I sincerely do not understand slashdot's near religious devotion to this. I honestly want to understand what I am missing. As I understand it, net neutrality basically says that you do not want to have the cost of your internet usage be proportional to how much you use. It does not seem wrong to me that if you use a ton, pay more or get throttled. Otherwise, someone else is paying the bill for your usage.
So, am I off or is this just a case of millennial wanting free stuff?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic form of socialistic government to the right of communism, but way the fuck left of everything else. See also: Nazi
Progressivism: An authoritarian and autocratic form of socialistic government to the left of fascism, but way the fuck left of everything else. See also: Modern Democrat
As a professor, it was painfully obvious the year that "millennials" started hitting. In order to create fair exams, certain content is repeated for comparison. These provide measures to see if variation in class performance is due to baseline ability, or mistakes in test writing. At the time, we were not sure what was going on, since the millennial phenomena hadn't been described yet. All we did know is that these students were profoundly worse than the years before. They struggled with concepts, gave up when faced with difficult problems, and became irate when you did not drop everything to cater to them, on their schedule. This trend continued for several years.
Worse, there was a growing trend of arrogance that went with this relative lack of ability. Increasingly, students began to confuse the ability to look up something on wikipedia, with actual knowledge and problem solving skill. They were also very dogmatic and intellectually uncurious. If presented with a fact that challenged their preconceptions, they would simply shut down and ignore it. I never thought that exchanging ideas at a university would no longer be in vogue.
So, when stories of this generation began to circulate about this generation being lazy in the workplace with a sense of entitlement, I was in no way shocked. This is what I had seen in my engineering classes. To be clear, I am not saying that I had zero, bright and hardworking students. Some of the best that I had taught were in this era. What I am saying is that the proportion of academic gems to soot was very low.
I would also be remiss not to comment about "being saddled with 1 trillion in college debt." That is classic millennial thought. I.E. a complete and total lack of personal responsibility. No one forced that generation to go to a high priced schools. Every state in the U.S. has a very good public university, which is not all that expensive. This was an option. In fact, it is one that I personally chose, so that I would not have huge, crippling debt. As a generation, millennials were remarkably short sighted and un-analytical about college. It does not take a genius to understand that spending $240,000 at an elite school to earn a degree that leads to jobs that make 30K is simply idiotic. Yet, many of millennials did just that.
No one forced that generation to rack up this debt in trivial non-ecconomcailly viable majors. In fact, because of the internet, millennials had access to far more information about salaries and outcomes than any other generation before it. As a group, millennials simply CHOSE to ignore advice, evidence, and basic math. It is not anyone's fault but their own. Now, they need to live with the consequences of bad judgement.
So, yes, every generation has its triumphs and flaws. Some win major world wars, some travel to the moon, and some even invent the internet. Others, well, I guess their crowning achievement is finding a way to count the number of superficial friends that they have... and wonder why they are considered lesser by those before and after them.
So far, all the "above" posters were commenting on China and human rights and other such issues. There were no pejoratives, beyond the ones you used. Self loathing is one of the saddest mental disorders. I feel so bad for you that you hate yourself and your culture so much, that you jump at imaginary SJW hobgoblins.
You mean to say that doing most of the country's meaningful work and the lions share of responsibility, while being constantly belittled and demonized can take its toll? Weird huh.
The models have been very bad at predicting anything, unless you really twist the data around. The problem is that global warming is as much faith and science. It might be true, but the data is not there, if you are honest.
The conspiracy of chemtrails is that the governments are already doing this to control the environment. A chemtrail differs from a contrail in that it lasts longer and has an unusual chemical make-up when someone tries to measure it. The belief is that tests are being currently undertaken to understand the efficacy of attempting this.
I find it funny that people who use pejoratives, like conspiracy nut" instead closely examine claims are the first to believe descriptors like "ingenious method" in the article posting, when it comes from their lead NPC. To act like their have never been conspiracies is folly. Just ask the black Americans infected with syphilis, just to study disease models. I am sure they were called conspiracy nut too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Part of what is wrong in the world today, is people like the OP, who apply logic so badly, they equate rape and murder with the equivalent of saying "our leader is bad."
Before Walker was elected governor, Wisconsin had a massive budget deficit with out of control spending on special interest groups. People were fleeing the state, especially young, recent college graduates. By placing in several reforms, the state turned around to running a budget surplus and experiencing an economic boom.
You voted him because "Orange Man bad," and he shared the same letter in group of association. Your vote had nothing to do with policy, logic, or even rational self interest. You are the very reason democracy is beginning to fail. You have mentally degenerated to the point where you do not evaluate circumstance. You think joining a club installs supreme virtue, while belonging to another club is automatic dehumanizing evil. You operate at a level beneath rational thought. I would feel sorry for you, but I am more sorry for the suffering in the world that your mindset causes.
It should not matter if someone is a D or an R or a whatever. Only if their policies work, and promote a general well being. If you think the either side has a monopoly on good ideas or successful strategies to improve life, then you are not thinking. You are actually something of an embarrassment.
You dislike trump because your masters told you to. You call him a fascist, while you support violence to squelch the speech of others. You call him a racist while favoring some groups over others. You say you want to help the poor, but give little yourself. You think women tell the truth all the time, and men always lie, and don't see how that is sexist. The list could go on, but you are the problem. Not the guy who revived the economy instead of cheering the slow death of the place you live.
When you dig deeper in the articles, and read the speeches and comments, they really do sound apologetic. However, the analysts, from sources that are not what one would call right leaning, all seem to miss this. Bias is what bias does, but hey, congrats on being modded up for expressing a liberal leaning view on slashdot. In other news, the sky is blue...
From an outsiders perspective, you are implying that somehow each engineer deserves $166,000 a year salary for effectively doing very little. Maybe it would simply be more efficient to spend about 10 million in university research grants and try to figure out how to get more productivity out of the engineers, or at least assess who actually deserves that kind of salary. By your own admission, clearly most of them do not.
From a societal perspective, I really question the value that you are assigning to these computer engineers to the world. I am really skeptical that more good is done by your "paper work people" than say, hiring 3 teachers, 4 social workers, 5 park rangers, or provide a full scholarships for a solid engineering education at say, the university of Illinois, for two kids. Or, if you want to stay in technology, I suspect that two mechanical engineers improving breaking systems or improving the car impact safety is probably more valuable than chasing a doodad that most people really are not asking for.
The reason this is bad because currently the "authoritative" sources are actually incredibly biased, manufacture stories, and often hide information to further an agenda. They understand that if you control the narrative, you can manufacture a reality, or at least keep compliant people invested in such a narrative.
For example, you might yell tinfoil hate but here are a few off the top of my head:
Dan Rather, anchor long time CBS anchor, forced to resign in disgrace for manufacturing anti-conservative news http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBI...
Funny if you read the NY times and other articles attempting to pretend this was a normal stepping down
If i need, I can go on. The point being it is easy to paint others with pejoratives like "tin foil hat" while failing to even consider much that you believe is likely from tainted perspective. Many people rightly fear that google (aka youtube) are censoring opinions that poke holes in their world view. Fake-news is more about people who disagree, not with people posting things that are untrue.
It seems to me that some important person in the news was advocating for exactly what you are talking about. Hmmmm, what was that guys name again? Seems to me that guy may not be as much of a moron as the forums seem to claim...
True idiocy is living by virtue signaling. It robs you of your natural intelligence and logic. You would be far better in life to purge the immature parts of yourself that says things like "Trump is an idiot, but..." You might want to start evaluating people and ideologies issue by issue. You will find that some of what you just accepted as fact was untrue, that people are complicated and not cookie cutter heroes and villains, and that issues are seldom as simple as they seem. When you achieve this, the world makes more sense, and TBH, it becomes far more interesting. You are on the verge of breaking the bubble. Good luck to you.
Or perhaps don't go to a $30,000 a year university and major in something like trans-generdered sheep dance theory. It is not my fault that you made such a remarkably bad life decision. Stop asking me (and other tax payers) to pay for your bullshit.
Before you say anything about privilege or other SJW crap, my family was very poor. I went to a state school and majored in a STEM field, so that I had a reasonable chance of finding a job when I was done. I had to work through school to pay for my tuition, which was possible because I CHOSE not to masturbate my ego and go to an elite school that I could not afford.
The bald fact is that the tuition for fours years at your local state school is likely the cost of one year in whatever school that you went to. Otherwise, there is almost no way you are begging for loan forgiveness or bankruptcy, since the costs are just not that high at State U.
Now, before you comment that you majored something better than whatever "#studies" major that you really did, let me call bullshit. While it is true that recent graduates have faced a tough job market, it turns out that those who graduated with a challenging major with a good GPA fared very well. So, if you can't pay your loan, you are either (1) cosmically unlucky (2) a dumbass who chose a stupid-assed major at an expensive place (3) an entitled douche who can't stop being an asshole for the 15 minutes it takes to do an interview or (4) had a shit-poor GPA despite being at private school that probably grade inflates.
So in any case, no matter if its your ego, your inability to take life seriously, or because you are an ass-hat, the fact is that YOU purchased something. Your tuition went on to pay people's salaries and maintain buildings etc. It was not play money. It was not free. The government did not force you to make bad choices. YOU DID. Own it. Don't expect other people to make sacrifices in their lives because of your personal bullshit.
Personally, I never asked my computer and cell phone to be the same. I am very comfortable with them being different tools for different jobs. I am fine with them being optomized differently so that they can do their job in as an effective way possible.
I think of all the non-sense that has hit Mac Os in recent years, in an effort to make it more IOS like. I do not like how they removed management controls away from iTunes. I LIKED having more robust photo options. Almost everything they have added in to merge the two operating systems has made my MacBook pro's interface worse.
To me, it is culmination of the split between Jobs and Cook. Jobs wanted to make technology insanely great. Cook wants to make it insanely the same.
What is amazing to me is that a person whose life totally is totally defined by his use of American technology, subsists on the products of American innovation, and requires American military might to secure his county's freedom since he is to weak/lazy to handle it would have the gall to think that he is civilized instead of a mere pet.
Your post and ones like it can be summoned up by one awful truth: Europe spent over 400 years fucking up the world, and you are angry that it is taking America too long to clean up your shit. In that time, you have given the world the gifts of slavery, racism, and unfettered greed. You had robbed the resources of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and many parts of the world are still reeling from your selfish abuse. Where you saw weakness, you stole. Where you saw culture, you pillaged. Where you saw unity, you created dissent. History judges you as some of the worst people ever. To call yourself civilized now or at any point is such a tragic misuse of the word, it defies all cognition.
So yes, you left us with the mess of slavery. You left us with a balkanized world. You left a swath of nations who you raped for centuries, trying to overcome your legacy of shame and poverty. The world you made is an absolute mess. The difference between YOU and the U.S. is that we try to fix it. We try to make a situation where a rising tide lifts all boats. As a result of these efforts, in the American century, we have seen world poverty begin to decline. By all measures, the difference between being civilized and and that of pathetic barbarism is exactly the gulf between us and you.
The above post titled counterproductive is insightful and frankly good advice. However, it illustrates what is mostly wrong with the world. It is you.
Tribalism runs so deep that you do not even see the ugliness and illogic of your thoughts. The post would have been very productive if it just stopped at why solar may overtake other power sources and why. Instead, it swerves into cautioning against chest thumping. Do you understand why that is so messed up?
One chest thumps when they are crowing victory over a hated opponent. This means you have a hated opponent. By context, this means you think anyone who uses or advocates the use of fossil fuels is the enemy. Not someone who disagrees about a technical matter, but an enemy. That dude, is just fucked up.
Do you really think fossil fuel advocates sit around all day and say "Gee, I really love pollution. That cheap, clean fuel makes me sick. I want to spend the most money that I can on the dirtiest possible things. I hate birds and babies and anything that could remotely lead to a rainbow. My favorite flavor of ice-cream is toxic sludge." Seriously, are you that twisted that you think this, or is it the case that you do not merely think?
The honest answer is that so far, solar and other renewables do not YET have nearly the consistent energy density to provide stable power for the maximum number of people. It is not even close. This is why people still chose fossil fuels. I am willing to suspect that you do not voluntarily live large swaths of your day without electricity on demand. So, do not for a comment think other people should.
In the future, solar may even do what this article suggests and produce stable, cheap, clean energy. It may even do so without causing more environmental damage to create it, than burning something does. As was suggested, when this happens renewables will replace fossil fuels, because it is the rational choice. Nothing to crow, or chest thump about. There is no enemy. There is just people making economic choices based on hard facts, not fantasies.
Now, the reason this makes you one of the worst people in the world is that this mentality that you have so totally internalizes (with many other's on this forum) is getting people killed. You are dehumanizing people instead of intellectually debating them. This leads to violence, and things like the Las Vegas killings. Your intellectual ancestors are truly the Nazi's.
As part of the scientific community who has published many articles, I can affirm that the above poster is exaggerating at best. Since the age of the word processor, the author does the lions share of the type setting. In fact, I have had articles sent back for revision if the type setting was wrong. So, I am not sure what all these high paid graphics artists are doing.
Now, I have also reviewed hundreds of articles. I guess I really did not get the memo, because I was not paid for a single one. Maybe in the above posters magical journal, they pay reviews, but in my experience it is a service that one has to do gratis, if they want grant money from a federal agency. If I am wrong, i am happy to send a bill
As for the rest of the arguments, all I can say is that circles are circular because they are circles. If one creates a system with an arbitrary number of cost centers at an arbitrary cost, then they can get an arbitrary value for their production fee. For example, many journals are located in DC or New York. While I am sure this is a lot of fun for the editor, it is not necessary. I am pretty sure in a world of interconnected supply chains, one could base in somewhere cheap like West Virginia, pay negligible rent and pay the editor less since it is a cheap place to live. Suddenly, the costs go down.
BTW, the editor's main job is to find reviewers and to see if the article fits the scope of the journal. Despite the title, there is very little editing of typos etc going on from that position. Some journals also have people do this gratis, for the ability to have a better chance to get grants, of course.
To put this in further perspective, the poster claims over $2000 per article. Using an example I know well, the journal of physical chemistry has about 30-40 articles per issue. So, this means each issue is costing 60-80K dollars. In comparison, a comic book has a break even point of about $20,000/issue. These are in full color, based in New York, and they have to pay all their artists and authors. Since a comic book costs about 3 dollars, this means they are doing this for less than the poster's journal, who gets all their material for free. Something doesn't add up.
Did I mention that the authors of the article have to pay to be published? Just saying...
I know this will engender rage from these forums, but something is generally overlooked when talking about the unusual success of leftist European countries compared to what is generally observed. The socialist countries work where the others in say, South America, fail because they are able to piggy back off of the United States.
These countries have to pay abnormally low amounts of the GDP for defense, despite having large and potentially hostile neighbors. It is easy to be a Swedish pacisifist when someone else's blood and treasure is ensuring that you do not speak Russian.
The technology that gives these countries a better standard of living is usually paid and developed by other nations. For example, by shifting the cost of developing new medicines and procedures elsewhere, more money is available to raise the internal standards. The United States alone pays for about 44% of the world's medical research cost.
If you read the article, there is a subtle warning not made by the authors. Before the disastrous affordable care act, the U.S. proportion of medical research was 57% in 2007. As more socialist policies were adopted, an incredible decline in activity soon followed. It should be noted this was not accidental, as can be clearly understood by anyone who actually read the law. There are several policies inherent in the bill that create this as an expected outcome.
This is important to note because this is not only true in medicine but many other areas of science. For all its failings, the capitalist model in the U.S. has been the engine that has been driving the success of Western Civilization for the last 70 years. As this engine slows down, the benefits it provided will decrease too.
Another interesting allegory can be found in the article. As China becomes more capitalistic, it's proportion of R.D spending has increased dramatically. While China likes to style itself as socialist country, this is mostly lip-service used to keep continuity in governance. Any casual visit to the country or even cursory reading shows abundant signs that China is quickly becoming the center of capitalism in the world. They have learned the lessons that we have lost and are benefiting immensely from it.
In any case, this also does not bode well for the European socialist countries. The United States due to tradition, heritage, and world view has generally lead to favorably treaties when dealing with trade, defense, and the sharing of technology. However, China is not burdened with any such preconceptions. China is very willing to keep core technology to itself for the benefits of its citizens. It is very willing to make sure that dealings with outside nations lead to its direct benefit. Or, to put it in a way more in tune with the slashdot mind, a country that bans youtube and limits the number of foreign movies that are released in a year to bolster its own film industry is not going to share its biotech.
I guess I am trying to say is be careful of what you wish for. Enlightened socialism is by far the best way to live. We all know this because we have ALL lived under such a system. It's called childhood. The parents provide for all our needs. Sure, we do some chores to give back, but overall someone else is paying the bills. The problem with socialism is that, so far, no one has figured out a way to make it truly pay for itself.
The above post is well written, positive, and well thought out. However, it and other posts in this thread are missing a key idea.
You tend to think of the loss of manufacturing as not a big thing. China and other parts of Asia are undergoing a great rennisuance driven by the incredible wealth derived from manufacturing. The production of tangible goods really still is king. By and large the west is running massive trade deficits with the east. In effect, this means that wealth is continually being siphoned out of the country. Symptoms of this are showing up in many ways, but few understand why. This is the driving force behind wage stagnation combined with decreasing buying power. The jobless rate amongst millennial is atrocious and worse for the African American community in the U.S. The cost of things have gone up while your ability to pay for them has gone down. It is not your imagination.
You may want to look twice at the oft repeated things that industry is of the best, and it is good to let them go. This is true in part...it is very good for the wealthiest amongst us. For the rest, not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
I sincerely do not understand slashdot's near religious devotion to this. I honestly want to understand what I am missing. As I understand it, net neutrality basically says that you do not want to have the cost of your internet usage be proportional to how much you use. It does not seem wrong to me that if you use a ton, pay more or get throttled. Otherwise, someone else is paying the bill for your usage.
So, am I off or is this just a case of millennial wanting free stuff?
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic form of socialistic government to the right of communism, but way the fuck left of everything else. See also: Nazi Progressivism: An authoritarian and autocratic form of socialistic government to the left of fascism, but way the fuck left of everything else. See also: Modern Democrat
As a professor, it was painfully obvious the year that "millennials" started hitting. In order to create fair exams, certain content is repeated for comparison. These provide measures to see if variation in class performance is due to baseline ability, or mistakes in test writing. At the time, we were not sure what was going on, since the millennial phenomena hadn't been described yet. All we did know is that these students were profoundly worse than the years before. They struggled with concepts, gave up when faced with difficult problems, and became irate when you did not drop everything to cater to them, on their schedule. This trend continued for several years.
Worse, there was a growing trend of arrogance that went with this relative lack of ability. Increasingly, students began to confuse the ability to look up something on wikipedia, with actual knowledge and problem solving skill. They were also very dogmatic and intellectually uncurious. If presented with a fact that challenged their preconceptions, they would simply shut down and ignore it. I never thought that exchanging ideas at a university would no longer be in vogue.
So, when stories of this generation began to circulate about this generation being lazy in the workplace with a sense of entitlement, I was in no way shocked. This is what I had seen in my engineering classes. To be clear, I am not saying that I had zero, bright and hardworking students. Some of the best that I had taught were in this era. What I am saying is that the proportion of academic gems to soot was very low.
I would also be remiss not to comment about "being saddled with 1 trillion in college debt." That is classic millennial thought. I.E. a complete and total lack of personal responsibility. No one forced that generation to go to a high priced schools. Every state in the U.S. has a very good public university, which is not all that expensive. This was an option. In fact, it is one that I personally chose, so that I would not have huge, crippling debt. As a generation, millennials were remarkably short sighted and un-analytical about college. It does not take a genius to understand that spending $240,000 at an elite school to earn a degree that leads to jobs that make 30K is simply idiotic. Yet, many of millennials did just that.
No one forced that generation to rack up this debt in trivial non-ecconomcailly viable majors. In fact, because of the internet, millennials had access to far more information about salaries and outcomes than any other generation before it. As a group, millennials simply CHOSE to ignore advice, evidence, and basic math. It is not anyone's fault but their own. Now, they need to live with the consequences of bad judgement.
So, yes, every generation has its triumphs and flaws. Some win major world wars, some travel to the moon, and some even invent the internet. Others, well, I guess their crowning achievement is finding a way to count the number of superficial friends that they have... and wonder why they are considered lesser by those before and after them.
So far, all the "above" posters were commenting on China and human rights and other such issues. There were no pejoratives, beyond the ones you used. Self loathing is one of the saddest mental disorders. I feel so bad for you that you hate yourself and your culture so much, that you jump at imaginary SJW hobgoblins.
So, OP is saying the problem simply boils down to the fact that there are too many Californians. As a Texan, we most definitely agree.
You mean to say that doing most of the country's meaningful work and the lions share of responsibility, while being constantly belittled and demonized can take its toll? Weird huh.
The models have been very bad at predicting anything, unless you really twist the data around. The problem is that global warming is as much faith and science. It might be true, but the data is not there, if you are honest.
The conspiracy of chemtrails is that the governments are already doing this to control the environment. A chemtrail differs from a contrail in that it lasts longer and has an unusual chemical make-up when someone tries to measure it. The belief is that tests are being currently undertaken to understand the efficacy of attempting this.
I find it funny that people who use pejoratives, like conspiracy nut" instead closely examine claims are the first to believe descriptors like "ingenious method" in the article posting, when it comes from their lead NPC. To act like their have never been conspiracies is folly. Just ask the black Americans infected with syphilis, just to study disease models. I am sure they were called conspiracy nut too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
Part of what is wrong in the world today, is people like the OP, who apply logic so badly, they equate rape and murder with the equivalent of saying "our leader is bad."
Before Walker was elected governor, Wisconsin had a massive budget deficit with out of control spending on special interest groups. People were fleeing the state, especially young, recent college graduates. By placing in several reforms, the state turned around to running a budget surplus and experiencing an economic boom.
You voted him because "Orange Man bad," and he shared the same letter in group of association. Your vote had nothing to do with policy, logic, or even rational self interest. You are the very reason democracy is beginning to fail. You have mentally degenerated to the point where you do not evaluate circumstance. You think joining a club installs supreme virtue, while belonging to another club is automatic dehumanizing evil. You operate at a level beneath rational thought. I would feel sorry for you, but I am more sorry for the suffering in the world that your mindset causes.
It should not matter if someone is a D or an R or a whatever. Only if their policies work, and promote a general well being. If you think the either side has a monopoly on good ideas or successful strategies to improve life, then you are not thinking. You are actually something of an embarrassment.
You dislike trump because your masters told you to. You call him a fascist, while you support violence to squelch the speech of others. You call him a racist while favoring some groups over others. You say you want to help the poor, but give little yourself. You think women tell the truth all the time, and men always lie, and don't see how that is sexist. The list could go on, but you are the problem. Not the guy who revived the economy instead of cheering the slow death of the place you live.
When you dig deeper in the articles, and read the speeches and comments, they really do sound apologetic. However, the analysts, from sources that are not what one would call right leaning, all seem to miss this. Bias is what bias does, but hey, congrats on being modded up for expressing a liberal leaning view on slashdot. In other news, the sky is blue...
https://www.politifact.com/tru...
From an outsiders perspective, you are implying that somehow each engineer deserves $166,000 a year salary for effectively doing very little. Maybe it would simply be more efficient to spend about 10 million in university research grants and try to figure out how to get more productivity out of the engineers, or at least assess who actually deserves that kind of salary. By your own admission, clearly most of them do not.
From a societal perspective, I really question the value that you are assigning to these computer engineers to the world. I am really skeptical that more good is done by your "paper work people" than say, hiring 3 teachers, 4 social workers, 5 park rangers, or provide a full scholarships for a solid engineering education at say, the university of Illinois, for two kids. Or, if you want to stay in technology, I suspect that two mechanical engineers improving breaking systems or improving the car impact safety is probably more valuable than chasing a doodad that most people really are not asking for.
The reason this is bad because currently the "authoritative" sources are actually incredibly biased, manufacture stories, and often hide information to further an agenda. They understand that if you control the narrative, you can manufacture a reality, or at least keep compliant people invested in such a narrative.
For example, you might yell tinfoil hate but here are a few off the top of my head:
Dan Rather, anchor long time CBS anchor, forced to resign in disgrace for manufacturing anti-conservative news http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBI...
Funny if you read the NY times and other articles attempting to pretend this was a normal stepping down
Brian Williams, NBC making false claims https://www.bbc.com/news/world...
NPR admitting press is biased and making up stories https://nypost.com/2017/10/21/...
If i need, I can go on. The point being it is easy to paint others with pejoratives like "tin foil hat" while failing to even consider much that you believe is likely from tainted perspective. Many people rightly fear that google (aka youtube) are censoring opinions that poke holes in their world view. Fake-news is more about people who disagree, not with people posting things that are untrue.
It seems to me that some important person in the news was advocating for exactly what you are talking about. Hmmmm, what was that guys name again? Seems to me that guy may not be as much of a moron as the forums seem to claim...
True idiocy is living by virtue signaling. It robs you of your natural intelligence and logic. You would be far better in life to purge the immature parts of yourself that says things like "Trump is an idiot, but..." You might want to start evaluating people and ideologies issue by issue. You will find that some of what you just accepted as fact was untrue, that people are complicated and not cookie cutter heroes and villains, and that issues are seldom as simple as they seem. When you achieve this, the world makes more sense, and TBH, it becomes far more interesting. You are on the verge of breaking the bubble. Good luck to you.
Or perhaps don't go to a $30,000 a year university and major in something like trans-generdered sheep dance theory. It is not my fault that you made such a remarkably bad life decision. Stop asking me (and other tax payers) to pay for your bullshit.
Before you say anything about privilege or other SJW crap, my family was very poor. I went to a state school and majored in a STEM field, so that I had a reasonable chance of finding a job when I was done. I had to work through school to pay for my tuition, which was possible because I CHOSE not to masturbate my ego and go to an elite school that I could not afford.
The bald fact is that the tuition for fours years at your local state school is likely the cost of one year in whatever school that you went to. Otherwise, there is almost no way you are begging for loan forgiveness or bankruptcy, since the costs are just not that high at State U.
Now, before you comment that you majored something better than whatever "#studies" major that you really did, let me call bullshit. While it is true that recent graduates have faced a tough job market, it turns out that those who graduated with a challenging major with a good GPA fared very well. So, if you can't pay your loan, you are either (1) cosmically unlucky (2) a dumbass who chose a stupid-assed major at an expensive place (3) an entitled douche who can't stop being an asshole for the 15 minutes it takes to do an interview or (4) had a shit-poor GPA despite being at private school that probably grade inflates.
So in any case, no matter if its your ego, your inability to take life seriously, or because you are an ass-hat, the fact is that YOU purchased something. Your tuition went on to pay people's salaries and maintain buildings etc. It was not play money. It was not free. The government did not force you to make bad choices. YOU DID. Own it. Don't expect other people to make sacrifices in their lives because of your personal bullshit.
Personally, I never asked my computer and cell phone to be the same. I am very comfortable with them being different tools for different jobs. I am fine with them being optomized differently so that they can do their job in as an effective way possible.
I think of all the non-sense that has hit Mac Os in recent years, in an effort to make it more IOS like. I do not like how they removed management controls away from iTunes. I LIKED having more robust photo options. Almost everything they have added in to merge the two operating systems has made my MacBook pro's interface worse.
To me, it is culmination of the split between Jobs and Cook. Jobs wanted to make technology insanely great. Cook wants to make it insanely the same.
What is amazing to me is that a person whose life totally is totally defined by his use of American technology, subsists on the products of American innovation, and requires American military might to secure his county's freedom since he is to weak/lazy to handle it would have the gall to think that he is civilized instead of a mere pet.
Your post and ones like it can be summoned up by one awful truth: Europe spent over 400 years fucking up the world, and you are angry that it is taking America too long to clean up your shit. In that time, you have given the world the gifts of slavery, racism, and unfettered greed. You had robbed the resources of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and many parts of the world are still reeling from your selfish abuse. Where you saw weakness, you stole. Where you saw culture, you pillaged. Where you saw unity, you created dissent. History judges you as some of the worst people ever. To call yourself civilized now or at any point is such a tragic misuse of the word, it defies all cognition.
So yes, you left us with the mess of slavery. You left us with a balkanized world. You left a swath of nations who you raped for centuries, trying to overcome your legacy of shame and poverty. The world you made is an absolute mess. The difference between YOU and the U.S. is that we try to fix it. We try to make a situation where a rising tide lifts all boats. As a result of these efforts, in the American century, we have seen world poverty begin to decline. By all measures, the difference between being civilized and and that of pathetic barbarism is exactly the gulf between us and you.
The above post titled counterproductive is insightful and frankly good advice. However, it illustrates what is mostly wrong with the world. It is you.
Tribalism runs so deep that you do not even see the ugliness and illogic of your thoughts. The post would have been very productive if it just stopped at why solar may overtake other power sources and why. Instead, it swerves into cautioning against chest thumping. Do you understand why that is so messed up?
One chest thumps when they are crowing victory over a hated opponent. This means you have a hated opponent. By context, this means you think anyone who uses or advocates the use of fossil fuels is the enemy. Not someone who disagrees about a technical matter, but an enemy. That dude, is just fucked up.
Do you really think fossil fuel advocates sit around all day and say "Gee, I really love pollution. That cheap, clean fuel makes me sick. I want to spend the most money that I can on the dirtiest possible things. I hate birds and babies and anything that could remotely lead to a rainbow. My favorite flavor of ice-cream is toxic sludge." Seriously, are you that twisted that you think this, or is it the case that you do not merely think?
The honest answer is that so far, solar and other renewables do not YET have nearly the consistent energy density to provide stable power for the maximum number of people. It is not even close. This is why people still chose fossil fuels. I am willing to suspect that you do not voluntarily live large swaths of your day without electricity on demand. So, do not for a comment think other people should.
In the future, solar may even do what this article suggests and produce stable, cheap, clean energy. It may even do so without causing more environmental damage to create it, than burning something does. As was suggested, when this happens renewables will replace fossil fuels, because it is the rational choice. Nothing to crow, or chest thump about. There is no enemy. There is just people making economic choices based on hard facts, not fantasies.
Now, the reason this makes you one of the worst people in the world is that this mentality that you have so totally internalizes (with many other's on this forum) is getting people killed. You are dehumanizing people instead of intellectually debating them. This leads to violence, and things like the Las Vegas killings. Your intellectual ancestors are truly the Nazi's.
As part of the scientific community who has published many articles, I can affirm that the above poster is exaggerating at best. Since the age of the word processor, the author does the lions share of the type setting. In fact, I have had articles sent back for revision if the type setting was wrong. So, I am not sure what all these high paid graphics artists are doing.
Now, I have also reviewed hundreds of articles. I guess I really did not get the memo, because I was not paid for a single one. Maybe in the above posters magical journal, they pay reviews, but in my experience it is a service that one has to do gratis, if they want grant money from a federal agency. If I am wrong, i am happy to send a bill
As for the rest of the arguments, all I can say is that circles are circular because they are circles. If one creates a system with an arbitrary number of cost centers at an arbitrary cost, then they can get an arbitrary value for their production fee. For example, many journals are located in DC or New York. While I am sure this is a lot of fun for the editor, it is not necessary. I am pretty sure in a world of interconnected supply chains, one could base in somewhere cheap like West Virginia, pay negligible rent and pay the editor less since it is a cheap place to live. Suddenly, the costs go down.
BTW, the editor's main job is to find reviewers and to see if the article fits the scope of the journal. Despite the title, there is very little editing of typos etc going on from that position. Some journals also have people do this gratis, for the ability to have a better chance to get grants, of course.
To put this in further perspective, the poster claims over $2000 per article. Using an example I know well, the journal of physical chemistry has about 30-40 articles per issue. So, this means each issue is costing 60-80K dollars. In comparison, a comic book has a break even point of about $20,000/issue. These are in full color, based in New York, and they have to pay all their artists and authors. Since a comic book costs about 3 dollars, this means they are doing this for less than the poster's journal, who gets all their material for free. Something doesn't add up.
Did I mention that the authors of the article have to pay to be published? Just saying...
I know this will engender rage from these forums, but something is generally overlooked when talking about the unusual success of leftist European countries compared to what is generally observed. The socialist countries work where the others in say, South America, fail because they are able to piggy back off of the United States.
These countries have to pay abnormally low amounts of the GDP for defense, despite having large and potentially hostile neighbors. It is easy to be a Swedish pacisifist when someone else's blood and treasure is ensuring that you do not speak Russian.
The technology that gives these countries a better standard of living is usually paid and developed by other nations. For example, by shifting the cost of developing new medicines and procedures elsewhere, more money is available to raise the internal standards. The United States alone pays for about 44% of the world's medical research cost.
https://www.usnews.com/news/ar...
If you read the article, there is a subtle warning not made by the authors. Before the disastrous affordable care act, the U.S. proportion of medical research was 57% in 2007. As more socialist policies were adopted, an incredible decline in activity soon followed. It should be noted this was not accidental, as can be clearly understood by anyone who actually read the law. There are several policies inherent in the bill that create this as an expected outcome.
This is important to note because this is not only true in medicine but many other areas of science. For all its failings, the capitalist model in the U.S. has been the engine that has been driving the success of Western Civilization for the last 70 years. As this engine slows down, the benefits it provided will decrease too.
Another interesting allegory can be found in the article. As China becomes more capitalistic, it's proportion of R.D spending has increased dramatically. While China likes to style itself as socialist country, this is mostly lip-service used to keep continuity in governance. Any casual visit to the country or even cursory reading shows abundant signs that China is quickly becoming the center of capitalism in the world. They have learned the lessons that we have lost and are benefiting immensely from it.
In any case, this also does not bode well for the European socialist countries. The United States due to tradition, heritage, and world view has generally lead to favorably treaties when dealing with trade, defense, and the sharing of technology. However, China is not burdened with any such preconceptions. China is very willing to keep core technology to itself for the benefits of its citizens. It is very willing to make sure that dealings with outside nations lead to its direct benefit. Or, to put it in a way more in tune with the slashdot mind, a country that bans youtube and limits the number of foreign movies that are released in a year to bolster its own film industry is not going to share its biotech.
I guess I am trying to say is be careful of what you wish for. Enlightened socialism is by far the best way to live. We all know this because we have ALL lived under such a system. It's called childhood. The parents provide for all our needs. Sure, we do some chores to give back, but overall someone else is paying the bills. The problem with socialism is that, so far, no one has figured out a way to make it truly pay for itself.
Reality is calling. It says it misses you. Please come back to it.
And yet, real wages are falling here, and not in those countries. You have over simplified much, and explained little of reality. SO sorry.
The above post is well written, positive, and well thought out. However, it and other posts in this thread are missing a key idea.
You tend to think of the loss of manufacturing as not a big thing. China and other parts of Asia are undergoing a great rennisuance driven by the incredible wealth derived from manufacturing. The production of tangible goods really still is king. By and large the west is running massive trade deficits with the east. In effect, this means that wealth is continually being siphoned out of the country. Symptoms of this are showing up in many ways, but few understand why. This is the driving force behind wage stagnation combined with decreasing buying power. The jobless rate amongst millennial is atrocious and worse for the African American community in the U.S. The cost of things have gone up while your ability to pay for them has gone down. It is not your imagination.
You may want to look twice at the oft repeated things that industry is of the best, and it is good to let them go. This is true in part...it is very good for the wealthiest amongst us. For the rest, not so much.