You don't really understand averages do you? 1 guy earning a trillion dollars and 999,999 people earning $0 makes the average person a millionaire. Being paid $23k vs $20k makes you richer than the next guy, but you're still very poor.
You're not taking into account the different kind of jobs and how many people are hired to do them. Even your own source says the difference is about $3k more in the public sector at the low end, vs $30k less at the high end. Maybe the government just hires more people in the higher-paid professions than the private sector. I mean, Walmart is the biggest employer in several states.
Congress can do whatever it wants, but if it's not mentioned in the constitution, it's an illegal overreach. The regulation itself might be reasonable, but they need to do it the proper way, through a constitutional amendment.
Even if you build up, you'll still end up with the same problem. Look at New York. There's tons of skyscrapers there, but the price is just as high. Large cities have lot's of positive feedback loops that attract more and more people and businesses to it, and unless living costs rise enough to exclude some, they'll just keep coming. Eventually, you'll run into physical limitations on how high you can build.
A lot of "people problems," however, don't reduce easily. Insufficient data, poor algorithms, and a failure to account for humanity conspire against reductionism.
People are machines. Complex, biological, but still just machines that act according to a predetermined set of rules. You can't predict the outcome 100% of the time, but you can definitely do better than 50%. Just look at what happens during an election. A couple of negative stories come out for a candidate, and 9/10 times their poll results tank. This is why you hear so many allegations of sexual harassment right around election time. A court would never accept a case for which there are no evidence and had happened a decade ago, but Joe Public is easily influenced.
In Silicon Valley, the problem is that there are too many people and they're driving up living costs. The solution is simple. Stop more people from coming and move some of the people already here away. The good news is that you don't need to do anything to make it happen. As living costs rise and wages couldn't keep up, it becomes more and more difficult for people to continue living here. Eventually, some of them will be forced to move. And as news of this gets out, and fewer people consider moving here in the first place.
The only thing is, welfare actually makes the problem worse. Because you can be very poor and still live in the area on food stamps and low-income housing, you're incentivized to not move. Moving is always a risk, and people in general are irrationally afraid of things they don't know. They'd rather be in a bad but familiar situation than a better, but unfamiliar one. If you take away the welfare though, you basically force that decision. If they were literally starving to death or sleeping under a bridge, they'd be looking for a way out as soon as possible. So from a government perspective, it would be better to give them a small loan, maybe $3000, with a condition that they use the money to move elsewhere, than to try and keep them fed.
Unfortunately, that's not a very intuitive option, which means most people won't understand why it would be better for both the poor and everyone else, making it a political non-starter. So we're left with the other solution, which is waiting for them to suffer enough to get out on their own.
Taxes don't matter because the money goes to government worker pensions.
Pensions don't build or repair roads.
Pensions don't teach schoolchildren.
Pensions don't put out fires.
Pensions don't solve crimes or keep the peace. Pensions don't feed the poor or provide for the needy.
Pensions don't keep the air and water clean.
They do feed the poor. What do you think retired civil servants will be if they don't have pensions? Many of them worked below-market-wage jobs for decades, which means they won't have nearly as much saved up for retirement as their private sector peers. Compound interest means even a small difference in income adds up to a huge difference in the size of the retirement fund.
Not to mention what a dick move it would be to promise pensions then take it away when it's inconvenient.
I said nothing of the sort. I said a different perspective, which derives primarily from different life experience. Would you seriously try to argue that women and men have the same life experiences? No innate difference at all is required to have a different way of seeing the world.
If that perspective leads to making different decisions (better decisions, as you claim), then there are behavioral differences between the genders. That behavior could translate to better team dynamics, but it could also translate to worse individual performance. You've simply discounted the negative possibility because... well, I don't know. Plus, you didn't provide a source for your claim.
As it happens, I believe there is ample evidence, both in common experience and in formal studies, that there are innate differences between men and women, in the sense of slightly different statistical distributions of abilities. Individual variation absolutely dwarfs these statistical biases, though, so there's no whatsoever point in applying gender stereotypes to evaluate a given individual.
No disagreement here.
Different pay absolutely could and should be justified by different productivity. That said, my experience in the field of software engineering, is that if there's a systematic difference in productivity it's in favor of women. I suspect that's not a result of inherently greater capability in female engineers, but of various selection biases against them, which collectively mean that a woman has to be better than her male peers to be perceived to be as good.
How do you know you're not simply biased against men? Perhaps others have an accurate assessment of those women, while you perceived them to be more productive because of your bias.
Basically, there is almost no reason whatsoever to expect that slight differences in distribution of ability (and they really are slight) would cause the large differences in employee population that we see and every reason to expect that the differences we see are a result of bias. Note that bias need not be intentional to be real. In fact it's easy to construct plausible scenarios in when everyone is trying hard to be completely meritocratic and the result is completely unmeritocratic.
Then perhaps hiring (and promotions) should not take into gender account at all. Make it so that the gender (or in fact any other physical trait) could not be determined, e.g. instead of in-person interviews, do only IM interviews. Why doesn't any software company do this? Oh right, because it would skew their numbers even further towards men and the so-called feminists would have a fit.
...the recent paucity of women in software engineering...
I'd like to see a source for that. A quick look suggests the opposite is happening.
The clear implication is that the rare women with the talent and interest for the job would be significantly more valuable to a company, precisely because of their rarity.
No. Women are not collectibles, rareness does not equate to value. Men of similar talent should be recruited just as aggressively.
And in any case, if you pursue them because of their gender, then you are already a sexist, because you presume their ability is tied to whether their genitals exist inside or outside their body.
...the five members of the team are not all of equal value, because the one woman brings something that none of her colleagues have, a woman's perspective.
You're saying there are innate differences due to gender. One gender could do something the other couldn't. Then wouldn't those differences mean women and men are not necessarily equally effective? And if that's the case, then wouldn't different pay could be justified by different productivity?
Or to put it simply, if you accept there are innate differences between the genders, then you must necessarily accept different pay, hiring ratio and other such metrics can be a natural outcome due to those differences.
Being able to cross the US is based on 55 mpg at 50 mph. My trunk can fit maybe 10 5-gallon gas cans. Plus the 13 gallons in the regular tank, that's 63 gallons. 63 x 55 = 3465 miles.
"Just because the current incarnation sucks, doesn't mean it will always suck."
It also doesn't mean that it will improve. The only thing that will bring improvement is competition that gives a better customer experience w/o significantly costing more.
I don't recall there being a monopoly in this market? In any case, I don't think anyone's ever won a bet against technology improving.
Just because the current incarnation sucks, doesn't mean it will always suck. A lot of the stupidity you go through with the current machine is to prevent mistakes on the part of the customer. Image recognition (e.g. Tensorflow) is already good enough to recognize things about 95% of the time, it won't be too long before it can distinguish produce just as well, or even better than humans. At which point, you would only have problems while buying beer.
As for the amount of time spent in checkout, you're forgetting the time you spend waiting for customers in front of you. At stores near me, the automated checkout lines are usually empty. I might wait a minute before getting to a machine. Meanwhile, the human checkout lines are packed, sometimes 8 or 10 people. At least 2 of those would be elderly, one would insist on giving the exact change, and the other only has a checkbook. Amongst the rest, one would have food stamps or coupons, which I suspect have some fine print along the lines of "actual value is to be negotiated with the cashier at checkout time" written on them. Another, often a lady with kids, would attempt to use multiple credit cards, all of which are unhappy with her account balance. But yes, when I actually arrive at the cashier, it's usually pretty quick thanks to my insistence on paying in an ordinary manner.
They all require something expensive as input, in the case of electrolysis that's very clean water. You may not have noticed, but that's already at a premium on this planet, and it's becoming more scarce and thus expensive.
You should try to learn a bit about a topic before writing about them, because you can't be more wrong.
Tap water is just fine for electrolysis. One might even need to add salt or other impurities to it to get it to work. If you actually tried to use pure water, it'll backfire on you, because pure water doesn't conduct electricity, and the electric current in the water is what generates those H2 and O2 bubbles.
Water is also not very expensive, in fact, it's negligible compared to the energy cost. My city sells it at $0.006 per gallon.
Slowing down does wonders for fuel efficiency no matter what car you have. My dead-dinosaur-burning car goes from 35 mpg at 70 mph to 55 mpg at 50 mph. If I fill the trunk with gas cans, it could probably cross the continental US without refueling at all.
As someone who got into farming a decade ago, kinda by accident when I wanted a temporary sabbatical from my (computer) research job, I've not seen many downsides. Low (sometimes very) income, but living expenses are likewise low and as long as I don't go for flashy, I can afforded every opportunity to nerd out.
That's when you're healthy and had a lot of money from your previous job. It works fine in the short term, but not necessarily long term. Health care isn't going to be any cheaper in rural areas, in fact, doctors are paid 25% more in Iowa than New York. Specialists, even more so. Farming equipment will fail and need to be serviced or replaced. You need to buy gas, fertilizer, feed etc. to keep the farm running. Your house needs upkeep, as does your car or truck. You need to save money for contingencies, such as a drought or an unexpected cold spell that could destroy a year's worth of income. And if you have kids and want them to go to college, that's even more money.
In the end, a farm is a business, and to continue functioning, it needs to balance the revenue against the costs. If you can run a successful business, you'll be a good farmer. But it's much easier to make 6 figures with a tech job, then buy a house in the suburbs with a big yard and just grow things as a hobby.
If the US or any modern country crashed completely people in the cities are going to die off pretty badly due to crime, disease, hunger and so on.
Crashed, how? What would completely render the hundreds of cities all across the nation uninhabitable, but somehow allow agriculture to continue untouched?
Nuclear war? Infectious disease? Robot apocalypse? The countryside is immune to none of those. Nuclear winter will kill crops even faster than supplies will run out in a city (which is about 3 months last I heard). Maybe disease will not spread as quickly, but if it's a really nasty disease with airborne transmission, a multi-year incubation period and very high death rate, the rural areas will get infected as well, long before anyone notices that it exists. Killer robots will be flying, so a city, with high-rising obstacles everywhere and no clear view of the target, is actually a more difficult environment. Meanwhile your 12 gauge is not going to shoot down any drones more than 500 feet up.
1. You describe a dictatorship, not socialism in general
2. You completely misunderstood GP's point, which is, this is par for the course in capitalism and it will fix itself
If a government uses its bully pulpit to subsidize insulin, then what that government is actually doing is subsidizing unhealthy lifestyles, and thus the problem will only get worse. There needs to be a correction in society; either new methods of manufacturing must be found, or people must adopt a healthier lifestyle.
Oh yeah, killing diabetic people really improves public health! Who cares about people with Type I? Maybe next time they'll remember not to be born with any congenital problems!
The only county that would have benefited from the TPP was the US.
Nope. Japan is still pushing TPP after American withdraw:
"We have finally come to an agreement on the rules of free and fair trade. We hope to utilize that agreed framework. Unfortunately, the U.S. has declared withdrawal from the TPP. Since we have come thus far, we would like to capitalize upon the result of our long years of efforts," Abe said in Japanese. "Japan must now take on a leadership role and move the discussions forward."
Slashdot Mirror
You don't really understand averages do you? 1 guy earning a trillion dollars and 999,999 people earning $0 makes the average person a millionaire. Being paid $23k vs $20k makes you richer than the next guy, but you're still very poor.
You're not taking into account the different kind of jobs and how many people are hired to do them. Even your own source says the difference is about $3k more in the public sector at the low end, vs $30k less at the high end. Maybe the government just hires more people in the higher-paid professions than the private sector. I mean, Walmart is the biggest employer in several states.
Congress can do whatever it wants, but if it's not mentioned in the constitution, it's an illegal overreach. The regulation itself might be reasonable, but they need to do it the proper way, through a constitutional amendment.
Even if you build up, you'll still end up with the same problem. Look at New York. There's tons of skyscrapers there, but the price is just as high. Large cities have lot's of positive feedback loops that attract more and more people and businesses to it, and unless living costs rise enough to exclude some, they'll just keep coming. Eventually, you'll run into physical limitations on how high you can build.
A lot of "people problems," however, don't reduce easily. Insufficient data, poor algorithms, and a failure to account for humanity conspire against reductionism.
People are machines. Complex, biological, but still just machines that act according to a predetermined set of rules. You can't predict the outcome 100% of the time, but you can definitely do better than 50%. Just look at what happens during an election. A couple of negative stories come out for a candidate, and 9/10 times their poll results tank. This is why you hear so many allegations of sexual harassment right around election time. A court would never accept a case for which there are no evidence and had happened a decade ago, but Joe Public is easily influenced.
In Silicon Valley, the problem is that there are too many people and they're driving up living costs. The solution is simple. Stop more people from coming and move some of the people already here away. The good news is that you don't need to do anything to make it happen. As living costs rise and wages couldn't keep up, it becomes more and more difficult for people to continue living here. Eventually, some of them will be forced to move. And as news of this gets out, and fewer people consider moving here in the first place.
The only thing is, welfare actually makes the problem worse. Because you can be very poor and still live in the area on food stamps and low-income housing, you're incentivized to not move. Moving is always a risk, and people in general are irrationally afraid of things they don't know. They'd rather be in a bad but familiar situation than a better, but unfamiliar one. If you take away the welfare though, you basically force that decision. If they were literally starving to death or sleeping under a bridge, they'd be looking for a way out as soon as possible. So from a government perspective, it would be better to give them a small loan, maybe $3000, with a condition that they use the money to move elsewhere, than to try and keep them fed.
Unfortunately, that's not a very intuitive option, which means most people won't understand why it would be better for both the poor and everyone else, making it a political non-starter. So we're left with the other solution, which is waiting for them to suffer enough to get out on their own.
Taxes don't matter because the money goes to government worker pensions.
Pensions don't build or repair roads.
Pensions don't teach schoolchildren.
Pensions don't put out fires.
Pensions don't solve crimes or keep the peace.
Pensions don't feed the poor or provide for the needy.
Pensions don't keep the air and water clean.
They do feed the poor. What do you think retired civil servants will be if they don't have pensions? Many of them worked below-market-wage jobs for decades, which means they won't have nearly as much saved up for retirement as their private sector peers. Compound interest means even a small difference in income adds up to a huge difference in the size of the retirement fund.
Not to mention what a dick move it would be to promise pensions then take it away when it's inconvenient.
Weight loss and fitness aren't directly related anyways. Weight is more a result of diet than exercise.
I said nothing of the sort. I said a different perspective, which derives primarily from different life experience. Would you seriously try to argue that women and men have the same life experiences? No innate difference at all is required to have a different way of seeing the world.
If that perspective leads to making different decisions (better decisions, as you claim), then there are behavioral differences between the genders. That behavior could translate to better team dynamics, but it could also translate to worse individual performance. You've simply discounted the negative possibility because... well, I don't know. Plus, you didn't provide a source for your claim.
As it happens, I believe there is ample evidence, both in common experience and in formal studies, that there are innate differences between men and women, in the sense of slightly different statistical distributions of abilities. Individual variation absolutely dwarfs these statistical biases, though, so there's no whatsoever point in applying gender stereotypes to evaluate a given individual.
No disagreement here.
Different pay absolutely could and should be justified by different productivity. That said, my experience in the field of software engineering, is that if there's a systematic difference in productivity it's in favor of women. I suspect that's not a result of inherently greater capability in female engineers, but of various selection biases against them, which collectively mean that a woman has to be better than her male peers to be perceived to be as good.
How do you know you're not simply biased against men? Perhaps others have an accurate assessment of those women, while you perceived them to be more productive because of your bias.
Basically, there is almost no reason whatsoever to expect that slight differences in distribution of ability (and they really are slight) would cause the large differences in employee population that we see and every reason to expect that the differences we see are a result of bias. Note that bias need not be intentional to be real. In fact it's easy to construct plausible scenarios in when everyone is trying hard to be completely meritocratic and the result is completely unmeritocratic.
Then perhaps hiring (and promotions) should not take into gender account at all. Make it so that the gender (or in fact any other physical trait) could not be determined, e.g. instead of in-person interviews, do only IM interviews. Why doesn't any software company do this? Oh right, because it would skew their numbers even further towards men and the so-called feminists would have a fit.
...the recent paucity of women in software engineering...
I'd like to see a source for that. A quick look suggests the opposite is happening.
The clear implication is that the rare women with the talent and interest for the job would be significantly more valuable to a company, precisely because of their rarity.
No. Women are not collectibles, rareness does not equate to value. Men of similar talent should be recruited just as aggressively.
And in any case, if you pursue them because of their gender, then you are already a sexist, because you presume their ability is tied to whether their genitals exist inside or outside their body.
...the five members of the team are not all of equal value, because the one woman brings something that none of her colleagues have, a woman's perspective.
You're saying there are innate differences due to gender. One gender could do something the other couldn't. Then wouldn't those differences mean women and men are not necessarily equally effective? And if that's the case, then wouldn't different pay could be justified by different productivity?
Or to put it simply, if you accept there are innate differences between the genders, then you must necessarily accept different pay, hiring ratio and other such metrics can be a natural outcome due to those differences.
Being able to cross the US is based on 55 mpg at 50 mph. My trunk can fit maybe 10 5-gallon gas cans. Plus the 13 gallons in the regular tank, that's 63 gallons. 63 x 55 = 3465 miles.
"Just because the current incarnation sucks, doesn't mean it will always suck."
It also doesn't mean that it will improve. The only thing that will bring improvement is competition that gives a better customer experience w/o significantly costing more.
I don't recall there being a monopoly in this market? In any case, I don't think anyone's ever won a bet against technology improving.
Have you actually done electrolysis or are you just talking out of your ass? Maybe you should try it with pure water and see how far you get.
Just because the current incarnation sucks, doesn't mean it will always suck. A lot of the stupidity you go through with the current machine is to prevent mistakes on the part of the customer. Image recognition (e.g. Tensorflow) is already good enough to recognize things about 95% of the time, it won't be too long before it can distinguish produce just as well, or even better than humans. At which point, you would only have problems while buying beer.
As for the amount of time spent in checkout, you're forgetting the time you spend waiting for customers in front of you. At stores near me, the automated checkout lines are usually empty. I might wait a minute before getting to a machine. Meanwhile, the human checkout lines are packed, sometimes 8 or 10 people. At least 2 of those would be elderly, one would insist on giving the exact change, and the other only has a checkbook. Amongst the rest, one would have food stamps or coupons, which I suspect have some fine print along the lines of "actual value is to be negotiated with the cashier at checkout time" written on them. Another, often a lady with kids, would attempt to use multiple credit cards, all of which are unhappy with her account balance. But yes, when I actually arrive at the cashier, it's usually pretty quick thanks to my insistence on paying in an ordinary manner.
They all require something expensive as input, in the case of electrolysis that's very clean water. You may not have noticed, but that's already at a premium on this planet, and it's becoming more scarce and thus expensive.
You should try to learn a bit about a topic before writing about them, because you can't be more wrong.
Tap water is just fine for electrolysis. One might even need to add salt or other impurities to it to get it to work. If you actually tried to use pure water, it'll backfire on you, because pure water doesn't conduct electricity, and the electric current in the water is what generates those H2 and O2 bubbles.
Water is also not very expensive, in fact, it's negligible compared to the energy cost. My city sells it at $0.006 per gallon.
Slowing down does wonders for fuel efficiency no matter what car you have. My dead-dinosaur-burning car goes from 35 mpg at 70 mph to 55 mpg at 50 mph. If I fill the trunk with gas cans, it could probably cross the continental US without refueling at all.
As someone who got into farming a decade ago, kinda by accident when I wanted a temporary sabbatical from my (computer) research job, I've not seen many downsides. Low (sometimes very) income, but living expenses are likewise low and as long as I don't go for flashy, I can afforded every opportunity to nerd out.
That's when you're healthy and had a lot of money from your previous job. It works fine in the short term, but not necessarily long term. Health care isn't going to be any cheaper in rural areas, in fact, doctors are paid 25% more in Iowa than New York. Specialists, even more so. Farming equipment will fail and need to be serviced or replaced. You need to buy gas, fertilizer, feed etc. to keep the farm running. Your house needs upkeep, as does your car or truck. You need to save money for contingencies, such as a drought or an unexpected cold spell that could destroy a year's worth of income. And if you have kids and want them to go to college, that's even more money.
In the end, a farm is a business, and to continue functioning, it needs to balance the revenue against the costs. If you can run a successful business, you'll be a good farmer. But it's much easier to make 6 figures with a tech job, then buy a house in the suburbs with a big yard and just grow things as a hobby.
If the US or any modern country crashed completely people in the cities are going to die off pretty badly due to crime, disease, hunger and so on.
Crashed, how? What would completely render the hundreds of cities all across the nation uninhabitable, but somehow allow agriculture to continue untouched?
Nuclear war? Infectious disease? Robot apocalypse? The countryside is immune to none of those. Nuclear winter will kill crops even faster than supplies will run out in a city (which is about 3 months last I heard). Maybe disease will not spread as quickly, but if it's a really nasty disease with airborne transmission, a multi-year incubation period and very high death rate, the rural areas will get infected as well, long before anyone notices that it exists. Killer robots will be flying, so a city, with high-rising obstacles everywhere and no clear view of the target, is actually a more difficult environment. Meanwhile your 12 gauge is not going to shoot down any drones more than 500 feet up.
If you put in windows, especially big ones, it's going to be a lot less hurricane-proof.
1. You describe a dictatorship, not socialism in general
2. You completely misunderstood GP's point, which is, this is par for the course in capitalism and it will fix itself
If a government uses its bully pulpit to subsidize insulin, then what that government is actually doing is subsidizing unhealthy lifestyles, and thus the problem will only get worse. There needs to be a correction in society; either new methods of manufacturing must be found, or people must adopt a healthier lifestyle.
Oh yeah, killing diabetic people really improves public health! Who cares about people with Type I? Maybe next time they'll remember not to be born with any congenital problems!
A single drop of water can't hurt you, but a billion drops of water will. Quantity has a quality all its own.
By that logic, everyone should've voted Trump. After all, if you voted for someone who didn't win, it's a wasted vote!
The only county that would have benefited from the TPP was the US.
Nope. Japan is still pushing TPP after American withdraw:
"We have finally come to an agreement on the rules of free and fair trade. We hope to utilize that agreed framework. Unfortunately, the U.S. has declared withdrawal from the TPP. Since we have come thus far, we would like to capitalize upon the result of our long years of efforts," Abe said in Japanese. "Japan must now take on a leadership role and move the discussions forward."
I can see some sort of home-brew Resident Evil thing happening if things go wrong.
Zombies aren't a thing IRL.
The best I can say about you is you have the courage of your convictions.
I wouldn't want someone like you in my country, though.
Sounds like you're advocating for thought police.