Of course not, but that's a dozen fewer families grieving. Are you saying that somehow 2 dead is just as bad as 14? I'm sorry, while 2 dead is bad, 14 is clearly worse.
Until we have some uniform education, insurance, licensing, and registration regulations in place it's very hard to know how effective they would be.
Few if any people get bent out of shape over the regulations imposed on motor vehicle operation, sales, and ownership. Yet, they are much more stringent than any gun laws. We should be doing the same for guns at a minimum.
You should have to be trained, demonstrate competency, deemed mentally stable, and be licensed to own a gun. A gun should have a title associated with it that gets transferred even in the event of a private sale. Failure to store, operate, or maintain a gun properly could result in loss of your license to use it and you should have to carry insurance to cover yourself and others in the event of accidental injury. If your gun is stolen and used in a crime you would share in the liability, - especially if your gun was not stored in a safe manor.
And just like bars can be liable for serving alcohol to drunks, gun dealerships should be expected to perform due diligence before selling anyone a gun.
More to your point, certain kinds of mental illness would lead to the loss of gun licensure and if your mentally ill son shoots up a mall with your guns, you will be held responsible.
Yes mental illness is a serious problem and it's an obvious factor in many of these shootings but so is the fact that guns are far too easy to obtain for the people that shouldn't have them.
These following rhetorical questions since I don't expect to change your mind on anything, but you do seem to have a distorted view on what child rearing was like 40 years ago and what it is like today.
Where you actually around 40 years ago? Have you ever been a parent?
FWIW, I'm 51 and have two kids, - one of them is a teen. 40 years ago I was in the 6th grade. While I can't say my memory is 100% accurate or that my experience of that time in history was universal, I can say that you appear to confusing the realities of 40 years ago with a period of time that had long since past by then.
Further, your complaints about modern parenting are often echoed by other people but less commonly by actual modern parents (at least when talking about themselves). Kids being raised by the state? What does that even mean? Are your referring to kids in daycare? Those aren't typically run by the state. Forty years ago there were still some state run orphanages but those are pretty much gone. Today, on the other hand, about 4% of kids are homeschooled which was almost unheard of 40 years ago. So it would seem that 40 years ago the state played a stronger role in raising more kids than it does today.
I do agree with some of your concerns about modern society (deregulation, increased income gaps, the danger of monopolies) but we are probably pretty far apart on the causes and what to do about them. I do see a casual link between increased income gaps and two income families in that having two income families has somewhat camouflaged the drop in real family incomes over the last decades.
Are you talking about formula? Humans have been consuming milk from other mammals for thousands of years. It was bottled and sold in stores in the 1800s.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you're trying to say partly because your historical claims seem pretty off base. Just so we're clear, 40 years ago was 1975. Cultural revolution was well underway. In the 60' and 70's stay at home moms rarely breastfed in the US unless they were poor. Forty years ago, they didn't need to stay home or their kids would starve as you implied in your first post. Devices for feeding infants milk from animals date back thousands of years. Modern bottles and nipples were available in the early part of the last century and various "formulas" have been common in grocery stores since the 30s. And don't forget that breast feeding doesn't always work for the mom. "Lactation failure" is not unusual. Before bottles "wet nursing" was a common profession. Further, breast feeding in the US is more common today than it was 40 years ago since the medical profession actively encourages it.
Women being forced and duped into thinking that they have to work in order to be a person is entirely socially generated hysteria and stigma. 40 years ago women did not have "careers" in a workplace because there was little in the way of formula. Meaning if the woman did not stay home and feed the kid, they died of starvation. Since the woman is the only parent with the ability to make milk it made sense for her to make her career in the home.
The above claim about the state of things 40 years ago is just wrong.
Your most recent post states that women now have choices and you're only trying to say that staying at home should be considered a noble choice as well. But your first post seemed to imply that cultural decline is somehow linked to the fact that women are encouraged to have careers and we'd be better off as a society if they stayed at home like they did 40 years ago. So, which is it?
FWIW, I think staying at home IS a noble choice and lots of women do, especially when their kids are young. Or they work part time. It's also a noble choice to have a career which is why there is such a strong push to have more flexible schedules and better day care options so that families are better able to balance career and family.
Plus, we are long past the time where it has to be the mom taking care of the kids. Dad can do it too.
I can pretty much guarantee you that there were people 40 years ago that thought society was going to hell in a hand basket. Further 40 to 50 years ago people were freaked out about communists and believed that at any moment the US might be nuked into non-exisistence.
My observation is that you make far too many assumptions. Not everyone who sees things differently than you do has been brainwashed. It's very possible that you might just be wrong about some things including me.
For example, I don't believe that self sufficiency requires you to work 40+ hours for somebody else, nor do I believe the only reward in life is money. I left a high paying job at a telco to work at a non profit human services organization. From there I moved on to a non profit that does research in energy efficiency.
I'm able to use my talents to promote the things that I value, do things that I enjoy doing, all while making a living. Shouldn't a women have the same choices? How does a society not benefit from that? What if a woman has lots of valuable skills but being a homemaker isn't really one of them nor is it something she enjoys?
Be careful that don't brainwash yourself. The world has 7 billion people. Baby making is not something that we need to force half the population to dedicate their lives to.
Imagine it's 60 years ago and you have a highly talented daughter that's dating a great guy. They get engaged but he gets killed in some accident. Now she's in her twenties and most of the decent guys she knows are already engaged or married.
She finds another successful man but he's kind of an asshole. She marries him anyway because for women of that era, marriage is really the only legit option in life and she has no other prospects. They have a couple of kids and before long he's developed into a complete asshole who treats her like dirt. He cheats on her, he's abusive, the whole nine yards.
But the society of 60 years ago frowns on divorce and even if she did divorce him she's got nothing other than basic skills. She can't get a job that would support her and provide for her retirement.
This is the world women were stuck in, - which is why so many pushed for something better.
And guess what? 40 years ago people just like you felt like society was crumbling around their feet. And 40 years before that, people felt the same way.
Do seriously think it's trendy to neglect your kids? Do you even have kids? If anything, both parents are expected to focus much more of their energy on their kids than the parents of 60 years ago.
Personally I hope my daughter finds some nice guy and has a happy family. But I also want her to use her talents and have her own life, - not just live for her husband and kids. I want her to be able to thrive on her own if need be. And further I don't want there to be any obstacles for her to enter an IT field if that's something she'd be good at. I don't want her to avoid something that might prove to be really rewarding for her just because she doesn't see other women doing it.
What I did say was that the iMac led to an explosion of USB products. If you wanted to hook a printer, keyboard, mouse, Zip drive, external hard drive or whatever to an iMac, it had to be USB.
Yes, and you could buy a floppy disk drive very cheaply too. Nobody uses those anymore either.
What a ridiculous comparison. Floppies were limited in their design capacity, and Apple's decision to start phasing them out in 1998 (I believe) was ALSO premature. Why? Because there wasn't a good alternative on the market yet for those who needed to transfer files. Zipdisks were fine, but they were pricey, buggy, and annoying. CD-ROMs were write-only. CD-RWs were unreliable and often unsupported in some readers. It was really the USB flash drive which finally replaced the floppy, but that didn't come around until 2000. Once they became cheap and popular, most computer companies finally started dropping floppy drives.
The "i" in iMac stood for "Internet". One the selling points of the product is that it took only two steps to connect to the Internet. Being connected meant there was less need for physical media and sneaker net. For those who wanted a floppy drive, there were USB drives available. Another important factor that people forget was that the writing was already on the wall for the original 3.5 floppy and it took a stack of them to do much with. The problem was that there was no clear successor. Zip drives were competing with SyQuest drives and "Super Disks" (remember those) that had some backwards compatibility. The removable media world was in transition.
In spite of getting a ton of criticism for leaving off what was thought to be a crucial peripheral, the original iMac was one of Apple's most successful products and helped bring back the company from the brink of bankruptcy. It also led to an explosion of USB products and helped push USB into being a truly universal connector which is still found on virtually every computer almost 20 years later. Had innovation been left up to PC manufacturers we might have been stuck with RS-232 and parallel ports for another decade.
Thanks for clearing that up. I understand that Isle Royal in Lake Superior is technically part of the British Isles even though it much closer to Minnesota than mainland Michigan.
No, not really. They didn't pay for any software at all; that's the whole problem. They paid for a service. If they paid for some software, they could just stick with what they have instead of pissing off users by divulging their identities when the users had never agreed to that before, at least until they could get the software made so that old comments used the pseudonyms while newer comments switched to the new policy.
Instead, they bought a service which apparently doesn't offer this ability. I don't know if there's a legal case to be made here, but it seems to me that their website had a policy before where people could make posts anonymously (or pseudonymously), and now they're changing to a real-name policy. That would be OK, except they're making it retroactive, which is certainly wrong ethically, and quite possibly legally, depending on the wording of their prior user agreement policy. You can't just go change agreements like that retroactively. And the fact that the SaaS vendor doesn't support this is no excuse. Either they need to switch to a new vendor, get the vendor to change, or eliminate the service (and comment section) altogether.
Yes, like I said, there are other options that they are not willing to pursue for whatever reasons. That doesn't mean it was a poor decision to go with an SAAS vendor over paying somebody a lot more money to create, test, and maintain a custom solution to a problem that's already been solved. Money that simply may not be there. Print publications aren't exactly a high growth industry.
You mean they made a reasonable decision to pay a whole lot less for software that already exists. Said software has limitations as does all software but there are probably other solutions to this problem that they just aren't willing to pursue for whatever reasons.
I consider a willful act of doing harm to be worse than negligence.
Only on a case-by-case basis. For example, I'd consider widespread willful negligence that results in the deaths of thousands do be way more serious a crime than a serial killer who's reaching his second dozen victims.
You are talking about the severity and magnitude of outcomes. I'm talking about evil. Though they can be related, they aren't the same, at least not in my mind.
In your examples, the second is a worse outcome for sure but evil is strongly tied to intent. A guy who drives drunk and ends up killing 4 people is negligent and responsible. He should be punished and it would be quite understandable if the family of the victims hated him and never forgave him. He demonstrated exceptionally bad judgement and selfishness. But I wouldn't call him evil.
Let's say another man kidnaps and tortures a couple of kids for the fun of it, but they eventually escape and in time fully recover. That guy is more evil than the drunk even though the outcome is not as severe.
Adding proper security is probably a small portion of the total cost of development and I doubt many device manufactures would knowingly skimp in that area knowing how vulnerable they are to lawsuits. What is more likely to happen is that attacks get more sophisticated over time and products that did have reasonable security when implanted in your body 5 years ago, don't anymore.
That's not how security works, except security by obscurity. Bugs don't mysteriously appear in old code; they have always been there and are merely discovered. You can build code that is and will forever be resistant to network attacks (unless they find your password). I understand it's possible to build provably secure code, it's just very expensive.
Exploiting bugs are not the only form of attack. Encryption schemes get broken, the tools available to hackers get more sophisticated and social engineering continues to be a problem. Even air gapped systems have been compromised. Given time and money, just about any system can be hacked. Do you doubt that?
It's not always about negligence. Sometimes that blame lies strictly with the perpetrator.
The latter of course. There is a broad spectrum of misdeeds. I consider a willful act of doing harm to be worse than negligence.
Besides, in the case of implanted medical devices it takes years and years of testing to get them to market. I had a relative in the industry whose company basically went bankrupt for that reason. They spent years testing in Germany with good success but eventually they ran out of money.
Adding proper security is probably a small portion of the total cost of development and I doubt many device manufactures would knowingly skimp in that area knowing how vulnerable they are to lawsuits. What is more likely to happen is that attacks get more sophisticated over time and products that did have reasonable security when implanted in your body 5 years ago, don't anymore.
Go is awesome for concurrency. Maybe not so great for realtime but I think that's generally true of languages with GC. One language doesn't need to be used for everything.
I think religion often serves to help justify barbarous acts but the motivation comes from other sources. There is a clash of cultures and the belief that the success, wealth, and excess of one culture is coming at the expense of others.
There is no doubt that there are religious fanatics very much involved but if you look at who they are successfully able to recruit, it's not people who are exactly living the good life. It's people who feel they've been marginalized, - people who want to feel part of something bigger, people who want to feel powerful.
The people who did this were native French speakers, - at least at the concert. They didn't get there by hiding among the refugees. In fact, that would be a pretty slow, unreliable, and inefficient way to get anybody anywhere. Plus there is no need to do it since ISIS has had little difficulty in recruiting followers that already in the West.
I don't know. I don't think the job market for oxen and horses has ever really recovered.
They're still employed though. And you ignore that humans are a bit more flexible than oxen and horses.
I think you will find that there are just fewer horses and oxen.
The crux of your argument seems to be that automation has not lead to mass unemployment in the past, so why would it in the future? Why worry about it now?
I'd argue that while it hasn't lead to mass unemployment yet, it's more recently lead to under-employment and a decline in wealth for everyone except for an increasingly small number of people.
You could argue that, but that's not happening. Sure, there are a small wealthy portion of the world which does well no matter what. But most of the world's population has been getting wealthier and this trend has continued to the present.
Life's too short to trust in falsehoods.
I was talking about the US in particular, but yes if you want to go there, wealth has been increasing world-wide. The reason it has is because there is a never ending search for ways to produce goods for less money. So far that has been achieved through both automation and finding sources of cheaper labor. That has elevated the level of wealth for people in those regions with cheap labor. But what is starting to happen is that even dirt cheap labor is becoming more expensive than automation. China's growth economic growth is slowing down for that reason.
Now to get a decent job, most people have got to spend a small fortune on a college education. Most skilled workers start their careers in serious debt. And of course as soon as they start working, they need to start saving for retirement because almost nobody has pensions anymore. Then somewhere down the line they will find that their skills are no longer relevant so they get spend a small fortune on college again, - while trying to save for the kids' college education and their retirement. That's even if a 50 year recent college grad can find work.
It's not my fault some college students made very poor life choices.
The choice to go to college? Not knowing which jobs will be automated 25 years from now?
I'm not saying it's anyone individual's fault. I'm saying that we are fast approaching a time where AI and robotics will replace humans at a faster rate than humans can retrained to do the work that's not already being done by machines. There is just less and less that people can do that machines can't do cheaper.
The example I keep seeing used is self-driving vehicles, particularly trucks.
And the example that keeps getting ignored is farming. If out of work farmers and their descendants couldn't get new work, then we'd be around 80-90% unemployment.
I don't know. I don't think the job market for oxen and horses has ever really recovered.
The crux of your argument seems to be that automation has not lead to mass unemployment in the past, so why would it in the future? Why worry about it now?
I'd argue that while it hasn't lead to mass unemployment yet, it's more recently lead to under-employment and a decline in wealth for everyone except for an increasingly small number of people.
Former farmhands took jobs that required little in the way of skills they didn't already have, skills that industry was willing to teach them. But lets be clear, there were lots of worker abuses in the industrial revolution. Over time unionization and government regulation made for better working conditions and pay, but unions are almost to the point of irrelevance in this country.
Now to get a decent job, most people have got to spend a small fortune on a college education. Most skilled workers start their careers in serious debt. And of course as soon as they start working, they need to start saving for retirement because almost nobody has pensions anymore. Then somewhere down the line they will find that their skills are no longer relevant so they get spend a small fortune on college again, - while trying to save for the kids' college education and their retirement. That's even if a 50 year recent college grad can find work.
We are almost getting to the point of being share croppers.
Yes you do- or can. It's all about efficiency and productivity though. Paying someone who produces 1000 units an hour an extra 10 dollars per hour comes out to just 1 cent difference on the per unit costs.Of course taxes add to it and it wouldn't be that simple because there would be an additional employment tax as well as social security and so on on top of that 10 dollars but you can get the point easily.
It is a lot harder however when you are providing services of some sort or when the production is lower. At 100 units per hour, the cost difference would be roughly 10 cents per unit (not considering taxes and all). So if someone could pick your tomatoes at a rate of 100 packs an hour (lets say 2 tomatoes to a pack), paying them $20 an hour would have a cost associated with 20 cents on each pack of tomatoes purchased. Paying them a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would be 13 some cents cheaper so it isn't a huge cost increase to pay them a little more.
Where it hurts is when you can only service or produce 10 units per hour. An extra $10 dollar per hour would be $1 per unit. A typical waitress at one of these full service chain restaurants can likely handle 4 to 6 tables an hour depending on the number of people at each table. If every table leave $2 for a tip, they are earning $8 to $12 more per hour than their base salary. But as restaurants usually have it, they are not packed enough at all times of the day to enable this type of turnover so there will be several hours which the waitress/waiter would only service 1 or 2 units per hour and you would need a tip increased quite a bit to make up the difference.
For a single tomato, 20 cents a tomato vs. 8 cents doesn't seem like a lot but to someone like a Sam's Club who buys millions of tomatoes it's a huge difference. And you have to remember that picking the tomato is just one step in the process of getting it to the produce counter. If you paid everyone along with way $20 an hour, the cost of a single tomato would be much larger than it is today. The other thing about tomatoes (and produce in general) is that there's a huge amount of loss between the time they are picked and the time they are bought. I used to work in a produce department while in college. We'd sometimes throw away entire cases as soon as they came off the truck. For the remaining cases, a certain percentage wasn't fit to sell, so they would get tossed in the process of filling the display. Then a couple of times a day at least, the ones on display would be gone through and the ones started to look bad would get pulled.
It wouldn't surprise me at all that for every tomato sold, at least one is tossed and that money has to be recouped in the price of the tomatoes that actually get sold.
We always like to blame somebody else. It's not so simple. We all want cheap stuff. You don't get cheap stuff by paying high wages. Even if an employer wants to do the right thing and pay their employees decent wages, how long do you think they will last against their competitors who are more than happy to pay as little as they possibly can?
Where I do agree with the treefinder dude is that the never-ending quest to find low-cost or no cost labor creates a lot of social problems. But I think it's overly simplistic to blame all the world's problems on US imperialism like he does. I'm also disturbed by his fear over the "loss of European genetic heritage".
It sort of surprised me but then I thought about it and it pretty much paralleled how many people in the US act towards Mexican immigrants.
Legal or illegal Mexican immigrants? I live in San Antonio and we are extremely tolerant toward legal Mexican immigrants. The Mexican Americans are not please with the illegal ones due to the jobs and resources they lose/share. For the most part, they really look down on them.
Besides organizations like LaRaza, most of the support for illegal Mexicans comes from white people - usually either due to reasons of "white guilt" or cheap labor.
It sort of surprised me but then I thought about it and it pretty much paralleled how many people in the US act towards Mexican immigrants.
Legal or illegal Mexican immigrants? I live in San Antonio and we are extremely tolerant toward legal Mexican immigrants. The Mexican Americans are not please with the illegal ones due to the jobs and resources they lose/share. For the most part, they really look down on them.
Besides organizations like LaRaza, most of the support for illegal Mexicans comes from white people - usually either due to reasons of "white guilt" or cheap labor.
The Irish were hated for the same reasons back in the 1800s. They were seen as a cheaper source of labor that were taking the jobs of people already there.
Mexican Americans look down on illegal ones? Why do they look down on them? Because they were too poor, uneducated, or didn't have the family ties to migrate here legally? I tend to be sympathetic towards them. They take substantial risks to improve their lives and the lives of their families. The same was true of our many immigrant ancestors and I think it's that history of risk-taking that has in many ways lead to the success of our country. It also explains some of the philosophical differences we have with other Western powers.
The treefinder dude is a xenophobe. There is not much doubt about that. I would also not lay all the blame for the world's faults on US imperialism as he does. But I do think it's fairly obviously true that people will migrate to where conditions for them are likely to be better and corporations are more than willing to take advantage of that. That is nothing new.
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Of course not, but that's a dozen fewer families grieving. Are you saying that somehow 2 dead is just as bad as 14? I'm sorry, while 2 dead is bad, 14 is clearly worse.
Until we have some uniform education, insurance, licensing, and registration regulations in place it's very hard to know how effective they would be.
Few if any people get bent out of shape over the regulations imposed on motor vehicle operation, sales, and ownership. Yet, they are much more stringent than any gun laws. We should be doing the same for guns at a minimum.
You should have to be trained, demonstrate competency, deemed mentally stable, and be licensed to own a gun. A gun should have a title associated with it that gets transferred even in the event of a private sale. Failure to store, operate, or maintain a gun properly could result in loss of your license to use it and you should have to carry insurance to cover yourself and others in the event of accidental injury. If your gun is stolen and used in a crime you would share in the liability, - especially if your gun was not stored in a safe manor.
And just like bars can be liable for serving alcohol to drunks, gun dealerships should be expected to perform due diligence before selling anyone a gun.
More to your point, certain kinds of mental illness would lead to the loss of gun licensure and if your mentally ill son shoots up a mall with your guns, you will be held responsible.
Yes mental illness is a serious problem and it's an obvious factor in many of these shootings but so is the fact that guns are far too easy to obtain for the people that shouldn't have them.
These following rhetorical questions since I don't expect to change your mind on anything, but you do seem to have a distorted view on what child rearing was like 40 years ago and what it is like today.
Where you actually around 40 years ago? Have you ever been a parent?
FWIW, I'm 51 and have two kids, - one of them is a teen. 40 years ago I was in the 6th grade. While I can't say my memory is 100% accurate or that my experience of that time in history was universal, I can say that you appear to confusing the realities of 40 years ago with a period of time that had long since past by then.
Further, your complaints about modern parenting are often echoed by other people but less commonly by actual modern parents (at least when talking about themselves). Kids being raised by the state? What does that even mean? Are your referring to kids in daycare? Those aren't typically run by the state. Forty years ago there were still some state run orphanages but those are pretty much gone. Today, on the other hand, about 4% of kids are homeschooled which was almost unheard of 40 years ago. So it would seem that 40 years ago the state played a stronger role in raising more kids than it does today.
I do agree with some of your concerns about modern society (deregulation, increased income gaps, the danger of monopolies) but we are probably pretty far apart on the causes and what to do about them. I do see a casual link between increased income gaps and two income families in that having two income families has somewhat camouflaged the drop in real family incomes over the last decades.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you're trying to say partly because your historical claims seem pretty off base. Just so we're clear, 40 years ago was 1975. Cultural revolution was well underway. In the 60' and 70's stay at home moms rarely breastfed in the US unless they were poor. Forty years ago, they didn't need to stay home or their kids would starve as you implied in your first post. Devices for feeding infants milk from animals date back thousands of years. Modern bottles and nipples were available in the early part of the last century and various "formulas" have been common in grocery stores since the 30s. And don't forget that breast feeding doesn't always work for the mom. "Lactation failure" is not unusual. Before bottles "wet nursing" was a common profession. Further, breast feeding in the US is more common today than it was 40 years ago since the medical profession actively encourages it.
Women being forced and duped into thinking that they have to work in order to be a person is entirely socially generated hysteria and stigma. 40 years ago women did not have "careers" in a workplace because there was little in the way of formula. Meaning if the woman did not stay home and feed the kid, they died of starvation. Since the woman is the only parent with the ability to make milk it made sense for her to make her career in the home.
The above claim about the state of things 40 years ago is just wrong.
Your most recent post states that women now have choices and you're only trying to say that staying at home should be considered a noble choice as well. But your first post seemed to imply that cultural decline is somehow linked to the fact that women are encouraged to have careers and we'd be better off as a society if they stayed at home like they did 40 years ago. So, which is it?
FWIW, I think staying at home IS a noble choice and lots of women do, especially when their kids are young. Or they work part time. It's also a noble choice to have a career which is why there is such a strong push to have more flexible schedules and better day care options so that families are better able to balance career and family.
Plus, we are long past the time where it has to be the mom taking care of the kids. Dad can do it too.
I can pretty much guarantee you that there were people 40 years ago that thought society was going to hell in a hand basket. Further 40 to 50 years ago people were freaked out about communists and believed that at any moment the US might be nuked into non-exisistence.
My observation is that you make far too many assumptions. Not everyone who sees things differently than you do has been brainwashed. It's very possible that you might just be wrong about some things including me.
For example, I don't believe that self sufficiency requires you to work 40+ hours for somebody else, nor do I believe the only reward in life is money. I left a high paying job at a telco to work at a non profit human services organization. From there I moved on to a non profit that does research in energy efficiency.
I'm able to use my talents to promote the things that I value, do things that I enjoy doing, all while making a living. Shouldn't a women have the same choices? How does a society not benefit from that? What if a woman has lots of valuable skills but being a homemaker isn't really one of them nor is it something she enjoys?
Be careful that don't brainwash yourself. The world has 7 billion people. Baby making is not something that we need to force half the population to dedicate their lives to.
Imagine it's 60 years ago and you have a highly talented daughter that's dating a great guy. They get engaged but he gets killed in some accident. Now she's in her twenties and most of the decent guys she knows are already engaged or married.
She finds another successful man but he's kind of an asshole. She marries him anyway because for women of that era, marriage is really the only legit option in life and she has no other prospects. They have a couple of kids and before long he's developed into a complete asshole who treats her like dirt. He cheats on her, he's abusive, the whole nine yards.
But the society of 60 years ago frowns on divorce and even if she did divorce him she's got nothing other than basic skills. She can't get a job that would support her and provide for her retirement.
This is the world women were stuck in, - which is why so many pushed for something better.
And guess what? 40 years ago people just like you felt like society was crumbling around their feet. And 40 years before that, people felt the same way.
Do seriously think it's trendy to neglect your kids? Do you even have kids? If anything, both parents are expected to focus much more of their energy on their kids than the parents of 60 years ago.
Personally I hope my daughter finds some nice guy and has a happy family. But I also want her to use her talents and have her own life, - not just live for her husband and kids. I want her to be able to thrive on her own if need be. And further I don't want there to be any obstacles for her to enter an IT field if that's something she'd be good at. I don't want her to avoid something that might prove to be really rewarding for her just because she doesn't see other women doing it.
Where did I say that Apple invented USB?
What I did say was that the iMac led to an explosion of USB products. If you wanted to hook a printer, keyboard, mouse, Zip drive, external hard drive or whatever to an iMac, it had to be USB.
Yes, and you could buy a floppy disk drive very cheaply too. Nobody uses those anymore either.
What a ridiculous comparison. Floppies were limited in their design capacity, and Apple's decision to start phasing them out in 1998 (I believe) was ALSO premature. Why? Because there wasn't a good alternative on the market yet for those who needed to transfer files. Zipdisks were fine, but they were pricey, buggy, and annoying. CD-ROMs were write-only. CD-RWs were unreliable and often unsupported in some readers. It was really the USB flash drive which finally replaced the floppy, but that didn't come around until 2000. Once they became cheap and popular, most computer companies finally started dropping floppy drives.
The "i" in iMac stood for "Internet". One the selling points of the product is that it took only two steps to connect to the Internet. Being connected meant there was less need for physical media and sneaker net. For those who wanted a floppy drive, there were USB drives available. Another important factor that people forget was that the writing was already on the wall for the original 3.5 floppy and it took a stack of them to do much with. The problem was that there was no clear successor. Zip drives were competing with SyQuest drives and "Super Disks" (remember those) that had some backwards compatibility. The removable media world was in transition.
In spite of getting a ton of criticism for leaving off what was thought to be a crucial peripheral, the original iMac was one of Apple's most successful products and helped bring back the company from the brink of bankruptcy. It also led to an explosion of USB products and helped push USB into being a truly universal connector which is still found on virtually every computer almost 20 years later. Had innovation been left up to PC manufacturers we might have been stuck with RS-232 and parallel ports for another decade.
Thanks for clearing that up. I understand that Isle Royal in Lake Superior is technically part of the British Isles even though it much closer to Minnesota than mainland Michigan.
I should say that I don't agree with their choice. If the only option is to wipe the old comments then that is what they should do.
No, not really. They didn't pay for any software at all; that's the whole problem. They paid for a service. If they paid for some software, they could just stick with what they have instead of pissing off users by divulging their identities when the users had never agreed to that before, at least until they could get the software made so that old comments used the pseudonyms while newer comments switched to the new policy.
Instead, they bought a service which apparently doesn't offer this ability. I don't know if there's a legal case to be made here, but it seems to me that their website had a policy before where people could make posts anonymously (or pseudonymously), and now they're changing to a real-name policy. That would be OK, except they're making it retroactive, which is certainly wrong ethically, and quite possibly legally, depending on the wording of their prior user agreement policy. You can't just go change agreements like that retroactively. And the fact that the SaaS vendor doesn't support this is no excuse. Either they need to switch to a new vendor, get the vendor to change, or eliminate the service (and comment section) altogether.
Yes, like I said, there are other options that they are not willing to pursue for whatever reasons. That doesn't mean it was a poor decision to go with an SAAS vendor over paying somebody a lot more money to create, test, and maintain a custom solution to a problem that's already been solved. Money that simply may not be there. Print publications aren't exactly a high growth industry.
You mean they made a reasonable decision to pay a whole lot less for software that already exists. Said software has limitations as does all software but there are probably other solutions to this problem that they just aren't willing to pursue for whatever reasons.
Sorry, meant to say that the thousands dying is a worse outcome, but a worse outcome is not always the result of more "evil" act.
I consider a willful act of doing harm to be worse than negligence.
Only on a case-by-case basis. For example, I'd consider widespread willful negligence that results in the deaths of thousands do be way more serious a crime than a serial killer who's reaching his second dozen victims.
You are talking about the severity and magnitude of outcomes. I'm talking about evil. Though they can be related, they aren't the same, at least not in my mind.
In your examples, the second is a worse outcome for sure but evil is strongly tied to intent. A guy who drives drunk and ends up killing 4 people is negligent and responsible. He should be punished and it would be quite understandable if the family of the victims hated him and never forgave him. He demonstrated exceptionally bad judgement and selfishness. But I wouldn't call him evil.
Let's say another man kidnaps and tortures a couple of kids for the fun of it, but they eventually escape and in time fully recover. That guy is more evil than the drunk even though the outcome is not as severe.
Adding proper security is probably a small portion of the total cost of development and I doubt many device manufactures would knowingly skimp in that area knowing how vulnerable they are to lawsuits. What is more likely to happen is that attacks get more sophisticated over time and products that did have reasonable security when implanted in your body 5 years ago, don't anymore.
That's not how security works, except security by obscurity. Bugs don't mysteriously appear in old code; they have always been there and are merely discovered. You can build code that is and will forever be resistant to network attacks (unless they find your password). I understand it's possible to build provably secure code, it's just very expensive.
Exploiting bugs are not the only form of attack. Encryption schemes get broken, the tools available to hackers get more sophisticated and social engineering continues to be a problem. Even air gapped systems have been compromised. Given time and money, just about any system can be hacked. Do you doubt that?
It's not always about negligence. Sometimes that blame lies strictly with the perpetrator.
The latter of course. There is a broad spectrum of misdeeds. I consider a willful act of doing harm to be worse than negligence.
Besides, in the case of implanted medical devices it takes years and years of testing to get them to market. I had a relative in the industry whose company basically went bankrupt for that reason. They spent years testing in Germany with good success but eventually they ran out of money.
Adding proper security is probably a small portion of the total cost of development and I doubt many device manufactures would knowingly skimp in that area knowing how vulnerable they are to lawsuits. What is more likely to happen is that attacks get more sophisticated over time and products that did have reasonable security when implanted in your body 5 years ago, don't anymore.
But that would qualify.
Go is awesome for concurrency. Maybe not so great for realtime but I think that's generally true of languages with GC. One language doesn't need to be used for everything.
I think religion often serves to help justify barbarous acts but the motivation comes from other sources. There is a clash of cultures and the belief that the success, wealth, and excess of one culture is coming at the expense of others.
There is no doubt that there are religious fanatics very much involved but if you look at who they are successfully able to recruit, it's not people who are exactly living the good life. It's people who feel they've been marginalized, - people who want to feel part of something bigger, people who want to feel powerful.
The people who did this were native French speakers, - at least at the concert. They didn't get there by hiding among the refugees. In fact, that would be a pretty slow, unreliable, and inefficient way to get anybody anywhere. Plus there is no need to do it since ISIS has had little difficulty in recruiting followers that already in the West.
I don't know. I don't think the job market for oxen and horses has ever really recovered.
They're still employed though. And you ignore that humans are a bit more flexible than oxen and horses.
I think you will find that there are just fewer horses and oxen.
The crux of your argument seems to be that automation has not lead to mass unemployment in the past, so why would it in the future? Why worry about it now? I'd argue that while it hasn't lead to mass unemployment yet, it's more recently lead to under-employment and a decline in wealth for everyone except for an increasingly small number of people.
You could argue that, but that's not happening. Sure, there are a small wealthy portion of the world which does well no matter what. But most of the world's population has been getting wealthier and this trend has continued to the present. Life's too short to trust in falsehoods.
I was talking about the US in particular, but yes if you want to go there, wealth has been increasing world-wide. The reason it has is because there is a never ending search for ways to produce goods for less money. So far that has been achieved through both automation and finding sources of cheaper labor. That has elevated the level of wealth for people in those regions with cheap labor. But what is starting to happen is that even dirt cheap labor is becoming more expensive than automation. China's growth economic growth is slowing down for that reason.
Now to get a decent job, most people have got to spend a small fortune on a college education. Most skilled workers start their careers in serious debt. And of course as soon as they start working, they need to start saving for retirement because almost nobody has pensions anymore. Then somewhere down the line they will find that their skills are no longer relevant so they get spend a small fortune on college again, - while trying to save for the kids' college education and their retirement. That's even if a 50 year recent college grad can find work.
It's not my fault some college students made very poor life choices.
The choice to go to college? Not knowing which jobs will be automated 25 years from now? I'm not saying it's anyone individual's fault. I'm saying that we are fast approaching a time where AI and robotics will replace humans at a faster rate than humans can retrained to do the work that's not already being done by machines. There is just less and less that people can do that machines can't do cheaper.
The example I keep seeing used is self-driving vehicles, particularly trucks.
And the example that keeps getting ignored is farming. If out of work farmers and their descendants couldn't get new work, then we'd be around 80-90% unemployment.
I don't know. I don't think the job market for oxen and horses has ever really recovered.
The crux of your argument seems to be that automation has not lead to mass unemployment in the past, so why would it in the future? Why worry about it now?
I'd argue that while it hasn't lead to mass unemployment yet, it's more recently lead to under-employment and a decline in wealth for everyone except for an increasingly small number of people.
Former farmhands took jobs that required little in the way of skills they didn't already have, skills that industry was willing to teach them. But lets be clear, there were lots of worker abuses in the industrial revolution. Over time unionization and government regulation made for better working conditions and pay, but unions are almost to the point of irrelevance in this country.
Now to get a decent job, most people have got to spend a small fortune on a college education. Most skilled workers start their careers in serious debt. And of course as soon as they start working, they need to start saving for retirement because almost nobody has pensions anymore. Then somewhere down the line they will find that their skills are no longer relevant so they get spend a small fortune on college again, - while trying to save for the kids' college education and their retirement. That's even if a 50 year recent college grad can find work.
We are almost getting to the point of being share croppers.
Yes you do- or can. It's all about efficiency and productivity though. Paying someone who produces 1000 units an hour an extra 10 dollars per hour comes out to just 1 cent difference on the per unit costs.Of course taxes add to it and it wouldn't be that simple because there would be an additional employment tax as well as social security and so on on top of that 10 dollars but you can get the point easily.
It is a lot harder however when you are providing services of some sort or when the production is lower. At 100 units per hour, the cost difference would be roughly 10 cents per unit (not considering taxes and all). So if someone could pick your tomatoes at a rate of 100 packs an hour (lets say 2 tomatoes to a pack), paying them $20 an hour would have a cost associated with 20 cents on each pack of tomatoes purchased. Paying them a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour would be 13 some cents cheaper so it isn't a huge cost increase to pay them a little more.
Where it hurts is when you can only service or produce 10 units per hour. An extra $10 dollar per hour would be $1 per unit. A typical waitress at one of these full service chain restaurants can likely handle 4 to 6 tables an hour depending on the number of people at each table. If every table leave $2 for a tip, they are earning $8 to $12 more per hour than their base salary. But as restaurants usually have it, they are not packed enough at all times of the day to enable this type of turnover so there will be several hours which the waitress/waiter would only service 1 or 2 units per hour and you would need a tip increased quite a bit to make up the difference.
For a single tomato, 20 cents a tomato vs. 8 cents doesn't seem like a lot but to someone like a Sam's Club who buys millions of tomatoes it's a huge difference. And you have to remember that picking the tomato is just one step in the process of getting it to the produce counter. If you paid everyone along with way $20 an hour, the cost of a single tomato would be much larger than it is today. The other thing about tomatoes (and produce in general) is that there's a huge amount of loss between the time they are picked and the time they are bought. I used to work in a produce department while in college. We'd sometimes throw away entire cases as soon as they came off the truck. For the remaining cases, a certain percentage wasn't fit to sell, so they would get tossed in the process of filling the display. Then a couple of times a day at least, the ones on display would be gone through and the ones started to look bad would get pulled.
It wouldn't surprise me at all that for every tomato sold, at least one is tossed and that money has to be recouped in the price of the tomatoes that actually get sold.
We always like to blame somebody else. It's not so simple. We all want cheap stuff. You don't get cheap stuff by paying high wages. Even if an employer wants to do the right thing and pay their employees decent wages, how long do you think they will last against their competitors who are more than happy to pay as little as they possibly can?
Where I do agree with the treefinder dude is that the never-ending quest to find low-cost or no cost labor creates a lot of social problems. But I think it's overly simplistic to blame all the world's problems on US imperialism like he does. I'm also disturbed by his fear over the "loss of European genetic heritage".
It sort of surprised me but then I thought about it and it pretty much paralleled how many people in the US act towards Mexican immigrants.
Legal or illegal Mexican immigrants? I live in San Antonio and we are extremely tolerant toward legal Mexican immigrants. The Mexican Americans are not please with the illegal ones due to the jobs and resources they lose/share. For the most part, they really look down on them.
Besides organizations like LaRaza, most of the support for illegal Mexicans comes from white people - usually either due to reasons of "white guilt" or cheap labor.
It sort of surprised me but then I thought about it and it pretty much paralleled how many people in the US act towards Mexican immigrants.
Legal or illegal Mexican immigrants? I live in San Antonio and we are extremely tolerant toward legal Mexican immigrants. The Mexican Americans are not please with the illegal ones due to the jobs and resources they lose/share. For the most part, they really look down on them.
Besides organizations like LaRaza, most of the support for illegal Mexicans comes from white people - usually either due to reasons of "white guilt" or cheap labor.
The Irish were hated for the same reasons back in the 1800s. They were seen as a cheaper source of labor that were taking the jobs of people already there.
Mexican Americans look down on illegal ones? Why do they look down on them? Because they were too poor, uneducated, or didn't have the family ties to migrate here legally? I tend to be sympathetic towards them. They take substantial risks to improve their lives and the lives of their families. The same was true of our many immigrant ancestors and I think it's that history of risk-taking that has in many ways lead to the success of our country. It also explains some of the philosophical differences we have with other Western powers.
The treefinder dude is a xenophobe. There is not much doubt about that. I would also not lay all the blame for the world's faults on US imperialism as he does. But I do think it's fairly obviously true that people will migrate to where conditions for them are likely to be better and corporations are more than willing to take advantage of that. That is nothing new.
The only calls I've gotten on my personal iPhone that weren't from people I gave my number to were wrong numbers.