I've heard that the right/left difference in Europe is just whether one wants to be controlled by the church or by the state. In the US it is whether one wants to be controlled by the state, or by themselves.
The difference between left and right in the US is whether one wants to be controlled mostly by the state and moderately by giant corporations, or moderately by the state and mostly by giant corporations.
Those in the political arena who advocate actually for people being controlled mostly by themselves are a minority on both continents: "libertarians" in the US and "liberals" in Europe.
Yeah, he used "Balkanisation" properly. However, he would never ever stereotype African Americans or Hispanics the same way...but stereotyping people from the Balkans is OK. Based on one decade of history (the 1990s). Of course people of Balkan origin in the USA are not a recognized identity politics group with activists to scream "discrimination!", so it's OK.
Recently I got a smart watch as a gift. Ended up being returned to the store. Since...what's the point exactly? It has to be tethered via bluetooth nonstop to my phone. So why exactly am I wearing it, if the phone always has to be nearby, in my pocket, on the table, in my backpack? I can control my phone via it...wait, why would I just not pick up the phone in my hand then? I don't need a remote control for something that's within arm's reach. With a phone app to add, just more bloatware on my smartphone, it has enough, thanks.
The only thing that was kind of cool was the ability to change the watch face...so I can have a different watch every day, sort of. However I have to think about charging enough gadgets as is...the smart watch is not worth the hassle. The screen is too small for anything productive (who wants to read e-mail from a small watch screen?). I spend too much time looking at screens every day as is...don't need another one.
A smart watch may be a good plot device in James Bond movie. Not really practical for most people.
I just want to point out that human excrement counts as natural fertilizer, too. In some places it has been used for that purpose for thousands of years.
Which turns out to be a pretty bad idea for a number of reasons.
The link above outlines some of the problems with using treated human excrement as fertilizer. Using untreated human excrement is known to be highly risky, as it is likely to cause and spread disease.
"Guys, computers are just stupid machines. They just do what we tell them to do - but don't tell anybody that, people think they are magic, and we make a lot of money from that."
With a Greek accent, where "sh" and "ch" are pronounced like "ss", and "j" and soft "g" are pronounced like "dz".
I don't understand why people extrapolate so much from a computer being able to beat humans at chess. Or any similar game. Sure, it's a great feat of programming, but it doesn't mean "strong AI" is coming any time soon. These are just...games. Meaning, things humans made up to fill up their spare time. Some may be very complex, but ultimately they are very precise constructs of the human mind with very well-defined, restrictive rules. It is not strange that ultimately, one precise construct of the human mind (an AI program) can "figure out" another (a game of chess). Finally, there are games we humans play because they are challenging for us, but which are fundamentally easy for computers (for example, those which require doing calculations or figuring out probabilities on the fly). A true strong AI would beat us at the stuff we do easily, without even thinking about it.
Until people realize that any kind of universal basic income scheme will never do what it's intended to do.
Reduce the cost of the social safety net? Simplify and cheapen for the taxpayer the dispensation of social assistance? How is that related to housing in SF?
The UBI is not about "ending poverty". It's about simplifying state aid to individuals. A ton of which is already paid out to people in every developed country, but very inefficiently.
However, the idea of UBI, or at least, the sane version, is that it would be implemented in an "economy of plenty" where automation was producing goods and services at much lower costs and much higher availability. Those conditions are hand-wavey; we can't quantify them yet, so it's problematic to try and predict the costs of living, etc. But that's why UBI or similar will be required; workers will be out and automation will be in. It's not today's landscape that defines the need.
Uhm, no.
UBI was not conceived, as an idea, as a response to rising automation and the prospect of large masses of unemployed people. This prospect, due to the current automation and AI hype, which I believe to be vastly overblown (as it was in the past - yes, lots of people will lose their current jobs, but most of them will find other ones), is being used currently to additionally argue in favour of some sort of UBI. That, however, is rather beside the point.
UBI was originally conceived as an idea that radically simplifies and cheapens the various types of state aid given to people, while at the same time removing the stigma attached with them. There are many potentially "sane" variants of UBI, with one being the Negative Income Tax (NIT) proposed by Rhys-Williams and Milton Friedman. Another option is the Guaranteed Livable Income (GLI) scheme proposed by the Green Party of Canada, where everyone is given a payment, but those who have jobs essentially pay this back via taxes, so in the end it ends up being a sort of welfare payment that the unemployed (and poorly paid) collect.
The point being, if I just pay out EVERYONE e.g. $1500 a month (or whatever), I don't have to (as a state/government) worry about checking who qualifies for welfare, pension assistance, subsidies for their energy bills, food stamps, or whatever else I was already giving out to those in need. I can eliminate all those programs, all the costs associated with them, all the employees associated with them. I don't have to go around chasing welfare recipients to see if they're attending their retraining course, going to job fairs, applying for work, or not delivering pizza on the side without declaring their income. Furthermore, I've removed the stigma from getting welfare (since EVERYONE gets it, both the millionaire and the homeless bum on the street) which often traps people in a cycle of dependence and poverty. The end result, since the people who have a job will repay this money via taxes, is more or less the same as today: people without a job, poor people, people in need, get monetary assistance from the government. At a lower total cost to the government than today - hypothetically.
Now, there are lots of details to work out - do we still need minimum wage laws? Will companies that use low-cost labour (e.g. fast food joints) "piggy-back" on UBI and skim the profits by just paying their employees a UBI "top-up" rather than the full salary, offloading costs to the government? What exactly should the UBI amount be, per month? How do you to the "claw-back" via taxes to make it fair and still motivate people to work? How do you prevent people moving from low-UBI jurisdictions to high-UBI jurisdictions just to make more money by doing nothing? How does one qualify for UBI in the first place? Etc., etc.
Almost none of these are related to automation and mass joblessness however, and none require a futuristic economy of plenty.
If everyone followed his advice our Clown World economy would collapse.
My thoughts exactly. "There's a lot of crap you don't need," he says. Kinda like most of the stuff being pitched on Shark Tank. Kinda like Shark Tank itself. Or TV game shows in general. Or...
Microsoft have demonstrated time and time again when they come up with a fancy new UI, it's pretty much garbage. Please, don't give me the same crappy interface I'd have on a little mobile device on my multi-monitor desktop setup. It boggles the mind how MS can be so utterly fucking clueless about the fact that many of us don't work on mobile devices.
Microsoft isn't unfortunately the only problem. (G)UI designers, especially for operating systems (i.e. the desktop, whatever you want to call it) seem to have something up their ass...some kind of insatiable urge to re-design everything, to make "better" things that have been figured out and work. Microsoft isn't the only offender here (although they are the ones with the most impact due to their market share), look at GNOME 3. Or look at what KDE was doing with Plasma before reverting to "folder view" (i.e. the traditional desktop) as the default in one of the recent versions.
The funny thing is that mobile devices have also adopted a version of the traditional desktop, despite having the opportunity to start fresh and having to work with a different input method (fingers not mice and keyboards). Think about it, your Android device has a desktop...icons you tap to open things, a button you push to see all the windows which are open, and to switch between them...this is because this approach makes sense and is intuitive.
Why do people keep having the urge to reinvent the wheel? Just for novelty's sake? "I am so smart and it's not invented here" syndrome?
Anyone arguing against dual citizenship hates freedom. Why do they hate freedom? Do they want people to have less freedom?
Not to mention that like 99.999% of the time, whether your neighbour has dual, triple or quadruple citizenship has no effect on your potentially single-citizenship self. If you are a citizen of country X, while you are in country X the government of country X will treat you just like any other citizen of country X and won't give a damn whether you are a citizen of another or of another 10 countries.
Canada even explicitly states this for example (it's written in the passport, or used to be, I think). If you are in another country where you are a citizen, you fall under their laws and regulations as such and there's nothing the Canadian government can do about that. Essentially they say we'll care about you as a Canadian citizen while you're in Canada or in a third country on a Canadian passport - but if you're in your other country of citizenship, you're on your own. I think that's fair.
Multiple citizenships are not just freebies for people who hold them (like the ability to potentially travel to more countries visa-free than with just one of the passports you have), they also entail responsibilities. If you are a US citizen, you must report your income to the US government every year and potentially pay taxes on it even if you are also a Polish citizen who is living in Poland currently.
Not to mention that there are millions of people on this planet with "dormant" secondary citizenship(s). Let's say you moved from Somalia to the US as a refugee and eventually became a US citizen. After that you let your Somali passport and other ID documents expire since you didn't care anymore. Technically you are still a Somali citizen. Renouncing that citizenship (which you do not use in practice at all) would probably be a great pain in the ass. Why make people go through that?
In order to go to school or work in the United States, you should have to be a citizen.
So basically you want zero immigration? You do realize that if you were to apply that logic retroactively, that there would be no US citizens at all today? Since they are all (Native Americans with 100% Native American ancestry excluded, which is a very tiny amount of the population) descendants of immigrants.
(After the first sentence, I thought you were being sarcastic. The second one changed my mind.)
It's also a mistake to have 00:00 set to midnight. Midnight doesn't seem like the end/start of a day. Midnight "feels" like late night of the same day. That is reason enough to have ordination of a day's hours not reset at midnight.
I'm slightly amused how in typical Slashdot fashion everyone picked up on my factual error (messing up the solar with the stellar day; btw guys, thanks for the correction, my mistake) but not on the crux of my argument that the way we tell time is largely arbitrary, as your post nicely points out. I don't see the difference, in terms of accuracy and in relation to physics, between calling noon 12 o'clock and calling it 8 o'clock as in your suggestion. Having said that, I don't really see the practical difference, in the same sense, between solar noon falling at 12 or at 1 (or 11). Numbering the hours is just a convention in the end. I mean, why even a 24 hour clock? Why not metric time or decimal time? Again, just a convention that has stuck around.
Knowing that, there is nothing wrong with slightly manipulating these conventions (like having "permanent" DST) in order to achieve something we find desirable (like more daylight hours in the afternoon and evening, which is suitable for a mostly urban population that does not rise at the crack of dawn but mostly works 9-5).
I'm not sure what time zones could move closer to solar noon on DST, I thought the eastern edge of the time zones is usually closest to solar noon.
The Central European Time zone (CET; GMT +1 that is, GMT +2 during DST) is arbitrarily extended both eastward and westward due to political reasons. Its western edges (Spain) should be GMT and its eastern edges (e.g. Serbia) GMT +2 (and they used to be until ~40 years ago). The eastern edges are therefore closer to noon during DST in the summer - and moving permanently to GMT +2 would make it so all year round.
Of course, for Spain for example, this would make things worse as it would make them permanently 2 hours out of wack, but I guess that could encourage them to move back to their "proper" time zone.
These types of situations are repeated all over the planet (think China, which despite spanning five actual time zones, is in a single time zone by decree), and DST seems to have a bit of a "smoothing" effect on these semi-arbitrary time zones, meaning that if it is to be abolished, there would be a lot of argument whether you should abolish DST or move to permanent DST. I would hope that such discussions would end with the most logical solution - the break-up of these arbitrary time zones into more sensible ones more closely aligned with the "true" time zones - but we can't really hope for that, as unfortunately politics trumps reason a lot of the time.
Clocks are based around solar noon. We're screwing it up half the year now, don't screw it up for the full year.
The actual day is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds, so we are already off by having a 24 hour day. Not to mention the year does not have 365 days exactly, which is why we have leap years, but the Gregorian calendar isn't perfect etc.
Furthermore, time zones (even we look at "pure, straight" time zones, not adjustments made for political or practical reasons) are a rough approximation. If every clock were tracking solar noon, the time 100 a miles away would be slightly different. Time zones were created to have predictable shifts in the clock. Ergo, most of the Earth is off of true solar noon, DST or not.
Finally, due to the arbitrary nature of some time zones due to political or economic considerations, moving permanently to DST would actually take a lot of places closer to actual solar noon.
Ultimately, telling time is just a convention. All that matters is that this convention is consistent planet-round so we can effectively schedule things. In the end, what is the practical difference of working 8-4 and setting the clock one hour forward and working 9-5?
So, basically people whose livelihood exists via social manipulation of actual producers, i.e. engineers.
Do you place auditors, retail workers, store managers, call centre workers, post office workers, garbage collectors, grad school administrative workers, lab technicians, etc. etc. in the same category? What about other engineers (see more below)?
Also, let's assume people are forced to come to the office rather than work from home just due to management paranoia. Why then do people from different partner companies fly half-way around the world (e.g. from Europe to Japan or vice-versa) to meet each other face to face when a skype call would do? Surely can't be just due to paranoia...
Speaking of other engineers: software/IT types are the ones who clamour about not being let to work from home...because most of the time, they just need a computer and an internet connection to work. However, calling most programmers "engineers" is a bit of a stretch (IMO, having worked both in software and hardware/electronics), so most engineers are not in software/IT. What if you're an electrical or mechanical engineer who needs to *build stuff*? If I need to work in a lab, I'm not going do dish out hundreds of $k to equip (a high-end oscilloscope can cost upwards of $30k) my basement (assuming I even have a basement of sufficient size), and my employer sure ain't gonna pay that either for each of their employees (which would be much more expensive than just having a single lab where everyone comes to work). Coming to work (and yes, commuting if necessary) is just the sensible thing to do. Also, how do I test a hardware prototype together with a colleague remotely?
Since most companies are not pure software/IT companies, you will have people from other domains working with you and in management, from domains that are not suitable for remote working. They might not have enough understanding for the software/IT people's desire to work from home, but the software/IT people have to understand where these people come from. Yes, an IT person might spend 90% of the time in his office doing stuff (s)he can easily do from home - but in the remaining 10% of the time Suzy from accounting wants to go down the hall and ask why her e-mail/printer/db app is not working and resolve the issue in 10 minutes, not have to call/e-mail the IT person and wait for an hour to have the problem fixed. Ultimately, software/IT is not an end to itself, it's a *tool* to get other useful work done.
The root cause of this problem is the (post-WW2) urban design and layout of most (North) American cities, not in the fact that employers require workers to be physically in the office.
There are places on this Earth where living (relatively) close to work is possible and affordable, where commuting is a 15 min. walk or a 30 min. bus/subway ride, or a 20 min. drive, or some such thing.
Not to mention that, outside of the Slashdot-type crowd, most people are not a/antisocial geeks that choose jobs that require minimal meaningful interaction with other people (I'm among the more antisocial types myself, but I realize that in wider society, I am in the minority). Maybe many or even most IT/tech jobs can mostly be done from home, but in other fields (think e.g. marketing, branding, event management, such things...then things like auditing...and lots of other examples) it is not possible.
Finally: slackers/abusers removed, the people who complain about not being able to work from home are the ones who like working from home and are productive doing so. Not all of us are productive working from our living room or bedroom (and actually few of us can afford the space for a dedicated home office), and we prefer to spacially separate our work and home lives, and not be distracted by the cat/dog/wife/kids/neighbour mowing the lawn/etc. while working, enjoy, if just for the sake of changing the scenery, getting out of the house and meeting our colleagues, etc.
Companies spend huge sums developing products, and they get severely punished if consumers don't want them. As an epistemological statement, I would bet they are right more often than you are on (even if not always).
You're making the assumption that companies only respond to market demands, which we know is not true (if it were, nothing truly new would come on to the market - how many focus groups would tell you in 1995 that everyone wants touchscreen smartphones?).
Companies actively shape market demand (or at least exert a lot of effort attempting to do so), sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Ergo a lot of what goes out there as product is a result not of market research are people's current tastes, but of someone's conscious and directed design and marketing decision.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard that the right/left difference in Europe is just whether one wants to be controlled by the church or by the state. In the US it is whether one wants to be controlled by the state, or by themselves.
The difference between left and right in the US is whether one wants to be controlled mostly by the state and moderately by giant corporations, or moderately by the state and mostly by giant corporations.
Those in the political arena who advocate actually for people being controlled mostly by themselves are a minority on both continents: "libertarians" in the US and "liberals" in Europe.
Yeah, he used "Balkanisation" properly. However, he would never ever stereotype African Americans or Hispanics the same way...but stereotyping people from the Balkans is OK. Based on one decade of history (the 1990s). Of course people of Balkan origin in the USA are not a recognized identity politics group with activists to scream "discrimination!", so it's OK.
This.
Recently I got a smart watch as a gift. Ended up being returned to the store. Since...what's the point exactly? It has to be tethered via bluetooth nonstop to my phone. So why exactly am I wearing it, if the phone always has to be nearby, in my pocket, on the table, in my backpack? I can control my phone via it...wait, why would I just not pick up the phone in my hand then? I don't need a remote control for something that's within arm's reach. With a phone app to add, just more bloatware on my smartphone, it has enough, thanks.
The only thing that was kind of cool was the ability to change the watch face...so I can have a different watch every day, sort of. However I have to think about charging enough gadgets as is...the smart watch is not worth the hassle. The screen is too small for anything productive (who wants to read e-mail from a small watch screen?). I spend too much time looking at screens every day as is...don't need another one.
A smart watch may be a good plot device in James Bond movie. Not really practical for most people.
Actually no, read the VICE article I linked, using treated human sewage is also problematic.
I just want to point out that human excrement counts as natural fertilizer, too. In some places it has been used for that purpose for thousands of years.
Which turns out to be a pretty bad idea for a number of reasons.
The link above outlines some of the problems with using treated human excrement as fertilizer. Using untreated human excrement is known to be highly risky, as it is likely to cause and spread disease.
"Guys, computers are just stupid machines. They just do what we tell them to do - but don't tell anybody that, people think they are magic, and we make a lot of money from that." With a Greek accent, where "sh" and "ch" are pronounced like "ss", and "j" and soft "g" are pronounced like "dz".
It means you can expect X-Men on Ice!
More properly known as Clippit. I'm sure it'll be great!
I don't understand why people extrapolate so much from a computer being able to beat humans at chess. Or any similar game. Sure, it's a great feat of programming, but it doesn't mean "strong AI" is coming any time soon. These are just...games. Meaning, things humans made up to fill up their spare time. Some may be very complex, but ultimately they are very precise constructs of the human mind with very well-defined, restrictive rules. It is not strange that ultimately, one precise construct of the human mind (an AI program) can "figure out" another (a game of chess). Finally, there are games we humans play because they are challenging for us, but which are fundamentally easy for computers (for example, those which require doing calculations or figuring out probabilities on the fly). A true strong AI would beat us at the stuff we do easily, without even thinking about it.
Until people realize that any kind of universal basic income scheme will never do what it's intended to do.
Reduce the cost of the social safety net? Simplify and cheapen for the taxpayer the dispensation of social assistance? How is that related to housing in SF?
The UBI is not about "ending poverty". It's about simplifying state aid to individuals. A ton of which is already paid out to people in every developed country, but very inefficiently.
However, the idea of UBI, or at least, the sane version, is that it would be implemented in an "economy of plenty" where automation was producing goods and services at much lower costs and much higher availability. Those conditions are hand-wavey; we can't quantify them yet, so it's problematic to try and predict the costs of living, etc. But that's why UBI or similar will be required; workers will be out and automation will be in. It's not today's landscape that defines the need.
Uhm, no.
UBI was not conceived, as an idea, as a response to rising automation and the prospect of large masses of unemployed people. This prospect, due to the current automation and AI hype, which I believe to be vastly overblown (as it was in the past - yes, lots of people will lose their current jobs, but most of them will find other ones), is being used currently to additionally argue in favour of some sort of UBI. That, however, is rather beside the point.
UBI was originally conceived as an idea that radically simplifies and cheapens the various types of state aid given to people, while at the same time removing the stigma attached with them. There are many potentially "sane" variants of UBI, with one being the Negative Income Tax (NIT) proposed by Rhys-Williams and Milton Friedman. Another option is the Guaranteed Livable Income (GLI) scheme proposed by the Green Party of Canada, where everyone is given a payment, but those who have jobs essentially pay this back via taxes, so in the end it ends up being a sort of welfare payment that the unemployed (and poorly paid) collect.
The point being, if I just pay out EVERYONE e.g. $1500 a month (or whatever), I don't have to (as a state/government) worry about checking who qualifies for welfare, pension assistance, subsidies for their energy bills, food stamps, or whatever else I was already giving out to those in need. I can eliminate all those programs, all the costs associated with them, all the employees associated with them. I don't have to go around chasing welfare recipients to see if they're attending their retraining course, going to job fairs, applying for work, or not delivering pizza on the side without declaring their income. Furthermore, I've removed the stigma from getting welfare (since EVERYONE gets it, both the millionaire and the homeless bum on the street) which often traps people in a cycle of dependence and poverty. The end result, since the people who have a job will repay this money via taxes, is more or less the same as today: people without a job, poor people, people in need, get monetary assistance from the government. At a lower total cost to the government than today - hypothetically.
Now, there are lots of details to work out - do we still need minimum wage laws? Will companies that use low-cost labour (e.g. fast food joints) "piggy-back" on UBI and skim the profits by just paying their employees a UBI "top-up" rather than the full salary, offloading costs to the government? What exactly should the UBI amount be, per month? How do you to the "claw-back" via taxes to make it fair and still motivate people to work? How do you prevent people moving from low-UBI jurisdictions to high-UBI jurisdictions just to make more money by doing nothing? How does one qualify for UBI in the first place? Etc., etc.
Almost none of these are related to automation and mass joblessness however, and none require a futuristic economy of plenty.
If everyone followed his advice our Clown World economy would collapse.
My thoughts exactly. "There's a lot of crap you don't need," he says. Kinda like most of the stuff being pitched on Shark Tank. Kinda like Shark Tank itself. Or TV game shows in general. Or...
My first thought was they were referring to some system's Extended Support Release.
Mine that they were talking about equivalent series resistance.
Microsoft have demonstrated time and time again when they come up with a fancy new UI, it's pretty much garbage. Please, don't give me the same crappy interface I'd have on a little mobile device on my multi-monitor desktop setup. It boggles the mind how MS can be so utterly fucking clueless about the fact that many of us don't work on mobile devices.
Microsoft isn't unfortunately the only problem. (G)UI designers, especially for operating systems (i.e. the desktop, whatever you want to call it) seem to have something up their ass...some kind of insatiable urge to re-design everything, to make "better" things that have been figured out and work. Microsoft isn't the only offender here (although they are the ones with the most impact due to their market share), look at GNOME 3. Or look at what KDE was doing with Plasma before reverting to "folder view" (i.e. the traditional desktop) as the default in one of the recent versions.
The funny thing is that mobile devices have also adopted a version of the traditional desktop, despite having the opportunity to start fresh and having to work with a different input method (fingers not mice and keyboards). Think about it, your Android device has a desktop...icons you tap to open things, a button you push to see all the windows which are open, and to switch between them...this is because this approach makes sense and is intuitive.
Why do people keep having the urge to reinvent the wheel? Just for novelty's sake? "I am so smart and it's not invented here" syndrome?
Anyone arguing against dual citizenship hates freedom. Why do they hate freedom? Do they want people to have less freedom?
Not to mention that like 99.999% of the time, whether your neighbour has dual, triple or quadruple citizenship has no effect on your potentially single-citizenship self. If you are a citizen of country X, while you are in country X the government of country X will treat you just like any other citizen of country X and won't give a damn whether you are a citizen of another or of another 10 countries.
Canada even explicitly states this for example (it's written in the passport, or used to be, I think). If you are in another country where you are a citizen, you fall under their laws and regulations as such and there's nothing the Canadian government can do about that. Essentially they say we'll care about you as a Canadian citizen while you're in Canada or in a third country on a Canadian passport - but if you're in your other country of citizenship, you're on your own. I think that's fair.
Multiple citizenships are not just freebies for people who hold them (like the ability to potentially travel to more countries visa-free than with just one of the passports you have), they also entail responsibilities. If you are a US citizen, you must report your income to the US government every year and potentially pay taxes on it even if you are also a Polish citizen who is living in Poland currently.
Not to mention that there are millions of people on this planet with "dormant" secondary citizenship(s). Let's say you moved from Somalia to the US as a refugee and eventually became a US citizen. After that you let your Somali passport and other ID documents expire since you didn't care anymore. Technically you are still a Somali citizen. Renouncing that citizenship (which you do not use in practice at all) would probably be a great pain in the ass. Why make people go through that?
In order to go to school or work in the United States, you should have to be a citizen.
So basically you want zero immigration? You do realize that if you were to apply that logic retroactively, that there would be no US citizens at all today? Since they are all (Native Americans with 100% Native American ancestry excluded, which is a very tiny amount of the population) descendants of immigrants.
(After the first sentence, I thought you were being sarcastic. The second one changed my mind.)
...will it include sharks?
It's also a mistake to have 00:00 set to midnight. Midnight doesn't seem like the end/start of a day. Midnight "feels" like late night of the same day. That is reason enough to have ordination of a day's hours not reset at midnight.
I'm slightly amused how in typical Slashdot fashion everyone picked up on my factual error (messing up the solar with the stellar day; btw guys, thanks for the correction, my mistake) but not on the crux of my argument that the way we tell time is largely arbitrary, as your post nicely points out. I don't see the difference, in terms of accuracy and in relation to physics, between calling noon 12 o'clock and calling it 8 o'clock as in your suggestion. Having said that, I don't really see the practical difference, in the same sense, between solar noon falling at 12 or at 1 (or 11). Numbering the hours is just a convention in the end. I mean, why even a 24 hour clock? Why not metric time or decimal time? Again, just a convention that has stuck around.
Knowing that, there is nothing wrong with slightly manipulating these conventions (like having "permanent" DST) in order to achieve something we find desirable (like more daylight hours in the afternoon and evening, which is suitable for a mostly urban population that does not rise at the crack of dawn but mostly works 9-5).
I'm not sure what time zones could move closer to solar noon on DST, I thought the eastern edge of the time zones is usually closest to solar noon.
The Central European Time zone (CET; GMT +1 that is, GMT +2 during DST) is arbitrarily extended both eastward and westward due to political reasons. Its western edges (Spain) should be GMT and its eastern edges (e.g. Serbia) GMT +2 (and they used to be until ~40 years ago). The eastern edges are therefore closer to noon during DST in the summer - and moving permanently to GMT +2 would make it so all year round.
Of course, for Spain for example, this would make things worse as it would make them permanently 2 hours out of wack, but I guess that could encourage them to move back to their "proper" time zone.
These types of situations are repeated all over the planet (think China, which despite spanning five actual time zones, is in a single time zone by decree), and DST seems to have a bit of a "smoothing" effect on these semi-arbitrary time zones, meaning that if it is to be abolished, there would be a lot of argument whether you should abolish DST or move to permanent DST. I would hope that such discussions would end with the most logical solution - the break-up of these arbitrary time zones into more sensible ones more closely aligned with the "true" time zones - but we can't really hope for that, as unfortunately politics trumps reason a lot of the time.
Clocks are based around solar noon. We're screwing it up half the year now, don't screw it up for the full year.
The actual day is 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds, so we are already off by having a 24 hour day. Not to mention the year does not have 365 days exactly, which is why we have leap years, but the Gregorian calendar isn't perfect etc.
Furthermore, time zones (even we look at "pure, straight" time zones, not adjustments made for political or practical reasons) are a rough approximation. If every clock were tracking solar noon, the time 100 a miles away would be slightly different. Time zones were created to have predictable shifts in the clock. Ergo, most of the Earth is off of true solar noon, DST or not.
Finally, due to the arbitrary nature of some time zones due to political or economic considerations, moving permanently to DST would actually take a lot of places closer to actual solar noon.
Ultimately, telling time is just a convention. All that matters is that this convention is consistent planet-round so we can effectively schedule things. In the end, what is the practical difference of working 8-4 and setting the clock one hour forward and working 9-5?
So, basically people whose livelihood exists via social manipulation of actual producers, i.e. engineers.
Do you place auditors, retail workers, store managers, call centre workers, post office workers, garbage collectors, grad school administrative workers, lab technicians, etc. etc. in the same category? What about other engineers (see more below)?
Also, let's assume people are forced to come to the office rather than work from home just due to management paranoia. Why then do people from different partner companies fly half-way around the world (e.g. from Europe to Japan or vice-versa) to meet each other face to face when a skype call would do? Surely can't be just due to paranoia...
Speaking of other engineers: software/IT types are the ones who clamour about not being let to work from home...because most of the time, they just need a computer and an internet connection to work. However, calling most programmers "engineers" is a bit of a stretch (IMO, having worked both in software and hardware/electronics), so most engineers are not in software/IT. What if you're an electrical or mechanical engineer who needs to *build stuff*? If I need to work in a lab, I'm not going do dish out hundreds of $k to equip (a high-end oscilloscope can cost upwards of $30k) my basement (assuming I even have a basement of sufficient size), and my employer sure ain't gonna pay that either for each of their employees (which would be much more expensive than just having a single lab where everyone comes to work). Coming to work (and yes, commuting if necessary) is just the sensible thing to do. Also, how do I test a hardware prototype together with a colleague remotely?
Since most companies are not pure software/IT companies, you will have people from other domains working with you and in management, from domains that are not suitable for remote working. They might not have enough understanding for the software/IT people's desire to work from home, but the software/IT people have to understand where these people come from. Yes, an IT person might spend 90% of the time in his office doing stuff (s)he can easily do from home - but in the remaining 10% of the time Suzy from accounting wants to go down the hall and ask why her e-mail/printer/db app is not working and resolve the issue in 10 minutes, not have to call/e-mail the IT person and wait for an hour to have the problem fixed. Ultimately, software/IT is not an end to itself, it's a *tool* to get other useful work done.
From my point of view, North American suburbia sucks as a place to live and raise a family in.
The root cause of this problem is the (post-WW2) urban design and layout of most (North) American cities, not in the fact that employers require workers to be physically in the office.
There are places on this Earth where living (relatively) close to work is possible and affordable, where commuting is a 15 min. walk or a 30 min. bus/subway ride, or a 20 min. drive, or some such thing.
Exactly.
Not to mention that, outside of the Slashdot-type crowd, most people are not a/antisocial geeks that choose jobs that require minimal meaningful interaction with other people (I'm among the more antisocial types myself, but I realize that in wider society, I am in the minority). Maybe many or even most IT/tech jobs can mostly be done from home, but in other fields (think e.g. marketing, branding, event management, such things...then things like auditing...and lots of other examples) it is not possible.
Finally: slackers/abusers removed, the people who complain about not being able to work from home are the ones who like working from home and are productive doing so. Not all of us are productive working from our living room or bedroom (and actually few of us can afford the space for a dedicated home office), and we prefer to spacially separate our work and home lives, and not be distracted by the cat/dog/wife/kids/neighbour mowing the lawn/etc. while working, enjoy, if just for the sake of changing the scenery, getting out of the house and meeting our colleagues, etc.
Companies spend huge sums developing products, and they get severely punished if consumers don't want them. As an epistemological statement, I would bet they are right more often than you are on (even if not always).
You're making the assumption that companies only respond to market demands, which we know is not true (if it were, nothing truly new would come on to the market - how many focus groups would tell you in 1995 that everyone wants touchscreen smartphones?).
Companies actively shape market demand (or at least exert a lot of effort attempting to do so), sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Ergo a lot of what goes out there as product is a result not of market research are people's current tastes, but of someone's conscious and directed design and marketing decision.
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