Rather than miles travelled though, I'd rather see it on tires calculated based on the square root of the mass of the tire --- that way larger vehicles would pay more, smaller ones less. There's also already a system in place to collect that (the existing fees for disposal of used tires).
The alternative would be to have special charging connectors for electric vehicles and tack the tax onto such, which would require monitoring people bypassing such, witness the existing problems w/ sales of off-road diesel (which has a special dye in most localities).
The problem is, the harvested food contains quite a bit of water, so represents a drain on that --- which is a problem the Middle East has been having --- shipping something they're short on (water) up to customers in Europe who have plenty of it and don't return it.
Agree w/ your other points though, but I really think that nifty mechanical things to grow vegetables will be a major player --- like the ``Biotron'' which once was advertised to grow roses (but was used to grow marijuana) or the small table-top devices which are sold to grow salad greens and cherry tomatoes like the ``Aerogarden'':
There was an article a while back in _Discover_ magazine about a college professor who was advocating that people get their food from a radius of ~250 miles or so, mentioned here I believe:
Yeah, I tried to go that route, but the nice locally-owned bank couldn't resist being bought out --- two name changes later and I now own a couple of dozen shares of a Spanish bank --- curious how honest / decent they are? Check the news:
Humans are actually quite good at floating point math as embodied by ballistic trajectories --- watch outfielders run straight to where a ball will be when it comes down rather than following a curve, or a marksman who can consistently shoot coins or aspirin out of the air (for the former always positioning the bullet hole so that the coin will be useful as a watch fob).
Integer math as expressed in the real world can be quite good too --- I knew one teller who could take a fresh stack of $100 bills and zip down to the exact number needed to pay one's travel authorization (usually in the range of $2,000 -- $3,500, but usually different for each person in line) w/ a single motion, or there was John Scarne who could take a new deck of cards, shuffle it an arbitrary number of times, then cut to the Ace of Spades _every_ time.
The screen difference I want to see is something which is inherently daylight viewable --- the iPad isn't going to replace my Fujitsu Stylistic until I can use it reliably in the sun on summer days w/o having to scramble for a patch of dark shade (it comes out to the range w/ me to do ballistics calculations, record/track my shots &c.).
I tell you what, you go home and remove _every_ printed piece from your home which has arrived in it since then new year, and then go for a week w/o purchasing a single product w/ any printing on it, and we'll then shut down the presses here --- be sure that you get any posters from your walls, all food packaging which is printed, &c.
In the meanwhile, I'll keep working on promotional material for Nike and similar companies.
No, the lack of Unicode support here on Slashdot has required the OP to use an ``f'' to instead of a ``long-s'' such as was used in Colonial times which is the crux of the joke.
If the jobs created by the internet are growing so fast, why is the unemployment rate so high?
What of all the people who aren't suited for employment in internet-related jobs? There can be only so many employed in fast-food restaurants --- a service industry economy isn't sustainable.
But blacksmiths are directly equivalent to mechanics --- the town I live in, Mechanicsburg, was named for the fact that it was a hub where wagons were repaired --- where every town used to have one or more blacksmiths, now they have one or more mechanics (and the affordability of cars means there are more of them than there were ever of wagons). The problem is knowledge-based software doesn't have the same physical demands as objects such as cars and trucks.
The creation of a couple of jobs in Silicon Valley (as in the original story) does not make up for a broad class of jobs which have ceased to exist --- society needs to face that, and work out solutions in advance.
The printing plant is doing fine, thank you, it just employs fewer people to do even more work.
The number of jobs removed by automation doesn't support that --- take the page composition / printing industry --- used to require an entire floor of compositors to do a publication --- behind them was an entire industry creating rules, chases, printing presses, and hot metal casting machines. Phototypesetting wiped out the people creating specialty metal pieces as well as hot metal casting machines, and vastly reduced the number of people needed to make flats to make plates to print from. CTP (Computer To Plate) pretty much wiped out everything but the printing presses --- sure, one has a few people in California (and India) coding software, but once it's time to make pages, you need one or two people to lay them out, a copy editor and customer-service rep to oversee the job, a pre-press person to check it, one person in the plate-making room and a couple of people to run the printing press --- a dozen or so people performing a job which used to need hundreds.
My company made the switch to CTP years ago, but I still constantly meet people who used to work their, but now have lower-paying jobs or are un-employed.
In ten years their factory went from ~1,300 employees to about half that, 650 --- do you really think, the companies making the CNC machines are employing 650 people to make that up?
The difference is that they actually had to access a person's private property (his car) and place an unmarked device in it. Any such devices should be clearly marked as government property _and_ matched up w/ a search warrant # which is on file in the same locale as the vehicle is registered in.
I think it would have been far more interesting if instead of removing it, the mechanic had instead:
- rolled the car out into the public street
- called the local police department to report a suspicious, possibly explosive device in a vehicle
- notified the owner of the car and asked for him to coordinate things with the bomb squad
Moreover, the biggest problem w/ warrant-less placement of such devices is that it fails the equal protection under the law test. Poor people park their cars out on public streets or on driveways --- which can apparently be accessed w/o a search-warrant, while rich people live in gated communities and have their cars stored off the street, often in garages which are pretty much inaccessible w/o a search-warrant.
That said, properly written software for Mac OS 1.0 could run perfectly through every version of Mac OS, up to and including under Classic emulation on PowerPC running up to Mac OS X 10.5 --- here's the source code for a Missile Command clone which demonstrates that:
Is the book which the movie _Bladerunner_ was (loosely) based on. Moreover, _A Scanner Darkly_ was filmed in 2006. (Compleat list of films based on his works here: http://www.philipkdick.com/films_intro.html )
I'm also not that wild about the Library of America Editions --- are they still setting _everything_ in Galliard? While I like that typeface, it's a bit too strong stylistically, esp. the italics, for such lengthy texts IMO.
No, I went off my Tolkien kick a long while ago (burned out while trying to read _The Complete History of Middle Earth_ at Vol. 4 or so. I've been finding it more difficult to find things to read, so may have to re-visit this at some point in time.
Pastiches don't really interest me either --- I'd rather have a good burger than a mediocre steak and all that --- and much of contemporary and recent fantasy is what has been characterized on rec.arts.sf.written as ``EFP'' Extruded Fantasy Product.
Interesting. I've always thought the whole political labeling thing was a bad idea --- it's far more workable in the long term to attack specifics, rather than labels.
Putting in a printing plant is an interesting idea, but needs a _lot_ of infrastructure (where do you get paper and ink from? printing plates? glue?).
The problem is, any sort of competitive printing press would quickly saturate and over-whelm the local market --- where do they sell to after the local school has a full set of textbooks (less than a month's production effort).
In that case you'd want to try _The Black Book of Arda_ instead.
The thing which I'm curious about, is what is it in Russia that makes them choose to identify w/ and retcon for, or do causuist apologetics for Morgoth and Sauron?
Each city being their own time zone was what drove the adoption of 1-hour wide time zones.
While currently supported software can readily be up-dated (there's a post farther up which notes this should just be an easily-updated lookup table/file), the problem is for older un-supported systems --- darned nuisance for people doing retro-computing w/ NeXTs, Go Corp. Pen Computers &c.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than miles travelled though, I'd rather see it on tires calculated based on the square root of the mass of the tire --- that way larger vehicles would pay more, smaller ones less. There's also already a system in place to collect that (the existing fees for disposal of used tires).
The alternative would be to have special charging connectors for electric vehicles and tack the tax onto such, which would require monitoring people bypassing such, witness the existing problems w/ sales of off-road diesel (which has a special dye in most localities).
William
My father made the same complaint of the Red Cross during Vietnam.
William
which is the goal of Heifer International:
http://www.heifer.org/
(Over 50% of the chickens in South Korea are descended from eggs donated after the Korean War)
William
The problem is, the harvested food contains quite a bit of water, so represents a drain on that --- which is a problem the Middle East has been having --- shipping something they're short on (water) up to customers in Europe who have plenty of it and don't return it.
Agree w/ your other points though, but I really think that nifty mechanical things to grow vegetables will be a major player --- like the ``Biotron'' which once was advertised to grow roses (but was used to grow marijuana) or the small table-top devices which are sold to grow salad greens and cherry tomatoes like the ``Aerogarden'':
http://www.amazon.com/AeroGarden-900110-1208-Classic-Garden-Gourmet/dp/B0015MG9P2/ref=dp_cp_ob_ol_title_0
There was an article a while back in _Discover_ magazine about a college professor who was advocating that people get their food from a radius of ~250 miles or so, mentioned here I believe:
http://www.naturalawakeningsmag.com/Natural-Awakenings/March-2011/America-rsquos-Growing-Food-Revolution/
Not an issue in the US unless one is bank ~$250,000 or whatever the maximum the FDIC will insure per depositor these days.
Yeah, I tried to go that route, but the nice locally-owned bank couldn't resist being bought out --- two name changes later and I now own a couple of dozen shares of a Spanish bank --- curious how honest / decent they are? Check the news:
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110310-709686.html
William
Humans are actually quite good at floating point math as embodied by ballistic trajectories --- watch outfielders run straight to where a ball will be when it comes down rather than following a curve, or a marksman who can consistently shoot coins or aspirin out of the air (for the former always positioning the bullet hole so that the coin will be useful as a watch fob).
Integer math as expressed in the real world can be quite good too --- I knew one teller who could take a fresh stack of $100 bills and zip down to the exact number needed to pay one's travel authorization (usually in the range of $2,000 -- $3,500, but usually different for each person in line) w/ a single motion, or there was John Scarne who could take a new deck of cards, shuffle it an arbitrary number of times, then cut to the Ace of Spades _every_ time.
William
The screen difference I want to see is something which is inherently daylight viewable --- the iPad isn't going to replace my Fujitsu Stylistic until I can use it reliably in the sun on summer days w/o having to scramble for a patch of dark shade (it comes out to the range w/ me to do ballistics calculations, record/track my shots &c.).
William
I tell you what, you go home and remove _every_ printed piece from your home which has arrived in it since then new year, and then go for a week w/o purchasing a single product w/ any printing on it, and we'll then shut down the presses here --- be sure that you get any posters from your walls, all food packaging which is printed, &c.
In the meanwhile, I'll keep working on promotional material for Nike and similar companies.
William
No, the lack of Unicode support here on Slashdot has required the OP to use an ``f'' to instead of a ``long-s'' such as was used in Colonial times which is the crux of the joke.
William
If the jobs created by the internet are growing so fast, why is the unemployment rate so high?
What of all the people who aren't suited for employment in internet-related jobs? There can be only so many employed in fast-food restaurants --- a service industry economy isn't sustainable.
William
Interesting short story by Marshall Brain on this:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Wishful thinking, but society, as a whole does need to face the fact that there will be less work needed to support people in the future.
William
But blacksmiths are directly equivalent to mechanics --- the town I live in, Mechanicsburg, was named for the fact that it was a hub where wagons were repaired --- where every town used to have one or more blacksmiths, now they have one or more mechanics (and the affordability of cars means there are more of them than there were ever of wagons). The problem is knowledge-based software doesn't have the same physical demands as objects such as cars and trucks.
The creation of a couple of jobs in Silicon Valley (as in the original story) does not make up for a broad class of jobs which have ceased to exist --- society needs to face that, and work out solutions in advance.
The printing plant is doing fine, thank you, it just employs fewer people to do even more work.
William
The number of jobs removed by automation doesn't support that --- take the page composition / printing industry --- used to require an entire floor of compositors to do a publication --- behind them was an entire industry creating rules, chases, printing presses, and hot metal casting machines. Phototypesetting wiped out the people creating specialty metal pieces as well as hot metal casting machines, and vastly reduced the number of people needed to make flats to make plates to print from. CTP (Computer To Plate) pretty much wiped out everything but the printing presses --- sure, one has a few people in California (and India) coding software, but once it's time to make pages, you need one or two people to lay them out, a copy editor and customer-service rep to oversee the job, a pre-press person to check it, one person in the plate-making room and a couple of people to run the printing press --- a dozen or so people performing a job which used to need hundreds.
My company made the switch to CTP years ago, but I still constantly meet people who used to work their, but now have lower-paying jobs or are un-employed.
Or look at Snapper:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snapper.html
In ten years their factory went from ~1,300 employees to about half that, 650 --- do you really think, the companies making the CNC machines are employing 650 people to make that up?
William
The difference is that they actually had to access a person's private property (his car) and place an unmarked device in it. Any such devices should be clearly marked as government property _and_ matched up w/ a search warrant # which is on file in the same locale as the vehicle is registered in.
I think it would have been far more interesting if instead of removing it, the mechanic had instead:
- rolled the car out into the public street
- called the local police department to report a suspicious, possibly explosive device in a vehicle
- notified the owner of the car and asked for him to coordinate things with the bomb squad
Moreover, the biggest problem w/ warrant-less placement of such devices is that it fails the equal protection under the law test. Poor people park their cars out on public streets or on driveways --- which can apparently be accessed w/o a search-warrant, while rich people live in gated communities and have their cars stored off the street, often in garages which are pretty much inaccessible w/o a search-warrant.
William
That said, properly written software for Mac OS 1.0 could run perfectly through every version of Mac OS, up to and including under Classic emulation on PowerPC running up to Mac OS X 10.5 --- here's the source code for a Missile Command clone which demonstrates that:
http://mrob.com/pub/source/missile.html
Anyone know if there's a Pascal compiler for Mac OS X which would let it work yet?
Uh,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Is the book which the movie _Bladerunner_ was (loosely) based on. Moreover, _A Scanner Darkly_ was filmed in 2006. (Compleat list of films based on his works here: http://www.philipkdick.com/films_intro.html )
I'm also not that wild about the Library of America Editions --- are they still setting _everything_ in Galliard? While I like that typeface, it's a bit too strong stylistically, esp. the italics, for such lengthy texts IMO.
William
Because some projects take longer than 14 years to complete?
William
No, I went off my Tolkien kick a long while ago (burned out while trying to read _The Complete History of Middle Earth_ at Vol. 4 or so. I've been finding it more difficult to find things to read, so may have to re-visit this at some point in time.
Pastiches don't really interest me either --- I'd rather have a good burger than a mediocre steak and all that --- and much of contemporary and recent fantasy is what has been characterized on rec.arts.sf.written as ``EFP'' Extruded Fantasy Product.
William
Interesting. I've always thought the whole political labeling thing was a bad idea --- it's far more workable in the long term to attack specifics, rather than labels.
William
for foodstuffs at any rate:
http://www.heifer.org/
Putting in a printing plant is an interesting idea, but needs a _lot_ of infrastructure (where do you get paper and ink from? printing plates? glue?).
The problem is, any sort of competitive printing press would quickly saturate and over-whelm the local market --- where do they sell to after the local school has a full set of textbooks (less than a month's production effort).
William
In that case you'd want to try _The Black Book of Arda_ instead.
The thing which I'm curious about, is what is it in Russia that makes them choose to identify w/ and retcon for, or do causuist apologetics for Morgoth and Sauron?
William
Each city being their own time zone was what drove the adoption of 1-hour wide time zones.
While currently supported software can readily be up-dated (there's a post farther up which notes this should just be an easily-updated lookup table/file), the problem is for older un-supported systems --- darned nuisance for people doing retro-computing w/ NeXTs, Go Corp. Pen Computers &c.
William
Yeah, it was kind of ironic the previous poster's linked page having a link to:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population%20growth%20of%20China&lk=2
which shows China has a 0.63% population growth --- 154th in the world.
William
Yeah, I should've poked around a bit for a better link:
http://cryptome.org/0001/tm-31-210.htm
William