They won't because he is really good at what he does.
That's not the only reason. They won't fire him because it's not necessary. Given his health, it's only a matter of time before they need to hunt for a new CEO, anyway.
The people who think that SQL sucks don't usually understand it. The first hurdle is that you need to think about it as a set-oriented language. You are dealing with operations that work on sets. You select a subset of all objects in the table, filter for only the columns that you want, modify them via update, insert new items, join two sets together, etc. If you come looking at it as a procedural replacement, you are starting out screwed.
Next, like all languages, the pure relational model has grown warts (some significant) over the years. If you're willing to consider Java or Ruby as decent languages (and there are a lot of flaws at the language level in both), you shouldn't hate on SQL for this kind of thing.
Finally, there are things that should have been in SQL that were never actually standardized - things like schema migration, for example. Yes, the language does a crappy job at them and in ways that are incompatible between implementations. But, when you look at todays object-oriented languages, which have no standardized way to migrate objects from one version to the next (well, except for CLOS-respecting Common Lisp implementations), I don't see these sorts of things as a shortcoming - languages get standardized when they get standardized.
So, yes, it's a crappy language - just like all the rest out there. But at least the language core is built on a formal model which can be followed to make databases work together better. It's longevity is not just because Microsoft or Oracle said to use it. It's because, when you get right down to it, it's a pretty reasonable language for what it was meant to do. Just like FORTRAN, COBOL, C, and many others. And it still has a better syntax than Perl. What's not to love?
Well, I'd take the "on faith" out of quotes, especially with mathematics.
First, you need to believe that the proofs were done correctly and that they have no holes. In most cases, this is fairly self-evident, as a student having a engineering-oriented undergraduate calculus class can do the proofs required to this level of understanding. But it doesn't stop there...
This level of proof is contingent upon the real number system working "as expected". In order to prove this level of stuff (unless you want to get into abstractions like filter theory and other esoteric topological models), you need to understand things like Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences. Which all have their own level of proof into which errors might have crept.
And even before this, you need to understand how integers work. You need to believe enough set theory to build this edifice.
Finally, you get to the point where you have to believe that that standard naive models of logic work (and, yes, there are alternative models of logic, as well, should you want to go down this path) - and all of these have places where mistakes in proofs might have crept in.
Then you have the infinite regress problem: If you believe that A->B is true, you must believe that A is true, but you must also believe that modus ponens holds. But this means that you actually have to believe that A and modus ponens holds and that A and modus ponens holding at the same time prove B. But now you have to believe the latter as well. But now you have to figure out the issue of how you tie the knot in your logic because you now need to believe three things to prove to yourself that B is true. And it keeps going, four, five, six, and at the end, you need to believe an infinite amount of finite "facts" to prove that A->B is true if A is true. Which means you're getting into higher order logics (HOLs) in order to have a finite number of items to think about.
And we really haven't spent any time on the philosophical epistemological questions that underlie even this.
In the end, you can't get away from faith at a whole lot of levels. And, oddly enough, the more levels you know about, the more faith you need.
In reality, that faith is bolstered by knowing that if someone did actually poke holes in these models, they'd probably get either that Fields Medal or Abel Prize (not to mention getting that tenured position that they'd really want), so it's not that large of a leap of faith, especially since a large number of these foundational subjects have been formalized for 50+ years now (calculus has it's roots tracing back 300+ years, naive logic back over 2000+ years) and no one has poked significant holes in them yet.
So the real question is "Where is the line between faith and truth?". Which, of course, is a philosophical question.
Thats because Warren Buffet doesn't like the idea of transferring wealth from one generation to the next.
Well, that and he really didn't need to since the BRK.A and BRK.B shares he gave them made them quite comfortable for the rest of their lives, unless they sold them all and blew it on hookers and scotch. Hell, his son sits on the board of Berkshire Hathaway.
They also had the incredibly strange line "... only secure persons are allowed onto the facility..." I guess I'd be too insecure to get onto the facility. Maybe they'd let me go inside instead.
But, to be honest, when I looked at the slide show... meh... It's a stupid ugly room inside a stupid ugly building with stupid ugly suburban business park landscaping outside with a bunch of wire, boxes, batteries and generators inside the room. And not even pretty or unusual ones at that. Oh yeah... there are also four cheap, ugly monitors sitting on an ugly table - Verizon won't even pay a few dollars to mount them in a console and give the operator a comfortable chair? How is this different from any other data center pictures (other than being more boring)?
I wasted two minutes of my life for this? Who the hell mods these things up for posting, anyway?
Although there tends to be a Dr. Who bias whereby whichever Doctor you see first is your favorite Doctor (similar to one's first James Bond), my personal favorites are Tom Baker (#4) and David Tennant (#10).
That's not particularly true for me... I started watching Doctor Who when Tom Baker played the character. When the switch to Peter Davidson was made, he became my favorite Doctor (I sort of liked the fact that he seemed annoyed most of the time). I really didn't much care for Colin Baker, but Sylvester McCoy was sort of OK (if you could get past the crappy writing) - he was actually better in the Fox movie where he died and was replaced with Paul McGann (but again, the writing sucked), and McGann was OK for the single movie he was in. But with Chris Eckleston and the relaunch of the series, things really took off. He quickly became my favorite Doctor. David Tennant was fine, and Matt Smith has been saved so far by really great writing but, in my opinion, Eckleston has been the best Doctor - his combination of actually showing a range of emotions together with a great sense of him having fun and with some of the best writing happening when the relaunched show was fresh makes him the right place to start and him my favorite Doctor (up to this point; that's one of the great things about Doctor Who - the next one can always be better).
And, so to get back to your point, while there might be a bias among fans where the first Doctor you see is your favorite, it isn't always so. In fact, I'd take any of the ones from the new, relaunched series over any of the old ones.
When you build a new freeway, you will reduce traffic.
No, you will only increase traffic flow and road area. Which is a separate thing entirely from traffic - the integral of traffic flow over time and the road area. Traffic engineering is enineering and you have to understand what the terms mean if you're going to discuss it with any effectiveness.
In fact, the GP was correct - in general, increasing the numbers of freeways will tend to increase traffic because there is an increased flow over a wider area per unit time. However, your perception of traffic, will decrease for a while. This is what makes the notion of building roads so seductive (well that and the government contracts that can be given to politicians' friends). Yes, building more roads is very seductive but, in the long run, counterproductive.
'Now Timmy, eat your veggies, or the Men in Black Suits are going to come and assassinate Mommy and Daddy...you wouldn't want that, now would you?'.
Yeah. 'Cause I know that little fucker, Timmy. He'd just say "No biggie," and toss the rest of the plate on the floor just to watch it happen. Kids these days...
Could it be that the problem is entitlement attitudes of native-born Americans?
Yes, as an American, I believe that I am entitled to an American government that supports and oversees economic activity, including labor policies, which lead to a better standard of living for myself and my family and others who live in my nation while maintaining a morally defensible wealth distribution. And, BTW, your remark is stereotyping, prejudicial, and condescending. Not to mention stupid.
Our public education system does a terrible job at showing how math is relevant.
Fuck relevancy. The reason you study math is for its inherent logical beauty. If you don't see that, you don't get logic and you're going to be a crappy scientist / engineer / programmer anyway. If you want "relevancy" go into one of the arts or social sciences.
What can be expected isn't radical sweeping changes even though his speeches identify that as a goal. Rather what you can expect is progress towards that goal.
Actually, Wisconsin has shown the opposite, especially when extremists like those in the Tea Party are making policies. Extremists will push things as far as they can, as they are certain that they are right. Ron Paul strikes me as a man who is *very* certain of his beliefs and, as such, is prone to extremism. In this case, being "principled" means that you're not open to compromise. He strikes me as a man who probably doesn't much care if he gets re-elected as long as he can enact the changes he thinks are "right".
I can't begin to count the number of times market forces, amortizing massive investments over huge economies of scale, have trumped common sense.
In a command sector of a mixed economy, such as this sector is, the government can absorb the massive investment costs and can effectively ignore "market forces" that you mention. Once the companies designing and fabbing the chips are strong/advanced enough, they can be unleashed upon the world as a very strong competitor. This is one of the advantages of having an actual industrial policy. Sadly, the free-market religion being adhered to by the US these days cannot fathom any way that this might actually work and, as such, disallows any such governmental "interference".
I expect our chip-design and manufacturing leadership to be lost to China in 5-10 years. Maybe this will start people thinking that the free market is not a panacea. But it's OK because the free market gives us the freedom to lose. Sort of like the homeless people wandering around your downtown who say they like living on the streets better than "getting help". Yes, we Americans love our myths...
Oh yeah? Then why haven't I gotten one yet? I mean, besides from the fact of having done nothing particularly interesting in the fields of Chemistry, Physics, or Medicine... But other than that, I totally deserve one - and I haven't got mine yet. So, yeah... ABSOLUTELY CORRUPT!
And, for those of you who actually think I'm serious... WOOOOOSH!
If I came along and removed say, your finger, you would have every right to be pissed because it isn't my right to remove your finger since it isn't my finger.
Yes, but that's because I'm a human being who can feel pain and who has some idea I'd like to keep my finger. I fail to see how a clump of cells which has not even yet developed a finger, let alone a nervous system, would protest about its "finger" being taken. You propose a moral equivalence between the living and the not-quite-living that is invalid.
In fact, I'll go even further... Once one could prove that I had no sensations and no chance of having the same back, I'd be perfectly fine with the harvesting of my organs, even if the cost of that would be my own death - it's something that I ponder, coming up on my last few decades on this mudball and it's one of the reasons we have living wills and, in my state, physician-assisted suicide. Of course, you probably don't believe in these, either.
And now your only defense is that somehow, this clump of cells is a human being who just doesn't know it yet (actually, doesn't know anything yet). I disagree. Each of my cells potentially has the capability of becoming another me - we just don't have the scientific capability of doing it yet (we have it in other mammals now, it's just a matter of time). When I cut my toenails, am I destroying life? Why not? It has the "potential" to grow into another me (modulo teleomeres and environmental influences). In fact, since some of the cells have mutations, they're probably a different human being than me. So why am I not a murderer, when I cut my toenails? Or guilty of involuntary homicide when I cut myself and some of my "unique" cells die?
Let's take another tack - some kids out there have the "potential" to turn into murderers. But we don't execute all kids because of this "potential". The law doesn't tend to honor "potential" when it comes to individual behavior. Why should we honor the "potential" of an unformed blastocyst to become another human being? I just don't see it. Maybe you can come up with a new argument, but all the ones I've heard so far are unconvincing.
They will be obliged to live off of the welfare of others. Luckily food is cheap, internet is cheap, computers are cheap - they will have lots of amusements.
Really? Because our current begrudging support of the "welfare queens" and "anchor babies" is going so well... Yes, the rich will always be willing to share enough resources with the poor to make sure they have enough to live on. Get back to me when you can live on what gets passed out by our current munificent economic overlords.
...each artist will earn a pittance. Luckily, said pittance will be enough to live modestly
Really? Have you actually talked to an "artist" recently? In the music business, most folks can't get enough gigs with enough pay to survive on. What little income they do make is generally made by teaching or working a day job. Of course, if your definition of "modestly" is "starving to death", I'm sure you're right.
People at the top will get taxed more. There's simply no way around it.
Yeah, other than just letting the poor die... Why under your glorious economic paradise will this not happen? Oh yes, the benevolence of the wealthy. Oddly enough, we've tried that before. Historical note... IT DIDN'T WORK!
Over time, politically, we'll have a human leader who is advised by a bunch of humans who are themselves advised by a bunch of robots.
Why of course we will - because our leaders pay attention to the best research available to them every day, right now! Of course, they'd always take a rational, non-ideological position once shown that it was correct! What was I thinking!?!
There will be some fantastic innovations.
Well, unless we've picked all of the low-hanging technological fruit. Maybe the new discoveries will require probabilistic modeling that can't be done. Or maybe the only way that we'll have a positive expected value from the discoveries would take more resources or risk than anyone has available. Maybe we have reached the limits of what we can reasonably do with the physical world (when your next physical theory talks about things happening at the Planck length or the diameter of the universe, you can be pretty sure that it's not going to be particularly useful without a whole bunch of additional work which probably won't be done by an isolated scientist sitting at his home lab bench). And even if you can find someone willing to personally take the risks involved with new technology, will society allow it? Oh, yeah, I forgot... The robots will tell us to do it and we'll obey.
So if you're a die-hard scientist, you're in good shape.
Have you looked at the statistics for scientific employment lately? Especially in the chemistry, biological, and physical fields? The cost of scientific research is going up as more expensive laboratories and equipment is needed to push our knowledge the next millimeter along. Who will fund this work? Have you looked at corporate R (as opposed to D) funding? It's gone down for the last thirty years, especially when you limit it to institutions wealthy enough to engage in fundamental physical research.
Entertainers will do reasonably well, but that's technically just a subset of art.
Wow! All this and we still can't get rid of Brittney Spears and Celine Dion... well, at least Celine can sing.
They will grow, and pay dividends, and you will benefit from that.
Well, at least if you can afford to buy the stock, something which the current underclass cannot afford to do. As long as we're talking pie in the sky, why don't we just dilute all corporate stock by 50% and hand out the new shares to our citizenry? Oh yeah, the ones who are doing well under our current system wouldn't like that.
I'm sure people are scoffing 'hey look, the software guy says that software guys are going to win'. And that's fair.
No, we're scoffing at your naive viewpoint; at your a
I'll concede that Krugman may indeed be a popular bloviator who uses his economics credentials for credibility rather than knowledge
Bash Krugman all you want, but the guy has better statistics-based macroeconomic models than all of the philosophy-based fresh-water economists put together. And, he's still doing relevant, published research in the field. There are many economists out there far more worthy of the phrase "using his credentials for credibility" than Krugman.
It's funny how the "natural" unemployment figure moves over time. In the late fifties, it was assumed that the rate was in the 2-3% range. In the seventies, it had moved to the 3-5% range, and now you're hearing economists talking about 5-8% being the new "natural" rate. I think that what "natural" really means in this context is "how much we can get away with without people rioting in the streets".
Slashdot Mirror
They won't because he is really good at what he does.
That's not the only reason. They won't fire him because it's not necessary. Given his health, it's only a matter of time before they need to hunt for a new CEO, anyway.
The people who think that SQL sucks don't usually understand it. The first hurdle is that you need to think about it as a set-oriented language. You are dealing with operations that work on sets. You select a subset of all objects in the table, filter for only the columns that you want, modify them via update, insert new items, join two sets together, etc. If you come looking at it as a procedural replacement, you are starting out screwed.
Next, like all languages, the pure relational model has grown warts (some significant) over the years. If you're willing to consider Java or Ruby as decent languages (and there are a lot of flaws at the language level in both), you shouldn't hate on SQL for this kind of thing.
Finally, there are things that should have been in SQL that were never actually standardized - things like schema migration, for example. Yes, the language does a crappy job at them and in ways that are incompatible between implementations. But, when you look at todays object-oriented languages, which have no standardized way to migrate objects from one version to the next (well, except for CLOS-respecting Common Lisp implementations), I don't see these sorts of things as a shortcoming - languages get standardized when they get standardized.
So, yes, it's a crappy language - just like all the rest out there. But at least the language core is built on a formal model which can be followed to make databases work together better. It's longevity is not just because Microsoft or Oracle said to use it. It's because, when you get right down to it, it's a pretty reasonable language for what it was meant to do. Just like FORTRAN, COBOL, C, and many others. And it still has a better syntax than Perl. What's not to love?
Well, I'd take the "on faith" out of quotes, especially with mathematics.
First, you need to believe that the proofs were done correctly and that they have no holes. In most cases, this is fairly self-evident, as a student having a engineering-oriented undergraduate calculus class can do the proofs required to this level of understanding. But it doesn't stop there...
This level of proof is contingent upon the real number system working "as expected". In order to prove this level of stuff (unless you want to get into abstractions like filter theory and other esoteric topological models), you need to understand things like Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences. Which all have their own level of proof into which errors might have crept.
And even before this, you need to understand how integers work. You need to believe enough set theory to build this edifice.
Finally, you get to the point where you have to believe that that standard naive models of logic work (and, yes, there are alternative models of logic, as well, should you want to go down this path) - and all of these have places where mistakes in proofs might have crept in.
Then you have the infinite regress problem: If you believe that A->B is true, you must believe that A is true, but you must also believe that modus ponens holds. But this means that you actually have to believe that A and modus ponens holds and that A and modus ponens holding at the same time prove B. But now you have to believe the latter as well. But now you have to figure out the issue of how you tie the knot in your logic because you now need to believe three things to prove to yourself that B is true. And it keeps going, four, five, six, and at the end, you need to believe an infinite amount of finite "facts" to prove that A->B is true if A is true. Which means you're getting into higher order logics (HOLs) in order to have a finite number of items to think about.
And we really haven't spent any time on the philosophical epistemological questions that underlie even this.
In the end, you can't get away from faith at a whole lot of levels. And, oddly enough, the more levels you know about, the more faith you need.
In reality, that faith is bolstered by knowing that if someone did actually poke holes in these models, they'd probably get either that Fields Medal or Abel Prize (not to mention getting that tenured position that they'd really want), so it's not that large of a leap of faith, especially since a large number of these foundational subjects have been formalized for 50+ years now (calculus has it's roots tracing back 300+ years, naive logic back over 2000+ years) and no one has poked significant holes in them yet.
So the real question is "Where is the line between faith and truth?". Which, of course, is a philosophical question.
It was titled "The Idiot's Lantern" - series 2, episode 7.
Thats because Warren Buffet doesn't like the idea of transferring wealth from one generation to the next.
Well, that and he really didn't need to since the BRK.A and BRK.B shares he gave them made them quite comfortable for the rest of their lives, unless they sold them all and blew it on hookers and scotch. Hell, his son sits on the board of Berkshire Hathaway.
... my reviewers only really care about one thing: number of publications in peer reviewed journals. Everything else comes in last.
Oh come on, I'm sure the grants you bring in (or don't bring in) are more important.
They also had the incredibly strange line "... only secure persons are allowed onto the facility..." I guess I'd be too insecure to get onto the facility. Maybe they'd let me go inside instead.
But, to be honest, when I looked at the slide show... meh... It's a stupid ugly room inside a stupid ugly building with stupid ugly suburban business park landscaping outside with a bunch of wire, boxes, batteries and generators inside the room. And not even pretty or unusual ones at that. Oh yeah... there are also four cheap, ugly monitors sitting on an ugly table - Verizon won't even pay a few dollars to mount them in a console and give the operator a comfortable chair? How is this different from any other data center pictures (other than being more boring)?
I wasted two minutes of my life for this? Who the hell mods these things up for posting, anyway?
Although there tends to be a Dr. Who bias whereby whichever Doctor you see first is your favorite Doctor (similar to one's first James Bond), my personal favorites are Tom Baker (#4) and David Tennant (#10).
That's not particularly true for me... I started watching Doctor Who when Tom Baker played the character. When the switch to Peter Davidson was made, he became my favorite Doctor (I sort of liked the fact that he seemed annoyed most of the time). I really didn't much care for Colin Baker, but Sylvester McCoy was sort of OK (if you could get past the crappy writing) - he was actually better in the Fox movie where he died and was replaced with Paul McGann (but again, the writing sucked), and McGann was OK for the single movie he was in. But with Chris Eckleston and the relaunch of the series, things really took off. He quickly became my favorite Doctor. David Tennant was fine, and Matt Smith has been saved so far by really great writing but, in my opinion, Eckleston has been the best Doctor - his combination of actually showing a range of emotions together with a great sense of him having fun and with some of the best writing happening when the relaunched show was fresh makes him the right place to start and him my favorite Doctor (up to this point; that's one of the great things about Doctor Who - the next one can always be better).
And, so to get back to your point, while there might be a bias among fans where the first Doctor you see is your favorite, it isn't always so. In fact, I'd take any of the ones from the new, relaunched series over any of the old ones.
When you build a new freeway, you will reduce traffic.
No, you will only increase traffic flow and road area. Which is a separate thing entirely from traffic - the integral of traffic flow over time and the road area. Traffic engineering is enineering and you have to understand what the terms mean if you're going to discuss it with any effectiveness.
In fact, the GP was correct - in general, increasing the numbers of freeways will tend to increase traffic because there is an increased flow over a wider area per unit time. However, your perception of traffic, will decrease for a while. This is what makes the notion of building roads so seductive (well that and the government contracts that can be given to politicians' friends). Yes, building more roads is very seductive but, in the long run, counterproductive.
'Now Timmy, eat your veggies, or the Men in Black Suits are going to come and assassinate Mommy and Daddy...you wouldn't want that, now would you?'.
Yeah. 'Cause I know that little fucker, Timmy. He'd just say "No biggie," and toss the rest of the plate on the floor just to watch it happen. Kids these days...
Could it be that the problem is entitlement attitudes of native-born Americans?
Yes, as an American, I believe that I am entitled to an American government that supports and oversees economic activity, including labor policies, which lead to a better standard of living for myself and my family and others who live in my nation while maintaining a morally defensible wealth distribution. And, BTW, your remark is stereotyping, prejudicial, and condescending. Not to mention stupid.
...how easy it was to get their MBA, because all they did was get drunk, skip class, and screw hookers all the time.
Hey! To be fair, they did have a pulse and paid their tuition, too!
Our public education system does a terrible job at showing how math is relevant.
Fuck relevancy. The reason you study math is for its inherent logical beauty. If you don't see that, you don't get logic and you're going to be a crappy scientist / engineer / programmer anyway. If you want "relevancy" go into one of the arts or social sciences.
Tell me, is the English language better off or worse off for it?
Yes. A living language is usually better than a dead one. Ask the ancient Romans.
What can be expected isn't radical sweeping changes even though his speeches identify that as a goal. Rather what you can expect is progress towards that goal.
Actually, Wisconsin has shown the opposite, especially when extremists like those in the Tea Party are making policies. Extremists will push things as far as they can, as they are certain that they are right. Ron Paul strikes me as a man who is *very* certain of his beliefs and, as such, is prone to extremism. In this case, being "principled" means that you're not open to compromise. He strikes me as a man who probably doesn't much care if he gets re-elected as long as he can enact the changes he thinks are "right".
Can I get a law giving me the right to be remembered online? Forever? How about a law that requires everyone to notice me online? That could be handy.
I can't begin to count the number of times market forces, amortizing massive investments over huge economies of scale, have trumped common sense.
In a command sector of a mixed economy, such as this sector is, the government can absorb the massive investment costs and can effectively ignore "market forces" that you mention. Once the companies designing and fabbing the chips are strong/advanced enough, they can be unleashed upon the world as a very strong competitor. This is one of the advantages of having an actual industrial policy. Sadly, the free-market religion being adhered to by the US these days cannot fathom any way that this might actually work and, as such, disallows any such governmental "interference".
I expect our chip-design and manufacturing leadership to be lost to China in 5-10 years. Maybe this will start people thinking that the free market is not a panacea. But it's OK because the free market gives us the freedom to lose. Sort of like the homeless people wandering around your downtown who say they like living on the streets better than "getting help". Yes, we Americans love our myths...
have you ever seen a moose wearing a dress?
Do you Republicans have to bring up Sarah Palin on every single story?
Ponies!!!
Oh yeah? Then why haven't I gotten one yet? I mean, besides from the fact of having done nothing particularly interesting in the fields of Chemistry, Physics, or Medicine... But other than that, I totally deserve one - and I haven't got mine yet. So, yeah... ABSOLUTELY CORRUPT!
And, for those of you who actually think I'm serious... WOOOOOSH!
... that's just because I like librarians
Yeah, me too.
If I came along and removed say, your finger, you would have every right to be pissed because it isn't my right to remove your finger since it isn't my finger.
Yes, but that's because I'm a human being who can feel pain and who has some idea I'd like to keep my finger. I fail to see how a clump of cells which has not even yet developed a finger, let alone a nervous system, would protest about its "finger" being taken. You propose a moral equivalence between the living and the not-quite-living that is invalid.
In fact, I'll go even further... Once one could prove that I had no sensations and no chance of having the same back, I'd be perfectly fine with the harvesting of my organs, even if the cost of that would be my own death - it's something that I ponder, coming up on my last few decades on this mudball and it's one of the reasons we have living wills and, in my state, physician-assisted suicide. Of course, you probably don't believe in these, either.
And now your only defense is that somehow, this clump of cells is a human being who just doesn't know it yet (actually, doesn't know anything yet). I disagree. Each of my cells potentially has the capability of becoming another me - we just don't have the scientific capability of doing it yet (we have it in other mammals now, it's just a matter of time). When I cut my toenails, am I destroying life? Why not? It has the "potential" to grow into another me (modulo teleomeres and environmental influences). In fact, since some of the cells have mutations, they're probably a different human being than me. So why am I not a murderer, when I cut my toenails? Or guilty of involuntary homicide when I cut myself and some of my "unique" cells die?
Let's take another tack - some kids out there have the "potential" to turn into murderers. But we don't execute all kids because of this "potential". The law doesn't tend to honor "potential" when it comes to individual behavior. Why should we honor the "potential" of an unformed blastocyst to become another human being? I just don't see it. Maybe you can come up with a new argument, but all the ones I've heard so far are unconvincing.
Where to start... where to start?
They will be obliged to live off of the welfare of others. Luckily food is cheap, internet is cheap, computers are cheap - they will have lots of amusements.
Really? Because our current begrudging support of the "welfare queens" and "anchor babies" is going so well... Yes, the rich will always be willing to share enough resources with the poor to make sure they have enough to live on. Get back to me when you can live on what gets passed out by our current munificent economic overlords.
Really? Have you actually talked to an "artist" recently? In the music business, most folks can't get enough gigs with enough pay to survive on. What little income they do make is generally made by teaching or working a day job. Of course, if your definition of "modestly" is "starving to death", I'm sure you're right.
People at the top will get taxed more. There's simply no way around it.
Yeah, other than just letting the poor die... Why under your glorious economic paradise will this not happen? Oh yes, the benevolence of the wealthy. Oddly enough, we've tried that before. Historical note... IT DIDN'T WORK!
Over time, politically, we'll have a human leader who is advised by a bunch of humans who are themselves advised by a bunch of robots.
Why of course we will - because our leaders pay attention to the best research available to them every day, right now! Of course, they'd always take a rational, non-ideological position once shown that it was correct! What was I thinking!?!
There will be some fantastic innovations.
Well, unless we've picked all of the low-hanging technological fruit. Maybe the new discoveries will require probabilistic modeling that can't be done. Or maybe the only way that we'll have a positive expected value from the discoveries would take more resources or risk than anyone has available. Maybe we have reached the limits of what we can reasonably do with the physical world (when your next physical theory talks about things happening at the Planck length or the diameter of the universe, you can be pretty sure that it's not going to be particularly useful without a whole bunch of additional work which probably won't be done by an isolated scientist sitting at his home lab bench). And even if you can find someone willing to personally take the risks involved with new technology, will society allow it? Oh, yeah, I forgot... The robots will tell us to do it and we'll obey.
So if you're a die-hard scientist, you're in good shape.
Have you looked at the statistics for scientific employment lately? Especially in the chemistry, biological, and physical fields? The cost of scientific research is going up as more expensive laboratories and equipment is needed to push our knowledge the next millimeter along. Who will fund this work? Have you looked at corporate R (as opposed to D) funding? It's gone down for the last thirty years, especially when you limit it to institutions wealthy enough to engage in fundamental physical research.
Entertainers will do reasonably well, but that's technically just a subset of art.
Wow! All this and we still can't get rid of Brittney Spears and Celine Dion... well, at least Celine can sing.
They will grow, and pay dividends, and you will benefit from that.
Well, at least if you can afford to buy the stock, something which the current underclass cannot afford to do. As long as we're talking pie in the sky, why don't we just dilute all corporate stock by 50% and hand out the new shares to our citizenry? Oh yeah, the ones who are doing well under our current system wouldn't like that.
I'm sure people are scoffing 'hey look, the software guy says that software guys are going to win'. And that's fair.
No, we're scoffing at your naive viewpoint; at your a
I'll concede that Krugman may indeed be a popular bloviator who uses his economics credentials for credibility rather than knowledge
Bash Krugman all you want, but the guy has better statistics-based macroeconomic models than all of the philosophy-based fresh-water economists put together. And, he's still doing relevant, published research in the field. There are many economists out there far more worthy of the phrase "using his credentials for credibility" than Krugman.
It's funny how the "natural" unemployment figure moves over time. In the late fifties, it was assumed that the rate was in the 2-3% range. In the seventies, it had moved to the 3-5% range, and now you're hearing economists talking about 5-8% being the new "natural" rate. I think that what "natural" really means in this context is "how much we can get away with without people rioting in the streets".