Uh... everyone? "Machines" are pretty generalized. A single farmer runs a combine the size of a barn now a days. They're so big and so modern they mostly drive themselves. But that's food. Machines help reduce the manpower to make food. Who buys food? Everyone.
Oh goody, you found the mechaninism that funnels wealth from the middle class to the rich. You must be the pride of [subjects home town].
Yes it can be cut. But even if we completely eliminated it we'd still be on a path to bankruptcy
Of course it isn't the problem. It's a problem, one of many, the same way that EVERY expense out of the budget is a problem. And every source of income is a (partial) solution.
And of course we can't simply axe it all. We NEED a military. The same way that we NEED to pay our debts and to educate our young. Doing without would be disastrous.
Also, I love how foxnews and the old folgies bitch about the "entitlement generation", but the term they decided to use overlaps with the congress's budget entitlements. Which consists mainly of:
1: Debt. ie, people and nations investing in the USA. And earning interest. By definition, the wealthy.
2: Social Security. ie, old people. Retiring baby boomers aren't dying at 67 like they used to when they made this system.
3: Everything else that the wealthy old people want to cut out so they can continue to take their SS check and invest it in bonds.
But yeah, we'll have to trim back who gets SS. And it'd help a lot of we sorted out the clusterfuck that is our medical system. But it would also help if we trimmed back the military. Duh.
How about the threat that they automate away the jobs leaving us with a society split into three castes:
1. Those who own the machines
2. Those who make/maintain the machines
3. The vast swath of un-needed humanity.
In a capitalistic society, if there's no demand for you, you have no way to sustain yourself. You will be poor with no real hope of rising out of it.
Companies can invest in a new tools. Say, upgrading hand-crank drills to powered electric drills, or a team of secretaries to Outlook, or a hoarde of line-workers to a robotics system. They do this because it'll make them a buck. The old system cost X, the new system costs X-Y. Y is the benefit of the change. Where does Y go? The (ex)workers? The company? The customers? What percentage goes where?
The important thing to remember though, is that getting robots/computers to do our work for us is progress. It's literally making a better system. But you have to think about the consequences of changing the system.
Right, the mind is a muscle. Exercise it and learn everything you can, it'll make you smart. And if you're smart you'll get tracked into the honor system or bumped up to the fancy school. And if you do well there, you'll get the scholarships and acceptance letters from the good universities. With a degree that matter and a good GPA, your first job will be the exciting and engaging sort which pays the big bucks. Overall you'll be successful. So study up kids, because this shit is important.
Likewise, on the flip-side, if you relax and take whatever grade they give you, you'll be tracked as one of the dumb kids and most teachers will simply give up on you. (That's not official, and there are a lot of good exceptions, but it's pretty common). Post highschool, you can always get a loan, or use daddy's money, to get into a third-rate school and take an easy degree. If you graduate or no, work will be tougher to find (although it's largely a factor of how the economy is doing that decade) and good luck getting work in the field you actually studied. So you'll compromise and take a job pushing office papers, or menial labor. You can get by, but it's harder, and statistically a larger percentage of that lot will crack under the pressure and drop out of society. There's always a chance you'll get your shit together and start working hard and be one of those rags-to-riches stories, but their rarity is what makes them a story.
Fun fact: There's a massive sliding scale between these two points. It even extrapolates beyond!
As long as you get the job you want it absolutely doesn't matter what the degree was in or what your GPA was.
As long as you get into the university you want it absolutely doesn't matter what your highscool GPA was or what AP classes you took.
As long as you get tracked into the honor system or get into the prestigious highschool, it doesn't matter how smart you looked in jr. high
So what do you tell the kids when they ask you if schoolwork is important?
As long as you get the job you want it absolutely doesn't matter what your degree is or what your GPA was.
As long as you get into the university you want it absolutely doesn't matter what your highschool GPA was or what AP classes you took.
As long as you get tracked into the honors system or get into the prestigious highschool, it doesn't matter how smart you look in jr. high.
So what do you say when a jr. high kid asks you if schoolwork is important?
This and double this. A lot of people confess to things they didn't do. It's not just the mentally ill off their drugs. If the cops suspect you've done something they will grill you like it's their professional job. They'll claim any number of lies about what your future looks like, what evidence they have, and what the best course of action would be for you. You'll be faced with DECADES in prison vs a few years of probation because "you cooperated".
All that said, DNA test aren't the loose guesstimation that finger-print reading has been in the past. They have a false-positive rate, but I'm pretty sure they could just run it again. Scientific authorities are actually pretty authoritative. They're also usually not the ones in charge.
Your facts are probably true. But I'd say you're jumping to conclusions. 0.8% difference between the two systems when the range is from 3 to 11 isn't much. What's your error band?
(And you know the reason that NV is so high is because of Vegas, right? They have a system of hiring stage crew and backup singers for semi-permanent gigs which come and go all the time. That and it's a big boom or bust town. When times are good, people go gamble. When times are bad, it's nice to know that most people cut back on the trips to Vegas. Sucks for the kids growing up in Vegas though. But anyway, there are real-world reasons for statistical trends. )
Of the 25 states with the lowest unemployment, 13 are right to work states.
Another way of saying that would be HALF. (depending on how you round it)
So, you know, facts and figures are a good thing. But they don't particularly leap up and put your opponent in a full nelson. Declaring that there's a "clear correlation" is probably what got your your troll mod.
That or you pissed in the union guy's cornflakes.
The point just before we whip out the Molotov cocktails and metaphorical pitchforks. It's perfectly understandable for people to be nervous about this sort of thing. And rightly so. That little bit with it being voluntary makes a WORLD of difference.
The slippery slope argument is not arguing that we should go back, merely that we shouldn't go any further.
Also remember that GATTACA is a utopia. For most people.
As is perfectly your right. If it were any other way, it wouldn't be voluntary, now would it?
And you're right, this did not work as expected. But it worked. So there's some cheering going on. Br.
Me though? That little bit in there with it being voluntary makes it just SO much better that I might consider it. (They destroy all the samples and data afterwards, right?)
SAN FRANCISCO, May 7, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Diamond Foods, Inc. (Nasdaq:DMND) ("Diamond") today announced the appointment of food and beverage industry veteran Brian J. Driscoll as President and Chief Executive Officer, Link
He left Hostess in March, and got a new job in May. Unless this is some other Brian Driscoll CEO in the food industry...
Ok, so you're wrong on this one. Maybe one of the other 6 CEOs that helped pile-drive hostess in the last year is having trouble getting work. Could be.
But these people aren't betting anything. The system is rigged in their favor, and even if they do a REALLY shitty job, they come out with a million dollar bonus and a new job where they ride the gravy train and get a merit bonuses, or ride the fail train and get another severance bonus. And they'll say there was nothing they could do to help their old company. That it was doomed. And they'll blame a laundry list of factors. They may even be right. But then why the hell are we paying these people so much if they have so little power?
I'm not particularly familiar with the bakers union's contract. Do you know if the run of the mill guy has a severance bonus?
Why do CEOs get severance pay out of the company coffers while workers get unemployment out of the government's coffers?
You know how people complain about the welfare queens that learn how to work the system? Jumping from job to job just long enough to collect unemployment. They're bad employees but not bad enough to get canned until they qualify for the benies. Those people are bad right? Leeches sucking resources out of the system that they're not contributing to.
How does that compare to a CEO that sticks around for less than two years, fails to turn the company around, THE VERY THING HE WAS HIRED TO DO, and leaves with a million dollar bonus?
But no, you're right. A contract is a contract. But why the hell was the CEO's contract so sweet when he did such a bad job?
(Also, I don't actually know if the execs or the union workers were overpaid, just who got raises and who got cuts.)
Which might ultimately be the best thing for the workers.
Getting a CEO that sticks around for more than a year and gets the company to actually make a buck would help the little people.
Really screws over the pensioners though.
Because they as individuals own homes, have families, established roots, and don't want to live as wandering gypsies.
Because they collectivly, the union, work at THESE plants/factories/bakeries? (do they bake twinkies? I thought they were just extruded). Unless you want them to organize some sort of mass exoduse, the bakers union serves the people working at the bakery. Killing the old boss to get a new boss IS how they go work for another company.
I hear what you're saying, and pensions are just fundamentally flawed for a company in decline... But is a 401(k) really better? How much do you trust stock brokers in NY with your future?
Still, the exiting CEO Brian Driscoll taking $1.5 million on his way out, just last March, is kind of a slap in the face when he lead the company to the verge of bankruptcy. Also, executives got raises up to 80% in 2011. What's not fair is that management got raises while simultaneously doing a very poor job, axeing jobs, demanding wage cuts, and screwing over pensioners.
The union striked, the company folded. That sucks. But the real failure here is with management. All this didn't happen over night. They've been headed here for a long time. And with...what... SEVEN CEO's in the last decade? Do you really think anyone has been steering the boat?
Hey, sometimes companies fail. But when that line on the chart starts to encroach on the bottom line it shouldn't be just the workers that take the brunt of the hardship to keep it all afloat. Of course, when you ask a professional like a CEO to take a pay cut, they simply leave (with a bonus) and you have to hire another one. And so you have a death spiral as a procession of CEO fuck shit up. Heaven forbid we get a blue collar guy leading the company.
Hostess also had the problem that they were a declining company that still had the burden of a larger company's pension plan. There's no good solution to that. The pension system doesn't work so well when the size of the company grows and shrinks.
Well, of course the Android has a problem with all the different flavors. Fragmentation is a problem for Google's baby.
Buuuuuuut, if Android is open, of course people are free to fork it, expand it, trim it, and do whatever they want with it. Any action which restricts our ability to do that is... well... wrong.
If they wanted there to be a clear winner, they should just you know, pick one and publicly say "HERE. THIS ONE. THIS GUY RIGHT HERE. HE'S HAS JUST WON THE INTERNET AND HIS VERSION OF THE ANDROID IS THE ONE TRUE FLAVOR! We're not going to give two shits about anyone else's version and we're throwing our weight behind this one. (or two, or twelve, whatever)". And just kind of hope that everyone picks it and a de-facto standard emerges. But the whole "constructive competition" thing is kind of important for the open source.
My first born son has been in the hospital for the last three months. He was born a little early. Let's just say that I'm open to the idea of not going through that again.
Because I detest the consumer-culture. The passively consuming brain-dead herd arguing that Coke is better than Pepsi seems like a barren wasteland of cultural significance. There's no soul there. It's subverting the worth of word-of-mouth advertising. Any sort of producer/maker/business that manages "brands" is too damn big for my tastes. They buy and sell popularity like it's a commodity rather than something they earn through making quality products. They want that free advertising, and I see no reason to give it to them.
"Paying for my post"? Dude, you don't thank the alcoholic at the bar for keeping it afloat. (And if you do, it's an ironic sort of gallows humor which makes you an ass). Now don't get me wrong, I'm a raging hypocrite here. I enjoy my soda of choice even though they sink a lot of money into advertising and steering their brand. And I have eaten at those chain restaurants that serve overpriced food with all the shit on the walls. I've bought a lot of stuff from ThinkGeek (back when that supported Slashdot). So me, right here, I'm supporting the very brands I'm rallying against. But I wish they'd fire their whole marketing division and cut $0.05 off the final cost to me.
In short, fuck marketers. And fuck the people who swallow their shit and ask for seconds.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... everyone? "Machines" are pretty generalized. A single farmer runs a combine the size of a barn now a days. They're so big and so modern they mostly drive themselves. But that's food. Machines help reduce the manpower to make food. Who buys food? Everyone.
Oh goody, you found the mechaninism that funnels wealth from the middle class to the rich. You must be the pride of [subjects home town].
The whole "fiscal cliff" doom the fox network is spreading
NPR has been touting the term as well and preaching about how bad it's going to be.
"what if military spending isn't the problem?"
Yes it can be cut. But even if we completely eliminated it we'd still be on a path to bankruptcy
Of course it isn't the problem. It's a problem, one of many, the same way that EVERY expense out of the budget is a problem. And every source of income is a (partial) solution.
And of course we can't simply axe it all. We NEED a military. The same way that we NEED to pay our debts and to educate our young. Doing without would be disastrous.
Also, I love how foxnews and the old folgies bitch about the "entitlement generation", but the term they decided to use overlaps with the congress's budget entitlements. Which consists mainly of:
1: Debt. ie, people and nations investing in the USA. And earning interest. By definition, the wealthy.
2: Social Security. ie, old people. Retiring baby boomers aren't dying at 67 like they used to when they made this system.
3: Everything else that the wealthy old people want to cut out so they can continue to take their SS check and invest it in bonds.
But yeah, we'll have to trim back who gets SS. And it'd help a lot of we sorted out the clusterfuck that is our medical system. But it would also help if we trimmed back the military. Duh.
How about the threat that they automate away the jobs leaving us with a society split into three castes:
1. Those who own the machines
2. Those who make/maintain the machines
3. The vast swath of un-needed humanity.
In a capitalistic society, if there's no demand for you, you have no way to sustain yourself. You will be poor with no real hope of rising out of it.
Companies can invest in a new tools. Say, upgrading hand-crank drills to powered electric drills, or a team of secretaries to Outlook, or a hoarde of line-workers to a robotics system. They do this because it'll make them a buck. The old system cost X, the new system costs X-Y. Y is the benefit of the change. Where does Y go? The (ex)workers? The company? The customers? What percentage goes where?
The important thing to remember though, is that getting robots/computers to do our work for us is progress. It's literally making a better system. But you have to think about the consequences of changing the system.
Right, the mind is a muscle. Exercise it and learn everything you can, it'll make you smart. And if you're smart you'll get tracked into the honor system or bumped up to the fancy school. And if you do well there, you'll get the scholarships and acceptance letters from the good universities. With a degree that matter and a good GPA, your first job will be the exciting and engaging sort which pays the big bucks. Overall you'll be successful. So study up kids, because this shit is important.
Likewise, on the flip-side, if you relax and take whatever grade they give you, you'll be tracked as one of the dumb kids and most teachers will simply give up on you. (That's not official, and there are a lot of good exceptions, but it's pretty common). Post highschool, you can always get a loan, or use daddy's money, to get into a third-rate school and take an easy degree. If you graduate or no, work will be tougher to find (although it's largely a factor of how the economy is doing that decade) and good luck getting work in the field you actually studied. So you'll compromise and take a job pushing office papers, or menial labor. You can get by, but it's harder, and statistically a larger percentage of that lot will crack under the pressure and drop out of society. There's always a chance you'll get your shit together and start working hard and be one of those rags-to-riches stories, but their rarity is what makes them a story.
Fun fact: There's a massive sliding scale between these two points. It even extrapolates beyond!
Dead aliens would be too big of a story for NASA to be promoting in this way.
As long as you get the job you want it absolutely doesn't matter what the degree was in or what your GPA was.
As long as you get into the university you want it absolutely doesn't matter what your highscool GPA was or what AP classes you took.
As long as you get tracked into the honor system or get into the prestigious highschool, it doesn't matter how smart you looked in jr. high
So what do you tell the kids when they ask you if schoolwork is important?
As long as you get the job you want it absolutely doesn't matter what your degree is or what your GPA was.
As long as you get into the university you want it absolutely doesn't matter what your highschool GPA was or what AP classes you took.
As long as you get tracked into the honors system or get into the prestigious highschool, it doesn't matter how smart you look in jr. high.
So what do you say when a jr. high kid asks you if schoolwork is important?
Haven't you heard? They're in binders now.
This and double this. A lot of people confess to things they didn't do. It's not just the mentally ill off their drugs. If the cops suspect you've done something they will grill you like it's their professional job. They'll claim any number of lies about what your future looks like, what evidence they have, and what the best course of action would be for you. You'll be faced with DECADES in prison vs a few years of probation because "you cooperated".
All that said, DNA test aren't the loose guesstimation that finger-print reading has been in the past. They have a false-positive rate, but I'm pretty sure they could just run it again. Scientific authorities are actually pretty authoritative. They're also usually not the ones in charge.
(And you know the reason that NV is so high is because of Vegas, right? They have a system of hiring stage crew and backup singers for semi-permanent gigs which come and go all the time. That and it's a big boom or bust town. When times are good, people go gamble. When times are bad, it's nice to know that most people cut back on the trips to Vegas. Sucks for the kids growing up in Vegas though. But anyway, there are real-world reasons for statistical trends. )
Of the 25 states with the lowest unemployment, 13 are right to work states.
Another way of saying that would be HALF. (depending on how you round it)
So, you know, facts and figures are a good thing. But they don't particularly leap up and put your opponent in a full nelson. Declaring that there's a "clear correlation" is probably what got your your troll mod.
That or you pissed in the union guy's cornflakes.
But when does it stop being voluntary?
The point just before we whip out the Molotov cocktails and metaphorical pitchforks.
It's perfectly understandable for people to be nervous about this sort of thing. And rightly so. That little bit with it being voluntary makes a WORLD of difference.
The slippery slope argument is not arguing that we should go back, merely that we shouldn't go any further.
Also remember that GATTACA is a utopia. For most people.
Pointed out elsewhere: ...cigarette lighter found in Vaatstra's bag which contains dna traces that match the traces found on the schoolgirl's body. "
"
You want my DNA? Come back with a court order.
As is perfectly your right. If it were any other way, it wouldn't be voluntary, now would it?
And you're right, this did not work as expected. But it worked. So there's some cheering going on.
Br. Me though? That little bit in there with it being voluntary makes it just SO much better that I might consider it. (They destroy all the samples and data afterwards, right?)
SAN FRANCISCO, May 7, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Diamond Foods, Inc. (Nasdaq:DMND) ("Diamond") today announced the appointment of food and beverage industry veteran Brian J. Driscoll as President and Chief Executive Officer,
Link
He left Hostess in March, and got a new job in May. Unless this is some other Brian Driscoll CEO in the food industry...
Ok, so you're wrong on this one. Maybe one of the other 6 CEOs that helped pile-drive hostess in the last year is having trouble getting work. Could be.
But these people aren't betting anything. The system is rigged in their favor, and even if they do a REALLY shitty job, they come out with a million dollar bonus and a new job where they ride the gravy train and get a merit bonuses, or ride the fail train and get another severance bonus. And they'll say there was nothing they could do to help their old company. That it was doomed. And they'll blame a laundry list of factors. They may even be right. But then why the hell are we paying these people so much if they have so little power?
I'm not particularly familiar with the bakers union's contract. Do you know if the run of the mill guy has a severance bonus? Why do CEOs get severance pay out of the company coffers while workers get unemployment out of the government's coffers?
You know how people complain about the welfare queens that learn how to work the system? Jumping from job to job just long enough to collect unemployment. They're bad employees but not bad enough to get canned until they qualify for the benies. Those people are bad right? Leeches sucking resources out of the system that they're not contributing to.
How does that compare to a CEO that sticks around for less than two years, fails to turn the company around, THE VERY THING HE WAS HIRED TO DO, and leaves with a million dollar bonus?
But no, you're right. A contract is a contract. But why the hell was the CEO's contract so sweet when he did such a bad job?
(Also, I don't actually know if the execs or the union workers were overpaid, just who got raises and who got cuts.)
Which might ultimately be the best thing for the workers.
Getting a CEO that sticks around for more than a year and gets the company to actually make a buck would help the little people.
Really screws over the pensioners though.
Ah! BLACKLISTS. That'll teach them thar unions!
Because they as individuals own homes, have families, established roots, and don't want to live as wandering gypsies.
Because they collectivly, the union, work at THESE plants/factories/bakeries? (do they bake twinkies? I thought they were just extruded). Unless you want them to organize some sort of mass exoduse, the bakers union serves the people working at the bakery. Killing the old boss to get a new boss IS how they go work for another company.
I hear what you're saying, and pensions are just fundamentally flawed for a company in decline... But is a 401(k) really better? How much do you trust stock brokers in NY with your future?
Still, the exiting CEO Brian Driscoll taking $1.5 million on his way out, just last March, is kind of a slap in the face when he lead the company to the verge of bankruptcy. Also, executives got raises up to 80% in 2011. What's not fair is that management got raises while simultaneously doing a very poor job, axeing jobs, demanding wage cuts, and screwing over pensioners.
The union striked, the company folded. That sucks. But the real failure here is with management. All this didn't happen over night. They've been headed here for a long time. And with...what... SEVEN CEO's in the last decade? Do you really think anyone has been steering the boat?
Hey, sometimes companies fail. But when that line on the chart starts to encroach on the bottom line it shouldn't be just the workers that take the brunt of the hardship to keep it all afloat. Of course, when you ask a professional like a CEO to take a pay cut, they simply leave (with a bonus) and you have to hire another one. And so you have a death spiral as a procession of CEO fuck shit up. Heaven forbid we get a blue collar guy leading the company.
Hostess also had the problem that they were a declining company that still had the burden of a larger company's pension plan. There's no good solution to that. The pension system doesn't work so well when the size of the company grows and shrinks.
Well, of course the Android has a problem with all the different flavors. Fragmentation is a problem for Google's baby.
Buuuuuuut, if Android is open, of course people are free to fork it, expand it, trim it, and do whatever they want with it. Any action which restricts our ability to do that is... well... wrong.
If they wanted there to be a clear winner, they should just you know, pick one and publicly say "HERE. THIS ONE. THIS GUY RIGHT HERE. HE'S HAS JUST WON THE INTERNET AND HIS VERSION OF THE ANDROID IS THE ONE TRUE FLAVOR! We're not going to give two shits about anyone else's version and we're throwing our weight behind this one. (or two, or twelve, whatever)". And just kind of hope that everyone picks it and a de-facto standard emerges. But the whole "constructive competition" thing is kind of important for the open source.
You, uh... never read the rest of the series did you?
Because that's a horrible way to talk about your wife. The Bene Tleilax are masters of the genome, their Axolotl tanks are women.
My first born son has been in the hospital for the last three months. He was born a little early. Let's just say that I'm open to the idea of not going through that again.
Because I detest the consumer-culture. The passively consuming brain-dead herd arguing that Coke is better than Pepsi seems like a barren wasteland of cultural significance. There's no soul there. It's subverting the worth of word-of-mouth advertising. Any sort of producer/maker/business that manages "brands" is too damn big for my tastes. They buy and sell popularity like it's a commodity rather than something they earn through making quality products. They want that free advertising, and I see no reason to give it to them.
"Paying for my post"? Dude, you don't thank the alcoholic at the bar for keeping it afloat. (And if you do, it's an ironic sort of gallows humor which makes you an ass). Now don't get me wrong, I'm a raging hypocrite here. I enjoy my soda of choice even though they sink a lot of money into advertising and steering their brand. And I have eaten at those chain restaurants that serve overpriced food with all the shit on the walls. I've bought a lot of stuff from ThinkGeek (back when that supported Slashdot). So me, right here, I'm supporting the very brands I'm rallying against. But I wish they'd fire their whole marketing division and cut $0.05 off the final cost to me.
In short, fuck marketers. And fuck the people who swallow their shit and ask for seconds.