Essentially every single large banking and rating agency has at some point crunched the numbers. Governments (and specifically financial ministries) crunch them. Finally, investigative press crunches these numbers as well.
Suggestion for google search terms: real income in US last 20 years. This produces (for me) hits to: Wikipedia and CNN money as first two links that do a pretty decent job of presenting and narrating the basics. By digging deeper you will find press quoting larger financial institutions as well, and those start to get into the actual meat of the issue rather then populist stuff (as they earn money by advising investment, and reduction of real income in large population means readjustment of profits between companies serving these people). Outcome generally depends on what numbers those chose to crunch and what to leave out, and what kind of weight was given to each number.
Finally there's a really good collection of links that will get you started here (as it presents argument in less of a populist and more scientific way): http://people.stern.nyu.edu/nroubini/INEQUALI.HTM
I'm sorry, but I don't have a simple bite-size "truth is here" source. Reality is, modern economy is exceedingly complex and getting numbers on even a small part of it is a full time job of many decently earning people in City and Wall Street. If you're really interested in the subject (and honestly, you should be, this is about the entire context of your ability to enjoy a financially secure life), these will get you started. Do note that most of what you will find is press-filtered, because to get real numbers, the "pay wall" has a whole lot of zeroes as major banks like Goldman Sachs and Nakamura who are probably best (or at least best-informed) number crunchers out there don't do the number crunching for free.
We're talking about two different things now. I was talking about "real income" which is a term often used to describe income adjusted to buying power. You are talking about absolute income.
Extreme example to show the difference: If we were living in Zimbabwe where inflation is such that your decent month's salary that you could live on in the beginning of the month can't buy you a bus ticket at the end of the month, your argument would still hold. Your income would still grow and in fact, grow much faster then in, for example, USA! Your real income however would be likely going down as your buying power, even with monthly increases in salary will simply not keep up with inflation.
In the West, we're do not have such inflation. However we do have inflation as it is required by keynesian economics to keep the economy going, and when taken into account, MEDIAN income FOR MIDDLE CLASS has gone DOWN. That is when you limit yourself to comparing only for middle class, excluding top and bottom earners from the chart. Then your MEDIAN real income is indeed DOWN. Not up.
Exact number depends on how you calculate inflation (i.e. what kind of products you take into account when calculating relative buying power, do you account for technological advances making certain goods cheaper but also outdated such as older computers, etc) and what do you count as middle class, but realistic numbers are typically between 5% and 30% lower real income over last twenty years for middle class. The reason median for entire population is up is that pretty much everyone, even very far right organizations with huge interests in the subject admit that very top 0.1% of population has had an real income increase of several hundred percent.
1. Receiving most of your income from investments 2. Work in a few rare jobs that increased real income (usually leadership position of at least average sized company) 3. Ignore inflation and think that numbers in your account represent absolute rather then relative value.
The point is that at the moment, this isn't truly the case. A small portion of the part that is down is going to the poor countries. A large portion of that part has gone to increase income of richest of our elite as well as massively increased richest elite in the poor countries. This is very visible in things like luxury product sales, such as luxury cars.
I know. The fact also is, I live in a very wealthy and competitive country, and this allows me to stay informed. Middle class income is DOWN over 20% over last twenty years, mainly because of balancing effect of globalization. This trend isn't changing.
The big problem is that the large portion of this wealth hasn't gone to poorer countries, but instead significantly increased the gap incomes inside our (Western) countries and that top class net income has massively increased over the same time period. This is another trend that isn't changing (though it has taken a hit during last two years from global solvency crisis).
You do realize that this has been happening for last twenty years regardless of our agreement? Real income of middle class in US and Western countries (Western European countries, Japan, Australia, etc) is down over 20% over last twenty years. That's what globalization has done.
It is a fact that if we redistributed wealth so that top 1% earners (world wide) would go down to at maximum 10 times of current middle class earner's earnings, we could make everyone on the planet have the same level of life as current middle class in in a couple of decades.
OP's argument is that if we don't do it ourselves, either some disgruntled teen, or an organization built on hatred towards our system will build and release a genetically targeted plague that will wipe out most of the 1% (likely alongside most of the white populace), effectively forcing such redistribution. I.e. it's not about whether it's sociologically possible under current model of governance, but that it's inevitable in face of progress to either be done so pre-emptively or be forced.
That said, we're not really that good at predicting how technology eventually impacts our lives. We can only hypothesize, and for example the age of internet which started as "we can bring freedom to everyone though borderlessness" has now fast becoming a detailed database on everyone that Stasi could only dream on having (social networking, Chinese great firewall, Palantir's tools for NSA/CIA, etc). Therefore it's entirely feasible that instead of redistribution of wealth we will instead have people on top improve their stranglehold on resources and even more poor masses fight bloody wars among themselves for slim pickings left to them.
Every single antibiotic is a form of poison. They are designed to poison the target bacteria. Good antibiotics are ones that are poisonous to target bacterial cells, but not to human cells. These are rare - most are usually at least lightly poisonous to some human cells (typically liver and kidney cells are most impacted, as they are the ones that metabolize poisons out of human body). Most antibiotics are poisonous to some human cells as well, but not poisonous enough to cause permanent harm. This is why doctors advise against strenuous activity when on antibiotics. Such activity increases metabolism, which in turn increases the effect of the mild poison on human liver and kidney cells which will metabolize the poison (antibiotic) out.
"Antibiotic immunity" means that bacteria evolves to become immune or highly resistant to poisonous effect of antibiotic. That forces us to use antibiotics that are progressively more harmful to human cells so that they stay poisonous enough to impact the target bacteria. Eventually we run out of options on antibiotics that are acceptably poisonous to human kidney and liver cells, and move to level where they become lethal to these organs as a whole. In other words, some of the modern "last line" antibiotics designed to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria are lethal to humans if taken for a reasonable amount of time (in some cases, this takes less then a week).
In a nutshell: antibiotic is a poison that (preferably) targets biochemical pathways that are not as important to human cells as they are to target bacterial/microbial cells. The so called "last line" antibiotics sacrifice the relative harmlessness to human cells to remain poisonous to target bacteria that has evolved immunity or high levels of resistance to other poisons (antibiotics). In fact, the very name tells you that it's poison: "anti biotic". It's just aimed to be chiefly poisonous to microbes instead of large organisms such as humans.
This is a silly claim. There are antibiotics that can kill most of the resistant bacteria. We know many of them. Problem is, they also kill the host when host is human, typically by destroying kidneys or liver.
It's not that we don't have the tools to kill these "super germs". We do. We just don't have the tools that kill the germs without killing the humans. Essentially we're paving the path for bacteria that adapt to antibiotics as a threat to their existence by remaining/becoming vulnerable to antibiotics that destroy various internal organs, and becoming resistant to those that do not.
It's UK issue. Most EU countries have similar agreements about extradition of criminals with USA, however they, just like USA itself have a provision which blocks extradition for acts that are not crimes in the host country.
UK for some (read: political) reasons did not add such provision. Funnily, USA did add the same provision to the very same paper on THEIR end. As a result, you have this utterly insane political problem, where UK citizens can be extradited to USA for acts that aren't classified as crimes in UK. At the same time, USA citizens cannot be extradited to UK for same reason. And rest of EU does not have this problem.
You missed the "mass patenting of everything even remotely patentable" which means that anyone would have to sift through incredible amounts of patents and perform analysis on them to figure out if they're infringing. This isn't viable even for major corporations with massive resources. How do you expect it to be viable for anyone?
When you're threatening someone with patent case, you are required to tell that entity what you're threatening them with if you act in accordance with original spirit of patenting. Threatening with "we will not tell you" patents is against that spirit, and hence unethical.
The basis behind original idea of patenting requires openness about what is actually patented, so that other inventors can either plan to incorporate your inventions into theirs (and pay you for it) or plan their inventions not to infringe on your patents.
By obfuscating which patents are being infringed on, microsoft's behavior becomes unethical, as they are going against the aforementioned purpose of patents, making it harder for companies not directly involved to plan their current and future inventions.
Unfortunately this "patent obfuscation" combined with "mass patenting of everything even remotely patentable", while unethical, has become modus operandi. Inventors not only cannot easily check which patents they may be infringing upon, they can't even ask a company with patents if they are infringing and if they are, what exactly they're infringing upon (so they could plan on either incorporating or going around the said patents)!
You can if you have a good noise/echo canceler. It will essentially read audio that is going out TV, and cancel it for anything being input via microphone in TV.
Iirc you see various implementations of this technology in things like loudspeaker systems for telephony and conferencing.
Not only this, but mozilla officially stated in their blog that they will actively work to prevent people from getting ESR version, so only the corporations have access to it "because it shouldn't be the fix for add-on breaking problem".
Basically, "you will have the problems we shove down your throats and you will like them", once again.
Problem is, people tend to focus on the aspect they're strong at, ignore one they're weak at and think those who are weak at their aspect of choice are idiots. Of course, these people think original person is an idiot at their chosen aspect.
So everyone thinks everyone who has different focus from them to be an idiot. And everyone is right.
There are, but if you read the article, his problem is learning curve and the fact that if he's disconnected from the working machine and something is wrong, he can't call for help.
I really suggest reading the articles linked. They are far more interesting then average stuff you get on slashdot and it answers a lot of questions as to "why is he still using this dated stuff". Especially the part that notes that when someone pitching a new system is in the room, Hawking's talking speed goes up because of his competitiveness and stubbornness.
1. Fallout 2. Contamination area 3. Devastation of infrastructure 4. "Beheading element" (look up NATO doctrine vs USSR)
A couple of nukes that hit their targets in US would be very close to MAD, and definitely dangerous enough to warrant a place in "don't piss them off enough to start shooting those missiles" club.
Of course, a couple of nukes that actually hit their targets in continental US are not a simple thing to make. You need a working, relatively accurate ballistic missile, and those are very difficult to design without proper know-how and resources, as North Korea's and Iran's struggles with the subject showed.
Blocking EFF is all but certainly collateral. The list was given by authorities, and they have a history with messing this stuff up in the past, such as blocking activist sites when making child porn block lists. In general, police around here prefers not to piss people off without reason, it's a cultural thing. Police is very respected here in Finland, in large part because it makes an effort no to abuse its rights.
We're finns are far more confused as to why this blocking order went through in the first place as there is a known ECJ decision which specifically makes such block lists illegal and finnish courts take painstaking effort to be in compliance with ECJ. Sound like our justice system did something that it's known to do at times again - be slow as hell. We have several convicting judgments from ECJ in relation to "people not getting their business done in court in timely matter" unfortunately, and this seems to be one of them, as ECJ's decision came in the end of 2011.
I guess the latin confused you. It's common for people who do not understand that some issues involve physics too complex for them to understand. So they get opinionated, get on their high horse, and truly believe they are right.
Facts will not dissuade them, like they don't dissuade you. Never mind power will need to be produced. Never mind nuclear is at the moment the least dangerous source of power by FAR, in terms of casualties (including Fukushima) per generated power. But apparently that is irrelevant, because we're talking about that scary nuclear thing you don't really understand. Not understanding being the important part of course, coal burns and looks safe - because you understand it! Coal killing almost ten times more people then nuclear every year during normal operation is... safe!
Problem is that people like you get fanatical about things they do not understand, take it personally, and start calling people with facts on their side "a menace", "godless heretics", "terrorists" "child molesters" and so on. Essentially, pitchforks come out to burn the witch. Discussion and dialogue has no place, because you don't want to discuss anything. You just want to burn the witch. Facts be damned.
Correct. Nuke plants have significantly LONGER lifetimes then most plants.
People who modded you insightful: Sutor, ne supra crepidam. You look about as silly as average person walking into computer shot talking about "processor gigabytes and hard drive gigaherts".
Slashdot Mirror
Essentially every single large banking and rating agency has at some point crunched the numbers. Governments (and specifically financial ministries) crunch them. Finally, investigative press crunches these numbers as well.
Suggestion for google search terms: real income in US last 20 years. This produces (for me) hits to: Wikipedia and CNN money as first two links that do a pretty decent job of presenting and narrating the basics. By digging deeper you will find press quoting larger financial institutions as well, and those start to get into the actual meat of the issue rather then populist stuff (as they earn money by advising investment, and reduction of real income in large population means readjustment of profits between companies serving these people). Outcome generally depends on what numbers those chose to crunch and what to leave out, and what kind of weight was given to each number.
Finally there's a really good collection of links that will get you started here (as it presents argument in less of a populist and more scientific way): http://people.stern.nyu.edu/nroubini/INEQUALI.HTM
I'm sorry, but I don't have a simple bite-size "truth is here" source. Reality is, modern economy is exceedingly complex and getting numbers on even a small part of it is a full time job of many decently earning people in City and Wall Street. If you're really interested in the subject (and honestly, you should be, this is about the entire context of your ability to enjoy a financially secure life), these will get you started. Do note that most of what you will find is press-filtered, because to get real numbers, the "pay wall" has a whole lot of zeroes as major banks like Goldman Sachs and Nakamura who are probably best (or at least best-informed) number crunchers out there don't do the number crunching for free.
We're talking about two different things now. I was talking about "real income" which is a term often used to describe income adjusted to buying power. You are talking about absolute income.
Extreme example to show the difference: If we were living in Zimbabwe where inflation is such that your decent month's salary that you could live on in the beginning of the month can't buy you a bus ticket at the end of the month, your argument would still hold. Your income would still grow and in fact, grow much faster then in, for example, USA! Your real income however would be likely going down as your buying power, even with monthly increases in salary will simply not keep up with inflation.
In the West, we're do not have such inflation. However we do have inflation as it is required by keynesian economics to keep the economy going, and when taken into account, MEDIAN income FOR MIDDLE CLASS has gone DOWN. That is when you limit yourself to comparing only for middle class, excluding top and bottom earners from the chart. Then your MEDIAN real income is indeed DOWN. Not up.
Exact number depends on how you calculate inflation (i.e. what kind of products you take into account when calculating relative buying power, do you account for technological advances making certain goods cheaper but also outdated such as older computers, etc) and what do you count as middle class, but realistic numbers are typically between 5% and 30% lower real income over last twenty years for middle class. The reason median for entire population is up is that pretty much everyone, even very far right organizations with huge interests in the subject admit that very top 0.1% of population has had an real income increase of several hundred percent.
Then you're either:
1. Receiving most of your income from investments
2. Work in a few rare jobs that increased real income (usually leadership position of at least average sized company)
3. Ignore inflation and think that numbers in your account represent absolute rather then relative value.
The point is that at the moment, this isn't truly the case. A small portion of the part that is down is going to the poor countries. A large portion of that part has gone to increase income of richest of our elite as well as massively increased richest elite in the poor countries. This is very visible in things like luxury product sales, such as luxury cars.
Well played. I used "average", you said "median" and I repeated it.
Median income across entire population is up. Median income among middle class is DOWN. Median income among poorest is also DOWN.
Guess who's real income is up during this time?
I know. The fact also is, I live in a very wealthy and competitive country, and this allows me to stay informed. Middle class income is DOWN over 20% over last twenty years, mainly because of balancing effect of globalization. This trend isn't changing.
The big problem is that the large portion of this wealth hasn't gone to poorer countries, but instead significantly increased the gap incomes inside our (Western) countries and that top class net income has massively increased over the same time period. This is another trend that isn't changing (though it has taken a hit during last two years from global solvency crisis).
You do realize that this has been happening for last twenty years regardless of our agreement? Real income of middle class in US and Western countries (Western European countries, Japan, Australia, etc) is down over 20% over last twenty years. That's what globalization has done.
It is a fact that if we redistributed wealth so that top 1% earners (world wide) would go down to at maximum 10 times of current middle class earner's earnings, we could make everyone on the planet have the same level of life as current middle class in in a couple of decades.
OP's argument is that if we don't do it ourselves, either some disgruntled teen, or an organization built on hatred towards our system will build and release a genetically targeted plague that will wipe out most of the 1% (likely alongside most of the white populace), effectively forcing such redistribution. I.e. it's not about whether it's sociologically possible under current model of governance, but that it's inevitable in face of progress to either be done so pre-emptively or be forced.
That said, we're not really that good at predicting how technology eventually impacts our lives. We can only hypothesize, and for example the age of internet which started as "we can bring freedom to everyone though borderlessness" has now fast becoming a detailed database on everyone that Stasi could only dream on having (social networking, Chinese great firewall, Palantir's tools for NSA/CIA, etc). Therefore it's entirely feasible that instead of redistribution of wealth we will instead have people on top improve their stranglehold on resources and even more poor masses fight bloody wars among themselves for slim pickings left to them.
Every single antibiotic is a form of poison. They are designed to poison the target bacteria. Good antibiotics are ones that are poisonous to target bacterial cells, but not to human cells. These are rare - most are usually at least lightly poisonous to some human cells (typically liver and kidney cells are most impacted, as they are the ones that metabolize poisons out of human body). Most antibiotics are poisonous to some human cells as well, but not poisonous enough to cause permanent harm. This is why doctors advise against strenuous activity when on antibiotics. Such activity increases metabolism, which in turn increases the effect of the mild poison on human liver and kidney cells which will metabolize the poison (antibiotic) out.
"Antibiotic immunity" means that bacteria evolves to become immune or highly resistant to poisonous effect of antibiotic. That forces us to use antibiotics that are progressively more harmful to human cells so that they stay poisonous enough to impact the target bacteria. Eventually we run out of options on antibiotics that are acceptably poisonous to human kidney and liver cells, and move to level where they become lethal to these organs as a whole. In other words, some of the modern "last line" antibiotics designed to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria are lethal to humans if taken for a reasonable amount of time (in some cases, this takes less then a week).
In a nutshell: antibiotic is a poison that (preferably) targets biochemical pathways that are not as important to human cells as they are to target bacterial/microbial cells. The so called "last line" antibiotics sacrifice the relative harmlessness to human cells to remain poisonous to target bacteria that has evolved immunity or high levels of resistance to other poisons (antibiotics). In fact, the very name tells you that it's poison: "anti biotic". It's just aimed to be chiefly poisonous to microbes instead of large organisms such as humans.
This is a silly claim. There are antibiotics that can kill most of the resistant bacteria. We know many of them. Problem is, they also kill the host when host is human, typically by destroying kidneys or liver.
It's not that we don't have the tools to kill these "super germs". We do. We just don't have the tools that kill the germs without killing the humans. Essentially we're paving the path for bacteria that adapt to antibiotics as a threat to their existence by remaining/becoming vulnerable to antibiotics that destroy various internal organs, and becoming resistant to those that do not.
It's UK issue. Most EU countries have similar agreements about extradition of criminals with USA, however they, just like USA itself have a provision which blocks extradition for acts that are not crimes in the host country.
UK for some (read: political) reasons did not add such provision. Funnily, USA did add the same provision to the very same paper on THEIR end. As a result, you have this utterly insane political problem, where UK citizens can be extradited to USA for acts that aren't classified as crimes in UK. At the same time, USA citizens cannot be extradited to UK for same reason. And rest of EU does not have this problem.
You missed the "mass patenting of everything even remotely patentable" which means that anyone would have to sift through incredible amounts of patents and perform analysis on them to figure out if they're infringing. This isn't viable even for major corporations with massive resources. How do you expect it to be viable for anyone?
When you're threatening someone with patent case, you are required to tell that entity what you're threatening them with if you act in accordance with original spirit of patenting. Threatening with "we will not tell you" patents is against that spirit, and hence unethical.
The basis behind original idea of patenting requires openness about what is actually patented, so that other inventors can either plan to incorporate your inventions into theirs (and pay you for it) or plan their inventions not to infringe on your patents.
By obfuscating which patents are being infringed on, microsoft's behavior becomes unethical, as they are going against the aforementioned purpose of patents, making it harder for companies not directly involved to plan their current and future inventions.
Unfortunately this "patent obfuscation" combined with "mass patenting of everything even remotely patentable", while unethical, has become modus operandi. Inventors not only cannot easily check which patents they may be infringing upon, they can't even ask a company with patents if they are infringing and if they are, what exactly they're infringing upon (so they could plan on either incorporating or going around the said patents)!
Any person's who believes into officially stated purpose of patents.
You can if you have a good noise/echo canceler. It will essentially read audio that is going out TV, and cancel it for anything being input via microphone in TV.
Iirc you see various implementations of this technology in things like loudspeaker systems for telephony and conferencing.
It is LEGAL but UNETHICAL. In fact there are many laws that are unethical.
Not only this, but mozilla officially stated in their blog that they will actively work to prevent people from getting ESR version, so only the corporations have access to it "because it shouldn't be the fix for add-on breaking problem".
Basically, "you will have the problems we shove down your throats and you will like them", once again.
Problem is, people tend to focus on the aspect they're strong at, ignore one they're weak at and think those who are weak at their aspect of choice are idiots. Of course, these people think original person is an idiot at their chosen aspect.
So everyone thinks everyone who has different focus from them to be an idiot. And everyone is right.
Funny my ass dear mods. That's about as informative as it will ever get on slashdot!
There are, but if you read the article, his problem is learning curve and the fact that if he's disconnected from the working machine and something is wrong, he can't call for help.
I really suggest reading the articles linked. They are far more interesting then average stuff you get on slashdot and it answers a lot of questions as to "why is he still using this dated stuff". Especially the part that notes that when someone pitching a new system is in the room, Hawking's talking speed goes up because of his competitiveness and stubbornness.
Considering:
1. Fallout
2. Contamination area
3. Devastation of infrastructure
4. "Beheading element" (look up NATO doctrine vs USSR)
A couple of nukes that hit their targets in US would be very close to MAD, and definitely dangerous enough to warrant a place in "don't piss them off enough to start shooting those missiles" club.
Of course, a couple of nukes that actually hit their targets in continental US are not a simple thing to make. You need a working, relatively accurate ballistic missile, and those are very difficult to design without proper know-how and resources, as North Korea's and Iran's struggles with the subject showed.
Blocking EFF is all but certainly collateral. The list was given by authorities, and they have a history with messing this stuff up in the past, such as blocking activist sites when making child porn block lists. In general, police around here prefers not to piss people off without reason, it's a cultural thing. Police is very respected here in Finland, in large part because it makes an effort no to abuse its rights.
We're finns are far more confused as to why this blocking order went through in the first place as there is a known ECJ decision which specifically makes such block lists illegal and finnish courts take painstaking effort to be in compliance with ECJ. Sound like our justice system did something that it's known to do at times again - be slow as hell. We have several convicting judgments from ECJ in relation to "people not getting their business done in court in timely matter" unfortunately, and this seems to be one of them, as ECJ's decision came in the end of 2011.
I guess the latin confused you. It's common for people who do not understand that some issues involve physics too complex for them to understand. So they get opinionated, get on their high horse, and truly believe they are right.
Facts will not dissuade them, like they don't dissuade you. Never mind power will need to be produced. Never mind nuclear is at the moment the least dangerous source of power by FAR, in terms of casualties (including Fukushima) per generated power. But apparently that is irrelevant, because we're talking about that scary nuclear thing you don't really understand. Not understanding being the important part of course, coal burns and looks safe - because you understand it! Coal killing almost ten times more people then nuclear every year during normal operation is... safe!
Problem is that people like you get fanatical about things they do not understand, take it personally, and start calling people with facts on their side "a menace", "godless heretics", "terrorists" "child molesters" and so on. Essentially, pitchforks come out to burn the witch. Discussion and dialogue has no place, because you don't want to discuss anything. You just want to burn the witch. Facts be damned.
Correct. Nuke plants have significantly LONGER lifetimes then most plants.
People who modded you insightful: Sutor, ne supra crepidam. You look about as silly as average person walking into computer shot talking about "processor gigabytes and hard drive gigaherts".