If you think this is some sort of new phenomenon, you're dreaming. This is the way it's always been, just a lot less subtle than it might have been a few decades ago.
How does Lott's study coincide with the elimination of lead from the environment or Roe vs. Wade, etc.? Is everyone flogging a different horse in the same harness? Cherry-picking among causal factors for political purposes is as bad as cherry-picking data.
"Our bottom line assessment on all these hypotheses is therefore as follows: each may
contain an element of truth, and nothing we have done proves they are false. Any claim that
these hypotheses explain large components of the fluctuations in crime, however, does not seem
consistent with the aggregate data."
After you've written enough Perl you feel like doing it any other way is an uphill battle. Nevertheless, once you grok/accept its peculiarities, Python is a pretty good replacement. You can even be as concise as with Perl after a while. Plus the young'uns like Python more than Perl because Perl's sigils freak them out and make them want to cry.
If we end up with unlimited resources as a result of the automation of mining asteroids and farms on the moon, as well as having unlimited energy from fusion, then the employment problem will become irrelevant...
Hey, good point! Same if the Virgin Mary comes down on a cloud and shows us her infinite mercy. Or if Jesus comes in after the Four Horsemen and we end up in heaven on earth. Or if Santa Claus clones himself into 10 million copies, and distributes free food, shelter, clothing, and of course toys. Come to think of it, there are lots and lots of ways the employment problem can become irrelevant!
The people that have been replaced by technology at those companies will go on doing something else at other jobs.
What if the vast majority of jobs below a certain skill level are being automated? What if fewer and fewer new jobs are being created because automated equipment is more and more versatile and cost effective?
Surprise! The empty meme from the mid-20th century you are glibly repeating becomes invalid.
That and the rest of the hypotheses in which displaced workers find jobs elsewhere are invalid when most jobs are being carried out by machines instead of people. The problem is not that jobs are eliminated in one sector by robots, eventually to be replaced by a similar number of jobs in another sector. The problem is that a large fraction of all jobs below a certain (gradually increasing) skill level are being removed from the human job pool, without being replaced by similar-skilled new ones anywhere else. This is new. It is not like the Industrial Revolution. The danger is that the human job pool will be permanently reduced relative to the number of humans seeking jobs.
We have to open our eyes and make sure we don't destroy vast quantities of employment in a short-sighted rush to maximize quarterly profits. Good luck with that, though.
You are repeating a shallow and stupid meme from the 1950's. It would only be true if the "liberated" owned the machines. Since they will not own the robots, the "liberated" will be fucked, backwards and forwards.
I consider myself Liberal and Progressive. I did not support the center-right Obama. He is yet another staunchly pro-establishment political operator like so many before him.
Wake up, folks. We have been living in an authoritarian military oligarchy since World War I, when the finance-military-industrial-congressional complex got started in earnest. The rest is history, and Amazon is filled to the brim with its documentation.
No, no. That sounds far too negative. Pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into public aquifers should be called "subsoil refinement," or "natural resource enhancement," or "energy availability augmentation," or "Fueling for America," or "Mom-Baseball-Apple-Pie-ing" or "free-stuff-and-beer-for-everyone-ing," or "happy-great-wonderful-and-in-god's-name-ing." You know, something that emphasizes the positives.
You are shouting into the wind. There is a vast river of oil money clearly within view, mixed in with that of related and dependent industries including war for profit at the service of the fossil fuel business, auto manufacture and sales, auto infrastructure contractors, auto maintenance and repair, suburban home developers, real estate businesses, real estate finance, etc. You will not be able to distract anyone from it until it disappears. By then you will be an old man, and will no longer derive any satisfaction at all from saying "I told you so." The money always wins.
Levi cautions that being self-sufficient does not mean that the country will be insulated from seesawing energy prices, since those oil prices are set by global markets
This is why a number of nation states, companies, and organizations promote conflict in the Middle East and vastly exaggerate the threats present there. "Instability in the Middle East" has for decades been the prime justification of high oil prices. Not "increased demand by China and India," which do not correlate with spot oil prices, nor "The Summer Driving Season," nor any of the several other horse-shit justifications that are trotted out one after another with admirable regularity. It is a sucker's game, and we are the suckers.
There is no reason for that. Things can be sent up pre-assembled or with enough robotic equipment to perform modest final assembly remotely. The latter, even if expensive, will be significantly less costly than sending human-habitable infrastructure and the resources for a return trip.
My argument has nothing to do with Carl Sagan. It is purely a cost issue, and the far greater expense of manned space flight limits space exploration overall.
I understand your argument, but "on the spot" analyses are rarely needed, and missions like Curiosity will be very productive without them. I can't see any practical justification for manned space missions today. This will likely be the case for decades. Slowly building way stations for gradually more ambitious robotic missions to Mars, the asteroids, and eventually other planets can later be augmented to serve as way stations for manned space exploration when resources and technology make it practical and affordable.
Let's face it, though. We are all rational adults here. This would all be part of a hundred year plan. Humans will not go to Mars or any other location in our solar system for decades, possibly a century or two. They probably will rarely if ever go to the moon in our lifetimes. The money and justification are simply not there. We have a historic responsibility to play our role and leave the rest for future generations to each play the role that corresponds to them.
Given the budgetary constraints that will exist for about the next 10 years, it is ludicrous to continue insisting on manned space missions. An L2 way station, as well as multiple way stations on the way to Mars can only be affordable and practically achievable for unmanned missions. Even then it will be a struggle to keep such projects funded.
The presence of humans adds essentially nothing of practical utility, and certainly nothing whatsoever of scientific utility. Its sole enormous contribution is expense. If the point is to explore space, then adding humans to the mix will stop these projects cold.
'we end up with lots and lots of small files for every interface and class in our system. On any less than trivial Java system, development quickly turns into a game of code- and file-system navigation rather than programming and code editing. This nature of Java development requires IDEs to become navigation tools above all.
Hallelujah! Let freedom ring from MS Windows' all versions.
Let freedom ring from OS X.
Let freedom ring from every cell phone and mobile device.
From every unix and linux variant, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every cubicle and every laptop,
from every text editor and every console, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, scripting men and compiled code men,
coders and computer scientists, professionals and students, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah! Those goddamn stinking hippie bisexual pot-smoking latte-drinking intellectual commie pinko faggots. That oughtta show 'em.
You have just stumbled upon a disturbing possibility.
Boy, you in a heap o' trouble now. Actually, I wasn't expecting this for another 10 or 15 years [looks at watch]. Hmph!
Got to love modern day freedom of the press!
If you think this is some sort of new phenomenon, you're dreaming. This is the way it's always been, just a lot less subtle than it might have been a few decades ago.
How does Lott's study coincide with the elimination of lead from the environment or Roe vs. Wade, etc.? Is everyone flogging a different horse in the same harness? Cherry-picking among causal factors for political purposes is as bad as cherry-picking data.
"Our bottom line assessment on all these hypotheses is therefore as follows: each may contain an element of truth, and nothing we have done proves they are false. Any claim that these hypotheses explain large components of the fluctuations in crime, however, does not seem consistent with the aggregate data."
from What Do Economists Know About Crime? (pdf)
The tawdry subject of coin comes immediately to mind. Was this person somehow encouraged to make these vast, overly general statements?
After you've written enough Perl you feel like doing it any other way is an uphill battle. Nevertheless, once you grok/accept its peculiarities, Python is a pretty good replacement. You can even be as concise as with Perl after a while. Plus the young'uns like Python more than Perl because Perl's sigils freak them out and make them want to cry.
Hey, good point! Same if the Virgin Mary comes down on a cloud and shows us her infinite mercy. Or if Jesus comes in after the Four Horsemen and we end up in heaven on earth. Or if Santa Claus clones himself into 10 million copies, and distributes free food, shelter, clothing, and of course toys. Come to think of it, there are lots and lots of ways the employment problem can become irrelevant!
What if the vast majority of jobs below a certain skill level are being automated? What if fewer and fewer new jobs are being created because automated equipment is more and more versatile and cost effective?
Surprise! The empty meme from the mid-20th century you are glibly repeating becomes invalid.
We have to open our eyes and make sure we don't destroy vast quantities of employment in a short-sighted rush to maximize quarterly profits. Good luck with that, though.
Once again, those who own the means of production, the robots in this case, will control the fates of those who don't.
You are repeating a shallow and stupid meme from the 1950's. It would only be true if the "liberated" owned the machines. Since they will not own the robots, the "liberated" will be fucked, backwards and forwards.
I consider myself Liberal and Progressive. I did not support the center-right Obama. He is yet another staunchly pro-establishment political operator like so many before him.
Wake up, folks. We have been living in an authoritarian military oligarchy since World War I, when the finance-military-industrial-congressional complex got started in earnest. The rest is history, and Amazon is filled to the brim with its documentation.
I can't remember an article here on /. that so magnificently qualifies as "News for Nerds" as this one. Bravo.
No, no. That sounds far too negative. Pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into public aquifers should be called "subsoil refinement," or "natural resource enhancement," or "energy availability augmentation," or "Fueling for America," or "Mom-Baseball-Apple-Pie-ing" or "free-stuff-and-beer-for-everyone-ing," or "happy-great-wonderful-and-in-god's-name-ing." You know, something that emphasizes the positives.
As tempting as any I've heard, and I'm not kidding. Of course, you'd have to ride a bus.
No, he's not.
No, "laugh at the self inflicted misery of humanity" falls neatly into "(2) people who don't give a f*ck."
You are shouting into the wind. There is a vast river of oil money clearly within view, mixed in with that of related and dependent industries including war for profit at the service of the fossil fuel business, auto manufacture and sales, auto infrastructure contractors, auto maintenance and repair, suburban home developers, real estate businesses, real estate finance, etc. You will not be able to distract anyone from it until it disappears. By then you will be an old man, and will no longer derive any satisfaction at all from saying "I told you so." The money always wins.
Levi cautions that being self-sufficient does not mean that the country will be insulated from seesawing energy prices, since those oil prices are set by global markets
This is why a number of nation states, companies, and organizations promote conflict in the Middle East and vastly exaggerate the threats present there. "Instability in the Middle East" has for decades been the prime justification of high oil prices. Not "increased demand by China and India," which do not correlate with spot oil prices, nor "The Summer Driving Season," nor any of the several other horse-shit justifications that are trotted out one after another with admirable regularity. It is a sucker's game, and we are the suckers.
There is no reason for that. Things can be sent up pre-assembled or with enough robotic equipment to perform modest final assembly remotely. The latter, even if expensive, will be significantly less costly than sending human-habitable infrastructure and the resources for a return trip.
My argument has nothing to do with Carl Sagan. It is purely a cost issue, and the far greater expense of manned space flight limits space exploration overall.
I understand your argument, but "on the spot" analyses are rarely needed, and missions like Curiosity will be very productive without them. I can't see any practical justification for manned space missions today. This will likely be the case for decades. Slowly building way stations for gradually more ambitious robotic missions to Mars, the asteroids, and eventually other planets can later be augmented to serve as way stations for manned space exploration when resources and technology make it practical and affordable.
Let's face it, though. We are all rational adults here. This would all be part of a hundred year plan. Humans will not go to Mars or any other location in our solar system for decades, possibly a century or two. They probably will rarely if ever go to the moon in our lifetimes. The money and justification are simply not there. We have a historic responsibility to play our role and leave the rest for future generations to each play the role that corresponds to them.
None of that requires a human presence, though.
Given the budgetary constraints that will exist for about the next 10 years, it is ludicrous to continue insisting on manned space missions. An L2 way station, as well as multiple way stations on the way to Mars can only be affordable and practically achievable for unmanned missions. Even then it will be a struggle to keep such projects funded.
The presence of humans adds essentially nothing of practical utility, and certainly nothing whatsoever of scientific utility. Its sole enormous contribution is expense. If the point is to explore space, then adding humans to the mix will stop these projects cold.
Strange that it didn't seem to occur to people here in what is ostensibly nerd land. Very strange. Disturbing, even.
'we end up with lots and lots of small files for every interface and class in our system. On any less than trivial Java system, development quickly turns into a game of code- and file-system navigation rather than programming and code editing. This nature of Java development requires IDEs to become navigation tools above all.
Hallelujah!
Let freedom ring from MS Windows' all versions.
Let freedom ring from OS X.
Let freedom ring from every cell phone and mobile device.
From every unix and linux variant, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every cubicle and every laptop, from every text editor and every console, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, scripting men and compiled code men, coders and computer scientists, professionals and students, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!