First off, I think that hypothesis and tests can be cited for intelligent design. Yes, one could prove that life was designed. But the intelligent design proponents have not yet offered testable hypotheses with greater explanatory power than the current model. Please encourage them to do so.
If somebody could actually prove that, it would be the find of the century, and possibly the millennium.
Be careful what you wish for, though. It could just as well be proof for the von Daniken-style space-alien uplift nuts or the Stargate fans, instead of the big sky daddy that the Discovery Institute people want to find. And if they find a message in Arabic or Punjabi or Farsi, it will be the Muslims, Sikhs, or Bahais celebrating rather than the Christians.
It is also the filtering of evidence and interpretation of evidence so as to favor one's viewpoint. Quite common in our science today. It is quite common everywhere you have humans, which would include science. If you don't believe me, check out the long, long list of cognitive biases.
The difference is that the scientists agree to play by certain rules that try to filter out the crap. It can take a while, because the truth is slippery, and humans were evolved for surviving, not research.
But compare the progress in science over the last couple hundred years with progress in philosophy or theology or politics, and I think you'll agree those johnnies in the lab have done pretty well.
I'd have to pose it back to you. Why not six days? Why not what appears to be a Big Bang taking six days?
Sure god could have taken millions of years, I just don't think it happened that way, and luckily that only matters to me, everyone else is free to think what they want. It unfortunately matters to everybody. If it did happen a different way, then we have the science and the biology wrong.
That science matters pragmatically, as we use it to save and extend lives, reduce human suffering, and improve human life. It matters intellectually, as quite a lot of people want to know these things in a factual way, and aren't content to just call it a matter of personal opinion.
And it matters theologically too. Many religious scientists see understanding God's creation as a religious calling. To them, saying that you shouldn't study the history of life is like telling a preacher he shouldn't study the history of the bible.
Of course, you're welcome to your opinion on what the age of the earth is, just as you're welcome to your opinion on the meaning of any particular bible verse. But when a lot of people have spent a lot of time studying something and have come up with some answers, you can see why they would be reluctant to take your personal and opinion very seriously, right?
I acknowledge that carbon dating is taken as truth by a lot of people, but I have not been convinced of it being infallible. I don't think carbon dating is used for that; IIRC, it only is good for like 50k years. And nobody would suggest that any particular dating method is infallible. It's just that a variety of different approaches come to similar answers, so we go with our best understanding so far.
I also do not think of human beings as animals. In which case, your issue may be more with philosophy than with science or theology. If you look at the history of biological classification from Linnaeus on, you could see it as a history of people giving up certain plausible but cherished distinctions. Personally, I see those distinctions as cultural, and not required by Christian theology.
There are plenty of very sincere Christians working in the sciences. The ones whose works I've read view their job as the study of creation in all its glory. That man is also an evolved animal is not a problem for them any more than the fact that the universe does not revolve around the sun. That God's works are more complicated than we first thought, and perhaps more than we are comfortable with, is not a problem, it's a challenge. It's a professional challenge, to explore and understand, and a personal challenge to be properly humble and accepting.
And what is "good theology". Is there any theology in the entire world that is based on evidence rather than someone's interpretation of a mythical tradition? Even to an atheist, there is definitely good theology in the same sense that there is good philosophy, good scholarship, and good advice.
I'm both an atheist and a skeptic, and after I got over being a prick about it, I could see that there were a lot of smart, sincere religious people out there doing their very best to lead good lives. And they often feel that the creationists, the religious warmongers, and the nutty god-pushers are guilty of twisting theology for their own sinful ends.
Whatever you think of the core beliefs of a given religion, the world's religious traditions preserve a great deal of pragmatic advice on how to conduct one's life. They provide a structure for examination of what it means to be human, and what kind of world we should strive to make. And they fill a spiritual need that, even if you and I don't have it, the bulk of humanity does.
Fighting was the word used. How many people have to fight, meaning spend constant attention, in order to keep issues fair ? Everybody. That's the nature of truth: it requires a constant struggle to discover and maintain. Especially when dealing with controversial subjects.
Alternative views need to be presented separately, on separate pages, with separate editors. Otherwise, it's just censorship. That has been tried, and doesn't work so well. Wikipedia now avoids it. There is a whole fork of Wikipedia that behaves as you like. It is much less popular than Wikipedia.
As for the ad-hominems, I don't dignify them with an answer. It's not ad hominem when it's pertinent. You're making a weak argument that you keep declining to back up with evidence. But rather than admitting this, you're continuing to assert your position. That naturally leads one to wonder why. I offered my hypotheses, which you decline to refute.
Why don't you just look at the slashdot reporting of a few issues. Seriously? Your claim here is that Slashdot is a more reliable source for unbiased information than Wikipedia?
Hillary Clinton's page was the last one. You mean this one, where we learn about one of the many people working to keep Wikipedia articles fair? How terrible of him!
Also Jim Wales selling (literally) favorable wikipedia pages comes to mind. That's the Merkey thing? I have looked at that one a bit, and Merkey is nuttier than a Skippy factory. His allegation is uncorroborated, he has a history of bizarre behavior, and regardless he's a minor figure whose page almost nobody cares about. And regardless, there's no minority view being suppressed, so it doesn't support your point.
And I do know from experience that alternative views don't last, if they aren't reversed directly. Diffs or GTFO.
My guess is you're somebody who's either strongly partisan or promoting some "alternative" view that is legitimately not part of a general-purpose encyclopedia, you got your ass handed to you on Wikipedia, and you've got your knickers in a twist over it. Certainly, neither your (lack of) research skills nor your (poor) reasoning ability suggests you'd make decent job of identifying legitimate minority views. So again, put up or shut up.
They have a "neutral point of view" policy. In practice, however, this means that they just enforce point of views top-down. If you have a particular example in mind, point it out. But generally, I think it works pretty well. Widely held or significant minority views are generally represented, with the amount of ink they get roughly proportionate to the minority view's significance.
They definitely don't cover every possible view, but they don't intend to. Because everything in Wikipedia has to be verifiable from good sources, they just cover views acknowledged as significant. That sucks if you have just created a new Grand Unified Theory in your basement, but it's generally good for readers, as it helps keep the articles clear of a lot of dubious material. Like Grand Unified Theories made up in basements.
Yet when I got to university there was simply no emphasis on sourcing, we were shown Google and then yelled at about how Wikipedia was the devil and told to get busy. [...] The reality is students are lazy and the majority do the minimum to pass. Simply increasing the minimum standard and giving students the resources they need improves all the students who are just cruising through. Of course this is only if they have no alternative!:P That is the best from-the-trenches explanation of this problem that I have seen, and if I hadn't posted already, I'd mod you up. It's not that I approve of the situation, but most students were equally lazy in my day, so this problem is not going away. Blaming Wikipedia is missing the point.
Even if you tell them not to rely on Wikipedia as a primary source and try to emphasise the basic requirements of good source materials they either are not interested on taking the advice or they are too lazy to do proper research.
A math professor pal of mine is always delighted with the students who turn in obviously shoddy stuff, as then he can quickly and easily give them bad grades. Wouldn't citing Wikipedia (or obviously cribbing from it) serve that purpose for you?
The professor seems to be saying that we should put our trust only in trained experts. However, she's just an associate IT professor with a CS degree, and she's at some university I've never heard of. So given that she is running her mouth about something where she has no professional qualification, I will take her advice and ignore her.
But her freedom of speech isn't at risk. I disagree totally. Yes, they are not asking for her web site to be closed down. But did you actually read the subpoena?
They want her bank statements, her canceled checks, her tax returns, and any documents even vaguely related to any issue covered on her web site, including correspondence with her physicians, attorneys, and any member of the government. Imagine how you would feel about giving the last seven years of your correspondence and financial records over to a hostile party.
And, of course, they want the right to grill her about anything related to any of that, while she pays a couple hundred bucks an hour in legal fees. And for why? Because she has blogged critically about them.
That doesn't just have an effect on her right to free speech. It has an chilling effect on every blogger who sees themselves as a citizen journalist. Anybody who wants to blog about something important -- or even read blogs like that -- should oppose legal harassment like this.
Fearless prediction: Windows 7 will be basically a BSD core running a WINE-like API layer to run legacy WinNT code. They have to throw everything out and start over again because the WinNT codebase is corrupt spaghetti. That would be a genius move, but I think for them to pull it off they'd need to have it going as an in-the-labs project for a couple of years. And I don't think Ballmer has the humility or the cojones to have hedged his bets like that. Maybe for Window 8.
I have some issues with The Steve, but I have to give him credit for the ability to think bold thoughts. Ballmer mistakes bullying for bravery.
DEC was busy driving the company out of business. I'll have to eat my words now. I said they never succeeded at anything they attempted after 1985, but they sure pulled that off.
Uh, dude, 1998 called and they want their argument back. I agree with you in principle, but David Spade called and he wants his late-90s snotty answer back.
'must have' PC software [...]AutoCad [...] Photoshop [...] Crysis This was a persuasive argument in 1998. But watch an office next time their internet connection goes down. Most of what average people actually must have is on the Internet now, and Microsoft's plan to dominate that thankfully failed.
What you write is still true for the kind of person who spends $2k and up on a system. But for those spending hundreds rather than thousands, they generally are perfectly happy to play Internet games, use Internet media programs, and Internet office suites. Or to use their free Linux equivalents. If they even notice a difference.
Even Microsoft knows that a long-term bet on Windows is not a great idea, which is why they're willing to pay $45 bn for a tattered-looking Yahoo.
When you control the software AND the hardware you can get things done faster. Steve Jobs even said that in a CNN interview. This is true, but irrelevant. Driver issues definitely complicate things, and I hear Vista hasn't done so well with them. However, Vista's slowness, piggishness, and lack of interesting features have little to do with driver support.
Like the Gartner guy in TFA, I believe it has more to do with Microsoft's engineering and product management practices. I think there's also a philosophical difference. The Mac OS X people are all of the Unix tradition. Windows, on the other hand, mixes the just-make-it-work Windows approach with the spirit of VMS (via Cutler and NT).
The Unix philosophy seems to have scaled better. The Windows mobile offering is a totally different beast than Vista, but both OS X and Linux can be made to fit on everything from phones to handhelds to high-end systems. Linux and OS X (as well as some of the other Unix children) also have been releasing more frequently and (IMHO) improving more than Windows has.
I hope Microsoft pulls it together, but the philosophical differences may be too deeply baked into the culture and into the code base to turn it around quickly.
Even a junior manager at a McDonald's has learned this stuff within their first 30 days on the job. Really.
Two things: a) you're wrong. And b) if you were, you'd still be missing the point.
You're wrong, because half these items are about product innovation. I promise you that a junior manager at McDonald's is not rewarded for changing the menu every week. McDonald's is primarily in the business of reliability and repeatability; innovation is only of interest in certain parts of corporate, and only so much as it keeps others from stealing their turf. Otherwise, they wisely don't let anybody fuck with what's making them billions.
And you're missing the point because it's not about what you can repeat out of a business book's bullet points. It's about doing it.
I've never played WoW, and I think the whole crack-via-internet thing is morally dubious, but I respect them for what they've accomplished. A lot more people set out to do something like this than succeed. Even if their explanations for success were totally banal (and they aren't entirely so), it's still worth paying attention, because however obvious these things are from your armchair, people engaged in giant projects often lose sight of things that you would think are painfully obvious.
So please take your snide superiority and go launch something that makes it up to a mere $5m in annual revenues. Then come back and tell us again how easy and obvious it is.
On the contrary, "unemployment" only counts those people who are still "actively looking" for jobs. Well, then look at the labor force participation rate, which seems to be what you're after. Trade has been going up for decades, but the overall labor force participation rate has improved.
It doesn't count people like my father, who got laid off in February 2007, gave up looking last Fall, and now calls himself "retired" even though he hadn't intended to retire yet and doesn't have as much money as he wanted saved up.
I don't know anything about your father's situation, but the general problem faced by older workers has little to do with trade. The main issue there is that they grew up in a time when you got a job early and expected to stay in that company for life, getting paid a little bit more each year until you retired. When your father started work, an employer was a community as much as a business.
Now that has changed. These days, you're employable as long as you have beneficial skills at a good price. If the performance of older workers is lower than younger ones (either due to aging or the whippersnappers having more relevant training), then a lot of companies expect to pay them less. A lot of older workers don't like the idea, and prefer to take early retirement than to get paid less than somebody younger.
According to Krugman, this started to change with the corporate raiders in the 80s, who could restructure a company and fire all those people they saw as overpaid, and not worry about keeping people on to 65. A number of other factors have reinforced that change, so that any younger person I know would laugh if you suggested they find a life-long employer. They expect to be changing jobs with some frequency up until they retire.
people who used to be making $75K/year as white-collar workers, and now flip burgers at Mickey D's. And that particular statistic, I believe, has gone way up.
I'd love to see a reliable statistic for that. If you find one, let me know.
Jobs ARE being lost to outsourcing- and to declare that they're all just being lost to automation is to delude yourself and to attempt to delude others. Net, outsourcing creates jobs. Mainly it moves them around, though. You're just not counting them as jobs if you don't like the people who get them.
The main cause of job destruction is indeed automation. Historically, almost everybody worked on farms. Thanks to improved tech, most of those jobs are gone. That freed up a labor pool for all sorts of things, especially industrial production. Most of those early industrial jobs are gone now too, thanks to further automation.
And that's important here because although jobs are getting destroyed all the time, we keep finding new things for people to do. Unemployment goes up and down some, but there is zero reason to think that the loss of a few tech support jobs that didn't even exist ten years ago are substantially different than the jobs lost at every new invention and new trade opportunity since the cotton gin.
Because companies can now outsource to other nations without such pesky problems as labor laws or a living wage, we are quickly seeing the working class gains of the last few decades evaporate. A way of framing it in which you neatly ignore that the reason those people don't have the kinds of protection you do: because they can't afford it. Yet, anyhow.
The reason we developed these protections was not some sort of inherent moral superiority; it was because we became rich enough that we could make choices unavailable before.
But look at South Korea as an example. Through extensive trade, they have gotten richer, and picked up a lot of the rights that they lacked. And by trading with them, we've gotten richer too.
Or look at Japan. A smoking, post-fascist wreck after the war, they rebuilt to the extent that in the 1980s, half of everybody was running around shouting, "ZOMG JAPAN WILL DESTROY US!" But we trade as much or more with them, and overall nobody is sweating that now.
Outsourcing is a very bad deal.
You probably mean offshoring. When you go out to a restaurant or buy a frozen pizza, you are outsourcing cooking. Outsourcing is just another way of doing division of labor.
Of course, the recent corporate fashion for outsourcing and offshoring, like any fashion, frequently leads people to do idiotic things. No argument there. But that's not an indictment of trade, but American corporate culture.
Those consumers used to be employed at Schwinn, and now they've starved to death in the gutter. They're not consumers anymore! So obviously, given the massive rise in trade and outsourcing, the few of us still employed should barely be able to get into our cars for stepping over corpses.
But it turns out that unemployment is not massively high. Trade has gone up substantially in the post-NAFTA era, but unemployment has gone down. We are seeing a little bump right now, but that has nothing to do with trade, and everything to do with idiocy in the Bush administration.
Outsource their work and they don't have money to buy your stuff at some point.
This is plausible, but wrong. If you took a little time to look historically, you'd see that.
Over the last few decades, our trade is up dramatically, 10x or more. Everybody's is. But is there drastically more unemployment? Or drastically more poverty? No, just the opposite. The only big difference in the US is increased inequality, but that has nothing to do with trade and everything to do with ideology.
It gets worse when you start trying to apply that same simplistic thinking to what is effectively an ecosystem.
Funny you should say that, because that's where you're going wrong. Systemically, trade produces measurable net benefits, proven both in theory and in practice.
If my employer finds somebody to do my job for cheaper, whether they do that in my city, elsewher in my country, or a different one, then I personally lose, while my employer and my employer's customers win. Then I get a new job, and things carry on. On average, though, they win more than I lose; we are collectively richer.
Because trade is not a huge cause of lost jobs compared to normal market flux, the solution to this problem is relatively easy. Because we are collectively richer, we can use some of that extra wealth to retrain people who lose jobs due to trade.
Outsourcing lowers the GDP of our country, reducing our buying power. What logically happens is jobs are removed from our country. You realize this is the trade policy equivalent of saying "Windows (or MacOS) is way better" when you've never actually used a Mac (or Windows box), right?
Please go read about comparative advantage, which is the core of why trade works. Do some math; build some simulations. Then you can come back and make new and different errors, rather than the basic, obvious ones.
As an incentive, here's a thought experiment. If moving manufacturing jobs from Alabama to Mexico is bad, then wouldn't moving jobs from California to Alabama also be bad? And ditto for moving a job from downtown to a suburb?
Please don't answer right away. Go study comparative advantage and come back with some actual math.
So your argument is that Adobe should have understood that Apple liked Carbon enough to write key in-house apps in it, and enough to announce that that were taking it to 64-bit, but not enough to actually follow through? Yeah, that's persuasive.
More importantly, it has to run on Windows, and keeping the OpenStep on Windows project alive for one application is a poor use of resources?
Well clearly, Carbon on Windows is a hugely popular platform.
And the reason that OpenStep got killed is all about The Steve's inability to play well with others, and nothing to do with Adobe or iTunes. They killed OS X on Intel as a product and OpenStep as a cross-platform approach along with the Apple clone industry.
They could have kept OpenStep alive, benefiting all the NeXT developers, and, once OS X was out, anybody who wanted to do cross-platform apps. But Jobs doesn't want anybody to do cross-platform apps. He thinks just like a telco head. If he had a choice between him making a dollar and you making a dollar, or him making 50 cents and you making nothing, he'd take the latter. Because then you wouldn't be stealing "his" dollar.
Slashdot Mirror
If somebody could actually prove that, it would be the find of the century, and possibly the millennium.
Be careful what you wish for, though. It could just as well be proof for the von Daniken-style space-alien uplift nuts or the Stargate fans, instead of the big sky daddy that the Discovery Institute people want to find. And if they find a message in Arabic or Punjabi or Farsi, it will be the Muslims, Sikhs, or Bahais celebrating rather than the Christians.
The difference is that the scientists agree to play by certain rules that try to filter out the crap. It can take a while, because the truth is slippery, and humans were evolved for surviving, not research.
But compare the progress in science over the last couple hundred years with progress in philosophy or theology or politics, and I think you'll agree those johnnies in the lab have done pretty well.
Sure god could have taken millions of years, I just don't think it happened that way, and luckily that only matters to me, everyone else is free to think what they want. It unfortunately matters to everybody. If it did happen a different way, then we have the science and the biology wrong.
That science matters pragmatically, as we use it to save and extend lives, reduce human suffering, and improve human life. It matters intellectually, as quite a lot of people want to know these things in a factual way, and aren't content to just call it a matter of personal opinion.
And it matters theologically too. Many religious scientists see understanding God's creation as a religious calling. To them, saying that you shouldn't study the history of life is like telling a preacher he shouldn't study the history of the bible.
Of course, you're welcome to your opinion on what the age of the earth is, just as you're welcome to your opinion on the meaning of any particular bible verse. But when a lot of people have spent a lot of time studying something and have come up with some answers, you can see why they would be reluctant to take your personal and opinion very seriously, right?
There are plenty of very sincere Christians working in the sciences. The ones whose works I've read view their job as the study of creation in all its glory. That man is also an evolved animal is not a problem for them any more than the fact that the universe does not revolve around the sun. That God's works are more complicated than we first thought, and perhaps more than we are comfortable with, is not a problem, it's a challenge. It's a professional challenge, to explore and understand, and a personal challenge to be properly humble and accepting.
That's my understanding anyhow.
I'm both an atheist and a skeptic, and after I got over being a prick about it, I could see that there were a lot of smart, sincere religious people out there doing their very best to lead good lives. And they often feel that the creationists, the religious warmongers, and the nutty god-pushers are guilty of twisting theology for their own sinful ends.
Whatever you think of the core beliefs of a given religion, the world's religious traditions preserve a great deal of pragmatic advice on how to conduct one's life. They provide a structure for examination of what it means to be human, and what kind of world we should strive to make. And they fill a spiritual need that, even if you and I don't have it, the bulk of humanity does.
My guess is you're somebody who's either strongly partisan or promoting some "alternative" view that is legitimately not part of a general-purpose encyclopedia, you got your ass handed to you on Wikipedia, and you've got your knickers in a twist over it. Certainly, neither your (lack of) research skills nor your (poor) reasoning ability suggests you'd make decent job of identifying legitimate minority views. So again, put up or shut up.
For example, look at the 9/11 attacks article. The article represents the mainstream view, but has a paragraph on the conspiracy nut version of events, with a link off to a detailed article on the conspiracy theories.
Or check out the article on evolution. It mainly focuses on what 99.9% of biologists agree on, but it mentions and links to articles on objections to evolution, the creation-evolution controversy, and other critical views.
They definitely don't cover every possible view, but they don't intend to. Because everything in Wikipedia has to be verifiable from good sources, they just cover views acknowledged as significant. That sucks if you have just created a new Grand Unified Theory in your basement, but it's generally good for readers, as it helps keep the articles clear of a lot of dubious material. Like Grand Unified Theories made up in basements.
The reality is students are lazy and the majority do the minimum to pass. Simply increasing the minimum standard and giving students the resources they need improves all the students who are just cruising through. Of course this is only if they have no alternative!
Even if you tell them not to rely on Wikipedia as a primary source and try to emphasise the basic requirements of good source materials they either are not interested on taking the advice or they are too lazy to do proper research.
A math professor pal of mine is always delighted with the students who turn in obviously shoddy stuff, as then he can quickly and easily give them bad grades. Wouldn't citing Wikipedia (or obviously cribbing from it) serve that purpose for you?
The professor seems to be saying that we should put our trust only in trained experts. However, she's just an associate IT professor with a CS degree, and she's at some university I've never heard of. So given that she is running her mouth about something where she has no professional qualification, I will take her advice and ignore her.
They want her bank statements, her canceled checks, her tax returns, and any documents even vaguely related to any issue covered on her web site, including correspondence with her physicians, attorneys, and any member of the government. Imagine how you would feel about giving the last seven years of your correspondence and financial records over to a hostile party.
And, of course, they want the right to grill her about anything related to any of that, while she pays a couple hundred bucks an hour in legal fees. And for why? Because she has blogged critically about them.
That doesn't just have an effect on her right to free speech. It has an chilling effect on every blogger who sees themselves as a citizen journalist. Anybody who wants to blog about something important -- or even read blogs like that -- should oppose legal harassment like this.
I have some issues with The Steve, but I have to give him credit for the ability to think bold thoughts. Ballmer mistakes bullying for bravery.
What you write is still true for the kind of person who spends $2k and up on a system. But for those spending hundreds rather than thousands, they generally are perfectly happy to play Internet games, use Internet media programs, and Internet office suites. Or to use their free Linux equivalents. If they even notice a difference.
Even Microsoft knows that a long-term bet on Windows is not a great idea, which is why they're willing to pay $45 bn for a tattered-looking Yahoo.
Like the Gartner guy in TFA, I believe it has more to do with Microsoft's engineering and product management practices. I think there's also a philosophical difference. The Mac OS X people are all of the Unix tradition. Windows, on the other hand, mixes the just-make-it-work Windows approach with the spirit of VMS (via Cutler and NT).
The Unix philosophy seems to have scaled better. The Windows mobile offering is a totally different beast than Vista, but both OS X and Linux can be made to fit on everything from phones to handhelds to high-end systems. Linux and OS X (as well as some of the other Unix children) also have been releasing more frequently and (IMHO) improving more than Windows has.
I hope Microsoft pulls it together, but the philosophical differences may be too deeply baked into the culture and into the code base to turn it around quickly.
Even a junior manager at a McDonald's has learned this stuff within their first 30 days on the job. Really.
Two things: a) you're wrong. And b) if you were, you'd still be missing the point.
You're wrong, because half these items are about product innovation. I promise you that a junior manager at McDonald's is not rewarded for changing the menu every week. McDonald's is primarily in the business of reliability and repeatability; innovation is only of interest in certain parts of corporate, and only so much as it keeps others from stealing their turf. Otherwise, they wisely don't let anybody fuck with what's making them billions.
And you're missing the point because it's not about what you can repeat out of a business book's bullet points. It's about doing it.
I've never played WoW, and I think the whole crack-via-internet thing is morally dubious, but I respect them for what they've accomplished. A lot more people set out to do something like this than succeed. Even if their explanations for success were totally banal (and they aren't entirely so), it's still worth paying attention, because however obvious these things are from your armchair, people engaged in giant projects often lose sight of things that you would think are painfully obvious.
So please take your snide superiority and go launch something that makes it up to a mere $5m in annual revenues. Then come back and tell us again how easy and obvious it is.
It doesn't count people like my father, who got laid off in February 2007, gave up looking last Fall, and now calls himself "retired" even though he hadn't intended to retire yet and doesn't have as much money as he wanted saved up.
I don't know anything about your father's situation, but the general problem faced by older workers has little to do with trade. The main issue there is that they grew up in a time when you got a job early and expected to stay in that company for life, getting paid a little bit more each year until you retired. When your father started work, an employer was a community as much as a business.
Now that has changed. These days, you're employable as long as you have beneficial skills at a good price. If the performance of older workers is lower than younger ones (either due to aging or the whippersnappers having more relevant training), then a lot of companies expect to pay them less. A lot of older workers don't like the idea, and prefer to take early retirement than to get paid less than somebody younger.
According to Krugman, this started to change with the corporate raiders in the 80s, who could restructure a company and fire all those people they saw as overpaid, and not worry about keeping people on to 65. A number of other factors have reinforced that change, so that any younger person I know would laugh if you suggested they find a life-long employer. They expect to be changing jobs with some frequency up until they retire.
people who used to be making $75K/year as white-collar workers, and now flip burgers at Mickey D's. And that particular statistic, I believe, has gone way up.
I'd love to see a reliable statistic for that. If you find one, let me know.
The main cause of job destruction is indeed automation. Historically, almost everybody worked on farms. Thanks to improved tech, most of those jobs are gone. That freed up a labor pool for all sorts of things, especially industrial production. Most of those early industrial jobs are gone now too, thanks to further automation.
And that's important here because although jobs are getting destroyed all the time, we keep finding new things for people to do. Unemployment goes up and down some, but there is zero reason to think that the loss of a few tech support jobs that didn't even exist ten years ago are substantially different than the jobs lost at every new invention and new trade opportunity since the cotton gin.
The reason we developed these protections was not some sort of inherent moral superiority; it was because we became rich enough that we could make choices unavailable before.
But look at South Korea as an example. Through extensive trade, they have gotten richer, and picked up a lot of the rights that they lacked. And by trading with them, we've gotten richer too.
Or look at Japan. A smoking, post-fascist wreck after the war, they rebuilt to the extent that in the 1980s, half of everybody was running around shouting, "ZOMG JAPAN WILL DESTROY US!" But we trade as much or more with them, and overall nobody is sweating that now.
Outsourcing is a very bad deal.
You probably mean offshoring. When you go out to a restaurant or buy a frozen pizza, you are outsourcing cooking. Outsourcing is just another way of doing division of labor.
Of course, the recent corporate fashion for outsourcing and offshoring, like any fashion, frequently leads people to do idiotic things. No argument there. But that's not an indictment of trade, but American corporate culture.
But it turns out that unemployment is not massively high. Trade has gone up substantially in the post-NAFTA era, but unemployment has gone down. We are seeing a little bump right now, but that has nothing to do with trade, and everything to do with idiocy in the Bush administration.
Outsource their work and they don't have money to buy your stuff at some point.
This is plausible, but wrong. If you took a little time to look historically, you'd see that.
Over the last few decades, our trade is up dramatically, 10x or more. Everybody's is. But is there drastically more unemployment? Or drastically more poverty? No, just the opposite. The only big difference in the US is increased inequality, but that has nothing to do with trade and everything to do with ideology.
It gets worse when you start trying to apply that same simplistic thinking to what is effectively an ecosystem.
Funny you should say that, because that's where you're going wrong. Systemically, trade produces measurable net benefits, proven both in theory and in practice.
If my employer finds somebody to do my job for cheaper, whether they do that in my city, elsewher in my country, or a different one, then I personally lose, while my employer and my employer's customers win. Then I get a new job, and things carry on. On average, though, they win more than I lose; we are collectively richer.
Because trade is not a huge cause of lost jobs compared to normal market flux, the solution to this problem is relatively easy. Because we are collectively richer, we can use some of that extra wealth to retrain people who lose jobs due to trade.
Please go read about comparative advantage, which is the core of why trade works. Do some math; build some simulations. Then you can come back and make new and different errors, rather than the basic, obvious ones.
As an incentive, here's a thought experiment. If moving manufacturing jobs from Alabama to Mexico is bad, then wouldn't moving jobs from California to Alabama also be bad? And ditto for moving a job from downtown to a suburb?
Please don't answer right away. Go study comparative advantage and come back with some actual math.
Because it doesn't matter if iTunes is 32-bit?
So your argument is that Adobe should have understood that Apple liked Carbon enough to write key in-house apps in it, and enough to announce that that were taking it to 64-bit, but not enough to actually follow through? Yeah, that's persuasive.
More importantly, it has to run on Windows, and keeping the OpenStep on Windows project alive for one application is a poor use of resources?
Well clearly, Carbon on Windows is a hugely popular platform.
And the reason that OpenStep got killed is all about The Steve's inability to play well with others, and nothing to do with Adobe or iTunes. They killed OS X on Intel as a product and OpenStep as a cross-platform approach along with the Apple clone industry.
They could have kept OpenStep alive, benefiting all the NeXT developers, and, once OS X was out, anybody who wanted to do cross-platform apps. But Jobs doesn't want anybody to do cross-platform apps. He thinks just like a telco head. If he had a choice between him making a dollar and you making a dollar, or him making 50 cents and you making nothing, he'd take the latter. Because then you wouldn't be stealing "his" dollar.