The economy is nothing but money trading hands. A wage increase is _by definition_ a boost to the economy, as long as doesn't severely affect the other cash flows of the company and the company can remain alive (which in this case virtually all of them can; not so much if you increase it to $500/hr).
> We're trying to optimize something in a very complex system
Yes! You're starting out well.
> If I'm running a business, and my payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, I have two options: 1) slow or stop hiring, cut staff, or even go out of business;
Of course, as said, this only 'works' if the wage was abysmally low to begin with (which is true in this case). If you're already paying your workers $100/hr, paying them $200/hr is likely not to do much, but going from $5/hr to $10/hr is going to do a lot.
There are many reasons for this. Low-paid workers often lose productivity due to working multiple jobs or making non-optimal life decisions to save money. Employee theft and misbehavior goes down. Job satisfaction (and the resulting increase in productivity) goes up. There are a lot of other positive effects.
> I think it will largely end up being a feel-good measure that well-off, well-meaning people can use to congratulate themselves about
I actually agree with you a little bit here. But that's life.
No they are most definitely not meaningless. Humans are just as good at programming as pigeons are good at flying into space, and this comparison holds true even if there were no spacecraft to compare pigeons to.
That's not even the start of it. There's a huge number of assembly instructions that cannot be implemented in C.
But 'assembly language' is so ill-defined (there are thousands of assembly languages) that it's just meaningless to say "Anything you can do in assembly language, you can do in C" anyway.
Whenever a programming task can be precisely defined, a machine can do it better. The process of converting C to assembly is hard for humans but machines can do it easily. The evolution of programming has mostly been a repetition of the same theme: Identification of a problem, clumsy efforts by humans to solve that problem manually, development of a process that automates that problem, and then sitting back and letting the computer handle that particular problem while we move on to more challenging ones. You could say this about not just converting high-level code to assembly (early programs that did this were called 'autocodes' and were in the domain of AI research), but about parallelism and type checking and memory analysis.
No, I'm saying the reason is because they don't know how good they have it, and they are mostly coddled and shielded from the effects of their own bad programming.
We are great at the things we actually evolved to do. Language, visual perception, navigating social situations, etc. These are the reasons we went from 500 cc of brain volume to 1500 cc. These are extremely hard problems that require the equivalent of petaflops of computation.
Yet it takes minutes of conscious effort for us to multiply two puny 10-digit numbers! We are extremely and demonstrably bad at doing arithmetic. The reason? Our working memory capacity is extremely limited and we have trouble consciously holding a lot of different pieces of information or outcomes in our heads simultaneously.
That's one of the reasons we are terrible at programming. We simply are unable to think of all the different ways our code can go belly-up. There's nothing subjective at all about what I'm saying. That you think it's equivalent to a 'proper breathing' quack shows you aren't even making a tiny bit of effort to understand my point.
In 1972 you would have been railing against C and insisting you need assembly to write an OS.
Tools get better over time. Yes, you need a language designed for systems-level coding to write some applications, but that doesn't equate to freedom to do anything you want and lack of restrictions. In fact it should mean quite the opposite.
> the source of troubles is usually in humans, not technology
Exactly, and that's why C/C++ is bad. Humans are terrible at programming. This isn't an insult to anyone and it's not me trying to say "no one is as good a coder as I am." It's a statement of fact, and everyone - including you and me - is terrible at programming. The human brain did not evolve to program computers. Programming computers is just something we kind of stumbled upon by accident and we have been continuing to stumble and fumble and generally make fools of ourselves. This is why we desperately NEED languages to hold our hands. Ironically, in the early days of programming, when people seemed to have a more mature attitude towards the art, this was a commonly-accepted fact. That's why Fortran and Lisp were developed even though it was hard and time-consuming and expensive to write compilers for those languages in those days (only a handful of people around the world knew how to write a compiler) and the code produced by those languages was typically awful and strained already-poor hardware to its limits. And when C was developed, it was a HIGH-LEVEL language. It was the python or the scala of its day. It was designed as a labor-saving device, a way to write operating systems without fucking around with assembly. "Writing an operating system in a high-level language? You're fucking nuts!" And just like a proper high-level language, it held the programmer's hands and put major restrictions on what he was allowed to do, at least relative to assembly.
The modern programmer is a victim of luxury. His computers are powerful and he has a choice of thousands of languages, many of them really good. And like the rich bohemian who decides to live in filth for no reason, he thinks there's something impressive or 'cool' or 'edgy' about programming in a complex unstructured language. There isn't.
I think a good question to ask is: "WHY is it important that young men sit in classes and approach real women?"
(Btw, I'm not defending these men at all; hear me out)
An unsatisfactory answer would be: "Because that's the normal thing to do." But why is it normal? "Because everyone else is doing it."
A more satisfactory answer would be: "Because long-term, doing those activities will result in more personal growth and more life satisfaction than watching porn and playing video games." But then you have to ask if that is actually true. Certainly for some people it is better to have a higher education and to get married. But realistically, for a lot of people nowadays, education means nothing but crushing student debt and approaching women means nothing but the depressing reality of having to deal with obnoxious women who are entitled and pampered and think the universe owes them everything.
Faced with this reality, I can empathize with men who choose not to live the 'normal' path. But at the same time, sitting at home all day watching porn isn't a good life path. There is a third way: Following your passions, taking up challenges, making up your own rules and living life your own way.
To be fair, there are amazing old people as well. One of the oldest guys at my workplace is 80 or something; he's been retired for 15 years but he still regularly shows up and in his retirement he's written tons of technical articles and books. And when asked of his opinion of the newer generation, "They are enthusiastic and accepting, and this place has never been better." I couldn't imagine that guy saying a single hateful word. I don't know what happens to people that causes them to become hateful pricks as they get older, but I know that simply being old is no excuse.
Holy fuck man, this is the 3rd time I'm saying this. Do I have to say it ten times more for you to understand? Are you seriously not capable of reading comprehension? That link talks about carbon footprint. That's all. We're talking about a much larger category of waste here.
- The average American produces a lot of waste, higher than all other countries, no matter if they live in cities or rural areas.
- City living is often assumed to be less wasteful, but the numbers indicate that it isn't that simple. People living in cities consume less energy for transportation but use more energy for other things and produce more solid waste.
- This pattern persists even when looking at non-American countries.
Please don't reply until you've fully read and listened (may take a very long time).
But this isn't about the average American! For fuck's sake, just pay a little attention. We're comparing megacities globally. The pattern of increased consumption in cities persists even when you look at non-American cities.
If you're pissed that I called him a moron, you better stop talking, because it seems like the moron label is way too good for you.
Third world populations? No they aren't. The first comparison is with Tokyo. London, Seoul, Moscow, Paris, and Osaka are all in the list as well, and all do better than New York on a per-capita basis. Really, there's no way you can spin this in a positive way or excuse it. The plain truth is that New York is a wasteful fucking city.
Absolute numbers are important and convey one kind of information; per-capita numbers are also important and convey another kind of information. Both are given in the article.
I think it's hilarious that you're ok with not reading the article, then you say "who can both read and think." Go play with your alphabet blocks, dum-dums.
No, you moron, if you actually read beyond two sentences, they talk about per-capita consumption, and it's STILL higher than non-megacity living. But it doesn't stop there. They actually try to find out the reason this is the case. It turns out, even though people living in close proximity use less energy for transportation and so on, the effects of increased wealth cause more energy consumption and waste production overall.
I'm not against increased wealth and better living conditions for everyone. It's just something that we should keep in mind. Packing people together in cities doesn't necessarily make them more efficient.
What I want to know is: Why all the act about encryption? If there is going to be a backdoor, and everyone knows there is going to be a backdoor, and the backdoor is enforced by federal law, then why go through all this circus?
Building something capable of surviving a 10,000-year journey is no mean feat, I'll grant you that. But there's no reason to think we can't do it. People are already working on a clock designed to last for 10,000 years: http://longnow.org/clock/ . The technologies used to do that aren't even that advanced. Plus, most of the issues with that clock have to do with Earth-specific problems (temperature fluctuations, humidity, theft, and so on). Deep space is actually a much better environment for preserving things.
> He thinks a thermonuclear weapon is a compact power source
If it's not a source of power, then what is it a source of? Rainbows?
> much like a dam, a battery, or a tank full of gas.
I never compared thermonuclear weapons with dams or batteries. You're a shallow-thinking fool if you that's all you interpreted from what I said.
> What, exactly, about life on the Earth is so unbearable is never quite clear with these people.
Actually I think life on Earth is quite dandy. I wouldn't personally want to leave. But all these people ranting about 'new energy sources' or 'better rockets' are fooling themselves; we do not need a new scientific breakthrough to reach the stars if that's what we wish to do. Moreover, a new scientific breakthrough would not even help that much, probably, as we already know the limits pretty well.
Fission is already pretty up there in terms of energy density. Fusion is better (and we already have practical fusion power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... ) and antimatter is literally the physical limit, as no source of energy can ever be more dense than antimatter due to general relativity. We can produce and store antimatter; unfortunately production of antimatter is extremely inefficient due to physical law.
What I'm saying is that we already know what the physical limitations are. We don't need a 'new source of energy', nor would one change the equation that much.
Nonsense. Distance is immaterial (literally); the important thing is *time*. We can travel to the stars with current tech. We just can't live long enough to survive the journey. Even chemical rockets are 'good enough to travel to the stars.'
Which is why the real way to get to the stars isn't through a ridiculous 600-meter space colony carrying live humans. It's through robotics and frozen embryos (or just robotics).
We can start colonizing the galaxy *right now* - we just lack the will to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
The economy is nothing but money trading hands. A wage increase is _by definition_ a boost to the economy, as long as doesn't severely affect the other cash flows of the company and the company can remain alive (which in this case virtually all of them can; not so much if you increase it to $500/hr).
> We're trying to optimize something in a very complex system
Yes! You're starting out well.
> If I'm running a business, and my payroll increases 30% while sales remain flat, I have two options: 1) slow or stop hiring, cut staff, or even go out of business;
Aaaaand... you crashed into the water. Raising wages increases productivity, demonstrably so: http://www.raisetheminimumwage...
Of course, as said, this only 'works' if the wage was abysmally low to begin with (which is true in this case). If you're already paying your workers $100/hr, paying them $200/hr is likely not to do much, but going from $5/hr to $10/hr is going to do a lot.
There are many reasons for this. Low-paid workers often lose productivity due to working multiple jobs or making non-optimal life decisions to save money. Employee theft and misbehavior goes down. Job satisfaction (and the resulting increase in productivity) goes up. There are a lot of other positive effects.
> I think it will largely end up being a feel-good measure that well-off, well-meaning people can use to congratulate themselves about
I actually agree with you a little bit here. But that's life.
No they are most definitely not meaningless. Humans are just as good at programming as pigeons are good at flying into space, and this comparison holds true even if there were no spacecraft to compare pigeons to.
People who have never written a C compiler generally tend to think it's "one step above assembler."
Being 'the best that there currently is' does not equate to 'being amazing at it.'
That's not even the start of it. There's a huge number of assembly instructions that cannot be implemented in C.
But 'assembly language' is so ill-defined (there are thousands of assembly languages) that it's just meaningless to say "Anything you can do in assembly language, you can do in C" anyway.
> It was (and is) considered a mid-level language
By who?
Whenever a programming task can be precisely defined, a machine can do it better. The process of converting C to assembly is hard for humans but machines can do it easily. The evolution of programming has mostly been a repetition of the same theme: Identification of a problem, clumsy efforts by humans to solve that problem manually, development of a process that automates that problem, and then sitting back and letting the computer handle that particular problem while we move on to more challenging ones. You could say this about not just converting high-level code to assembly (early programs that did this were called 'autocodes' and were in the domain of AI research), but about parallelism and type checking and memory analysis.
You're again deciding to completely not listen. It's not worth arguing with you anymore.
No, I'm saying the reason is because they don't know how good they have it, and they are mostly coddled and shielded from the effects of their own bad programming.
You have a very shallow level of understanding.
> Humans actually suck at just about everything.
We are great at the things we actually evolved to do. Language, visual perception, navigating social situations, etc. These are the reasons we went from 500 cc of brain volume to 1500 cc. These are extremely hard problems that require the equivalent of petaflops of computation.
Yet it takes minutes of conscious effort for us to multiply two puny 10-digit numbers! We are extremely and demonstrably bad at doing arithmetic. The reason? Our working memory capacity is extremely limited and we have trouble consciously holding a lot of different pieces of information or outcomes in our heads simultaneously.
That's one of the reasons we are terrible at programming. We simply are unable to think of all the different ways our code can go belly-up. There's nothing subjective at all about what I'm saying. That you think it's equivalent to a 'proper breathing' quack shows you aren't even making a tiny bit of effort to understand my point.
In 1972 you would have been railing against C and insisting you need assembly to write an OS.
Tools get better over time. Yes, you need a language designed for systems-level coding to write some applications, but that doesn't equate to freedom to do anything you want and lack of restrictions. In fact it should mean quite the opposite.
> the source of troubles is usually in humans, not technology
Exactly, and that's why C/C++ is bad. Humans are terrible at programming. This isn't an insult to anyone and it's not me trying to say "no one is as good a coder as I am." It's a statement of fact, and everyone - including you and me - is terrible at programming. The human brain did not evolve to program computers. Programming computers is just something we kind of stumbled upon by accident and we have been continuing to stumble and fumble and generally make fools of ourselves. This is why we desperately NEED languages to hold our hands. Ironically, in the early days of programming, when people seemed to have a more mature attitude towards the art, this was a commonly-accepted fact. That's why Fortran and Lisp were developed even though it was hard and time-consuming and expensive to write compilers for those languages in those days (only a handful of people around the world knew how to write a compiler) and the code produced by those languages was typically awful and strained already-poor hardware to its limits. And when C was developed, it was a HIGH-LEVEL language. It was the python or the scala of its day. It was designed as a labor-saving device, a way to write operating systems without fucking around with assembly. "Writing an operating system in a high-level language? You're fucking nuts!" And just like a proper high-level language, it held the programmer's hands and put major restrictions on what he was allowed to do, at least relative to assembly.
The modern programmer is a victim of luxury. His computers are powerful and he has a choice of thousands of languages, many of them really good. And like the rich bohemian who decides to live in filth for no reason, he thinks there's something impressive or 'cool' or 'edgy' about programming in a complex unstructured language. There isn't.
I think a good question to ask is: "WHY is it important that young men sit in classes and approach real women?"
(Btw, I'm not defending these men at all; hear me out)
An unsatisfactory answer would be: "Because that's the normal thing to do." But why is it normal? "Because everyone else is doing it."
A more satisfactory answer would be: "Because long-term, doing those activities will result in more personal growth and more life satisfaction than watching porn and playing video games." But then you have to ask if that is actually true. Certainly for some people it is better to have a higher education and to get married. But realistically, for a lot of people nowadays, education means nothing but crushing student debt and approaching women means nothing but the depressing reality of having to deal with obnoxious women who are entitled and pampered and think the universe owes them everything.
Faced with this reality, I can empathize with men who choose not to live the 'normal' path. But at the same time, sitting at home all day watching porn isn't a good life path. There is a third way: Following your passions, taking up challenges, making up your own rules and living life your own way.
To be fair, there are amazing old people as well. One of the oldest guys at my workplace is 80 or something; he's been retired for 15 years but he still regularly shows up and in his retirement he's written tons of technical articles and books. And when asked of his opinion of the newer generation, "They are enthusiastic and accepting, and this place has never been better." I couldn't imagine that guy saying a single hateful word. I don't know what happens to people that causes them to become hateful pricks as they get older, but I know that simply being old is no excuse.
Holy fuck man, this is the 3rd time I'm saying this. Do I have to say it ten times more for you to understand? Are you seriously not capable of reading comprehension? That link talks about carbon footprint. That's all. We're talking about a much larger category of waste here.
- The average American produces a lot of waste, higher than all other countries, no matter if they live in cities or rural areas.
- City living is often assumed to be less wasteful, but the numbers indicate that it isn't that simple. People living in cities consume less energy for transportation but use more energy for other things and produce more solid waste.
- This pattern persists even when looking at non-American countries.
Please don't reply until you've fully read and listened (may take a very long time).
But this isn't about the average American! For fuck's sake, just pay a little attention. We're comparing megacities globally. The pattern of increased consumption in cities persists even when you look at non-American cities.
If you're pissed that I called him a moron, you better stop talking, because it seems like the moron label is way too good for you.
Third world populations? No they aren't. The first comparison is with Tokyo. London, Seoul, Moscow, Paris, and Osaka are all in the list as well, and all do better than New York on a per-capita basis. Really, there's no way you can spin this in a positive way or excuse it. The plain truth is that New York is a wasteful fucking city.
Absolute numbers are important and convey one kind of information; per-capita numbers are also important and convey another kind of information. Both are given in the article.
I think it's hilarious that you're ok with not reading the article, then you say "who can both read and think." Go play with your alphabet blocks, dum-dums.
No, you moron, if you actually read beyond two sentences, they talk about per-capita consumption, and it's STILL higher than non-megacity living. But it doesn't stop there. They actually try to find out the reason this is the case. It turns out, even though people living in close proximity use less energy for transportation and so on, the effects of increased wealth cause more energy consumption and waste production overall.
I'm not against increased wealth and better living conditions for everyone. It's just something that we should keep in mind. Packing people together in cities doesn't necessarily make them more efficient.
What I want to know is: Why all the act about encryption? If there is going to be a backdoor, and everyone knows there is going to be a backdoor, and the backdoor is enforced by federal law, then why go through all this circus?
Building something capable of surviving a 10,000-year journey is no mean feat, I'll grant you that. But there's no reason to think we can't do it. People are already working on a clock designed to last for 10,000 years: http://longnow.org/clock/ . The technologies used to do that aren't even that advanced. Plus, most of the issues with that clock have to do with Earth-specific problems (temperature fluctuations, humidity, theft, and so on). Deep space is actually a much better environment for preserving things.
Why hello there, AC.
> "Tech", they speak like Scientologists.
What? http://www.merriam-webster.com...
> He thinks a thermonuclear weapon is a compact power source
If it's not a source of power, then what is it a source of? Rainbows?
> much like a dam, a battery, or a tank full of gas.
I never compared thermonuclear weapons with dams or batteries. You're a shallow-thinking fool if you that's all you interpreted from what I said.
> What, exactly, about life on the Earth is so unbearable is never quite clear with these people.
Actually I think life on Earth is quite dandy. I wouldn't personally want to leave. But all these people ranting about 'new energy sources' or 'better rockets' are fooling themselves; we do not need a new scientific breakthrough to reach the stars if that's what we wish to do. Moreover, a new scientific breakthrough would not even help that much, probably, as we already know the limits pretty well.
Who's the ranting moron here?
> A small, portable power source that would be several orders of magnitude more powerful than what we have today, for one.
You mean more compact and more powerful than this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... , which we have today?
Maybe you should re-evaluate your criteria.
Fission is already pretty up there in terms of energy density. Fusion is better (and we already have practical fusion power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... ) and antimatter is literally the physical limit, as no source of energy can ever be more dense than antimatter due to general relativity. We can produce and store antimatter; unfortunately production of antimatter is extremely inefficient due to physical law.
What I'm saying is that we already know what the physical limitations are. We don't need a 'new source of energy', nor would one change the equation that much.
Nonsense. Distance is immaterial (literally); the important thing is *time*. We can travel to the stars with current tech. We just can't live long enough to survive the journey. Even chemical rockets are 'good enough to travel to the stars.'
Which is why the real way to get to the stars isn't through a ridiculous 600-meter space colony carrying live humans. It's through robotics and frozen embryos (or just robotics).
We can start colonizing the galaxy *right now* - we just lack the will to do so.