Understaffed hospitals can't cope with a mass influx of patients. Big deal.
Do you really think the US will do better where doctors are already working 16 hour days? What are you going to do? Tell them to work 30 hour days? At least in France they can declare some sort of "state of emergency" and double the number of working doctors.
Stop trying to score political points for "your side" and accept the fact that labor laws sometimes have tragic unforeseen consequences.
Why does the strawman pop up in every single internet discussion? Have you considered the possibility that I might have a moderate opinion on labor laws or are you too ignorant to care?
"Less" is correct. Without less, all of the program output gets displayed on screen. With less, only one screen of text is displayed at a time. So it is displaying less (than the original).
Did you even read the article you linked to? This has nothing to do with doctors and everything to do with air conditioning.
The bulk of the victims — many of them elderly — died during the height of the heat wave, which brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 degrees in a country where air conditioning is rare. Others apparently were greatly weakened during the peak temperatures but did not die until days later.
I've personally found self checkout faster just because the wait is shorter. There's also less people who pay by food stamp / check / multiple gift cards that hold up the line for several minutes.
Keep in mind there are gasoline taxes and subsidies already and you have to remove them first. Without any taxes or subsidies, gas is around $2 a gallon right now.
Now let's consider how much the carbon tax will be. We can deal with rising CO2 levels in 2 ways. One by working around its effects, such as rising sea level by building infrastructure. The other is to recapture the CO2. Building infrastructure is expensive, and hard to calculate, but recapture is easy. In favorable locations (that is, most of the world), a tree takes $100 to plant, plus $100 for the land itself. Over the course of a century, it will grow to be 100 hundred tons, of which 32% is carbon. Let's say we then cut the tree down and bury the wood underground, and that costs another $200 per tree. That means $400 in carbon taxes will get you several 32 tons of carbon back in the ground.
How many gallons of gasoline is that? Well, a gallon of gas turn into 20 lbs of CO2, of which 5.4 lbs is carbon. If you do the math, then you can see that one 100-ton tree has the carbon equivalent of 13000 gallons of gasoline, or $0.03 per gallon in carbon taxes.
The only way you can get $8 a gallon in carbon taxes is if you use a completely unfair method to calculate the tax, similar to other "sin" taxes where you make laws for the sake of "morals" rather than real reasons. In other words, total bullshit.
The IAU should just accept that there's several dozen planets around every star and there's no clear delineation between the classes of planets. According to their definition, the new Neptune-sized planet would not be a planet because it hasn't cleared its orbit of other planet-sized bodies. It also runs into problems with planet-sized objects not in orbit around any star. We know there are tons of red and brown dwarfs out there floating in the abyss. It would be really strange if there weren't any smaller objects floating out there too.
Even the headline reflects this. The ship will be known as Boaty McBoatface to tens of millions of people, and Attenborough to just a handful. Which one is it's real name?
Even assuming the solar powered zeppelin can reach the same speed as a fossil fuel powered one, it's still incredibly slow. What would have been a 14 hour transpacific flight is 6 days in a zeppelin (the round the world trip is actually only around the northern hemisphere, so it's much shorter than the circumference of the Earth). You have to provide food and entertainment for the duration. Probably internet as well since nobody can miss work for that long on a regular basis. All of that needs to be solar powered too. Low price alone won't make that viable. If kerosene gets too expensive, they will just switch over to synthetic fuels.
I didn't claim the economy was rosy or that labor participation rates were good, I said that the statement that the number of jobs has decreased is wrong. That is, even with the decrease in labor participation rates, we still don't have "fewer jobs".
Ok, let's not argue over technicalities then.
Much of the fall of labor participation rates in the US is simply due to demographics: people are getting older. Another contributing factor is a large drop among young age groups; the latter is due to in large part due to longer education, and in smaller part to pricing entry-level workers out of the market. Labor force participation rates among older workers are actually up.
This still sounds hand-wavy. Do you have sources to support those claims?
Even if this line of reasoning were valid, that particular reasoning is false. In order for demand to exceed the supply of labor, it's sufficient for every person to want more than the equivalent of one person working for them.
Having more demand than supply does not mean demand is infinite. It may be larger than supply right now, but as long as it's not infinite, it can be surpassed. Due to automation, the productivity of labor has skyrocketed, and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. At some point, any one person will be so productive that they can satisfy any demand they themselves can dream up.
Almost everybody can do many jobs that are useful that require nearly no skills: dish washing, cleaning, weeding, clearing rocks, security, maid service, delivery, giving people rides, caring for the elderly, caring for the sick, dog sitting, manual harvesting of fruit, manual crafts; even the disabled usually can do something useful that requires little skill: proofreading, marketing, phone answering, Mechanical Turk, etc. Furthermore, when you automate existing jobs, you get both more resources and more demand for paying for such jobs.
The demand for those services is quite limited. I wouldn't use many of those services because it takes more effort for me to find a good supplier than doing it myself. Some of those are also automate-able, or already automated (dish washing, delivery, taxi service, fruit harvesting).
What keeps people from working is not a lack of demand, it's price fixing (including regulation) and welfare. That is, government price fixing keeps labor costs artificially high (through regulations and minimum wages). It also keeps the cost of living artificially high (through standards, zoning, regulation). And if welfare pays more than someone could earn through work, they will obviously choose not to work.
This is typical Libertarian rhetoric. Many of the jobs you mentioned actually cost much more than minimum wage. Mowing the lawn is $30 for 20 minutes of work. Dog walking is $20 for a 15 minute walk. Meanwhile, manual fruit harvesting pays far below minimum wage because illegal immigrants are afraid to report it. And proofreading, MTurk and the rest of those you listed are all below minimum wage because they're contract work rather than hourly work.
I will give you welfare though. The way it's implemented right now is that you lose welfare as soon as you start working, and there is a long application process if you happen get laid off again. The policy actively discourages them from looking for jobs. The right way to do welfare is to gradually back off as their income rises, so it's always better financially to work rather than not work.
We will reach singularity sooner or later. The human brain is not a magical device whose function can never be emulated by computers. We see more and more of it being emulated now, and soon a large section of the population will have no work to do.
Sure, some people are gonna be butthurt that tech stole their job.
They are not "butthurt". They are actually hurt because the jobs they knew how to do no longer exist. Maybe you've never been unemployed or spoken to anyone who's unemployed, but they can't just "get over it".
Personally, I would love to see machines do all of the programming in my place. What I'd hate is having no income to feed myself.
Labor participation rate is the lowest in the past 30 years. The only reason total number of jobs have risen is due to population growth. That doesn't help. There are significantly fewer working people for every non-working person, which means a much larger social burden on everyone who works.
The limit on how many people work isn't job availability (that's pretty much inexhaustible and infinite), but availability of people willing to do the jobs.
2 problems with this:
1. You assume infinite demand. Jobs exist to service demand. But clearly any single individual cannot use infinite resources, even if it's available to them. Therefore demand is finite, and by extension, so are jobs.
2. You assume all jobs can be done by all people. This is clearly false. Even with education, most people cannot do creative or highly technical work well enough to make money. There will always be a large segment of the population who are not suited to the new jobs.
In a good world, people wouldn't be so afraid of terrorists that they race to throw their liberties under the bus.
But this is the real world.
And in the real world, the FBI and CIA have responsibilities to stop terrorist attacks. To perform their duties correctly, they need information. Ideally as much as possible. On everyone. Sure, some of that information is not relevant, but collecting it causes no harm to the investigative process. What it does cause harm to is the public. This is why we have a FISA court: to balance the interests of the public against the needs of the investigation. But are they capable of doing that?
Imagine you are the judge. You're presented with evidence by a person whose sole responsibility is to get an approval from you. He presents sworn statements from FBI or CIA agents indicating that there is a real potential for a terrorist attack, while conveniently withholding any evidence that could have led you towards a rejection. By rejecting the request, you may be putting hundreds of lives at risk. Meanwhile, the worst that can happen if you approve is the 3-letter agency discovering there was no threat after all. Neither the target nor the public would know of the investigation or your approval.
Netflix is in a better position to negotiate the terms than any individual Canadian. They actually get face time with content owners. The onus is on Netflix to convince them that pushing Canadians into piracy will reduce their revenue rather than increase it.
ALso, I went through Eastern Europe. It was awesome, as someone with hard currency to spend!
Indeed, it's great being in America with money to spend too. Oh wait, are you a millennial? Nevermind, you get to work at a part-time minimum wage job that pays so little that you qualify for food stamps. Good thing you're not living in an Eastern-European welfare state, they don't even have food stamps there!
A capitalist system naturally tends towards monopoly. This, combined with the power of money means monopolies and oligopolies eventually acquire political power. In a non-democratic society, this occurs through corruption - the bribing of officials. In a democratic one, it occurs through propaganda and election funding.
Regulatory capture is just one way of maintaining market power. It's an easy route because the public is generally too ignorant to understand the changes being made by a corrupt official (and they should not be expected to since even a reasonable number of regulations can be far too many for any one person to understand). However, that's more an argument against corruption than it is for regulation, as the latter is necessary to ensure a working market.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think the US will do better where doctors are already working 16 hour days? What are you going to do? Tell them to work 30 hour days? At least in France they can declare some sort of "state of emergency" and double the number of working doctors.
Stop trying to score political points for "your side" and accept the fact that labor laws sometimes have tragic unforeseen consequences.
Why does the strawman pop up in every single internet discussion? Have you considered the possibility that I might have a moderate opinion on labor laws or are you too ignorant to care?
"Less" is correct. Without less, all of the program output gets displayed on screen. With less, only one screen of text is displayed at a time. So it is displaying less (than the original).
The bulk of the victims — many of them elderly — died during the height of the heat wave, which brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 degrees in a country where air conditioning is rare. Others apparently were greatly weakened during the peak temperatures but did not die until days later.
I've personally found self checkout faster just because the wait is shorter. There's also less people who pay by food stamp / check / multiple gift cards that hold up the line for several minutes.
With a minimum wage increase, Chick-fil-a will be raising their prices too. Your cheaper alternative will be cup ramen, not another fast food joint.
Here in the US, doctors only kill people by accidentally falling asleep on the surgery table. It's so much better!
I think he means self-driving cars. Those don't try to recreate GTA in real life and are inherently safer.
Keep in mind there are gasoline taxes and subsidies already and you have to remove them first. Without any taxes or subsidies, gas is around $2 a gallon right now.
Now let's consider how much the carbon tax will be. We can deal with rising CO2 levels in 2 ways. One by working around its effects, such as rising sea level by building infrastructure. The other is to recapture the CO2. Building infrastructure is expensive, and hard to calculate, but recapture is easy. In favorable locations (that is, most of the world), a tree takes $100 to plant, plus $100 for the land itself. Over the course of a century, it will grow to be 100 hundred tons, of which 32% is carbon. Let's say we then cut the tree down and bury the wood underground, and that costs another $200 per tree. That means $400 in carbon taxes will get you several 32 tons of carbon back in the ground.
How many gallons of gasoline is that? Well, a gallon of gas turn into 20 lbs of CO2, of which 5.4 lbs is carbon. If you do the math, then you can see that one 100-ton tree has the carbon equivalent of 13000 gallons of gasoline, or $0.03 per gallon in carbon taxes.
The only way you can get $8 a gallon in carbon taxes is if you use a completely unfair method to calculate the tax, similar to other "sin" taxes where you make laws for the sake of "morals" rather than real reasons. In other words, total bullshit.
The IAU should just accept that there's several dozen planets around every star and there's no clear delineation between the classes of planets. According to their definition, the new Neptune-sized planet would not be a planet because it hasn't cleared its orbit of other planet-sized bodies. It also runs into problems with planet-sized objects not in orbit around any star. We know there are tons of red and brown dwarfs out there floating in the abyss. It would be really strange if there weren't any smaller objects floating out there too.
Even the headline reflects this. The ship will be known as Boaty McBoatface to tens of millions of people, and Attenborough to just a handful. Which one is it's real name?
Even assuming the solar powered zeppelin can reach the same speed as a fossil fuel powered one, it's still incredibly slow. What would have been a 14 hour transpacific flight is 6 days in a zeppelin (the round the world trip is actually only around the northern hemisphere, so it's much shorter than the circumference of the Earth). You have to provide food and entertainment for the duration. Probably internet as well since nobody can miss work for that long on a regular basis. All of that needs to be solar powered too. Low price alone won't make that viable. If kerosene gets too expensive, they will just switch over to synthetic fuels.
I didn't claim the economy was rosy or that labor participation rates were good, I said that the statement that the number of jobs has decreased is wrong. That is, even with the decrease in labor participation rates, we still don't have "fewer jobs".
Ok, let's not argue over technicalities then.
Much of the fall of labor participation rates in the US is simply due to demographics: people are getting older. Another contributing factor is a large drop among young age groups; the latter is due to in large part due to longer education, and in smaller part to pricing entry-level workers out of the market. Labor force participation rates among older workers are actually up.
This still sounds hand-wavy. Do you have sources to support those claims?
Even if this line of reasoning were valid, that particular reasoning is false. In order for demand to exceed the supply of labor, it's sufficient for every person to want more than the equivalent of one person working for them.
Having more demand than supply does not mean demand is infinite. It may be larger than supply right now, but as long as it's not infinite, it can be surpassed. Due to automation, the productivity of labor has skyrocketed, and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. At some point, any one person will be so productive that they can satisfy any demand they themselves can dream up.
Almost everybody can do many jobs that are useful that require nearly no skills: dish washing, cleaning, weeding, clearing rocks, security, maid service, delivery, giving people rides, caring for the elderly, caring for the sick, dog sitting, manual harvesting of fruit, manual crafts; even the disabled usually can do something useful that requires little skill: proofreading, marketing, phone answering, Mechanical Turk, etc. Furthermore, when you automate existing jobs, you get both more resources and more demand for paying for such jobs.
The demand for those services is quite limited. I wouldn't use many of those services because it takes more effort for me to find a good supplier than doing it myself. Some of those are also automate-able, or already automated (dish washing, delivery, taxi service, fruit harvesting).
What keeps people from working is not a lack of demand, it's price fixing (including regulation) and welfare. That is, government price fixing keeps labor costs artificially high (through regulations and minimum wages). It also keeps the cost of living artificially high (through standards, zoning, regulation). And if welfare pays more than someone could earn through work, they will obviously choose not to work.
This is typical Libertarian rhetoric. Many of the jobs you mentioned actually cost much more than minimum wage. Mowing the lawn is $30 for 20 minutes of work. Dog walking is $20 for a 15 minute walk. Meanwhile, manual fruit harvesting pays far below minimum wage because illegal immigrants are afraid to report it. And proofreading, MTurk and the rest of those you listed are all below minimum wage because they're contract work rather than hourly work.
I will give you welfare though. The way it's implemented right now is that you lose welfare as soon as you start working, and there is a long application process if you happen get laid off again. The policy actively discourages them from looking for jobs. The right way to do welfare is to gradually back off as their income rises, so it's always better financially to work rather than not work.
Sure, some people are gonna be butthurt that tech stole their job.
They are not "butthurt". They are actually hurt because the jobs they knew how to do no longer exist. Maybe you've never been unemployed or spoken to anyone who's unemployed, but they can't just "get over it".
Personally, I would love to see machines do all of the programming in my place. What I'd hate is having no income to feed myself.
The limit on how many people work isn't job availability (that's pretty much inexhaustible and infinite), but availability of people willing to do the jobs.
2 problems with this:
What is your solution to these people?
Or, you know, they could stop using radio communication and switch over to fiber optics.
In a perfect world, there are no terrorists.
In a good world, people wouldn't be so afraid of terrorists that they race to throw their liberties under the bus.
But this is the real world.
And in the real world, the FBI and CIA have responsibilities to stop terrorist attacks. To perform their duties correctly, they need information. Ideally as much as possible. On everyone. Sure, some of that information is not relevant, but collecting it causes no harm to the investigative process. What it does cause harm to is the public. This is why we have a FISA court: to balance the interests of the public against the needs of the investigation. But are they capable of doing that?
Imagine you are the judge. You're presented with evidence by a person whose sole responsibility is to get an approval from you. He presents sworn statements from FBI or CIA agents indicating that there is a real potential for a terrorist attack, while conveniently withholding any evidence that could have led you towards a rejection. By rejecting the request, you may be putting hundreds of lives at risk. Meanwhile, the worst that can happen if you approve is the 3-letter agency discovering there was no threat after all. Neither the target nor the public would know of the investigation or your approval.
Do you think you can be completely impartial?
I don't think anyone can.
Are you saying it needs to be flushed occasionally? With the blood of patriots and tyrants perhaps?
Netflix is in a better position to negotiate the terms than any individual Canadian. They actually get face time with content owners. The onus is on Netflix to convince them that pushing Canadians into piracy will reduce their revenue rather than increase it.
How does one vote for a particular delegate?
Do you have sources for those studies? And how does it pan out for non-social issues?
ALso, I went through Eastern Europe. It was awesome, as someone with hard currency to spend!
Indeed, it's great being in America with money to spend too. Oh wait, are you a millennial? Nevermind, you get to work at a part-time minimum wage job that pays so little that you qualify for food stamps. Good thing you're not living in an Eastern-European welfare state, they don't even have food stamps there!
If you're a programmer in the US and you contribute regularly to your 401k, then you are in the top 1%. Rich hypocrite.
GP can only be a hypocrite if he advocates something. I see nothing being advocated for in his post.
A capitalist system naturally tends towards monopoly. This, combined with the power of money means monopolies and oligopolies eventually acquire political power. In a non-democratic society, this occurs through corruption - the bribing of officials. In a democratic one, it occurs through propaganda and election funding.
Regulatory capture is just one way of maintaining market power. It's an easy route because the public is generally too ignorant to understand the changes being made by a corrupt official (and they should not be expected to since even a reasonable number of regulations can be far too many for any one person to understand). However, that's more an argument against corruption than it is for regulation, as the latter is necessary to ensure a working market.
Can a 2.x method directly call a 3.x method or are you talking about IPC?
Exactly. Their 'job' usually consists of taking care of the fringe cases.
Spoken like a fresh grad. You know those "fringe" cases are 90% of the programming work, right?