No, I think we in the developed world have to accept that our labor isn't as competitive as it used to be. Lower wages, benefits, and social program levels (particularly, lower minimum wages, pullback of laws regulating the number of hours one can work in a week, and cutting back on public pensions) are a consequence of that.
I don't see slavery as the "bottom" since even countries like China and India are well beyond that. But what's the draw for labor in the most expensive markets of the world? Not everyone wants to deal with a huge and ever increasing thicket of laws and regulations.
I find it highly irrational how the response to the most pressing issue of the developed world today, the decades long demographic increase in the supply of global labor has been met with policies that increase the cost of developed world labor.
Do we accept child labour?
I note here that we all have a vast amount of unpaid child labor through the world. For example, children in the developed world generally are required to spend a considerable portion of their lives working in a school for no pay.
Further, I don't see any evidence that we're doing our children any favors by keeping them out of the usual labor force for so long. Apparently, there's cases of people who have managed to graduate from college in the US who have never seen a real job. What sort of employer is going to take a chance on them?
Sure, I don't advocate a return to the days of 60 hour work weeks and little kids fiddling around in the middle of deadly machines because they were the only ones who could fit. But I think the actual age at which people are allowed to start working should be much lower than it currently it.
Will we accept Slavery?
There's no reason to. It's worth noting that actual slave labor isn't that competitive. You can't make quality products from slaves. That was tried in the 20th century by a bunch of fascist/communist countries without much success.
I've read much about how due to various vague climate change threats, we should make sacrifices in our standard of living. But those same people draw the line at making sacrifices in our standard of living because the effective labor force available to the global economy has increased substantially over the past 50 years. But my take is that the latter reason is a more valid reason for doing so than the former.
But you know how it works. Big corporation will outsource wherever in the world labor is cheapest. When workers attempt to get raises, factories get moved to poorer countries
They're running out of choices. For example, there isn't another China with its massive industrial base to chose from. There are only so many people in the world. Any race to the bottom eventually finds that bottom.
If there are jobs available...
There are billions of jobs available. But only certain regions are trying to get those jobs.
can they take their money (the tributes) away with minimal repercussions?
They can take their money, but the capital is far less mobile. People have moved factories to other countries, but it's not a simple task like moving money.
I can't help but notice none of that changes who the employer is and who the employee is
I was being sarcastic. Being able to decree how much another has to pay you (as in the form of taxes), without any obligation to provide service in return is not an employee/employer relationship. It is a ruler/subject relation.
It's not so much a re-definition of "middle class", it's more a perpetuation of the very pervasive myth that most Americans are middle class, when in fact most are really working class.
Where's the evidence for this claim? Just because "the average American family" can't be bothered to save money doesn't mean that they aren't middle class. Keep in mind the key word of your definition, "can".
At a minimum, middle class family is one that can accumulate wealth if they manage their finances reasonably well.
Just because you can accumulate wealth doesn't mean that you choose to do so. The "facts" you state, merely show that a lot of people are choosing not to accumulate wealth, to live from paycheck to paycheck, and so on. They don't show whether those people are so-called working class or middle class.
If you are working for all of your money, you simply aren't middle class and weren't ever really.
I disagree with the other replier. This is a bad definition because it lumps the people who make bad financial decisions in with people who actually are some degree of poor because they don't earn very much. My take is that if you can save/invest 10% of your salary (the "tithe" level, if you will), then you're some degree of middle class even if you choose not to do so.
A lot of higher paid wage slaves have themselves convinced that they are something different than people that fill Amazon orders and that's not really the case.
And why should I pay heed to beliefs that we should all shoehorn ourselves into categories of victimhood? In this case, a lot of highly paid wage slaves are such because they choose to be. It's a lot easier to choose to squander money that you've been paid rather than choose to save money that you never saw. That alone makes those highly paid wave slaves very different than the shipping and handling people.
Big corporation reduce workforce to increase profit. At some point they will produce everything for cheap using abroad subcontractors. That means a lot of money goes straight to shareholders without having any chance to go in workers' pockets. And since workers are also consumers, this badly impact the economy
The subcontractors have workers too. It just means the labor part of an economy will move to healthier places. And the workers out of a job? They can find new work.
Also, this apparent benefit to owning capital indicates to me that maybe some developed world people should think about getting some capital as a buffer against possibly getting less for their labor.
At some point we will need to find a way to tax the profit and reinject money in consumer's pockets so that they can purchase the goods produced.
Ah yes, the gerbil exercise wheel theory of economic activity being the sole reason for having an economy or perhaps even a society.
As to the one-dimensional model, it wasn't mentioned in the abstract. I skipped over the first article since I erroneously thought such things wouldn't be discussed in there.
The question is "Is this model useful?"
Not for the claim they were making:
Here we model the solar and thermal radiative transfer in incipient and complete runaway greenhouse atmospheres at line-by-line spectral resolution using a modern spectral database. We find a thermal radiation limit of 282âWâmâ'2 (lower than previously reported) and that 294âWâmâ'2 of solar radiation is absorbed (higher than previously reported). Therefore, a steam atmosphere induced by such a runaway greenhouse may be a stable state for a planet receiving a similar amount of solar radiation as Earth today.
The problem is that key cooling components of the atmosphere hide in higher dimensional, dynamic models of atmosphere.
Routers could manage data flows more effectively if they made smarter choices about which packets to discard and which ones to expedite. To do this, they would need to gather much more information about the network than simply the availability of routing links. For instance, if a router knew it was receiving high-quality IPTV packets destined for a satellite phone, it might choose to drop those packets in order to prioritize others that are more likely to reach their destinations.
And if a router knew it was receiving packets destined for a competitor's service, it could slow them down a bit and maybe drop a bunch.
What's the point of making every device a router? It's not going to have the bandwidth or latency of a real router. And I doubt there's that much local traffic to justify a mesh system by default. Maybe it makes sense given the P2P culture out there, but I still wonder how much of the local network will have the content you want?
And it's worth noting that the human body consists of highly specialized parts. Only a few cells are actually connected to the nervous system. It's certainly not every cell in the body in some sort of distributed network.
Then there's "MAPE".
One idea, proposed by IBM, is the Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute (MAPE) loop, or more simply, the knowledge cycle. Algorithms that follow this architecture must perform four main tasks:
In other words, traffic signals and road signs. While driving, humans don't respond well to sudden changes or warnings. It's not going to end well, if the intersection you're about to cross suddenly is chock full of traffic. Or there's no warning for the exit on your highway, except a sign at the very exit itself.
I just don't see the analogy to the human brain here in any of their examples. It's all rather crude stuff. And what really is the advantage of doing these things at the lowest possible level, over shoveling packets as fast as possible and letting higher layers of logic handle the subtleties of networks?
Which country invaded others just to give more resources to their own (i.e. oil) corporations?
So what? That's a game businesses can't play.
What competitive advantage could be getting US corporations over other countries ones thanks to unrestricted NSA snooping of literally everyone's information and intellectual property?
OTOH, what strategic advantages does having your country's businesses in control of lots of resources yield your government? This is not some magically one-sided relationship where only the business profits.
So an employee can use the information gained from his employment to blackmail his boss.
This employee also arbitrarily taxes his employer, can kill his employer (despite your second amendment claim), and heavily regulates every aspect of his employer's activities.
Bullshit. The second amend still exists. Failing that, you still have the inherent right to rebellion that no government can take away. Furthermore, the US military is made up of the people themselves, who may in a revolution decide to side with the people. This means there is no monopoly on armed force.
I just can't help but notice that you haven't addressed that corporations don't have those guns. You have government with vast amounts of guns, citizens with considerable amounts of guns, and corporations with a few private security maybe, but nothing like the fire power possessed by everyone else.
Remember all the poor people around the world who die because of government action? Wait, you can't, because the media (owned by corporations) doesn't cover them. Government kills the lower classes directly and indirectly all the time. People of higher classes Michael Hastings (he may not be the corporate rich, but he's relative high) make the news because they're rare, and it creates the illusion that the rich aren't in control "Look guys, every once in a while one of us (not really, as again Hasting wasn't corporate level rich)! We are as powerless as you! Honest!"
The rich don't die as much because dead rich people don't pay tribute very well.
So you think that, "It's too bad I have to interrupt your two minute hate here". Is an apropos response to, "It's the American influence, indeed the US is central to the global unrestricted power of corporations"?
Yes, I think it's an appropriate response to any 1984-style vilifying of a suitably unpopular scapegoat.
How about you show where the hate is coming from here?
It's something of a fad on the internet right now to blame "corporations" for the ills of society.
What "unrestricted power"? It's too bad I have to interrupt your two minute hate here, but we need to keep in mind that the NSA remains a more powerful organization than the business corporations that people like to hate.
Ok, so what's supposed to be terrifying about it? A parasite that promptly kills its food source and has no notable survival or propagation advantage is supposed to be bad why?
Bacteria are naturally genetically modified organisms due to their routine ability to swap genetic material with complete different bacteria species. If it were that easy and advantageous to kill most plants on Earth, some bacteria would have figured it out by now.
What puzzles me is the absence of discussion of rain storms. These transfer a lot of heat to the upper atmosphere where it is radiated to space. They also pump energy into wind, increasing the circulation of air and increasing the heat loss from those convection effects.
Also, I gather the relative heating depends on the spectrum of the star to some degree. I gather there's some degree of transparency of water to the lower frequency UV so a bluer star with the same energy influx might have a bit more energy penetrate the atmosphere than a redder star.
Even if you consider the cost of propellant, it's still a few hundred dollars per kilogram of payload in a vehicle that costs one or more orders of magnitude more than that.
The concern is if they try to bring it in a safe orbit and something bad happens and it comes into the atmosphere over time due to gravity.
The answer is that if the asteroid enters the Earth's atmosphere, it's going to do so at least at a speed of 8.5 km/s. If it's coming in from deep space, it may be going a lot faster than that. The energy is going to be dissipated in large part by break up and vaporization of the asteroid. There might be some damage to property and people on the ground from the few pieces that survive reentry, but it's going to be like "rock falls through roof/totals car" rather than "city vaporized by huge fire ball".
I would assert that social interaction with carpet apes is a more common and needed skill than social interaction with parents (or teachers). I mean, Congress sure looks like it's being run by a bunch of apes (beat)
All I can say is that when people enter college or the workforce, different environments and not just socially, they all tend to have that "deer in the headlights" look. I think people place too much emphasis on developing social skills in a public school environment. And when that seems to be the main advantage over home schooling, then one has to consider that maybe home schooling combined with some sort of social environment might be better than public schooling under the current circumstances.
What could possibly go wrong moving asteroid chunks into Earth orbit.
Not much could go wrong aside from the mission just not working. The Earth's atmosphere will stop an errant asteroid chunk of this size. If those chunks get far bigger, then they'll have to worry to some degree about preventing asteroid impacts with Earth.
China was overrun pretty much like France, and at least the Chinese had the excuse of having a civil war going on while the invasion happened.
France had similar divisions between right and left. Those rivalries didn't reach the point of a shooting war, but that internal conflict help crippled their military preparedness and encouraged a number of factions (what became the Vichy French) to collaborate with the German invaders.
The US Constitution doesn't recognize a right to travel to the country of your choosing. Otherwise it's just a classic case of a small, focused special interest getting what it wants at the expense of a diffuse and mostly disinterested majority.
Slashdot Mirror
We have to think about what bottom we can accept.
No, I think we in the developed world have to accept that our labor isn't as competitive as it used to be. Lower wages, benefits, and social program levels (particularly, lower minimum wages, pullback of laws regulating the number of hours one can work in a week, and cutting back on public pensions) are a consequence of that.
I don't see slavery as the "bottom" since even countries like China and India are well beyond that. But what's the draw for labor in the most expensive markets of the world? Not everyone wants to deal with a huge and ever increasing thicket of laws and regulations.
I find it highly irrational how the response to the most pressing issue of the developed world today, the decades long demographic increase in the supply of global labor has been met with policies that increase the cost of developed world labor.
Do we accept child labour?
I note here that we all have a vast amount of unpaid child labor through the world. For example, children in the developed world generally are required to spend a considerable portion of their lives working in a school for no pay.
Further, I don't see any evidence that we're doing our children any favors by keeping them out of the usual labor force for so long. Apparently, there's cases of people who have managed to graduate from college in the US who have never seen a real job. What sort of employer is going to take a chance on them?
Sure, I don't advocate a return to the days of 60 hour work weeks and little kids fiddling around in the middle of deadly machines because they were the only ones who could fit. But I think the actual age at which people are allowed to start working should be much lower than it currently it.
Will we accept Slavery?
There's no reason to. It's worth noting that actual slave labor isn't that competitive. You can't make quality products from slaves. That was tried in the 20th century by a bunch of fascist/communist countries without much success.
I've read much about how due to various vague climate change threats, we should make sacrifices in our standard of living. But those same people draw the line at making sacrifices in our standard of living because the effective labor force available to the global economy has increased substantially over the past 50 years. But my take is that the latter reason is a more valid reason for doing so than the former.
But you know how it works. Big corporation will outsource wherever in the world labor is cheapest. When workers attempt to get raises, factories get moved to poorer countries
They're running out of choices. For example, there isn't another China with its massive industrial base to chose from. There are only so many people in the world. Any race to the bottom eventually finds that bottom.
If there are jobs available...
There are billions of jobs available. But only certain regions are trying to get those jobs.
can they take their money (the tributes) away with minimal repercussions?
They can take their money, but the capital is far less mobile. People have moved factories to other countries, but it's not a simple task like moving money.
I can't help but notice none of that changes who the employer is and who the employee is
I was being sarcastic. Being able to decree how much another has to pay you (as in the form of taxes), without any obligation to provide service in return is not an employee/employer relationship. It is a ruler/subject relation.
The weird thing is we probably should just print money.
Why? You get inflation and as a result no one is actually any better off except fixed rate borrowers and the money printers.
It's not so much a re-definition of "middle class", it's more a perpetuation of the very pervasive myth that most Americans are middle class, when in fact most are really working class.
Where's the evidence for this claim? Just because "the average American family" can't be bothered to save money doesn't mean that they aren't middle class. Keep in mind the key word of your definition, "can".
At a minimum, middle class family is one that can accumulate wealth if they manage their finances reasonably well.
Just because you can accumulate wealth doesn't mean that you choose to do so. The "facts" you state, merely show that a lot of people are choosing not to accumulate wealth, to live from paycheck to paycheck, and so on. They don't show whether those people are so-called working class or middle class.
If you are working for all of your money, you simply aren't middle class and weren't ever really.
I disagree with the other replier. This is a bad definition because it lumps the people who make bad financial decisions in with people who actually are some degree of poor because they don't earn very much. My take is that if you can save/invest 10% of your salary (the "tithe" level, if you will), then you're some degree of middle class even if you choose not to do so.
A lot of higher paid wage slaves have themselves convinced that they are something different than people that fill Amazon orders and that's not really the case.
And why should I pay heed to beliefs that we should all shoehorn ourselves into categories of victimhood? In this case, a lot of highly paid wage slaves are such because they choose to be. It's a lot easier to choose to squander money that you've been paid rather than choose to save money that you never saw. That alone makes those highly paid wave slaves very different than the shipping and handling people.
Big corporation reduce workforce to increase profit. At some point they will produce everything for cheap using abroad subcontractors. That means a lot of money goes straight to shareholders without having any chance to go in workers' pockets. And since workers are also consumers, this badly impact the economy
The subcontractors have workers too. It just means the labor part of an economy will move to healthier places. And the workers out of a job? They can find new work.
Also, this apparent benefit to owning capital indicates to me that maybe some developed world people should think about getting some capital as a buffer against possibly getting less for their labor.
At some point we will need to find a way to tax the profit and reinject money in consumer's pockets so that they can purchase the goods produced.
Ah yes, the gerbil exercise wheel theory of economic activity being the sole reason for having an economy or perhaps even a society.
The question is "Is this model useful?"
Not for the claim they were making:
Here we model the solar and thermal radiative transfer in incipient and complete runaway greenhouse atmospheres at line-by-line spectral resolution using a modern spectral database. We find a thermal radiation limit of 282âWâmâ'2 (lower than previously reported) and that 294âWâmâ'2 of solar radiation is absorbed (higher than previously reported). Therefore, a steam atmosphere induced by such a runaway greenhouse may be a stable state for a planet receiving a similar amount of solar radiation as Earth today.
The problem is that key cooling components of the atmosphere hide in higher dimensional, dynamic models of atmosphere.
Routers could manage data flows more effectively if they made smarter choices about which packets to discard and which ones to expedite. To do this, they would need to gather much more information about the network than simply the availability of routing links. For instance, if a router knew it was receiving high-quality IPTV packets destined for a satellite phone, it might choose to drop those packets in order to prioritize others that are more likely to reach their destinations.
And if a router knew it was receiving packets destined for a competitor's service, it could slow them down a bit and maybe drop a bunch.
What's the point of making every device a router? It's not going to have the bandwidth or latency of a real router. And I doubt there's that much local traffic to justify a mesh system by default. Maybe it makes sense given the P2P culture out there, but I still wonder how much of the local network will have the content you want?
And it's worth noting that the human body consists of highly specialized parts. Only a few cells are actually connected to the nervous system. It's certainly not every cell in the body in some sort of distributed network.
Then there's "MAPE".
One idea, proposed by IBM, is the Monitor-Analyze-Plan-Execute (MAPE) loop, or more simply, the knowledge cycle. Algorithms that follow this architecture must perform four main tasks:
In other words, traffic signals and road signs. While driving, humans don't respond well to sudden changes or warnings. It's not going to end well, if the intersection you're about to cross suddenly is chock full of traffic. Or there's no warning for the exit on your highway, except a sign at the very exit itself.
I just don't see the analogy to the human brain here in any of their examples. It's all rather crude stuff. And what really is the advantage of doing these things at the lowest possible level, over shoveling packets as fast as possible and letting higher layers of logic handle the subtleties of networks?
Which country invaded others just to give more resources to their own (i.e. oil) corporations?
So what? That's a game businesses can't play.
What competitive advantage could be getting US corporations over other countries ones thanks to unrestricted NSA snooping of literally everyone's information and intellectual property?
OTOH, what strategic advantages does having your country's businesses in control of lots of resources yield your government? This is not some magically one-sided relationship where only the business profits.
So an employee can use the information gained from his employment to blackmail his boss.
This employee also arbitrarily taxes his employer, can kill his employer (despite your second amendment claim), and heavily regulates every aspect of his employer's activities.
Bullshit. The second amend still exists. Failing that, you still have the inherent right to rebellion that no government can take away. Furthermore, the US military is made up of the people themselves, who may in a revolution decide to side with the people. This means there is no monopoly on armed force.
I just can't help but notice that you haven't addressed that corporations don't have those guns. You have government with vast amounts of guns, citizens with considerable amounts of guns, and corporations with a few private security maybe, but nothing like the fire power possessed by everyone else.
Remember all the poor people around the world who die because of government action? Wait, you can't, because the media (owned by corporations) doesn't cover them. Government kills the lower classes directly and indirectly all the time. People of higher classes Michael Hastings (he may not be the corporate rich, but he's relative high) make the news because they're rare, and it creates the illusion that the rich aren't in control "Look guys, every once in a while one of us (not really, as again Hasting wasn't corporate level rich)! We are as powerless as you! Honest!"
The rich don't die as much because dead rich people don't pay tribute very well.
So you think that, "It's too bad I have to interrupt your two minute hate here". Is an apropos response to, "It's the American influence, indeed the US is central to the global unrestricted power of corporations"?
Yes, I think it's an appropriate response to any 1984-style vilifying of a suitably unpopular scapegoat.
How about you show where the hate is coming from here?
It's something of a fad on the internet right now to blame "corporations" for the ills of society.
What "unrestricted power"? It's too bad I have to interrupt your two minute hate here, but we need to keep in mind that the NSA remains a more powerful organization than the business corporations that people like to hate.
Ok, so what's supposed to be terrifying about it? A parasite that promptly kills its food source and has no notable survival or propagation advantage is supposed to be bad why?
Bacteria are naturally genetically modified organisms due to their routine ability to swap genetic material with complete different bacteria species. If it were that easy and advantageous to kill most plants on Earth, some bacteria would have figured it out by now.
There's one obvious way to find out. Try it and see what happens.
What puzzles me is the absence of discussion of rain storms. These transfer a lot of heat to the upper atmosphere where it is radiated to space. They also pump energy into wind, increasing the circulation of air and increasing the heat loss from those convection effects.
Also, I gather the relative heating depends on the spectrum of the star to some degree. I gather there's some degree of transparency of water to the lower frequency UV so a bluer star with the same energy influx might have a bit more energy penetrate the atmosphere than a redder star.
Even if you consider the cost of propellant, it's still a few hundred dollars per kilogram of payload in a vehicle that costs one or more orders of magnitude more than that.
and killing offspring is directly opposed to the core of evolutionary theory
Unless those offspring are in direct competition for food and reproductive access with your offspring. Then it makes a lot of sense evolution-wise.
The concern is if they try to bring it in a safe orbit and something bad happens and it comes into the atmosphere over time due to gravity.
The answer is that if the asteroid enters the Earth's atmosphere, it's going to do so at least at a speed of 8.5 km/s. If it's coming in from deep space, it may be going a lot faster than that. The energy is going to be dissipated in large part by break up and vaporization of the asteroid. There might be some damage to property and people on the ground from the few pieces that survive reentry, but it's going to be like "rock falls through roof/totals car" rather than "city vaporized by huge fire ball".
I would assert that social interaction with carpet apes is a more common and needed skill than social interaction with parents (or teachers). I mean, Congress sure looks like it's being run by a bunch of apes (beat)
All I can say is that when people enter college or the workforce, different environments and not just socially, they all tend to have that "deer in the headlights" look. I think people place too much emphasis on developing social skills in a public school environment. And when that seems to be the main advantage over home schooling, then one has to consider that maybe home schooling combined with some sort of social environment might be better than public schooling under the current circumstances.
What could possibly go wrong moving asteroid chunks into Earth orbit.
Not much could go wrong aside from the mission just not working. The Earth's atmosphere will stop an errant asteroid chunk of this size. If those chunks get far bigger, then they'll have to worry to some degree about preventing asteroid impacts with Earth.
China was overrun pretty much like France, and at least the Chinese had the excuse of having a civil war going on while the invasion happened.
France had similar divisions between right and left. Those rivalries didn't reach the point of a shooting war, but that internal conflict help crippled their military preparedness and encouraged a number of factions (what became the Vichy French) to collaborate with the German invaders.
The US Constitution doesn't recognize a right to travel to the country of your choosing. Otherwise it's just a classic case of a small, focused special interest getting what it wants at the expense of a diffuse and mostly disinterested majority.
One tonne is one metric ton by definition.