And why would that be? I'd have to say that the US probably wouldn't be over 500 million unless there was a lot more immigration than there currently is.
According to the Department of Labor, only 58% of adults in the USA are working, so we're already well over a hundred million not working.
And the public noticed which is an order of magnitude below your claimed threshold. Keep in mind how so many loony public and charity projects these days boast about how many jobs they create.
It's also worth noting that the US as well as many other developed world countries has worked hard to unemploy lots of its citizens which the developing world offers a vast amount of labor at much cheaper costs. So I can't say that the low employment figure really is that relevant to our discussion of robots replacing the workforce. There are other reasons at play here for why there's a lot of unemployment in the developed world.
And of you city-twits who will say "grow less corn", STFU. You don't clearly don't understand the uncontrollable variables of farming
Such as growing other crops than corn? Farmers can't "control" that factor? If this is too hard for them to figure out, maybe we should let someone else do the farming thing.
The problem with your assertion is that the US simply didn't have the political backing in the first war to invade Iraq. "Finishing the job" would create strategic problems such as fighting an insurgency with no support from anyone in the Middle East or the developed world.
Detonates from electrical charge, not shock or heat, like TNT.
If it can chemically detonate, then it will under enough shock and heat, something a high power laser can readily apply, since that's how you get a detonation rather than a local fizzle in the first place.
I meant it as defined by the Austrian School of Economics.
Their claims don't rely on actions and choices being rational in any sense. Any such definition would be irrelevant.
The term is not useless how I use it, though; it is not so broad as you think.
I strongly disagree. How can someone (or for that matter, something) act irrationally when any actions they make are by default, demonstrated subjectively valued, and hence, "rational"?
Then you don't mean economic rationality which has a particular common meaning. You could have saved the lives of a bunch of posts by making that clear earlier. I also wonder whether it'd be possible to commit an irrational act given the broad nature of your definition. A term which doesn't distinguish anything, isn't of much use.
Rather than engage in actual tech news, let's speculate wildly(second guess in as many weeks) on the identity of someone who explicitly wanted to remain anonymous, and who has committed no crimes.
He's a public figure so he's fair game. I think though such idle speculation would serve more to hide Satoshi Nakamoto than reveal him.
I think Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a space alien, who introduced the Bitcoin on this planet in order to run his personal intergalactic ponzi scam.
I agree! It's pretty clear that humans of this period of history simply didn't have the technology or intelligence to do what Bitcoin does. It has to be aliens!
I still think you're on the losing side there. There have been experiments done which indicate people routinely don't act in an economically rational manner with respect to the limited context of the experiment.
Instead, I think there's a lot to be gained by simply not bothering to care about the rationality, real or imagined, of other peoples' individual choices. For example, it hasn't even been determine that there is a need for more energy efficiency. Yet advocates have skipped on past that little problem to obsess over light bulb buyers' lack of rationality.
It's a silly game that society shouldn't be playing. If we're going to mess with other peoples' activities because they are perceived as "irrational", then that makes a pretext for the rest of us to mess with your activities on the same basis.
No, I did not assume. One does not need to assume reality.
Then already you need something beyond mere logic. You need evidence for your assumption.
I didn't say anything about size correlating with rationality. I'm talking about size and solvency.
Well, I did. But let's look at things in your limited sense.
In the past few years business bankruptcies in the US peaked just above 1% per year (in 2008) of businesses that employ workers while individual bankruptcies peaked about 0.5% per year (again in 2008). There's no real difference between how businesses as a whole and individuals fared in the recent economic crisis.
2008 was also the year that banks, investment firms, pension funds, etc were suffering from solvency issues that frankly affected the individual far less. There's no indication that size and solvency are correlated IMHO.
You must be blind, as the outcome of human history is all about centralization and pooling resources together to increase the group's chance of survival.
Really? So this is your "logic"? Argument from an appeal to obviousness is a fallacy. But then so is merely claiming stuff is true because you assert without evidence that it really happened.
Um.... what do you call CBS if not a channel through which "they" can put out their version of the story?
How can CBS verify that the NSA is doing what they claim to be doing? For example, there's this claim that the NSA is only spying on 60 or so US citizens. How would CBS know that versus the NSA spying on 60 million US citizens? CBS has no way to distinguish this because all of that is secret. They're just a higher visibility platform than some vanity blog with three readers. They have no more ability to bring credibility to the claims that the NSA makes.
I just want to take this opportunity to point out that Economics is the softest of all the sciences. Compared to Economics, psi research is practically classical physics. Sociology and Psychology have long eclipsed Economics in terms of rigor and honest application of the scientific method.
You demonstrate a natural talent for... economics.
Economically speaking, people *always* behave rationally.
I would not go that far especially since you're actually just mentioning cases where people think they're behaving rationally rather than actually doing so.
Having said that, people are remarkably bad at determining when other people are acting irrationally. For example, in thls light bulb debate a number of people have assumed that decisions about purchasing light bulbs is only driven by energy efficiency and some people are just too dumb to figure that out.
Value is entirely subjective and for someone to impose their own subjective values onto another is asinine, coercive, and straight up maddening.
Which is why the logical, rational way to build society is to concentrate power into the hands of a few. A rational market may be like a gradual rising tide that lifts all boats, but an irrational market is like a storm that capsizes and sinks the smaller boats. The logical answer is to centralize and create a smaller number of bigger boats.
Sorry, that's not logic. First, you assume that irrational markets are more harmful to small players than big ones. Rather irrational markets are more harmful to irrational traders than rational markets are. Size doesn't correlate with rationality.
Second, centralization is actually a big contributing factor to market irrationality. A lot of wealth and economic power in the hands of an incompetent leader or a coterie of parasites just results in big, irrational perturbations of the market.
Love it or hate it, but all the government and socialism the world has seen in recent human history is not done out of greed or corruption by malicious men seeking power and delighting in other people's misery.
So what if they have good intentions (which incidentally, I think is a rather generous assumption on your part)? Outcome is far more relevant. I see centralization actually making the problems you claim it fixes worse.
The fraud comes when Enron would purposefully drop their "cheap" stations off the grid for "maintenance" at 12:01AM. The grid couldn't cover this using reserves of other companies only. So the grid regulator would be forced to buy at $999/MW-Hr from Enron until they could spool up MORE power stations owned by others.
I was thinking more the hiding of 12 billion dollars in losses, but there's some fraud here too.
In every bubble in history the predictions of collapse were wrong every time, except one.
Trying to determine the timing of a bubble collapse is something of a fool's game since as the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. But actually predicting that a bubble has happened is not that hard. For example, a common sign that things have gone too far is that serious errors and fraud are ignored.
For example, during the recent real estate crisis, some loans had faulty paperwork such that it couldn't legally be determined who owned the loan. During the California electricity crisis (of 2000-2001), it was a bubble for electricity producers. A key player was Enron who was already engaging in huge levels of fraud to cover huge mistakes it had made. And there were many, many crazy businesses with insane plans during the dotcom bubble.
Another indicator is that outsiders get involved. For example, here's a story about Bitcoins. The relevant part for us is the first few paragraphs where the narrator is talking with her family at dinner while a few of her relatives consider whether Bitcoins are the get-rich ticket they've been looking for. When you see people with very little knowledge of a market jumping in, that's a big sign of a bubble.
Huge volatility is often a sign of a bubble. If something rises and falls greatly for little reason, that's an indication that the price of that good or service is based on fellow traders' perceptions not any underlying value.
Finally, there's the psychological side. A sound investment with good return isn't going to be hurt by people talking bad about it. When people get upset over negative talk, it's a sign that the market in question isn't healthy.
Ok, then release it mother fucker, stop spooling it out.
You don't get the game. As ganjadude noted, it makes more of an impression dribbled out over time rather than dumped at once. Second, the involved reporters are milking this story for what it's worth. Obviously, you'd rather have it all now, but that's not in their interests to do so.
Third, part of the story is the duplicitous official responses to it. For example, the Obama administration was caught in several lies early on. And they occasionally still get caught telling a humdinger (such as Obama assuring the Chancellor of Germany that the US didn't spy on her and being contradicted in days by another Snowden revelation).
It's wrong to say "I don't want a random stranger walking around in my business with a gun"?
I gather the complaint was about the alleged toothless banning. That is, telling everyone that they can't bring guns on the premises, but not actually doing anything about it when they do anyway.
And that garbage about "it stops other people from robbing the place" is false, because I sure as hell don't want two people shooting it out in my business.
That's a non sequitur. How does your desire not to have a shootout in your business keep people from robbing it?
The dust that will be produced will be nothing compare that to the recent US moon mission where they struck the moon deliberately then collect dust samples to see what's underground.
Sure it will. The dust from those long ago impacts settled long ago and won't affect the Chinese mission. The mission planners for the Chinese lander were just worried about dust from their landing interfering with their own vehicle, which is a very reasonable concern.
As to the alleged drama to NASA's LADEE mission, they have a much better scientific opportunity than they were going to have. They can just run the mission longer than planned so that they get the atmosphere with the Chang'e 3 injection and without as that contribution dissipates.
My point about "create" was appropriate. Even if we accept the dubious proposition that insurance companies want to pay for preventative care and similar things, we still have a big gap between paying for and actually having the insuree get that preventative care.
This is a capitalist economy after all. Things need to be paid for somehow.
Not at all. We have another choice, don't get the thing in the first place. There's this false moral claim that people should have some vague concept of "health care" and that somehow has transformed into a remarkably poor and expensive health insurance. We don't need to pay for this crap.
Running on the wheel is for entertainment.
It's also exercise as I noted. Now, what does paying insurance companies extra for stuff that wasn't that valuable in the first place do for us?
The hamster cage may be a consumption item (the bread part in bread and circus), but it does not make up the whole of economy.
This particular hamster wheel makes up roughly a sixth of the US's economy. I think it's a rather dumb argument to make to claim that only screwing up a large portion of the economy makes the mess ok. Especially, since you could repeat the argument for all the other large pieces of the economy which are similarly getting messed up.
It'd be cheaper in the long-run to pay for everybody to get a yearly physical to catch things sooner. Which is why insurance companies are glad to do it. Same with birth control.
Insurance companies are so "glad" to do that, that they had to be forced by law.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it within a hundred years?
And why would that be? I'd have to say that the US probably wouldn't be over 500 million unless there was a lot more immigration than there currently is.
According to the Department of Labor, only 58% of adults in the USA are working, so we're already well over a hundred million not working.
And the public noticed which is an order of magnitude below your claimed threshold. Keep in mind how so many loony public and charity projects these days boast about how many jobs they create.
It's also worth noting that the US as well as many other developed world countries has worked hard to unemploy lots of its citizens which the developing world offers a vast amount of labor at much cheaper costs. So I can't say that the low employment figure really is that relevant to our discussion of robots replacing the workforce. There are other reasons at play here for why there's a lot of unemployment in the developed world.
And of you city-twits who will say "grow less corn", STFU. You don't clearly don't understand the uncontrollable variables of farming
Such as growing other crops than corn? Farmers can't "control" that factor? If this is too hard for them to figure out, maybe we should let someone else do the farming thing.
Very expensive reflective coating may buy you a fraction of a second, maybe even a whole one...
A fraction of a second is a long time when you have a lot of rounds incoming.
The problem with your assertion is that the US simply didn't have the political backing in the first war to invade Iraq. "Finishing the job" would create strategic problems such as fighting an insurgency with no support from anyone in the Middle East or the developed world.
Detonates from electrical charge, not shock or heat, like TNT.
If it can chemically detonate, then it will under enough shock and heat, something a high power laser can readily apply, since that's how you get a detonation rather than a local fizzle in the first place.
I meant it as defined by the Austrian School of Economics.
Their claims don't rely on actions and choices being rational in any sense. Any such definition would be irrelevant.
The term is not useless how I use it, though; it is not so broad as you think.
I strongly disagree. How can someone (or for that matter, something) act irrationally when any actions they make are by default, demonstrated subjectively valued, and hence, "rational"?
I do not mean rational in the traditional sense.
Then you don't mean economic rationality which has a particular common meaning. You could have saved the lives of a bunch of posts by making that clear earlier. I also wonder whether it'd be possible to commit an irrational act given the broad nature of your definition. A term which doesn't distinguish anything, isn't of much use.
Rather than engage in actual tech news, let's speculate wildly(second guess in as many weeks) on the identity of someone who explicitly wanted to remain anonymous, and who has committed no crimes.
He's a public figure so he's fair game. I think though such idle speculation would serve more to hide Satoshi Nakamoto than reveal him.
I think Satoshi Nakamoto is actually a space alien, who introduced the Bitcoin on this planet in order to run his personal intergalactic ponzi scam.
I agree! It's pretty clear that humans of this period of history simply didn't have the technology or intelligence to do what Bitcoin does. It has to be aliens!
I still think you're on the losing side there. There have been experiments done which indicate people routinely don't act in an economically rational manner with respect to the limited context of the experiment.
Instead, I think there's a lot to be gained by simply not bothering to care about the rationality, real or imagined, of other peoples' individual choices. For example, it hasn't even been determine that there is a need for more energy efficiency. Yet advocates have skipped on past that little problem to obsess over light bulb buyers' lack of rationality.
It's a silly game that society shouldn't be playing. If we're going to mess with other peoples' activities because they are perceived as "irrational", then that makes a pretext for the rest of us to mess with your activities on the same basis.
You certainly do not benefit from the vast amount of particulates, radioactivity and heavy metals that coal burning dumps into the atmosphere.
The value of the electricity produced outweighs that. Why ignore the benefits?
No, I did not assume. One does not need to assume reality.
Then already you need something beyond mere logic. You need evidence for your assumption.
I didn't say anything about size correlating with rationality. I'm talking about size and solvency.
Well, I did. But let's look at things in your limited sense.
In the past few years business bankruptcies in the US peaked just above 1% per year (in 2008) of businesses that employ workers while individual bankruptcies peaked about 0.5% per year (again in 2008). There's no real difference between how businesses as a whole and individuals fared in the recent economic crisis.
2008 was also the year that banks, investment firms, pension funds, etc were suffering from solvency issues that frankly affected the individual far less. There's no indication that size and solvency are correlated IMHO.
You must be blind, as the outcome of human history is all about centralization and pooling resources together to increase the group's chance of survival.
Really? So this is your "logic"? Argument from an appeal to obviousness is a fallacy. But then so is merely claiming stuff is true because you assert without evidence that it really happened.
Um.... what do you call CBS if not a channel through which "they" can put out their version of the story?
How can CBS verify that the NSA is doing what they claim to be doing? For example, there's this claim that the NSA is only spying on 60 or so US citizens. How would CBS know that versus the NSA spying on 60 million US citizens? CBS has no way to distinguish this because all of that is secret. They're just a higher visibility platform than some vanity blog with three readers. They have no more ability to bring credibility to the claims that the NSA makes.
The same people that benefit from less coal mining, fracking, and global warming.
Who would those people be? Global warming is a wash for me, but I benefit from coal mining and fracking.
I just want to take this opportunity to point out that Economics is the softest of all the sciences. Compared to Economics, psi research is practically classical physics. Sociology and Psychology have long eclipsed Economics in terms of rigor and honest application of the scientific method.
You demonstrate a natural talent for... economics.
Economically speaking, people *always* behave rationally.
I would not go that far especially since you're actually just mentioning cases where people think they're behaving rationally rather than actually doing so.
Having said that, people are remarkably bad at determining when other people are acting irrationally. For example, in thls light bulb debate a number of people have assumed that decisions about purchasing light bulbs is only driven by energy efficiency and some people are just too dumb to figure that out.
Value is entirely subjective and for someone to impose their own subjective values onto another is asinine, coercive, and straight up maddening.
I agree wholeheartedly.
Which is why the logical, rational way to build society is to concentrate power into the hands of a few. A rational market may be like a gradual rising tide that lifts all boats, but an irrational market is like a storm that capsizes and sinks the smaller boats. The logical answer is to centralize and create a smaller number of bigger boats.
Sorry, that's not logic. First, you assume that irrational markets are more harmful to small players than big ones. Rather irrational markets are more harmful to irrational traders than rational markets are. Size doesn't correlate with rationality.
Second, centralization is actually a big contributing factor to market irrationality. A lot of wealth and economic power in the hands of an incompetent leader or a coterie of parasites just results in big, irrational perturbations of the market.
Love it or hate it, but all the government and socialism the world has seen in recent human history is not done out of greed or corruption by malicious men seeking power and delighting in other people's misery.
So what if they have good intentions (which incidentally, I think is a rather generous assumption on your part)? Outcome is far more relevant. I see centralization actually making the problems you claim it fixes worse.
The fraud comes when Enron would purposefully drop their "cheap" stations off the grid for "maintenance" at 12:01AM. The grid couldn't cover this using reserves of other companies only. So the grid regulator would be forced to buy at $999/MW-Hr from Enron until they could spool up MORE power stations owned by others.
I was thinking more the hiding of 12 billion dollars in losses, but there's some fraud here too.
In every bubble in history the predictions of collapse were wrong every time, except one.
Trying to determine the timing of a bubble collapse is something of a fool's game since as the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. But actually predicting that a bubble has happened is not that hard. For example, a common sign that things have gone too far is that serious errors and fraud are ignored.
For example, during the recent real estate crisis, some loans had faulty paperwork such that it couldn't legally be determined who owned the loan. During the California electricity crisis (of 2000-2001), it was a bubble for electricity producers. A key player was Enron who was already engaging in huge levels of fraud to cover huge mistakes it had made. And there were many, many crazy businesses with insane plans during the dotcom bubble.
Another indicator is that outsiders get involved. For example, here's a story about Bitcoins. The relevant part for us is the first few paragraphs where the narrator is talking with her family at dinner while a few of her relatives consider whether Bitcoins are the get-rich ticket they've been looking for. When you see people with very little knowledge of a market jumping in, that's a big sign of a bubble.
Huge volatility is often a sign of a bubble. If something rises and falls greatly for little reason, that's an indication that the price of that good or service is based on fellow traders' perceptions not any underlying value.
Finally, there's the psychological side. A sound investment with good return isn't going to be hurt by people talking bad about it. When people get upset over negative talk, it's a sign that the market in question isn't healthy.
Ok, then release it mother fucker, stop spooling it out.
You don't get the game. As ganjadude noted, it makes more of an impression dribbled out over time rather than dumped at once. Second, the involved reporters are milking this story for what it's worth. Obviously, you'd rather have it all now, but that's not in their interests to do so.
Third, part of the story is the duplicitous official responses to it. For example, the Obama administration was caught in several lies early on. And they occasionally still get caught telling a humdinger (such as Obama assuring the Chancellor of Germany that the US didn't spy on her and being contradicted in days by another Snowden revelation).
It's wrong to say "I don't want a random stranger walking around in my business with a gun"?
I gather the complaint was about the alleged toothless banning. That is, telling everyone that they can't bring guns on the premises, but not actually doing anything about it when they do anyway.
And that garbage about "it stops other people from robbing the place" is false, because I sure as hell don't want two people shooting it out in my business.
That's a non sequitur. How does your desire not to have a shootout in your business keep people from robbing it?
The dust that will be produced will be nothing compare that to the recent US moon mission where they struck the moon deliberately then collect dust samples to see what's underground.
Sure it will. The dust from those long ago impacts settled long ago and won't affect the Chinese mission. The mission planners for the Chinese lander were just worried about dust from their landing interfering with their own vehicle, which is a very reasonable concern.
As to the alleged drama to NASA's LADEE mission, they have a much better scientific opportunity than they were going to have. They can just run the mission longer than planned so that they get the atmosphere with the Chang'e 3 injection and without as that contribution dissipates.
This is a capitalist economy after all. Things need to be paid for somehow.
Not at all. We have another choice, don't get the thing in the first place. There's this false moral claim that people should have some vague concept of "health care" and that somehow has transformed into a remarkably poor and expensive health insurance. We don't need to pay for this crap.
Running on the wheel is for entertainment.
It's also exercise as I noted. Now, what does paying insurance companies extra for stuff that wasn't that valuable in the first place do for us?
The hamster cage may be a consumption item (the bread part in bread and circus), but it does not make up the whole of economy.
This particular hamster wheel makes up roughly a sixth of the US's economy. I think it's a rather dumb argument to make to claim that only screwing up a large portion of the economy makes the mess ok. Especially, since you could repeat the argument for all the other large pieces of the economy which are similarly getting messed up.
I've even go so far as to say I'm relatively sure we'll find life on every planetary body in our solar system.
So what? You have no basis for your surety.
It'd be cheaper in the long-run to pay for everybody to get a yearly physical to catch things sooner. Which is why insurance companies are glad to do it. Same with birth control.
Insurance companies are so "glad" to do that, that they had to be forced by law.