Gah. This is the type of link I'd be delighted to share with all the old timey BBS friends I'm still in touch with, but that small piece of jingoistic tripe ruins the whole experience for me.
Did I say anything about "creating" wealth? Ford's goal was to create an economy where he commanded as many resources as possible towards the creation of automobiles. Ford wasn't minting money, he was transferring his wealth (i.e. current profits) to the workers.
A few rich CEOs can buy maybe a dozen or so cars before the marginal utility starts to wear a little thin, but if you can persuade those CEOs to transfer enough of their wealth to their employees so that the individual employees can afford a car, then you've got utility by the boatloads.
Indeed, history shows us that other automobile employers had to follow suit and Ford's profit sharing program resulted in much cheaper cars across the board.
Granted, he also raised wages in order to prevent turnover and that heightened efficiency led to the cheaper cars. Happy workers are productive workers and, yes, they do actually pull more natural resources from the ground and produce more sprockets under the right conditions. (Note: Even if inflation is looming, the workers don't know it yet and they're still happily working harder.)
That's rather the point. If all you ever do is keep lowering employee wages until you hit the sweet spot, you'll be in a whole lot of trouble when you realize that you were on the wrong side of the labor supply and demand curve the whole time. High turnover was a warning sign to Ford that he (and the rest of his industry) were on the wrong side of the curve and they needed to raise wages. Ford undoubtably realized that one of the happy side-effects of repairing the situation was that there would be a heightened market for automobiles among the working class. Everybody wins. Ford builds his automobile empire and the working people get their cars. (Well, everyone wins except for us, the 21st century recipients of the negative environmental and social effects of car culture.)
jpmorgan, you're only correct when an industry is operating on the far side of the labor supply and demand curve. I also suspect you're not much of a Keynesian.
I suppose this all has some relevance to the recent situation. There was, afterall, a very high turnover rate amongst tech workers during the 90s who were chasing pre-IPO dreams. That sounds like (one of many) dead canaries in a mineshaft to me. (Remember: Although a few won the IPO lottery, the majority of tech workers didn't and suffered grueling hours, draconian IP contracts and vaporware products as a result. Meanwhile, corporate propaganda was telling us that the supply of workers was low when, in fact, we now find most tech workers are out of a job.)
But this makes sense to me and here's why. Firstly, he's setting an example and raising the stakes. Other companies who are competing for labor will have to raise their wages to meet Ford's bid, so not just his own employees are affected by the higher wage.
Secondly, his employees will go out and spend their extra dough on products and services and that extra money will eventually circulate around until it lands in the lap of somebody who decides to buy a car.
It's a trickle up effect. The tide rises all ships, yadayada.
Re:3500 year old technology
on
Awari Solved
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· Score: 1
A perfect game of tic tac toe results in the first player winning.
I think it makes perfect sense that people are going to have very divergent experiences in creating intimacy online.
Success will mostly depend on one's luck. Is the boy that Suzy meeting for coffee really just a slick talking sociopath? Is the girl Freddy talks to in IRC really just a guy? Who knows?!
Sure, there are textual clues. Some people are better at reading text clues than verbal and physical cues. Some people are better at the IRL game. Many people are just plain clueless and will end up with the sociopath no matter what.
I bolded "many people," because, what I think tends to happen is that people get fed with up failures IRL and move online thinking they'll stand better chances. That's not always the case, and what you end up with are pockets of community where sociopath and clueless victim are drawn to each other.
You also end up with other kinds of pockets of community. Meeting likeminds is great. Spending all your free time stalking MOBs, looking at tentacle porn or trading fursuits with likeminds is probably not such a hot idea. Your buddies won't challenge you. They won't say, "gee, maybe filling your mind with anime rape porn isn't such a healthy idea." Or they won't say, "maybe you should stop trying to level today and go look for a job."
Some of my old online buddies have gone the obsession route. I can't hold a conversation with them anymore. If I asked them, they'd say they're very happy with their new online friends and user meets, but I sense an undercurrent of discontent, malaise. Nobody wants to live a one-dimensional life.
I recently read an opinion article in The Oregonian that made a similar point about the spontaneous grieving surrounding well publicized deaths.
I think it doesn't really matter whether grieving is real or imagined. If somebody's feeling something, they have the right to express it. On the other hand, our information society is at a really scary crossroads. Media, and interactive media is still media, wants to be hyperreal. It wants to be more intense, more interesting and more intimate that real life. Adbusters published a pretty enlightening piece by sociologist Todd Gitlin that expresses this problem.
The question, then, is: Do we really want virtual intimacy to replace actual intimacy? Personally, I think it's still a poor imitation.
Body language is important. The world is chaulk full of slick preditors and intuition is the only way to separate them from everybody else. People who don't trust their intuition, or have faulty intuition, usually end up being prey.
If you trust somebody's ability to type a colon and a close-parenthesis more than your trust your own instincts, that's pretty scary. It's probably also why you have poor relationships IRL. Emoticons can not replace body language because body language is subverbal and subconscious. With the exception of freudian slips, typing is and always will be a conscious activity that is easily manipulated.
These were pretty mild, but if the pseudo-editors here pull a Lone Gunman with a major Buffy plot twist... Well, let's just say, the last time I tortured somebody, they didn't even have chainsaws.
Just because correlation != causation, it doesn't mean you can ignore correlation. When you see correlation, you should go "ding! there's a possibility of a connection here, but I won't get my panties in a bunch just yet." If somebody slaps on a reasonable, scientifically sound theory on that correlation, then you should be suspicious. Maybe not suspicious enough to act, but certainly suspicious enough to want to do further research.
You can't villianize people for feeling passionately that we should research some probable disasters. It doesn't matter if their thesis is wrong or right, since science progresses either way. Anyways, if you're really worried about funds being wasted on paranoia, you should be bitching about the military budget.
I've been playing with some low-memory browsers on various old computers I've been trying to resurrect and pngs have given me trouble on a couple browsers. Luckily, there are a few small footprint browsers still in development, so with any luck they'll get the kinks out.
>In countries where people are starving, the population growth is enormous.
Exactly. Staving people have more children under the misguided philosophy that their children will help support them. The only way for this cycle to taper off is for the starvation to reach a point where people die faster than they can reproduce.
AllTheWeb saves the day. Semicid is a vaginal contraceptive that's chalk full of Nonoxynol-9 to kill all those little swimmers dead. It's been around since 1973, so it shoulda been around when you went to college.
The only interesting part of that article is the part where a Microserf basically admits that MS's monopoly lets them write crappy software:
"Microsoft has this stigma about not getting it right until version three... We didn't have a choice with Xbox. If we didn't get it right with version one, Sony and Nintendo would eat us alive."
— Pete Isensee, lead developer for Microsoft's Xbox Advanced Technology Group.
I dislike cries of "too US-centric" as much as the next Yankee, but come on, the story here isn't that they discovered the American continent first. The wow-that's-incredible part of the story is the idea that Chinese explorers circumnavigated the globe 100 years before Magellan's voyage.
As it has been pointed out, lots of people beat Columbus to the New World, (Vikings and Native Americans to name a couple.) but going all the way around the world is something of an accomplishment. Incidentally, when you sail around the world you're bound to bump into the American continent anyways.
>Yeah, Kuro5hin has been planning to do exactly what
>Slashdot is doing.
Except Kuro5hin is introducing classified-style text ads, which is a heck of a lot less annoying than "large what-the-advertisers-want" ads, and probably a better business model.
Only baboons are impressed by larger ads, so Slashdot's advertisers won't be much more successful with larger ads and Slashdot will lose aesthetically minded readers. This means the advertisers will eventually realize larger ads aren't working and will seek more beneficial advertising elsewhere. Meanwhile, K5, with their more grassroots and less obnoxious advertising scheme, will be quietly taking over the Universe. Unless Google beats them to it.
Obviously, this story was a fluff piece. Some fluff is okay, but as watchdogs of society and government, journalists should have more important things to do than give endless free publicity to inventors and their "secret" society-altering inventions, be they Jaskars, Segways, or Transmeta chips. Traditional news values are utterly predictable and easy to manipulate (e.g. "Arm the Homeless").
However, zero point energy, as far as I understand it, is one of those quantum weirdities that seem to defy Newtonian physics.
>Slowing the economy down even more helps the planet?
Here's a hint: The planet is finite. And I'm pretty sure that the day we run out of resources is going to be a hell of a lot worse than any mere recession.
I shipped my tower, parts and all, about half a dozen times cross-country USPS ground and UPS ground while I was going to college and the worst damage I ever had was a rip in the original packaging. UPS required that all computer equipment be double boxed with several inches of padding between the boxes, so I'm not quite sure why his boxes don't seem to fit that criteria. I'm probably going to rot in enviro-purgatory, though, until all those packaging peanuts finish decomposing.
My guess is that they're either trying to hock more of their $79.95 Comprehensive Thesaurus plug-ins, or they're trying to kill off all possible "I'd like to see Bill Gates naked and petrified" -> "I'll drink to that" thesaurus misfirings.
>It's easy to speculate that Mobile Suit Gundam >and Cowboy Bebop were dropped because of
>Tuesday's terrorist attacks since each show has a >fair amount of violence,
I hope not. I've noticed that the overlying theme for the Mobile Suit Gundam series is the need for empathy with one's enemies, the dehumanizing effects of war, and the moral dilemmas soldiers face. In fact, it gets quite blatant at times, such as the plot for 08th MS Team, where the protagonist falls in love with an enemy soldier. Also, in Mobile Suit Gundam, Amuro Ray is always desserting to run off and sulk about having to kill people. Soldiers conidering their morality before following orders? Talk about a threat to national security.
Slashdot Mirror
Gah. This is the type of link I'd be delighted to share with all the old timey BBS friends I'm still in touch with, but that small piece of jingoistic tripe ruins the whole experience for me.
A few rich CEOs can buy maybe a dozen or so cars before the marginal utility starts to wear a little thin, but if you can persuade those CEOs to transfer enough of their wealth to their employees so that the individual employees can afford a car, then you've got utility by the boatloads.
Indeed, history shows us that other automobile employers had to follow suit and Ford's profit sharing program resulted in much cheaper cars across the board.
Granted, he also raised wages in order to prevent turnover and that heightened efficiency led to the cheaper cars. Happy workers are productive workers and, yes, they do actually pull more natural resources from the ground and produce more sprockets under the right conditions. (Note: Even if inflation is looming, the workers don't know it yet and they're still happily working harder.)
That's rather the point. If all you ever do is keep lowering employee wages until you hit the sweet spot, you'll be in a whole lot of trouble when you realize that you were on the wrong side of the labor supply and demand curve the whole time. High turnover was a warning sign to Ford that he (and the rest of his industry) were on the wrong side of the curve and they needed to raise wages. Ford undoubtably realized that one of the happy side-effects of repairing the situation was that there would be a heightened market for automobiles among the working class. Everybody wins. Ford builds his automobile empire and the working people get their cars. (Well, everyone wins except for us, the 21st century recipients of the negative environmental and social effects of car culture.)
jpmorgan, you're only correct when an industry is operating on the far side of the labor supply and demand curve. I also suspect you're not much of a Keynesian.
I suppose this all has some relevance to the recent situation. There was, afterall, a very high turnover rate amongst tech workers during the 90s who were chasing pre-IPO dreams. That sounds like (one of many) dead canaries in a mineshaft to me. (Remember: Although a few won the IPO lottery, the majority of tech workers didn't and suffered grueling hours, draconian IP contracts and vaporware products as a result. Meanwhile, corporate propaganda was telling us that the supply of workers was low when, in fact, we now find most tech workers are out of a job.)
Secondly, his employees will go out and spend their extra dough on products and services and that extra money will eventually circulate around until it lands in the lap of somebody who decides to buy a car.
It's a trickle up effect. The tide rises all ships, yadayada.
A perfect game of tic tac toe results in the first player winning.
Success will mostly depend on one's luck. Is the boy that Suzy meeting for coffee really just a slick talking sociopath? Is the girl Freddy talks to in IRC really just a guy? Who knows?!
Sure, there are textual clues. Some people are better at reading text clues than verbal and physical cues. Some people are better at the IRL game. Many people are just plain clueless and will end up with the sociopath no matter what.
I bolded "many people," because, what I think tends to happen is that people get fed with up failures IRL and move online thinking they'll stand better chances. That's not always the case, and what you end up with are pockets of community where sociopath and clueless victim are drawn to each other.
You also end up with other kinds of pockets of community. Meeting likeminds is great. Spending all your free time stalking MOBs, looking at tentacle porn or trading fursuits with likeminds is probably not such a hot idea. Your buddies won't challenge you. They won't say, "gee, maybe filling your mind with anime rape porn isn't such a healthy idea." Or they won't say, "maybe you should stop trying to level today and go look for a job."
Some of my old online buddies have gone the obsession route. I can't hold a conversation with them anymore. If I asked them, they'd say they're very happy with their new online friends and user meets, but I sense an undercurrent of discontent, malaise. Nobody wants to live a one-dimensional life.
I think it doesn't really matter whether grieving is real or imagined. If somebody's feeling something, they have the right to express it. On the other hand, our information society is at a really scary crossroads. Media, and interactive media is still media, wants to be hyperreal. It wants to be more intense, more interesting and more intimate that real life. Adbusters published a pretty enlightening piece by sociologist Todd Gitlin that expresses this problem.
The question, then, is: Do we really want virtual intimacy to replace actual intimacy? Personally, I think it's still a poor imitation.
If you trust somebody's ability to type a colon and a close-parenthesis more than your trust your own instincts, that's pretty scary. It's probably also why you have poor relationships IRL. Emoticons can not replace body language because body language is subverbal and subconscious. With the exception of freudian slips, typing is and always will be a conscious activity that is easily manipulated.
These were pretty mild, but if the pseudo-editors here pull a Lone Gunman with a major Buffy plot twist... Well, let's just say, the last time I tortured somebody, they didn't even have chainsaws.
Does the phrase "phone sex" ring any bells?
You can't villianize people for feeling passionately that we should research some probable disasters. It doesn't matter if their thesis is wrong or right, since science progresses either way. Anyways, if you're really worried about funds being wasted on paranoia, you should be bitching about the military budget.
I've been playing with some low-memory browsers on various old computers I've been trying to resurrect and pngs have given me trouble on a couple browsers. Luckily, there are a few small footprint browsers still in development, so with any luck they'll get the kinks out.
>In countries where people are starving, the population growth is enormous.
Exactly. Staving people have more children under the misguided philosophy that their children will help support them. The only way for this cycle to taper off is for the starvation to reach a point where people die faster than they can reproduce.
How can you talk about human life so clinically? Every time that population growth tapers off, it's because human beings are starving to death.
Google search for "Spam saved my life".
AllTheWeb saves the day. Semicid is a vaginal contraceptive that's chalk full of Nonoxynol-9 to kill all those little swimmers dead. It's been around since 1973, so it shoulda been around when you went to college.
I dislike cries of "too US-centric" as much as the next Yankee, but come on, the story here isn't that they discovered the American continent first. The wow-that's-incredible part of the story is the idea that Chinese explorers circumnavigated the globe 100 years before Magellan's voyage.
As it has been pointed out, lots of people beat Columbus to the New World, (Vikings and Native Americans to name a couple.) but going all the way around the world is something of an accomplishment. Incidentally, when you sail around the world you're bound to bump into the American continent anyways.
>Slashdot is doing.
Except Kuro5hin is introducing classified-style text ads, which is a heck of a lot less annoying than "large what-the-advertisers-want" ads, and probably a better business model.
Only baboons are impressed by larger ads, so Slashdot's advertisers won't be much more successful with larger ads and Slashdot will lose aesthetically minded readers. This means the advertisers will eventually realize larger ads aren't working and will seek more beneficial advertising elsewhere. Meanwhile, K5, with their more grassroots and less obnoxious advertising scheme, will be quietly taking over the Universe. Unless Google beats them to it.
Obviously, this story was a fluff piece. Some fluff is okay, but as watchdogs of society and government, journalists should have more important things to do than give endless free publicity to inventors and their "secret" society-altering inventions, be they Jaskars, Segways, or Transmeta chips. Traditional news values are utterly predictable and easy to manipulate (e.g. "Arm the Homeless").
However, zero point energy, as far as I understand it, is one of those quantum weirdities that seem to defy Newtonian physics.
>but it is always nice to institute friendly
>governments in parts of the world that are
>close to countries that are rich in oil.
Hm. Friendly governments are especially useful if you need to build a pipeline through that country.
"Take that causality!" -- Professor Farnsworth
>Slowing the economy down even more helps the planet?
Here's a hint: The planet is finite. And I'm pretty sure that the day we run out of resources is going to be a hell of a lot worse than any mere recession.
I shipped my tower, parts and all, about half a dozen times cross-country USPS ground and UPS ground while I was going to college and the worst damage I ever had was a rip in the original packaging. UPS required that all computer equipment be double boxed with several inches of padding between the boxes, so I'm not quite sure why his boxes don't seem to fit that criteria. I'm probably going to rot in enviro-purgatory, though, until all those packaging peanuts finish decomposing.
My guess is that they're either trying to hock more of their $79.95 Comprehensive Thesaurus plug-ins, or they're trying to kill off all possible "I'd like to see Bill Gates naked and petrified" -> "I'll drink to that" thesaurus misfirings.
>It's easy to speculate that Mobile Suit Gundam >and Cowboy Bebop were dropped because of
>Tuesday's terrorist attacks since each show has a >fair amount of violence,
I hope not. I've noticed that the overlying theme for the Mobile Suit Gundam series is the need for empathy with one's enemies, the dehumanizing effects of war, and the moral dilemmas soldiers face. In fact, it gets quite blatant at times, such as the plot for 08th MS Team, where the protagonist falls in love with an enemy soldier. Also, in Mobile Suit Gundam, Amuro Ray is always desserting to run off and sulk about having to kill people. Soldiers conidering their morality before following orders? Talk about a threat to national security.