Wrong. Flying planes is not a very marketable skill; there's tons of pilots out there with FAA licenses looking for work. This guy doesn't have that: he's only trained to military standards, not FAA civilian standards, and has no FAA licenses at all. He'll have to go back to school and fly around in Cessnas to get those licenses. Granted, he'll be able to do it a lot faster than someone with no background, but the FAA hourly minimums are still significant, for instance 40 flight hours for the Private license alone, which at $50-100 per flight hour in a Cessna adds up to a nice chunk of change. There's no shortage of pilots right now (though flight schools will happily tell you the opposite because they want your money).
Employee satisfaction and retention is important in good businesses. That doesn't seem to matter in the military.
Well of course not. In the military, you don't have to worry about your subordinates simply walking off the job when they're pissed off at their boss's inanity or the crappy workplace environment. In the civilian world, you do. (I speak as someone who did walk off the job one day when my boss pissed me off.) Walking off the job in the military means a court-martial. Doing so in the civilian world means the worker just goes and gets another job elsewhere, while the boss has to explain to his superiors why an important team member just quit with no warning, and how badly this is going to fuck up the schedule since they're chronically understaffed.
Interesting, but this isn't all that different from your typical automotive assembly line robot which has been around for a few decades now. It's just a lot smaller and cheaper, which means it's suitable for far more applications (by virtue of its cost and size). It'd be great for handling small products on an assembly line, putting things into packages, etc. There's not much intelligence there, which is really what your typical nontechnical American thinks of when the word "robot" is used: something that looks something like a human and has some intelligence in reacting to situations.
Thanks for the reference, though: this gives me some ideas.
We already have a permanent underclass of welfare recipients. At least with a stipend, they wouldn't have to constantly look for ways to make more money (under the table) without losing their benefits, and could go get normal jobs to increase their income. And everyone else would have a stipend to fall back on too: students, people who lose their jobs, etc., not just people who've become really skilled at getting government benefits.
Not necessarily: that stipend has to come from somewhere, and that means increasing taxes for everyone who is working. Of course, if we make drastic cuts elsewhere, a good chunk of it would be paid for without any tax increases: the military budget, the "war on drugs", etc. can all be cut way, way back and those funds diverted. Plus of course our current welfare systems (at state and federal levels both) can be eliminated entirely, moving all the funds to the stipend program (and eliminating a ton of administrative overhead). I suppose Social Security could be phased out too, since there's not much point in having that if you're going to have a guaranteed stipend for everyone regardless of age. But even after all those changes, if you do the math, I don't think there's enough money to pay for a liveable stipend, for, say, everyone making less than $300k, or even $200k.
I imagine they'll do the same thing as all the scribes, elevator operators, and weavers who have been replaced by machines. Some of them will be like my buddy and get paid better money to maintain and operate the new machines, he is an engineer taking care of weaving machines. The rest will become datacenter techs, web designers, whatever new jobs are required.
Yes, but what about the Kardashian and Honey Boo Boo fans? People like that aren't capable of being datacenter techs or web designers. And America is absolutely full of people like that. There's only so many barista and janitor jobs out there.
Gou and Foxcon might be using the word robot but in the majority of instances it is not what most people would consider a robot.
What "most people" (or at least, most ignorant Americans) consider a "robot" is something that doesn't exist, except maybe Honda's Asimo robot (which doesn't even do anything really useful). The Roomba wouldn't be considered a "robot" by these people either, but it certainly is.
In the industrial sector, a "robot" is a machine that completes tasks automatically. A CNC machine is a robot, for instance, even though it's just a fancy milling machine that operates according to a program. A pick-and-place machine (which places electronic components on circuit boards) is a commonly-used robot in the electronics industry. If you look at the manufacturer's plate on many of these machines, they say "industrial robot".
I'm liking the "basic income" idea more and more. Instead of employing an army of people to run the welfare systems and look for "cheaters", just give everyone a stipend without any checks at all (except maybe for a high threshold as you said). I can see a lot of people choosing to pursue their own business, as long as this stipend is enough to keep them from starving; it makes the risk of starting a new business much lower. It'd also fix the idiotic problem where people on welfare don't want to work because they'd then lose their benefits, in effect, spending their time working for the same income they get for doing nothing, and now not having free time to do other things like be with family or go to school.
No, that's still a crappy design. I get that the thing is supposed to be collapsable, but things that can be folded up like that are supposed to be designed so that they fold up only when you want them too, such as by flipping a lever. When they're erected, they're supposed to stay that way, especially if they have people inside them! If a stroller is supposed to be for carting kids around, it shouldn't collapse as soon as a little upward force is placed on it; it should stay that way, even if you pick it up with the kid inside, until you activate some kind of release mechanism to make it fold up.
I've gotten a couple of items from Amazon lately; they weren't books, and were items that luckily weren't fragile and had their own retail packaging, but it seems that Amazon has decided to hire people who know absolutely nothing about how to pack items for shipping, or even basic physics. Both items came, by themselves, in a box somewhat larger than the item, with a single bubble pack (the inflated "pillows" that usually come in a chain) thrown in, and plenty of extra space. What's the point of throwing in the air pillow if you're not going to fill all the space in the box?
[Posted from my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop - I guess I have a maximum of 12 months before X11 is dumped altogether in favour of Mir and I wipe the disk with debian stable]
You can just move to Linux Mint KDE if you want. It's just like Kubuntu, without the ubuntu in the name and things seem slightly more polished. It remains to be seen whether Mint goes to Mir or Wayland, but since Mint doesn't support Unity at all, it'll probably be Wayland.
X.org wasn't a different display server, it was a fork of XFree86. Not only did it use the exact same protocol, it even used the exact same code (at least at first, though they added some new extensions later after everyone dumped XFree86 and switched to X.org).
No one (except a few morons) said that the X.org fork would be the "demise" of Linux. I remember the whole thing quite well; everyone was relieved that X on Linux would finally stop stagnating, and get some much-needed new development without that idiot Dawes holding everyone back. Within a very short time, all the distros had switched to the new fork and XFree86 became nothing more than a memory.
The lower the level, the worse fragmentation is. Who cares how many text editors are out there, for instance? It doesn't matter, because you can use any of them that you please.
But lower down the chain, fragmentation becomes more of a problem, because things higher up the stack rely on standardization below them to work.
How many Linux kernels are there, for instance? Only one. (There's some different versions, but they're all compatible with each other as far as running application code.) (There's also *BSD and HURD, but those aren't used nearly as much, and at least one of the BSDs actually has a Linux compatibility layer to run binary Linux applications.) Until recently, there was only one display server, X; so graphical applications and toolkits only had to work with that. Then along came Wayland, which promised to fix a lot of problems with X; this wasn't so bad: most of us knew that X was long in the tooth and a replacement had to come sooner or later, so having everyone transition from the old to the new was a doable thing. But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.
Anyway, back to your other complaints: different libraries aren't a problem. Using one library doesn't interfere with using another; applications just use whatever libraries they're linked against. System utils doing the same things isn't a problem: use the one you like, the others aren't going to keep you from doing that. Different HTTP servers is a good thing: use the one you like. Choice is a good thing, not a bad thing, as long as things are compatible. Graphical toolkits are a little lower on the stack, so that is a bit of a pain having more than one, so it's a balance between choice and standardization. Having two main ones doesn't seem so bad; 6 or 7 of them would be more of a problem. (There's more than 2 graphical toolkits, but only 2 of them are really in widespread use in Linux-land.) DEs are higher up the stack than toolkits; use the one you like. There's nothing preventing you from using KDE apps in GNOME, and vice-versa. However, DEs are lower than regular apps, usually have a lot of stuff integrated, and are the "face" seen by users, so it would be nice if Linux had its act together better in that regard. Of course, when a DE is tied directly to an incompatible display server, that really fragments things.
BTW, last I heard there were at least 3 or 4 different graphical toolkits for Windows (Win32, MFC,.NET), and those are all from the same company.
Don't be ridiculous; the whole idea of Mir and Wayland is to speed up the desktop, as X is horribly obsolete and slow. This "XMir" is just so X stuff can be run on Mir until it gets updated to run on Mir directly.
Of course, there's a whole separate issue which is that Mir competes with Wayland and fragments the Linux infrastructure, but this doesn't affect speed.
Bears are limited in numbers and frequently endangered. Polar bears in particular are definitely endangered. They should be protected.
Humans, OTOH, are not endangered, and in fact, there's far too many of them (esp. in those "shit hole cities" you refer to). They require no protection.
BTW, those cities you deride are producers: they produce all the manufactured and engineered goods you consume on your farm or country property. The internet you're using to send your message wasn't invented on a farm or in a rural area. The CPU you used in your computer to write your message wasn't built in a rural area, it was built in a city, in a factory, by factory workers, and was designed by a team of thousands of engineers in a city. The monitor you used to read this thread before responding to it was built in a factory in a city (probably in China), by factory workers, and again designed by engineers in a city somewhere. The products you buy (including food products which use foods grown in your country locales) all had their packaging designed by graphic artists and manufactured in a city somewhere.
Without cities, you'd have no communications, no economy, not even any guns (those are made in factories too), and at best you'd be a subsistence farmer with rather poor nutrition (the invention of agriculture caused humans to lose over a foot in height) and a short life span.
This is a good point actually. If the SI system is supposed to be so wonderful because of simple prefixes denoting powers of 10 sizes of the unit, then why go off and make up a different, archaically-based name instead of using the prefixes that are the centerpiece of the system? The prefixes are the thing that's so great about SI.
A home lost in a forest fire is a home loss that could have been prevented. "Poor people", the ones I was referring to, are not "poor people" at all. They have chosen to build million dollar homes in an area with a very high risk index for forest fires. If they lost their home due to fire, it was because of their own negligence.
There's risk everywhere. What about people with homes near sea level, or near beaches? What about people living in the southeast where hurricanes frequently hit? What about people in California, where there's earthquakes?
This is what insurance is for. If it was such a huge fire risk, then why would an insurance company bother to insure there? It seems the insurance companies disagree with you about the risk for those areas, or maybe they actually did charge very high insurance premiums, which those people willingly paid. Fire insurance isn't like flood insurance; it's all from private companies (last I heard) and not the Federal government, so it's not like the taxpayer is on the hook for those losses. And insurance companies are not required to insure in areas they don't want to; after hurricane Katrina, they all pulled out of the Gulfport MS area and won't offer insurance there which covers losses due to high winds (the local government had to create its own "wind pool" insurance for people there, and it's horrifically expensive).
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Wrong. Flying planes is not a very marketable skill; there's tons of pilots out there with FAA licenses looking for work. This guy doesn't have that: he's only trained to military standards, not FAA civilian standards, and has no FAA licenses at all. He'll have to go back to school and fly around in Cessnas to get those licenses. Granted, he'll be able to do it a lot faster than someone with no background, but the FAA hourly minimums are still significant, for instance 40 flight hours for the Private license alone, which at $50-100 per flight hour in a Cessna adds up to a nice chunk of change. There's no shortage of pilots right now (though flight schools will happily tell you the opposite because they want your money).
Employee satisfaction and retention is important in good businesses. That doesn't seem to matter in the military.
Well of course not. In the military, you don't have to worry about your subordinates simply walking off the job when they're pissed off at their boss's inanity or the crappy workplace environment. In the civilian world, you do. (I speak as someone who did walk off the job one day when my boss pissed me off.) Walking off the job in the military means a court-martial. Doing so in the civilian world means the worker just goes and gets another job elsewhere, while the boss has to explain to his superiors why an important team member just quit with no warning, and how badly this is going to fuck up the schedule since they're chronically understaffed.
Interesting, but this isn't all that different from your typical automotive assembly line robot which has been around for a few decades now. It's just a lot smaller and cheaper, which means it's suitable for far more applications (by virtue of its cost and size). It'd be great for handling small products on an assembly line, putting things into packages, etc. There's not much intelligence there, which is really what your typical nontechnical American thinks of when the word "robot" is used: something that looks something like a human and has some intelligence in reacting to situations.
Thanks for the reference, though: this gives me some ideas.
We already have a permanent underclass of welfare recipients. At least with a stipend, they wouldn't have to constantly look for ways to make more money (under the table) without losing their benefits, and could go get normal jobs to increase their income. And everyone else would have a stipend to fall back on too: students, people who lose their jobs, etc., not just people who've become really skilled at getting government benefits.
Not necessarily: that stipend has to come from somewhere, and that means increasing taxes for everyone who is working. Of course, if we make drastic cuts elsewhere, a good chunk of it would be paid for without any tax increases: the military budget, the "war on drugs", etc. can all be cut way, way back and those funds diverted. Plus of course our current welfare systems (at state and federal levels both) can be eliminated entirely, moving all the funds to the stipend program (and eliminating a ton of administrative overhead). I suppose Social Security could be phased out too, since there's not much point in having that if you're going to have a guaranteed stipend for everyone regardless of age. But even after all those changes, if you do the math, I don't think there's enough money to pay for a liveable stipend, for, say, everyone making less than $300k, or even $200k.
I imagine they'll do the same thing as all the scribes, elevator operators, and weavers who have been replaced by machines.
Some of them will be like my buddy and get paid better money to maintain and operate the new machines, he is an engineer taking care of weaving machines.
The rest will become datacenter techs, web designers, whatever new jobs are required.
Yes, but what about the Kardashian and Honey Boo Boo fans? People like that aren't capable of being datacenter techs or web designers. And America is absolutely full of people like that. There's only so many barista and janitor jobs out there.
Gou and Foxcon might be using the word robot but in the majority of instances it is not what most people would consider a robot.
What "most people" (or at least, most ignorant Americans) consider a "robot" is something that doesn't exist, except maybe Honda's Asimo robot (which doesn't even do anything really useful). The Roomba wouldn't be considered a "robot" by these people either, but it certainly is.
In the industrial sector, a "robot" is a machine that completes tasks automatically. A CNC machine is a robot, for instance, even though it's just a fancy milling machine that operates according to a program. A pick-and-place machine (which places electronic components on circuit boards) is a commonly-used robot in the electronics industry. If you look at the manufacturer's plate on many of these machines, they say "industrial robot".
I'm liking the "basic income" idea more and more. Instead of employing an army of people to run the welfare systems and look for "cheaters", just give everyone a stipend without any checks at all (except maybe for a high threshold as you said). I can see a lot of people choosing to pursue their own business, as long as this stipend is enough to keep them from starving; it makes the risk of starting a new business much lower. It'd also fix the idiotic problem where people on welfare don't want to work because they'd then lose their benefits, in effect, spending their time working for the same income they get for doing nothing, and now not having free time to do other things like be with family or go to school.
I never said it was a death knell for Microsoft, I said it was a death knell for whoever MS was buying into.
No, that's still a crappy design. I get that the thing is supposed to be collapsable, but things that can be folded up like that are supposed to be designed so that they fold up only when you want them too, such as by flipping a lever. When they're erected, they're supposed to stay that way, especially if they have people inside them! If a stroller is supposed to be for carting kids around, it shouldn't collapse as soon as a little upward force is placed on it; it should stay that way, even if you pick it up with the kid inside, until you activate some kind of release mechanism to make it fold up.
Hmm, that sounds like a crappy design.
I've gotten a couple of items from Amazon lately; they weren't books, and were items that luckily weren't fragile and had their own retail packaging, but it seems that Amazon has decided to hire people who know absolutely nothing about how to pack items for shipping, or even basic physics. Both items came, by themselves, in a box somewhat larger than the item, with a single bubble pack (the inflated "pillows" that usually come in a chain) thrown in, and plenty of extra space. What's the point of throwing in the air pillow if you're not going to fill all the space in the box?
Yep, the deal with MS was an obvious sign that B&N's end was nearing. Having MS buy into something is a death knell these days.
And entirely relevant and true too.
Can't you just pick up the stroller and carry it up a few stairs? How much does a stroller with a small child weigh anyway?
Polishing a turd still leaves you with a turd in the end.
[Posted from my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop - I guess I have a maximum of 12 months before X11 is dumped altogether in favour of Mir and I wipe the disk with debian stable]
You can just move to Linux Mint KDE if you want. It's just like Kubuntu, without the ubuntu in the name and things seem slightly more polished. It remains to be seen whether Mint goes to Mir or Wayland, but since Mint doesn't support Unity at all, it'll probably be Wayland.
You don't know much about software, do you?
X.org wasn't a different display server, it was a fork of XFree86. Not only did it use the exact same protocol, it even used the exact same code (at least at first, though they added some new extensions later after everyone dumped XFree86 and switched to X.org).
No one (except a few morons) said that the X.org fork would be the "demise" of Linux. I remember the whole thing quite well; everyone was relieved that X on Linux would finally stop stagnating, and get some much-needed new development without that idiot Dawes holding everyone back. Within a very short time, all the distros had switched to the new fork and XFree86 became nothing more than a memory.
The lower the level, the worse fragmentation is. Who cares how many text editors are out there, for instance? It doesn't matter, because you can use any of them that you please.
But lower down the chain, fragmentation becomes more of a problem, because things higher up the stack rely on standardization below them to work.
How many Linux kernels are there, for instance? Only one. (There's some different versions, but they're all compatible with each other as far as running application code.) (There's also *BSD and HURD, but those aren't used nearly as much, and at least one of the BSDs actually has a Linux compatibility layer to run binary Linux applications.) Until recently, there was only one display server, X; so graphical applications and toolkits only had to work with that. Then along came Wayland, which promised to fix a lot of problems with X; this wasn't so bad: most of us knew that X was long in the tooth and a replacement had to come sooner or later, so having everyone transition from the old to the new was a doable thing. But now, stupid Canonical had to decide to fragment things with Mir, which does mostly the same thing as Wayland but in an incompatible manner, so who knows what's going to happen.
Anyway, back to your other complaints: different libraries aren't a problem. Using one library doesn't interfere with using another; applications just use whatever libraries they're linked against. System utils doing the same things isn't a problem: use the one you like, the others aren't going to keep you from doing that. Different HTTP servers is a good thing: use the one you like. Choice is a good thing, not a bad thing, as long as things are compatible. Graphical toolkits are a little lower on the stack, so that is a bit of a pain having more than one, so it's a balance between choice and standardization. Having two main ones doesn't seem so bad; 6 or 7 of them would be more of a problem. (There's more than 2 graphical toolkits, but only 2 of them are really in widespread use in Linux-land.) DEs are higher up the stack than toolkits; use the one you like. There's nothing preventing you from using KDE apps in GNOME, and vice-versa. However, DEs are lower than regular apps, usually have a lot of stuff integrated, and are the "face" seen by users, so it would be nice if Linux had its act together better in that regard. Of course, when a DE is tied directly to an incompatible display server, that really fragments things.
BTW, last I heard there were at least 3 or 4 different graphical toolkits for Windows (Win32, MFC, .NET), and those are all from the same company.
Don't be ridiculous; the whole idea of Mir and Wayland is to speed up the desktop, as X is horribly obsolete and slow. This "XMir" is just so X stuff can be run on Mir until it gets updated to run on Mir directly.
Of course, there's a whole separate issue which is that Mir competes with Wayland and fragments the Linux infrastructure, but this doesn't affect speed.
Bears are limited in numbers and frequently endangered. Polar bears in particular are definitely endangered. They should be protected.
Humans, OTOH, are not endangered, and in fact, there's far too many of them (esp. in those "shit hole cities" you refer to). They require no protection.
BTW, those cities you deride are producers: they produce all the manufactured and engineered goods you consume on your farm or country property. The internet you're using to send your message wasn't invented on a farm or in a rural area. The CPU you used in your computer to write your message wasn't built in a rural area, it was built in a city, in a factory, by factory workers, and was designed by a team of thousands of engineers in a city. The monitor you used to read this thread before responding to it was built in a factory in a city (probably in China), by factory workers, and again designed by engineers in a city somewhere. The products you buy (including food products which use foods grown in your country locales) all had their packaging designed by graphic artists and manufactured in a city somewhere.
Without cities, you'd have no communications, no economy, not even any guns (those are made in factories too), and at best you'd be a subsistence farmer with rather poor nutrition (the invention of agriculture caused humans to lose over a foot in height) and a short life span.
This is a good point actually. If the SI system is supposed to be so wonderful because of simple prefixes denoting powers of 10 sizes of the unit, then why go off and make up a different, archaically-based name instead of using the prefixes that are the centerpiece of the system? The prefixes are the thing that's so great about SI.
A home lost in a forest fire is a home loss that could have been prevented. "Poor people", the ones I was referring to, are not "poor people" at all. They have chosen to build million dollar homes in an area with a very high risk index for forest fires. If they lost their home due to fire, it was because of their own negligence.
There's risk everywhere. What about people with homes near sea level, or near beaches? What about people living in the southeast where hurricanes frequently hit? What about people in California, where there's earthquakes?
This is what insurance is for. If it was such a huge fire risk, then why would an insurance company bother to insure there? It seems the insurance companies disagree with you about the risk for those areas, or maybe they actually did charge very high insurance premiums, which those people willingly paid. Fire insurance isn't like flood insurance; it's all from private companies (last I heard) and not the Federal government, so it's not like the taxpayer is on the hook for those losses. And insurance companies are not required to insure in areas they don't want to; after hurricane Katrina, they all pulled out of the Gulfport MS area and won't offer insurance there which covers losses due to high winds (the local government had to create its own "wind pool" insurance for people there, and it's horrifically expensive).
That sounds similar in size to the Kodiak bear (aka Alaskan grizzly).
One natural danger you forgot is meteorites/asteroids. Britain isn't immune to those, like Russia found out a few months ago.
So I guess we humans are ALL stupid, since we live someplace where we could get hit by an asteroid, right pspahn?