Oh, pardon me for being so terribly imprecise; I meant "union shop". The difference is whether you're forced to join a union after you get hired or before...
"Kurzweil is often credited with inventing omnifont OCR, but it was in use by companies, including CompuScan, in the late 1960s and 1970s. See Schantz, The History of OCR; Data processing magazine, Volume 12 (1970), p. 46"
Kurzweil's Wikipedia page also talks about all the companies he founded, all the books he wrote, and all the awards he received:
Kurzweil is famous for his breakthroughs in OCR, computer speech synthesis and digital music creation" as well as his theory of The Singularity, that point when technology is sufficiently advanced that it contests and surpasses human intelligence."
He founded some companies and made a name for himself. But what breakthroughs did he actually make? What are his technical contributions?
You, like every other person who doesn't like gun control, have no facts. And when you do think you have a fact, it is either cherry picked or wrong.
Neither do you. Swiss violence has been low for reasons unrelated to gun control or gun ownership. On the other hand, US violent crime has always been high, for reasons unrelated to gun ownership. Restricting gun ownership in the US would likely do nothing to curb violent crime.
You, like every other person who wants gun control, don't have facts either. And in the absence of clear and convincing facts either way, the rational choice is not to create more and more restrictive laws.
You can't compare wages like that over time because they depend on many other factors. Apart from demographics, many government regulations intended to improve working conditions will lead to a decrease in wages: retirement benefits, health care, etc. are paid for by not increasing wages. Where else did you think the money comes from when you impose additional regulations? Corporate shareholders aren't going to pay for it out of their own pocket.
My grandfather, on "just" a bachelor's degree, single-handedly supported a family, owned a home in Long Beach and a vacation cabin and a boat, and retired on an inflation-adjusted pension after only 25 years of work at a company
Yes, and your grandfather was privileged and lucky. Today, many more people have bachelor's degrees, meaning it doesn't guarantee a good job anymore. Homes in Long Beach are expensive, among other things because of policies intended to "preserve home values" and "protect middle class wealth". He could own real furniture because there were still local businesses making wooden furniture, and those businesses existed because they had low operating cost and could get their materials cheaply, something that isn't possible anymore due to all sorts of regulations and environmental protection. I don't pass judgment on whether his world was better or worse than ours, but I can tell you: you can't have your cake and eat it too: if you want a more educated population, more benefits, and more environmental protection, you have to sacrifice something for that.
Granted, he didn't have slashdot.
He also couldn't get millions of books for free or get online education on just about any topic he chose. His home may have contained asbestos, his wooden furniture might have killed him, his food contained DDT, his waterways were polluted, and there was far more poverty and deprivation in his time.
If I could reduce work by a few hours for a few hours less pay, I would. But that doesn't make sense because going from 8h to 6h work days entails a high cost.
You don't have to "force" anybody to do anything. All you have to do is to eliminate the arbitrary government policies that incentivize a particular number of hours worked per day.
That is such a ridiculous statement. Oh yes, my work week will be shortened; along with my paycheck.
You can keep your standard of living constant and work less, or you can keep the amount of work constant and increase your standard of living. Most people choose the latter, as you seem to.
No, I'm still trying to figure out how your claim that, supposedly, in Marx's time fewer people were working
Feanorian claimed that "mechanization displaces jobs" like Marx predicted. Feanorian and Marx are obviously both wrong, as a simple look at labor participation rates shows you. We have more jobs today, not fewer, and more people filling those jobs, both in absolute and in relative terms.
Neither of them made an argument about unpaid peasant home makers. Unpaid peasant home makers clearly have less unpaid work to do today due to mechanization, and it's hard to see how that could possibly be considered a bad thing.
As a side note, you should be paying more attention to names of people you're replying to, because I think you're confusing me with the guy who started the thread
I'm not confusing you. But you should pay more attention to the context of an argument instead of interpreting words out of context.
Michigan lawmakers just approved a right-to-work law in an effort to dismantle union power,
Right-to-work is the law in many European nations with strong labor unions.
The widespread use of closed shop and union security agreements is a US aberration and has nothing to do with union power in general, it has to do with protecting the power of a few powerful and politically connected organizations.
So, pray tell, all those people who were not working in Marx's time as a percentage of society - where did they get their food from?
From their husbands, mostly. The point is that mechanization did not cause a collapse in the job market; instead, there was a modest increase. Hence, Marx was wrong.
most of them don't really enjoy their jobs. At best, they find them tolerable.
So, as I was saying: people choose to work longer hours, some because they want the extra money, others because they like their job. So, people aren't forced into working 40h+ weeks by some evil capitalist plot.
What if the vast majority of jobs below a certain skill level are being automated? What if fewer and fewer new jobs are being created because automated equipment is more and more versatile and cost effective?
That's been happening for 100 years, in addition to extensive outsourcing, yet unemployment has not skyrocketed, and labor participation rate has gone up; in different words, there is more work and more people doing that work today than 100 years ago, despite automation and outsourcing. So, there must be a flaw in your reasoning.
Surprise! The empty meme from the mid-20th century you are glibly repeating becomes invalid.
It's not an "empty meme", it's a scientific and economic fact. The Marxist meme you are repeating so naively is clearly invalid.
Marx talks how capital's need to grow lead to technological innovation to make production more efficient. This in principle could allow for people to work much less and still maintain very high standards of living. However, our production is oriented toward maximizing profits, not human needs, therefore we work longer hours in spite of the mechanization of most of production.
If you really wanted to, you could easily have a 19th century working class standard of living on very few hours of work per week. The reason you don't do that is because you want a higher standard of living, and also because labor is something people value increasingly doing in itself.
So yea, mechanization not only displaces jobs,
Marx made those predictions a century and a half ago, and mechanization has been happening ever since. Yet, far more people work today as a percentage of society and in absolute numbers than back in his time. That soundly disproves the idea that "mechanization displaces jobs" and shows that Marx and other "socialist/anarchist thinkers" were completely wrong.
Of course, technology replaces labor; that is the purpose of using technology. But that doesn't "cause unemployment". The people that have been replaced by technology at those companies will go on doing something else at other jobs.
Google has an obligation to maximize its profits. It has some wiggle room in areas like working conditions, but it can't just leave billions in taxes on the table.
Also, a lot of the money we're talking about is retirement funds and savings; the more Google pays to the government, the less Google's stockholders get, and that includes most of us.
No, the trap you are falling into is thinking of consumption as being utilitarian, but once the basic needs are met, it stops being utilitarian. People already mostly pay for status symbols and tokens, and those are a matter of social convention and perception, not production or quality. People already buy lots of inferior and inconvenient handmade stuff, and they go through a lot of inconveniences to live with those status symbols. And this is not new either:
In addition to that misunderstanding, your economic reasoning is faulty as well. Either (1) everybody has the production technology, or (2) a few people have the technology and give stuff away free, or (3) a few people have the technology and don't give stuff away. In cases (1) and (2), everybody gets free stuff. In case (3), the rest of the world is in the same situation as if those robots didn't exist, and people just go back to producing stuff the way they produced it before.
You're making a bizarre 19th century argument. In fact, when robots can make physical things for next to nothing, they can make more robots for next to nothing. People owning robots won't be wealthy. The wealthy people will be those who know how to program those robots to do interesting things and make interesting stuff.
In fact, most of our economy is already not about physical production. Even if robots make 100% of everything we consume and take care of most of our physical needs, people will still pay for music, live performances, vacations, backrubs, video game weapons, literature, elaborate rituals for making coffee, and even logos, and symbols.
Counter-argument: several of the worst laws introduced in Europe and the UK over the past decades have been defeated because they violated rights granted under European-Union law.
I don't see that as much of a "counter argument". The Soviet Union and Roman emperors also occasionally did something good for their citizens, that didn't make those desirable forms of government. The EU in its current form is not a democratic institution, it is effectively an unaccountable, byzantine bureaucracy.
Some of the laws that got overturned just in Britain in the past few years for violating EU human rights clauses were truly terrifying, without the EU - nothing could have stopped those atrocities from happening.
If Britain, Austria, France, etc. don't manage to have reasonable democratic government that protects the interests of the people, how is that going to come about at the EU level?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, pardon me for being so terribly imprecise; I meant "union shop". The difference is whether you're forced to join a union after you get hired or before...
So I gather you don't know either what technologies he actually invented.
May I suggest you do too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
"Kurzweil is often credited with inventing omnifont OCR, but it was in use by companies, including CompuScan, in the late 1960s and 1970s. See Schantz, The History of OCR; Data processing magazine, Volume 12 (1970), p. 46"
Kurzweil's Wikipedia page also talks about all the companies he founded, all the books he wrote, and all the awards he received:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_kurzweil
The guy is clearly a great communicator, promoter, manager and businessman. But did he actually make specific technical contributions? What are they?
I mean, given that people are saying he's going to revolutionize machine learning and language processing at Google, isn't that a legitimate question?
Let me help you here.
Einstein came up with the photoelectric effect and the theories of special and general relativity.
Turing invented the Turing machine and the Turing test.
Codd invented the relational database model.
Alan Kay invented Smalltalk and object oriented progrmaming.
Kurzweil invented ______________
He founded some companies and made a name for himself. But what breakthroughs did he actually make? What are his technical contributions?
Neither do you. Swiss violence has been low for reasons unrelated to gun control or gun ownership. On the other hand, US violent crime has always been high, for reasons unrelated to gun ownership. Restricting gun ownership in the US would likely do nothing to curb violent crime.
You, like every other person who wants gun control, don't have facts either. And in the absence of clear and convincing facts either way, the rational choice is not to create more and more restrictive laws.
You can't compare wages like that over time because they depend on many other factors. Apart from demographics, many government regulations intended to improve working conditions will lead to a decrease in wages: retirement benefits, health care, etc. are paid for by not increasing wages. Where else did you think the money comes from when you impose additional regulations? Corporate shareholders aren't going to pay for it out of their own pocket.
Yes, and your grandfather was privileged and lucky. Today, many more people have bachelor's degrees, meaning it doesn't guarantee a good job anymore. Homes in Long Beach are expensive, among other things because of policies intended to "preserve home values" and "protect middle class wealth". He could own real furniture because there were still local businesses making wooden furniture, and those businesses existed because they had low operating cost and could get their materials cheaply, something that isn't possible anymore due to all sorts of regulations and environmental protection. I don't pass judgment on whether his world was better or worse than ours, but I can tell you: you can't have your cake and eat it too: if you want a more educated population, more benefits, and more environmental protection, you have to sacrifice something for that.
He also couldn't get millions of books for free or get online education on just about any topic he chose. His home may have contained asbestos, his wooden furniture might have killed him, his food contained DDT, his waterways were polluted, and there was far more poverty and deprivation in his time.
If I could reduce work by a few hours for a few hours less pay, I would. But that doesn't make sense because going from 8h to 6h work days entails a high cost.
You don't have to "force" anybody to do anything. All you have to do is to eliminate the arbitrary government policies that incentivize a particular number of hours worked per day.
You can keep your standard of living constant and work less, or you can keep the amount of work constant and increase your standard of living. Most people choose the latter, as you seem to.
Feanorian claimed that "mechanization displaces jobs" like Marx predicted. Feanorian and Marx are obviously both wrong, as a simple look at labor participation rates shows you. We have more jobs today, not fewer, and more people filling those jobs, both in absolute and in relative terms.
Neither of them made an argument about unpaid peasant home makers. Unpaid peasant home makers clearly have less unpaid work to do today due to mechanization, and it's hard to see how that could possibly be considered a bad thing.
I'm not confusing you. But you should pay more attention to the context of an argument instead of interpreting words out of context.
Right-to-work is the law in many European nations with strong labor unions.
The widespread use of closed shop and union security agreements is a US aberration and has nothing to do with union power in general, it has to do with protecting the power of a few powerful and politically connected organizations.
I see, so given that Marx's hare-brained economic predictions clearly have turned out to be false, you're now trying roundabout ad hominems.
If you want something portable and compact, there are tons of emulators of programmable calculators (many of them free) for Android phones.
If you want something more heavy-duty running on Linux, you have a choice between Octave, Python, and R.
From their husbands, mostly. The point is that mechanization did not cause a collapse in the job market; instead, there was a modest increase. Hence, Marx was wrong.
So, as I was saying: people choose to work longer hours, some because they want the extra money, others because they like their job. So, people aren't forced into working 40h+ weeks by some evil capitalist plot.
You still "get reported", in the form of your IP address and browser identity, even if you're logged out.
That's been happening for 100 years, in addition to extensive outsourcing, yet unemployment has not skyrocketed, and labor participation rate has gone up; in different words, there is more work and more people doing that work today than 100 years ago, despite automation and outsourcing. So, there must be a flaw in your reasoning.
It's not an "empty meme", it's a scientific and economic fact. The Marxist meme you are repeating so naively is clearly invalid.
If you really wanted to, you could easily have a 19th century working class standard of living on very few hours of work per week. The reason you don't do that is because you want a higher standard of living, and also because labor is something people value increasingly doing in itself.
Marx made those predictions a century and a half ago, and mechanization has been happening ever since. Yet, far more people work today as a percentage of society and in absolute numbers than back in his time. That soundly disproves the idea that "mechanization displaces jobs" and shows that Marx and other "socialist/anarchist thinkers" were completely wrong.
Of course, technology replaces labor; that is the purpose of using technology. But that doesn't "cause unemployment". The people that have been replaced by technology at those companies will go on doing something else at other jobs.
Google has an obligation to maximize its profits. It has some wiggle room in areas like working conditions, but it can't just leave billions in taxes on the table.
Also, a lot of the money we're talking about is retirement funds and savings; the more Google pays to the government, the less Google's stockholders get, and that includes most of us.
No, the trap you are falling into is thinking of consumption as being utilitarian, but once the basic needs are met, it stops being utilitarian. People already mostly pay for status symbols and tokens, and those are a matter of social convention and perception, not production or quality. People already buy lots of inferior and inconvenient handmade stuff, and they go through a lot of inconveniences to live with those status symbols. And this is not new either:
In addition to that misunderstanding, your economic reasoning is faulty as well. Either (1) everybody has the production technology, or (2) a few people have the technology and give stuff away free, or (3) a few people have the technology and don't give stuff away. In cases (1) and (2), everybody gets free stuff. In case (3), the rest of the world is in the same situation as if those robots didn't exist, and people just go back to producing stuff the way they produced it before.
You're making a bizarre 19th century argument. In fact, when robots can make physical things for next to nothing, they can make more robots for next to nothing. People owning robots won't be wealthy. The wealthy people will be those who know how to program those robots to do interesting things and make interesting stuff.
In fact, most of our economy is already not about physical production. Even if robots make 100% of everything we consume and take care of most of our physical needs, people will still pay for music, live performances, vacations, backrubs, video game weapons, literature, elaborate rituals for making coffee, and even logos, and symbols.
I don't see that as much of a "counter argument". The Soviet Union and Roman emperors also occasionally did something good for their citizens, that didn't make those desirable forms of government. The EU in its current form is not a democratic institution, it is effectively an unaccountable, byzantine bureaucracy.
If Britain, Austria, France, etc. don't manage to have reasonable democratic government that protects the interests of the people, how is that going to come about at the EU level?
The irony, of course, is that most of the content that is actually being copied is American and British, yet that's not where most of the money goes.
Fusion is no cleaner than fission.
Why don't you look at the homelessness statistics for your own country?
Also, other countries just force people they don't like into institutions or cheap housing.
I was amazed too; it reminded me of East Germany and it made Australia feel slightly creepy.
You need to read up a lot more on international politics. Just sayin'.