The US has spent at least the last decade hoovering data and penetrating networks on a global scale, including the ability to tap undersea fiber optics, intercepting and backdooring hardware shipments, and been tied to destroying airgapped centerfuges with a computer virus and even possibly knocking North Korea off the internet briefly.
And those are things we know about. Then there's other, unlevel playing field options like a global special forces capability to gain clandestine physical access to infrastructure, an entire constellation of satellites and until very recently the ability to fly into space and take or modify satellites.
Unfortunately it works even when you don't want it to work.
I've been "trained" by people who had every incentive to train me well, but they were just terrible at it. Some yak too much about bullshit (which is worse if you have some rapport with them, worse yet if you know and like them), some are just bad at explaining things, some weren't that good at their job to begin with. And many IT jobs involve so many intangibles that technical knowledge isn't the issue, it's figuring out fucked up politics and 1001 broken workflows and unstated management expectations.
And then I've been on the training end of it, where training somebody else was to my absolute benefit and had miserable outcomes. Sometimes it's just my lack of teaching ability (I refuse to coach any of my son's youth sports for this reason, and my wife wants to divorce me whenever she can't figure something out on her computer). Sometimes the person's just not at the right level of expertise -- management usually has multiple incentives to hire someone with less experience. And sometimes its the intangibles of a specific job and employer, things that defy documentation or obvious rational reasoning or have dependencies you couldn't fix.
And that's when everyone WANTS to play ball, speaks the same language, eats the same food and maybe even has inside experience at the same job.
Now, add conflict (losing your job), stress (ditto), cultural differences, language barriers and everything else associated with a forced transition. How does it ever work out right?
if they start doing part of your job while you are training them badly, the folks you report to will likely notice.
I mean, what are they gonna do, fire you? You're already making me train my replacement and you're going to complain about their poor performance and try and hold me accountable? That's laughable. If you were willing to shitcan me without whatever it is I know, you would have done it already. At this stage you need me bad enough that nitpicky performance questions aren't likely to be on the table. And if they are, then go ahead, fire me. I'll take unemployment for $200, Alex. You'll never demonstrate termination for cause after at (likely coercive) separation agreement has been signed unless I show up high on mescaline, waving a gun and exposing myself.
The absolute best management is hoping for is anything they can get OTHER than a cold transition to outsiders, especially contractors. Because that option was available up front and was free. But someone up the food chain has a hard on for making their little outsourcing plan work, so they're desperate for any advantage they can get. Marginal training is better than no training.
It's not sabotage and you could never prove it without documentary evidence of a deliberate conspiracy.
I'm not a trainer or an educator. I have no background in training. Presumably any reasonable job in IT involves a lot of fairly complex skills which I am not competent to instruct others on doing in anything but an informal manner, especially under the duress of a looming and forced period of unemployment.
I did a shitty job of training? Probably at least as shitty as I do plumbing, haircuts, landing an airplane or any other skilled task which I am not specifically trained to do. You have to have a college degree and a license to teach children to count to 10, and you expect perfection when I train someone, particularly from a foreign country less skilled in English, in how to do my job?
Fuck you. Fuck you for importing people to do a job so you can get rich(er), fuck you for treating my career keeping your under-capitalized IT system running as if it was a cookie recipe. How about you train me to do your job asshole? Oh, that's right, executives have innate magical skills that warrant six figure salaries and incentives.
If your 6 rupees for a dozen replacements do a terrible job, don't blame my training for being inadequate.
I would say, after extensive testing, that acid doesn't make you believe anything you're not predisposed to believe.
I would say it does give you a sense that some things are extremely profound, but we could never remember what the hell it was the next day. A portable cassette recorder was employed during one session and all that resulted was incoherent babbling and laughter.
We did run into one of the well-known, silver tongued campus preachers one time. We must have spent 2 hours talking to him, and I don't remember anything profound until a physics PhD candidate showed up and joined the conversation.
Crooked politicians. Tax evasion. A hidden class of above the law plutocrats.
None of this seems surprising. Even the usual suspects turn up, such as Putin and his inner circle. The official from Iceland was the most interesting thing, mostly because Iceland.
Did anyone think differently, an "oh shit, the politicians are dirty, people are evading taxes, my reality has been fractured" kind of moment when they read about this?
I'm pretty sure the male figure from any romance cover could be photoshopped into quite a few propaganda posters. Nearly every ideology has had a series of posters that showed a bare-cheasted, muscle-bound national hero in some role or other.
It's not just fascists, either, Soviet and American propaganda has used the same trope.
I'm not sure you'd have to do more than contractually prohibit sale and make some kind of token effort at enforcing flagrant violations.
What would be amusing is if major IP holders actually made an effort to embargo sales in that district on purpose. One, the court would lose influence, and two, the morons that live there might pressure their elected representatives to not have a kangaroo court.
While I agree that it seems that oil and gas and middle east politics are intractably linked, there's probably a reasonable argument to be made for other national security interests beside that, as well as broader national security arguments to be made over "energy security" and its impact on the entire economy.
We're *all* stakeholders in the political economy of energy cost and availability. I'd kind of like to be able to heat my house in the winter, cook food and not have the price of food be half of my income, or deal with the social instability that would come from broad problems with all of the above.
Let's say your a product maker and you decide to prohibit the sale of your product in the geographical area of the Eastern District of Texas -- a contractual agreement with every buyer that says this product may not be made available to any customer residing within this district. And you went the extra mile to actually enforce it, secret shopping resellers to make sure they were enforcing this provision and enforcing contract terms than penalized it, and all the various documentation that says you don't sell it there and are willing to cut off customers who defy this contract.
Would you be able to claim exemption from a case filed in this district, since you could say that any litigant had not experienced harm in that district due to the lack of availability of the product in question?
And by subsidies, I mean specific transfer payments to the oil/gas industry or specific tax credits offered to the oil/gas industry. Things that make direct contributions to the oil and gas industry bottom line and allow them to sell the product at a higher margin.
I'm less interested in hearing about indirect costs of greenhouse gas emissions, etc. I believe these are real costs to society as a whole, so it's less clear whether the oil/gas industry should pay for these costs or whether they should be charged at the retail level to consumers of the product who actually do the emitting.
I'd guess that people given very low dose tablets in a controlled (from a doctor, small quantities) way wouldn't spiral out of control, at least not most of them. My guess is that a threshold dose of about 2.5 mg oxycodone would provide enough euphoric effect to make people feel like they were getting some value out of it without providing enough to be overly euphoric.
It'd be very hard to get very high with that size dose, and with limited quantities and dosing instructions advising only every 8 hours or something, the half-life would make it difficult to develop much if any actual physical addiction.
Now, this is for most people -- will there be corner cases of abuse? Sure, some people will *try* get addicted, some people will simply have genetic predispositions that make them addicted. But limited how much you hand out per visit and how often you're willing to give it out will also hinder development of a lot of accidental addictions.
And even if it became actually habit forming, you're still talking about something that could mostly be safely used for decades, and by that time a lot of the people who got it may be dead from other unrelated diseases or stop using it for other reasons.
I've been to urgent care clinics outside of the normal bankers hours a doctors office has been open and more than once gotten a doctor who is very likely an immigrant -- heavily accented English, age of 40-55, etc.
I suppose they *could* have immigrated and gone to medical school in the US, but that seems like an awfully difficult process. I always assumed they were doctors who came to the US with medical degrees and jumped through whatever hoops they had to jump through to get credentialed in the US.
They probably had limited employment opportunities (accent, questions of credential quality which may or may not be justified, etc) so they found work at the urgent care clinic.
The care I needed was minor and they were just fine. I liked the Ukrainian woman better than the guy from India.
A friend's wife is senior management with a hospital system and we were talking about some of the impossible challenges of medical care and cost.
I kind of wondered if more opiates, doled out in small doses & quantities, wasn't actually partly the answer.
1) Pacifies the hypochondriacs and people with vague and poorly defined "symptoms" who end up getting a bunch of expensive tests to rule out rare conditions they don't have. They go home, feel better from the opiates and maybe find something else to be distracted about because they feel better. Eliminates a lot of doctor time, lab time and expensive time on limited access equipment like MRIs.
2) Masks symptoms in people who have chronic conditions and have no actual cure. These people may have expensive and marginally effective therapies for what actually ails them, but quite often these are expensive drugs, demanding physical therapies or other treatments that don't much improve their actual condition or how they feel and won't cure them anyway. A lot of the time is strikes me that these people are on expensive medications with weird side effects and marginal primary effects whose principal value seems to be they aren't opiates.
OK, there would be downsides, some of these people would develop low-level habits, but that's where the small doses and quantities part comes in. Given opiates under managed conditions, most would not spiral into raging junkies and many may actually experience an improved quality of life because they *feel* better. Even if they did have low-level, maintenance habits they could be on opiates for years without any significant side effects, and as drugs they are dirt cheap.
The up side is that a lot of people who clog the medical system with non-problems and conditions that mainly need to be managed to keep them living functional lives, probably saving a bunch of money and resources for people with treatable or more life-threatening conditions.
In a way, it's kind of a rationing of medical resources but with potential state-of-mind improvement for those rationed out of the system.
I think the slow maturation of humans makes cannibalism a poor food choice. I think a lot of livestock is a year or less to get to butchering weight. Humans, 15 years to get to full size? 9 months gestation?
This dawned on me during a repeat viewing of Soylent Green. Soylent Green may have been reasonable to buy a few years of foodstock while simultaneously thinning the population, but eventually it wouldn't sustain the population without some other external inputs.
Rome in particular is a questionable example of that logic.
First of all, was it even migration necessarily? Roman citizenship used to be limited to classes of people who actually came from the city itself. As time passed, the class of people who could be citizens and further regions of the empire were granted citizenship.
Many of the "migrants" who moved to Rome weren't migrants, but slaves brought to Rome after conquest of new territories. And I've also read a logic employed similarly to support contemporary immigration that they brought with them things that were appropriated by Rome for its own benefit, not to mention the labor value needed to support a growing civilization and city-state.
Plus by about 100 CE the Empire was geographically quite large, raising the question as to how much was migration and how much was just Romanized people moving around the existing empire. You don't think of people moving to Florida from Minnesota as necessarily a destabilizing form of migration, and a lot of the people who may have moved from Gaul to Rome were already living as Romans, speaking Latin and living in Roman cities in the provinces.
Some of Rome's problems in the late Republican period were due to mass migrations that had nothing to do with Rome. The Cimbrian wars were caused by mass migrations from Germania into Northern Italy, migrations that continued destabilizing the greater Roman frontier and largely serving to motivate Caesar's conquest of Gaul, which for better or for worse sorted out and pacified the regional conflicts of mass migrations into Gaul for at least a century if not longer.
To the extent that later mass migrations resulted in the fall of Rome, it's probably a better explanation that Rome had other problems, such as internal corruption and an economic structure that weakened the state and made a large frontier structurally unsupportable.
I know what you mean, but older workers can still learn new things. They may have experience that's still relevant in other fields.
See, I think this is true but I don't believe that most *employers* think it's true. I mean, there are guys who are really talented at some $programming_language who can't get hired in a job for $some_other_language because they have no work history despite the obvious overlaps in skills.
And the further you go from the specifics of what you used to do to what the new job wants, the less those skills are valued even though the older worker's general life experience and accumulated wisdom has to be worth something. I work with some talented people much younger than I am, but they make higher-order mistakes I don't anymore because I've learned that lesson.
the idea of starting at the bottom, working alongside and competing with 23 year-olds
Yeah, but let's say you were doing something technically oriented and then you could get trained to do some kind of coding. How do you compete in a work environment structured around 23 year olds willing to do death march 60 hour weeks? Neither my body nor my family could accommodate that?
We tend to act as though people who are unemployed deserve to be unemployed-- that they're lazy, stupid, or inherently worthless-- and that there's no reason to do anything to help them.
I think this is a huge problem and there a lot of employers who won't hire someone who is unemployed for any reason. They're like "XYZ laid them off when they restructured -- must be a reason they got fired, but other people didn't. The skills and experience are good, but there's probably some liability there."
However, in a world where there just aren't enough jobs to go around, we may have to look into some way of allowing those people a livable lifestyle (e.g. minimum guaranteed income).
I think ultimately this has to be part of the solution. I wish there was a straightforward way to tax employers who offshore or outsource or otherwise dump employees and make higher profits as they end up socializing the costs of their increased profitability. It would act as a disincentive to doing this, but the reality is quite often its that or the business is no longer viable, which is why I think there should be some kind of general unemployment tax split between workers and employers that would fund a longer term unemployment compensation so that business kind of pays up front for the ability to unload workers on society for their own benefit.
It might also make sense to just combine this with retirement savings plans so that it becomes a retirement/unemployment savings plan that workers could tap for income replacement when unemployed and without penalty and at least at reduced levels of taxation.
So I think there's still a question: As we make jobs obsolete through technology, what do we do with the people who lose their jobs? In the short-term, I think it would make sense to focus on have cheap/free job training to allow them to move to other jobs and other industries.
Training makes sense on the surface, but then you run into the older workers who have to start over on a new career path. Maybe this is hard but doable for workers in their 30s, but for workers in their 50s you might categorize it as extremely difficult and likely not practical.
The best solution I could think of would be an increased unemployment insurance tax (split 25-75 between employees and employers) which would fund training for unemployed workers. Workers over 50 would get some kind of long term unemployment compensation and the ability to tap retirement funds free of taxation and penalties.
While more taxes isn't great, the reality is that by obsoleting classes of workers who will at best be under employed if not unemployed, we're creating costs and losing out on tax revenue and economic productivity. The costs are being socialized while many of the gains privatized.
Plumbing is my least favorite trade to freelance on at home.
It inevitably involves a mess, at best just water, at worst, the icky insides of drains. It almost always seems to involve really confined spaces (under sinks and other hard to reach places).
I'll attempt small repairs or simple things, but I have a very low threshold of failure for it and don't mind calling someone if necessary.
128 GB USB3 drives aren't $8 on Newegg, and I bought the SanDisk UltraFit on purpose because its so small it basically doesn't need to be removed from my laptop in ordinary use, so I can use it with symlinks as an extension of my filesystem.
The price I paid on Amazon is the same as Newegg charges, it came in 2 days and I didn't pay shipping.
I just re-watched the Matrix last night and wondered why the Matrix reality had to model our conventional shitty reality when it could have merely presented each body its own perfect reality where it lived a life of never ending pleasure.
Maybe it's a question of human neuropsychology that this wouldn't work (I think an Agent Smith said there was something about humans like this) or perhaps even the machines lack the ability to effectively simulate humans for other humans in the Matrix and they rely on actual human brains as kind of processing nodes to create an effective virtual reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the playing field *really* that level?
The US has spent at least the last decade hoovering data and penetrating networks on a global scale, including the ability to tap undersea fiber optics, intercepting and backdooring hardware shipments, and been tied to destroying airgapped centerfuges with a computer virus and even possibly knocking North Korea off the internet briefly.
And those are things we know about. Then there's other, unlevel playing field options like a global special forces capability to gain clandestine physical access to infrastructure, an entire constellation of satellites and until very recently the ability to fly into space and take or modify satellites.
If it keeps perfect time but is just set a minute slow, it will always be wrong.
If it's slow because it loses time, it will eventually wrap around and be right. Now, it might take a very long time, but it will eventually be right.
Unfortunately it works even when you don't want it to work.
I've been "trained" by people who had every incentive to train me well, but they were just terrible at it. Some yak too much about bullshit (which is worse if you have some rapport with them, worse yet if you know and like them), some are just bad at explaining things, some weren't that good at their job to begin with. And many IT jobs involve so many intangibles that technical knowledge isn't the issue, it's figuring out fucked up politics and 1001 broken workflows and unstated management expectations.
And then I've been on the training end of it, where training somebody else was to my absolute benefit and had miserable outcomes. Sometimes it's just my lack of teaching ability (I refuse to coach any of my son's youth sports for this reason, and my wife wants to divorce me whenever she can't figure something out on her computer). Sometimes the person's just not at the right level of expertise -- management usually has multiple incentives to hire someone with less experience. And sometimes its the intangibles of a specific job and employer, things that defy documentation or obvious rational reasoning or have dependencies you couldn't fix.
And that's when everyone WANTS to play ball, speaks the same language, eats the same food and maybe even has inside experience at the same job.
Now, add conflict (losing your job), stress (ditto), cultural differences, language barriers and everything else associated with a forced transition. How does it ever work out right?
if they start doing part of your job while you are training them badly, the folks you report to will likely notice.
I mean, what are they gonna do, fire you? You're already making me train my replacement and you're going to complain about their poor performance and try and hold me accountable? That's laughable. If you were willing to shitcan me without whatever it is I know, you would have done it already. At this stage you need me bad enough that nitpicky performance questions aren't likely to be on the table. And if they are, then go ahead, fire me. I'll take unemployment for $200, Alex. You'll never demonstrate termination for cause after at (likely coercive) separation agreement has been signed unless I show up high on mescaline, waving a gun and exposing myself.
The absolute best management is hoping for is anything they can get OTHER than a cold transition to outsiders, especially contractors. Because that option was available up front and was free. But someone up the food chain has a hard on for making their little outsourcing plan work, so they're desperate for any advantage they can get. Marginal training is better than no training.
It's not sabotage and you could never prove it without documentary evidence of a deliberate conspiracy.
I'm not a trainer or an educator. I have no background in training. Presumably any reasonable job in IT involves a lot of fairly complex skills which I am not competent to instruct others on doing in anything but an informal manner, especially under the duress of a looming and forced period of unemployment.
I did a shitty job of training? Probably at least as shitty as I do plumbing, haircuts, landing an airplane or any other skilled task which I am not specifically trained to do. You have to have a college degree and a license to teach children to count to 10, and you expect perfection when I train someone, particularly from a foreign country less skilled in English, in how to do my job?
Fuck you. Fuck you for importing people to do a job so you can get rich(er), fuck you for treating my career keeping your under-capitalized IT system running as if it was a cookie recipe. How about you train me to do your job asshole? Oh, that's right, executives have innate magical skills that warrant six figure salaries and incentives.
If your 6 rupees for a dozen replacements do a terrible job, don't blame my training for being inadequate.
I would say, after extensive testing, that acid doesn't make you believe anything you're not predisposed to believe.
I would say it does give you a sense that some things are extremely profound, but we could never remember what the hell it was the next day. A portable cassette recorder was employed during one session and all that resulted was incoherent babbling and laughter.
We did run into one of the well-known, silver tongued campus preachers one time. We must have spent 2 hours talking to him, and I don't remember anything profound until a physics PhD candidate showed up and joined the conversation.
The congressional delegations of a given state traditionally have a lot of influence over appointments to their Federal courts.
I'm just trying to figure out a use case for a disposable laser.
The only one I can come up with is some kind of party favor and even then I'm guessing it would need a power source.
It usually seems that any value beyond "ooh, laser" almost always requires some amount of non-disposable electronics that make the laser useful.
Crooked politicians. Tax evasion. A hidden class of above the law plutocrats.
None of this seems surprising. Even the usual suspects turn up, such as Putin and his inner circle. The official from Iceland was the most interesting thing, mostly because Iceland.
Did anyone think differently, an "oh shit, the politicians are dirty, people are evading taxes, my reality has been fractured" kind of moment when they read about this?
I'm pretty sure the male figure from any romance cover could be photoshopped into quite a few propaganda posters. Nearly every ideology has had a series of posters that showed a bare-cheasted, muscle-bound national hero in some role or other.
It's not just fascists, either, Soviet and American propaganda has used the same trope.
I'm not sure you'd have to do more than contractually prohibit sale and make some kind of token effort at enforcing flagrant violations.
What would be amusing is if major IP holders actually made an effort to embargo sales in that district on purpose. One, the court would lose influence, and two, the morons that live there might pressure their elected representatives to not have a kangaroo court.
While I agree that it seems that oil and gas and middle east politics are intractably linked, there's probably a reasonable argument to be made for other national security interests beside that, as well as broader national security arguments to be made over "energy security" and its impact on the entire economy.
We're *all* stakeholders in the political economy of energy cost and availability. I'd kind of like to be able to heat my house in the winter, cook food and not have the price of food be half of my income, or deal with the social instability that would come from broad problems with all of the above.
Let's say your a product maker and you decide to prohibit the sale of your product in the geographical area of the Eastern District of Texas -- a contractual agreement with every buyer that says this product may not be made available to any customer residing within this district. And you went the extra mile to actually enforce it, secret shopping resellers to make sure they were enforcing this provision and enforcing contract terms than penalized it, and all the various documentation that says you don't sell it there and are willing to cut off customers who defy this contract.
Would you be able to claim exemption from a case filed in this district, since you could say that any litigant had not experienced harm in that district due to the lack of availability of the product in question?
And by subsidies, I mean specific transfer payments to the oil/gas industry or specific tax credits offered to the oil/gas industry. Things that make direct contributions to the oil and gas industry bottom line and allow them to sell the product at a higher margin.
I'm less interested in hearing about indirect costs of greenhouse gas emissions, etc. I believe these are real costs to society as a whole, so it's less clear whether the oil/gas industry should pay for these costs or whether they should be charged at the retail level to consumers of the product who actually do the emitting.
I'd guess that people given very low dose tablets in a controlled (from a doctor, small quantities) way wouldn't spiral out of control, at least not most of them. My guess is that a threshold dose of about 2.5 mg oxycodone would provide enough euphoric effect to make people feel like they were getting some value out of it without providing enough to be overly euphoric.
It'd be very hard to get very high with that size dose, and with limited quantities and dosing instructions advising only every 8 hours or something, the half-life would make it difficult to develop much if any actual physical addiction.
Now, this is for most people -- will there be corner cases of abuse? Sure, some people will *try* get addicted, some people will simply have genetic predispositions that make them addicted. But limited how much you hand out per visit and how often you're willing to give it out will also hinder development of a lot of accidental addictions.
And even if it became actually habit forming, you're still talking about something that could mostly be safely used for decades, and by that time a lot of the people who got it may be dead from other unrelated diseases or stop using it for other reasons.
I've been to urgent care clinics outside of the normal bankers hours a doctors office has been open and more than once gotten a doctor who is very likely an immigrant -- heavily accented English, age of 40-55, etc.
I suppose they *could* have immigrated and gone to medical school in the US, but that seems like an awfully difficult process. I always assumed they were doctors who came to the US with medical degrees and jumped through whatever hoops they had to jump through to get credentialed in the US.
They probably had limited employment opportunities (accent, questions of credential quality which may or may not be justified, etc) so they found work at the urgent care clinic.
The care I needed was minor and they were just fine. I liked the Ukrainian woman better than the guy from India.
A friend's wife is senior management with a hospital system and we were talking about some of the impossible challenges of medical care and cost.
I kind of wondered if more opiates, doled out in small doses & quantities, wasn't actually partly the answer.
1) Pacifies the hypochondriacs and people with vague and poorly defined "symptoms" who end up getting a bunch of expensive tests to rule out rare conditions they don't have. They go home, feel better from the opiates and maybe find something else to be distracted about because they feel better. Eliminates a lot of doctor time, lab time and expensive time on limited access equipment like MRIs.
2) Masks symptoms in people who have chronic conditions and have no actual cure. These people may have expensive and marginally effective therapies for what actually ails them, but quite often these are expensive drugs, demanding physical therapies or other treatments that don't much improve their actual condition or how they feel and won't cure them anyway. A lot of the time is strikes me that these people are on expensive medications with weird side effects and marginal primary effects whose principal value seems to be they aren't opiates.
OK, there would be downsides, some of these people would develop low-level habits, but that's where the small doses and quantities part comes in. Given opiates under managed conditions, most would not spiral into raging junkies and many may actually experience an improved quality of life because they *feel* better. Even if they did have low-level, maintenance habits they could be on opiates for years without any significant side effects, and as drugs they are dirt cheap.
The up side is that a lot of people who clog the medical system with non-problems and conditions that mainly need to be managed to keep them living functional lives, probably saving a bunch of money and resources for people with treatable or more life-threatening conditions.
In a way, it's kind of a rationing of medical resources but with potential state-of-mind improvement for those rationed out of the system.
I think the slow maturation of humans makes cannibalism a poor food choice. I think a lot of livestock is a year or less to get to butchering weight. Humans, 15 years to get to full size? 9 months gestation?
This dawned on me during a repeat viewing of Soylent Green. Soylent Green may have been reasonable to buy a few years of foodstock while simultaneously thinning the population, but eventually it wouldn't sustain the population without some other external inputs.
Rome in particular is a questionable example of that logic.
First of all, was it even migration necessarily? Roman citizenship used to be limited to classes of people who actually came from the city itself. As time passed, the class of people who could be citizens and further regions of the empire were granted citizenship.
Many of the "migrants" who moved to Rome weren't migrants, but slaves brought to Rome after conquest of new territories. And I've also read a logic employed similarly to support contemporary immigration that they brought with them things that were appropriated by Rome for its own benefit, not to mention the labor value needed to support a growing civilization and city-state.
Plus by about 100 CE the Empire was geographically quite large, raising the question as to how much was migration and how much was just Romanized people moving around the existing empire. You don't think of people moving to Florida from Minnesota as necessarily a destabilizing form of migration, and a lot of the people who may have moved from Gaul to Rome were already living as Romans, speaking Latin and living in Roman cities in the provinces.
Some of Rome's problems in the late Republican period were due to mass migrations that had nothing to do with Rome. The Cimbrian wars were caused by mass migrations from Germania into Northern Italy, migrations that continued destabilizing the greater Roman frontier and largely serving to motivate Caesar's conquest of Gaul, which for better or for worse sorted out and pacified the regional conflicts of mass migrations into Gaul for at least a century if not longer.
To the extent that later mass migrations resulted in the fall of Rome, it's probably a better explanation that Rome had other problems, such as internal corruption and an economic structure that weakened the state and made a large frontier structurally unsupportable.
I know what you mean, but older workers can still learn new things. They may have experience that's still relevant in other fields.
See, I think this is true but I don't believe that most *employers* think it's true. I mean, there are guys who are really talented at some $programming_language who can't get hired in a job for $some_other_language because they have no work history despite the obvious overlaps in skills.
And the further you go from the specifics of what you used to do to what the new job wants, the less those skills are valued even though the older worker's general life experience and accumulated wisdom has to be worth something. I work with some talented people much younger than I am, but they make higher-order mistakes I don't anymore because I've learned that lesson.
the idea of starting at the bottom, working alongside and competing with 23 year-olds
Yeah, but let's say you were doing something technically oriented and then you could get trained to do some kind of coding. How do you compete in a work environment structured around 23 year olds willing to do death march 60 hour weeks? Neither my body nor my family could accommodate that?
We tend to act as though people who are unemployed deserve to be unemployed-- that they're lazy, stupid, or inherently worthless-- and that there's no reason to do anything to help them.
I think this is a huge problem and there a lot of employers who won't hire someone who is unemployed for any reason. They're like "XYZ laid them off when they restructured -- must be a reason they got fired, but other people didn't. The skills and experience are good, but there's probably some liability there."
However, in a world where there just aren't enough jobs to go around, we may have to look into some way of allowing those people a livable lifestyle (e.g. minimum guaranteed income).
I think ultimately this has to be part of the solution. I wish there was a straightforward way to tax employers who offshore or outsource or otherwise dump employees and make higher profits as they end up socializing the costs of their increased profitability. It would act as a disincentive to doing this, but the reality is quite often its that or the business is no longer viable, which is why I think there should be some kind of general unemployment tax split between workers and employers that would fund a longer term unemployment compensation so that business kind of pays up front for the ability to unload workers on society for their own benefit.
It might also make sense to just combine this with retirement savings plans so that it becomes a retirement/unemployment savings plan that workers could tap for income replacement when unemployed and without penalty and at least at reduced levels of taxation.
Put differently, how many people are going to spend $31 to try out this thing called Linux?
Less than the number of people who will just wipe the USB stick you just gave them without ever booting it and fill it with porn or MP3s.
So I think there's still a question: As we make jobs obsolete through technology, what do we do with the people who lose their jobs? In the short-term, I think it would make sense to focus on have cheap/free job training to allow them to move to other jobs and other industries.
Training makes sense on the surface, but then you run into the older workers who have to start over on a new career path. Maybe this is hard but doable for workers in their 30s, but for workers in their 50s you might categorize it as extremely difficult and likely not practical.
The best solution I could think of would be an increased unemployment insurance tax (split 25-75 between employees and employers) which would fund training for unemployed workers. Workers over 50 would get some kind of long term unemployment compensation and the ability to tap retirement funds free of taxation and penalties.
While more taxes isn't great, the reality is that by obsoleting classes of workers who will at best be under employed if not unemployed, we're creating costs and losing out on tax revenue and economic productivity. The costs are being socialized while many of the gains privatized.
Plumbing is my least favorite trade to freelance on at home.
It inevitably involves a mess, at best just water, at worst, the icky insides of drains. It almost always seems to involve really confined spaces (under sinks and other hard to reach places).
I'll attempt small repairs or simple things, but I have a very low threshold of failure for it and don't mind calling someone if necessary.
You must not have read closely.
128 GB USB3 drives aren't $8 on Newegg, and I bought the SanDisk UltraFit on purpose because its so small it basically doesn't need to be removed from my laptop in ordinary use, so I can use it with symlinks as an extension of my filesystem.
The price I paid on Amazon is the same as Newegg charges, it came in 2 days and I didn't pay shipping.
I mean there's cheap and there's throw them out because you don't like the color cheap.
I just bought a 128 GB SANDisk USB3 stick from Amazon for $31.
How cheap does a 32GB drive need to be to be cheap?
I already think they're cheap enough that I wish Microsoft would quit refusing to install and boot from USB drives as a kind of copy protection.
I just re-watched the Matrix last night and wondered why the Matrix reality had to model our conventional shitty reality when it could have merely presented each body its own perfect reality where it lived a life of never ending pleasure.
Maybe it's a question of human neuropsychology that this wouldn't work (I think an Agent Smith said there was something about humans like this) or perhaps even the machines lack the ability to effectively simulate humans for other humans in the Matrix and they rely on actual human brains as kind of processing nodes to create an effective virtual reality.