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User: david_thornley

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  1. Re:Just a numbers game... on April Jobs Report: 211,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 4.4 Percent (npr.org) · · Score: 2

    To repeat, since you are a moderate conservative, good luck trying to find someone to vote for, regardless of letters next to names.

  2. Re:Real numbers? on April Jobs Report: 211,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 4.4 Percent (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Therefore it counts as 'unemployed' or rather 'not employed' people who retired early, people who are full time students, people who are stay-at-home parents.

    You do realize that some people retire early, go to school, or become stay-at-home parents because they can't find a job, right?

  3. Re:Real numbers? on April Jobs Report: 211,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 4.4 Percent (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    You see, Obama would NEVER do such a thing ... ever.

    Right. No Democrat straw man would say anything bad about Obama. Protoplasmic Democrats are a bit more varied.

  4. Re:Real numbers? on April Jobs Report: 211,000 Jobs Added, Unemployment At 4.4 Percent (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Problem is, you can't tell the difference between a woman who has no interest in being employed because she wants to be a stay-at-home mother and a woman who can't get a decent job and so is a stay-at-home mother. Someone who can't get a good job might go to some sort of school instead, and hope to be better prepared when the economy picks up. If I were to lose my job today, I'd just call myself retired, although I currently intend to keep working for a while.

    If we had a count of people who'd be working if they could find a decent job (and we'd have to define "decent job" here), we could get a more accurate unemployment rate.

  5. However, it means that people in small states have much more voting power in Presidential elections. It also means that most people are disenfranchised. If my state's vote is sufficiently close that my vote might possibly be important, the Republicans have won anyway. The only people whose votes actually matter are the ones in swing states.

  6. Re:Juncker probably the most unpopular man in the on EU Leader Says English Is Losing Importance (politico.eu) · · Score: 1

    If those French-speaking countries get out of poverty and become financially important players, they're going to have a lot of English speakers. Dominant languages have momentum.

  7. Re:English "losing"? on EU Leader Says English Is Losing Importance (politico.eu) · · Score: 1

    The EU contains countries. If a Swiss guy wants to talk to a Greek woman, they do need a common language, which is more likely to be English than German, French, Italian, or Greek.

    Automatic real-time translation of spoken words is a REALLY difficult problem, since it requires actual understanding.

    At one point, I was in charge of internationalizing one of our shop floor apps. I set it all up, and then translated all the English phrases into Japanese. In many cases, I'd type in the English phrase and get several suggestions back, all looking different (I don't read any specifically Japanese script). In order to pick properly, I'd have to understand the English phrase (no problem) and understand the Japanese phrases (problem). I didn't have a better idea for verifying translations than putting them back through Google in the other direction, which (a) I didn't do, and (b) isn't practical for real-time voice translation.

    I was later told, rather gently, that some of my translations had needed to be changed, in a way that sounded like someone was afraid of offending my facility with Japanese. I thought that was pretty funny.

  8. Re:Fortunately (or unforunately), IT will affect t on EU Leader Says English Is Losing Importance (politico.eu) · · Score: 1

    Would you say that people who want to enter the music field need to know at least elementary Italian?

  9. Re:... Says the Frenchman on EU Leader Says English Is Losing Importance (politico.eu) · · Score: 0

    The word "barbarian" originally meant "person who doesn't speak Greek". Your Greek friends are etymologically correct.

  10. Re:... Says the Frenchman on EU Leader Says English Is Losing Importance (politico.eu) · · Score: 1

    Do musical scores in French have words like "Allegro" in them? Italian gave us all the keywords for music, just like English gave us the keywords for programming.

  11. Re:Poor old Travis on Justice Department Opens Criminal Probe Into Uber (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    The free market also doesn't deal with externalities, pretty much by definition. A driver can cause financial loss to lots of people, in and out of the car, and when I'm crossing the street I don't know which car will run me over or what the driver's insurance is like.

  12. Re:Uber should be shut down on Justice Department Opens Criminal Probe Into Uber (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    However, articles of incorporation are a thing that all corporations have, and they at least theoretically can be revoked.

  13. Re:Virtual pleading the 5th on Justice Department Opens Criminal Probe Into Uber (washingtonpost.com) · · Score: 1

    Yes, it is. Any private company has the right to refuse service/entry to anyone they feel like.

    Close, but not quite.

    A private company as the right to refuse service to individuals in general, but it needs to be for a legal reason. Refusing service to law enforcement officers in the performance of their duties will get it in real trouble.

  14. Re:Marsha Blackburn is in a safe district on Billboards Target Lawmakers Who Voted To Let ISPs Sell User Information (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Satan typically couldn't make it through the primary. There's always a filter somewhere. In my Congressional district, the last time an incumbent retired his successor was picked in the Democratic primary.

  15. Re:Society is beginning to crumble. on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    Radical Muslim fundamentalists aren't causing that much damage, except in Muslim countries, where the sky has indeed been falling frequently. There's real limits on what we can do about that. They don't have the centralized power necessary to damage the more developed parts of the world, which are a whole lot more resilient than most people give them credit for. If they do develop centralized power, they've created a target for the extremely powerful Western military forces, so that's a self-limiting problem.

  16. Re:Automated weaponry, too on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    Automating soldiers sounds to me like an extremely difficult thing to do.

    The insurgents will not be able to defeat regular troops. What they can do is make life hell for other people, including the wealthy.

  17. Re:All of them. on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    Lots of people don't have soft skills. Lots of people don't have hard skills.

    When I was young, a man with few skills but a good work ethic could make a decent living and, with scrimping, support a family. There are some low-skill jobs still around, but they don't pay at all well.

    One result was that most people had at least a little money to spend, so they could buy at least some services, so there was a demand for people with soft skills.

    Remove the ability of the least productive quarter of the population to get a job, and the demand for soft skills goes down. Go to the extreme some people are projecting, and the soft skill niche goes way down.

    A billionaire can only live twenty-four hours a day, can only eat so much, can only screw several paid members of the appropriate sex(es) at a time, and so forth. Figure a thousand people to give every luxury to each billionaire, and that's not likely to make that much of a bump in the employment statistics.

  18. Re:All of them. on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    Hunter-gatherers had plenty of leisure for taking naps, lying in the sun, and shooting the bull with other people. Serious labor didn't get started until we developed agriculture.

  19. Re:Hilary Pubilcally Supported TPP on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    You still don't get it. Clinton was against the TPP, and is far less corrupt in every way than Trump.

  20. Re:More fortune-telling on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    As for me, I mean people who give up their time to work for or put their money at risk to finance a productive endeavor

    When we get a critical mass of people who can't get paid for their work and don't have money to put at risk, we have a revolution. Ideally, this is political, resulting in heavy taxes and a universal basic income.

  21. Re:Any "Objective Repeatable Task" is automatable on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    More likely you'd manufacture the whole roof assembly with robots in a factory, and then just plunk it on top. Sure, this will be difficult for existing buildings, but it doesn't take too much imagination to see how we could shift the way we build buildings to make sense in a world of automation.

    It will work for existing buildings. One of the features of the robotic industrial revolution is that it's easy to make custom stuff, including properly shaped roof assemblies with facilities to attach them to existing structures.

  22. Re:Nowhere! on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    The people who own productive capacity have no reason to provide their productive output to people who produce nothing, that is not an exchange, that is simple robbery/extortion 'by law'.

    Or not by law. Fire enough people and leave them without ways to make a living, and they won't just go away and quietly watch their children starve to death. If the capitalists are lucky, they'll find themselves heavily taxed to support others, because any other way will be much much worse for them. It will do an immense amount of damage to society, but when there are tens of millions who are being shoved to the gutters by society they aren't going to care. The mob may not be able to win against the government, but they can make sure the government can't win either, by making large areas ungovernable.

    If you think this is unfortunate, then think of an alternative that allows people to earn enough resources for a halfway decent living. Removing regulations isn't going to do it, because the real problem is that, in this situation, many people aren't going to be productive enough, relative to robots, to earn a living. We don't have wide open frontiers anymore, with more land available as needed by killing more of the natives.

  23. Re:Useless article, half baked.. on The Parts of America Most Susceptible To Automation (theatlantic.com) · · Score: 1

    That's why we kept making attack submarines after the fall of the Soviet Union, despite not actually needing them.

  24. Re:Processing Power on NASA Runs Competition To Help Make Old Fortran Code Faster (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    In 1986, workstations didn't use Intel CPUs. That came later.

  25. Re:Ultimate 'geek' dream assignment? on NASA Runs Competition To Help Make Old Fortran Code Faster (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    That $91K is taxed the same whether or not you put another $27.5K on top of it. The $27.5K will be taxed more than if it were the only income.

    Tax brackets work on marginal income. You pay I% up to $J. If you make more than $J, you pay I% of $J plus the tax on the income over $J, which will be at a higher rate.