I should point out that something Bruce Schneier constantly alludes to is that where humans get really really stupid is in dealing with risks that involve numbers like 0.000001% chance of $1,000,000,000 worth of damage.
Oh, and if you really want to travel safely, I should point out that while planes are much safer than cars, by far the safest option is trains - trains kill only 24 people annually, while planes kill 700, and cars 44,000. In fact, you're much more likely to commit suicide then to be killed riding a plane, train, or bus.
A true story regarding the problem of walking in behind people (one of the easiest ways to enter a large building you shouldn't be able to access):
Employee walks into the office building. A bit behind that employee was the CEO, but the CEO's badge was not visible, and this was a newer employee who didn't recognize the CEO. The employee made sure the door closed on the CEO. The CEO took swift action to send a message to the whole company: He called security, found out who that employee was, and sent word down the chain of command to give that employee a special award.
Not saying that the Austrians couldn't have reached the same conclusions. Heck, I worked for a couple of months for a firm that handled the paperwork of many of the subprime mortgages, and I could tell there was likely a serious problem (nothing illegal, nothing I could tell that was overtly fraudulent, just patterns that suggested that the people taking out loans couldn't pay them back and the lender was lending them money anyways).
My point is, to not see the bubble required willful blindness to whole schools of economic thought.
Just as a note on tax revenue in particular: Assume that permanent tax cuts which leave some non-zero level of taxation have a permanent positive effect on annual economic growth. There exists some year N such that from that year forward government revenue is higher than it would have been without the tax cut.
2 major problems with that argument: 1. N may be a couple of centuries from now. As Keynes famously put it, in the long run we're all dead. 2. When the economy grows, government responsibilities grow with it. For instance, an economy that's growing so much it needs more workers attracts immigrants, and thus there's a higher population that the government now has to police.
I should also make it clear that what Keynesians generally advocate is for governments to run surpluses during good times and deficits during bad times. In other words, buy useful stuff during recessions (when they're nice and cheap) and then effectively 'sell high' by upping taxes when the economy is doing better. The desired effect of this is that the federal government, along with the Federal Reserve, act to smooth out the economic growth curve. The trouble is that the US government almost never has the discipline to run surpluses during relatively good times - either somebody wants a tax cut, or somebody wants a new spending program.
Actually, research into behavioral economics in particular acknowledges the existence of asshats, information asymmetry, and people acting against their best interest.
For instance, a classic behavioral economics experiment involves 2 subjects: Person A offers a way to split $20 between A and B. Person B can either accept the offer or reject it, but if he rejects the offer then both A and B get nothing. The 'rational' thing to do is for A to offer B $1 while he takes $19, and for B to accept (because $1 is better than $0), but in practice, A tends to offer B closer to $10, and B refuses when the offer gets below about $5.
The list of criminals that created the financial crisis is much longer than that. You can easily include: Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs / US Treasury) Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan) Alan Greenspan (former Fed chairman) George W Bush, Dick Cheney Phil Gramm, Jim Leach, and Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (US Senate) Richard S. Fuld, Jr. and Bart McDade (Lehman Bros) Joseph Cassano (AIG) Tim Geitner (NY Federal Reserve / US Treasury) Bernie Madoff Angelo R. Mozilo, David S. Loeb (Countrywide Financial) Roland Arnall (Ameriquest Mortgage)...
I should point out, on the list of economists who were correct and carefully ignored, add a lot of neo-Keynesians such as Paul Krugman.
My basic view on why economists so frequently get things wrong: They were paid to get it wrong. Specifically, they were paid by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation to argue that deregulation and lower taxes always make things better, regardless of what the 'better' is.
For instance, over the course of my lifetime, I've seen tax cuts pushed as a way of spurring economic growth (sometimes right), increasing tax revenue (which is flat wrong), increasing employment (usually wrong), and even balancing the budget (ludicrously wrong). The judgments of "right" and "wrong" here come from looking at the various rounds of tax cuts, notably in the 1980's, and seeing whether the promised effect actually happened. The argument "I want to cut taxes and cut government spending the same amount" is an honest argument, while "I want to cut taxes to balance the budget" is not.
Then "disproportionately" is not the right word. The right word is "unjustifiably".
"disproportionately" implies that there's something you're measuring against, and that there is some number that's proportionate. For instance, if we consider two groups of people, and one group has 150 deaths per 100,000 from a particular cause while on average there are only 5 deaths per 100,000 from that cause, we'd look for what disproportionately causes the first group to have 30 times the usual number of deaths.
By pretty much any metric, nuclear is safer and cheaper (especially when you consider those externalities like carbon emissions) than coal/oil/hydro, etc.
Which metrics? What do those metrics measure to demonstrate the relative safety of nuclear power? Do those metrics include the costs of health care for those living nearby the plant adversely affected by the emissions? Do they include the costs of accident cleanup averaged out over the number of accidents per GwH (or some other appropriate standard)?
Electricity isn't free because those generators, transformers, power lines, etc cost money to build and maintain. You could set up systems where you paid the cost via taxes, or via increased prices from the businesses that now have to cover the cost of your power, but you can't eliminate the cost.
Plus, you eliminate any incentive to reduce your electricity usage.
(especially now that nuclear power has suddenly become disproportionately unpopular)
There are lots of problems with this phrase: 1. "especially now" and "suddenly" imply that opposition to nuclear power is something new, rather than something that's had at least rumblings about for over 50 years. 2. "disproportionately" doesn't describe what you're comparing it to. I'm guessing it's the cost of nuclear power, factoring in the average cost per KwH, the incidence of accidents, and the average cost per accident, but that's little more than a guess.
So that little editorial comment seems to read: "Nuclear power is safe and fantastic, but those environmentalist nutjobs have suddenly convinced everybody to hate it for no good reason."
The more reasonable comment, if you were going to make any general statement at all, would be something like: "Nuclear power seems to be mostly safe, but environmentalists have convinced many people that it's a bad idea because of a few notable accidents."
Or, you know, you could just leave that out entirely. Knowing where geothermal energy could be a viable source is worth doing regardless of what happens to nuclear power plants.
The tech companies such as Google will probably be against it, so they'll be at least some campaign cash to be had by voting Nay. Up until now, it had always been a matter of corporations with cash versus citizens without cash.
Probably not. Modern scholarship seems to mostly be of the opinion that any kind of notable star around 4 BCE (which is when we currently think Jesus might have been born) would most likely have been not a star at all, but a comet.
But in any event, the Clarke story by that name is fantastic.
If the machines create extra profit for the company, there is less need for cost cutting.
Regardless of whether there's a need for cost cutting, an economically rational company will cut costs whenever possible. Remember, their goal isn't social justice or keeping their employees happy, it's making money.
Most people will still benefit from more automation.
Most people in the world are unskilled or semi-skilled laborers. They are precisely the ones that will not benefit from more automation.
Most Slashdotters are highly skilled semi-professionals or students. We will benefit from more automation. But it's fallacious to generalize from that to "most people".
Except that your employers knows you don't need as much income, so they lower their costs by cutting your salary (in real terms), by not giving you raises when the currency inflates, by simply firing you and hiring somebody else in at 2/3 the cost, or just telling you to take a pay cut or be fired.
It's really not even close to a new argument. The basic idea, put forward by the Luddites was that new technology makes workers more and more superfluous, ruining the lives of workers.
Karl Marx even took it a step further: He argued that while the new technology leads to lower prices of goods and services, which would appear to benefit workers, he pointed out that employers would then adjust to the lower cost of living by lowering real wages, which meant that the lowest-level workers don't benefit at all from the technology.
They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.
Secret societies like this were relatively common in the late 1700's and most of the 1800's. But it's Freemason-like style, it's focus on sight, the timing, and the choice of German as the language suggests that it could be connected with the original Bavarian Illuminati.
Or not. That's the hard part about figuring out the history of this kind of thing - they're all secret.
Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope?
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.
That's because Dell has basically discontinued selling Linux-based systems to consumers. This was around the same time that almost all retailers made much the same decision, which certainly looks rather suspiciously like a certain supplier of operating systems was pulling some strings in violation of their anti-trust settlement.
A good example of this: My second grade teacher taught us all how to use different bases. Her effort helps me to this day in reading and understanding octal and hexadecimal without even thinking. And yet using octal was on no standardized test.
(Yes, as Tom Lehrer points out, base 8 is just like base 10, if you're missing 2 fingers)
It should be pointed out that building a teaching work force that's totally awesome means paying teachers rates that are totally awesome. And judging from battles I've seen over school funding, a lot of Americans don't really want to do that - they want top-notch teachers at bargain basement rates.
I support the Greek pronunciation to solve that problem: U (well, upsilon, really) is always 'ooh' as in 'food', and A (again, alpha really) is 'ah' as in 'ramen'. So you get something like 'ooh-rah-noose'.
Those companies which are publicly traded have thousands of owners, but a very small number of people have majority control over those companies which are publicly traded. My 401(k) plan holds a few shares of Walmart, but if I disagree with what the Waltons want to do, the company will go with the Waltons. Even if I get thousands of small shareholders together, Walmart will still do what the Waltons want it to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I should point out that something Bruce Schneier constantly alludes to is that where humans get really really stupid is in dealing with risks that involve numbers like 0.000001% chance of $1,000,000,000 worth of damage.
Oh, and if you really want to travel safely, I should point out that while planes are much safer than cars, by far the safest option is trains - trains kill only 24 people annually, while planes kill 700, and cars 44,000. In fact, you're much more likely to commit suicide then to be killed riding a plane, train, or bus.
A true story regarding the problem of walking in behind people (one of the easiest ways to enter a large building you shouldn't be able to access):
Employee walks into the office building. A bit behind that employee was the CEO, but the CEO's badge was not visible, and this was a newer employee who didn't recognize the CEO. The employee made sure the door closed on the CEO. The CEO took swift action to send a message to the whole company: He called security, found out who that employee was, and sent word down the chain of command to give that employee a special award.
In fact, there's a worthwhile read on precisely this topic: The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One
Some evidence that Paul Krugman's been pretty accurate:
2005, calling the housing bubble (he actually did so repeatedly throughout 2005)
2006, calling the housing bubble and risk of a crash
Not saying that the Austrians couldn't have reached the same conclusions. Heck, I worked for a couple of months for a firm that handled the paperwork of many of the subprime mortgages, and I could tell there was likely a serious problem (nothing illegal, nothing I could tell that was overtly fraudulent, just patterns that suggested that the people taking out loans couldn't pay them back and the lender was lending them money anyways).
My point is, to not see the bubble required willful blindness to whole schools of economic thought.
Just as a note on tax revenue in particular: Assume that permanent tax cuts which leave some non-zero level of taxation have a permanent positive effect on annual economic growth. There exists some year N such that from that year forward government revenue is higher than it would have been without the tax cut.
2 major problems with that argument:
1. N may be a couple of centuries from now. As Keynes famously put it, in the long run we're all dead.
2. When the economy grows, government responsibilities grow with it. For instance, an economy that's growing so much it needs more workers attracts immigrants, and thus there's a higher population that the government now has to police.
I should also make it clear that what Keynesians generally advocate is for governments to run surpluses during good times and deficits during bad times. In other words, buy useful stuff during recessions (when they're nice and cheap) and then effectively 'sell high' by upping taxes when the economy is doing better. The desired effect of this is that the federal government, along with the Federal Reserve, act to smooth out the economic growth curve. The trouble is that the US government almost never has the discipline to run surpluses during relatively good times - either somebody wants a tax cut, or somebody wants a new spending program.
Actually, research into behavioral economics in particular acknowledges the existence of asshats, information asymmetry, and people acting against their best interest.
For instance, a classic behavioral economics experiment involves 2 subjects: Person A offers a way to split $20 between A and B. Person B can either accept the offer or reject it, but if he rejects the offer then both A and B get nothing. The 'rational' thing to do is for A to offer B $1 while he takes $19, and for B to accept (because $1 is better than $0), but in practice, A tends to offer B closer to $10, and B refuses when the offer gets below about $5.
The list of criminals that created the financial crisis is much longer than that. You can easily include: ...
Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs / US Treasury)
Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan)
Alan Greenspan (former Fed chairman)
George W Bush, Dick Cheney
Phil Gramm, Jim Leach, and Thomas J. Bliley, Jr. (US Senate)
Richard S. Fuld, Jr. and Bart McDade (Lehman Bros)
Joseph Cassano (AIG)
Tim Geitner (NY Federal Reserve / US Treasury)
Bernie Madoff
Angelo R. Mozilo, David S. Loeb (Countrywide Financial)
Roland Arnall (Ameriquest Mortgage)
I should point out, on the list of economists who were correct and carefully ignored, add a lot of neo-Keynesians such as Paul Krugman.
My basic view on why economists so frequently get things wrong: They were paid to get it wrong. Specifically, they were paid by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation to argue that deregulation and lower taxes always make things better, regardless of what the 'better' is.
For instance, over the course of my lifetime, I've seen tax cuts pushed as a way of spurring economic growth (sometimes right), increasing tax revenue (which is flat wrong), increasing employment (usually wrong), and even balancing the budget (ludicrously wrong). The judgments of "right" and "wrong" here come from looking at the various rounds of tax cuts, notably in the 1980's, and seeing whether the promised effect actually happened. The argument "I want to cut taxes and cut government spending the same amount" is an honest argument, while "I want to cut taxes to balance the budget" is not.
Then "disproportionately" is not the right word. The right word is "unjustifiably".
"disproportionately" implies that there's something you're measuring against, and that there is some number that's proportionate. For instance, if we consider two groups of people, and one group has 150 deaths per 100,000 from a particular cause while on average there are only 5 deaths per 100,000 from that cause, we'd look for what disproportionately causes the first group to have 30 times the usual number of deaths.
By pretty much any metric, nuclear is safer and cheaper (especially when you consider those externalities like carbon emissions) than coal/oil/hydro, etc.
Which metrics? What do those metrics measure to demonstrate the relative safety of nuclear power? Do those metrics include the costs of health care for those living nearby the plant adversely affected by the emissions? Do they include the costs of accident cleanup averaged out over the number of accidents per GwH (or some other appropriate standard)?
Electricity isn't free because those generators, transformers, power lines, etc cost money to build and maintain. You could set up systems where you paid the cost via taxes, or via increased prices from the businesses that now have to cover the cost of your power, but you can't eliminate the cost.
Plus, you eliminate any incentive to reduce your electricity usage.
FTFS:
(especially now that nuclear power has suddenly become disproportionately unpopular)
There are lots of problems with this phrase:
1. "especially now" and "suddenly" imply that opposition to nuclear power is something new, rather than something that's had at least rumblings about for over 50 years.
2. "disproportionately" doesn't describe what you're comparing it to. I'm guessing it's the cost of nuclear power, factoring in the average cost per KwH, the incidence of accidents, and the average cost per accident, but that's little more than a guess.
So that little editorial comment seems to read:
"Nuclear power is safe and fantastic, but those environmentalist nutjobs have suddenly convinced everybody to hate it for no good reason."
The more reasonable comment, if you were going to make any general statement at all, would be something like:
"Nuclear power seems to be mostly safe, but environmentalists have convinced many people that it's a bad idea because of a few notable accidents."
Or, you know, you could just leave that out entirely. Knowing where geothermal energy could be a viable source is worth doing regardless of what happens to nuclear power plants.
Doesn't have to be limited to nuclear plants: Business in general will always downplay / obscure / lie about the downsides of their activities.
In general, I'm aware that if something really went wrong in any kind of heavy industry near my home, I'd be Fuked.
The tech companies such as Google will probably be against it, so they'll be at least some campaign cash to be had by voting Nay. Up until now, it had always been a matter of corporations with cash versus citizens without cash.
Probably not. Modern scholarship seems to mostly be of the opinion that any kind of notable star around 4 BCE (which is when we currently think Jesus might have been born) would most likely have been not a star at all, but a comet.
But in any event, the Clarke story by that name is fantastic.
If the machines create extra profit for the company, there is less need for cost cutting.
Regardless of whether there's a need for cost cutting, an economically rational company will cut costs whenever possible. Remember, their goal isn't social justice or keeping their employees happy, it's making money.
Most people will still benefit from more automation.
Most people in the world are unskilled or semi-skilled laborers. They are precisely the ones that will not benefit from more automation.
Most Slashdotters are highly skilled semi-professionals or students. We will benefit from more automation. But it's fallacious to generalize from that to "most people".
Except that your employers knows you don't need as much income, so they lower their costs by cutting your salary (in real terms), by not giving you raises when the currency inflates, by simply firing you and hiring somebody else in at 2/3 the cost, or just telling you to take a pay cut or be fired.
It's really not even close to a new argument. The basic idea, put forward by the Luddites was that new technology makes workers more and more superfluous, ruining the lives of workers.
Karl Marx even took it a step further: He argued that while the new technology leads to lower prices of goods and services, which would appear to benefit workers, he pointed out that employers would then adjust to the lower cost of living by lowering real wages, which meant that the lowest-level workers don't benefit at all from the technology.
And here I was thinking it was "We apologize for the inconvenience"
They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.
Secret societies like this were relatively common in the late 1700's and most of the 1800's. But it's Freemason-like style, it's focus on sight, the timing, and the choice of German as the language suggests that it could be connected with the original Bavarian Illuminati.
Or not. That's the hard part about figuring out the history of this kind of thing - they're all secret.
RTFFAQ:
Slashdot seems to be very U.S.-centric. Do you have any plans to be more international in your scope?
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It is worth noting that there is a Japanese Slashdot run by VA Japan. While we helped them a little in their early days, they essentially run their own content without any real involvement from us... none of us can read Kanji! There are currently no plans to do other language or nation specific Slashdot sites.
That's because Dell has basically discontinued selling Linux-based systems to consumers. This was around the same time that almost all retailers made much the same decision, which certainly looks rather suspiciously like a certain supplier of operating systems was pulling some strings in violation of their anti-trust settlement.
A good example of this: My second grade teacher taught us all how to use different bases. Her effort helps me to this day in reading and understanding octal and hexadecimal without even thinking. And yet using octal was on no standardized test.
(Yes, as Tom Lehrer points out, base 8 is just like base 10, if you're missing 2 fingers)
It should be pointed out that building a teaching work force that's totally awesome means paying teachers rates that are totally awesome. And judging from battles I've seen over school funding, a lot of Americans don't really want to do that - they want top-notch teachers at bargain basement rates.
I support the Greek pronunciation to solve that problem: U (well, upsilon, really) is always 'ooh' as in 'food', and A (again, alpha really) is 'ah' as in 'ramen'. So you get something like 'ooh-rah-noose'.
That's where the $2000 for room and board comes in, and the assumption that you're living with your parents when school isn't in session.
Those companies which are publicly traded have thousands of owners, but a very small number of people have majority control over those companies which are publicly traded. My 401(k) plan holds a few shares of Walmart, but if I disagree with what the Waltons want to do, the company will go with the Waltons. Even if I get thousands of small shareholders together, Walmart will still do what the Waltons want it to do.