The population of the developed world is not increasing, and in most developed countries it is decreasing.
Wrong. The population of the developed world IS increasing. It's all from immigration, but it's still increasing. The US population has increased every single year. Are you trying to claim that immigrants aren't people? And the population is growing in the 3rd-world countries too; so much that the excess is moving to the developed nations. Overall, it's increasing everywhere.
Also, the US is by no means overpopulated. I just drove across the country, and most of it is empty.
Yeah, because a lot of it is used for agriculture. Where do you think the food's going to come from when you pave over all the fields and replace them with subdivisions full of McMansions? There's also a serious lack of water in the Western states. Population growth is constrained by freshwater supply. You can't build a bunch of subdivisions in southern Utah when there's zero water there. I guess you're one of those people who won't be happy until every natural place has been eliminated and all land is filled with development, right?
That's funny because the new job I am about to start in a week for a DoD contractor just bought me a Mac Book Pro. I wonder how they are going to put Windows and malware on it.
Good luck connecting that thing to a DoD network.
I love the city I live in too, but I guess not everybody appreciates hills and trees with all kinds of outdoor adventures just a short drive away.
Don't forget, the top phone brands are all busy neutering their phones by removing all the most useful features, such as an SD card slot and a removable battery. What kind of idiot would pay $600+ for a phone without these basic features (besides an Apple customer)? It's a perfect opportunity for a cheap brand to build a customer base by having these features.
Maybe because some money is better than no money. Foreign companies likely don't think the way US companies do: these days in the US, if a large company can't be #1 or #2, with an insanely-huge profit margin, they just throw in the towel and go chase after something else (usually failing, whereas they would have made a lot more money just sticking in there and making lower profits as #3, #4, or #5). In other countries, they don't always have this mentality. What's wrong with being #5 and making a small profit while your employees have good jobs and your executives have handsome salaries? Maybe the shareholders won't like it as much, but who cares; if you're a large enough company, you shouldn't need outside investment anyway.
Also, these other companies could be taking the long-term view: it's better for them to hang around and outlast the others, and wait for them to make a misstep, or for people to get sick of their high prices.
Oh please, you're trying to imply that higher gas prices would somehow lead to a famine, which is ridiculous. Higher fuel prices would simply increase the cost of transport, which would result in some higher prices as that cost would be passed to the consumer. But they'd have more money to pay for it because their taxes could be reduced, since they wouldn't be subsidizing road costs through non-road-related taxes any more. (Of course, politicians never seem to reduce taxes like that, and once the original justification is gone for a tax they find another one, but that's another argument.)
The problem is that some people's opinions somehow carry more weight than others, and they somehow get favor with the court system. A man would have to be either very brave or very stupid to try to get a job as a kindergarten teacher these days.
The reason you're able to live outside the city right now is because fuel prices are insanely cheap, and the cost of transportation is subsidized. If road users were forced to pay for both the entire cost of road construction and upkeep, as well as the pollution problems caused by their fuel usage, transport costs would be much, much higher. Raise gas prices to $10-15/gallon and see how many people continue to live out in the sticks. On top of that, enact strict anti-pollution laws which make it very difficult or even impossible to keep older cars on the road (meaning you'll have to buy a newer car, which means a car payment plus the high fuel costs, though at least you'll get higher mpgs so it'll offset things a little bit), and everyone will be living in the city (or at least a very built-up suburb) except a few rich people who can afford to drive their Ferrari to work from their 100-acre estate.
There's big disadvantages to that: insane and idiotic government regulations, horrible and shitty software (the government only uses Windows, and loads it down with all kinds of malware), crappy work locations, etc.
Bad example with the nail salon thing. How many men have you seen with fingernail polish? There might be a few gay men interested in breathing those fumes all day, but they're likely employed in nail salons (or more likely own them). That field likely is almost-all-female naturally.
The child-care example is quite valid, however. Lots of men like being with small children, but our culture discourages that as they're seen as potential molesters. Another example is primary education: how many kindergarten or grade 1-4 teachers are male? There's simply no evidence that 95% of men have zero interest in being around small children, absent social stigma.
Anyway, I know you're joking about the cartel thing, but there's definitely a stigma about having men around small kids without female supervision, and this really is an inefficiency that's bad for society. Personally I think it results in a lot of women being around kids (because they fill the void basically) who really shouldn't be. As a society, we seem to have this idea that women are all wonderful, caring people when around small children, and it simply isn't true. A lot of them are nasty, heartless bitches and shouldn't be around any kids or have their own. Assuming men are generally bad and women are generally great with kids is bound to result in a bunch of these women taking jobs with children.
They're not going to be tossed out as obsolete. As another poster above noted, women are a majority, not a minority. Just not in actual coding; they're a majority in places in management, project management, testing, and UI design. So the women are concentrating (smartly, I'll add) in things which will be the last things to be outsourced, if ever, and aren't as subject to age discrimination. As usual, this shows that women in general are more social than men, and move into jobs which require more socializing and less of just keeping your nose stuck to a monitor all day, even when it involves working with men who do exactly this.
That's fine when you have an area that is set aside to be a forest. Even if it burns down, no problem, just wait a couple decades and it'll grow back, so all the lost trees are replaced. But this was at Yellowstone National Park, a place that's specifically off-limits to human development (aside from a handful of NPS-owned buildings for tourists and such).
The problem is with places which aren't protected this way: humans decide to take land that used to be a forest, and then turn it into a subdivision or a shopping mall (oh sorry, those are out of vogue now; it'll be a "lifestyle center"). Those trees aren't coming back. With too many humans using too much land, there's not enough space for the number of trees we used to have. It doesn't have to be that way; if more land was set aside for forests, and more humans lived in more dense environments (cities), and there was more recycling of wood products (esp. paper), everything would be fine. Also, for wood products, they could switch to using bamboo for more stuff, since bamboo grows so quickly and usually works just as well if not better, depending on the application.
Not a problem. Pretty soon, reproduction won't require men anyway, and we'll have an all-female society as women realize that uneducated, idiot, sports-obsessed men are not an asset in their lives and push them out.
Doctors don't have those problems. They have to deal with annoying insurance issues, but they have staff for that. I should hope they actually enjoy the doctoring part of their jobs. How many tech workers really enjoy dealing with all the shitty technologies they work with (it's not like they get to pick them)? And doctors don't have bosses usually; they run their own offices, frequently as partners in a small group with other doctors.
A lot of accountants run their own independent businesses.
A lot of lawyers, likewise, are partners in a small firm, or have their own firm.
How many engineers have their own small firm? Almost none.
How's that useful when the dozens of commercial apps you install don't use it or work with it? That's nice for the open-source stuff that does work with it, but be realistic: most Windows users use little to no open-source stuff, and a bunch of proprietary crapware from McAfee, Adobe, their printer vendor or other hardware makers, etc.
Not a problem, they can partner with the Russians for all that stuff. America can't even launch anything any more without buying engines from the Russians, and the Russians have a much more successful military. America spends trillions and gets nothing for it, Russia sends in some Spetznaz and a few armored divisions and gets Crimea and other territory. Meanwhile, ISIS is destroying 2000-year-old Roman-era UN-protected temples and the US military, for all its "operational experience and force projection", is completely powerless to stop a handful of guys with some dynamite in their backpacks. What a joke.
Yep. Although one thing seems to have changed since your kids were subject to you spending too much time at work: the stability. At least 20+ years ago it was a stable career (esp. 30+ years ago, it seemed to start having a lot of problems in the early 90s). So it's even less attractive as a job prospect now. Yeah, it's a better career than flipping burgers I guess, and maybe law (I hear law kinda sucks these days), but being a veterinarian sounds like a much more interesting and rewarding career to me for many reasons, so I can certainly see why girls would be drawn to that: you get to work with cute animals, people actually appreciate you, you don't have some shitty boss telling you to work 90 hours/week to meet some arbitrary deadline for some shitty project that's not going to sell anyway (like a Windows Phone) and which no one will care about,...
"Less inhospitable than other nearby planets" doesn't make this planet automatically "hospitable". If it gets to the point where people have to live in domed cities or underground or something, I could see why some people would want to build generation ships and go somewhere else. It's a long shot of course; what would be the feasibility in fixing this planet to make it decent again, vs. what's the feasibility of finding another planet that's more hospitable out-of-the-box?
You're wrong about the asteroid, though. A small asteroid, sure, we could survive that. But there are "planet-killer" ones out there. But they're extremely unlikely to hit the Earth anytime soon.
I have to disagree, to a point. People frequently have certain deal-breakers, which are basic points of compatibility. For instance, I have no interest in dating a smoker. I don't want someone like that in my life; I can't stand being around tobacco smoke and sure as hell don't want someone smoking in bed with me. That's a basic deal-breaker. But Tinder doesn't allow me to see that about people, whereas any other dating site has that as one of the basic parameters, so you could meet someone and start talking, meet them in person, and then find out they're just not relationship material because of a basic deal-breaker like this. This is just one example, other people have other (and multiple) deal-breakers; maybe they don't want to date someone who thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, or who loves having a bunch of giant dogs and other animals around the house, etc. You may like someone, but that doesn't mean you can actually share a home with them if you can't get along on basic things.
In fact, I'd say the fact that *most* people don't screen people based on parameters like this (because most people do not find their partners on dating sites, but rather at bars or other meatspace places where these parameters are again not always apparent) could be one of the reasons the divorce rate is so high. You're right, people *aren't* picking well; they're using too much emotion, instead of screening people out who are simply bad matches for reasons like these, and then looking to see who they have chemistry with. They have some fairy-tale notion that they're going to run into Mr./Ms. Right at the supermarket or something and hit it off. Sure, you might meet someone attractive that you have chemistry with like that (or more likely, at a bar), but then it turns out you have serious compatibility problems. But if you've gotten emotionally attached already, you're likely to overlook that stuff, and then when you finally do break up, it's really messy, when you should have simply said "no thanks" right at the beginning.
No, they have to have different ones for different regions. All the other countries aren't free-for-alls either, they just have different regulations about power and channels.
That proves my point. If you dress up as Batman, yes, people will see your good deeds and a google search of you will show up "good guy!" to cover up the shitting at Wendy's.
No, they don't. You're missing my point. No one ever heard of this Batman guy (except at the children's hospital he visited) until he died. Then everyone was talking about what a great guy he was. I'm sure he was a great guy, but my point is that he only made national news when he got hit by a car and died. Just driving a black Lamborghini made to look sorta like the Batmobile, dressing in a Batsuit even better than many of the movie ones, and visiting dying children regularly wasn't enough for him to make national news. Getting hit and killed while doing that was.
Yeah, this is why all this push to get women into IT is annoying as hell. Has anyone actually *asked* them why they're not interested? I'll bet the poor reputation of the career (as you point out) is one big, big reason. You have to know all kinds of arcane crap, you have to go through hard degree programs in college, the pay isn't all that great, workers are laid off all the time, and the social factor sucks. Women are usually much more social than men anyway (especially compared to IT/engineering men), so why would they be interested? If a woman's smart she'll probably go into finance, law, or medicine instead.
This sounds good and all, but I looked at your static.izs.me link, and it says this article was written by a Christian Rudder in 2010, not Sam Yagan. The Observer article says Christian was OKC's "data hound". So Yagan didn't write this post, one of his employees did; he obviously had it taken down when it made him look bad. He even acknowledges this, but really it's pretty obvious he's changed his tune since back in '10 OKC was all about being free (except for ads), and then Yagan joined the dark side with the Match.com acquisition.
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The population of the developed world is not increasing, and in most developed countries it is decreasing.
Wrong. The population of the developed world IS increasing. It's all from immigration, but it's still increasing. The US population has increased every single year. Are you trying to claim that immigrants aren't people?
And the population is growing in the 3rd-world countries too; so much that the excess is moving to the developed nations. Overall, it's increasing everywhere.
Also, the US is by no means overpopulated. I just drove across the country, and most of it is empty.
Yeah, because a lot of it is used for agriculture. Where do you think the food's going to come from when you pave over all the fields and replace them with subdivisions full of McMansions? There's also a serious lack of water in the Western states. Population growth is constrained by freshwater supply. You can't build a bunch of subdivisions in southern Utah when there's zero water there. I guess you're one of those people who won't be happy until every natural place has been eliminated and all land is filled with development, right?
That's funny because the new job I am about to start in a week for a DoD contractor just bought me a Mac Book Pro. I wonder how they are going to put Windows and malware on it.
Good luck connecting that thing to a DoD network.
I love the city I live in too, but I guess not everybody appreciates hills and trees with all kinds of outdoor adventures just a short drive away.
Many DoD facilities are not in or near cities.
Don't forget, the top phone brands are all busy neutering their phones by removing all the most useful features, such as an SD card slot and a removable battery. What kind of idiot would pay $600+ for a phone without these basic features (besides an Apple customer)? It's a perfect opportunity for a cheap brand to build a customer base by having these features.
Maybe because some money is better than no money. Foreign companies likely don't think the way US companies do: these days in the US, if a large company can't be #1 or #2, with an insanely-huge profit margin, they just throw in the towel and go chase after something else (usually failing, whereas they would have made a lot more money just sticking in there and making lower profits as #3, #4, or #5). In other countries, they don't always have this mentality. What's wrong with being #5 and making a small profit while your employees have good jobs and your executives have handsome salaries? Maybe the shareholders won't like it as much, but who cares; if you're a large enough company, you shouldn't need outside investment anyway.
Also, these other companies could be taking the long-term view: it's better for them to hang around and outlast the others, and wait for them to make a misstep, or for people to get sick of their high prices.
Oh please, you're trying to imply that higher gas prices would somehow lead to a famine, which is ridiculous. Higher fuel prices would simply increase the cost of transport, which would result in some higher prices as that cost would be passed to the consumer. But they'd have more money to pay for it because their taxes could be reduced, since they wouldn't be subsidizing road costs through non-road-related taxes any more. (Of course, politicians never seem to reduce taxes like that, and once the original justification is gone for a tax they find another one, but that's another argument.)
The problem is that some people's opinions somehow carry more weight than others, and they somehow get favor with the court system. A man would have to be either very brave or very stupid to try to get a job as a kindergarten teacher these days.
The reason you're able to live outside the city right now is because fuel prices are insanely cheap, and the cost of transportation is subsidized. If road users were forced to pay for both the entire cost of road construction and upkeep, as well as the pollution problems caused by their fuel usage, transport costs would be much, much higher. Raise gas prices to $10-15/gallon and see how many people continue to live out in the sticks. On top of that, enact strict anti-pollution laws which make it very difficult or even impossible to keep older cars on the road (meaning you'll have to buy a newer car, which means a car payment plus the high fuel costs, though at least you'll get higher mpgs so it'll offset things a little bit), and everyone will be living in the city (or at least a very built-up suburb) except a few rich people who can afford to drive their Ferrari to work from their 100-acre estate.
There's big disadvantages to that: insane and idiotic government regulations, horrible and shitty software (the government only uses Windows, and loads it down with all kinds of malware), crappy work locations, etc.
Bad example with the nail salon thing. How many men have you seen with fingernail polish? There might be a few gay men interested in breathing those fumes all day, but they're likely employed in nail salons (or more likely own them). That field likely is almost-all-female naturally.
The child-care example is quite valid, however. Lots of men like being with small children, but our culture discourages that as they're seen as potential molesters. Another example is primary education: how many kindergarten or grade 1-4 teachers are male? There's simply no evidence that 95% of men have zero interest in being around small children, absent social stigma.
Anyway, I know you're joking about the cartel thing, but there's definitely a stigma about having men around small kids without female supervision, and this really is an inefficiency that's bad for society. Personally I think it results in a lot of women being around kids (because they fill the void basically) who really shouldn't be. As a society, we seem to have this idea that women are all wonderful, caring people when around small children, and it simply isn't true. A lot of them are nasty, heartless bitches and shouldn't be around any kids or have their own. Assuming men are generally bad and women are generally great with kids is bound to result in a bunch of these women taking jobs with children.
Not for long. Humans will quickly breed and repopulate.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the 80s were a better time. Everything went down the tubes with the invention of grunge music.
They're not going to be tossed out as obsolete. As another poster above noted, women are a majority, not a minority. Just not in actual coding; they're a majority in places in management, project management, testing, and UI design. So the women are concentrating (smartly, I'll add) in things which will be the last things to be outsourced, if ever, and aren't as subject to age discrimination. As usual, this shows that women in general are more social than men, and move into jobs which require more socializing and less of just keeping your nose stuck to a monitor all day, even when it involves working with men who do exactly this.
That's fine when you have an area that is set aside to be a forest. Even if it burns down, no problem, just wait a couple decades and it'll grow back, so all the lost trees are replaced. But this was at Yellowstone National Park, a place that's specifically off-limits to human development (aside from a handful of NPS-owned buildings for tourists and such).
The problem is with places which aren't protected this way: humans decide to take land that used to be a forest, and then turn it into a subdivision or a shopping mall (oh sorry, those are out of vogue now; it'll be a "lifestyle center"). Those trees aren't coming back. With too many humans using too much land, there's not enough space for the number of trees we used to have. It doesn't have to be that way; if more land was set aside for forests, and more humans lived in more dense environments (cities), and there was more recycling of wood products (esp. paper), everything would be fine. Also, for wood products, they could switch to using bamboo for more stuff, since bamboo grows so quickly and usually works just as well if not better, depending on the application.
My pet peeves with modern society are with the morons who revel in their own ignorance.
Today ignorance is celebrated.
Ignorance should never be treated as a virtue. And yet that is what is happening and this original post proves that this attitude is still alive.
Welcome to American society.
Not a problem. Pretty soon, reproduction won't require men anyway, and we'll have an all-female society as women realize that uneducated, idiot, sports-obsessed men are not an asset in their lives and push them out.
Doctors don't have those problems. They have to deal with annoying insurance issues, but they have staff for that. I should hope they actually enjoy the doctoring part of their jobs. How many tech workers really enjoy dealing with all the shitty technologies they work with (it's not like they get to pick them)? And doctors don't have bosses usually; they run their own offices, frequently as partners in a small group with other doctors.
A lot of accountants run their own independent businesses.
A lot of lawyers, likewise, are partners in a small firm, or have their own firm.
How many engineers have their own small firm? Almost none.
How's that useful when the dozens of commercial apps you install don't use it or work with it? That's nice for the open-source stuff that does work with it, but be realistic: most Windows users use little to no open-source stuff, and a bunch of proprietary crapware from McAfee, Adobe, their printer vendor or other hardware makers, etc.
Not a problem, they can partner with the Russians for all that stuff. America can't even launch anything any more without buying engines from the Russians, and the Russians have a much more successful military. America spends trillions and gets nothing for it, Russia sends in some Spetznaz and a few armored divisions and gets Crimea and other territory. Meanwhile, ISIS is destroying 2000-year-old Roman-era UN-protected temples and the US military, for all its "operational experience and force projection", is completely powerless to stop a handful of guys with some dynamite in their backpacks. What a joke.
Yep. Although one thing seems to have changed since your kids were subject to you spending too much time at work: the stability. At least 20+ years ago it was a stable career (esp. 30+ years ago, it seemed to start having a lot of problems in the early 90s). So it's even less attractive as a job prospect now. Yeah, it's a better career than flipping burgers I guess, and maybe law (I hear law kinda sucks these days), but being a veterinarian sounds like a much more interesting and rewarding career to me for many reasons, so I can certainly see why girls would be drawn to that: you get to work with cute animals, people actually appreciate you, you don't have some shitty boss telling you to work 90 hours/week to meet some arbitrary deadline for some shitty project that's not going to sell anyway (like a Windows Phone) and which no one will care about, ...
"Less inhospitable than other nearby planets" doesn't make this planet automatically "hospitable". If it gets to the point where people have to live in domed cities or underground or something, I could see why some people would want to build generation ships and go somewhere else. It's a long shot of course; what would be the feasibility in fixing this planet to make it decent again, vs. what's the feasibility of finding another planet that's more hospitable out-of-the-box?
You're wrong about the asteroid, though. A small asteroid, sure, we could survive that. But there are "planet-killer" ones out there. But they're extremely unlikely to hit the Earth anytime soon.
I have to disagree, to a point. People frequently have certain deal-breakers, which are basic points of compatibility. For instance, I have no interest in dating a smoker. I don't want someone like that in my life; I can't stand being around tobacco smoke and sure as hell don't want someone smoking in bed with me. That's a basic deal-breaker. But Tinder doesn't allow me to see that about people, whereas any other dating site has that as one of the basic parameters, so you could meet someone and start talking, meet them in person, and then find out they're just not relationship material because of a basic deal-breaker like this. This is just one example, other people have other (and multiple) deal-breakers; maybe they don't want to date someone who thinks the Earth is 6000 years old, or who loves having a bunch of giant dogs and other animals around the house, etc. You may like someone, but that doesn't mean you can actually share a home with them if you can't get along on basic things.
In fact, I'd say the fact that *most* people don't screen people based on parameters like this (because most people do not find their partners on dating sites, but rather at bars or other meatspace places where these parameters are again not always apparent) could be one of the reasons the divorce rate is so high. You're right, people *aren't* picking well; they're using too much emotion, instead of screening people out who are simply bad matches for reasons like these, and then looking to see who they have chemistry with. They have some fairy-tale notion that they're going to run into Mr./Ms. Right at the supermarket or something and hit it off. Sure, you might meet someone attractive that you have chemistry with like that (or more likely, at a bar), but then it turns out you have serious compatibility problems. But if you've gotten emotionally attached already, you're likely to overlook that stuff, and then when you finally do break up, it's really messy, when you should have simply said "no thanks" right at the beginning.
No, they have to have different ones for different regions. All the other countries aren't free-for-alls either, they just have different regulations about power and channels.
That proves my point. If you dress up as Batman, yes, people will see your good deeds and a google search of you will show up "good guy!" to cover up the shitting at Wendy's.
No, they don't. You're missing my point. No one ever heard of this Batman guy (except at the children's hospital he visited) until he died. Then everyone was talking about what a great guy he was. I'm sure he was a great guy, but my point is that he only made national news when he got hit by a car and died. Just driving a black Lamborghini made to look sorta like the Batmobile, dressing in a Batsuit even better than many of the movie ones, and visiting dying children regularly wasn't enough for him to make national news. Getting hit and killed while doing that was.
Yeah, this is why all this push to get women into IT is annoying as hell. Has anyone actually *asked* them why they're not interested? I'll bet the poor reputation of the career (as you point out) is one big, big reason. You have to know all kinds of arcane crap, you have to go through hard degree programs in college, the pay isn't all that great, workers are laid off all the time, and the social factor sucks. Women are usually much more social than men anyway (especially compared to IT/engineering men), so why would they be interested? If a woman's smart she'll probably go into finance, law, or medicine instead.
This sounds good and all, but I looked at your static.izs.me link, and it says this article was written by a Christian Rudder in 2010, not Sam Yagan. The Observer article says Christian was OKC's "data hound". So Yagan didn't write this post, one of his employees did; he obviously had it taken down when it made him look bad. He even acknowledges this, but really it's pretty obvious he's changed his tune since back in '10 OKC was all about being free (except for ads), and then Yagan joined the dark side with the Match.com acquisition.