All the furniture I bought has been made in America, same with my cookware. The cars are made in America, except one came from Japan. My bike was made here. The lumber, including the engineered wood, for the house remodel was made here. The screw and nails were made here as well, because I bought them. The drywall was made here too. The solar panels I put in for the pool were made here but some materials were sourced from China. The appliances were unfortunately made in Germany and South Korea. My lawnmower and weed wacker was made here though as was the air conditioner and heater, and tankless.
They were "assembled" here- but quite likely much of what you list had most of their components made overseas and then just screwed together in the US just so it can say made in America.
This is doubly true for cars. If your car is an American brand such as GM, doesn't mean it is made in America. I'm not sure if this statistic is still true- but a decade or so ago, a friend of mine in the car industry told me a really interesting fact. He asked: What Company imports the most cars to the US? The answer was: General Motors. The next question was: What company EXPORTS the most cars out of the US? The answer was: Toyota.
So, not sure if still true, but in the not so distant past the #1 importer of cars into the US was a Detroit firm and the #1 exporter was a Japanese firm.
The morale is; if you want to buy an American car, buy a foreign car.
You must live in an absent the poor and uneducated, who comprise the majority of those that still smoke.
Quite the contrary actually. I live in a poor midsized Southern town. Now granted, most of the people I personally spend time with are decidedly in the middle, like myself; and I work in a facility where smoking is prohibited, employees are not even allowed to go outside for a smoke break.
There really isn't anything to hate on here, or to like, because there just isn't anything of substance there.
Not only that, but it would take several years to get anything of substance going. It's not going to be Trump deciding how to use any potential "AI", it will be his successor, and we've no idea who that will be, or which party they will be representing.
Whether to use or abuse any AI, if any came out of this, wouldn't even be Trump's decision.
I mean, AI is a neutral thing. It is neither good, nor bad.
By that, I mean, it's a tool. Whether or not it's a good thing or bad thing depends on who's using it and your point of view of the person using it.
Not only that, but the term A.I. has begun to mean so many different things that saying "I want to spend money on AI" is rather an empty statement unless you specify "what kind of AI".
Are they looking for self-learning, are they looking for sentient machines, or are they talking about computer algorithms? Mass media has blurred exactly what is meant by A.I. now.
White collar workers will smoke on the weekends at parties, but might never smoke during the week or at the office. Your personal experiences may not reflect all of society.
Well, my experiences don't reflect society if it's at 15%.
However, I suspect we've seen a shift, not just in % that smoke, but HOW people smoke. The city I live in, 15 years ago there would be butts on the ground outside on every corner where smokers would drop cigarettes out their windows... a lot of burnt grass in intersection medians where they would simmer and char the grass. You don't see that very often now.
It appears that people that DO smoke are more conscientious about how they smoke now (or just are more brow-beaten by non smokers); there is a lot less smoking in public, or even on the roads. I suspect a higher % of smoking now happens in the homes and gardens of the smokers rather than on the streets.
If I'm Reading this right, about 15% of American adults smoke these days, compared to about 42% of adults in 1942. Granted, this story is about teenagers that will soon be adults, and a million more than expected is not a number to be scoffed at, but really when we start getting numbers down that low, I don't know how much more outrage is necessary. The number is never going to be zero percent, no matter what the Puritans wish.
I'm surprised it's as high as 15%. I almost never see people smoking anymore- and vaping is pretty rare around here.
On the bright side smoking is a form of population control, and then maybe we wont see all these annoying climate change(tm) articles on slashdot anymore.
Not a very effective one. It doesn't kill off people before they reproduce and it only lowers their life expectancy by 10%. As a population control it is weak.
Quite the opposite. Caffeine (and more broadly, the coffee that many people consume it in), has all sorts of wide ranging health benefits. There have been hundreds of studies by people trying to prove how unhealthy coffee (and caffeine) is, and all the studies ending up proving the exact opposite; that it actually reduces all sorts of illnesses.
It's a great idea so long as they still permit compostables. Compostable plastics are produced from renewable sources, so they even have the potential to be carbon-neutral. They do have to be tested to make sure they only break down into harmless compounds, though. We should be doing this everywhere.
Even if you take the "green" reasoning out of the argument to ban plastics, this might make sense from a business perspective for Hawaii. Hawaii relies a lot on tourism. Plastic trash is the enemy of pristine beaches, volcanos and scenic overlooks.
At $700 per month, the cost isn't that high. If you did that in the U.S. it comes out to $2.7 trillion...
What world do you live in where $20,000 per household annually can be written off as not that high?
Whereas I agree, that's a lot of money (although remember, this replaces unemployment benefits- so net cost won't be $700 per adult)
$700 per month = $8400 per year for an adult. I really don't think most households have 2.5 adults living in them. Maybe the average household has 2.5 PEOPLE... but kids aren't going to be getting this money.
I'm on the fence about the whole thing but I find it interesting that there's an assumption that the result was a bad thing. I don't believe in an afterlife so you're born, you live, you die. The only thing that makes much sense during that period is to try and be happy and this study seemed to improve their happiness.
I agree with that assessment; but 2k can't show you what will happen to the economy. If it crashes as a result of people not working; so no one can get a job that wants one and goods become more expensive through inflation so all of a sudden your UBI doesn't buy much- people will no longer be happy.
It's easy to see that the 2k getting the "free money" were happier- but if the whole population did this; what would it do to the economy? Would that free money quickly become insignificant due to inflation, or lack of available goods due to lack of labour?
2k getting money is very different to EVERYONE getting money.
Don't we already have a similar situation in the USA - people who win a lottery? That would be an interesting group to study, to see what people do when they get a pot of money that isn't transformative (i.e. hundreds of millions), but sustaining (i.e. gives them what amounts to an annuity of something resembling a UBI, or is enough to basically replace their pre-winnings salary).
Probably... although the majority of winners do take the whole pot of money... and the majority of them are back to their old wealth levels within 3 years.
There isn't enough info, and I doubt a 2k test run will yield statistically detectable changes in crime and traffic rate. (Aside: what if crime rates actually went up due to UBI?)
The biggest problem with 2k doing the test is; that's not enough people to tank the economy if this turns out to be economically important.
That said, I would say that happiness in life is ultimately the most important thing. Happiness is what makes life worth living; but if the economy collapsed because of UBI, I don't think people would be happy for long.
You can't experiment with UBI on 2000 people- you need to do it with a whole region, or country... I wouldn't want to be living in one of the first test places though in case it went wrong.
Not even that (as I've said in another post). Bees have been around for literally millions of years; it would be amazing if they still weren't any good at picking up clues on which plants deliver the goods. Want to bet that a bee's visual cortex can't classify the difference between a "busy" pattern of lots of patches and a "simpler" pattern? All it has to learn is to associate busier patterns with the reward for one colour of "flower", and simpler ones for the other. Job done, no counting required.
Indeed, this is my first thought too. Not that I think it is out of the realm of possibility that bees can count; but it is probably much more likely there is some sort of pattern matching is going on, as you suggest. Bees need to be able to recognise visual patterns to find flowers; you'd expect them to be good at that. It's a much more feasible explanation than that they can count and do simple maths.
That's the exact definition of Pavlovian conditioning. You don't need the reward / punishment in the actual test, that's the exact point of it.
Also 14 is not nearly a large enough sample size to determine whether that slight deviation from a perfect 50:50 result is not by chance.
So this is not even a good enough experiment to determine whether pavlovian conditioning works on bees.
Laughably small test sample numbers! Insects and spiders have shown that they DO possess more intelligence than we give them credit for. (I've seen studies suggesting cockroaches could have similar intelligence to rodents); but this test is just statistical noise. You don't get any confirmable answer with these numbers.
However... put that aside... imagine they did 14,000 tests and got the same result %; does that show that insects can do maths? Probably not, there could have been some other form of pattern matching going on that the researchers weren't aware of.
This implies that talk radio came from no where. It became popular on the right because they were excluded by other medians.
And they may have had a fair point with that, I wouldn't say they were excluded, but there has always been a slight bias against the right in media; it wasn't a deliberate bias though. In general, I think the kind of people who are most into journalism tend to lean to the left. Historically, the more artsy people have been left leaning, and journalists have been recruited more from the language arts crowd.
I think TV and radio may have had a gentle bias because of that towards the left. (newspaper media has always been polarized politically on both ends of the scale).left mimicked them and we ended up with the ridiculous polarization of the media that we have today).
What people like Rush, and Fox News did in reaction to that "accidental bias" against the right was to go full scale right-wing with a deliberate bias. In the course of three decades we've gone from small natural biases to massive opposing armies of biased journalism.
And I should mention, only one side has stopped talking. The side that dismisses anyone who disagrees with them as racists.
That's not true. Both sides have stopped.
It was the right that split off first with things like Rush Limbaugh network, Fox News, Storm Front. The left mimicked the right- CNN went to the left when Fox became popular (it may have had a slight left bend before then because journalists themselves tend to be more liberal- but it wasn't a deliberate bias like today); news sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed popped up. The left never really managed a viable alternative to the right wing radio editorials like Limbaugh- but they tried to crack that nut too several times.
The phenomenon of ignoring the main stream and creating a "safe space" where everyone thinks alike, started on the right and was copied by the left.
There is no common ground anymore, so there is no point in trying to discuss things with people at the other end of the political spectrum.
I dont even try anymore, if youre a Trumper, youre not worth my time.
Your sentiment is probably indicative of what is happening here. You don't want to talk to "Trumpers" and they almost certainly don't want to talk to you either.
Certainly with news sites we're seeing polarization occurring. You can't just have news anymore- you have to have liberal news OR conservative news. People go to their own sites. There is enough internet for everyone now that conservative people tend to congregate around conservative sites and liberal people congregate around liberal sites.
If there is more civility, it's because we're isolating ourselves more now. We're going places where we are comfortable in our ideology. We don't meet in middle ground anymore, there are special havens online for people that think like we do.
Why the heck are these companies assuming that just because the email is different it is a different person? Anyone could just own a domain and setup an unlimited number of aliases to a single address without exploiting any stupid weirdness google created.
Yeah, I use about a dozen different e-mail addresses. I'm clearly not 12 people. I'm not even 12 personalities in one person.
The story is that companies are so lax on security that they let you do things like update card details without actually logging in.
Indeed, whereas gmail might have made things more convenient for them; the fact is, there are countless ways you can create innumerable e-mail addresses. The story here isn't that they used e-mail; the story is that Financial Institutions are so desperate for business that they give out lines of credit based on only having an e-mail address.
That's really pretty stupid. I don't want to victim blame the companies here, clearly they were taken advantage of; but they clearly have some pretty dumb policies in place here to allow themselves to be victimized here.
The North Pole needs a wall to keep it in place. Make the penguins pay for it!! We cannot give that pole to the Ruskies
There are no penguins anywhere near the North Pole. Penguins are only in the Southern Hemisphere, if they lived in the Arctic they would be quickly wiped out by polar bears as they have no way to defend themselves or to evade a land-predator.
You would have to get Polar Bears to pay for the wall since the North Pole is in the North.
Slashdot Mirror
All the furniture I bought has been made in America, same with my cookware. The cars are made in America, except one came from Japan. My bike was made here. The lumber, including the engineered wood, for the house remodel was made here. The screw and nails were made here as well, because I bought them. The drywall was made here too. The solar panels I put in for the pool were made here but some materials were sourced from China. The appliances were unfortunately made in Germany and South Korea. My lawnmower and weed wacker was made here though as was the air conditioner and heater, and tankless.
They were "assembled" here- but quite likely much of what you list had most of their components made overseas and then just screwed together in the US just so it can say made in America.
This is doubly true for cars. If your car is an American brand such as GM, doesn't mean it is made in America. I'm not sure if this statistic is still true- but a decade or so ago, a friend of mine in the car industry told me a really interesting fact. He asked: What Company imports the most cars to the US? The answer was: General Motors. The next question was: What company EXPORTS the most cars out of the US? The answer was: Toyota.
So, not sure if still true, but in the not so distant past the #1 importer of cars into the US was a Detroit firm and the #1 exporter was a Japanese firm.
The morale is; if you want to buy an American car, buy a foreign car.
You must live in an absent the poor and uneducated, who comprise the majority of those that still smoke.
Quite the contrary actually. I live in a poor midsized Southern town. Now granted, most of the people I personally spend time with are decidedly in the middle, like myself; and I work in a facility where smoking is prohibited, employees are not even allowed to go outside for a smoke break.
There really isn't anything to hate on here, or to like, because there just isn't anything of substance there.
Not only that, but it would take several years to get anything of substance going. It's not going to be Trump deciding how to use any potential "AI", it will be his successor, and we've no idea who that will be, or which party they will be representing.
Whether to use or abuse any AI, if any came out of this, wouldn't even be Trump's decision.
I mean, AI is a neutral thing. It is neither good, nor bad.
By that, I mean, it's a tool. Whether or not it's a good thing or bad thing depends on who's using it and your point of view of the person using it.
Not only that, but the term A.I. has begun to mean so many different things that saying "I want to spend money on AI" is rather an empty statement unless you specify "what kind of AI".
Are they looking for self-learning, are they looking for sentient machines, or are they talking about computer algorithms? Mass media has blurred exactly what is meant by A.I. now.
User script? User CSS?
CSS? More likely CCCP!
White collar workers will smoke on the weekends at parties, but might never smoke during the week or at the office. Your personal experiences may not reflect all of society.
Well, my experiences don't reflect society if it's at 15%.
However, I suspect we've seen a shift, not just in % that smoke, but HOW people smoke. The city I live in, 15 years ago there would be butts on the ground outside on every corner where smokers would drop cigarettes out their windows... a lot of burnt grass in intersection medians where they would simmer and char the grass. You don't see that very often now.
It appears that people that DO smoke are more conscientious about how they smoke now (or just are more brow-beaten by non smokers); there is a lot less smoking in public, or even on the roads. I suspect a higher % of smoking now happens in the homes and gardens of the smokers rather than on the streets.
Why is everyone moaning? Our leaders' policies will likely light us all up like Krakatoa before we hit 40.
If I had to guess, 40 is probably below the median age on Slashdot.
If I'm Reading this right, about 15% of American adults smoke these days, compared to about 42% of adults in 1942. Granted, this story is about teenagers that will soon be adults, and a million more than expected is not a number to be scoffed at, but really when we start getting numbers down that low, I don't know how much more outrage is necessary. The number is never going to be zero percent, no matter what the Puritans wish.
I'm surprised it's as high as 15%. I almost never see people smoking anymore- and vaping is pretty rare around here.
On the bright side smoking is a form of population control, and then maybe we wont see all these annoying climate change(tm) articles on slashdot anymore.
Not a very effective one. It doesn't kill off people before they reproduce and it only lowers their life expectancy by 10%. As a population control it is weak.
As does caffeine!
Quite the opposite. Caffeine (and more broadly, the coffee that many people consume it in), has all sorts of wide ranging health benefits. There have been hundreds of studies by people trying to prove how unhealthy coffee (and caffeine) is, and all the studies ending up proving the exact opposite; that it actually reduces all sorts of illnesses.
It's a great idea so long as they still permit compostables. Compostable plastics are produced from renewable sources, so they even have the potential to be carbon-neutral. They do have to be tested to make sure they only break down into harmless compounds, though. We should be doing this everywhere.
Even if you take the "green" reasoning out of the argument to ban plastics, this might make sense from a business perspective for Hawaii. Hawaii relies a lot on tourism. Plastic trash is the enemy of pristine beaches, volcanos and scenic overlooks.
At $700 per month, the cost isn't that high. If you did that in the U.S. it comes out to $2.7 trillion...
What world do you live in where $20,000 per household annually can be written off as not that high?
Whereas I agree, that's a lot of money (although remember, this replaces unemployment benefits- so net cost won't be $700 per adult)
$700 per month = $8400 per year for an adult. I really don't think most households have 2.5 adults living in them. Maybe the average household has 2.5 PEOPLE... but kids aren't going to be getting this money.
I'm on the fence about the whole thing but I find it interesting that there's an assumption that the result was a bad thing. I don't believe in an afterlife so you're born, you live, you die. The only thing that makes much sense during that period is to try and be happy and this study seemed to improve their happiness.
I agree with that assessment; but 2k can't show you what will happen to the economy. If it crashes as a result of people not working; so no one can get a job that wants one and goods become more expensive through inflation so all of a sudden your UBI doesn't buy much- people will no longer be happy.
It's easy to see that the 2k getting the "free money" were happier- but if the whole population did this; what would it do to the economy? Would that free money quickly become insignificant due to inflation, or lack of available goods due to lack of labour?
2k getting money is very different to EVERYONE getting money.
Don't we already have a similar situation in the USA - people who win a lottery? That would be an interesting group to study, to see what people do when they get a pot of money that isn't transformative (i.e. hundreds of millions), but sustaining (i.e. gives them what amounts to an annuity of something resembling a UBI, or is enough to basically replace their pre-winnings salary).
Probably... although the majority of winners do take the whole pot of money... and the majority of them are back to their old wealth levels within 3 years.
There isn't enough info, and I doubt a 2k test run will yield statistically detectable changes in crime and traffic rate.
(Aside: what if crime rates actually went up due to UBI?)
The biggest problem with 2k doing the test is; that's not enough people to tank the economy if this turns out to be economically important.
That said, I would say that happiness in life is ultimately the most important thing. Happiness is what makes life worth living; but if the economy collapsed because of UBI, I don't think people would be happy for long.
You can't experiment with UBI on 2000 people- you need to do it with a whole region, or country... I wouldn't want to be living in one of the first test places though in case it went wrong.
Wasn't this the proposed theme to Iron Sky 2. Hint: It's Lizard people living down there below Antarctica.
Not even that (as I've said in another post). Bees have been around for literally millions of years; it would be amazing if they still weren't any good at picking up clues on which plants deliver the goods. Want to bet that a bee's visual cortex can't classify the difference between a "busy" pattern of lots of patches and a "simpler" pattern? All it has to learn is to associate busier patterns with the reward for one colour of "flower", and simpler ones for the other. Job done, no counting required.
Indeed, this is my first thought too. Not that I think it is out of the realm of possibility that bees can count; but it is probably much more likely there is some sort of pattern matching is going on, as you suggest. Bees need to be able to recognise visual patterns to find flowers; you'd expect them to be good at that. It's a much more feasible explanation than that they can count and do simple maths.
That's the exact definition of Pavlovian conditioning. You don't need the reward / punishment in the actual test, that's the exact point of it.
Also 14 is not nearly a large enough sample size to determine whether that slight deviation from a perfect 50:50 result is not by chance.
So this is not even a good enough experiment to determine whether pavlovian conditioning works on bees.
Laughably small test sample numbers! Insects and spiders have shown that they DO possess more intelligence than we give them credit for. (I've seen studies suggesting cockroaches could have similar intelligence to rodents); but this test is just statistical noise. You don't get any confirmable answer with these numbers.
However... put that aside... imagine they did 14,000 tests and got the same result %; does that show that insects can do maths? Probably not, there could have been some other form of pattern matching going on that the researchers weren't aware of.
This implies that talk radio came from no where. It became popular on the right because they were excluded by other medians.
And they may have had a fair point with that, I wouldn't say they were excluded, but there has always been a slight bias against the right in media; it wasn't a deliberate bias though. In general, I think the kind of people who are most into journalism tend to lean to the left. Historically, the more artsy people have been left leaning, and journalists have been recruited more from the language arts crowd.
I think TV and radio may have had a gentle bias because of that towards the left. (newspaper media has always been polarized politically on both ends of the scale).left mimicked them and we ended up with the ridiculous polarization of the media that we have today).
What people like Rush, and Fox News did in reaction to that "accidental bias" against the right was to go full scale right-wing with a deliberate bias. In the course of three decades we've gone from small natural biases to massive opposing armies of biased journalism.
And I should mention, only one side has stopped talking. The side that dismisses anyone who disagrees with them as racists.
That's not true. Both sides have stopped.
It was the right that split off first with things like Rush Limbaugh network, Fox News, Storm Front. The left mimicked the right- CNN went to the left when Fox became popular (it may have had a slight left bend before then because journalists themselves tend to be more liberal- but it wasn't a deliberate bias like today); news sites like Huffington Post and Buzzfeed popped up. The left never really managed a viable alternative to the right wing radio editorials like Limbaugh- but they tried to crack that nut too several times.
The phenomenon of ignoring the main stream and creating a "safe space" where everyone thinks alike, started on the right and was copied by the left.
There is no common ground anymore, so there is no point in trying to discuss things with people at the other end of the political spectrum.
I dont even try anymore, if youre a Trumper, youre not worth my time.
Your sentiment is probably indicative of what is happening here. You don't want to talk to "Trumpers" and they almost certainly don't want to talk to you either.
Certainly with news sites we're seeing polarization occurring. You can't just have news anymore- you have to have liberal news OR conservative news. People go to their own sites. There is enough internet for everyone now that conservative people tend to congregate around conservative sites and liberal people congregate around liberal sites.
If there is more civility, it's because we're isolating ourselves more now. We're going places where we are comfortable in our ideology. We don't meet in middle ground anymore, there are special havens online for people that think like we do.
Why the heck are these companies assuming that just because the email is different it is a different person?
Anyone could just own a domain and setup an unlimited number of aliases to a single address without exploiting any stupid weirdness google created.
Yeah, I use about a dozen different e-mail addresses. I'm clearly not 12 people. I'm not even 12 personalities in one person.
Oh yes we are. No we're not... yes we are.
The story is that companies are so lax on security that they let you do things like update card details without actually logging in.
Indeed, whereas gmail might have made things more convenient for them; the fact is, there are countless ways you can create innumerable e-mail addresses. The story here isn't that they used e-mail; the story is that Financial Institutions are so desperate for business that they give out lines of credit based on only having an e-mail address.
That's really pretty stupid. I don't want to victim blame the companies here, clearly they were taken advantage of; but they clearly have some pretty dumb policies in place here to allow themselves to be victimized here.
Hitler had no problem giving half the Poles to the Ruskies, and he was a staunch anti-commie!
Yeah, but he was planning to take it back (along with all of Eastern Europe) at a later date. He was only loaning the Pole to Russia.
The North Pole needs a wall to keep it in place. Make the penguins pay for it!! We cannot give that pole to the Ruskies
There are no penguins anywhere near the North Pole. Penguins are only in the Southern Hemisphere, if they lived in the Arctic they would be quickly wiped out by polar bears as they have no way to defend themselves or to evade a land-predator.
You would have to get Polar Bears to pay for the wall since the North Pole is in the North.