This subthread is really about eating their own species. Chimps [animalplanet.com] have been observed doing so and it's common knowledge that lions will kill and eat offspring that isn't theirs. Just killed (wah) your first two points.
No, you haven't really. Well, my "absolutely", statement sure, that was obviously silly, but it's pretty obvious there is an evolutionary instinctual element to many species not preferring to eat their own. That's why all of these anecdotes are so "shocking" (i.e. why the media covers it in "nature" specials) and why the pack-oriented species are still around...
The market for $8 "all you can eat" streaming? It's very saturated in many senses of the term. Basically, you get what you pay for at that price.
And you can in fact stream (almost) any movie you want, you just have to be willing to pay what the owner of the movie wants to charge you for it, which for new releases is not part of "$8 all you can eat". You want better/cheaper? Fine, but that's not something in the hands of the companies like Netflix or Redbox, it's entirely in the hands of the studios who own the content...
Interesting anecdote, but just because Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy murdered and mutilated dozens of people, that doesn't mean it's a genetic trait.
Despite the adage, exceptions rarely prove the rule, and given the extensive study of chimpanzees over a century or more, these anecdotes are the exception. If there was *no* selection against cannibalism you would see it every day, not a few anecdotes.
I think you answered your own question in the subject...
Competing with Netflix is "easy" - if you are willing to outspend them on advertising and content while offering streaming at a lower price, and somehow stealing their mostly satisfied customers in a near-saturated market. Doing it *profitably* is another story - which is why the giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc haven't bothered trying...
Yeah, really. They didn't kill anyone to eat them, they their dead as a last-ditch attempt to keep from starving to death. And if you actually read anything about the stories, it was after some fascinating rationalization and logical conclusions, which is clearly not what a lizard or fish did before eating its offspring...
While true, your examples are not really indicative of any "evolutionary rule", and other than the polar bear example (which has like 2-3 anecdotes behind it) they are not large mammals and not primates. The fact is many species absolutely do NOT kill/eat their own.
BUT - it's also true that humans are not necessarily one of those. There are many example of human cultures eating their own, whether defeated enemies, dead relatives, or just because they want to. There is absolutely an instinctual aspect preventing interspecies cannibalism. But in humans I'd argue it's mostly cultural at this point.
Social contract is a load of crap - but so is "animal" instinct in humans. There is plenty of murder in the world, which pretty much rules out social contract or evolutionary instinct, at least in terms of preservation of the species.
If anything the real answer is cultural aversion. Some cultures were cannibalistic with no (moral) issue (though definite increased spread of disease issues). Some cultures won't eat pigs, while other cultures think insects are a delicacy.
Nothing you said actually addressed my point that it would still be *proportionally* the same. The issue is that the gap between tech and non tech has INCREASED, which is the whole point of the thread. If everyone's salary increased proportionally (i.e. it was ONLY a cost of living difference) then the non-tech people would still be in the same situation (i.e. still struggling, sharing rooms, etc), rather than getting priced out of the area COMPLETELY.
More or less. I was born in Santa Cruz. I have lived in SF, however, when I worked for gay.com.
In other words, you are not in fact up to date with the housing situation int the area over the last few years.
Yes, gold was the reason 150 years ago.
Very good. You're paying attention. I was giving you a history lesson which demonstrated that SF has always been expensive real estate, not claiming that gold is still the driving force behind the San Franciscan economy. Don't prevaricate.
Just like in the previous bit - things change, and you have not been here to see the latest, apparently. 150 years ago lucky prospectors drove up prices. Today it's tech employees. But the *point* is this is the cause of the "tech bubble" (if that is what it is, we'll see), which has changed the *rate* of increase in prices. To put it simply, 5-10 years ago rents were going up a few percent a year, now they are going up double digits.
But now THE reason is highly compensated tech employees
You are on crack. In order for that to be true, San Francisco would have to be peopled mostly by tech employees, which is very far from the case.
No, that's a total logical fallacy. The demographics are CHANGING, that's the point, it doesn't have to happen overnight to be true. Obviously anyone who already owned property or is living in rent-controlled property is less affected right now. But in that case rates are determined not by the average rental/housing prices, but by the AVAILABLE rentals, which given the housing crunch is like
And as the parent said, it's not just SF, it's SV as a whole.
SF is not in the SV. HTH.
You should have read the OP you replied to, which was explicitly talking about the whole Bay Area. And clearly it's different geographically, but in terms of the tech industry and housing discussion they are increasingly becoming indistinguishable (just looking at the commuting situation over the last few years between the two, it's gotten crazy).
Hey, my SV "suburban" house has appreciated over 30% in the last 3 years because of all of the tech employees with their high salaries (and higher stock options/bonuses) are looking for something to buy...
Yes, you are experiencing a bubble tied to another bubble. Sell now, if you're interested in actually getting that money. You will not have another chance.
Not at all. In the area I live housing prices never dropped. They just slowed down for a couple of years. In fact, the SF housing prices are much more of a bubble than in SV, since the former is driven by over-paid 20-somethings at "startups", and the latter is driven by the 30+ with families who have already made a ton of money on the last round of companies that succeeded (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc).
The 100k number for new grads get tossed around a lot, but you will find that most of those 100k entry level developer jobs are in one of two places: San Francisco or New York. Being offered 100k in New York or San Francisco is like being offered 40k somewhere else where it isn't so damn expensive to live
But that $100k starting salary is still WAY more than the starting salaries of most new college grads in other fields, which was the point. Cost of living in different locations is orthogonal to starting salaries between different fields.
For example, in San Fran it costs nearly $3000 a month to rent a broom closet
Actually, you can get a small but decent 1BR in the $3000 range, or split a nice 2BR with a roommate for $4000 ie. $2000 each. Is that really expensive? Yes. But it's FAR from a "broom closet". And the fact is a $100k salary can afford that while still having plenty of money to spend or save. That's the whole point of being paid more.
Wow, that post was all over the place. And a bit too borderline mysogynist without any actual point.
Pretty sure you could have just summarized it as: humans are humans, and there are "backstabbers" and political machinists regardless of gender. I can't stand people who try to generalize this sort of office behavior by gender - it mostly means they don't understand it at all, not that they have "figured it out".
The main difference is likely in the approach - women may be a bit more subtle about it, and men more aggressive. But who cares if you got poisoned or shot, you're still dead.
Tech salaries have contributed, but they are as high as they are in part because the cost of living in San Francisco is so high. The cart and horse push each other at different times.
Oh, and that is easily disproven, as if it were explainable simply by cost of living, *ALL* salaries would be going up proportionally and that's clearly not been the case.
Do you live in SF Bay Area? I'm assuming not because the previous poster totally has it nailed. Of course the city has always been expensive, but the booming tech industry (both for commuters to companies like Google and SF companies like Twitter) is the primary reason for the recent gentrification/housing boom/whatever you want to call it. I mean, jesus, this isn't even really a debatable argument, it's all anyone in the city or the local media ever talks about these days...
Yes, gold was the reason 150 years ago. But now THE reason is highly compensated tech employees - and especially the younger employees who want to live in the city, and given the shortage of talent right now are making a shit-ton of money right out of college compared to past years.
And as the parent said, it's not just SF, it's SV as a whole. Hey, my SV "suburban" house has appreciated over 30% in the last 3 years because of all of the tech employees with their high salaries (and higher stock options/bonuses) are looking for something to buy...
The real problem isn't the education pipeline. As TFS notes, only one male student in Mississippi bothered to take the AP CS exam.
Actually, yes, though it's a bit winding in the reasoning, the education pipeline (and the cause, lack of funding and emphasis) is definitely to blame for much of it. The real problem with the statistics quoted in the article isn't related to the number of female or male students taking the AP CS exam, per se, it's that they used *Mississippi* as an example!
According to that chart there were 28 students in the ENTIRE state of Mississippi who took the Calculus BC entrance exam. That's about the same number who took that exam at my high school in Illinois - and it wasn't that big a HS, senior class was about 400.
And while, of course, Mississippi is probably one of the poorest and worst educated states, I'm not going to attribute it all to "cultural differences" or "interests". I really had no interest in Calculus BC, but it was a near-requirement to get into the best colleges. The reason I was able to take it is my high school district was wealthy enough to offer it, and the students wealthy enough to have the previous education to be ready for it.
In American culture, being a developer or software engineer or whatever term you want to use is simply not seen as a prestigious career path. People in this career path are generally treated poorly and don't make that much money compared to career paths with similar educational requirements and difficulty, and the prestige is pathetic.
What, are you fucking kidding me?! It's one of the highest paid jobs right now, maybe the highest paid with a BS degree right out of college. And with the popularity of Facebook, Silicon Valley etc, startups, etc it's considered fairly prestigious. Claiming plumbing is more "prestigious" than software engineering, while I'm pretty sure isn't true almost anywhere, it's laughable in the areas of the country that actually *hire* engineers.
I will give you that going to somewhere like Stanford or Berkeley is different from the University of Mississippi - the former are actually at the point they have almost *TOO MANY* CS majors, and it's making the system somewhat unbalanced. But I'm also pretty sure the number of doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers from the former schools also massively outweighs the latter. But at the top schools heavily involved in the tech boom CS is almost the social norm, not the exception. And the grads are getting $100k++ straight out of college and being recruited from the best tech companies like rock stars.
I don't know, sounds like you are either not in the field, or you are and you have been socially burned too many times so you are bitter...
It's funny that you keep harping on the one variable in the article that *is* actually irrelevant to the whole thing, which is comparing across different populations. The whole point of a *scientific* study is to change one variable and see the effect, and clearly when you do that the difference is highly (statistically) significant.
And secondly - you are making a complete straw man to try to disprove the OPPOSITE correlation, ie. atheism leads to scientific study, when the obvious causation would be scientific study leads to atheism.
Anyway, this thread has gone exactly nowhere as you keep repeating the same irrelevant statistic. I'm not even sure why I'm debating with a known/. troll. My own fault. Sigh.
No, it really doesn't - and you may want to look up other scientific terms like "cohort" and "control".
1) While Indian scientists were more religious than UK scientists, they were *less* religious than Indian non-scientists. 2) Many of the atheist arguments are in fact based on modern science being incompatible with dogmatic religious beliefs, e.g. evolution vs creationism.
Besides, the phrase is actually "correlation does not imply causation". The mistake isn't equating them, just improperly using one to prove the other. But correlation IS in fact a very strong indicator of causation (aka. circumstantial evidence), and in this case there are plenty of other reasons that show one causes the other.
Except you missed the critical bit where The Bible is basically a few thousand years of people making up stories to justify their beliefs, so why would you think modern humanity couldn't continue to do the same thing?
Until they have a more affordable version, the with be a niche. Bugati is also a niche. Niche doesn't mean bad.
Bad example. Bugatti isn't a niche, Bugatti is just a marquee brand of the Volkswagen Group.
And while obviously Tesla will remain relatively small until they have the pricing and capacity to sell more cars, that's not really a very good definition of a niche. They are backordered for months and have already announced longer term plans for their next 2 models. That's called *startup*, not a niche.
As far as the price - maybe it's high, but also maybe Bob Lutz doesn't quite understand the concept of stock valuation. In theory its price is based on the POTENTIAL value of the company, not it's current state. Or maybe he's just butt hurt his former company's stock (GM) has tanked while Tesla's has skyrocketed.
Actually, if you want *real* niche, it's Lutz's new company, who's car (I'm not making this up) is basically taking a Fiskar Karma and replacing the electric motor with one from a Corvette ZR1: http://www.autoblog.com/2014/0...
The sad thing is I have never put my phone in a case, BECAUSE it completely defeats the purpose of a nice, compact smartphone. And I have never had an issue in, what, like 7-8 years.
But I am now considering it with the iPhone 6 because I am worried it's so thin (and the glass screen actually wraps around the sides, so even a side impact will hit glass) it could break with what I would consider "normal" wear and tear. I think there is a "too thin" and this iPhone has approached it...
Slashdot Mirror
This subthread is really about eating their own species. Chimps [animalplanet.com] have been observed doing so and it's common knowledge that lions will kill and eat offspring that isn't theirs. Just killed (wah) your first two points.
No, you haven't really. Well, my "absolutely", statement sure, that was obviously silly, but it's pretty obvious there is an evolutionary instinctual element to many species not preferring to eat their own. That's why all of these anecdotes are so "shocking" (i.e. why the media covers it in "nature" specials) and why the pack-oriented species are still around...
The market for $8 "all you can eat" streaming? It's very saturated in many senses of the term. Basically, you get what you pay for at that price.
And you can in fact stream (almost) any movie you want, you just have to be willing to pay what the owner of the movie wants to charge you for it, which for new releases is not part of "$8 all you can eat". You want better/cheaper? Fine, but that's not something in the hands of the companies like Netflix or Redbox, it's entirely in the hands of the studios who own the content...
Interesting anecdote, but just because Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy murdered and mutilated dozens of people, that doesn't mean it's a genetic trait.
Despite the adage, exceptions rarely prove the rule, and given the extensive study of chimpanzees over a century or more, these anecdotes are the exception. If there was *no* selection against cannibalism you would see it every day, not a few anecdotes.
"I didn't know it existed..."
I think you answered your own question in the subject...
Competing with Netflix is "easy" - if you are willing to outspend them on advertising and content while offering streaming at a lower price, and somehow stealing their mostly satisfied customers in a near-saturated market. Doing it *profitably* is another story - which is why the giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc haven't bothered trying...
...not to eat any animal that specifically asks me not to.
In fact they have not as much "integrated into your pack" as they have been specifically bred for thousands of years to serve you in hundreds of ways.
Then again, the dogs eaten in Asia, etc, have been specifically bred for food... so maybe it's not all that different...
Dogs used for food in Asia, etc are bred and raised just like other food livestock (unless you kidnapped someone's pet for dinner). Duh.
Yeah, really. They didn't kill anyone to eat them, they their dead as a last-ditch attempt to keep from starving to death. And if you actually read anything about the stories, it was after some fascinating rationalization and logical conclusions, which is clearly not what a lizard or fish did before eating its offspring...
I wouldn't want others to eat me (at least if it involved killing me first), so I wouldn't eat others either.
Well, I *really* don't want others to eat me if they *didn't* kill me first! Still can't get that scene from Hannibal out of my head...
While true, your examples are not really indicative of any "evolutionary rule", and other than the polar bear example (which has like 2-3 anecdotes behind it) they are not large mammals and not primates. The fact is many species absolutely do NOT kill/eat their own.
BUT - it's also true that humans are not necessarily one of those. There are many example of human cultures eating their own, whether defeated enemies, dead relatives, or just because they want to. There is absolutely an instinctual aspect preventing interspecies cannibalism. But in humans I'd argue it's mostly cultural at this point.
Social contract is a load of crap - but so is "animal" instinct in humans. There is plenty of murder in the world, which pretty much rules out social contract or evolutionary instinct, at least in terms of preservation of the species.
If anything the real answer is cultural aversion. Some cultures were cannibalistic with no (moral) issue (though definite increased spread of disease issues). Some cultures won't eat pigs, while other cultures think insects are a delicacy.
Nothing you said actually addressed my point that it would still be *proportionally* the same. The issue is that the gap between tech and non tech has INCREASED, which is the whole point of the thread. If everyone's salary increased proportionally (i.e. it was ONLY a cost of living difference) then the non-tech people would still be in the same situation (i.e. still struggling, sharing rooms, etc), rather than getting priced out of the area COMPLETELY.
Do you live in SF Bay Area?
More or less. I was born in Santa Cruz. I have lived in SF, however, when I worked for gay.com.
In other words, you are not in fact up to date with the housing situation int the area over the last few years.
Yes, gold was the reason 150 years ago.
Very good. You're paying attention. I was giving you a history lesson which demonstrated that SF has always been expensive real estate, not claiming that gold is still the driving force behind the San Franciscan economy. Don't prevaricate.
Just like in the previous bit - things change, and you have not been here to see the latest, apparently. 150 years ago lucky prospectors drove up prices. Today it's tech employees. But the *point* is this is the cause of the "tech bubble" (if that is what it is, we'll see), which has changed the *rate* of increase in prices. To put it simply, 5-10 years ago rents were going up a few percent a year, now they are going up double digits.
But now THE reason is highly compensated tech employees
You are on crack. In order for that to be true, San Francisco would have to be peopled mostly by tech employees, which is very far from the case.
No, that's a total logical fallacy. The demographics are CHANGING, that's the point, it doesn't have to happen overnight to be true. Obviously anyone who already owned property or is living in rent-controlled property is less affected right now. But in that case rates are determined not by the average rental/housing prices, but by the AVAILABLE rentals, which given the housing crunch is like
And as the parent said, it's not just SF, it's SV as a whole.
SF is not in the SV. HTH.
You should have read the OP you replied to, which was explicitly talking about the whole Bay Area. And clearly it's different geographically, but in terms of the tech industry and housing discussion they are increasingly becoming indistinguishable (just looking at the commuting situation over the last few years between the two, it's gotten crazy).
Hey, my SV "suburban" house has appreciated over 30% in the last 3 years because of all of the tech employees with their high salaries (and higher stock options/bonuses) are looking for something to buy...
Yes, you are experiencing a bubble tied to another bubble. Sell now, if you're interested in actually getting that money. You will not have another chance.
Not at all. In the area I live housing prices never dropped. They just slowed down for a couple of years. In fact, the SF housing prices are much more of a bubble than in SV, since the former is driven by over-paid 20-somethings at "startups", and the latter is driven by the 30+ with families who have already made a ton of money on the last round of companies that succeeded (Google, Facebook, Apple, etc).
The 100k number for new grads get tossed around a lot, but you will find that most of those 100k entry level developer jobs are in one of two places: San Francisco or New York. Being offered 100k in New York or San Francisco is like being offered 40k somewhere else where it isn't so damn expensive to live
But that $100k starting salary is still WAY more than the starting salaries of most new college grads in other fields, which was the point. Cost of living in different locations is orthogonal to starting salaries between different fields.
For example, in San Fran it costs nearly $3000 a month to rent a broom closet
Actually, you can get a small but decent 1BR in the $3000 range, or split a nice 2BR with a roommate for $4000 ie. $2000 each. Is that really expensive? Yes. But it's FAR from a "broom closet". And the fact is a $100k salary can afford that while still having plenty of money to spend or save. That's the whole point of being paid more.
Wow, that post was all over the place. And a bit too borderline mysogynist without any actual point.
Pretty sure you could have just summarized it as: humans are humans, and there are "backstabbers" and political machinists regardless of gender. I can't stand people who try to generalize this sort of office behavior by gender - it mostly means they don't understand it at all, not that they have "figured it out".
The main difference is likely in the approach - women may be a bit more subtle about it, and men more aggressive. But who cares if you got poisoned or shot, you're still dead.
Tech salaries have contributed, but they are as high as they are in part because the cost of living in San Francisco is so high. The cart and horse push each other at different times.
Oh, and that is easily disproven, as if it were explainable simply by cost of living, *ALL* salaries would be going up proportionally and that's clearly not been the case.
Do you live in SF Bay Area? I'm assuming not because the previous poster totally has it nailed. Of course the city has always been expensive, but the booming tech industry (both for commuters to companies like Google and SF companies like Twitter) is the primary reason for the recent gentrification/housing boom/whatever you want to call it. I mean, jesus, this isn't even really a debatable argument, it's all anyone in the city or the local media ever talks about these days...
Yes, gold was the reason 150 years ago. But now THE reason is highly compensated tech employees - and especially the younger employees who want to live in the city, and given the shortage of talent right now are making a shit-ton of money right out of college compared to past years.
And as the parent said, it's not just SF, it's SV as a whole. Hey, my SV "suburban" house has appreciated over 30% in the last 3 years because of all of the tech employees with their high salaries (and higher stock options/bonuses) are looking for something to buy...
The real problem isn't the education pipeline. As TFS notes, only one male student in Mississippi bothered to take the AP CS exam.
Actually, yes, though it's a bit winding in the reasoning, the education pipeline (and the cause, lack of funding and emphasis) is definitely to blame for much of it. The real problem with the statistics quoted in the article isn't related to the number of female or male students taking the AP CS exam, per se, it's that they used *Mississippi* as an example!
According to that chart there were 28 students in the ENTIRE state of Mississippi who took the Calculus BC entrance exam. That's about the same number who took that exam at my high school in Illinois - and it wasn't that big a HS, senior class was about 400.
And while, of course, Mississippi is probably one of the poorest and worst educated states, I'm not going to attribute it all to "cultural differences" or "interests". I really had no interest in Calculus BC, but it was a near-requirement to get into the best colleges. The reason I was able to take it is my high school district was wealthy enough to offer it, and the students wealthy enough to have the previous education to be ready for it.
In American culture, being a developer or software engineer or whatever term you want to use is simply not seen as a prestigious career path. People in this career path are generally treated poorly and don't make that much money compared to career paths with similar educational requirements and difficulty, and the prestige is pathetic.
What, are you fucking kidding me?! It's one of the highest paid jobs right now, maybe the highest paid with a BS degree right out of college. And with the popularity of Facebook, Silicon Valley etc, startups, etc it's considered fairly prestigious. Claiming plumbing is more "prestigious" than software engineering, while I'm pretty sure isn't true almost anywhere, it's laughable in the areas of the country that actually *hire* engineers.
I will give you that going to somewhere like Stanford or Berkeley is different from the University of Mississippi - the former are actually at the point they have almost *TOO MANY* CS majors, and it's making the system somewhat unbalanced. But I'm also pretty sure the number of doctors, lawyers, and investment bankers from the former schools also massively outweighs the latter. But at the top schools heavily involved in the tech boom CS is almost the social norm, not the exception. And the grads are getting $100k++ straight out of college and being recruited from the best tech companies like rock stars.
I don't know, sounds like you are either not in the field, or you are and you have been socially burned too many times so you are bitter...
It's funny that you keep harping on the one variable in the article that *is* actually irrelevant to the whole thing, which is comparing across different populations. The whole point of a *scientific* study is to change one variable and see the effect, and clearly when you do that the difference is highly (statistically) significant.
And secondly - you are making a complete straw man to try to disprove the OPPOSITE correlation, ie. atheism leads to scientific study, when the obvious causation would be scientific study leads to atheism.
Anyway, this thread has gone exactly nowhere as you keep repeating the same irrelevant statistic. I'm not even sure why I'm debating with a known /. troll. My own fault. Sigh.
No, it really doesn't - and you may want to look up other scientific terms like "cohort" and "control".
1) While Indian scientists were more religious than UK scientists, they were *less* religious than Indian non-scientists.
2) Many of the atheist arguments are in fact based on modern science being incompatible with dogmatic religious beliefs, e.g. evolution vs creationism.
Besides, the phrase is actually "correlation does not imply causation". The mistake isn't equating them, just improperly using one to prove the other. But correlation IS in fact a very strong indicator of causation (aka. circumstantial evidence), and in this case there are plenty of other reasons that show one causes the other.
Except you missed the critical bit where The Bible is basically a few thousand years of people making up stories to justify their beliefs, so why would you think modern humanity couldn't continue to do the same thing?
Science and atheism - correlation is not causation.
One of the rare times on slashdot where that line is complete bullshit...
Until they have a more affordable version, the with be a niche. Bugati is also a niche. Niche doesn't mean bad.
Bad example. Bugatti isn't a niche, Bugatti is just a marquee brand of the Volkswagen Group.
And while obviously Tesla will remain relatively small until they have the pricing and capacity to sell more cars, that's not really a very good definition of a niche. They are backordered for months and have already announced longer term plans for their next 2 models. That's called *startup*, not a niche.
As far as the price - maybe it's high, but also maybe Bob Lutz doesn't quite understand the concept of stock valuation. In theory its price is based on the POTENTIAL value of the company, not it's current state. Or maybe he's just butt hurt his former company's stock (GM) has tanked while Tesla's has skyrocketed.
Actually, if you want *real* niche, it's Lutz's new company, who's car (I'm not making this up) is basically taking a Fiskar Karma and replacing the electric motor with one from a Corvette ZR1: http://www.autoblog.com/2014/0...
I had a funny thought. The only other product I can think of that is obsessed with getting thinner is condoms.
Also laptops, TVs, and celebrities.
The sad thing is I have never put my phone in a case, BECAUSE it completely defeats the purpose of a nice, compact smartphone. And I have never had an issue in, what, like 7-8 years.
But I am now considering it with the iPhone 6 because I am worried it's so thin (and the glass screen actually wraps around the sides, so even a side impact will hit glass) it could break with what I would consider "normal" wear and tear. I think there is a "too thin" and this iPhone has approached it...