Reduced stockprices are not reduced investments. The stock has already been sold, investments made. It will only reflect on future investment rounds, but if the company provides a nice dividend or two before they do so, most investors will have forgotten the bad times.
It is quite a bit more complicated than that. While most of the investment that comes from selling shares of stock is made during the actual stock purchase, a company still has a vested interest in their stock price. The stock price helps them invest in human capital since many employees are probably paid partially in stock. The company also generally still owns some of its stock and can sell it for new capital investments. Even if they don't sell stock, the share price is used by banks to determine the credit worthiness of a company, and in the real world most investment is done with borrowed money and not cash stockpiles.
I didn't see anything in your articles that addressed how the German companies compete with such highly paid employees. They only talk about how the unions are able to negotiate such high rates.
Is it because German car companies pay less employees who are more highly trained? Is it because executive pay is lower? Is it because of government subsidies? Is it because they are riding on their own coat tails because their car companies were run much better than ours during the 80s and 90s? (and possibly will run into problems in 20 years just like US automakers did)
I also wish that Forbes had cited their sources a bit better, because it does look like they are comparing apples to oranges. UAW workers seem to make closer to $73 per hour from the sources I found. It looks like these statistics are possibly counting different kinds of workers. But there is no way of knowing since Forbes doesn't cite any sources for their numbers (it does cite a larger paper, but that paper doesn't cite any of its sources).
Regardless of any of these figures though, labor only accounts for about 10% of a car's total cost. So higher labor costs wouldn't necessarily make a car company that much less competitive, it would just take more money from car consumer's pockets. Considering Germany seems to make more high end cars than US manufacturers (that is an impression, I have no stats to back that up), I can see how they could pay their employees more.
GE is a publicly traded company, so the owners are the stockholders. With a union, the employees could get more salary and the stockholders could get lower dividends.
If you start talking about removing money from dividend receiving shareholders to pay employees, then that is the same thing as reducing investment in the company.
In an extreme case, you would never give dividends, and invest all your money in the company. You could say that dividends lower investments too. But nobody does that.
Actually, anyone who understands the stock market would say that dividends and stock repurchases reduce the amount of stockholder's equity left in the company (otherwise known as investment in the company). Companies generally do this either when they have few opportunities for growth or they believe their stock is undervalued.
If GE is a strong, efficiently run business, stockholders will invest even with higher salaries.
Being an efficiently run business includes not over paying employees. This means not paying their accountants $90k/year if Siemens is paying their accountants $75k/year.
And if you look around the world, for example Germany, you'll see that the employees make much more than similar employees in the US
That is not true. According to OECD, the average full time wage in the USA is 35% higher than Germany in PPP dollars (that is not GDP related, since that measurement is skewed by the very wealthy). No country in the world pays employees as much as the USA does, even in PPP dollars, although Luxembourg, Ireland, and Switzerland are within 10% of us.
Germany is a horrible example to use since their unions have made major concessions over the past decade, which is one reason why their economy weathered the downturn so well. If unions in the USA behaved like unions in Germany, I doubt there would be much public animosity towards them.
When you increase pay for average workers, that is rarely going to come from executive pay checks. There simply isn't enough money there to take. Salaries like $10 million per year are very high, but the companies with executive salaries that high generally have hundreds of thousands of employees. A 1% raise to each employee in a large company will dwarf the salaries of even the most highly paid CEOs.
The pay that goes to top level executives is usually a very small percentage of total salaries to regular employees in all but the smallest companies. If you took all of the pay given to the top 5 paid executives at GE, you could only pay each employee an extra $234. That is probably less than a 0.5% raise for each employee. Executive pay takes a pretty sharp nose dive for most other GE executives, so even if you took away all of their pay I doubt you would be able to even give a 5% raise to each employee.
So like the GP said, the money is going to come from reduced capital investments or increased prices.
It's a good thing that no other country has tried anything similar with their health care. The costs would be astronomical.
Right?
No other country has tried to do something similar to Obamacare. Obamacare does not address any of the actual causes of the ever rising health care costs in the US, it just adds more people to the existing bloated system. It also increases regulations that will probably get rid of many low cost individual health plans, thus increasing costs even more (although quality of care will also increase).
The things that help other countries keep their costs down, such as better malpractice laws, lower salaries for doctors and nurses, subsidized research paid for by US healthcare consumers, etc. are not addressed in any meaningful way.
or did Ranton spend the first half of his post saying everything was A-OK because we have the same quality of life as we did in 1960, then finish by saying how much better things are 50 years later (1960 + 53 = 2013)?
I never said that we have the same quality of life as we did in 1960. I just took specific examples from the GP and showed how things are at least as good now as they were in 1960.
Seriously, is anyone buying this? What the hell happened to _progress_? I know slippery slope is a 'logical fallacy' and all that rot, but 'come on. If you think the rich are content with rolling us back just to the 60's in wealth inequality you're nuts.
While some things do get cheaper, the price of things such as housing are probably not going to get significantly cheaper because populations keep growing and we aren't getting new land until we colonize deserts/oceans/other planets. We can and do go up with skyscrapers, but usually not as fast as populations grow.
Read the Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook if you want specific examples on how things have got so much better than in the recent past, and why people have a hard time noticing these changes. The book turns a bit into a morality lecture near the middle, but the first few chapters have a great deal of good examples of recent progress.
we used to get by on one salary, now we need two salaries in order to live check-to-check after paying for two cars for transportation (due to poor transit), childcare, healthcare, and high costs of shelter.
People can still easily get by on one salary if they are willing to live a standard of life similar to the 1960s. You can still get by with one car if only one parent works; we are just too used to being mobile. My dad grew up on a farm in the 60s and they just had one car. If my grandpa wasn't home and it didn't require an ambulance, then they didn't go into town. Basic healthcare for children is free or very cheap for all low income individuals, and high deductible plans are also inexpensive. Most procedures that costs a lot of money probably didn't even exist 50 years ago so those are a luxury by the standards of that generation.
Shelter is quite cheap if you are willing to have 5 people living in a 900 sq ft home, which was the norm back then. And while home economics classes may no longer teach the basics, it is quite easy to feed yourself on the cheap if you are willing to endure the kind of low level of selection that those in the 60s were used to (not counting food deserts, which I agree is a problem).
You simply don't recognize how much better things are today if you think that poor people would be better off if they went 50 years back in time.
That's a load of crap. People have lives outside of work. Most of the brilliant programmers I've know do nothing outside of work related to coding. I've known great programmers whose passion outside of work is music...
I think that the technique of asking for personal programming projects works much better for recent college grads than it does for seasoned programmers. If a 22 year old never had the ambition or desire to work on something outside of their classes then I really do think that is a red flag. Unless they can instead show a very impressive research project for school, which they would have spent a good deal of their free time on, I would then assume they just went into computer science because someone told them it was a good career path.
But for someone in the field for a decade or more, they very likely only do programming at work. They probably have a family that takes a good amount of their time and other hobbies to keep ties with their social network. And personally most of my side projects are still ones that will make my job easier, such as something that scripts a complicated build process. For seasoned developers that don't have any side projects to show, I would ask what technical books / journals / blogs they read in their free time to keep up to date on the industry. If they can't answer that either, then I would start to think that they probably aren't too passionate about their career. But that alone wouldn't be a complete deal breaker if other indicators show they would perform well at the job I am hiring them for.
So I guess the real conclusion is to hire as many candidates as you can as contract to hire or other temporary positions so you can rate their performance for a few months and easily drop them if they aren't cutting it.
You are assuming that children and fertility are a women-only issue. Actually most men seem to want children and all of them need children to create the next generation and keep society viable. Expecting women to take the entire burden is unfair.
I agree with the rest of your post, but saying that women are taking on the entire burden of childcare is dead wrong. That is unfortunately the case in most families where both parents work full time, but when a mother decides to put her career on hold to raise children both the man and woman suffer financially. The man is the required to be the sole breadwinner, which increases stress and often hurts career advancement because risks are harder to take. Both sides are risking their financial well being if a divorce occurs, since the woman will have lower future earnings and the man will be paying spousal support on top of child support for quite some time. And both of them have to lower their standard of living to accomodate the mother staying home (assuming she an income higher than the cost of day care).
Being a stay at home mom definetly hurts the mother's career more than the father's, but don't insinuate that the woman is taking the entire burden (or even the lion's share).
To be serious for a moment, your 2nd paragraph provided a jarring contrast to the first one.
How is there any contrast at all? In the first paragraph he is saying how he simply stating that he is supporting his wife while she is staying home with their child, but doesn't actually say that he is supportive of that decision. I have had similar conversations with my fiance about not wanting her to stay home with our future kids for financial reasons, and I don't think I am a monster for it (although she would end up getting her way if she feels strongly about it at that time).
And I am not sure why he is jaded enough to even bring up our ridiculous spousal support laws but he is not wrong. Our laws put the child's need far above the parents (not necessarily a bad thing), but that almost always means the primary breadwinner gets the shaft. There is nothing sexist or misogynistic about what he wrote. He just comes off as a very bitter person for even bringing up the topic.
Maybe in absolute numbers, but certainly not as a percentage.
Maybe I have just done a better job selecting my job offers, but outside of SMBs (I should have specified that) I find most middle managers to be very competent compared to the average developer working for them. That is probably because most of the talented developers eventually go into consulting or become middle managers themselves.
I mean, the days of 'six months of integration meetings before a final review and then a 12 month adoption process' could be over. Schwoop. All those suits sucked down the drain. All that planning, the meetings to define the 'scope' of the project. All the fucking Gantt charts. Drowned in the churning reality of change in the modern world.
You can't possibly have ever been in a position of importance while working on software systems for an enterprise sized company. It can easily take six months just to acquire funding for a migration project, let alone get anything done. Working on enterprise projects is not like working at a SMB. You have dozens of divisions in dozens of subsidiaries using dozens of different software products that all have loose integrations. You don't just grab ten developers, think up a few requirements, and deliver your first sprint the next week. Even small project budgets are still measured in millions of dollars.
Well, we can always hope that they'll drown those big meeting rooms full of 'middle management' enterprise types in the churn of their product cycles.
While there are plenty of worthless managers out there, they are far more rare than useless software developers. Even if their main skill in the office politics that helped them move up the ladder, the ability to get vital projects funded is just as important and difficult as being able to properly implement those projects. Getting companies to cough up tens of millions of dollars on projects they initially feel are sunk costs is no easy task.
When I am being offered a job I always try to get a feel for the company's middle management. The upper management comes and goes as blame and praise is constantly shifted, but the middle management that I will work with are usually more constant. I will probably be in a senior enough position that I can change many poor software engineering processes, but I will likely have little impact on how effective the company's managers are.
While I completely agree that being in 1st place doesn't mean much, taking a look at the entire top 500 does give a good measure of which countries are spending the most on R&D. I do think it is a little shameful that a country with half of our GDP has the fastest supercomputer, it is still commendable that the USA has about half of the top 500 supercomputers with only 20% of the world's GDP.
Honestly, I wouldn't get too comfortable with a given IDE -- some of them (I'm looking at you, Visual Studio) abstract away and hide a lot of the code and it can make for some really confusing times for you.
Honestly, I would take more time to get comfortable with a given IDE so you can actually use it well instead of feebly. A good IDE like Visual Studio rarely abstracts away anything that you aren't trying to abstract away. And since most of the time you want almost every part of your program to be abstracted away from you,,which is most of the power of a good IDE, this is what makes an IDE so useful.
Not being competent with a good IDE is far worse than not completely grepping your coding environment at a low level. At least in today's world (I had a different opionion 15 years ago). Google and coworkers can fill in a lot of gaps in knowledge when necessary, but spending day in day out using an IDE and never realizing how much better it is than command line tools is a big waste of productivity.
I know that people often underestimate how hard it is to program a good AI, but playing air hockey does not seem like a difficult AI problem. Once you are able to track the trajectory of the puck then you should never allow a goal as long as the reaction time is good enough. And with enough power you could hit the puck at the maximum speed that would not cause it to launch, and at angles where a human will have a harder time determining the target than the computer.
Its a good project for college students to learn robotics and AI, but it doesn't really look like interesting research.
This is absolutely not true. The vast majority of industry trade shows look quite professional. A small minority of industries that attract people with developmental problems (automobiles, guns, and games) don't.
I guess he should have said "Every entertainment related industry does the same thing".
I cannot think off the top of my head of any industry trade show which is entertainment or hobby related that does not have models showing off the products. It mostly depends on if it is mass market related. If a retail customer will ever buy your product, like a car, then there will be scantily clad women. If the product is only being sold to large corporations, like a pharmaceutical equipment tradeshow, then probably not.
The report could be complete bunk, but I do have issues with a few of your statements.
Was it really rational for the US government to engage in a race with a private company to sequence the human genome?
It was a very good thing because the Celera Corporation made every effort to keep their data private and out of GenBank. The results of the genome project would have been far less beneficial if there wasn't significant pressure from the DOE/NIH funded research. Celera did complete their work at a fraction of the cost the public research, but this was a project that was far too important to allow a single company to control the results.
Was it rational to do the sequencing using really expensive devices, when much lower cost sequencing would have been available a few years later anyway?
You can always make this rationalization. There will always be something better and cheaper down the line. It is easy to see that in hindsight they could have saved a couple billion dollars by waiting a few years, but the benefit is so large that a couple billion dollars is peanuts by comparison.
If the multiplier really is this high, why wouldn't private companies have a huge incentive to do this research without public funding?
Even if the multiplier is this high, it doesn't mean that a single company would get all of the benefits. For the government, they don't care about that. Perhaps in this case the benefit only became so great because the results were open and not controlled by an organization whose goal was profit. If Celera had been able to charge huge fees to any public research organization there may have been a lot less research, and therefore far less gains.
"Economic impact" is an ambiguous weasel-word, and the thing they did not say was "economic gain".
A positive economic impact is an economic gain. A negative economic impact is an economic loss. I really don't think anyone should fault the writers of this paper for assuming this was obvious.
In the case of people burning down their houses, you could actually subtract the losses from the gains, but the way these calculations are done, you'd still end up with nominal big overall gains, because the same dollar is counted many times in these calculations. Without that, you couldn't get such huge multipliers.
They do mention in the TFA that efforts were made to not count effects more than once when calculating cumulative effects. But obviously there are going to be huge multipliers when you are talking about basic research. That is the reason there has been more economic advance in the past two hundred years than there was in all of human history before it. Scientific advances build on each other in a very non-linear way.
For most other forms of government activity, it's worse: the losses can't even be accounted for because they tend occur as externalities or opportunity costs.
I do agree that government figures are almost always distorted because they do not account for opportunity costs. It is a shameful practice that makes almost any figures coming from the government meaningless, whether they are talking about the true cost of our last two wars or the true cost of Obamacare. I am not sure if this study takes into account opportunity costs, but even if they didn't the study shows such a large return on investment that I doubt opportunity costs would erase it.
"Generating economic impact" is a very useful measure. It is quite possibly the best measure of any government program other than social safety nets.
the federal government could create a trillion dollars of economic impact by forcing everybody to burn down their houses or by simply forcing everybody to pay twice as much for their health care
They said economic impact not economic activity. If they burned every house down and rebuilt every one of them, the net economic impact of spending trillions of dollars would be $0. Well, it would be a little positive because the houses would be nicer, but definetly not worth the money spent.
One research paper that I have read on the subject (because it didn't require a subscription to a pschology journal) can be found here. It is more of a survey paper than it is original research, so there are over 200 references in this 17 page paper if you want to read more. I just browsed through it again just now, and there is plenty of material on why humans anthropromorphize:
While attempting to gain this familiarity and competence, children attribute intentions and causal agency widely to the simplest and most abstract of onhuman stimuli. Because ascribing these mental characteristics aids children’s attempts to make sense of a wide variety of stimuli, those who have not yet attained a full sense of competence with their environment should be particularly likely to activate anthropomorphic representations and less likely to subsequently correct or adjust those representations. Anthropomorphism should therefore be especially helpful in these early stages of life as a means of reducing uncertainty. -- (Epley, Waytz & Cacioppo, 2007)
Sadly there are many examples that deal mostly with children, but that is the easiest way to deal with the topic without overtly criticising beliefs that even adults still hold onto. It is much better to discuss why believing that a ball has feelings is silly than talk about why thinking the existence of the universe has existential meaning exists is silly.
You can also find numerous books written on the subject. Just look for any book trying to investigate why humans have a need for religion and it will almost certainly bring up this topic.
Good answer, but I would contend that Science asks "How?" while Religion asks "Why?". Science is not concerned with the philosophical reasoning for things, it just seeks to understand the process.
Science is most certainly concerned with the philosophical reasoning for things. Science itself sprung up from the field of philosophy. But it is not concerned with inventing existential reasons for the actions of inanimate objects which have no intent. Science is very concerned with why humans feel the need to anthropomorphize things such as the beginning of the universe, the rising sun, or any number of natural phenomenons. Just because science doesn't invent answers when the real answers (to the best of our understanding) are uncomfortable does not mean it is unconcerned with those topics.
Like I said, you really are ignorant about understand the purpose of True Religion. We already discussed pseudo-religion.
You really need to stop making up definitions for things. Perhaps you read the term "True Religion" in some obscure book, but other than the name of a Jeans company both I and Google are not sure what you mean.
And pseudo-religion is a negative term for religious movements that are non-mainstream. It is used to paint the movement as not really being religious in nature but instead just an attempt to use religious concepts for another goal. It is used to describe groups such as Scientologists or the Nation of Islam. You seem to use it to describe all religions such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.
I personally do not agree with using pejorative terms such as psuedo-religion because it is merely an attempt to cast some religious beliefs as valid and others as invalid. Considering I find all religious beliefs to be invalid, I see no reason to rank the authenticity of any religion. I like to think of myself as equally accepting of all gods, from Yahweh and Zeus to Thor and Osiris. It is usually only religious people who criticize one religion more than another. (I do admit to criticizing different belief systems more than others though)
If you really don't understand the purpose and reason _why_ religion exists in the first place then stop pretending that you do based on a sample size of 1. If you think it is "only about a system of supernatural" then you really need to get out and study & interact more with those that _practice_ that religion. You might actually _learn_ something instead of pretending that you "already know."
Don't confuse the reason why people use religion and the actual method of fulfilling those needs. Religion and science are used for very similar things; it is the method that they provide their benefits that are different. Religion is the use of the supernatural to explain questions such as Why, What, Where (mostly Why), and science is the use of reason based on observations to explain the same questions. You may disagree with these definitions, just like I disagree with the most common definitions of the word atheist, but your opinion does not change what they mean.
That is only ONE definition and it is pretty _incomplete_ one. You could STILL have accurate knowledge and still be ignorant. i.e. Scientists "know" gravity exists but are STILL ignorant as to its cause, its speed, etc.
Once you have gained accurate knowledge you are less ignorant about only the specific thing you have gained knowledge of. Of course you are still going to be ignorant of other things. That doesn't alter the definition of knowledge or ignorance.
Lastly, to bring this back on topic, you still have not shown how it is possible to have Truth With Belief(s). The OP originally " Science is not about belief and faith" which is total nonsense. Nothing you have said demonstrates otherwise.
I never said otherwise because I did not agree with the OP. Science is very much about belief and faith. I do believe that I agree with what the OP meant behind is poorly chosen words, and I was trying to point out why he should have used different nomenclature.
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I am not going to specifically respond to the negative comments at the end of your post, other than to say you really need to grow up.
Way to cut and paste parts of my post in such a way that it makes it sound like I said things I didn't.
Okay, maybe I should have said "A religious person born in the past generation lacks much of the reasoning ability that scientists require, unless he was born into such a abnormally (using average in the US as a basepoint) strong religious environment that his reasoning skills are just too overpowered by indoctrination." That would have made it easier to understand for people trying hard to poke irrelevent holes in my statements.
And BTW, I find it hard to believe that you didn't understand I meant that Newton's religious beliefs do not detract from his brilliance because of the age in which he lived, not because it is rational to have religious beliefs. Personally I think you were just being an ass.
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Reduced stockprices are not reduced investments. The stock has already been sold, investments made. It will only reflect on future investment rounds, but if the company provides a nice dividend or two before they do so, most investors will have forgotten the bad times.
It is quite a bit more complicated than that. While most of the investment that comes from selling shares of stock is made during the actual stock purchase, a company still has a vested interest in their stock price. The stock price helps them invest in human capital since many employees are probably paid partially in stock. The company also generally still owns some of its stock and can sell it for new capital investments. Even if they don't sell stock, the share price is used by banks to determine the credit worthiness of a company, and in the real world most investment is done with borrowed money and not cash stockpiles.
I didn't see anything in your articles that addressed how the German companies compete with such highly paid employees. They only talk about how the unions are able to negotiate such high rates.
Is it because German car companies pay less employees who are more highly trained? Is it because executive pay is lower? Is it because of government subsidies? Is it because they are riding on their own coat tails because their car companies were run much better than ours during the 80s and 90s? (and possibly will run into problems in 20 years just like US automakers did)
I also wish that Forbes had cited their sources a bit better, because it does look like they are comparing apples to oranges. UAW workers seem to make closer to $73 per hour from the sources I found. It looks like these statistics are possibly counting different kinds of workers. But there is no way of knowing since Forbes doesn't cite any sources for their numbers (it does cite a larger paper, but that paper doesn't cite any of its sources).
Regardless of any of these figures though, labor only accounts for about 10% of a car's total cost. So higher labor costs wouldn't necessarily make a car company that much less competitive, it would just take more money from car consumer's pockets. Considering Germany seems to make more high end cars than US manufacturers (that is an impression, I have no stats to back that up), I can see how they could pay their employees more.
GE is a publicly traded company, so the owners are the stockholders. With a union, the employees could get more salary and the stockholders could get lower dividends.
If you start talking about removing money from dividend receiving shareholders to pay employees, then that is the same thing as reducing investment in the company.
In an extreme case, you would never give dividends, and invest all your money in the company. You could say that dividends lower investments too. But nobody does that.
Actually, anyone who understands the stock market would say that dividends and stock repurchases reduce the amount of stockholder's equity left in the company (otherwise known as investment in the company). Companies generally do this either when they have few opportunities for growth or they believe their stock is undervalued.
If GE is a strong, efficiently run business, stockholders will invest even with higher salaries.
Being an efficiently run business includes not over paying employees. This means not paying their accountants $90k/year if Siemens is paying their accountants $75k/year.
And if you look around the world, for example Germany, you'll see that the employees make much more than similar employees in the US
That is not true. According to OECD, the average full time wage in the USA is 35% higher than Germany in PPP dollars (that is not GDP related, since that measurement is skewed by the very wealthy). No country in the world pays employees as much as the USA does, even in PPP dollars, although Luxembourg, Ireland, and Switzerland are within 10% of us.
Germany is a horrible example to use since their unions have made major concessions over the past decade, which is one reason why their economy weathered the downturn so well. If unions in the USA behaved like unions in Germany, I doubt there would be much public animosity towards them.
When you increase pay for average workers, that is rarely going to come from executive pay checks. There simply isn't enough money there to take. Salaries like $10 million per year are very high, but the companies with executive salaries that high generally have hundreds of thousands of employees. A 1% raise to each employee in a large company will dwarf the salaries of even the most highly paid CEOs.
The pay that goes to top level executives is usually a very small percentage of total salaries to regular employees in all but the smallest companies. If you took all of the pay given to the top 5 paid executives at GE, you could only pay each employee an extra $234. That is probably less than a 0.5% raise for each employee. Executive pay takes a pretty sharp nose dive for most other GE executives, so even if you took away all of their pay I doubt you would be able to even give a 5% raise to each employee.
So like the GP said, the money is going to come from reduced capital investments or increased prices.
It's a good thing that no other country has tried anything similar with their health care. The costs would be astronomical.
Right?
No other country has tried to do something similar to Obamacare. Obamacare does not address any of the actual causes of the ever rising health care costs in the US, it just adds more people to the existing bloated system. It also increases regulations that will probably get rid of many low cost individual health plans, thus increasing costs even more (although quality of care will also increase).
The things that help other countries keep their costs down, such as better malpractice laws, lower salaries for doctors and nurses, subsidized research paid for by US healthcare consumers, etc. are not addressed in any meaningful way.
or did Ranton spend the first half of his post saying everything was A-OK because we have the same quality of life as we did in 1960, then finish by saying how much better things are 50 years later (1960 + 53 = 2013)?
I never said that we have the same quality of life as we did in 1960. I just took specific examples from the GP and showed how things are at least as good now as they were in 1960.
Seriously, is anyone buying this? What the hell happened to _progress_? I know slippery slope is a 'logical fallacy' and all that rot, but 'come on. If you think the rich are content with rolling us back just to the 60's in wealth inequality you're nuts.
While some things do get cheaper, the price of things such as housing are probably not going to get significantly cheaper because populations keep growing and we aren't getting new land until we colonize deserts/oceans/other planets. We can and do go up with skyscrapers, but usually not as fast as populations grow.
Read the Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook if you want specific examples on how things have got so much better than in the recent past, and why people have a hard time noticing these changes. The book turns a bit into a morality lecture near the middle, but the first few chapters have a great deal of good examples of recent progress.
we used to get by on one salary, now we need two salaries in order to live check-to-check after paying for two cars for transportation (due to poor transit), childcare, healthcare, and high costs of shelter.
People can still easily get by on one salary if they are willing to live a standard of life similar to the 1960s. You can still get by with one car if only one parent works; we are just too used to being mobile. My dad grew up on a farm in the 60s and they just had one car. If my grandpa wasn't home and it didn't require an ambulance, then they didn't go into town. Basic healthcare for children is free or very cheap for all low income individuals, and high deductible plans are also inexpensive. Most procedures that costs a lot of money probably didn't even exist 50 years ago so those are a luxury by the standards of that generation.
Shelter is quite cheap if you are willing to have 5 people living in a 900 sq ft home, which was the norm back then. And while home economics classes may no longer teach the basics, it is quite easy to feed yourself on the cheap if you are willing to endure the kind of low level of selection that those in the 60s were used to (not counting food deserts, which I agree is a problem).
You simply don't recognize how much better things are today if you think that poor people would be better off if they went 50 years back in time.
That's a load of crap. People have lives outside of work. Most of the brilliant programmers I've know do nothing outside of work related to coding. I've known great programmers whose passion outside of work is music...
I think that the technique of asking for personal programming projects works much better for recent college grads than it does for seasoned programmers. If a 22 year old never had the ambition or desire to work on something outside of their classes then I really do think that is a red flag. Unless they can instead show a very impressive research project for school, which they would have spent a good deal of their free time on, I would then assume they just went into computer science because someone told them it was a good career path.
But for someone in the field for a decade or more, they very likely only do programming at work. They probably have a family that takes a good amount of their time and other hobbies to keep ties with their social network. And personally most of my side projects are still ones that will make my job easier, such as something that scripts a complicated build process. For seasoned developers that don't have any side projects to show, I would ask what technical books / journals / blogs they read in their free time to keep up to date on the industry. If they can't answer that either, then I would start to think that they probably aren't too passionate about their career. But that alone wouldn't be a complete deal breaker if other indicators show they would perform well at the job I am hiring them for.
So I guess the real conclusion is to hire as many candidates as you can as contract to hire or other temporary positions so you can rate their performance for a few months and easily drop them if they aren't cutting it.
You are assuming that children and fertility are a women-only issue. Actually most men seem to want children and all of them need children to create the next generation and keep society viable. Expecting women to take the entire burden is unfair.
I agree with the rest of your post, but saying that women are taking on the entire burden of childcare is dead wrong. That is unfortunately the case in most families where both parents work full time, but when a mother decides to put her career on hold to raise children both the man and woman suffer financially. The man is the required to be the sole breadwinner, which increases stress and often hurts career advancement because risks are harder to take. Both sides are risking their financial well being if a divorce occurs, since the woman will have lower future earnings and the man will be paying spousal support on top of child support for quite some time. And both of them have to lower their standard of living to accomodate the mother staying home (assuming she an income higher than the cost of day care).
Being a stay at home mom definetly hurts the mother's career more than the father's, but don't insinuate that the woman is taking the entire burden (or even the lion's share).
To be serious for a moment, your 2nd paragraph provided a jarring contrast to the first one.
How is there any contrast at all? In the first paragraph he is saying how he simply stating that he is supporting his wife while she is staying home with their child, but doesn't actually say that he is supportive of that decision. I have had similar conversations with my fiance about not wanting her to stay home with our future kids for financial reasons, and I don't think I am a monster for it (although she would end up getting her way if she feels strongly about it at that time).
And I am not sure why he is jaded enough to even bring up our ridiculous spousal support laws but he is not wrong. Our laws put the child's need far above the parents (not necessarily a bad thing), but that almost always means the primary breadwinner gets the shaft. There is nothing sexist or misogynistic about what he wrote. He just comes off as a very bitter person for even bringing up the topic.
Maybe in absolute numbers, but certainly not as a percentage.
Maybe I have just done a better job selecting my job offers, but outside of SMBs (I should have specified that) I find most middle managers to be very competent compared to the average developer working for them. That is probably because most of the talented developers eventually go into consulting or become middle managers themselves.
I mean, the days of 'six months of integration meetings before a final review and then a 12 month adoption process' could be over. Schwoop. All those suits sucked down the drain. All that planning, the meetings to define the 'scope' of the project. All the fucking Gantt charts. Drowned in the churning reality of change in the modern world.
You can't possibly have ever been in a position of importance while working on software systems for an enterprise sized company. It can easily take six months just to acquire funding for a migration project, let alone get anything done. Working on enterprise projects is not like working at a SMB. You have dozens of divisions in dozens of subsidiaries using dozens of different software products that all have loose integrations. You don't just grab ten developers, think up a few requirements, and deliver your first sprint the next week. Even small project budgets are still measured in millions of dollars.
Well, we can always hope that they'll drown those big meeting rooms full of 'middle management' enterprise types in the churn of their product cycles.
While there are plenty of worthless managers out there, they are far more rare than useless software developers. Even if their main skill in the office politics that helped them move up the ladder, the ability to get vital projects funded is just as important and difficult as being able to properly implement those projects. Getting companies to cough up tens of millions of dollars on projects they initially feel are sunk costs is no easy task.
When I am being offered a job I always try to get a feel for the company's middle management. The upper management comes and goes as blame and praise is constantly shifted, but the middle management that I will work with are usually more constant. I will probably be in a senior enough position that I can change many poor software engineering processes, but I will likely have little impact on how effective the company's managers are.
While I completely agree that being in 1st place doesn't mean much, taking a look at the entire top 500 does give a good measure of which countries are spending the most on R&D. I do think it is a little shameful that a country with half of our GDP has the fastest supercomputer, it is still commendable that the USA has about half of the top 500 supercomputers with only 20% of the world's GDP.
Honestly, I wouldn't get too comfortable with a given IDE -- some of them (I'm looking at you, Visual Studio) abstract away and hide a lot of the code and it can make for some really confusing times for you.
Honestly, I would take more time to get comfortable with a given IDE so you can actually use it well instead of feebly. A good IDE like Visual Studio rarely abstracts away anything that you aren't trying to abstract away. And since most of the time you want almost every part of your program to be abstracted away from you, ,which is most of the power of a good IDE, this is what makes an IDE so useful.
Not being competent with a good IDE is far worse than not completely grepping your coding environment at a low level. At least in today's world (I had a different opionion 15 years ago). Google and coworkers can fill in a lot of gaps in knowledge when necessary, but spending day in day out using an IDE and never realizing how much better it is than command line tools is a big waste of productivity.
I know that people often underestimate how hard it is to program a good AI, but playing air hockey does not seem like a difficult AI problem. Once you are able to track the trajectory of the puck then you should never allow a goal as long as the reaction time is good enough. And with enough power you could hit the puck at the maximum speed that would not cause it to launch, and at angles where a human will have a harder time determining the target than the computer.
Its a good project for college students to learn robotics and AI, but it doesn't really look like interesting research.
Every industry does the same thing
This is absolutely not true. The vast majority of industry trade shows look quite professional. A small minority of industries that attract people with developmental problems (automobiles, guns, and games) don't.
I guess he should have said "Every entertainment related industry does the same thing".
I cannot think off the top of my head of any industry trade show which is entertainment or hobby related that does not have models showing off the products. It mostly depends on if it is mass market related. If a retail customer will ever buy your product, like a car, then there will be scantily clad women. If the product is only being sold to large corporations, like a pharmaceutical equipment tradeshow, then probably not.
The report could be complete bunk, but I do have issues with a few of your statements.
Was it really rational for the US government to engage in a race with a private company to sequence the human genome?
It was a very good thing because the Celera Corporation made every effort to keep their data private and out of GenBank. The results of the genome project would have been far less beneficial if there wasn't significant pressure from the DOE/NIH funded research. Celera did complete their work at a fraction of the cost the public research, but this was a project that was far too important to allow a single company to control the results.
Was it rational to do the sequencing using really expensive devices, when much lower cost sequencing would have been available a few years later anyway?
You can always make this rationalization. There will always be something better and cheaper down the line. It is easy to see that in hindsight they could have saved a couple billion dollars by waiting a few years, but the benefit is so large that a couple billion dollars is peanuts by comparison.
If the multiplier really is this high, why wouldn't private companies have a huge incentive to do this research without public funding?
Even if the multiplier is this high, it doesn't mean that a single company would get all of the benefits. For the government, they don't care about that. Perhaps in this case the benefit only became so great because the results were open and not controlled by an organization whose goal was profit. If Celera had been able to charge huge fees to any public research organization there may have been a lot less research, and therefore far less gains.
"Economic impact" is an ambiguous weasel-word, and the thing they did not say was "economic gain".
A positive economic impact is an economic gain. A negative economic impact is an economic loss. I really don't think anyone should fault the writers of this paper for assuming this was obvious.
In the case of people burning down their houses, you could actually subtract the losses from the gains, but the way these calculations are done, you'd still end up with nominal big overall gains, because the same dollar is counted many times in these calculations. Without that, you couldn't get such huge multipliers.
They do mention in the TFA that efforts were made to not count effects more than once when calculating cumulative effects. But obviously there are going to be huge multipliers when you are talking about basic research. That is the reason there has been more economic advance in the past two hundred years than there was in all of human history before it. Scientific advances build on each other in a very non-linear way.
For most other forms of government activity, it's worse: the losses can't even be accounted for because they tend occur as externalities or opportunity costs.
I do agree that government figures are almost always distorted because they do not account for opportunity costs. It is a shameful practice that makes almost any figures coming from the government meaningless, whether they are talking about the true cost of our last two wars or the true cost of Obamacare. I am not sure if this study takes into account opportunity costs, but even if they didn't the study shows such a large return on investment that I doubt opportunity costs would erase it.
"Generating economic impact" is a very useful measure. It is quite possibly the best measure of any government program other than social safety nets.
the federal government could create a trillion dollars of economic impact by forcing everybody to burn down their houses or by simply forcing everybody to pay twice as much for their health care
They said economic impact not economic activity. If they burned every house down and rebuilt every one of them, the net economic impact of spending trillions of dollars would be $0. Well, it would be a little positive because the houses would be nicer, but definetly not worth the money spent.
This has nothing to do with Monsanto. This is about medical research that has been boosted by advances such as mapping the human genome.
One research paper that I have read on the subject (because it didn't require a subscription to a pschology journal) can be found here. It is more of a survey paper than it is original research, so there are over 200 references in this 17 page paper if you want to read more. I just browsed through it again just now, and there is plenty of material on why humans anthropromorphize:
While attempting to gain this familiarity and competence, children attribute intentions and causal agency widely to the simplest and most abstract of onhuman stimuli. Because ascribing these mental characteristics aids children’s attempts to make sense of a wide variety of stimuli, those who have not yet attained a full sense of competence with their environment should be particularly likely to activate anthropomorphic representations and less likely to subsequently correct or adjust those representations. Anthropomorphism should therefore be especially helpful in these early stages of life as a means of reducing uncertainty. -- (Epley, Waytz & Cacioppo, 2007)
Sadly there are many examples that deal mostly with children, but that is the easiest way to deal with the topic without overtly criticising beliefs that even adults still hold onto. It is much better to discuss why believing that a ball has feelings is silly than talk about why thinking the existence of the universe has existential meaning exists is silly.
You can also find numerous books written on the subject. Just look for any book trying to investigate why humans have a need for religion and it will almost certainly bring up this topic.
Good answer, but I would contend that Science asks "How?" while Religion asks "Why?". Science is not concerned with the philosophical reasoning for things, it just seeks to understand the process.
Science is most certainly concerned with the philosophical reasoning for things. Science itself sprung up from the field of philosophy. But it is not concerned with inventing existential reasons for the actions of inanimate objects which have no intent. Science is very concerned with why humans feel the need to anthropomorphize things such as the beginning of the universe, the rising sun, or any number of natural phenomenons. Just because science doesn't invent answers when the real answers (to the best of our understanding) are uncomfortable does not mean it is unconcerned with those topics.
I was NOT talking about pseudo-religion.
Like I said, you really are ignorant about understand the purpose of True Religion. We already discussed pseudo-religion.
You really need to stop making up definitions for things. Perhaps you read the term "True Religion" in some obscure book, but other than the name of a Jeans company both I and Google are not sure what you mean.
And pseudo-religion is a negative term for religious movements that are non-mainstream. It is used to paint the movement as not really being religious in nature but instead just an attempt to use religious concepts for another goal. It is used to describe groups such as Scientologists or the Nation of Islam. You seem to use it to describe all religions such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.
I personally do not agree with using pejorative terms such as psuedo-religion because it is merely an attempt to cast some religious beliefs as valid and others as invalid. Considering I find all religious beliefs to be invalid, I see no reason to rank the authenticity of any religion. I like to think of myself as equally accepting of all gods, from Yahweh and Zeus to Thor and Osiris. It is usually only religious people who criticize one religion more than another. (I do admit to criticizing different belief systems more than others though)
If you really don't understand the purpose and reason _why_ religion exists in the first place then stop pretending that you do based on a sample size of 1. If you think it is "only about a system of supernatural" then you really need to get out and study & interact more with those that _practice_ that religion. You might actually _learn_ something instead of pretending that you "already know."
Don't confuse the reason why people use religion and the actual method of fulfilling those needs. Religion and science are used for very similar things; it is the method that they provide their benefits that are different. Religion is the use of the supernatural to explain questions such as Why, What, Where (mostly Why), and science is the use of reason based on observations to explain the same questions. You may disagree with these definitions, just like I disagree with the most common definitions of the word atheist, but your opinion does not change what they mean.
That is only ONE definition and it is pretty _incomplete_ one. You could STILL have accurate knowledge and still be ignorant. i.e. Scientists "know" gravity exists but are STILL ignorant as to its cause, its speed, etc.
Once you have gained accurate knowledge you are less ignorant about only the specific thing you have gained knowledge of. Of course you are still going to be ignorant of other things. That doesn't alter the definition of knowledge or ignorance.
Lastly, to bring this back on topic, you still have not shown how it is possible to have Truth With Belief(s). The OP originally " Science is not about belief and faith" which is total nonsense. Nothing you have said demonstrates otherwise.
I never said otherwise because I did not agree with the OP. Science is very much about belief and faith. I do believe that I agree with what the OP meant behind is poorly chosen words, and I was trying to point out why he should have used different nomenclature.
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I am not going to specifically respond to the negative comments at the end of your post, other than to say you really need to grow up.
Way to cut and paste parts of my post in such a way that it makes it sound like I said things I didn't.
Okay, maybe I should have said "A religious person born in the past generation lacks much of the reasoning ability that scientists require, unless he was born into such a abnormally (using average in the US as a basepoint) strong religious environment that his reasoning skills are just too overpowered by indoctrination." That would have made it easier to understand for people trying hard to poke irrelevent holes in my statements.
And BTW, I find it hard to believe that you didn't understand I meant that Newton's religious beliefs do not detract from his brilliance because of the age in which he lived, not because it is rational to have religious beliefs. Personally I think you were just being an ass.