Technology has eliminated jobs constantly for over 100 years, and yet almost everyone still has a job.
Actually, in most industrialised nations the unemployment rate has been consistently rising for the last fourty years --- pretty much exactly coinciding with steady increases in automation (yeah yeah I know correlation != causation). Also, the young tend to be the most affected. The US is the only exception to what is otherwise a rule. It's just that - an exception. (I think it may be at least partially because Americans have not embraced automation nearly as much as, say, European nations.) The lower end of the middle class is evaporating in most of the industralised world, and looking at the age demographics this is a disturbing trend. (I can see it in my own country too --- the standard of living my parents could afford on one equivalent salary to my own was higher than what now requires two such salaries in the household. I keep hearing how my standard of living is supposedly improving but at the same time myself and all my peers in this and other industries are living in tinier and tinier places, struggling more to afford proper cars, etc., and compared it how the previous generation lived we look poor.)
Actually, relatives of a friend of mine do own a textile factory in China, and they are NOT making a lot of money... competition is so incredibly tight, and margins so low, that they are in fact pretty poor, and also running at a high risk as even tiny (e.g. a few cents per unit) increases in manufacturing costs can knock them out.
That BBC article confuses the notion of "rate" with "absolute number":
The world's second most populous country has one of the highest infection rates - and more than five million HIV/Aids cases.
I think you are making the same mistake; having a large number of HIV cases is only to be expected when you have such an incredibly huge population. The rest of the articles make the same mistake... looking at a large absolute figure and concluding that it's all "really really terrible". But five million, although a lot of people and a horrible tragedy, is tiny when taking the population size into consideration. If you want to say that Indians are "worse" with HIV (in terms of being supposedly hypocritical about their values, as you suggest) then you have to use the per capita rates, not the absolute number (unlike your economics article). I live in a country with around a 25% HIV infection rate and the largest absolute number of infected people (over 10 million in a population of only 44 million compared to India's 1.something billion)... so sorry to say but 0.9% sounds miniscule to me, if you think India has a problem with its values you should come here.
Why to we have to put our children in automobiles?
Let me put it another way: You try raise your own children without ever putting them in automobiles. Try it. Let's see how far that gets you. Do you realise how dumb you sound now?
Can I imagine raising children without having them talk on cellphones (except in emergencies)? Yes, because I grew up in an era where cellphones didn't even exist.
OMFW, are you joking!?!?!?!? Because if we didn't, they would never get educated and die everytime they got sick because we couldn't even take them to the doctor? The vast majority of transporting of children is due to things they by and large mostly have to do (duh).
Maybe you live in a big city with well-developed public transport, but not everyone does.
Is cancer now the only negative effect on health from cigarette smoke? Gee, I didn't know that.
They're "nazis" you say? Well then I guess I better not listen to them, because "nazis" are really bad things, oooooh. They must be really evil murderers! Gosh, nazis! I never knew.
I hate to break it to you, but there is TONNES of literature and peer-reviewed studies on the harmful effects of both first and second hand smoke, and if you follow, more appearing all the time. Tonnes of peer-reviewed publications. A few studies funded by tobacco groups are unable to disprove these or hold back the tide of information these days, even despite the fact that the tobacco groups have far more money to throw at fake publications than the anti-smoking, uh, "nazis".
What is the agenda of these "nazis" btw? Is there huge amounts of money to be made by the "nazis" in reducing smoking? Or are they just people with nothing better to do with their time? Or were they "brought up to hate smokers"? Are they planning on rounding smokers into concentration camps and killing them? Do you even realise how ridiculous you sound? I know it's an attempt at "poisoning the well" but honestly it's so childishly done ("nazis"!) I'd be surprised if 6-yr olds fall for it.
Just to give you an idea though of the relative weakness of intensity of a cellphone transmission, a cellphone typically transmits at no greater than 2 watts (typically around 1)... my microwave oven on the other hand is 900 watts. A typical bluetooth headset with 10m range transmits at only 2.5 mW (milli-watts).
What the hell is "2.4 GHz of energy"? That makes no sense. 2.4 GHz is merely the frequency, not the intensity. The unit you're looking for is "watts". Your crappy little bluetooth transmitter is very low wattage, but your cellphone transmits at a much higher wattage because it has to talk to towers that are friggin kilometers away.
Cellphones transmit in the microwave band, which is known to definitely heat biological tissue. It is known and not disputed that using a cellphone causes a minor amount of heating in your cells (e.g. in your brain while talking); what's in question is whether or not this has long-term harmful effects. The higher the wattage, the more the heating effect (and other effects on human tissues).
Not sure if you were joking, but the rationale for having smoking/non-smoking sections in restaurants is because second-hand smoke kills. The odds that second-hand cellphone radiation is harmful to you are basically zero due to the inverse square law - the radiation intensity levels drop off in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. Meaning, if you aren't extremely close to the source, you're getting practically nothing. The only reason there may be some concern with cellphones is that you hold the friggin thing right against your head.
Automobiles cause ill effects when they get into accidents yet we put children in there. In child seats.
Because we have to.
Little 11-year old girls don't have to spend three hours a day with their cellphones stuck to their faces yakking away. If we find that doing so raises the risk of cancer too greatly it's a simple matter to more heavily moderate this completely unnecessary behaviour.
"Unless the resourceful managers of De Beers can find a way to gain control of the various sources of diamonds that will soon crowd the market, these sources [Zaire and Australia] may bring about the final collapse of world diamond prices."
The thing is it wouldn't be in the interests of those "new diamond producers" to collapse world diamond prices --- WTF would they do then, make a loss?! Why would anyone in their right minds sitting on something valuable want to cause the value to drop? Not a friggin chance --- they want in on those inflated prices, so all they do is join the De Beers cartel. They have some leverage over De Beers too as they have power to theoretically increase supply and thus lower prices. But *no* diamond producer wants to really start a price war, because slashing margins is a never-ending race to the bottom where all producers lose. So they all just get together and ALL keep making big money. Makes sense, no?
Wouldn't the government of China already have access to this same information through other sources?
Isn't all Internet traffic in China routed through the 'great firewall' already? They could simply log all Google traffic (including IP addresses and search queries) at this point.
This may be true in the US, where the unemployment rate is very low, but my point of reference is my own country (South Africa) where AFAIK it's a pretty low-paying job, due to the high unemployment rate and abundant supply of unskilled labour. I could be wrong though - haven't actually checked.
What's new is in the details. You can't take some extremely broadly generalised summary of new information and then claim it isn't new simply because that extremely broadly generalised version is also the generalised version of something else. You might as well have said "scientists have been making studies all the time, this is just another study, what's new?"
Sorry if it isn't that exciting to you, but real science isn't usually terribly exciting... lots and lots of excruciating details revealed very slowly over time, little bit by little bit. If you're waiting for one single groundbreaking study that announces it's learned everything about how the human brain works then good luck, you'll wait a while.
Yup, hence all my qualifiers, like "in theory" and putting "free" in quotes:) (I'm sure the garbagemen who collect my garbage for a low wage are also "free" "in theory" to find better work:/)
The GP does have a point though, in theory. Finding a more efficient way to produce something or obtain raw materials generates overall more wealth (or rather, wealth potential) within society. Economics is not a zero-sum game (for the rich to get richer the poor don't need to get poorer, since we can all make new "stuff"). In theory those jobs lost could be put to work creating something else, which could make other products cheaper in turn (increased labor supply in other markets), or making something new like a cure for cancer or cheap TV shows or furniture. Of course reality doesn't always allow this for individuals, particularly those who have spent their entire life in a now-obsolete industry.
One other 'angle' here though is that a single entity owning a supply of precious metals that outstrips the rest of the planet's supply would allow that entity to control prices. Traditional mining is expensive. They could surely set the price point at just below the level necessary to keep mines profitable, leaving little benefit for society at large but still putting millions out of work. (This doesn't even assume price fixing, yet even in, say, the oil industry with in theory many suppliers we still have artificially controlled pricing.)
I see your point, but OTOH, in a "free" labor market, nobody is forced to do that work are they? If that person doing the mining didn't want to risk their life in space they could find a job elsewhere, in theory.
The price for such labor will no doubt be set by the laws of supply and demand; they'll find the price point at which somebody skilled enough will be willing to do it. The price probably won't be all that high.
While grammar makes an argument more persuasive I can not believe that it is my argument. I can write a paragraph ignoring every grammatical rule in the book and abuse every logical fallacy known to man but as long as it creates a more positive emotional response my argument will be chosen over others. True, in the end I am exploiting the emotional weakness of my audience. Also by no means is it the most elegant way of presenting an argument but it is sadly highly effective.
It's true that you can (in practice) ignore grammar when persuading people, but I think that's only and precisely because so many people have poor comprehension skills, are unable to spot all the logical fallacies and appeals to emotion, and/or don't want to think at all but rather want to make decisions based on what they "feel". (I also don't think one should be 'trying to convince people' unless one has oneself carefully (and rationally - not emotionally) thought out said argument and convinced oneself first... otherwise one's own viewpoint is itself the product of emotional manipulation by others. Some might however take the relativist view that whatever one "feels" is correct should be regarded as "correct", almost by definition, but I don't agree with this at all. Emotions in my view can give us general clues us to what to analyse and how, but are only useful in combination with intelligent analysis.)
It's also true, as you pointed out, that you can (mis)use even proper grammar and language usage to make your argument sound stronger, by making it sound as if it is a sensible, intelligent argument - i.e. cloaking it in the appearance of intellectuality. Style without substance. Proper grammar itself does not imply that a sensible argument has been made. (However this again essentially boils down to a similar thing, as the reader makes a judgment based on how the text "feels" rather than what it says.) This is also one of the points of the linked text, and that again, if people were taught precision in language usage and comprehension, they would be able to see through it when they were being manipulated in this way.
Read this: Less than Words Can Say, and then come back and tell me if you still think precision in language usage simply does not matter.
Grammar doesn't just make your argument "sound more pleasing"; proper grammar is required to convey your argument, and in fact is your argument - without proper grammar usage (comprehension and production skills) you can really only convey general feelings and emotions about an issue, little more than disconnected slogans and sound bites (your non-sequitur at the end is an example.)
There is another glaring problem with '4 out of 5 dentists choose...' type of marketing... it doesn't normalise against the overall market share of a brand. For example, say it is claimed that "8 out 10 dentists use Crest". It sounds good, because it's a high number, but the number alone doesn't actually tell us much. Why? Assume in one case that 9 out of 10 members of the general public use Crest. This would means that dentists are less likely to choose Crest than people who don't know any better - which would mean Crest is probably bad. Now assume a second case in which 6 out of 10 members of the general public use Crest, and 8 out of 10 dentists use it. This means that people who know better are more likely to use Crest than people who don't, and would imply that Crest is good.
Of course, there is also a third case in which the numbers are the same for the general public and the 'experts', and in that case, it probably doesn't matter what you choose --- the market alternatives are probably just as good.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology has eliminated jobs constantly for over 100 years, and yet almost everyone still has a job.
Actually, in most industrialised nations the unemployment rate has been consistently rising for the last fourty years --- pretty much exactly coinciding with steady increases in automation (yeah yeah I know correlation != causation). Also, the young tend to be the most affected. The US is the only exception to what is otherwise a rule. It's just that - an exception. (I think it may be at least partially because Americans have not embraced automation nearly as much as, say, European nations.) The lower end of the middle class is evaporating in most of the industralised world, and looking at the age demographics this is a disturbing trend. (I can see it in my own country too --- the standard of living my parents could afford on one equivalent salary to my own was higher than what now requires two such salaries in the household. I keep hearing how my standard of living is supposedly improving but at the same time myself and all my peers in this and other industries are living in tinier and tinier places, struggling more to afford proper cars, etc., and compared it how the previous generation lived we look poor.)
Actually, relatives of a friend of mine do own a textile factory in China, and they are NOT making a lot of money ... competition is so incredibly tight, and margins so low, that they are in fact pretty poor, and also running at a high risk as even tiny (e.g. a few cents per unit) increases in manufacturing costs can knock them out.
That BBC article confuses the notion of "rate" with "absolute number":
The world's second most populous country has one of the highest infection rates - and more than five million HIV/Aids cases.
I think you are making the same mistake; having a large number of HIV cases is only to be expected when you have such an incredibly huge population. The rest of the articles make the same mistake ... looking at a large absolute figure and concluding that it's all "really really terrible". But five million, although a lot of people and a horrible tragedy, is tiny when taking the population size into consideration. If you want to say that Indians are "worse" with HIV (in terms of being supposedly hypocritical about their values, as you suggest) then you have to use the per capita rates, not the absolute number (unlike your economics article). I live in a country with around a 25% HIV infection rate and the largest absolute number of infected people (over 10 million in a population of only 44 million compared to India's 1.something billion) ... so sorry to say but 0.9% sounds miniscule to me, if you think India has a problem with its values you should come here.
Why to we have to put our children in automobiles?
Let me put it another way: You try raise your own children without ever putting them in automobiles. Try it. Let's see how far that gets you. Do you realise how dumb you sound now?
Can I imagine raising children without having them talk on cellphones (except in emergencies)? Yes, because I grew up in an era where cellphones didn't even exist.
OMFW, are you joking!?!?!?!? Because if we didn't, they would never get educated and die everytime they got sick because we couldn't even take them to the doctor? The vast majority of transporting of children is due to things they by and large mostly have to do (duh).
Maybe you live in a big city with well-developed public transport, but not everyone does.
Is cancer now the only negative effect on health from cigarette smoke? Gee, I didn't know that.
They're "nazis" you say? Well then I guess I better not listen to them, because "nazis" are really bad things, oooooh. They must be really evil murderers! Gosh, nazis! I never knew.
I hate to break it to you, but there is TONNES of literature and peer-reviewed studies on the harmful effects of both first and second hand smoke, and if you follow, more appearing all the time. Tonnes of peer-reviewed publications. A few studies funded by tobacco groups are unable to disprove these or hold back the tide of information these days, even despite the fact that the tobacco groups have far more money to throw at fake publications than the anti-smoking, uh, "nazis".
What is the agenda of these "nazis" btw? Is there huge amounts of money to be made by the "nazis" in reducing smoking? Or are they just people with nothing better to do with their time? Or were they "brought up to hate smokers"? Are they planning on rounding smokers into concentration camps and killing them? Do you even realise how ridiculous you sound? I know it's an attempt at "poisoning the well" but honestly it's so childishly done ("nazis"!) I'd be surprised if 6-yr olds fall for it.
You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy. You can't do both
False dilemma ... actually you can do both. Technology is not inherently dirty - it's possible to create and use cleaner technologies.
I am on the other hand emotionally unaffected.
Apparently you are also unaffected by facts.
Just to give you an idea though of the relative weakness of intensity of a cellphone transmission, a cellphone typically transmits at no greater than 2 watts (typically around 1) ... my microwave oven on the other hand is 900 watts. A typical bluetooth headset with 10m range transmits at only 2.5 mW (milli-watts).
2.4 Ghz of energy
What the hell is "2.4 GHz of energy"? That makes no sense. 2.4 GHz is merely the frequency, not the intensity. The unit you're looking for is "watts". Your crappy little bluetooth transmitter is very low wattage, but your cellphone transmits at a much higher wattage because it has to talk to towers that are friggin kilometers away.
Cellphones transmit in the microwave band, which is known to definitely heat biological tissue. It is known and not disputed that using a cellphone causes a minor amount of heating in your cells (e.g. in your brain while talking); what's in question is whether or not this has long-term harmful effects. The higher the wattage, the more the heating effect (and other effects on human tissues).
Not sure if you were joking, but the rationale for having smoking/non-smoking sections in restaurants is because second-hand smoke kills. The odds that second-hand cellphone radiation is harmful to you are basically zero due to the inverse square law - the radiation intensity levels drop off in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. Meaning, if you aren't extremely close to the source, you're getting practically nothing. The only reason there may be some concern with cellphones is that you hold the friggin thing right against your head.
Automobiles cause ill effects when they get into accidents yet we put children in there. In child seats.
Because we have to.
Little 11-year old girls don't have to spend three hours a day with their cellphones stuck to their faces yakking away. If we find that doing so raises the risk of cancer too greatly it's a simple matter to more heavily moderate this completely unnecessary behaviour.
"Unless the resourceful managers of De Beers can find a way to gain control of the various sources of diamonds that will soon crowd the market, these sources [Zaire and Australia] may bring about the final collapse of world diamond prices."
The thing is it wouldn't be in the interests of those "new diamond producers" to collapse world diamond prices --- WTF would they do then, make a loss?! Why would anyone in their right minds sitting on something valuable want to cause the value to drop? Not a friggin chance --- they want in on those inflated prices, so all they do is join the De Beers cartel. They have some leverage over De Beers too as they have power to theoretically increase supply and thus lower prices. But *no* diamond producer wants to really start a price war, because slashing margins is a never-ending race to the bottom where all producers lose. So they all just get together and ALL keep making big money. Makes sense, no?
Where do you get this crap? India has a pretty low HIV rate, and per capita is actually very close the HIV rate in the US.
Perhaps the eBay seller (or his/her jeweller) had it wrong, and it was real after all?
Wouldn't the government of China already have access to this same information through other sources?
Isn't all Internet traffic in China routed through the 'great firewall' already? They could simply log all Google traffic (including IP addresses and search queries) at this point.
This may be true in the US, where the unemployment rate is very low, but my point of reference is my own country (South Africa) where AFAIK it's a pretty low-paying job, due to the high unemployment rate and abundant supply of unskilled labour. I could be wrong though - haven't actually checked.
What's new is in the details. You can't take some extremely broadly generalised summary of new information and then claim it isn't new simply because that extremely broadly generalised version is also the generalised version of something else. You might as well have said "scientists have been making studies all the time, this is just another study, what's new?"
Sorry if it isn't that exciting to you, but real science isn't usually terribly exciting ... lots and lots of excruciating details revealed very slowly over time, little bit by little bit. If you're waiting for one single groundbreaking study that announces it's learned everything about how the human brain works then good luck, you'll wait a while.
Yup, hence all my qualifiers, like "in theory" and putting "free" in quotes :) (I'm sure the garbagemen who collect my garbage for a low wage are also "free" "in theory" to find better work :/)
The GP does have a point though, in theory. Finding a more efficient way to produce something or obtain raw materials generates overall more wealth (or rather, wealth potential) within society. Economics is not a zero-sum game (for the rich to get richer the poor don't need to get poorer, since we can all make new "stuff"). In theory those jobs lost could be put to work creating something else, which could make other products cheaper in turn (increased labor supply in other markets), or making something new like a cure for cancer or cheap TV shows or furniture. Of course reality doesn't always allow this for individuals, particularly those who have spent their entire life in a now-obsolete industry.
One other 'angle' here though is that a single entity owning a supply of precious metals that outstrips the rest of the planet's supply would allow that entity to control prices. Traditional mining is expensive. They could surely set the price point at just below the level necessary to keep mines profitable, leaving little benefit for society at large but still putting millions out of work. (This doesn't even assume price fixing, yet even in, say, the oil industry with in theory many suppliers we still have artificially controlled pricing.)
I see your point, but OTOH, in a "free" labor market, nobody is forced to do that work are they? If that person doing the mining didn't want to risk their life in space they could find a job elsewhere, in theory.
The price for such labor will no doubt be set by the laws of supply and demand; they'll find the price point at which somebody skilled enough will be willing to do it. The price probably won't be all that high.
While grammar makes an argument more persuasive I can not believe that it is my argument. I can write a paragraph ignoring every grammatical rule in the book and abuse every logical fallacy known to man but as long as it creates a more positive emotional response my argument will be chosen over others. True, in the end I am exploiting the emotional weakness of my audience. Also by no means is it the most elegant way of presenting an argument but it is sadly highly effective.
It's true that you can (in practice) ignore grammar when persuading people, but I think that's only and precisely because so many people have poor comprehension skills, are unable to spot all the logical fallacies and appeals to emotion, and/or don't want to think at all but rather want to make decisions based on what they "feel". (I also don't think one should be 'trying to convince people' unless one has oneself carefully (and rationally - not emotionally) thought out said argument and convinced oneself first ... otherwise one's own viewpoint is itself the product of emotional manipulation by others. Some might however take the relativist view that whatever one "feels" is correct should be regarded as "correct", almost by definition, but I don't agree with this at all. Emotions in my view can give us general clues us to what to analyse and how, but are only useful in combination with intelligent analysis.)
It's also true, as you pointed out, that you can (mis)use even proper grammar and language usage to make your argument sound stronger, by making it sound as if it is a sensible, intelligent argument - i.e. cloaking it in the appearance of intellectuality. Style without substance. Proper grammar itself does not imply that a sensible argument has been made. (However this again essentially boils down to a similar thing, as the reader makes a judgment based on how the text "feels" rather than what it says.) This is also one of the points of the linked text, and that again, if people were taught precision in language usage and comprehension, they would be able to see through it when they were being manipulated in this way.
Why should he?
Read this: Less than Words Can Say, and then come back and tell me if you still think precision in language usage simply does not matter.
Grammar doesn't just make your argument "sound more pleasing"; proper grammar is required to convey your argument, and in fact is your argument - without proper grammar usage (comprehension and production skills) you can really only convey general feelings and emotions about an issue, little more than disconnected slogans and sound bites (your non-sequitur at the end is an example.)
The creationists are essentially trolls
I realise the effects might be the same, but there is an important difference: trolls know that what they're posting is bunk.
There is another glaring problem with '4 out of 5 dentists choose ...' type of marketing ... it doesn't normalise against the overall market share of a brand. For example, say it is claimed that "8 out 10 dentists use Crest". It sounds good, because it's a high number, but the number alone doesn't actually tell us much. Why? Assume in one case that 9 out of 10 members of the general public use Crest. This would means that dentists are less likely to choose Crest than people who don't know any better - which would mean Crest is probably bad. Now assume a second case in which 6 out of 10 members of the general public use Crest, and 8 out of 10 dentists use it. This means that people who know better are more likely to use Crest than people who don't, and would imply that Crest is good.
Of course, there is also a third case in which the numbers are the same for the general public and the 'experts', and in that case, it probably doesn't matter what you choose --- the market alternatives are probably just as good.