How can anyone be stupid enough to believe that a judge ruling has any effect on medical science?
It doesn't, of course. But when there's a finding like this in a court, it's frequently because there is no real debate in medical science.
If you ask just about any competent doctor, they'll tell you that MMR vaccine is making everyone healthier. They'd almost definitely argue that even if the completely discredited study about MMR and autism is true, MMR is still worth it because it has saved roughly 500,000 lives a year.
Any "percent complete" provided by a developer is nonsense. Especially since the progression you'll typically hear is something like 50%, then 70%, then 90%, then 95%, then 96%, then 97%, then 99%, then "I just have to do XYZ", then "I just have to do ABC",...
The way you actually figure out where you stand is by having a list of tasks and estimates that are small enough that each task is expected to be a couple of days worth of work at most, and then rate tasks either complete or not complete (and it's not complete until QA says it is).
But is this a measure of people competing for jobs in good faith, or is it merely the number of people unemployed divided by the number of jobs? From TFA, I see it's the latter.
1. To be counted as unemployed, you must be actively looking for a job. If you aren't, you are officially a "discouraged worker" and removed from the unemployment rolls. So, for example, if your sister hasn't worked since 1995, an hasn't even been trying to get a job, she isn't one of those 3 people trying to fill a single opening.
2. Even if, say, 1/3 of people who are counted as unemployed are really bums trying to mooch off the government, that still means that half of the people legitimately looking for work are coming up empty.
It was even worse a few years ago, when the ration was more like 5 unemployed people to 1 job. In that situation, you could be demonstrably good at your profession, and still not be hired because they could get the best-of-the-best for a pittance in that economy.
Yeah, because the serial numbers and mandatory registrations have done so well to stop automotive theft.
They help a lot when a cop sees the car in question in between wherever it was stolen from, and the chop shop it's going to. Most importantly, it helps distinguish the stolen red Honda Civic from all of the legitimately owned red Honda Civics in the area, so the cops don't spend time chasing after the wrong car.
The reason cops don't go heavily after bike theft is that it's a relatively petty crime: A $200 theft is a very different animal from a $20,000 theft. I just wish that they spent an appropriate level of effort on those $20,000,000 thefts out there.
There are a couple of big reasons for this: 1. Most first-year faculty are adjuncts rather than assistant professors. Adjuncts make about $58K if they manage to work full time (most don't).
2. Colleges have been cutting faculty salaries aggressively for faculty who are not yet full tenured professors. What's driving the increase in college costs is actually administration, buildings, and sports, because that's what actually attracts students to a lot of colleges rather than the actual education part.
No there aren't: Sometimes there are 5 sides. Sometimes there really is only 1 side. Sometimes, what's being examined is so obscure that nobody has taken sides yet. Interesting stories typically have a lot of different completely truthful angles to take, and reducing everything to 2 sides is probably misleading.
This is especially true of political stories: If you've talked to 1 liberal and 1 conservative, you are not actually done accurately reporting the story, because you should be then determining who lied to you about what, go back and say "We think you're full of it with regards to ____, what do you have to say about that?", then figure out if how they lied again, etc.
You simply can't vote the most capable candidate into office unless you know the issues, and that means knowing facts. Not interpretation of them. Not skewed versions of them. Not partial lists of them. You need to know everything about it, or you're not making an informed decision, you're making a decision based on propaganda and lies.
It is completely impossible for any one person to know everything about every major issue. Whatever you know about something outside of your extremely narrow specialty will necessarily be incomplete and relying on expert opinion of some sort.
For example, if you ask many people on Slashdot the proper way to calculate algorithmic efficiency of a Quicksort, you'll get some definitive answers. If you ask those same people who provided definitive answers about how to properly determine cost-of-living increases to Social Security checks, you'll get some barely educated guesses, because they aren't operating in their area of expertise and not only don't know the answer but don't know (thanks to the Dunning-Kruger Effect) which of the available expert sources to believe and which are cranks. You'll run into the same problem if you ask an expert chemist about astrophysics or vice versa - the person you ask will have intelligent guesses but nowhere near a definitive answer. Even a well-intentioned and wise politician would run into this problem if, say, his background was financial law but the decision is about environmental regulation, or vice versa.
You can and should know some basic information about a lot of things, but that is a far cry from having expert-level detailed knowledge immune from propaganda.
Everyone has an opinion but reporters are to report the news.
"Reporters reporting the news" is hardly immune to bias: 1. What is considered "the news" anyways? I think we can agree that "Planes Flown Into World Trade Center" is news, and "Area Man Posts Cat Video" is not, but how about "50 People Protest" versus "Double Homicide On Fleet St" versus "10 Brokers Convicted of Mortgage Fraud"?
2. Who do you talk to in order to understand the news story in question? For example, in discussions on Syria's chemical weapons, does your report mostly contain information from (a) the White House, (b) US Congressional opposition leadership, (c) the Kremlin, (d) the UN, (e) Bashar al-Assad's government, (f) Syrian rebels, (g) the Israeli government, etc, etc.
3. Who's information do you believe, if there is disagreement about something? Which sources do you challenge aggressively and which sources do you treat as fairly impartial observers? For example, on an economics story, do you accept a government report as truth if there's a competing report by another group, especially if that group has a political ax to grind?
4. Even if you've perfectly balanced issues 1, 2, and 3, what comes first in your report and what becomes the headline? For example, on 9/12/2001, many headlines in the US read "America Attacked", which was true but conveys a somewhat different story than "18 Terrorists Attack World Trade Center and Pentagon".
Here's a suggestion: if you think Azerbaijan is such a breath of fresh air, why haven't you moved there? Oh, right, because despite of how bad things are in the US, it is still light years ahead of dictatorships like Azerbaijan.
And real democracies like Sweden are light years ahead of the US in the less-corruption department. I'm not saying they're perfect, but you simply don't get the same kinds of comments about those governments as you do about the US, even from citizens of those countries.
Someone described it very well: In Iran, you need to gain the acceptance of the unelected and unaccountable Council of Guardians first to become a successful politician. In the US, you need to gain the acceptance of the unelected and unaccountable Boards of Directors of major corporations. What exactly is the difference between the two systems?
Just a line where you can write a number of you choice. When the votes are counted the numbers are listed together with the votes.
Any system that allows you to prove how you personally voted, in any way, is open to coercion: e.g. "Show me proof that you voted for Jones rather than Smith if you want to keep your job."
Perhaps society only needs a few people per hundred that are great at math?
In fact, the richest and most powerful Americans would probably like there to be not so many people who understand math: Those who understand math can understand how badly they're being screwed by the richest and most powerful Americans!
You must be an American, since you apparently hold the current Secretary of Education responsible for the quality of American public school education decades before he took office (or in some cases, before he graduated high school).
Isn't it odd how, until 2009, it was considered every citizen's sacred duty to disobey the law and trash the government?
It is odd, because I was paying attention then, and I do lean fairly heavily leftwards politically (but again, listen to conservatives who have sense too, because good ideas are good ideas no matter where they come from) and I honestly can't remember being told it was my sacred duty to disobey the law, trash the government, or set things on fire. I was told about how George W Bush adminstration had managed to violate about 9 of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights, but what the really radical folks were suggesting be done about it amounted to holding signs, chanting on the street, marching in organized protests, and voting for something else. Occupy Wall Street, which included many of the same people who were out protesting the Bush administration, was actually far more confrontational than what was going on during, for example, the run-up to the Iraq War.
There were significant numbers of people talking along those lines in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Those folks have mostly retired or died, and the organizations they led (Weathermen, Black Panthers, Yippies, SDS, etc) are either non-existant or shells of their former selves. Most of the folks that are advocating outright defiance of the law these days are anarcho-capitalist libertarians, not anarcho-socialists.
Inside the liberal bubble (where I don't live, but I have relatives who do), there's another reason starting to be cited: 6) The State of New York is reporting that they had about 4-5 times as many unique visitors as they had uninsured people, and that many of those visits come in waves of 100,000 or so all at once. The suspicion is that opponents of Obamacare have organized DDOS attacks on the exchanges.
No idea if the premise is accurate, but it's certainly something that would be both technically possible and not (IMHO) below the die-hard opponents of the law.
What's the difference between an armed neighborhood watchman, and an armed police officer?
Well, here are some: 1. The police officer has the legal authority to act on behalf of the government. In theory at least, they are carrying out the collective will of the citizens as determined by the politicians. By contrast, the armed neighborhood watchman has no more legal authority than I do. 2. The police officer has the right to do things that citizens do not. For instance, a police officer can forcibly detain someone against their will if they have a reasonable suspicion that person is engaged in criminal activity, whereas a neighborhood watchman can only use force against someone who is presenting an immediate threat to people or property. 3. The average police officer has considerably more training than your average security guard. Most of that training is not about using violence, but rather about how to read and control people's emotions. 4. The police officer is supposed to protect and serve anyone and everyone. The armed neighborhood watchman is supposed to protect those who pay him. That makes a big difference for those who can't afford to pay for the security guard. 5. The police officer that covers your neighborhood coordinates his/her efforts with other police officers and other police departments in a way that armed neighborhood watchman simply can't do. For example, if someone is running from the cops, the various departments will work together to keep the chase going even if the suspect runs from one jurisdiction to the next. Your neighborhood watchman, on the other hand, might have to deal with trouble he never knew was coming, rather than knowing in advance, planning, and coordinating with the other neighborhood watchmen around him.
The police forces are certainly not perfect, but there are real reasons they exist, and real differences between them and private security guards.
Longer answers as to why: 1. As someone else mentioned, a simple static page is a lot less vulnerable to attack or disruption than a functional page. 2. Bandwidth costs are lower, since all you have are people hitting the site, seeing the shuttering, and going away again, rather than actually using it. 3. Anything behind the front page, such as databases, can and probably are shut down completely, saving on power and bandwidth. 4. Information provided on sites that aren't updated is likely to be inaccurate, which is worse than no information at all. 5. The cost to shutting them down can't have been all that high, since here's the process: (1) Have a developer make a static "We're not open for business" page, (2) have your admins configure front-end webservers with a mod_rewrite (or equivalent) to direct all traffic to that page, (3) shut down anything that's not a front-end webserver. Yes, it wasn't free, but my guess is whoever is coming up with the costs is factoring in paying the tech staff they already had on salary to do the work.
Basically, what I'm seeing is people who advocated shutting down the entire federal government as a complete waste of money are now going "Wait, I didn't mean that, or that, or that other thing." It's sort of like the reaction if you are told to remove everything from a messy room and start throwing absolutely everything out.
Fortunately, with all of the items I listed, the government was not really in a position to block adoption. Unfortunately, with innovative education methods it is...
Private schools and home schoolers can do pretty much whatever they want, so long as they provide a decent education somewhere in there. Rich parents take advantage of this fact to ensure that their little angel goes to a top-tier prep school rather than a public school.
The government only has the power to adopt a particular technique or tool in public schools, which has everything to do with the fact that they write the checks in public schools. And even then, the local government usually has wide discretion in what they do, so you don't have to convince Congress, you have to convince 7 people at a local school board meeting just down the street from where you live.
So government doesn't prevent a method from being adopted at all. It only prevents a method from being adopted on somebody else's nickel.
This line of industrial engineering robot displaced 18,000 low-skilled jobs and replaced them with around 200 high-skilled jobs (maintenance techs). Those other 17,200 went into the service industry or construction...
Also, in a truly shocking occurrence, 600 people managed to disappear without a trace.
A worthwhile read on the subject: Karl Marx on the effects of technological improvements You might not agree with it, or you might shy away from it solely because of who wrote it, but it was a serious economics argument explaining what happens and why.
None of these things are about one man thinking they've invented a better society, however - they're about lots of people working together to form consensus on gradual improvements to society, then putting that consensus into practice, then evaluating it.
The trouble with that distinction is that even the horrible things that have happened because someone thought they'd invented a better society wasn't happening solo either. For example, the reason Lenin was Lenin and not just some guy was because he had a bunch of Bolshevik pals who were steeped in Communist theory and had worked together to form consensus on some not-so-gradual improvements to society, based on ideas that had been floating around and partially implemented in some places for about 40-50 years before they did the whole overthrowing-the-czar thing.
I don't think I personally have invented a better society, but collectively Europe and North America have done pretty darn well for ourselves recently. Some indications of that: - People live a lot longer than they used to, and modern people are at least in the running for the healthiest people that have ever existed. (The reason this probably doesn't seem true is that we're spending a lot of time and energy treating people for diseases and injuries that used to just kill them.)
- Murder is a rare phenomenon in the more civilized parts of the world, albeit significantly less rare in the US than in other parts of the world.
- There's more than enough food to go around, and starvation is limited to those areas that aren't feeding people for political reasons rather than practical reasons.
- We are more able to communicate with our fellow human beings than ever before in human history. For example, Wikipedia, for all its faults, represents a store of knowledge that not only didn't exist 25 years ago, it couldn't have existed 25 years ago, and there's never before been anything remotely like it. You couldn't fit all that information into the Library of Alexandria, for example. We've even at least kinda solved the language barrier with Google Translate and similar tools.
- We're no longer considering forced labor to be completely acceptable. There's still some of that going on, but it's highly illegal. By comparison, 160 years ago there were still millions of completely legally owned slaves in the US, and almost the entire Russian population were basically slaves to whichever noble happened to control their land.
- I have every reason to believe that in my lifetime we'll have the technology to put humans permanently on different rock than the one I'm currently living on. That would have been a silly claim 75 years ago.
It's one of the big reasons that life here in the USA has changed for the worse, as the detrimental effects of living that way eventually invade just about every other aspect of daily life.
Interesting related stat: Most employers now routinely expect that employees will be paying attention to and responding within the hour to work email at almost all times of all days. According to this article, Americans work about 10% overtime, completely unpaid, doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
How can anyone be stupid enough to believe that a judge ruling has any effect on medical science?
It doesn't, of course. But when there's a finding like this in a court, it's frequently because there is no real debate in medical science.
If you ask just about any competent doctor, they'll tell you that MMR vaccine is making everyone healthier. They'd almost definitely argue that even if the completely discredited study about MMR and autism is true, MMR is still worth it because it has saved roughly 500,000 lives a year.
Any "percent complete" provided by a developer is nonsense. Especially since the progression you'll typically hear is something like 50%, then 70%, then 90%, then 95%, then 96%, then 97%, then 99%, then "I just have to do XYZ", then "I just have to do ABC", ...
The way you actually figure out where you stand is by having a list of tasks and estimates that are small enough that each task is expected to be a couple of days worth of work at most, and then rate tasks either complete or not complete (and it's not complete until QA says it is).
But is this a measure of people competing for jobs in good faith, or is it merely the number of people unemployed divided by the number of jobs? From TFA, I see it's the latter.
1. To be counted as unemployed, you must be actively looking for a job. If you aren't, you are officially a "discouraged worker" and removed from the unemployment rolls. So, for example, if your sister hasn't worked since 1995, an hasn't even been trying to get a job, she isn't one of those 3 people trying to fill a single opening.
2. Even if, say, 1/3 of people who are counted as unemployed are really bums trying to mooch off the government, that still means that half of the people legitimately looking for work are coming up empty.
It was even worse a few years ago, when the ration was more like 5 unemployed people to 1 job. In that situation, you could be demonstrably good at your profession, and still not be hired because they could get the best-of-the-best for a pittance in that economy.
Yeah, because the serial numbers and mandatory registrations have done so well to stop automotive theft.
They help a lot when a cop sees the car in question in between wherever it was stolen from, and the chop shop it's going to. Most importantly, it helps distinguish the stolen red Honda Civic from all of the legitimately owned red Honda Civics in the area, so the cops don't spend time chasing after the wrong car.
The reason cops don't go heavily after bike theft is that it's a relatively petty crime: A $200 theft is a very different animal from a $20,000 theft. I just wish that they spent an appropriate level of effort on those $20,000,000 thefts out there.
$75k is starting salary for a first-year assistant professor in America. Senior professors make two or three times that.
No it isn't
There are a couple of big reasons for this:
1. Most first-year faculty are adjuncts rather than assistant professors. Adjuncts make about $58K if they manage to work full time (most don't).
2. Colleges have been cutting faculty salaries aggressively for faculty who are not yet full tenured professors. What's driving the increase in college costs is actually administration, buildings, and sports, because that's what actually attracts students to a lot of colleges rather than the actual education part.
There are always 2 sides to a story
No there aren't: Sometimes there are 5 sides. Sometimes there really is only 1 side. Sometimes, what's being examined is so obscure that nobody has taken sides yet. Interesting stories typically have a lot of different completely truthful angles to take, and reducing everything to 2 sides is probably misleading.
This is especially true of political stories: If you've talked to 1 liberal and 1 conservative, you are not actually done accurately reporting the story, because you should be then determining who lied to you about what, go back and say "We think you're full of it with regards to ____, what do you have to say about that?", then figure out if how they lied again, etc.
You simply can't vote the most capable candidate into office unless you know the issues, and that means knowing facts. Not interpretation of them. Not skewed versions of them. Not partial lists of them. You need to know everything about it, or you're not making an informed decision, you're making a decision based on propaganda and lies.
It is completely impossible for any one person to know everything about every major issue. Whatever you know about something outside of your extremely narrow specialty will necessarily be incomplete and relying on expert opinion of some sort.
For example, if you ask many people on Slashdot the proper way to calculate algorithmic efficiency of a Quicksort, you'll get some definitive answers. If you ask those same people who provided definitive answers about how to properly determine cost-of-living increases to Social Security checks, you'll get some barely educated guesses, because they aren't operating in their area of expertise and not only don't know the answer but don't know (thanks to the Dunning-Kruger Effect) which of the available expert sources to believe and which are cranks. You'll run into the same problem if you ask an expert chemist about astrophysics or vice versa - the person you ask will have intelligent guesses but nowhere near a definitive answer. Even a well-intentioned and wise politician would run into this problem if, say, his background was financial law but the decision is about environmental regulation, or vice versa.
You can and should know some basic information about a lot of things, but that is a far cry from having expert-level detailed knowledge immune from propaganda.
Everyone has an opinion but reporters are to report the news.
"Reporters reporting the news" is hardly immune to bias:
1. What is considered "the news" anyways? I think we can agree that "Planes Flown Into World Trade Center" is news, and "Area Man Posts Cat Video" is not, but how about "50 People Protest" versus "Double Homicide On Fleet St" versus "10 Brokers Convicted of Mortgage Fraud"?
2. Who do you talk to in order to understand the news story in question? For example, in discussions on Syria's chemical weapons, does your report mostly contain information from (a) the White House, (b) US Congressional opposition leadership, (c) the Kremlin, (d) the UN, (e) Bashar al-Assad's government, (f) Syrian rebels, (g) the Israeli government, etc, etc.
3. Who's information do you believe, if there is disagreement about something? Which sources do you challenge aggressively and which sources do you treat as fairly impartial observers? For example, on an economics story, do you accept a government report as truth if there's a competing report by another group, especially if that group has a political ax to grind?
4. Even if you've perfectly balanced issues 1, 2, and 3, what comes first in your report and what becomes the headline? For example, on 9/12/2001, many headlines in the US read "America Attacked", which was true but conveys a somewhat different story than "18 Terrorists Attack World Trade Center and Pentagon".
Here's a suggestion: if you think Azerbaijan is such a breath of fresh air, why haven't you moved there? Oh, right, because despite of how bad things are in the US, it is still light years ahead of dictatorships like Azerbaijan.
And real democracies like Sweden are light years ahead of the US in the less-corruption department. I'm not saying they're perfect, but you simply don't get the same kinds of comments about those governments as you do about the US, even from citizens of those countries.
Someone described it very well: In Iran, you need to gain the acceptance of the unelected and unaccountable Council of Guardians first to become a successful politician. In the US, you need to gain the acceptance of the unelected and unaccountable Boards of Directors of major corporations. What exactly is the difference between the two systems?
Just a line where you can write a number of you choice. When the votes are counted the numbers are listed together with the votes.
Any system that allows you to prove how you personally voted, in any way, is open to coercion: e.g. "Show me proof that you voted for Jones rather than Smith if you want to keep your job."
Perhaps society only needs a few people per hundred that are great at math?
In fact, the richest and most powerful Americans would probably like there to be not so many people who understand math: Those who understand math can understand how badly they're being screwed by the richest and most powerful Americans!
You must be an American, since you apparently hold the current Secretary of Education responsible for the quality of American public school education decades before he took office (or in some cases, before he graduated high school).
Isn't it odd how, until 2009, it was considered every citizen's sacred duty to disobey the law and trash the government?
It is odd, because I was paying attention then, and I do lean fairly heavily leftwards politically (but again, listen to conservatives who have sense too, because good ideas are good ideas no matter where they come from) and I honestly can't remember being told it was my sacred duty to disobey the law, trash the government, or set things on fire. I was told about how George W Bush adminstration had managed to violate about 9 of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights, but what the really radical folks were suggesting be done about it amounted to holding signs, chanting on the street, marching in organized protests, and voting for something else. Occupy Wall Street, which included many of the same people who were out protesting the Bush administration, was actually far more confrontational than what was going on during, for example, the run-up to the Iraq War.
There were significant numbers of people talking along those lines in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Those folks have mostly retired or died, and the organizations they led (Weathermen, Black Panthers, Yippies, SDS, etc) are either non-existant or shells of their former selves. Most of the folks that are advocating outright defiance of the law these days are anarcho-capitalist libertarians, not anarcho-socialists.
Can we at least try to be objective?
This is about a piece in the WSJ, a.k.a. the higher-class Murdoch outlet, so no.
Inside the liberal bubble (where I don't live, but I have relatives who do), there's another reason starting to be cited:
6) The State of New York is reporting that they had about 4-5 times as many unique visitors as they had uninsured people, and that many of those visits come in waves of 100,000 or so all at once. The suspicion is that opponents of Obamacare have organized DDOS attacks on the exchanges.
No idea if the premise is accurate, but it's certainly something that would be both technically possible and not (IMHO) below the die-hard opponents of the law.
What's the difference between an armed neighborhood watchman, and an armed police officer?
Well, here are some:
1. The police officer has the legal authority to act on behalf of the government. In theory at least, they are carrying out the collective will of the citizens as determined by the politicians. By contrast, the armed neighborhood watchman has no more legal authority than I do.
2. The police officer has the right to do things that citizens do not. For instance, a police officer can forcibly detain someone against their will if they have a reasonable suspicion that person is engaged in criminal activity, whereas a neighborhood watchman can only use force against someone who is presenting an immediate threat to people or property.
3. The average police officer has considerably more training than your average security guard. Most of that training is not about using violence, but rather about how to read and control people's emotions.
4. The police officer is supposed to protect and serve anyone and everyone. The armed neighborhood watchman is supposed to protect those who pay him. That makes a big difference for those who can't afford to pay for the security guard.
5. The police officer that covers your neighborhood coordinates his/her efforts with other police officers and other police departments in a way that armed neighborhood watchman simply can't do. For example, if someone is running from the cops, the various departments will work together to keep the chase going even if the suspect runs from one jurisdiction to the next. Your neighborhood watchman, on the other hand, might have to deal with trouble he never knew was coming, rather than knowing in advance, planning, and coordinating with the other neighborhood watchmen around him.
The police forces are certainly not perfect, but there are real reasons they exist, and real differences between them and private security guards.
I call shenanigans! SHENANIGANS!!!
I swear to God I'll pistol-whip the next guy who says "Shenanigans"!
Longer answers as to why:
1. As someone else mentioned, a simple static page is a lot less vulnerable to attack or disruption than a functional page.
2. Bandwidth costs are lower, since all you have are people hitting the site, seeing the shuttering, and going away again, rather than actually using it.
3. Anything behind the front page, such as databases, can and probably are shut down completely, saving on power and bandwidth.
4. Information provided on sites that aren't updated is likely to be inaccurate, which is worse than no information at all.
5. The cost to shutting them down can't have been all that high, since here's the process: (1) Have a developer make a static "We're not open for business" page, (2) have your admins configure front-end webservers with a mod_rewrite (or equivalent) to direct all traffic to that page, (3) shut down anything that's not a front-end webserver. Yes, it wasn't free, but my guess is whoever is coming up with the costs is factoring in paying the tech staff they already had on salary to do the work.
Basically, what I'm seeing is people who advocated shutting down the entire federal government as a complete waste of money are now going "Wait, I didn't mean that, or that, or that other thing." It's sort of like the reaction if you are told to remove everything from a messy room and start throwing absolutely everything out.
Fortunately, with all of the items I listed, the government was not really in a position to block adoption. Unfortunately, with innovative education methods it is...
Private schools and home schoolers can do pretty much whatever they want, so long as they provide a decent education somewhere in there. Rich parents take advantage of this fact to ensure that their little angel goes to a top-tier prep school rather than a public school.
The government only has the power to adopt a particular technique or tool in public schools, which has everything to do with the fact that they write the checks in public schools. And even then, the local government usually has wide discretion in what they do, so you don't have to convince Congress, you have to convince 7 people at a local school board meeting just down the street from where you live.
So government doesn't prevent a method from being adopted at all. It only prevents a method from being adopted on somebody else's nickel.
This line of industrial engineering robot displaced 18,000 low-skilled jobs and replaced them with around 200 high-skilled jobs (maintenance techs). Those other 17,200 went into the service industry or construction ...
Also, in a truly shocking occurrence, 600 people managed to disappear without a trace.
A worthwhile read on the subject: Karl Marx on the effects of technological improvements You might not agree with it, or you might shy away from it solely because of who wrote it, but it was a serious economics argument explaining what happens and why.
Thank you, Nietzsche. Now, what are you own thoughts on the matter?
None of these things are about one man thinking they've invented a better society, however - they're about lots of people working together to form consensus on gradual improvements to society, then putting that consensus into practice, then evaluating it.
The trouble with that distinction is that even the horrible things that have happened because someone thought they'd invented a better society wasn't happening solo either. For example, the reason Lenin was Lenin and not just some guy was because he had a bunch of Bolshevik pals who were steeped in Communist theory and had worked together to form consensus on some not-so-gradual improvements to society, based on ideas that had been floating around and partially implemented in some places for about 40-50 years before they did the whole overthrowing-the-czar thing.
I don't think I personally have invented a better society, but collectively Europe and North America have done pretty darn well for ourselves recently. Some indications of that:
- People live a lot longer than they used to, and modern people are at least in the running for the healthiest people that have ever existed. (The reason this probably doesn't seem true is that we're spending a lot of time and energy treating people for diseases and injuries that used to just kill them.)
- Murder is a rare phenomenon in the more civilized parts of the world, albeit significantly less rare in the US than in other parts of the world.
- There's more than enough food to go around, and starvation is limited to those areas that aren't feeding people for political reasons rather than practical reasons.
- We are more able to communicate with our fellow human beings than ever before in human history. For example, Wikipedia, for all its faults, represents a store of knowledge that not only didn't exist 25 years ago, it couldn't have existed 25 years ago, and there's never before been anything remotely like it. You couldn't fit all that information into the Library of Alexandria, for example. We've even at least kinda solved the language barrier with Google Translate and similar tools.
- We're no longer considering forced labor to be completely acceptable. There's still some of that going on, but it's highly illegal. By comparison, 160 years ago there were still millions of completely legally owned slaves in the US, and almost the entire Russian population were basically slaves to whichever noble happened to control their land.
- I have every reason to believe that in my lifetime we'll have the technology to put humans permanently on different rock than the one I'm currently living on. That would have been a silly claim 75 years ago.
It's one of the big reasons that life here in the USA has changed for the worse, as the detrimental effects of living that way eventually invade just about every other aspect of daily life.
Interesting related stat: Most employers now routinely expect that employees will be paying attention to and responding within the hour to work email at almost all times of all days. According to this article, Americans work about 10% overtime, completely unpaid, doing this.
Well, actually, the real Dread Pirate Roberts has been living like a king in Patagonia. This guy is an imposter.