I doubt it. We get so make fake controversies drummed up for political benefit these days (Benghazi comes to mind) that the real ones just fade into the background noise.
The paranoid contingent of Slashdot will insist that this is working as intended -- that there's some grand conspiracy of tens of thousands of people all working, without a single leak, to blind the American populace. The more sane answer is that the two big political parties are so focused on the next election (two years is far too little, imo) that they have no choice but to pounce on every little thing hoping to gain an advantage. Getting elected through good policy doesn't work, because by the time your policy starts to show benefits, someone else is in office to take the credit.
And yet the damage is done. The original, incorrect comment is at +5. Tons of people will read it, and get the wrong idea, and never hear the correction. I don't particularly blame you, but this shows how quickly lies spread in the internet age. The truth doesn't stand a chance.
Your analysis contains some very important oversights:
Your numbers are taken from the US Census Bureau: 2001 & 2011.
First, let's look at the difference between 2003 & 2004, so that we can see the addition of the Department of Homeland Security. See how the total number of full time employees stays roughly the same, but the 2004 numbers have that extra section for the DHS with ~140k full time employees? Those people weren't all hired that year -- the DHS employees are already in the grand total on the top line. You were double counting them in your 2011 numbers. So let's revise your numbers to account for that: 2001: 2.7M employees with a payroll of $11.4B 2011: 2.85M employees with a payroll of $16.1B
That's a 6% increase in headcount, and a 41% increase in payroll. Still pretty big, right? Well, we ought to adjust for inflation. Looks like the $16.1B would have been worth $12.7B in 2001.
So really, we're looking at a 6% increase in headcount, and an 11% increase in inflation-adjusted payroll. It's not nothing, but it's not what you're making it out to be.
Let's go into even more detail!
By pulling up the 2008 numbers, we can see which parts are attributable to Bush, and which are attributable to Obama. Since Bush has more years of growth, we'll annualize the results.
(I did this in Excel, and you're free to download the tables from the Census website and repeat my calculations. I'm tired of making hyperlinks.)
Under Bush, the Federal Government grew at an average of 4.5% per year, with the largest contributors being National Defense, Healthcare and Law Enforcement. Under Obama, the Federal Government grew at an average of 1.4% per year, with the largest contributors being Healthcare and the Postal Service (which didn't grow much percentage-wise, but its sheer size meant that even a few percentage points put it over the top). Remember, we're talking about payroll here, so Social Security & Medicare aren't nearly as big.
So under Obama, the government payroll has actually been shrinking in inflation adjusted dollars. And remember, this is pre-sequester. Of course, that doesn't mean all of the cuts were Obama's idea, or all of the heavy spending was Bush's. But it does show that over the past several years, the government has been trimming the fat. Your "throw the bums out" approach is unwarranted.
This shouldn't be modded off-topic. This has been confirmed to be the bombing suspects, armed with assault rifles and explosives. One is dead, having used a suicide vest, and the other (supect #2, white hat) is still being hunted by over 9000 cops. That's not a lame joke. That's the actual number of cops on the scene.
That's a nice thought, and likely a side effect of his wagers, but is it really his intent?
I attended a guest lecture by Kip Thorne several years ago, and he made it seem that one of the early bets between him and Hawking (on the existence of black holes) was just a friendly wager between colleagues, the way you might bet a coworker a beer on the outcome of the Super Bowl, not some open challenge to all comers. The bet with Preskill regarding information loss in black holes seems similar - the prize was a book about baseball, after all.
Maybe this latest wager is different, but I doubt it. People were hard a work looking for the Higgs boson before Hawking offered his bet. I think a more likely explanation is that Hawking just does this for fun. Scientists are people, after all. They hang out at the water cooler, talk sports, complain about the weather, etc, just like any other office. Not everything they do needs to have some deeper purpose.
That's what the "free from government control" bit was about. Republicans wanted to sneak that nice sounding line in there so that they could kill off net neutrality. Democrats saw through their scheme and stopped it.
For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
That's not true. Maybe you didn't know it was a lie, and are just stating what you honestly believe to be fact, but it's a lie all the same. I blame Romney for creating this ridiculous talking point in the debates last year.
You can review PBS's financial statements for yourself. They lost ~$30 million in the past year, and a similar amount the year before -- page 5, "Change in net assets" row, "Total" columns for both 2012 and 2011.
They've got enough money that they could last for a while without public funding, but not forever. Cutting executive pay wouldn't make a difference. Also, I find it funny that banks need to pay millions of dollars of tax payer bailout dollars as bonuses to retain "top talent", but it's outrageous when PBS or schools want to spend a fraction of that to keep their top employees.
And really, it's a trivial cost for tax payers to bear (something like $1 per person per year), and provides our kids with educational programming that doesn't smother them with ads or ADHD-inducing hyperactive crap.
Who cares? That's just you, a random nobody on the internet (no offense). There is no deep insight to be had from pondering why you like looking at gifs of John Stewart. You like what you like.
Some people like dub step. There is no great understanding of the human condition that we can glean from that, except the very obvious one: "With seven billion people in the world, you can find an audience for just about anything."
As for why your interested changed, I would suggest it's simply because people change. You're not the person you were ten years ago, and the person inhabiting your body in ten years time won't be you.
Sure, but most people tweeting false info in a disaster are just stupid kids (or man-children) who think its funny. They're probably not going to put lots of effort into it, because then it wouldn't be fun.
According to this graph, in 1990, there were 120k deaths per 100k people amongst the 0-6 day age group alone. I could have sworn that there were at least a few children that survived the decade.
No, people think that because they've been force-fed propaganda for decades and are no longer able to make rational, evidence-based decisions about the world.
Having the robot factories here is good. We can tax the owners, tax the engineers, and use the proceeds to support all the unemployed people. Automation guarantees that we will, eventually, have 50+% permanent unemployment. We'll need to transition to a socialist economy to survive, and it will help if the factories are in our backyard.
Google "concurrent xbox live users", and it looks like they set a record of 2 million a few years back. That's all users, not just the paying Gold users. I'm sure they've grown since then, but tripled?
Now, the obvious caveat is that it's more common to play on an Xbox without an internet connection than it is to play in Steam's offline mode. But Steam's user base is definitely at least comparable to Xbox's.
Very true. That is why, as a loving parent, I allow my infant children to roam freely in traffic, unwashed, unvaccinated, and unsupervised. I'm sure they will thank me as soon as one of them lives long enough to learn to speak.
We don't receive enough sunlight to completely replace oil with sunlight with our current solar panels without covering most of the planet, etc.
As a fellow Seattleite, I used to think the same, but it's not actually true. Turns out other places get a lot more sun.
The total electrical energy consumption for the US is 4.1 TWh/yr, or 11.2e6 kWh/day. The insolation in the American southwest exceeds 5 kWh/m^2/day. So at 100% efficiency, it would take less than 0.9 square miles of solar panels to power the entire US. Even cheap solar cells tend to give at least 10% efficiency, so a 3x3 mile array of cheap panels in Arizona could power the entire country.
The real problems are distributing all that energy to darker places, storing all that energy for when the sun isn't out, and paying for all the panels plus the storage plus the distribution. The technology for all of that probably isn't cost effective yet, but it likely will be within my lifetime.
"Voted upon by everyone participating in the network"... So does that mean I can buy 0.001 bitcoins and have equal voting power? And therefore that I can create a million shill accounts? Or is voting weighted by total number of bitcoins possessed?
Either way, it seems like the hardcore devotees will have control. Not that that's a necessarily a bad thing, but don't pretend it's democratic if it's not.
Because it's an incredibly foolish thing to do, and anyone entering into such a deal is being exploited. And unlike some cases of exploitation, such as payday loans, there's no going back on this one. This kid was just seventeen, and he was tricked into a transaction that will negatively impact him for the rest of his life. It's akin to selling highly addictive drugs. You can talk about free markets and rational self-interest all you want, but in the real world, people make mistakes. We should protect each other from making mistakes that one can never recover from.
Who says it didn't make sense to print ten-cent notes in the 50s? The fact that they didn't do it is not proof that it would have been a bad idea. And even if it were a bad idea back then, the world has changed over the past sixty years. People have different habits, printing technology is cheaper, etc.
While I don't throw away coins (better to save them for coinstar every few years), I do agree. I keep my bills in my wallet, sorted by denomination. It makes it very easy to quickly pull out the needed amount, or count how much I have. I don't want to be forced to carry around a coin pouch. I don't want to have to dig through it with my finger tips trying to differentiate between the nickels and quarters and dollar coins, keeping track of whether or not I've already counted each coin. Coins are a pain in the ass to use, and the "savings" of 4 billion dollars over thirty years is a joke. Better to just stick with paper money, which is becoming less important thanks to electronic payment anyway. If you want to eliminate a type of currency, start with the penny.
The US government knows full well how to force such a transition. They're not doing it because there's no reason to. The cost is trivial, and people don't want to switch. What sort of democratic government forces an unwanted change on its people just to save 0.004% of the budget?
Slashdot Mirror
Singularity, anyone? Some people absolutely treat science like a religion, complete with its own Rapture, in order to cope with fear of death.
I doubt it. We get so make fake controversies drummed up for political benefit these days (Benghazi comes to mind) that the real ones just fade into the background noise.
The paranoid contingent of Slashdot will insist that this is working as intended -- that there's some grand conspiracy of tens of thousands of people all working, without a single leak, to blind the American populace. The more sane answer is that the two big political parties are so focused on the next election (two years is far too little, imo) that they have no choice but to pounce on every little thing hoping to gain an advantage. Getting elected through good policy doesn't work, because by the time your policy starts to show benefits, someone else is in office to take the credit.
And yet the damage is done. The original, incorrect comment is at +5. Tons of people will read it, and get the wrong idea, and never hear the correction. I don't particularly blame you, but this shows how quickly lies spread in the internet age. The truth doesn't stand a chance.
Your analysis contains some very important oversights:
Your numbers are taken from the US Census Bureau: 2001 & 2011.
First, let's look at the difference between 2003 & 2004, so that we can see the addition of the Department of Homeland Security. See how the total number of full time employees stays roughly the same, but the 2004 numbers have that extra section for the DHS with ~140k full time employees? Those people weren't all hired that year -- the DHS employees are already in the grand total on the top line. You were double counting them in your 2011 numbers. So let's revise your numbers to account for that:
2001: 2.7M employees with a payroll of $11.4B
2011: 2.85M employees with a payroll of $16.1B
That's a 6% increase in headcount, and a 41% increase in payroll. Still pretty big, right? Well, we ought to adjust for inflation. Looks like the $16.1B would have been worth $12.7B in 2001.
So really, we're looking at a 6% increase in headcount, and an 11% increase in inflation-adjusted payroll. It's not nothing, but it's not what you're making it out to be.
Let's go into even more detail!
By pulling up the 2008 numbers, we can see which parts are attributable to Bush, and which are attributable to Obama. Since Bush has more years of growth, we'll annualize the results.
(I did this in Excel, and you're free to download the tables from the Census website and repeat my calculations. I'm tired of making hyperlinks.)
Under Bush, the Federal Government grew at an average of 4.5% per year, with the largest contributors being National Defense, Healthcare and Law Enforcement. Under Obama, the Federal Government grew at an average of 1.4% per year, with the largest contributors being Healthcare and the Postal Service (which didn't grow much percentage-wise, but its sheer size meant that even a few percentage points put it over the top). Remember, we're talking about payroll here, so Social Security & Medicare aren't nearly as big.
So under Obama, the government payroll has actually been shrinking in inflation adjusted dollars. And remember, this is pre-sequester. Of course, that doesn't mean all of the cuts were Obama's idea, or all of the heavy spending was Bush's. But it does show that over the past several years, the government has been trimming the fat. Your "throw the bums out" approach is unwarranted.
This shouldn't be modded off-topic. This has been confirmed to be the bombing suspects, armed with assault rifles and explosives. One is dead, having used a suicide vest, and the other (supect #2, white hat) is still being hunted by over 9000 cops. That's not a lame joke. That's the actual number of cops on the scene.
That's a nice thought, and likely a side effect of his wagers, but is it really his intent?
I attended a guest lecture by Kip Thorne several years ago, and he made it seem that one of the early bets between him and Hawking (on the existence of black holes) was just a friendly wager between colleagues, the way you might bet a coworker a beer on the outcome of the Super Bowl, not some open challenge to all comers. The bet with Preskill regarding information loss in black holes seems similar - the prize was a book about baseball, after all.
Maybe this latest wager is different, but I doubt it. People were hard a work looking for the Higgs boson before Hawking offered his bet. I think a more likely explanation is that Hawking just does this for fun. Scientists are people, after all. They hang out at the water cooler, talk sports, complain about the weather, etc, just like any other office. Not everything they do needs to have some deeper purpose.
That's what the "free from government control" bit was about. Republicans wanted to sneak that nice sounding line in there so that they could kill off net neutrality. Democrats saw through their scheme and stopped it.
For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
That's not true. Maybe you didn't know it was a lie, and are just stating what you honestly believe to be fact, but it's a lie all the same. I blame Romney for creating this ridiculous talking point in the debates last year.
You can review PBS's financial statements for yourself. They lost ~$30 million in the past year, and a similar amount the year before -- page 5, "Change in net assets" row, "Total" columns for both 2012 and 2011.
They've got enough money that they could last for a while without public funding, but not forever. Cutting executive pay wouldn't make a difference. Also, I find it funny that banks need to pay millions of dollars of tax payer bailout dollars as bonuses to retain "top talent", but it's outrageous when PBS or schools want to spend a fraction of that to keep their top employees.
And really, it's a trivial cost for tax payers to bear (something like $1 per person per year), and provides our kids with educational programming that doesn't smother them with ads or ADHD-inducing hyperactive crap.
Yeah, fun is irrational. We should all be good little automatons, just like our owners wish.
Who cares? That's just you, a random nobody on the internet (no offense). There is no deep insight to be had from pondering why you like looking at gifs of John Stewart. You like what you like.
Some people like dub step. There is no great understanding of the human condition that we can glean from that, except the very obvious one: "With seven billion people in the world, you can find an audience for just about anything."
As for why your interested changed, I would suggest it's simply because people change. You're not the person you were ten years ago, and the person inhabiting your body in ten years time won't be you.
Sure, but most people tweeting false info in a disaster are just stupid kids (or man-children) who think its funny. They're probably not going to put lots of effort into it, because then it wouldn't be fun.
According to this graph, in 1990, there were 120k deaths per 100k people amongst the 0-6 day age group alone. I could have sworn that there were at least a few children that survived the decade.
No, people think that because they've been force-fed propaganda for decades and are no longer able to make rational, evidence-based decisions about the world.
Having the robot factories here is good. We can tax the owners, tax the engineers, and use the proceeds to support all the unemployed people. Automation guarantees that we will, eventually, have 50+% permanent unemployment. We'll need to transition to a socialist economy to survive, and it will help if the factories are in our backyard.
5.6 million concurrent Steam users.
Google "concurrent xbox live users", and it looks like they set a record of 2 million a few years back. That's all users, not just the paying Gold users. I'm sure they've grown since then, but tripled?
Now, the obvious caveat is that it's more common to play on an Xbox without an internet connection than it is to play in Steam's offline mode. But Steam's user base is definitely at least comparable to Xbox's.
Very true. That is why, as a loving parent, I allow my infant children to roam freely in traffic, unwashed, unvaccinated, and unsupervised. I'm sure they will thank me as soon as one of them lives long enough to learn to speak.
We don't receive enough sunlight to completely replace oil with sunlight with our current solar panels without covering most of the planet, etc.
As a fellow Seattleite, I used to think the same, but it's not actually true. Turns out other places get a lot more sun.
The total electrical energy consumption for the US is 4.1 TWh/yr, or 11.2e6 kWh/day. The insolation in the American southwest exceeds 5 kWh/m^2/day. So at 100% efficiency, it would take less than 0.9 square miles of solar panels to power the entire US. Even cheap solar cells tend to give at least 10% efficiency, so a 3x3 mile array of cheap panels in Arizona could power the entire country.
The real problems are distributing all that energy to darker places, storing all that energy for when the sun isn't out, and paying for all the panels plus the storage plus the distribution. The technology for all of that probably isn't cost effective yet, but it likely will be within my lifetime.
"Voted upon by everyone participating in the network"... So does that mean I can buy 0.001 bitcoins and have equal voting power? And therefore that I can create a million shill accounts? Or is voting weighted by total number of bitcoins possessed?
Either way, it seems like the hardcore devotees will have control. Not that that's a necessarily a bad thing, but don't pretend it's democratic if it's not.
The methods for increased productivity weren't invented by the current CEO or shareholders either. Why are they entitled to the extra profits?
Which goes back to what the OP said. that we need to "make it illegal for employers to ask for certain concessions."
Seriously, are you just trolling or what?
Well they started in Africa, and they sure as all hell didn't swim across the Atlantic. You figure it out.
Because it's an incredibly foolish thing to do, and anyone entering into such a deal is being exploited. And unlike some cases of exploitation, such as payday loans, there's no going back on this one. This kid was just seventeen, and he was tricked into a transaction that will negatively impact him for the rest of his life. It's akin to selling highly addictive drugs. You can talk about free markets and rational self-interest all you want, but in the real world, people make mistakes. We should protect each other from making mistakes that one can never recover from.
Who says it didn't make sense to print ten-cent notes in the 50s? The fact that they didn't do it is not proof that it would have been a bad idea. And even if it were a bad idea back then, the world has changed over the past sixty years. People have different habits, printing technology is cheaper, etc.
While I don't throw away coins (better to save them for coinstar every few years), I do agree. I keep my bills in my wallet, sorted by denomination. It makes it very easy to quickly pull out the needed amount, or count how much I have. I don't want to be forced to carry around a coin pouch. I don't want to have to dig through it with my finger tips trying to differentiate between the nickels and quarters and dollar coins, keeping track of whether or not I've already counted each coin. Coins are a pain in the ass to use, and the "savings" of 4 billion dollars over thirty years is a joke. Better to just stick with paper money, which is becoming less important thanks to electronic payment anyway. If you want to eliminate a type of currency, start with the penny.
The US government knows full well how to force such a transition. They're not doing it because there's no reason to. The cost is trivial, and people don't want to switch. What sort of democratic government forces an unwanted change on its people just to save 0.004% of the budget?