many machines which depend on it not varying by random little increments all the time. There are various ways of solving this problem, but just waving your hands and getting out your sundial to mark noon every day (as they did for millennia) is simply not possible in the modern world.
Why do we even bother with this? Why can't we just let noon move a second. Even after a hundred years it won't make any difference. Time zones on average vary in the suns position by a whole hour so a 1 sec variation of the solar zenith makes no difference. Anstronomers will still be able to find there stars.
Agreed. This is all nonsense. Even NIST admits that it's basically for legacy astronomical equipment. But any astronomer who needs real precision needs to deal with fractional-second corrections all the time now anyway, and there are published tables that allow one to do this. (For the current correction to convert from UTC to UT1, see here, which gives values accurate to +/-5 milliseconds.)
If we ever got maybe a minute or more off, I could possibly see the reason for a correction. But a second? Who cares? As I said, the very small number of people who actually need to use UT1 mostly do fractional-second conversions all the time anyway, as leap seconds aren't precise enough to keep up with the continuous variation.
Remove minorities from the statistics and you will find that the US violent crime rate is in line with the least violent nations in Europe.
Guns have nothing to do with it, or the Swiss would be awash in blood. Rather, what we need to do is focus on economic advancement of the underclasses, which are disproportionately populated by minorities (for whatever reason).
While you go on to make some good points, you also basically acknowledge that the problem is socioeconomic and about "underclasses." And that's basically true -- there are problems caused in society among poor people no matter what their color. So why keep talking about "minorities"? Why not just talk about solving the socioeconomic problems of the poor?
Because when you keep referencing "minorities" as problems, frankly it makes you sound racist... even if you don't mean it. I'm not accusing you of that -- I'm saying it doesn't seem necessary or helpful in your argument and may unnecessarily turn some people off to legitimate ideas you may have.
No. They are NOT quite the exact same thing. The identy x*1 = x is defined for all x in the set of Real numbers. The 2nd form is not.
Those aren't the two formulations you mentioned. You mentioned the identity "x/1 = x" as though it were a fundamental rule of arithmetic. It is not. It can be derived from your multiplicative identity after you define division. But so can "x/x = 1."
Or, to explain a little more: going from x*1 = x to your version of x/1 = x requires that you actually define what x/y means in the first place. And to do that consistently, you already need to exclude the fact that y != 0. Once you've done that, you can show that x/1=x, but you can just as easily show that x/x=1.
Your "division identity" depends on a consistent definition of what division is. Thus you can only state it once you've excluded division by zero. (Well, technically you could state it as another axiom or something rather than deriving it, but most mathematicians don't see the point in adding in excess unnecessary axioms... especially in this case, where you'd still have to come up with a consistent definition of division.)
My father was a police officer for 20 years and somehow managed not to shoot any black people or violate anyone's rights. That's 99.9% of police officers.
Well, you're off by at least an order of magnitude, and likely a lot more. If you look at official police misconduct numbers for example here, you'll see that something around 1% of police officers are involved in serious complaints each year. Keep in mind that's an annual rate, so I don't know how that extrapolates to the percentage of police who engage in bad activity over an entire career, but it's undoubtedly somewhat higher (and could be a significant percentage of police). (To be fair -- if you read the stats here in detail, the rate of criminal activity among police is not significantly higher than that of the general population, but one would think that we should hold law enforcement to a somewhat higher standard in obeying the law....)
And keep in mind these are reported official cases of misconduct. Recent analyses have shown that lots of questionable actions taken by police while on duty are not prosecuted or investigated thoroughly -- or even reported: recent media analysis of fatal shootings by police, for example, suggest they are probably twice as common as the official reported number.
You add all these factors together, and I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at figures closer to 10% or higher of police who engage in significant criminal misconduct.
I have a great deal of respect for "good cops" who put their lives on the line every day. If you dad was one of them, you should be proud. And most police do a good job. But there are also SIGNIFICANT numbers of police who commit crimes in the U.S. every year.
And the bad cops aren't 1 in 1000 (as your off-the-cuff stat suggests), they're definitely greater than 1 in 100, and factoring in recent stats, it's likely as many as 1 in 10 or more.
Also, we need to look at official criminal activity vs. more subtle forms of questionable actions, like intimidation in interrogations, etc. Those may not rise to a criminal level, but many, many police abuse their authority to various degrees. This is where GP has a point:
That's patently absurd.... "Don't talk to police" is for the people asking for trouble.
There are lawyers who advise that. In general, it seems like reasonable advice. Unless you are asking the police for help, you gain nothing from talking to them and can accidentally implicate yourself (even if you've actually done nothing wrong). Be polite. Provide ID if the situation warrants. Then ask to leave... politely. There are too many ways they have power and authority to screw you over, even if it doesn't rise to official "misconduct," so what's the benefit in taking the risk?
Which is why for all big carrier I know of for big alliance (one world, star alliance) you are not paying for luggage, you are paying for excess luggage. That may be different for discounter like Ryanair but it is not the case for standard carrier.
You obviously haven't traveled recently in the United States. Many of the "standard carriers" today charge for any checked bag in domestic travel. The "budget" airlines now often charge for carry-ons beyond the size of a basic "personal item."
Whether you like these new policies or not, the fact is that most carriers these days in the U.S. will charge you to bring standard baggage which was allowed for decades. (Don't believe me? See domestic baggage fees here comparing different airlines.)
Airline tickets are finally very affordable. Why should I be forced to pay for services like extra baggage when I don't need it?
I agree. There seem to be people who like a "prix fixe" version of airline fares, and other people who'd prefer "a la carte." "Prix fixe" made sense in the 1960s when airline travel was a luxury few could afford -- and GP seems to be looking back to that idyllic image with attractive stewardesses bringing you a glass of champagne and offering to light your cigarette for you, before offering you a lovely meal on real china.
Airline travel isn't like that anymore, and it hasn't been like that for decades. Unless you pay exorbitant prices to fly first class, you're basically strapped into a flying greyhound bus... where everything is made as cheap as possible.
And if that's the model -- why should I pay for services I don't want? If I want food or drink on a short flight, I can buy it and have more choice (and usually better quality) before I get on the plane. If I absolutely need to bring a huge bag of stuff, I'll pay the cost -- but most times I don't, and I won't. I'd rather save the $50 round trip most of those trips when I don't need the baggage fee.
Frankly, also -- people bring too much stuff these days. Look at movies or photos or stories of 100 years ago -- people didn't travel with the loads of crap everyone feels they need to bring these days. I started packing "lighter" quite a few years ago after I had an incident of a bag that was lost for a day and I realized I needed to carry at least a change of clothes in my carry-on just in case. Once I started packing that, I realized that actually I could be really efficient and fit most of the stuff I need in a small backpack for most trips of a few days. If the trip is more than a few days, I can either pay the baggage fee for a checked bag (or carry-on fee, if there is one), or I can just plan to spend $5 doing laundry one day at my destination... which is a lot cheaper than any baggage fee.
With a smaller and lighter bag, it's less to carry, less to worry about, it often can fit under my seat if the overhead bins are stuffed with overpacking idiots who insist on bringing a huge carry-on, and I don't need to worry about a checked bag being lost.
Actually that latter concern *IS* one area where airlines should have more regulation. If airlines are providing baggage transport free, that's one thing -- but if they are charging you $50+ round trip to check your bag, you should get an absolute guarantee that your bag gets to your destination with you. If it's not in your hand within an hour after your flight lands, you should get reimbursed the fee AND paid extra depending on the time it takes to deliver your bag to you.
I'm fine with them charging for a service -- but that service then should be of high quality and reasonably guaranteed.
Secondly your "rule two" is not actually rule of algebra. There is no rule x/x = 1.
There is an identity rule for division: anything divided by one is itself (x/1 = x) but there is no rule that says x/x = 1
You can derive "rule two" from the identity rule for multiplication x*1 = x --> x/x = 1
Huh? You've just stated two formulations that mean the same exact thing. Yes, when you set up axioms for a system of arithmetic, you often might derive things the first way, but there's no reason you couldn't first prove "x/x = 1" as a basic theorem instead and derive your "identity rule for division" from that. You generally wouldn't need either of these as axioms -- they both can be derived once you define division in terms of multiplication, i.e., something like "Given a and b with a != 0, there is exactly one x such that a*x=b. This x is denoted by b/a." (This theorem can be proven from more basic axioms involving identity elements and an axiom allowing the existence of a multiplicative inverse.)
Once you've defined division, then you can go onto prove that a/1 = a or a/a = 1 or whatever. Neither of these statements is more basic than the other, since they both follow directly from the definition of division and the definition of the multiplicative identity element 1.
In fact, usually a statement like a/a = 1 would be slightly more basic, since a^-1 can be defined as the reciprocal or multiplicative inverse once the theorem of division is proven. Thus a/a = a * a^-1 = 1, according to the definition of division and by the axiom asserting the existence of a multiplicative inverse (which usually states something like: "For every real number x != 0, there is a real number y such that x*y =1"). Your "identity rule for division" can then be derived from that.
However, that transformation always stipulates that x 0 because division by zero is undefined.
No -- that "transformation" doesn't "stipulate" anything. Division by zero is barred in the act of defining division -- because when you try to do the proof for my theorem above ("Given a and b with a != 0, there is exactly one x such that a*x=b. This x is denoted by b/a.") you'll find that x is NOT unique for situations where a is 0, which is the reason for its exclusion in the theorem.
Which is what you go on to show with your various examples. But you don't need to show them, and you don't need to say that division by zero is "undefined" -- rather, when you try to DERIVE a reasonable definition for division from prior axioms, there's no consistent way of choosing a unique result for a division by zero. Therefore, it is generally left undefined, as in my example theorem.
Mathematicians have no issue determine which rule has precedence, because neither rule applies to 0/0.
There is no conflict. Division by zero is specifically "undefined".
Right, I don't even... ehh... totally confused. It's not aprils fools right? Did this article get approved just to mock the submitter, or has Slashdot gone totally of the rails?
Well, Slashdot recently implemented a new engine for approving articles, but there was a place in the code where one could end up dividing by zero, and they just decided to arbitrarily set that value to "post a random nonsensical Ask Slashdot question."
So, Timothy screwed something up... and, well, rather than throwing up an exception -- VOILA... this story was approved!
I'm surprised you haven't noticed this before -- I think it's how most "Ask Slashdot" questions get posted these days.
Most people want search engines to understand synonyms, misspellings and contextual relevancy and return results that one had in mind rather than string matches. This only becomes more important with mobile/voice search.
I don't really fathom how this is "niche." This was how Google worked for about a decade. And that's how they came out ON TOP. People flocked to a search engine that didn't require complex Boolean logic to get what you wanted -- everything was "AND" by default, and you just got the terms that you wanted. Simple. Clean. End of story.
They gradually introduced "Did you mean?" starting around 2002 or 2003, which offered you a link to a "better" search. Then a few years later they silently stopped requiring search terms to actually be in the page. Then they started silently allowing word variations (plurals, verb forms, etc.). Then, by 2009 or so, they stopped with the "did you mean?" for most searches and just silently did it anyway. Then in 2011, they dropped the "+" operator, which didn't always work (see above), but at least seemed to work most of the time. They introduced "verbatim" search, but like double quotes and "intext:" operators and other "advanced search" options, Google doesn't behave consistently when you use them.
I can understand if people were asking for a "niche" product that required advanced programming. But all we want is a check-box for Google to stop messing with the search text. In terms of implementation, all it would need is an "IF verbatim checked, THEN just don't run the huge amount of code that does auto-correct."
It's like all of the iPhone autocorrect nonsense. I lived with it for about a month before I had to turn it off. It was "correcting" real words all over the place and making me look like I was illiterate by screwing up things for no apparent reason. So, I lived without it. I'd LOVE an "autocorrect" feature that actually did only that: autocorrect, i.e., if I type in a text that is NOT an actual word in the dictionary, try to correct it. And let me have a custom dictionary that actually listens to me. But that's impossible to get -- Apple won't let anyone have it, even though it would be 100 times simpler to implement.
AFAICT, they blithely ignore all the things that *used* to make it possible to actually give Google value - the Google-fu expressions, including most importantly +term and -term.
Umm, the + operator was deprecated in 2011. I don't exactly know what effect it has had since then. (It seems to do something, but it's highly unpredictable.)
Try using "intext:" or "allintext:" or similar commands. They don't quite work consistently either, and more frequently than not they will eliminate results that actually SHOULD be matches, but it's at least something that has an effect.
Tip for Google, if someone writes "+" in front of a word, that really really really means that they really really want that word to actually appear on the page. Really.
How many years ago did they break this, anyway? Used to work that way, aeons ago. I miss those times.
They announced it about 4-5 years ago, but it was basically broken before that.
By the way, there still is an "intext:" and "allintext:" operator which is supposed to be a kind of replacement, and it usually helps, but it doesn't ALWAYS work consistently. (Either Google sometimes ignores it, or it fails to display large numbers of results which actually contain the search term... which you can only find by eliminating the operator.)
If you put &tbs=li:1 at the end of your search URL, you'll get verbatim results.
Verbatim search HELPS, but it does NOT work consistently. Go search the Google products discussion forums and you'll find plenty of threads and examples showing where verbatim mode fails in all sorts of unpredictable ways. And even when it seems to do true "verbatim," it generally ends up omitting huge numbers of results that actually should return in a verbatim search, but which you can only find by disabling verbatim.
There are other operators people try -- using + and - or "in text" or double quotes -- NONE of them work consistently. Google will at various times fudge the results in some unpredictable way and/or omit large numbers of results that actually contain the specified words or phrase.
I'd love it if verbatim search actually worked. But as someone who does research and needs to often find very specific and unique results, Google simply has proven unpredictable for me. Unfortunately, I have little choice, because Google is more comprehensive in its databases for many searches, so I'm stuck playing around randomly guessing ideas about how to search and get Google to actually give me results that contain the terms that I want (and ALL of the results, rather than an arbitrary subset that "verbatim" search turns up).
And by the way -- supposedly the "intext:" and "allintext:" operators work better than verbatim, but it still breaks at times.
What he wants is a search engine that doesn't try as hard to infer what the user really wants, rather than one that has to be forced, with more use of quotes, to just look for the damn string. Perhaps that's a sufficiently small niche that no search engine would bother to offer that, and he'll just have to live with typing more double-quote characters.
Yeah, the problem is double-quotes don't consistently work in Google anymore. They haven't for several years. Nor do + or - signs, or "verbatim mode," or using the "in text" operator Google has suggested, or pretty much anything. In many cases quotes and other things like this help, but in other cases Google clearly chooses just to ignore them... in various ways... unpredictably.
Spend some time searching the Google forums and you'll find plenty of examples and discussion of these problems. I'd be happy if Google would actually make double quotes work literally ALL THE TIME... or at least SOME operator, but they don't. It seems to do SOMETHING, but the behavior is not consistent. And neither is just about any other search operator Google claims can be used for more precise searching. Who the hell knows how their databases work -- advanced searching in Google is a crapshoot. I've tried some historical searches in Google Books, for example, and choosing a different date range will arbitrarily add or delete results FROM THE SAME YEARS. That is, if you search for all results published 1940 to 1960, you'll get a different set of results for the 1950s than if you searched from 1950 to 1960.
It's maddening and insane. I'm sure that Google has introduced various optimizations to make its searches "more efficient," but in the process they've basically broken actual literal search... it simply does NOT work consistently anymore, hasn't in probably 7 or 8 years, and despite what Google employees claim, there's NO WAY to consistently enable it for all searches.
Maybe your problem isn't that the search engine is thinking too much, it's that you're not thinking enough and blaming it for trying to help. If it's just common words, you'll get the most common matches.
And maybe you don't understand how to use an actual literal search.
Anyone who has spent time doing such a thing understands that you need to use unique terms that will isolate the EXACT results you want. Back in the day (ca. 2000) Google would actually tell you when you typed in a "common word" (like "the" or "for" or whatever) that it was explicitly NOT searching for that term. Other terms -- it searched literally.
If you get used to search queries where you understand you need to search for precise terms, it can quickly find what you want in most cases. Most people can't quite figure this out, and I understand that Google may want to provide a "fuzzy" search to help them.
But for those of us who were able to find precisely what we wanted before and now can't because Google has progressively broken all the ways of marking things as literal search... it's frustrating.
So then it looks like Microsoft Office did, back when Microsoft Office was good.
I wouldn't exactly call Office 2003 "good." I'm not going to get into the "ribbon wars" -- personally, I could never stand it, but I understand some others love the ribbon and find it useful.
But I'm just talking about the fact that MS Office was a bloated piece of crap a decade ago too. I can't remember when it wasn't significantly bloated after the applications migrated from DOS. Go back and look at the versions of many applications prior to Windows 95 -- much, much smaller, but basically most of the features you still see today. Somehow we now have MS Office applications that take up 100 times more space, but they don't really have many more useful features than they did 20+ years ago (when you could install them with a handful of floppy disks).
Or, in this case, "Free as in speech, and free as in... well, it costs as much as a couple beers."
Re:Source for lifetime medical costs?
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FDA Bans Trans Fat
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However, I am reluctant to believe it based on your claim alone, and I would find it hard to persuade others. Have you got any sources to cite?
Do a Google search. The information isn't too hard to find. I've also posted links on this stuff many times before here... I just get tired of posting stuff over and over.
Basically, it's pretty well-established that smokers end up costing less over the total lifespan. There are numerous studies and economic analyses going back about 30 years that show that.
Obesity is a little more complicated, and if you do a search on it, you'll find a lot of conflicting studies -- some say that obese people die earlier and thus end up costing less, but others claim the early death doesn't make up for the increased costs. And then there's the whole "obesity paradox" thing where obese people seem to actually have better health outcomes for a number of diseases (though the extent to which this is actually true or a statistical artifact is hard to determine, and medical journals have been trying to sort this out for the past decade).
In any case, there are few facts that are absolutely not in dispute: (1) annual medical costs tend to go up as people become elderly, and (2) healthy people do cost less when they are younger, but eventually for MOST people those costs rise significantly as they get older.
In particular cases and for particular behaviors/diseases, an early death (even with preceding care) will cost less than if a similar person without that behavior/disease had lived for decades longer and encountered other long-term costly care. In other cases, some behaviors/diseases are so expensive to treat even short-term that their extra cost will never be offset.
Anyhow, do your own research. Come to your own conclusions. (By the way -- I don't smoke, I'm not obese, and I try to get some sort of regular exercise... not that it should mean anything for this analysis. I'm not advocating "unhealthy" behaviors -- just trying to be honest about the long-term economic impacts.)
Read the link for details, but basically people for the past thousand years or so -- at least in Europe -- generally worked roughly the same number of hours per year as they do today. The difference was that the work was distributed in different ways -- a lot of work was seasonal (particularly when most people were farmers), which meant you were working 16-hour days most days of the week during harvest, but you basically had little to do during the winter for a few months. And don't forget that work basically had to stop when the sun went down, and poor people couldn't generally afford light sources after dark -- so even if you wanted to work longer hours in the winter, you couldn't.
I'll agree with you that work was harder in the past in terms of manual labor, etc. But the amount of "leisure time" was probably not as much less as you imagine it to be.
We may not be living in a dystopia, but it is certainly true that productivity has skyrocketed per worker over the past couple centuries, but total work time has not decreased significantly. Granted, some of that extra productivity is necessary to go toward modern conveniences -- but we could probably all be working for half or a quarter of the hours we do and still have a reasonably high standard of living. The main difference would be that the rich people wouldn't be skimming such a huge amount off the top.
This should directly reduce this incidence of heart disease, and is good news for everyone except cost-cutting food producers.
Well, good news for people who want to live longer. But living longer does not always equal costing less.
On a related note, from TFS:
The food industry is expected to spend $6.2 billion over the next two decades to formulate replacements, but the money saved from health benefits is expected to be more than 20 times higher.
I hate these sorts of figures, because I bet they didn't take longevity into account. People who live longer cost more, because medical costs tend to increase significantly in old age, whether you eat "healthy" or not. People fall and break a hip or get some random treatable cancer or get dementia and need round-the-clock care while the mind breaks down for a decade.
Those things cost a lot. Having a sudden heart attack and dying at age 62 generally costs a lot less than a 95-year-old who had 30+ years of post-retirement high medical costs.
To be clear: I'm NOT arguing we should be trying to kill people or that we shouldn't value old people or whatever. I'm saying that the "saved medical costs" by reducing heart disease risks don't generally result in overall saved money in the long run, when we take increased lifespans into account. (You can see similar studies that have shown such things for obesity or smoking or whatever -- those people cost more in a short time, but then they die, and "healthy" people cost more long-term, which more than offsets the earlier short-term costs of "unhealthy" people.)
I'm all for making people healthier and having them live longer. I'm just tired of hearing misleading stats thrown around. But go ahead and get rid of the trans fats... there's nothing really great about them.
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If everyone were completely anonymous, I believe that would likely be an impediment to free speech. Because at some point, credibility is required.
Which is why historically -- and today -- people use pseudonyms, which can be more durable (and thus accrue reputation and credibility), but still not necessarily tied to a real-world identity.
Anonymity is not "an impediment to free speech." Complete anonymity can make it difficult to evaluate the quality of the speech, but it does not impede speech. Pseudonyms can solve that problem in many cases.
I have faith in people's intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think most people will see through baseless accusations, and not simply react to them with revulsion. If I were accused anonymously of pedophilia, with no further details, I would simply ignore the accusation, and I think most people would.
But that's not the only issue. This thread seems to be about high profile situations, but it's the ones that don't get much media attention which are the issue. When you go to apply for a job, and your prospective employer Googles your name, and they see a comment that implies you're a pedophile -- do you think they will just ignore it? Or, if you're trying to get a contract with a client, and the same thing happens, will they just ignore it?
Probably many will. But for others, you'll be "tainted." They won't confront you about it, but if they were on the fence about hiring you -- guess what? They'll just go to someone else who doesn't have a pedophile comment.
I'm not saying that we should be trying to suppress speech. But the idea that everyone's just going to ignore an inflammatory comment about your reputation is nonsense -- particularly when it comes to something like pedophilia in our current social climate. There's just about nothing worse than being accused of that today, and it's one of those "secretive" crimes that even if you try to stamp out, people will still have doubts about you.
Any organization that's looking to hire you or include you may easily decide it's "not worth the risk." And, frankly, they'd probably be right from a legal standpoint these days.
A system which could somehow suppress false accusations runs the danger of being perverted into suppression of any criticism of the powerful. I would rather have no suppression at all than take that risk.
Normally, I'd agree with you. But all it takes is one false accusation to get ANY traction anywhere, particularly involving pedophilia, and your career could be completely ruined. If the police and/or media decides to investigate -- even if it proves to be baseless -- you're screwed. No matter how many retractions and recantings and whatever are issued, most people will never see them. A headline that reads: "Nice well-known guy arrested on charges of pedophilia" is front-page material... the fact that charges were ultimately dropped a few weeks later will be buried near the end of the paper -- if anyone bothers to note that at all. The damage has been done, and with the internet's "permanent recall," good luck when anyone who ever wants to have a business or personal relationship with you Google's you.
I'm not saying I have a good answer to this problem. But for all the people who complain about Europe's implementation of the "right to be forgotten," it does seem like there needs to be some sort of correcting mechanism to allow defamation to your reputation (even if couched in "accused" and "alleged" but ultimately false) to fade away over time. And for pedophilia -- that kind of "bell just can't be unrung."
If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public. Ten years ago, the Internet hipsters in places like Salon, Slate and even Slashdot itself sneered at the whole concept. Readers, they opined, would never give up the rich smell of the leather-bound editions they never bought, curled up beside the baronial fireplaces they didn't have, to read on a small screen.
I'd never claim to predict what the general public will do, but as someone who has a collection of thousands of books, I tried out e-books, and I have absolutely no interest in them. PDF copies of books -- sometimes. "E-books" as reflowing text, often badly formatted, with illustrations messed up? No thank you.
I will say that I read very little ephemeral fiction, though -- and for people who read that stuff, I completely understand the attraction to e-books. I can understand how e-books function as "disposable" books. For me -- I rarely buy a book unless I actually intend to keep it. If I want a book for a week, I'll take it out of a library.
And if I intend to keep a book, I usually buy it because I want to be able to refer back to it. E-readers and e-book tools just lack the kind of consistent layout I'm used to with physical books. I can thumb through a paperback and have a clear memory of "yeah -- the passage was about 3/4 the way through, and there was a diagram on the upper left corner, with the passage opposite..." I can often locate the passage in a matter of seconds.
I can't do that with a typical e-book. For books I ever want to refer back to, I'd prefer a stable pagination and layout. Not saying everyone has to want this -- but it's what I find works for me. (And yes, obviously you can put electronic "bookmarks" and comments in e-books, but often you don't realize what you want to refer back to until long after you've read the book... also "marking up" the book is often much easier with a physical pencil/pen or highlighter.)
Today, e-books already account for over 30% of all books sold. Consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine.
I'd be somewhat cautious about the conclusions you're drawing. Paper books sales hit their low point in 2012 -- they've been growing again since. E-book sales seem to have hit a plateau since 2013 and haven't grown much since. (Some studies even suggest a slight decline in sales, but it depends on whose stats you believe.)
Yes, lots of people use e-books. But do "consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine," or are there significant numbers of consumers who don't really like them or have tried them and decide not to convert? Or is it more like what I said above about myself -- people who like to buy "disposable" books like them, but others have doubts?
I don't know what the long-term trend is going to be. Certainly I think some form of electronic book is here to stay. I have had scanned PDFs of books I frequently refer to on my computer for over 15 years. Those are useful to me. But e-books? I have absolutely no desire to buy them... and at least the trend in the past 2-3 years suggests that e-books have at least hit a temporary "wall" in their adoption process.
What's nonsense is locking civil time to atomic time. There would be no need for leap seconds if civil time simply remained linked to astronomical time, as it was for millenia.
Sorry, but what the heck are you talking about? Your "solution" makes no sense given the need for accurate timekeeping today. Astronomical time varies significantly with the earth's rotation all the time by various amounts of milliseconds (see here for an illustration of that variance since modern UTC standards were adopted).
The "length of a day" is simply nowhere near precise enough for modern applications. It worked to lock civil time to astronomical time when an error of a few milliseconds here and there wouldn't make a difference -- you could just reset all your clocks. But now much of our timekeeping software dealing with civil time works on machines where a few milliseconds here and there will screw things up all over the place.
Are you at all aware of the mess things were before the modern UTC standards were adopted? They tried to make corrections on an order of milliseconds on a regular basis, and it was annoying as all hell. That's why they proposed only altering the standard clocks when the collective error accumulated to closer to a second -- the shift could then easily take place.
What exactly do you think you're proposing here? That seconds will just be arbitrary lengths for civil time, varying on a daily or weekly basis to track the earth's variance in rotation? Or we keep the second constant, but that we make daily or weekly corrections somehow? Or what?
Modern technology needs civil time to be consistent. And it needs to be precise because there are far to many machines which depend on it not varying by random little increments all the time. There are various ways of solving this problem, but just waving your hands and getting out your sundial to mark noon every day (as they did for millennia) is simply not possible in the modern world.
Why do we even bother with this? Why can't we just let noon move a second. Even after a hundred years it won't make any difference. Time zones on average vary in the suns position by a whole hour so a 1 sec variation of the solar zenith makes no difference. Anstronomers will still be able to find there stars.
Agreed. This is all nonsense. Even NIST admits that it's basically for legacy astronomical equipment. But any astronomer who needs real precision needs to deal with fractional-second corrections all the time now anyway, and there are published tables that allow one to do this. (For the current correction to convert from UTC to UT1, see here, which gives values accurate to +/-5 milliseconds.)
If we ever got maybe a minute or more off, I could possibly see the reason for a correction. But a second? Who cares? As I said, the very small number of people who actually need to use UT1 mostly do fractional-second conversions all the time anyway, as leap seconds aren't precise enough to keep up with the continuous variation.
Remove minorities from the statistics and you will find that the US violent crime rate is in line with the least violent nations in Europe.
Guns have nothing to do with it, or the Swiss would be awash in blood. Rather, what we need to do is focus on economic advancement of the underclasses, which are disproportionately populated by minorities (for whatever reason).
While you go on to make some good points, you also basically acknowledge that the problem is socioeconomic and about "underclasses." And that's basically true -- there are problems caused in society among poor people no matter what their color. So why keep talking about "minorities"? Why not just talk about solving the socioeconomic problems of the poor?
Because when you keep referencing "minorities" as problems, frankly it makes you sound racist... even if you don't mean it. I'm not accusing you of that -- I'm saying it doesn't seem necessary or helpful in your argument and may unnecessarily turn some people off to legitimate ideas you may have.
No. They are NOT quite the exact same thing. The identy x*1 = x is defined for all x in the set of Real numbers. The 2nd form is not.
Those aren't the two formulations you mentioned. You mentioned the identity "x/1 = x" as though it were a fundamental rule of arithmetic. It is not. It can be derived from your multiplicative identity after you define division. But so can "x/x = 1."
Or, to explain a little more: going from x*1 = x to your version of x/1 = x requires that you actually define what x/y means in the first place. And to do that consistently, you already need to exclude the fact that y != 0. Once you've done that, you can show that x/1=x, but you can just as easily show that x/x=1.
Your "division identity" depends on a consistent definition of what division is. Thus you can only state it once you've excluded division by zero. (Well, technically you could state it as another axiom or something rather than deriving it, but most mathematicians don't see the point in adding in excess unnecessary axioms... especially in this case, where you'd still have to come up with a consistent definition of division.)
My father was a police officer for 20 years and somehow managed not to shoot any black people or violate anyone's rights. That's 99.9% of police officers.
Well, you're off by at least an order of magnitude, and likely a lot more. If you look at official police misconduct numbers for example here, you'll see that something around 1% of police officers are involved in serious complaints each year. Keep in mind that's an annual rate, so I don't know how that extrapolates to the percentage of police who engage in bad activity over an entire career, but it's undoubtedly somewhat higher (and could be a significant percentage of police). (To be fair -- if you read the stats here in detail, the rate of criminal activity among police is not significantly higher than that of the general population, but one would think that we should hold law enforcement to a somewhat higher standard in obeying the law....)
And keep in mind these are reported official cases of misconduct. Recent analyses have shown that lots of questionable actions taken by police while on duty are not prosecuted or investigated thoroughly -- or even reported: recent media analysis of fatal shootings by police, for example, suggest they are probably twice as common as the official reported number.
You add all these factors together, and I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at figures closer to 10% or higher of police who engage in significant criminal misconduct.
I have a great deal of respect for "good cops" who put their lives on the line every day. If you dad was one of them, you should be proud. And most police do a good job. But there are also SIGNIFICANT numbers of police who commit crimes in the U.S. every year.
And the bad cops aren't 1 in 1000 (as your off-the-cuff stat suggests), they're definitely greater than 1 in 100, and factoring in recent stats, it's likely as many as 1 in 10 or more.
Also, we need to look at official criminal activity vs. more subtle forms of questionable actions, like intimidation in interrogations, etc. Those may not rise to a criminal level, but many, many police abuse their authority to various degrees. This is where GP has a point:
That's patently absurd.... "Don't talk to police" is for the people asking for trouble.
There are lawyers who advise that. In general, it seems like reasonable advice. Unless you are asking the police for help, you gain nothing from talking to them and can accidentally implicate yourself (even if you've actually done nothing wrong). Be polite. Provide ID if the situation warrants. Then ask to leave... politely. There are too many ways they have power and authority to screw you over, even if it doesn't rise to official "misconduct," so what's the benefit in taking the risk?
Which is why for all big carrier I know of for big alliance (one world, star alliance) you are not paying for luggage, you are paying for excess luggage. That may be different for discounter like Ryanair but it is not the case for standard carrier.
You obviously haven't traveled recently in the United States. Many of the "standard carriers" today charge for any checked bag in domestic travel. The "budget" airlines now often charge for carry-ons beyond the size of a basic "personal item."
Whether you like these new policies or not, the fact is that most carriers these days in the U.S. will charge you to bring standard baggage which was allowed for decades. (Don't believe me? See domestic baggage fees here comparing different airlines.)
Airline tickets are finally very affordable. Why should I be forced to pay for services like extra baggage when I don't need it?
I agree. There seem to be people who like a "prix fixe" version of airline fares, and other people who'd prefer "a la carte." "Prix fixe" made sense in the 1960s when airline travel was a luxury few could afford -- and GP seems to be looking back to that idyllic image with attractive stewardesses bringing you a glass of champagne and offering to light your cigarette for you, before offering you a lovely meal on real china.
Airline travel isn't like that anymore, and it hasn't been like that for decades. Unless you pay exorbitant prices to fly first class, you're basically strapped into a flying greyhound bus... where everything is made as cheap as possible.
And if that's the model -- why should I pay for services I don't want? If I want food or drink on a short flight, I can buy it and have more choice (and usually better quality) before I get on the plane. If I absolutely need to bring a huge bag of stuff, I'll pay the cost -- but most times I don't, and I won't. I'd rather save the $50 round trip most of those trips when I don't need the baggage fee.
Frankly, also -- people bring too much stuff these days. Look at movies or photos or stories of 100 years ago -- people didn't travel with the loads of crap everyone feels they need to bring these days. I started packing "lighter" quite a few years ago after I had an incident of a bag that was lost for a day and I realized I needed to carry at least a change of clothes in my carry-on just in case. Once I started packing that, I realized that actually I could be really efficient and fit most of the stuff I need in a small backpack for most trips of a few days. If the trip is more than a few days, I can either pay the baggage fee for a checked bag (or carry-on fee, if there is one), or I can just plan to spend $5 doing laundry one day at my destination... which is a lot cheaper than any baggage fee.
With a smaller and lighter bag, it's less to carry, less to worry about, it often can fit under my seat if the overhead bins are stuffed with overpacking idiots who insist on bringing a huge carry-on, and I don't need to worry about a checked bag being lost.
Actually that latter concern *IS* one area where airlines should have more regulation. If airlines are providing baggage transport free, that's one thing -- but if they are charging you $50+ round trip to check your bag, you should get an absolute guarantee that your bag gets to your destination with you. If it's not in your hand within an hour after your flight lands, you should get reimbursed the fee AND paid extra depending on the time it takes to deliver your bag to you.
I'm fine with them charging for a service -- but that service then should be of high quality and reasonably guaranteed.
Secondly your "rule two" is not actually rule of algebra. There is no rule x/x = 1.
There is an identity rule for division: anything divided by one is itself (x/1 = x) but there is no rule that says x/x = 1
You can derive "rule two" from the identity rule for multiplication x*1 = x --> x/x = 1
Huh? You've just stated two formulations that mean the same exact thing. Yes, when you set up axioms for a system of arithmetic, you often might derive things the first way, but there's no reason you couldn't first prove "x/x = 1" as a basic theorem instead and derive your "identity rule for division" from that. You generally wouldn't need either of these as axioms -- they both can be derived once you define division in terms of multiplication, i.e., something like "Given a and b with a != 0, there is exactly one x such that a*x=b. This x is denoted by b/a." (This theorem can be proven from more basic axioms involving identity elements and an axiom allowing the existence of a multiplicative inverse.)
Once you've defined division, then you can go onto prove that a/1 = a or a/a = 1 or whatever. Neither of these statements is more basic than the other, since they both follow directly from the definition of division and the definition of the multiplicative identity element 1.
In fact, usually a statement like a/a = 1 would be slightly more basic, since a^-1 can be defined as the reciprocal or multiplicative inverse once the theorem of division is proven. Thus a/a = a * a^-1 = 1, according to the definition of division and by the axiom asserting the existence of a multiplicative inverse (which usually states something like: "For every real number x != 0, there is a real number y such that x*y =1"). Your "identity rule for division" can then be derived from that.
However, that transformation always stipulates that x 0 because division by zero is undefined.
No -- that "transformation" doesn't "stipulate" anything. Division by zero is barred in the act of defining division -- because when you try to do the proof for my theorem above ("Given a and b with a != 0, there is exactly one x such that a*x=b. This x is denoted by b/a.") you'll find that x is NOT unique for situations where a is 0, which is the reason for its exclusion in the theorem.
Which is what you go on to show with your various examples. But you don't need to show them, and you don't need to say that division by zero is "undefined" -- rather, when you try to DERIVE a reasonable definition for division from prior axioms, there's no consistent way of choosing a unique result for a division by zero. Therefore, it is generally left undefined, as in my example theorem.
Mathematicians have no issue determine which rule has precedence, because neither rule applies to 0/0. There is no conflict. Division by zero is specifically "undefined".
Yes.
Right, I don't even... ehh... totally confused. It's not aprils fools right? Did this article get approved just to mock the submitter, or has Slashdot gone totally of the rails?
Well, Slashdot recently implemented a new engine for approving articles, but there was a place in the code where one could end up dividing by zero, and they just decided to arbitrarily set that value to "post a random nonsensical Ask Slashdot question."
So, Timothy screwed something up... and, well, rather than throwing up an exception -- VOILA... this story was approved!
I'm surprised you haven't noticed this before -- I think it's how most "Ask Slashdot" questions get posted these days.
Most people want search engines to understand synonyms, misspellings and contextual relevancy and return results that one had in mind rather than string matches. This only becomes more important with mobile/voice search.
I don't really fathom how this is "niche." This was how Google worked for about a decade. And that's how they came out ON TOP. People flocked to a search engine that didn't require complex Boolean logic to get what you wanted -- everything was "AND" by default, and you just got the terms that you wanted. Simple. Clean. End of story.
They gradually introduced "Did you mean?" starting around 2002 or 2003, which offered you a link to a "better" search. Then a few years later they silently stopped requiring search terms to actually be in the page. Then they started silently allowing word variations (plurals, verb forms, etc.). Then, by 2009 or so, they stopped with the "did you mean?" for most searches and just silently did it anyway. Then in 2011, they dropped the "+" operator, which didn't always work (see above), but at least seemed to work most of the time. They introduced "verbatim" search, but like double quotes and "intext:" operators and other "advanced search" options, Google doesn't behave consistently when you use them.
I can understand if people were asking for a "niche" product that required advanced programming. But all we want is a check-box for Google to stop messing with the search text. In terms of implementation, all it would need is an "IF verbatim checked, THEN just don't run the huge amount of code that does auto-correct."
It's like all of the iPhone autocorrect nonsense. I lived with it for about a month before I had to turn it off. It was "correcting" real words all over the place and making me look like I was illiterate by screwing up things for no apparent reason. So, I lived without it. I'd LOVE an "autocorrect" feature that actually did only that: autocorrect, i.e., if I type in a text that is NOT an actual word in the dictionary, try to correct it. And let me have a custom dictionary that actually listens to me. But that's impossible to get -- Apple won't let anyone have it, even though it would be 100 times simpler to implement.
AFAICT, they blithely ignore all the things that *used* to make it possible to actually give Google value - the Google-fu expressions, including most importantly +term and -term.
Umm, the + operator was deprecated in 2011. I don't exactly know what effect it has had since then. (It seems to do something, but it's highly unpredictable.)
Try using "intext:" or "allintext:" or similar commands. They don't quite work consistently either, and more frequently than not they will eliminate results that actually SHOULD be matches, but it's at least something that has an effect.
The plus doesn't work very well anymore, half the result pages simply don't contain the word.
The plus operator was deprecated nearly 4 years ago. I don't know exactly what it does now, if anything.
You can try "verbatim" mode or the "intext:" operator, which both seem to have some effects, but they're also unpredictable.
Tip for Google, if someone writes "+" in front of a word, that really really really means that they really really want that word to actually appear on the page. Really.
How many years ago did they break this, anyway? Used to work that way, aeons ago. I miss those times.
They announced it about 4-5 years ago, but it was basically broken before that.
By the way, there still is an "intext:" and "allintext:" operator which is supposed to be a kind of replacement, and it usually helps, but it doesn't ALWAYS work consistently. (Either Google sometimes ignores it, or it fails to display large numbers of results which actually contain the search term... which you can only find by eliminating the operator.)
If you put &tbs=li:1 at the end of your search URL, you'll get verbatim results.
Verbatim search HELPS, but it does NOT work consistently. Go search the Google products discussion forums and you'll find plenty of threads and examples showing where verbatim mode fails in all sorts of unpredictable ways. And even when it seems to do true "verbatim," it generally ends up omitting huge numbers of results that actually should return in a verbatim search, but which you can only find by disabling verbatim.
There are other operators people try -- using + and - or "in text" or double quotes -- NONE of them work consistently. Google will at various times fudge the results in some unpredictable way and/or omit large numbers of results that actually contain the specified words or phrase.
I'd love it if verbatim search actually worked. But as someone who does research and needs to often find very specific and unique results, Google simply has proven unpredictable for me. Unfortunately, I have little choice, because Google is more comprehensive in its databases for many searches, so I'm stuck playing around randomly guessing ideas about how to search and get Google to actually give me results that contain the terms that I want (and ALL of the results, rather than an arbitrary subset that "verbatim" search turns up).
And by the way -- supposedly the "intext:" and "allintext:" operators work better than verbatim, but it still breaks at times.
What he wants is a search engine that doesn't try as hard to infer what the user really wants, rather than one that has to be forced, with more use of quotes, to just look for the damn string. Perhaps that's a sufficiently small niche that no search engine would bother to offer that, and he'll just have to live with typing more double-quote characters.
Yeah, the problem is double-quotes don't consistently work in Google anymore. They haven't for several years. Nor do + or - signs, or "verbatim mode," or using the "in text" operator Google has suggested, or pretty much anything. In many cases quotes and other things like this help, but in other cases Google clearly chooses just to ignore them... in various ways... unpredictably.
Spend some time searching the Google forums and you'll find plenty of examples and discussion of these problems. I'd be happy if Google would actually make double quotes work literally ALL THE TIME... or at least SOME operator, but they don't. It seems to do SOMETHING, but the behavior is not consistent. And neither is just about any other search operator Google claims can be used for more precise searching. Who the hell knows how their databases work -- advanced searching in Google is a crapshoot. I've tried some historical searches in Google Books, for example, and choosing a different date range will arbitrarily add or delete results FROM THE SAME YEARS. That is, if you search for all results published 1940 to 1960, you'll get a different set of results for the 1950s than if you searched from 1950 to 1960.
It's maddening and insane. I'm sure that Google has introduced various optimizations to make its searches "more efficient," but in the process they've basically broken actual literal search... it simply does NOT work consistently anymore, hasn't in probably 7 or 8 years, and despite what Google employees claim, there's NO WAY to consistently enable it for all searches.
Maybe your problem isn't that the search engine is thinking too much, it's that you're not thinking enough and blaming it for trying to help. If it's just common words, you'll get the most common matches.
And maybe you don't understand how to use an actual literal search.
Anyone who has spent time doing such a thing understands that you need to use unique terms that will isolate the EXACT results you want. Back in the day (ca. 2000) Google would actually tell you when you typed in a "common word" (like "the" or "for" or whatever) that it was explicitly NOT searching for that term. Other terms -- it searched literally.
If you get used to search queries where you understand you need to search for precise terms, it can quickly find what you want in most cases. Most people can't quite figure this out, and I understand that Google may want to provide a "fuzzy" search to help them.
But for those of us who were able to find precisely what we wanted before and now can't because Google has progressively broken all the ways of marking things as literal search... it's frustrating.
So then it looks like Microsoft Office did, back when Microsoft Office was good.
I wouldn't exactly call Office 2003 "good." I'm not going to get into the "ribbon wars" -- personally, I could never stand it, but I understand some others love the ribbon and find it useful.
But I'm just talking about the fact that MS Office was a bloated piece of crap a decade ago too. I can't remember when it wasn't significantly bloated after the applications migrated from DOS. Go back and look at the versions of many applications prior to Windows 95 -- much, much smaller, but basically most of the features you still see today. Somehow we now have MS Office applications that take up 100 times more space, but they don't really have many more useful features than they did 20+ years ago (when you could install them with a handful of floppy disks).
Perhaps you meant...EXTRAORDINARY magnitude.
No, TFS says "historical magnitude" just to refer to the fact that LibreOffice largely looks like Microsoft Office did over a decade ago.
(P.S. I say this as a fan of LibreOffice....)
I demand this be corrected immediately for false advertising.
It's actually not called "GratisOffice."
Or, in this case, "Free as in speech, and free as in... well, it costs as much as a couple beers."
However, I am reluctant to believe it based on your claim alone, and I would find it hard to persuade others. Have you got any sources to cite?
Do a Google search. The information isn't too hard to find. I've also posted links on this stuff many times before here... I just get tired of posting stuff over and over.
Basically, it's pretty well-established that smokers end up costing less over the total lifespan. There are numerous studies and economic analyses going back about 30 years that show that.
Obesity is a little more complicated, and if you do a search on it, you'll find a lot of conflicting studies -- some say that obese people die earlier and thus end up costing less, but others claim the early death doesn't make up for the increased costs. And then there's the whole "obesity paradox" thing where obese people seem to actually have better health outcomes for a number of diseases (though the extent to which this is actually true or a statistical artifact is hard to determine, and medical journals have been trying to sort this out for the past decade).
In any case, there are few facts that are absolutely not in dispute: (1) annual medical costs tend to go up as people become elderly, and (2) healthy people do cost less when they are younger, but eventually for MOST people those costs rise significantly as they get older.
In particular cases and for particular behaviors/diseases, an early death (even with preceding care) will cost less than if a similar person without that behavior/disease had lived for decades longer and encountered other long-term costly care. In other cases, some behaviors/diseases are so expensive to treat even short-term that their extra cost will never be offset.
Anyhow, do your own research. Come to your own conclusions. (By the way -- I don't smoke, I'm not obese, and I try to get some sort of regular exercise... not that it should mean anything for this analysis. I'm not advocating "unhealthy" behaviors -- just trying to be honest about the long-term economic impacts.)
Modern life is largely leisure time - the forty hour week and retirement are relatively recent changes.
Umm, yes and no.
Read the link for details, but basically people for the past thousand years or so -- at least in Europe -- generally worked roughly the same number of hours per year as they do today. The difference was that the work was distributed in different ways -- a lot of work was seasonal (particularly when most people were farmers), which meant you were working 16-hour days most days of the week during harvest, but you basically had little to do during the winter for a few months. And don't forget that work basically had to stop when the sun went down, and poor people couldn't generally afford light sources after dark -- so even if you wanted to work longer hours in the winter, you couldn't.
I'll agree with you that work was harder in the past in terms of manual labor, etc. But the amount of "leisure time" was probably not as much less as you imagine it to be.
We may not be living in a dystopia, but it is certainly true that productivity has skyrocketed per worker over the past couple centuries, but total work time has not decreased significantly. Granted, some of that extra productivity is necessary to go toward modern conveniences -- but we could probably all be working for half or a quarter of the hours we do and still have a reasonably high standard of living. The main difference would be that the rich people wouldn't be skimming such a huge amount off the top.
This should directly reduce this incidence of heart disease, and is good news for everyone except cost-cutting food producers.
Well, good news for people who want to live longer. But living longer does not always equal costing less.
On a related note, from TFS:
The food industry is expected to spend $6.2 billion over the next two decades to formulate replacements, but the money saved from health benefits is expected to be more than 20 times higher.
I hate these sorts of figures, because I bet they didn't take longevity into account. People who live longer cost more, because medical costs tend to increase significantly in old age, whether you eat "healthy" or not. People fall and break a hip or get some random treatable cancer or get dementia and need round-the-clock care while the mind breaks down for a decade.
Those things cost a lot. Having a sudden heart attack and dying at age 62 generally costs a lot less than a 95-year-old who had 30+ years of post-retirement high medical costs.
To be clear: I'm NOT arguing we should be trying to kill people or that we shouldn't value old people or whatever. I'm saying that the "saved medical costs" by reducing heart disease risks don't generally result in overall saved money in the long run, when we take increased lifespans into account. (You can see similar studies that have shown such things for obesity or smoking or whatever -- those people cost more in a short time, but then they die, and "healthy" people cost more long-term, which more than offsets the earlier short-term costs of "unhealthy" people.)
I'm all for making people healthier and having them live longer. I'm just tired of hearing misleading stats thrown around. But go ahead and get rid of the trans fats... there's nothing really great about them.