Some relevant data here (per pupil spending): US average - $10499 Alabama - $8870 California - $9657 Mississippi - $8075
You'd be surprised, but California is really not spending a lot on their kids either. The places that are spending a lot: DC - $16408 New Jersey - $16271 New York - $18126 Alaska - $15552 Vermont - $15175
It depends: If you defraud big businesses, rich people, or government, you're in trouble. If you defraud people with no power inside big business or government, then you can get a cabinet post.
Absolutely, I agree with you that the lives of industrial workers everywhere that work to give us our cheap stuff is fraught with conditions of suffering, forced labor (including outright slavery), misery, warfare, and death. You're right that the Chinese workers are just one of the larger places where this is happening - in other industries, it's the sweatshops in Indonesia, the maquiladoras in Latin America, and so on.
My point is that American and to some degree European society and economy is set up so that we never acknowledge that fact, and never ever ever consider doing something significant about it.
We don't have to imagine an answer to that: Look at the early northern United States, where lots of the economic activity was based around independent farmers and craftsmen.
Here's what's going on, in a nutshell: 1. The conditions at Foxconn are dangerous, cruel, and completely unacceptable to Western sensibilities. 2. The conditions at Foxconn are completely legal, better than other plants, and probably considered ethical by Chinese standards.
In other words, this whole brouhaha says more about outsourcing manufacturing to China in general than anything about Apple or Foxconn specifically. Basically, if Americans and Europeans really thought about who was getting killed and maimed and exploited in order to supply their cheap stuff, they'd never accept it, but because it's far away and not talked about they're effectively putting it out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
Your argument about oligarchy is a question of distribution, not production.
Specialization is about increasing and improving production. Within a group of people making an operating system, for example, you could have 1 person (say, Andrew Tanenbaum) writing the whole thing, or you could have somebody who specializes in memory management who can do a better job of handling memory management than the generalist who also has to think about disk IO. End result: better code.
That's true whether you distribute the code under GPL2 or whether you carefully bottle it up behind copyrights and patents and trade secrets. Where distribution makes a difference is whether the economic benefits of that expertise go to everybody (because it's GPL2 or BSD code) or get concentrated towards a particular set of people (e.g. Microsoft shareholders). But that's a different question from whether specialization improves productivity.
Sure, there were some people who were better at knapping than others. But there's also evidence that the basics fairly widespread knowledge, the sort of skill that your average Og could pull off in a pinch. Generally, Oog might make the spearpoints because he does a really good job, but if Oog can't do it, Og can.
Same sort of story as some people being better able to spear an animal so the tribe could eat. Yes, there were specialists, but the basics were general knowledge.
What you're describing is economic specialization. On the upside, that means that people who do plumbing or electrical or whatever are really good at it. On the downside, your everyday guy doesn't do plumbing or electrical, even on their own home. In theory, that makes things more efficient, because rather than a do-it-yourselfer completely botching the job, the specialist does the job right much faster than the do-it-yourselfer.
This process is not really that new: there was a time when pretty much everybody was doing the same things: hunting, gathering, banging rocks together to make spearpoints, fighting for survival, raising children, etc. Then you started getting differentiation based on gender (as far as current archaeology can tell) with men more involved in hunting and banging rocks together and women more involved in gathering, processing food, and raising children. Then you started getting divisions into professions, with some people specializing in warfare, food production, toolmaking, religion, and so on.
So we have specialized. And it's brought us productivity far beyond anything the world has ever known. But you're right that it means that we're more reliant than ever before on the skills of other people.
Of course, this discussion isn't about "new" spending. It's about restoring things to the status quo pre-2007, when the Democratic Congress paid for a program meant to bribe the voters by promising that after they're out of office, spending on a popular program would be reduced. And now, it's time for that promise to be kept, and, as usual, the pols are busy trying to break that promise by making a new promise to have the people cut spending after the current bunch is out of office...
Of course, you could tell the same story about the Bush tax cuts (costing about $100 billion per year, versus the $6 billion that is at issue with student loans) - they were sold as being affordable because they were temporary, but when the end of the cut came up both parties scrambled to prevent that end from actually happening.
A fair description of both major US parties is that they're full of ruthless evil bastards who would quite happily bankrupt the public treasury in search of more power and more votes. That's why I've stopped voting for either of them.
I'd actually make that even a stronger statement: Idiots in HR not only demand degrees, they also refuse to do any kind of on-the-job training and want only experienced employees.
There was a time when somebody graduating (or even close to graduating) high school could apply for an entry-level job at a major corporation that would involve some sort of training program at reduced pay for a while followed by the graduate starting a career at that corporation. The idea was that the training programs gave the corporation good value for their money by pulling in workers with good potential when they were relatively cheap, and giving them a reason to be part of company for a very long time, possibly even an entire 45-year career. And it's also worth pointing out that these companies were willing to invest in their current employees as well, so that it was quite possible for somebody who had started in the mailroom to work his way up through the ranks and become the CEO.
Very few if any companies do that any more. They now see training as an unnecessary expense, even in fields where they're having trouble finding qualified employees. For instance, very few hospitals are willing to train new nurses, all the while complaining about the shortage of good nurses. Surprisingly few HR reps have been able to connect the dots.
The Dems look like losers for continuing to support increased spending.
I'm going to have to call out your over-simplification there, because it's really easy to complain about "increased spending" without talking about what we're buying for our money.
Some government spending is definitely useful, and we all derive good value for that money. Some government spending is definitely useless and provides no value whatsoever for that money. There's a lot of stuff that's in between too - for instance, any resident of a city or suburb generally gets good value for having a good public water works, but no value (at best) for hiring the water works director's no-good brother-in-law to sit around the water works office. Good government should involve doing the useful spending and avoiding the useless spending at all levels of government, so (in our example) we might put money into having a good water works, but have a system in place to prevent the no-good brother-in-law from being hired.
Reasonable people can disagree what's useful and what's useless, but blanket statements like "All increased spending is bad" and "All government programs are good" are just plain stupid. Of course, what the electorate really really would like is no taxes and lots of spending, but any sane government makes the effort to balance those 2 desires.
Punishment it little if any deterrent. In countries with far less harsh criminal penalties than the United States, the crime rate stays about even to all other industrialized countries, even given the lesser punishments.
What is a strong deterrent, though, is a high risk of getting caught. For instance, if you put your criminal justice resources into hiring police, training them to be more effective at tracking down crimes, and building trust with the citizens (so they'll be more likely to volunteer information), that gives you a lot better results than putting your money into keeping people in prison longer for having a bag of weed.
The basic problem, in a nutshell, is all in the long-run payoff matrix:
1. AGW is true and a serious problem to the tune of what the scientific consensus viewpoint says:
A. Humanity does nothing: -$trillions, -billions of people, absolute catastrophe with serious questions about the survival of the human race.
B. Humanity does nothing effective: -$trillions, -billions of people, absolute catastrophe with serious questions about the survival of the human race.
C. Humanity does something expensive but effective: -$trillions, probably -millions of people, big mess.
D. Humanity does something cheap and effective (not likely): -$billions, probably -thousands of people, small mess
2. AGW is false or not a serious problem:
A. Humanity does nothing: 0
B. Humanity does nothing effective: -$billions, probably -thousands of people, small mess.
C: Humanity does something expensive but effective: -$trillians, probably -millions of people, big mess.
D. Humanity does something cheap and effective (not likely): -$billions, probably -thousands of people, small mess
We only have 1 shot, and we want to hit, in order: 2A, 2B or 2D, 1D, 1C, 2C (1A and 1B are obviously out of the question). The thing is, because of short-termism, regardless of whether AGW is true or false, most politicians and business leaders will choose A and some (e.g. Al Gore) will pick B while pretending it's D. Those that are advocating C aren't suggesting that this is in any way desireable, just that it's less bad than being wrong about picking A or B. Notice also that the scenarios where AGW is false or not a problem are preferable to AGW being true, but whether or not AGW is true isn't a decision we get to make. That means that the optimists among us sure want to believe AGW is false whether or not it really is.
Point 1: That one is pretty near zero doubt: NASA data. There are other sources as well, and even anti-AGW folks usually acknowledge a rise.
Point 2: Too vague to answer usefully, because "significant" is not defined. That means that a pro-AGW and an anti-AGW will see the same data and come to opposite conclusions about whether it's significant.
Point 3: Probably yes - Correlations between change in temperature and human emission of CO2. That's obviously not complete proof of causation, but it's indicative of either a causal link one way or the other or an unknown third factor that just happens to match other factors. An experimentally tested mechanism for CO2 emissions causing change in temperature says that this is a reasonably accurate hypothesis. This is about as close as we'll be able to come to a definitive yes without a couple more planet Earths and a few centuries to test things out more thoroughly.
Point 4: Probably yes (see point 3), but even if not this isn't entirely relevant. If it's caused by something else (cow farts, volcanos, etc), we still need to clean up the mess if we're going to survive.
Point 5: Almost definitely no. The reason is that those with the power to do something about it have a vested interest in not doing anything. In other words, the problem is politics, not science.
Point 6: Most studies on the theorized effects of global climate change on economies give this one a definite yes. Although the sea level thing is the one that's entered popular culture, the problems include desertification of farm land, water shortages, increased number and strength of tropical storms / hurricanes / monsoons, and the political fallout from all of those (starving homeless people tend to do desperate things like start wars).
Point 7: All of your listed actions are pretty much fantasy. What most governments are actually talking about is regulating the emission of CO2 in much the same way that they've regulated the emission of SO2.
Point 8: Fairly high, for the reasons laid out in point 5.
Basically, the way I see it, there's a problem, and we're absolutely screwed because those who might be able to do something effective about it don't want to. There's just too much short-term gain in doing nothing for anyone to really do something.
In all seriousness, Paul Krugman among others have theorized that a credible threat of extra-terrestrial invasion would in fact do wonders for the world: 1. We'd stop focusing on hating other people, and start focusing on hating those evil aliens. It would go a long way towards making peace on earth possible. 2. World governments which are currently acting mostly as a brake on the economy would start employing absolutely everybody to design and build new weapons designed to stop the invasion. Think along the lines of what the US did in WWII only about 25 times as massive.
You're not really right about the independents in Congress: Joe Lieberman is probably the ultimate spoiled child. He lost in the Connecticut Democratic primary back in 2006, went whining to the national Democratic leadership, and convinced them to back him rather than the guy who was ostensibly their party's candidate.
The other independent is Bernie Sanders. Like him or not, he definitely sticks to his socialist positions. He's willing to make deals with strange bedfellows though - for instance, he worked with Ron Paul on the Fed audit that uncovered trillions of dollars going to major banks.
There were generally 3 versions of the KKK, with somewhat different membership: - Early KKK were mostly Confederate veterans, and there's good reason to think their makeup was similar to the Confederate Army, with a combination of really rich officers and lots of dirt poor rural farmers. Estimated membership was about 550,000, which is way larger than a business+government good ol' boys' club could possibly be. - The pre-WWII KKK was by far the largest, peaking at about 6 million members, in a lot of places involving something like 1 out of every 3 white men. Again, way larger than an elite could possibly be. - During the Civil Rights Movement, while it wasn't always people who were officially KKK, there were mobs of thousands of people ready and willing to use violence against black people.
Slashdot Mirror
when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
You've quite clearly never driven in Rome.
My point was simply that the idea that California spends an unusually large amount on education is in fact false.
Some relevant data here (per pupil spending):
US average - $10499
Alabama - $8870
California - $9657
Mississippi - $8075
You'd be surprised, but California is really not spending a lot on their kids either. The places that are spending a lot:
DC - $16408
New Jersey - $16271
New York - $18126
Alaska - $15552
Vermont - $15175
Source: US Census.
It depends: If you defraud big businesses, rich people, or government, you're in trouble. If you defraud people with no power inside big business or government, then you can get a cabinet post.
Absolutely, I agree with you that the lives of industrial workers everywhere that work to give us our cheap stuff is fraught with conditions of suffering, forced labor (including outright slavery), misery, warfare, and death. You're right that the Chinese workers are just one of the larger places where this is happening - in other industries, it's the sweatshops in Indonesia, the maquiladoras in Latin America, and so on.
My point is that American and to some degree European society and economy is set up so that we never acknowledge that fact, and never ever ever consider doing something significant about it.
We don't have to imagine an answer to that: Look at the early northern United States, where lots of the economic activity was based around independent farmers and craftsmen.
Here's what's going on, in a nutshell:
1. The conditions at Foxconn are dangerous, cruel, and completely unacceptable to Western sensibilities.
2. The conditions at Foxconn are completely legal, better than other plants, and probably considered ethical by Chinese standards.
In other words, this whole brouhaha says more about outsourcing manufacturing to China in general than anything about Apple or Foxconn specifically. Basically, if Americans and Europeans really thought about who was getting killed and maimed and exploited in order to supply their cheap stuff, they'd never accept it, but because it's far away and not talked about they're effectively putting it out-of-sight-out-of-mind.
Your argument about oligarchy is a question of distribution, not production.
Specialization is about increasing and improving production. Within a group of people making an operating system, for example, you could have 1 person (say, Andrew Tanenbaum) writing the whole thing, or you could have somebody who specializes in memory management who can do a better job of handling memory management than the generalist who also has to think about disk IO. End result: better code.
That's true whether you distribute the code under GPL2 or whether you carefully bottle it up behind copyrights and patents and trade secrets. Where distribution makes a difference is whether the economic benefits of that expertise go to everybody (because it's GPL2 or BSD code) or get concentrated towards a particular set of people (e.g. Microsoft shareholders). But that's a different question from whether specialization improves productivity.
Sure, there were some people who were better at knapping than others. But there's also evidence that the basics fairly widespread knowledge, the sort of skill that your average Og could pull off in a pinch. Generally, Oog might make the spearpoints because he does a really good job, but if Oog can't do it, Og can.
Same sort of story as some people being better able to spear an animal so the tribe could eat. Yes, there were specialists, but the basics were general knowledge.
Little known fact: Lev Andropov's brother Picov Andropov is working as the staff chauffeur for Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe in Cambridge, MA.
What you're describing is economic specialization. On the upside, that means that people who do plumbing or electrical or whatever are really good at it. On the downside, your everyday guy doesn't do plumbing or electrical, even on their own home. In theory, that makes things more efficient, because rather than a do-it-yourselfer completely botching the job, the specialist does the job right much faster than the do-it-yourselfer.
This process is not really that new: there was a time when pretty much everybody was doing the same things: hunting, gathering, banging rocks together to make spearpoints, fighting for survival, raising children, etc. Then you started getting differentiation based on gender (as far as current archaeology can tell) with men more involved in hunting and banging rocks together and women more involved in gathering, processing food, and raising children. Then you started getting divisions into professions, with some people specializing in warfare, food production, toolmaking, religion, and so on.
So we have specialized. And it's brought us productivity far beyond anything the world has ever known. But you're right that it means that we're more reliant than ever before on the skills of other people.
It makes perfect sense: This program is written for speakers of American Iranian Farsi, English Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish, and Mexican Russian.
At least, that's what most NLP would probably make of it.
Of course, this discussion isn't about "new" spending. It's about restoring things to the status quo pre-2007, when the Democratic Congress paid for a program meant to bribe the voters by promising that after they're out of office, spending on a popular program would be reduced. And now, it's time for that promise to be kept, and, as usual, the pols are busy trying to break that promise by making a new promise to have the people cut spending after the current bunch is out of office...
Of course, you could tell the same story about the Bush tax cuts (costing about $100 billion per year, versus the $6 billion that is at issue with student loans) - they were sold as being affordable because they were temporary, but when the end of the cut came up both parties scrambled to prevent that end from actually happening.
A fair description of both major US parties is that they're full of ruthless evil bastards who would quite happily bankrupt the public treasury in search of more power and more votes. That's why I've stopped voting for either of them.
I'd actually make that even a stronger statement: Idiots in HR not only demand degrees, they also refuse to do any kind of on-the-job training and want only experienced employees.
There was a time when somebody graduating (or even close to graduating) high school could apply for an entry-level job at a major corporation that would involve some sort of training program at reduced pay for a while followed by the graduate starting a career at that corporation. The idea was that the training programs gave the corporation good value for their money by pulling in workers with good potential when they were relatively cheap, and giving them a reason to be part of company for a very long time, possibly even an entire 45-year career. And it's also worth pointing out that these companies were willing to invest in their current employees as well, so that it was quite possible for somebody who had started in the mailroom to work his way up through the ranks and become the CEO.
Very few if any companies do that any more. They now see training as an unnecessary expense, even in fields where they're having trouble finding qualified employees. For instance, very few hospitals are willing to train new nurses, all the while complaining about the shortage of good nurses. Surprisingly few HR reps have been able to connect the dots.
The Dems look like losers for continuing to support increased spending.
I'm going to have to call out your over-simplification there, because it's really easy to complain about "increased spending" without talking about what we're buying for our money.
Some government spending is definitely useful, and we all derive good value for that money. Some government spending is definitely useless and provides no value whatsoever for that money. There's a lot of stuff that's in between too - for instance, any resident of a city or suburb generally gets good value for having a good public water works, but no value (at best) for hiring the water works director's no-good brother-in-law to sit around the water works office. Good government should involve doing the useful spending and avoiding the useless spending at all levels of government, so (in our example) we might put money into having a good water works, but have a system in place to prevent the no-good brother-in-law from being hired.
Reasonable people can disagree what's useful and what's useless, but blanket statements like "All increased spending is bad" and "All government programs are good" are just plain stupid. Of course, what the electorate really really would like is no taxes and lots of spending, but any sane government makes the effort to balance those 2 desires.
Punishment it little if any deterrent. In countries with far less harsh criminal penalties than the United States, the crime rate stays about even to all other industrialized countries, even given the lesser punishments.
What is a strong deterrent, though, is a high risk of getting caught. For instance, if you put your criminal justice resources into hiring police, training them to be more effective at tracking down crimes, and building trust with the citizens (so they'll be more likely to volunteer information), that gives you a lot better results than putting your money into keeping people in prison longer for having a bag of weed.
The basic problem, in a nutshell, is all in the long-run payoff matrix:
1. AGW is true and a serious problem to the tune of what the scientific consensus viewpoint says:
A. Humanity does nothing: -$trillions, -billions of people, absolute catastrophe with serious questions about the survival of the human race.
B. Humanity does nothing effective: -$trillions, -billions of people, absolute catastrophe with serious questions about the survival of the human race.
C. Humanity does something expensive but effective: -$trillions, probably -millions of people, big mess.
D. Humanity does something cheap and effective (not likely): -$billions, probably -thousands of people, small mess
2. AGW is false or not a serious problem:
A. Humanity does nothing: 0
B. Humanity does nothing effective: -$billions, probably -thousands of people, small mess.
C: Humanity does something expensive but effective: -$trillians, probably -millions of people, big mess.
D. Humanity does something cheap and effective (not likely): -$billions, probably -thousands of people, small mess
We only have 1 shot, and we want to hit, in order: 2A, 2B or 2D, 1D, 1C, 2C (1A and 1B are obviously out of the question). The thing is, because of short-termism, regardless of whether AGW is true or false, most politicians and business leaders will choose A and some (e.g. Al Gore) will pick B while pretending it's D. Those that are advocating C aren't suggesting that this is in any way desireable, just that it's less bad than being wrong about picking A or B. Notice also that the scenarios where AGW is false or not a problem are preferable to AGW being true, but whether or not AGW is true isn't a decision we get to make. That means that the optimists among us sure want to believe AGW is false whether or not it really is.
Hence my view that we're likely doomed.
That smeghead makes everything around Red Dwarf uninhabitable.
So you're saying that crime having a 95% return is OK?
Point 1: That one is pretty near zero doubt: NASA data. There are other sources as well, and even anti-AGW folks usually acknowledge a rise.
Point 2: Too vague to answer usefully, because "significant" is not defined. That means that a pro-AGW and an anti-AGW will see the same data and come to opposite conclusions about whether it's significant.
Point 3: Probably yes - Correlations between change in temperature and human emission of CO2. That's obviously not complete proof of causation, but it's indicative of either a causal link one way or the other or an unknown third factor that just happens to match other factors. An experimentally tested mechanism for CO2 emissions causing change in temperature says that this is a reasonably accurate hypothesis. This is about as close as we'll be able to come to a definitive yes without a couple more planet Earths and a few centuries to test things out more thoroughly.
Point 4: Probably yes (see point 3), but even if not this isn't entirely relevant. If it's caused by something else (cow farts, volcanos, etc), we still need to clean up the mess if we're going to survive.
Point 5: Almost definitely no. The reason is that those with the power to do something about it have a vested interest in not doing anything. In other words, the problem is politics, not science.
Point 6: Most studies on the theorized effects of global climate change on economies give this one a definite yes. Although the sea level thing is the one that's entered popular culture, the problems include desertification of farm land, water shortages, increased number and strength of tropical storms / hurricanes / monsoons, and the political fallout from all of those (starving homeless people tend to do desperate things like start wars).
Point 7: All of your listed actions are pretty much fantasy. What most governments are actually talking about is regulating the emission of CO2 in much the same way that they've regulated the emission of SO2.
Point 8: Fairly high, for the reasons laid out in point 5.
Basically, the way I see it, there's a problem, and we're absolutely screwed because those who might be able to do something effective about it don't want to. There's just too much short-term gain in doing nothing for anyone to really do something.
In all seriousness, Paul Krugman among others have theorized that a credible threat of extra-terrestrial invasion would in fact do wonders for the world:
1. We'd stop focusing on hating other people, and start focusing on hating those evil aliens. It would go a long way towards making peace on earth possible.
2. World governments which are currently acting mostly as a brake on the economy would start employing absolutely everybody to design and build new weapons designed to stop the invasion. Think along the lines of what the US did in WWII only about 25 times as massive.
You're not really right about the independents in Congress: Joe Lieberman is probably the ultimate spoiled child. He lost in the Connecticut Democratic primary back in 2006, went whining to the national Democratic leadership, and convinced them to back him rather than the guy who was ostensibly their party's candidate.
The other independent is Bernie Sanders. Like him or not, he definitely sticks to his socialist positions. He's willing to make deals with strange bedfellows though - for instance, he worked with Ron Paul on the Fed audit that uncovered trillions of dollars going to major banks.
Yes: between 5700 and 10000 years ago (at least, according to roughly 45% of Americans).
Here's one of the major reasons I don't own a dog.
If they're inside:
Please let me out!
If they're outside:
Please let me in!
There were generally 3 versions of the KKK, with somewhat different membership:
- Early KKK were mostly Confederate veterans, and there's good reason to think their makeup was similar to the Confederate Army, with a combination of really rich officers and lots of dirt poor rural farmers. Estimated membership was about 550,000, which is way larger than a business+government good ol' boys' club could possibly be.
- The pre-WWII KKK was by far the largest, peaking at about 6 million members, in a lot of places involving something like 1 out of every 3 white men. Again, way larger than an elite could possibly be.
- During the Civil Rights Movement, while it wasn't always people who were officially KKK, there were mobs of thousands of people ready and willing to use violence against black people.