Criminals don't think that way. Even when the penalties involve being hanged, drawn and quartered, criminals keep committing crimes. They either don't care, or think they won't get caught, or think they will manage to avoid the full force of retribution.
Perhaps 'criminals' don't think that way, but plenty of other people do.
On the other hand, since they're not criminals, they're not likely to have to worry about it. It's not like kids sit down on Career day and say "I think I'll become a criminal! Naw, too much retribution. I'll find some other line of work."
A dead or incarcerated criminal can and has done it as well.
Only after he turns into a zombies. You are most likely referring to this possibility, I reckon.
And sure, there are a lot of studies to back anything you want in sociology and other human "sciences". That is why they say very little to corroborate or refute anything. Locating and identifying those few that produce any useful data, and understanding what conclusions can and cannot be taken from this data is generally a very hard job and requires something that most people lack: common sense.
That said I do not depend on these studies for my arguments. A bit of logic and common sense is usually enough to show how absurd is your set of beliefs.
I guess "logic and common sense" weren't enough for your keen intellect to distinquish between past tense and present or future tenses.
The generally accepted practical definition for "common sense" is "It matches my predjuices". Common sense, after all, is why people kept insisting that the Earth is flat.
You apparently are out of touch with reality my friend. There are plenty of studies that show exactly what I just said, but they are not even really necessary to understand that an incarcerated or a dead criminal cannot commit crimes against society. A rehabilitated one (whatever that word really means) can and has done it.
A dead or incarcerated criminal can and has done it as well. What the word "rehabilitated" really means to most people is that the person in question won't ever do it again. And unlike a dead or incarcerated criminal, may actually be capable of serving society.
As for "plenty of studies that should exactly what I said", the world, and especially the Internet are FULL of plenty of studies that show exactly what people say. That the Earth is flat, that aliens secretly rule us, that everything is 6000 years old or less. Some actual practical citations bearing the names of people not obviously on an ideological payroll would be far more convincing.
You forgot the main function, insulation, as in insulate society from criminals by keeping them apart.
Actually the two most important functions are insulation and deterrence. Both rehabilitation and retribution are irrelevant in comparison.
Unfortunately, we may keep criminals apart from society, but do so by putting then together with other criminals.
Prisons have reputation as "finishing schools" to learn criminal trades from experienced pros and as a place to learn the use of violence as an everyday solution for problems.
It would seem that a better solution would be to isolate criminals from those who would grow and amplify their faults - ideally in the company of better role models. However, coming up with people who can be good role models who wouldn't become victims is hard enough, and getting enough isolation would probably be prohibitively expensive.
Although dealing with prison-trained criminals isn't exactly cheap itself.
It's a consequence of being in prison, which itself is the punishment. Violent criminals aren't deterred by the threat of "protecting society", they're deterred by the threat of being locked up.
If criminals were really all that deterred by the threat of being locked up. Or tormented. Or killed, then crime would have been ended the first time a prisoner was punished.
Criminals don't think that way. Even when the penalties involve being hanged, drawn and quartered, criminals keep committing crimes. They either don't care, or think they won't get caught, or think they will manage to avoid the full force of retribution.
We've had thousands of years and innumerable practical "experiments" that demonstrate beyond doubt that you cannot impose virtue externally, be it by force of arms, force of law, or force of religion. The only thing that really keeps people from committing crimes is if you can convince them not to try at all. And there are strong indications that this might be as much a medical/psychological problem as a strictly moral one.
And one, that, so far we have relatively little success in dealing with on a practical basis.
Punishment may satisfy the vindictive, but to have any moral credibility, the punishment must FOLLOW the crime. And that means that damage has already been done. As a deterrent, it's pretty useless, and if it's too extreme can actually cause criminals to compound their crimes in an attempt to avoid the punishment.
That might work. Pull the buggy through a scanner and pay and leave. Let's do that.
We're talking Wal-Mart. After you pay, then the security guards at the door have to inspect everything. Because obviously no honest person would either run a cash register or shop there and we can't have Everyday Low Prices if we don't shred people's dignity making sure that even a 10-cent pack of gum wasn't paid for.
My vision of the store of the future is a Wal-Mart where automated container-freight modules are routed to slots in the store having been set up by inexpensive labor at whatever third-world port of call they came from, people dump it into their shopping carts, which are RFID-scanned and billed straight to their payday lendor accounts and only the security guards actually remain as employees.
Only in poorly regulated capitalism do entities get too big to fail.
Isn't the mantra of capitalism that regulating capitalism is a Sin?
Realistically, there's this old adage called "Nothing Succeeds like Success". Or, if you prefer, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". Etc.
Most markets are contain positive feedback loops where the more you prosper, the more you prosper. You can demand - and get - favorable prices from suppliers, you can buy up competitors or sit out price wars that ruin them or gain unfair advantages in many, many ways, even with no government in sight to meddle with the market.
The thing about positive feedback looks, however, it that they ultimately destroy the various systems that they run in. In business, that's a monopoly - there is essentially no other market left. You are too big to fail, because if you do fail, there's no recourse of consequence to take over and you end up taking down your suppliers and your customers with you. Even near-monopolies pose a risk that way if enough major players are are too closely dependent on the same things. Dominoes.
This is one of the great geek myths. People have been claiming this for over 100 years, but the overall trend is that average hours worked isn't changing (or specifically increasing for women; see link below). I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader why technological advancements tend to give added benefits to the richest parts of society and not the rest.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1997/04/art1full.pdf
In agricultural times, you had to work hard, but there was a definite point where working more didn't help. Once the fields were planted, or the crops harvested, the cows milked and so forth, assuming you weren't too tired to do anything else, the rest of the day was yours. And in temperate climates, field work wasn't even possible during the heart of the winter. You could mend harnesses, carve wood, try and avoid catching pneumonia, and that was about it. Nature itself regulated you.
In industrial times, machines aren't seasonal, don't need long fallow periods (just short downtimes for maintenance) and can in most cases run 24x7. People were expected to adapt to the needs of the machines.
Once you move up to knowledge work, things get even murkier, since there's no longer even a machine schedule to accomodate to. You're expected to be producing 110% 110% percent of the time, even though study after study indicates that that's not the optimal way to run a human body. If we came up with a drug that eliminated the need for sleep, you can bet it would become essentially mandatory for anyone who wanted to keep a living-wage job.
And --- even if it did, look at what people with too much time on hands do to this world: crime, gangs, terrorists, cults, drug users --- most of societies ills are AVOIDED by making these people have jobs so they don't have free time.
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop." -- Proverbs 16:27
Don't be put off because of its religious origin - it's the demonstration of a point that has been known for thousands of years.
This is true. Look at all the Infernal Machines we ride around so comfortably in and the goods we purchase that have been made in Dark Satanic Mills.
If the people who'd invented those things had kept out of their Devil's Workshops and drudged along behind their plows like honest folk, just think what a paradise we'd live in for all the 40 years of our average lifespans (four-score and 10 is the limit, not the mean).
Trying to race automation to the cost bottom is an exercise in futility; it's a race humans will not win. The only ones that benefit from it are the employers that get cheaper labour faster as a result.
Not only the employers. Consumers also benefit from the lower prices resulting from cheaper costs of production.
Not when they're all unemployed and cannot affor products at any price. That's like offering more incomed tax deductions to people who don't make enough money to be taxable in the first place.
Basically the only ones that are worse off are those people who did the jobs that are now automated. That's only in the short-run since increased production always ends up leading to new jobs, be it in that industry in other capacities or in other industries that wouldn't have existed otherwise (consider whether we'd ever have something like a computer industry if 90% of the population were still farmers as in 1862).
People are inordinately fond of projecting things in straight-line fashion. Not everything follows straight lines or even simple curves.
Just because "it always worked that way" doesn't mean that it always will.
The higher the minimum wage, the more incentive there will be to automate those minimum-wage jobs.
Ever since the Luddites, people have claimed that automation would put people out of work, but so far this hasn't happened. All it does is create new low-wage jobs as the money saved from automation goes back into the economy and creates new things for people to spend the money on. Or at least it used to back when income inequality was lower. But raising the minimum wage takes care of that.
So it all works out nicely.
As they say in the stock market: "Past performance is no indicator of future results".
You say that from the mindset that 4 hours of work per day is not excessive. There are a lot of people right now that view the 8 hour work day as a cakewalk, especially one that involves sitting in an office and looking at a computer screen for 8 hours. It's all relative. Maybe one day you will only need to put in 1 week or 1 day of work per year to earn your keep in society. Or maybe people will be fighting for the few prestigious jobs sustaining humanity and you'd be lucky to ever get to work in a job that was necessary rather than one that was for leisure or personal improvement.
Your mileage may vary.
I've known for many, many years that only about 6 hours of the average day am I truly productive. But since the standard workday is 8, I have to "earn" my salary by parking my lardy butt in an office chair to be on public display whether I'm doing anything productive or not. If I left after I had burned out for the day at least I could spend the freed-up time growing vegetables or something more useful or just resting to to a better job tomorrow. As it is, occasionally something comes up I can handle on auto-pilot, but not enough to actually justify sitting there just in case.
This whole 60-hour week thing is, to me, a desperate gasp of a dying system. We obviously have more people than work required, based on recent economic indicators, but we grind the people who are actually employed into powder in order to keep them desperate enough that they won't dare aspire to healthier working conditions. Splitting the work into 2 jobs would keep more people employed, for less time, and the people involved would have the advantage of being less fatigued/more clear-thinking, but bean-counter economics cares little about that, and only sees the overhead of keeping multiple people on the payroll with the concommittant extra expenses. Thus, despite being more productive than at any time in history, they refuse to be even a fraction less bean-productive even though they can often afford it and might even benefit from it.
To be fair, the bean-counters of company A are competing with the bean-counters of its competitors and like any arms race, there are no prizes granted for anything that doesn't keep the weapons stockpile growing.
Jimmy Carter's fault has always been that he wants fairness and "the right thing" not merely what's popular or "should be" right. Reagan's popularity was in large part because he didn't care that much about fairness, he wanted what "should be" right for him, his cronies, and his country, and everyone else was expected to get out of the way and take care of themselves.
If that's what you got from Reagan, I feel sorry for you. You seem to take everything Carter said on face value, and assume he meant well, while all the optimistic things Reagan said and meaningful things he accomplished must have all been for the nefarious purposes claimed by his harshest critics. The flaw in your argument should be clear to you immediately, in that Reagan couldn't both be popular (implying wide support) and only interested in what was best for his "cronies". I suggest you reevaluate your opinions of both based on the facts, not on hyperbole.
Read closer:
, he wanted what "should be" right for him, his cronies, and his country,
Not just his cronies, although like virtually all administrations, cronies get extra helpings of gravy.
Carter's failing was that he wanted to be fair to the whole world. And still does, as his present-day activities demonstrate. The problem is that the world is a bunch of ingrates, mostly run by people who are only interested in helping themselves, their cronies, and - sometimes - their countries.
And considering the party über alles attitude of recent years, the USA itself can be considered having fallen into that camp.
Jimmy Carter's fault has always been that he wants fairness and "the right thing" not merely what's popular or "should be" right. Reagan's popularity was in large part because he didn't care that much about fairness, he wanted what "should be" right for him, his cronies, and his country, and everyone else was expected to get out of the way and take care of themselves.
I'm with Carter's view, though. Snowden should face trial, because that's the appropriate response for distributing confidential information without permission. A fair and impartial trial would most likely acknowledge that he broke laws and agreements, but exonerate him because he had no obviously better alternative. It's also a good place to put the whole thing under close public inspection. And public inspection is one of the cornerstones of democracy, just as keeping everything hidden is a hallmark of the police state.
Unforfunately, at the moment, the best we seem to be able to offer Snowden is a fair and impartial conviction.
Not until they'd finished the scouring of the Shire it wasn't. The Party Tree had been felled and the Gaffer was in lock-up (though some privately thought that was the best place for him).
I'm pretty sure that was the point. Except, it was dumb, because as you say, they actually did come home and set everything that mattered right.
If you don't count Frodo. Who was short a finger and subject to flashbacks of such intensity that he eventually had to flee Middle-Earth to find a cure.
But the Tolkien Universe was designed that way. Eru explicitly stated that no matter what opposition to His will was mounted that in the end it would simply further His goals. Bastard.
Another fantasical element was that people were always making predictions. When the Good Guys prophesied something it always came true, right down to the enumeration of Sam's as-yet unborn children. When the Bad Guys prophesied something, it never came true.
exactly why they couldn't fly the ring bearer any closer to mordor.
Two words: Flying Nazgul.
It would have made an epic work a lot shorter.
Actually, one of the things that has always fascinate me about Tolkien is that his writing styles are fitted so well to the subject matter. "Tree and Leaf" is very conversational. "Farmer Giles of Ham" could have been an old fireside tale repeated in a tavern. The Hobbit is, of course, a fairy tale, the Lord of the Rings a grand epic, and the Silmarillion is high history/mytholody. And that's exactly how they read.
Which means that some of those works may seem silly to "serious" readers while other readers are bored to tears by the stiffness of the more epic works. But it does demonstrate that Tolkien was a true master of language. Not just words and grammars, but language as it is actually used.
Yea, and while you may do that, and Google employees may do that... no one else does. Thats the point.
People email XLS files because Excel is light years beyond anything Google has on the drawing board. If you've got some fancy Google sheets page that you think is bad ass... congratulations, you're working with what it was like on the pre-release versions of Lotus 1-2-3. Google sheets is a joke, as is there Docs. They've got all the proprietary disadvantages of Microsoft products. NONE of the advantages, none of the years of development, and in order to use it... you have to not only pay them in one form or another, but you have to accept that they're scanning your documents and can read any data they want.
Using Google Sheets for business purposes shows a serious lack of technical knowledge.
I'm guessing you think Excel is a way to look at rows of a database in the form of a CSV, in which case... you're doing it wrong across the board.
To be precise, my clients use Excel as a way to look at/send me rows of a database in the form of a CSV.
I use spreadsheets for basic calculations, but that's all. Anything more complex usually mandates an actual program.
The only time I ever receive an XLS that uses all those gee-whiz macro features that make it different than generic-cheapo-spreadsheet is when someone has exceeded the limits of what a spreadsheet can do and they need me to convert it into an actual application. Which is generally long after they've exceeded the limits of what a spreadsheet should be doing in the hands of sane people.
Frankly, I wouldn't trust a computationally-complex spreadsheet in the hands of most people. They start typing numbers in over the forumulas (violating cell protections in the process) and do other things that compromise its integrity.
Well hot damn, I will tell my boss that right away!
Of course, the loading time for it is a bit much but I am sure my whole company will love this free resource they can now use.
They like free employees even more.
And if you're a Team Player, I'm sure that if it really takes that much longer to download, you'll gladly stay late to deal with it. Salaried, of course, not overtime.
After all, there are plenty of people in (Third World Country) who would be more than happy to!
Never underestimate the willingness of modern companies - or consumers - to "save money" no matter what the ultimate cost.
> The portability, sharing and collaboration of Gdocs is light years ahead of the others
But not light years ahead of sending an xls in an email.
Sorry, but that's what the real world still uses.
Maybe someday someone will figure out how to change that fact, but so far GDocs is not that solution.
Maybe it's because you don't have to "send" the XLS in the Googleverse. You simply share out the Google doc of the spreadsheet to the intended recipient.
Maybe you're referring to spreadsheets crammed with gnarly formulas that are uniquely Microsoft, but those aren't the kind of XLS files I'm accustomed to getting or sending myself.
Phone companies need call detail records ("CDR"s) to do their billing, which happens monthly. After thgat they have no business need for the data, and retaining it has been an "attractive nuisance", and tempted governments into demanding they hand it over.
They still need it for billing disputes and the like. And of course, if they're not doing "big data" analyses of their own for commercial purposes, they're a lot different than, say, Amazon.
There is a significant advantage to having those records in phone company hands instead of government ones. If you have direct on-line access to data, any idle thought you might come up with is pretty much instantly exploitable. If the government has to go through a process - even a rubber-stamp FISA court - that reduces their ability to do large amounts of mischief in a short amount of time.
Bad enough that AT&T itself can plunder the data, considering how obnoxious they are, but at least I can select a somewhat less annoying carrier.
It's a lot easier than finding a less annoying government.
Yeah, but assuming that is what happened(and there were no other mechanical issues with the plane) the plane would have continued on it's pre-programmed heading and would have either circled the Beijing airport waiting for the (now deceased) pilots to tell it to land, or more likely would have been intercepted by Chinese air force jets when ATC was unable to contact the plane. See Helios Air for an example of where this happened. You'll note that despite the pilots being out of commission for most of the flight the airplane reached Athens then circled, totally on autopilot.
Could you elaborate? My Flight Simulator is admittedly dated, but none of the planes in it had an autopilot smart enough to fly in anything other than straight lines. No way to make it circle anything.
Circling a major airport on automated control sounds dicey anyway. Last time I flew through Atlanta, I swear they were looping all the way out to Savannah and back.
Then again, all evidence was that the Malaysia airliner wasn't aimed at ANY airport. Not even close.
I've only one thing I'd like to print right now: A replacement reverse-nozzle-thingie that goes on the end of the hoover hose.
Replacement custom lids for the battery compartments of various devices where the original got lost or broken.
The hinge cover that got broken off one corner of my laptop.
A box sized and shaped to hold certain control automaion buttons and displays that I have scattered around next to my bed and make them into one tidy package that custom-fits where I want to mount it and looks nice.
Maybe some drawer organizers better tailored to what I keep in storage than the current generic bins.
And yes, I've a hoover part or 2 that I'd like to have to adapt various recycled attachments from an older unit onto the one I use now.
Unfortunately, a lot of people think that CAD is like Photoshop or something - it is not. If you cannot construct a piece using a ruler & compass on paper, you probably shouldn't be using CAD neither.
They should try programming, instead. Everyone knows that if a child can do the software equivalent of drawing with ruler and compass, they're fully qualified to replace a team of those greedy expensive professional programmers on enterprise-level projects.
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Criminals don't think that way. Even when the penalties involve being hanged, drawn and quartered, criminals keep committing crimes. They either don't care, or think they won't get caught, or think they will manage to avoid the full force of retribution.
Perhaps 'criminals' don't think that way, but plenty of other people do.
On the other hand, since they're not criminals, they're not likely to have to worry about it. It's not like kids sit down on Career day and say "I think I'll become a criminal! Naw, too much retribution. I'll find some other line of work."
A dead or incarcerated criminal can and has done it as well.
Only after he turns into a zombies. You are most likely referring to this possibility, I reckon.
And sure, there are a lot of studies to back anything you want in sociology and other human "sciences". That is why they say very little to corroborate or refute anything. Locating and identifying those few that produce any useful data, and understanding what conclusions can and cannot be taken from this data is generally a very hard job and requires something that most people lack: common sense.
That said I do not depend on these studies for my arguments. A bit of logic and common sense is usually enough to show how absurd is your set of beliefs.
I guess "logic and common sense" weren't enough for your keen intellect to distinquish between past tense and present or future tenses.
The generally accepted practical definition for "common sense" is "It matches my predjuices". Common sense, after all, is why people kept insisting that the Earth is flat.
You apparently are out of touch with reality my friend. There are plenty of studies that show exactly what I just said, but they are not even really necessary to understand that an incarcerated or a dead criminal cannot commit crimes against society. A rehabilitated one (whatever that word really means) can and has done it.
A dead or incarcerated criminal can and has done it as well. What the word "rehabilitated" really means to most people is that the person in question won't ever do it again. And unlike a dead or incarcerated criminal, may actually be capable of serving society.
As for "plenty of studies that should exactly what I said", the world, and especially the Internet are FULL of plenty of studies that show exactly what people say. That the Earth is flat, that aliens secretly rule us, that everything is 6000 years old or less. Some actual practical citations bearing the names of people not obviously on an ideological payroll would be far more convincing.
You forgot the main function, insulation, as in insulate society from criminals by keeping them apart.
Actually the two most important functions are insulation and deterrence. Both rehabilitation and retribution are irrelevant in comparison.
Unfortunately, we may keep criminals apart from society, but do so by putting then together with other criminals.
Prisons have reputation as "finishing schools" to learn criminal trades from experienced pros and as a place to learn the use of violence as an everyday solution for problems.
It would seem that a better solution would be to isolate criminals from those who would grow and amplify their faults - ideally in the company of better role models. However, coming up with people who can be good role models who wouldn't become victims is hard enough, and getting enough isolation would probably be prohibitively expensive.
Although dealing with prison-trained criminals isn't exactly cheap itself.
That comes under the category of deterrence.
Huh? How is "protecting society" a punishment?
It's a consequence of being in prison, which itself is the punishment. Violent criminals aren't deterred by the threat of "protecting society", they're deterred by the threat of being locked up.
If criminals were really all that deterred by the threat of being locked up. Or tormented. Or killed, then crime would have been ended the first time a prisoner was punished.
Criminals don't think that way. Even when the penalties involve being hanged, drawn and quartered, criminals keep committing crimes. They either don't care, or think they won't get caught, or think they will manage to avoid the full force of retribution.
We've had thousands of years and innumerable practical "experiments" that demonstrate beyond doubt that you cannot impose virtue externally, be it by force of arms, force of law, or force of religion. The only thing that really keeps people from committing crimes is if you can convince them not to try at all. And there are strong indications that this might be as much a medical/psychological problem as a strictly moral one.
And one, that, so far we have relatively little success in dealing with on a practical basis.
Punishment may satisfy the vindictive, but to have any moral credibility, the punishment must FOLLOW the crime. And that means that damage has already been done. As a deterrent, it's pretty useless, and if it's too extreme can actually cause criminals to compound their crimes in an attempt to avoid the punishment.
That might work. Pull the buggy through a scanner and pay and leave. Let's do that.
We're talking Wal-Mart. After you pay, then the security guards at the door have to inspect everything. Because obviously no honest person would either run a cash register or shop there and we can't have Everyday Low Prices if we don't shred people's dignity making sure that even a 10-cent pack of gum wasn't paid for.
My vision of the store of the future is a Wal-Mart where automated container-freight modules are routed to slots in the store having been set up by inexpensive labor at whatever third-world port of call they came from, people dump it into their shopping carts, which are RFID-scanned and billed straight to their payday lendor accounts and only the security guards actually remain as employees.
Only in poorly regulated capitalism do entities get too big to fail.
Isn't the mantra of capitalism that regulating capitalism is a Sin?
Realistically, there's this old adage called "Nothing Succeeds like Success". Or, if you prefer, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft". Etc.
Most markets are contain positive feedback loops where the more you prosper, the more you prosper. You can demand - and get - favorable prices from suppliers, you can buy up competitors or sit out price wars that ruin them or gain unfair advantages in many, many ways, even with no government in sight to meddle with the market.
The thing about positive feedback looks, however, it that they ultimately destroy the various systems that they run in. In business, that's a monopoly - there is essentially no other market left. You are too big to fail, because if you do fail, there's no recourse of consequence to take over and you end up taking down your suppliers and your customers with you. Even near-monopolies pose a risk that way if enough major players are are too closely dependent on the same things. Dominoes.
This is one of the great geek myths. People have been claiming this for over 100 years, but the overall trend is that average hours worked isn't changing (or specifically increasing for women; see link below). I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader why technological advancements tend to give added benefits to the richest parts of society and not the rest.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1997/04/art1full.pdf
In agricultural times, you had to work hard, but there was a definite point where working more didn't help. Once the fields were planted, or the crops harvested, the cows milked and so forth, assuming you weren't too tired to do anything else, the rest of the day was yours. And in temperate climates, field work wasn't even possible during the heart of the winter. You could mend harnesses, carve wood, try and avoid catching pneumonia, and that was about it. Nature itself regulated you.
In industrial times, machines aren't seasonal, don't need long fallow periods (just short downtimes for maintenance) and can in most cases run 24x7. People were expected to adapt to the needs of the machines.
Once you move up to knowledge work, things get even murkier, since there's no longer even a machine schedule to accomodate to. You're expected to be producing 110% 110% percent of the time, even though study after study indicates that that's not the optimal way to run a human body. If we came up with a drug that eliminated the need for sleep, you can bet it would become essentially mandatory for anyone who wanted to keep a living-wage job.
"Idle hands are the devil's workshop." -- Proverbs 16:27
Don't be put off because of its religious origin - it's the demonstration of a point that has been known for thousands of years.
This is true. Look at all the Infernal Machines we ride around so comfortably in and the goods we purchase that have been made in Dark Satanic Mills.
If the people who'd invented those things had kept out of their Devil's Workshops and drudged along behind their plows like honest folk, just think what a paradise we'd live in for all the 40 years of our average lifespans (four-score and 10 is the limit, not the mean).
Trying to race automation to the cost bottom is an exercise in futility; it's a race humans will not win. The only ones that benefit from it are the employers that get cheaper labour faster as a result.
Not only the employers. Consumers also benefit from the lower prices resulting from cheaper costs of production.
Not when they're all unemployed and cannot affor products at any price. That's like offering more incomed tax deductions to people who don't make enough money to be taxable in the first place.
Basically the only ones that are worse off are those people who did the jobs that are now automated. That's only in the short-run since increased production always ends up leading to new jobs, be it in that industry in other capacities or in other industries that wouldn't have existed otherwise (consider whether we'd ever have something like a computer industry if 90% of the population were still farmers as in 1862).
People are inordinately fond of projecting things in straight-line fashion. Not everything follows straight lines or even simple curves.
Just because "it always worked that way" doesn't mean that it always will.
Ever since the Luddites, people have claimed that automation would put people out of work, but so far this hasn't happened. All it does is create new low-wage jobs as the money saved from automation goes back into the economy and creates new things for people to spend the money on. Or at least it used to back when income inequality was lower. But raising the minimum wage takes care of that.
So it all works out nicely.
As they say in the stock market: "Past performance is no indicator of future results".
You say that from the mindset that 4 hours of work per day is not excessive. There are a lot of people right now that view the 8 hour work day as a cakewalk, especially one that involves sitting in an office and looking at a computer screen for 8 hours. It's all relative. Maybe one day you will only need to put in 1 week or 1 day of work per year to earn your keep in society. Or maybe people will be fighting for the few prestigious jobs sustaining humanity and you'd be lucky to ever get to work in a job that was necessary rather than one that was for leisure or personal improvement.
Your mileage may vary.
I've known for many, many years that only about 6 hours of the average day am I truly productive. But since the standard workday is 8, I have to "earn" my salary by parking my lardy butt in an office chair to be on public display whether I'm doing anything productive or not. If I left after I had burned out for the day at least I could spend the freed-up time growing vegetables or something more useful or just resting to to a better job tomorrow. As it is, occasionally something comes up I can handle on auto-pilot, but not enough to actually justify sitting there just in case.
This whole 60-hour week thing is, to me, a desperate gasp of a dying system. We obviously have more people than work required, based on recent economic indicators, but we grind the people who are actually employed into powder in order to keep them desperate enough that they won't dare aspire to healthier working conditions. Splitting the work into 2 jobs would keep more people employed, for less time, and the people involved would have the advantage of being less fatigued/more clear-thinking, but bean-counter economics cares little about that, and only sees the overhead of keeping multiple people on the payroll with the concommittant extra expenses. Thus, despite being more productive than at any time in history, they refuse to be even a fraction less bean-productive even though they can often afford it and might even benefit from it.
To be fair, the bean-counters of company A are competing with the bean-counters of its competitors and like any arms race, there are no prizes granted for anything that doesn't keep the weapons stockpile growing.
Capitalism seems to like unemployment just fine. I''ve never seen it go to zero.
Of course, who says capitalism is the answer for now and forever?
Heresy! Burn the witch!
If that's what you got from Reagan, I feel sorry for you. You seem to take everything Carter said on face value, and assume he meant well, while all the optimistic things Reagan said and meaningful things he accomplished must have all been for the nefarious purposes claimed by his harshest critics. The flaw in your argument should be clear to you immediately, in that Reagan couldn't both be popular (implying wide support) and only interested in what was best for his "cronies". I suggest you reevaluate your opinions of both based on the facts, not on hyperbole.
Read closer:
, he wanted what "should be" right for him, his cronies, and his country,
Not just his cronies, although like virtually all administrations, cronies get extra helpings of gravy.
Carter's failing was that he wanted to be fair to the whole world. And still does, as his present-day activities demonstrate. The problem is that the world is a bunch of ingrates, mostly run by people who are only interested in helping themselves, their cronies, and - sometimes - their countries.
And considering the party über alles attitude of recent years, the USA itself can be considered having fallen into that camp.
Jimmy Carter's fault has always been that he wants fairness and "the right thing" not merely what's popular or "should be" right. Reagan's popularity was in large part because he didn't care that much about fairness, he wanted what "should be" right for him, his cronies, and his country, and everyone else was expected to get out of the way and take care of themselves.
I'm with Carter's view, though. Snowden should face trial, because that's the appropriate response for distributing confidential information without permission. A fair and impartial trial would most likely acknowledge that he broke laws and agreements, but exonerate him because he had no obviously better alternative. It's also a good place to put the whole thing under close public inspection. And public inspection is one of the cornerstones of democracy, just as keeping everything hidden is a hallmark of the police state.
Unforfunately, at the moment, the best we seem to be able to offer Snowden is a fair and impartial conviction.
Not until they'd finished the scouring of the Shire it wasn't. The Party Tree had been felled and the Gaffer was in lock-up (though some privately thought that was the best place for him).
I'm pretty sure that was the point. Except, it was dumb, because as you say, they actually did come home and set everything that mattered right.
If you don't count Frodo. Who was short a finger and subject to flashbacks of such intensity that he eventually had to flee Middle-Earth to find a cure.
But the Tolkien Universe was designed that way. Eru explicitly stated that no matter what opposition to His will was mounted that in the end it would simply further His goals. Bastard.
Another fantasical element was that people were always making predictions. When the Good Guys prophesied something it always came true, right down to the enumeration of Sam's as-yet unborn children. When the Bad Guys prophesied something, it never came true.
Crapy love interests? Like Aragorn and Arwen? Faramir and Eowen?
Crappy love interests are a major underpinning of Middle-Earth. Beren and Luthien?
exactly why they couldn't fly the ring bearer any closer to mordor.
Two words: Flying Nazgul.
It would have made an epic work a lot shorter.
Actually, one of the things that has always fascinate me about Tolkien is that his writing styles are fitted so well to the subject matter. "Tree and Leaf" is very conversational. "Farmer Giles of Ham" could have been an old fireside tale repeated in a tavern. The Hobbit is, of course, a fairy tale, the Lord of the Rings a grand epic, and the Silmarillion is high history/mytholody. And that's exactly how they read.
Which means that some of those works may seem silly to "serious" readers while other readers are bored to tears by the stiffness of the more epic works. But it does demonstrate that Tolkien was a true master of language. Not just words and grammars, but language as it is actually used.
Yea, and while you may do that, and Google employees may do that ... no one else does. Thats the point.
People email XLS files because Excel is light years beyond anything Google has on the drawing board. If you've got some fancy Google sheets page that you think is bad ass ... congratulations, you're working with what it was like on the pre-release versions of Lotus 1-2-3. Google sheets is a joke, as is there Docs. They've got all the proprietary disadvantages of Microsoft products. NONE of the advantages, none of the years of development, and in order to use it ... you have to not only pay them in one form or another, but you have to accept that they're scanning your documents and can read any data they want.
Using Google Sheets for business purposes shows a serious lack of technical knowledge.
I'm guessing you think Excel is a way to look at rows of a database in the form of a CSV, in which case ... you're doing it wrong across the board.
To be precise, my clients use Excel as a way to look at/send me rows of a database in the form of a CSV.
I use spreadsheets for basic calculations, but that's all. Anything more complex usually mandates an actual program.
The only time I ever receive an XLS that uses all those gee-whiz macro features that make it different than generic-cheapo-spreadsheet is when someone has exceeded the limits of what a spreadsheet can do and they need me to convert it into an actual application. Which is generally long after they've exceeded the limits of what a spreadsheet should be doing in the hands of sane people.
Frankly, I wouldn't trust a computationally-complex spreadsheet in the hands of most people. They start typing numbers in over the forumulas (violating cell protections in the process) and do other things that compromise its integrity.
Well hot damn, I will tell my boss that right away!
Of course, the loading time for it is a bit much but I am sure my whole company will love this free resource they can now use.
They like free employees even more.
And if you're a Team Player, I'm sure that if it really takes that much longer to download, you'll gladly stay late to deal with it. Salaried, of course, not overtime.
After all, there are plenty of people in (Third World Country) who would be more than happy to!
Never underestimate the willingness of modern companies - or consumers - to "save money" no matter what the ultimate cost.
> The portability, sharing and collaboration of Gdocs is light years ahead of the others
But not light years ahead of sending an xls in an email.
Sorry, but that's what the real world still uses.
Maybe someday someone will figure out how to change that fact, but so far GDocs is not that solution.
Maybe it's because you don't have to "send" the XLS in the Googleverse. You simply share out the Google doc of the spreadsheet to the intended recipient.
Maybe you're referring to spreadsheets crammed with gnarly formulas that are uniquely Microsoft, but those aren't the kind of XLS files I'm accustomed to getting or sending myself.
Phone companies need call detail records ("CDR"s) to do their billing, which happens monthly. After thgat they have no business need for the data, and retaining it has been an "attractive nuisance", and tempted governments into demanding they hand it over.
They still need it for billing disputes and the like. And of course, if they're not doing "big data" analyses of their own for commercial purposes, they're a lot different than, say, Amazon.
There is a significant advantage to having those records in phone company hands instead of government ones. If you have direct on-line access to data, any idle thought you might come up with is pretty much instantly exploitable. If the government has to go through a process - even a rubber-stamp FISA court - that reduces their ability to do large amounts of mischief in a short amount of time.
Bad enough that AT&T itself can plunder the data, considering how obnoxious they are, but at least I can select a somewhat less annoying carrier.
It's a lot easier than finding a less annoying government.
Yeah, but assuming that is what happened(and there were no other mechanical issues with the plane) the plane would have continued on it's pre-programmed heading and would have either circled the Beijing airport waiting for the (now deceased) pilots to tell it to land, or more likely would have been intercepted by Chinese air force jets when ATC was unable to contact the plane. See Helios Air for an example of where this happened. You'll note that despite the pilots being out of commission for most of the flight the airplane reached Athens then circled, totally on autopilot.
Could you elaborate? My Flight Simulator is admittedly dated, but none of the planes in it had an autopilot smart enough to fly in anything other than straight lines. No way to make it circle anything.
Circling a major airport on automated control sounds dicey anyway. Last time I flew through Atlanta, I swear they were looping all the way out to Savannah and back.
Then again, all evidence was that the Malaysia airliner wasn't aimed at ANY airport. Not even close.
I've only one thing I'd like to print right now: A replacement reverse-nozzle-thingie that goes on the end of the hoover hose.
Replacement custom lids for the battery compartments of various devices where the original got lost or broken.
The hinge cover that got broken off one corner of my laptop.
A box sized and shaped to hold certain control automaion buttons and displays that I have scattered around next to my bed and make them into one tidy package that custom-fits where I want to mount it and looks nice.
Maybe some drawer organizers better tailored to what I keep in storage than the current generic bins.
And yes, I've a hoover part or 2 that I'd like to have to adapt various recycled attachments from an older unit onto the one I use now.
Unfortunately, a lot of people think that CAD is like Photoshop or something - it is not. If you cannot construct a piece using a ruler & compass on paper, you probably shouldn't be using CAD neither.
They should try programming, instead. Everyone knows that if a child can do the software equivalent of drawing with ruler and compass, they're fully qualified to replace a team of those greedy expensive professional programmers on enterprise-level projects.