Tell that to a creative who's debating between freelancing on his own or taking a steady job.
What the hell is a "creative"? Is it anything like a "grammatically correct"?
Well, since you can't read a dictionary, here you go:
Creative (noun) 1) one who is creative; especially : one involved in the creation of advertisements 2) creative activity or the material produced by it especially in advertising
I don't know where you're at but we have no problem getting the people we need through our doors. If you're honestly going to turn down a position because your home hardware is better than what you get at work then you must not be too serious about the real reason to have a job; results.
I will absolutely turn down a position if they care so little about their employees and their productivity to give them substandard equipment. I am never going to sit around for a spinning disk hard drive to load my applications again, or deal with a computer with under 16 GB of RAM. If a company is going to complain about $1000 in yearly hardware purchases so I can have a new laptop every three years, two decent monitors, and noise cancelling headphones, how are they going to treat me as an employee? When I am approached for a job I take effort to notice the quality of the equipment I see their current employees using. I have never seen an employee with bad equipment treated well by their employer, and rarely see employees with amazing equipment treated poorly.
Perhaps you don't have trouble attracting employees, but if you treat your employees poorly you will have trouble attracting good employees. Most people have never worked at a company where almost all their coworkers are top notch, so they don't even know what they are missing.
And regardless of a company's respect of their employees, it is simply unproductive to give people slow hardware. Shaving $500 per year in hardware costs per employee is less than 1% of even a low paid IT worker. I have seen the result of 4 year old laptops that weren't even top of the line when they were new. It involves a lot of wasted time waiting for apps to load and dealing with constant crashes or reboots.
The real fact is that budget deficits in upcoming years will only be solved by cutting military, welfare, medicare, and social security spending.
While I do agree this is the most likely solution, it is not a fact that this will be necessary. Increasing research and education spending would have a positive impact on our economy. A better economy increases tax revenue, which could balance the budget without cutting any programs. The Clinton administration did not balance the budget by being fiscally conservative, they just rode the wave of the technology boom (although it is debatable if the budget was every truly balanced). A new technology wave from the biotech sector, to pick one possible example, could have a similar effect in the near future. But only if we spend the necessary research dollars.
The way things are going now it is becoming more likely that another country will take advantage of the next technology boom, not the US.
The "funny thing" is you don't know what you're talking about. Military spending in the US is dwarfed by social welfare spending, and that was before Obamacare.
How does social welfare spending have anything to do with whether military spending should be cut? My spending on a new tablet, phone, and computer every other year is dwarfed by my mortgage, grocery bill, and car/life/health insurance payments. But if I lost my job, I would skip buying the iPad Air 3 long before I would skip paying my mortgage.
Military spending as a percentage of our total budget is not that important. US military spending as a percentage of worldwide military spending is much more important. I would still feel quite secure if our military budget was twice that of the 2nd highest spender in the world, and that would still cut our military spending by over 40%. It would also allow us to increase NASA funding by 15x its current level, although I wouldn't advocate putting all of the savings there.
Thousands of people die in the US from the flu each year. Tens of thousands during years when H3N2 variants are prevalent. Since only a few Americans have died from Ebola this year, it is quite likely that a thousand or even close to ten thousand times more Americans die from the flu this year than from Ebola.
Well color me identifiably disappointed. We had better discussions from Slashdot posts than Gladwell gave in this interview.
I am curious of how these interviews are run. I assumed the questions are compiled and then sent to the interviewee who then has as much time to respond as he needs. That way he can provide a thoughtful and complete response since there would be no further dialogue.
But Gladwell's answers are what you would expect during a back and forth discussion. This is what you would find in an in-person interview where the interviewer asks follow-up questions and starts a meaningful dialogue. But without further questions, each of these responses are hollow and meaningless. I am very disappointed, because while I don't agree with everything Gladwell writes he at least is normally thought provoking.
He doesn't necessarily have to take a managerial role, but he does have to understand he will probably reach a relatively low ceiling of pay / responsibilities if he doesn't. One man can only be so valuable with only his own labor. Taking on managerial roles allows skilled people to become a force multiplier, which increases their value.
But if someone is willing to cap out at around $125k (Chicagoland salary) then they can continue being a purely technical resource until retirement if they are really good and keep learning.
You cannot tell me a toddler has be socialized to desire given things based on sex. And yet in those studies, such children were shown to prefer given toys largely on sexual grounds.
Of course toddlers are socialized to desire given things based on sex. It starts within days of birth. Girls are in the pink clothes, boys are in the blue clothes. Girls are more commonly told "you are so pretty" and boys are more commonly told "you are so smart." Girls get a princess castle, boys get a truck. The very fact that Babies R Us even has a boys and girls section for infants and toddlers shows the socialization starts that young.
I'm not saying socialization is the only reason boys and girls are different, but saying toddlers are immune to this socialization is dishonest.
You could still vote for individuals. When they hand out seats to the parties based on proportions, the individuals with the most votes in that party would get the seats.
Nope, I live there. Turns out that most people are entitled sons of bitches and didn't want to do hard manual labor outside all day for minimum wage. People would rather take unemployment benefits.
That is exactly the point the guy was trying to make. They won't do it for minimum wage, which is all they would get because companies are used to having an almost infinite supply of migrant labor. But once pay starts to hit $20-$25 per hour, people would flock to the job. I have a high school friend who works as a garbage man making $70k per year with an amazing pension. He would never do the job for $10/hr, but there was a high enough salary that got him to choose the career.
I honestly don't think salaries are out of line. Tech workers should make less than management, they have a smaller scope of responsibility.
While that is true for the vast majority of tech workers, for those top 5% of tech workers everyone wants this often isn't the case. The people designing and architecting large enterprise systems or creating new products in start-ups have as much or even more responsibility than their managers. When I am consulting for large corporations any managers under C-level are just window dressing compared to their systems architects. I'm sure those directors make a much larger salary, however.
$100k is so far above the poverty line that the poster (a ways) above who was dissatisfied with it is a joke
Acceptable salary ranges and standards of living are very subjective. You could just as easily say that anyone who is making enough money to feed their family shouldn't be dissatisfied when almost a billion people on the planet are starving (including 50 million even in America who are considered food insecure).
The poster you are referring was not only dissatisfied, he also correctly took the steps necessary to correct the problem. So he isn't just some person complaining about his lot in life. Now the only thing he is upset about is that skilled STEM workers have to move to other job roles to make the money he thinks they deserve. I tend to agree with him. As long as you believe his story, it seems even now that he has a $300k salary position he still feels he was as useful in his old role as he is in his new role (or else he shouldn't have been dissatisfied with his old salary).
No one is saying self driven cars are going to be gone immediately after autonomous cars are common. It will take decades before most of them are off the roads. Your old beater probably won't make it another 30 years, and if it does it will be the exception. If the predictions made in the article start coming true, you will start to find it hard to even find a house with a garage. Regulations stopping you from parking a car on the street will become as common as regulations stopping you from stabling your horse on the street. Within 50 years the vast majority of people would simply have no place to keep a car.
That is if renting cars becomes as ubiquitous as the article suggests.
Human drivers will probably exist on the same roads as autonomous cars for many decades, perhaps even forever. Cars started becoming common at about 1900, and by the early 1910s cars outnumbered horse buggies, but horse buggies were still being used in the 1930s. It will likely be the same with autonomous cars. Even after driverless cars are common, it will probably take at least a couple decades for the majority of cars to not require drivers.
I am on the side of people who just enjoy driving. I miss the mustang I gave up when I had children, and I still refuse to own a sedan with under 250 hp because it would be boring. But just how early cars where that much better than horses, autonomous cars will be too practical to not take over.
Once the home renovations start the change will become even more dramatic. There may not be any use for garages even in suburban homes, as a quick text could get you a car within minutes. Garages may become as common as stables within 50 years.
1) It was also the result of the government funding a massive push to educate the workforce in the post-secondary education system. If you look at 1910, which was an era where big business was running things, 2.7% of the population was college educated. By 1990 it was almost double that.
The notion that industrious people created the middle class is laughable. It was clearly a partnership between the public sector which educated the workforce and the private sector that took this new workforce and created a booming economy.
2) You seem to have some belief that the ruling class is different than the industrious people you keep mentioning. Politicians and business owners make up the ruling class.
3) Yes, government regulations clearly have their costs. There is no such thing as a system with no drawbacks. But any system without regulations is going to turn into an oligarchy in short order.
4) No, we trade liberty for comfort all the time, and it is a good thing. Absolute statements are almost always ridiculous. We trade some liberties to create functioning societies because those societies give us more benefits than the few liberties we gave up.
5) If you think work is not a burden you must never have done back breaking labor. Some work is most definitely a burden.
All the speech recognition software I've used has relied on a controlled environment (e.g. yelling directly into your phone with almost no reverberation, no competing conversations, very little background noise).
...
Modelling all the other kinds of background noise is much, much harder.
I agree, but the issue is this problem is harder than those that industry leaders are putting billions of dollars of R&D money into. What is $50k really going to accomplish? There are Kaggle competitions that pay out more than that for far more trivial problems (like a marginal increase in CTR prediction).
1) A vibrant middle class is an aberration of history. I don't think we can look to history and find meaningful examples of what exponentially increasing technology will do to our current social structures.
2) Our society determines what basic income is. Just like we determine our laws.
3) Living in a society that respects property rights has its costs. Almost the only difference between the relatively peaceful western world and places like the unrest in the middle east is that the vast majority of our population has a lot of opportunities. You take those away and we will have the same unrest here.
I tend to agree with Thomas Paine, who believed that all citizens have a natural inheritance created by the introduction of the system of landed property. So in return for society recognizing property rights those property holders owe society some of its proceeds. He explicitly stated this should not be considered charity.
4) He never said he thought there would only be positive results. He did say he thinks it would be a good idea, but plenty of good ideas still have consequences. And he was openly asking for other opinions while merely offering his own; there is no need to jump down his throat.
5) No one is saying people would be paid not to work. All people would just be told "you don't have to work to meet your basic needs." Once that burden is removed, people would still be free to work to better their lives further. Very few people would just sit around all day doing nothing, and those that do really would be the ones we want removed from the workforce anyway.
... you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant
I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising upper middle class.
The trend of the middle class falling into the lower class, and a small minority of the middle class rising into the upper middle class is what automation is creating.
I envision a future (perhaps 20 years out) where there is a huge gap between a servant class and the elite. The elite will still be split between what is now considered the upper middle class and the 1%, but they will all have a much different lifestyle than the servant class. Today's lower class jobs will be replaced with a more personalized service industry, where your average knowledge worker can easily hire a maid for instance. I am barely in the top 5% of household incomes and even I can already have my house cleaned and yard cared for every other week for less than 3% of our monthly net income. In 20 years that will probably turn into paying someone to do my dishes and laundry for me.
A basic income will allow these individuals who cannot command a living wage to still live a good life. I would love for us to move to a system where minimum wage is abolished but everyone receives around $10k per year and all other income is supplementary. Just the reduction in crime alone may even make this less costly to the upper class than paying for our current prison / police infrastructure. And some of the extra taxes you are paying will come back to you in the form of maids who only cost $4/hr.
Not it was not. No one claimed Google broke any law, and the government was not on either side of the case. This was a civil case, where someone thought Google was treating them unfairly.
Even though the government was not a plaintiff or defendant, it is still our laws that are being used to determine if the lawsuit wins. In this particular case it was anti-trust laws which were being examined.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that sexism does not primarily impact women negatively.
Boys are certainly negatively impacted by macho ideals such as the importance of "being a man." Any claim that girls are negatively affected by big breasted meek women in video games must also concede that boys are negatively affected by buff macho men who can solve all problems by shooting or beating up their opponents. I think both claims are a bit over the top, but making one claim and not the other is quite hypocritical.
I've seen studies that have shown that they interfere with learning, but none (that weren't sponsored by someone trying to sell stuff) that showed they improved learning.
I'll help you since your workplace must be blocking Google. From what I was able to briefly find, the meta-analysis of current research shows three things:
1) Blended use of technology and traditional learning probably produces the best results. 2) We are still figuring out how to best use technology in the classroom, but we are improving. 3) There has not been nearly enough large scale research to "prove" any assertions about the effectiveness of individual techniques in bringing technology to the classroom.
And depending on your definition of "sponsored by someone trying to sell stuff", you are probably unlikely to find many studies at all like that (a fact brought up by a couple of the above studies). Since most school districts cannot afford to spend money on unproven technologies, a large percentage of these studies have their devices donated or heavily subsidized by the device manufacturer. Here are some iPad specific ones, but even though some of them may have had iPads donated they still back up their research with actual test scores.
Actually, now they are locked into a cycle of debt that precludes using an old tractor in favor of buying new ones before the old ones wear out. Those who run old tractors fix them themselves. Besides, there is often no time to hire a mechanic, when the tractor breaks it needs to be back in production ASAP. Your analogy sucks.
As someone who grew up on a farm in rural Illinois, I only knew one farmer (out of dozens) that knew how to fix most of his mechanical issues. Everyone knew how to fix simple things, just like developers can usually fix simple issues with their tools. But any issue which couldn't be fixed by your average person with some handyman and automotive skills needed to be sent to a mechanic. I mean do you really think farmers just have a fully stocked auto shop with replacement parts in their tool shed?
Although you are correct that there is often no time for a mechanic. But the answer usually was to get help from neighbors by borrowing their equipment. And the turnaround from the mechanics at planting / harvest time was usually only a day or two.
That is not really what TFA is talking about. Automation of farming has removed the labor, but not the knowledge. It has not caused farmers to forget how to farm.
Automation of farming removed the knowledge of how to farm without the automation. Like another post said, when a tractor breaks down the farmer doesn't grab a shovel. He calls his mechanic. My dad is a farmer who is 64 years old, and even he doesn't remember how to farm like his grandfather did.
So, when the tractor breaks, the farmer fixes the tractor.
Maybe when your grandpa was a farmer this was true, but today the farmer calls his mechanic. The proportion of farmers who can fix their own high tech equipment is likely not that different than the proportion of developers who can debug low level code.
You absolutely have the right to cheat, because in reality, that's what life outside of school all is about... non-independant work.
School is not a real world simulator. It is a place to learn. Regardless of whether I agree with you on the morality of cheating, your reasoning is way off.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to a creative who's debating between freelancing on his own or taking a steady job.
What the hell is a "creative"? Is it anything like a "grammatically correct"?
Well, since you can't read a dictionary, here you go:
Creative (noun)
1) one who is creative; especially : one involved in the creation of advertisements
2) creative activity or the material produced by it especially in advertising
I assume he was going with the first meaning.
I don't know where you're at but we have no problem getting the people we need through our doors. If you're honestly going to turn down a position because your home hardware is better than what you get at work then you must not be too serious about the real reason to have a job; results.
I will absolutely turn down a position if they care so little about their employees and their productivity to give them substandard equipment. I am never going to sit around for a spinning disk hard drive to load my applications again, or deal with a computer with under 16 GB of RAM. If a company is going to complain about $1000 in yearly hardware purchases so I can have a new laptop every three years, two decent monitors, and noise cancelling headphones, how are they going to treat me as an employee? When I am approached for a job I take effort to notice the quality of the equipment I see their current employees using. I have never seen an employee with bad equipment treated well by their employer, and rarely see employees with amazing equipment treated poorly.
Perhaps you don't have trouble attracting employees, but if you treat your employees poorly you will have trouble attracting good employees. Most people have never worked at a company where almost all their coworkers are top notch, so they don't even know what they are missing.
And regardless of a company's respect of their employees, it is simply unproductive to give people slow hardware. Shaving $500 per year in hardware costs per employee is less than 1% of even a low paid IT worker. I have seen the result of 4 year old laptops that weren't even top of the line when they were new. It involves a lot of wasted time waiting for apps to load and dealing with constant crashes or reboots.
The real fact is that budget deficits in upcoming years will only be solved by cutting military, welfare, medicare, and social security spending.
While I do agree this is the most likely solution, it is not a fact that this will be necessary. Increasing research and education spending would have a positive impact on our economy. A better economy increases tax revenue, which could balance the budget without cutting any programs. The Clinton administration did not balance the budget by being fiscally conservative, they just rode the wave of the technology boom (although it is debatable if the budget was every truly balanced). A new technology wave from the biotech sector, to pick one possible example, could have a similar effect in the near future. But only if we spend the necessary research dollars.
The way things are going now it is becoming more likely that another country will take advantage of the next technology boom, not the US.
The "funny thing" is you don't know what you're talking about. Military spending in the US is dwarfed by social welfare spending, and that was before Obamacare.
How does social welfare spending have anything to do with whether military spending should be cut? My spending on a new tablet, phone, and computer every other year is dwarfed by my mortgage, grocery bill, and car/life/health insurance payments. But if I lost my job, I would skip buying the iPad Air 3 long before I would skip paying my mortgage.
Military spending as a percentage of our total budget is not that important. US military spending as a percentage of worldwide military spending is much more important. I would still feel quite secure if our military budget was twice that of the 2nd highest spender in the world, and that would still cut our military spending by over 40%. It would also allow us to increase NASA funding by 15x its current level, although I wouldn't advocate putting all of the savings there.
Thousands of people die in the US from the flu each year. Tens of thousands during years when H3N2 variants are prevalent. Since only a few Americans have died from Ebola this year, it is quite likely that a thousand or even close to ten thousand times more Americans die from the flu this year than from Ebola.
Flu will kill more Americans this year than Ebola will this decade.
I think its safe to say the flu will kill more Americans this year than Ebola will this century, or more likely this millennium.
Well color me identifiably disappointed. We had better discussions from Slashdot posts than Gladwell gave in this interview.
I am curious of how these interviews are run. I assumed the questions are compiled and then sent to the interviewee who then has as much time to respond as he needs. That way he can provide a thoughtful and complete response since there would be no further dialogue.
But Gladwell's answers are what you would expect during a back and forth discussion. This is what you would find in an in-person interview where the interviewer asks follow-up questions and starts a meaningful dialogue. But without further questions, each of these responses are hollow and meaningless. I am very disappointed, because while I don't agree with everything Gladwell writes he at least is normally thought provoking.
He doesn't necessarily have to take a managerial role, but he does have to understand he will probably reach a relatively low ceiling of pay / responsibilities if he doesn't. One man can only be so valuable with only his own labor. Taking on managerial roles allows skilled people to become a force multiplier, which increases their value.
But if someone is willing to cap out at around $125k (Chicagoland salary) then they can continue being a purely technical resource until retirement if they are really good and keep learning.
You cannot tell me a toddler has be socialized to desire given things based on sex. And yet in those studies, such children were shown to prefer given toys largely on sexual grounds.
Of course toddlers are socialized to desire given things based on sex. It starts within days of birth. Girls are in the pink clothes, boys are in the blue clothes. Girls are more commonly told "you are so pretty" and boys are more commonly told "you are so smart." Girls get a princess castle, boys get a truck. The very fact that Babies R Us even has a boys and girls section for infants and toddlers shows the socialization starts that young.
I'm not saying socialization is the only reason boys and girls are different, but saying toddlers are immune to this socialization is dishonest.
You could still vote for individuals. When they hand out seats to the parties based on proportions, the individuals with the most votes in that party would get the seats.
Nope, I live there. Turns out that most people are entitled sons of bitches and didn't want to do hard manual labor outside all day for minimum wage. People would rather take unemployment benefits.
That is exactly the point the guy was trying to make. They won't do it for minimum wage, which is all they would get because companies are used to having an almost infinite supply of migrant labor. But once pay starts to hit $20-$25 per hour, people would flock to the job. I have a high school friend who works as a garbage man making $70k per year with an amazing pension. He would never do the job for $10/hr, but there was a high enough salary that got him to choose the career.
I honestly don't think salaries are out of line. Tech workers should make less than management, they have a smaller scope of responsibility.
While that is true for the vast majority of tech workers, for those top 5% of tech workers everyone wants this often isn't the case. The people designing and architecting large enterprise systems or creating new products in start-ups have as much or even more responsibility than their managers. When I am consulting for large corporations any managers under C-level are just window dressing compared to their systems architects. I'm sure those directors make a much larger salary, however.
$100k is so far above the poverty line that the poster (a ways) above who was dissatisfied with it is a joke
Acceptable salary ranges and standards of living are very subjective. You could just as easily say that anyone who is making enough money to feed their family shouldn't be dissatisfied when almost a billion people on the planet are starving (including 50 million even in America who are considered food insecure).
The poster you are referring was not only dissatisfied, he also correctly took the steps necessary to correct the problem. So he isn't just some person complaining about his lot in life. Now the only thing he is upset about is that skilled STEM workers have to move to other job roles to make the money he thinks they deserve. I tend to agree with him. As long as you believe his story, it seems even now that he has a $300k salary position he still feels he was as useful in his old role as he is in his new role (or else he shouldn't have been dissatisfied with his old salary).
No one is saying self driven cars are going to be gone immediately after autonomous cars are common. It will take decades before most of them are off the roads. Your old beater probably won't make it another 30 years, and if it does it will be the exception. If the predictions made in the article start coming true, you will start to find it hard to even find a house with a garage. Regulations stopping you from parking a car on the street will become as common as regulations stopping you from stabling your horse on the street. Within 50 years the vast majority of people would simply have no place to keep a car.
That is if renting cars becomes as ubiquitous as the article suggests.
Human drivers will probably exist on the same roads as autonomous cars for many decades, perhaps even forever. Cars started becoming common at about 1900, and by the early 1910s cars outnumbered horse buggies, but horse buggies were still being used in the 1930s. It will likely be the same with autonomous cars. Even after driverless cars are common, it will probably take at least a couple decades for the majority of cars to not require drivers.
I am on the side of people who just enjoy driving. I miss the mustang I gave up when I had children, and I still refuse to own a sedan with under 250 hp because it would be boring. But just how early cars where that much better than horses, autonomous cars will be too practical to not take over.
Once the home renovations start the change will become even more dramatic. There may not be any use for garages even in suburban homes, as a quick text could get you a car within minutes. Garages may become as common as stables within 50 years.
1) It was also the result of the government funding a massive push to educate the workforce in the post-secondary education system. If you look at 1910, which was an era where big business was running things, 2.7% of the population was college educated. By 1990 it was almost double that.
The notion that industrious people created the middle class is laughable. It was clearly a partnership between the public sector which educated the workforce and the private sector that took this new workforce and created a booming economy.
2) You seem to have some belief that the ruling class is different than the industrious people you keep mentioning. Politicians and business owners make up the ruling class.
3) Yes, government regulations clearly have their costs. There is no such thing as a system with no drawbacks. But any system without regulations is going to turn into an oligarchy in short order.
4) No, we trade liberty for comfort all the time, and it is a good thing. Absolute statements are almost always ridiculous. We trade some liberties to create functioning societies because those societies give us more benefits than the few liberties we gave up.
5) If you think work is not a burden you must never have done back breaking labor. Some work is most definitely a burden.
All the speech recognition software I've used has relied on a controlled environment (e.g. yelling directly into your phone with almost no reverberation, no competing conversations, very little background noise).
...
Modelling all the other kinds of background noise is much, much harder.
I agree, but the issue is this problem is harder than those that industry leaders are putting billions of dollars of R&D money into. What is $50k really going to accomplish? There are Kaggle competitions that pay out more than that for far more trivial problems (like a marginal increase in CTR prediction).
1) A vibrant middle class is an aberration of history. I don't think we can look to history and find meaningful examples of what exponentially increasing technology will do to our current social structures.
2) Our society determines what basic income is. Just like we determine our laws.
3) Living in a society that respects property rights has its costs. Almost the only difference between the relatively peaceful western world and places like the unrest in the middle east is that the vast majority of our population has a lot of opportunities. You take those away and we will have the same unrest here.
I tend to agree with Thomas Paine, who believed that all citizens have a natural inheritance created by the introduction of the system of landed property. So in return for society recognizing property rights those property holders owe society some of its proceeds. He explicitly stated this should not be considered charity.
4) He never said he thought there would only be positive results. He did say he thinks it would be a good idea, but plenty of good ideas still have consequences. And he was openly asking for other opinions while merely offering his own; there is no need to jump down his throat.
5) No one is saying people would be paid not to work. All people would just be told "you don't have to work to meet your basic needs." Once that burden is removed, people would still be free to work to better their lives further. Very few people would just sit around all day doing nothing, and those that do really would be the ones we want removed from the workforce anyway.
... you should at least take into consideration the fact that automation has been increasing for over a century, as well as population, and yet unemployment has remained relatively constant
I am not necessarily worried about unemployment; I am worried about the increasing gap between the elite and everyone else. Early automation created the need for the middle class, as the wealthy needed trained people to run the machines. But in the past 40 years automation has become far more capable and sophisticated. It requires less people to run modern machines, but they need to be far more skilled than the last generation. This has lead to the shrinking middle class, the rising 1%, and also the rising upper middle class.
The trend of the middle class falling into the lower class, and a small minority of the middle class rising into the upper middle class is what automation is creating.
I envision a future (perhaps 20 years out) where there is a huge gap between a servant class and the elite. The elite will still be split between what is now considered the upper middle class and the 1%, but they will all have a much different lifestyle than the servant class. Today's lower class jobs will be replaced with a more personalized service industry, where your average knowledge worker can easily hire a maid for instance. I am barely in the top 5% of household incomes and even I can already have my house cleaned and yard cared for every other week for less than 3% of our monthly net income. In 20 years that will probably turn into paying someone to do my dishes and laundry for me.
A basic income will allow these individuals who cannot command a living wage to still live a good life. I would love for us to move to a system where minimum wage is abolished but everyone receives around $10k per year and all other income is supplementary. Just the reduction in crime alone may even make this less costly to the upper class than paying for our current prison / police infrastructure. And some of the extra taxes you are paying will come back to you in the form of maids who only cost $4/hr.
It was a lawsuit claiming Google broke a law.
Not it was not. No one claimed Google broke any law, and the government was not on either side of the case. This was a civil case, where someone thought Google was treating them unfairly.
Even though the government was not a plaintiff or defendant, it is still our laws that are being used to determine if the lawsuit wins. In this particular case it was anti-trust laws which were being examined.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that sexism does not primarily impact women negatively.
Boys are certainly negatively impacted by macho ideals such as the importance of "being a man." Any claim that girls are negatively affected by big breasted meek women in video games must also concede that boys are negatively affected by buff macho men who can solve all problems by shooting or beating up their opponents. I think both claims are a bit over the top, but making one claim and not the other is quite hypocritical.
I've seen studies that have shown that they interfere with learning, but none (that weren't sponsored by someone trying to sell stuff) that showed they improved learning.
I'll help you since your workplace must be blocking Google. From what I was able to briefly find, the meta-analysis of current research shows three things:
1) Blended use of technology and traditional learning probably produces the best results.
2) We are still figuring out how to best use technology in the classroom, but we are improving.
3) There has not been nearly enough large scale research to "prove" any assertions about the effectiveness of individual techniques in bringing technology to the classroom.
Does the Use of Technology Improve Learning?
The Answer Lies in Design
Effective Use of Technology as a Learning Tool
Learning with Technology. Evidence that technology can, and does, support learning.
Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning. A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies
Using Technology in Education: Does It Improve Anything?
And depending on your definition of "sponsored by someone trying to sell stuff", you are probably unlikely to find many studies at all like that (a fact brought up by a couple of the above studies). Since most school districts cannot afford to spend money on unproven technologies, a large percentage of these studies have their devices donated or heavily subsidized by the device manufacturer. Here are some iPad specific ones, but even though some of them may have had iPads donated they still back up their research with actual test scores.
Five Studies to Prove the iPad’s Educational Worth
iPad improves Kindergartners literacy scores
Study Finds Benefits in Use of iPad as an Educational Tool
iPads Improve Classroom Learning, Study Finds
iPad a Solid Education Tool, Study Reports
Actually, now they are locked into a cycle of debt that precludes using an old tractor in favor of buying new ones before the old ones wear out. Those who run old tractors fix them themselves. Besides, there is often no time to hire a mechanic, when the tractor breaks it needs to be back in production ASAP. Your analogy sucks.
As someone who grew up on a farm in rural Illinois, I only knew one farmer (out of dozens) that knew how to fix most of his mechanical issues. Everyone knew how to fix simple things, just like developers can usually fix simple issues with their tools. But any issue which couldn't be fixed by your average person with some handyman and automotive skills needed to be sent to a mechanic. I mean do you really think farmers just have a fully stocked auto shop with replacement parts in their tool shed?
Although you are correct that there is often no time for a mechanic. But the answer usually was to get help from neighbors by borrowing their equipment. And the turnaround from the mechanics at planting / harvest time was usually only a day or two.
That is not really what TFA is talking about. Automation of farming has removed the labor, but not the knowledge. It has not caused farmers to forget how to farm.
Automation of farming removed the knowledge of how to farm without the automation. Like another post said, when a tractor breaks down the farmer doesn't grab a shovel. He calls his mechanic. My dad is a farmer who is 64 years old, and even he doesn't remember how to farm like his grandfather did.
So, when the tractor breaks, the farmer fixes the tractor.
Maybe when your grandpa was a farmer this was true, but today the farmer calls his mechanic. The proportion of farmers who can fix their own high tech equipment is likely not that different than the proportion of developers who can debug low level code.
You absolutely have the right to cheat, because in reality, that's what life outside of school all is about... non-independant work.
School is not a real world simulator. It is a place to learn. Regardless of whether I agree with you on the morality of cheating, your reasoning is way off.