Oh, and before anyone objects, yes, it'd be perfectly possible to mechanize / automatize retail and food service. This has already happened, to some degree - you can buy all sorts of things from dispensing machines, and there are highly-automated restaurants around. But people will still pay for the 'privilege' of being served or sold to by another person; both for the intangibles of a human interaction and simply for the status of being seen to be served by another person. Even when a machine can perform a task as well as, or better than, a human, more efficiently and at a much lower cost, you will find humans who will pay a large amount extra simply for the knowledge that that task was performed by another human. That's another trend that never seems to die.
Right, and also, 'creative' jobs were just an example. We've invented other jobs for the 'unskilled' - Wal-Mart greeter, for instance. Food service is a wonderfully flexible industry in terms of being able to scale with the supply of workers - most people still don't eat out anywhere near three times a day every day, but the richer the overall economy becomes, the more people trend that way, hence the more crappy low-wage food service jobs get created. There are various other similar fields which can always suck up a few more minimum wage staff - retail is another huge one.
Note, some responders seem to be assuming I'm a mega capitalism cheerleader saying that this is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I'm not saying that, necessarily. I'm just saying that it seems to be what happens, in general, in most human societies: we don't ever say 'well, hey, this particular standard of living seems great, so let's aim broadly to have everyone hit that standard of living, and as time goes on, we'll each have to perform less and less work for all of us to hit that standard of living'. Which, after all, wouldn't be such a terrible outcome. Instead, we seem to keep inventing new luxuries and frivolities to allow us to continue to have a big rich/poor disparity, lots of 'work' for both the rich and the poor to do, and lots of truly ridiculous things for the rich to spend all their money on.
the regulations on 'made in' are fairly lax. 'made in mexico' just means the components were slapped into the case in mexico (in some extreme cases, it may just mean the assembled monitor was stuck into a box in mexico). many of the components were still likely made in China.
this is a big part of the problem, of course; it's very very difficult to figure out where much of the manufacture involved in any given product was done, with current labelling regulations in most countries.
it's not a question of 'let them'. if we don't buy the stuff they produce, that's a reasonable position; it's not through our agency that their labor is exploited. if we're buying the end products, though, we can hardly act as if we're in some kind of external observation position. it is _for us_ that the labor is being exploited. americans would not stand for american workers being treated the way chinese workers are, ditto canadians, brits, etc. why should it be okay for us to accept chinese workers being treated that way in order to produce the goods we consume?
the fact that some economies went through a certain system of development does not somehow make it inevitable that all economies must go through the same system of development. as other commenters have said, that's just an easy sop to conscience.
I've replied to it before on slashdot, but no, that's a fallacy.
There isn't some magic limited quality of labor that needs to be done, and once we replace all of that with robots, there'll be no work left for people to do any more. That fallacy has existed for hundreds of years. It never quite seems to happen, yet people persist with the belief.
Couple hundred years ago, it was cotton weaving - see, hundreds of thousands of people used to work weaving cotton, then machines got invented that could perform the job much more efficiently. Surely this would result in there not being enough work for all those people! oh no!
Well, in a very short timeframe that can happen, but over the long run it just doesn't work out that way. Why? We just keep inventing more work to do. There's no objective definition of 'work'. It's whatever you can get paid to do. Back in the age of manual cotton weaving, for instance, almost no-one made a living in the 'creative industries', which barely existed. Nowadays, tens of thousands of people make a good wage producing utterly unnecessary and frivolous TV shows. The key point is _there's a direct link between the two things_. Automate things that at present take hundreds of thousands of humans to do, and those hundreds of thousands of humans won't - over the long run - starve to death. We'll invent new stuff for them to do. That 'stuff' is frequently frivolous and entirely unnecessary - like television, or advertising, or professional sports, or pet grooming, or personal shopping...the reason all those ridiculous 'jobs' exist is _precisely_ because we've got so good at making the really essential tasks - farming, construction, health care, clothes manufacture, resource extraction, power generation etc - happen very efficiently that, once all of the above tasks are done for everyone in a reasonably developed country, there's still a *massive* potential labor surplus. Via the magic of the free market economy, instead of rationing all the essential labor and the results of that labor out equally so everyone works 5 hours a week and we all live a comfortable life by the standards of 1850, we instead invented a bewildering array of utterly unnecessary 'work' so most people can continue to 'work' 40 hours a week, and be rewarded with the opportunity to buy a crystal-encrufted cellphone, buy a shirt for their dog, and watch 2.5 Men on an HDTV. Ain't humanity great?
This process can continue more or less indefinitely if we want it to. I see no particular limit to human ingenuity in inventing ridiculous new spheres of activity.
"Now Gretchen Reynolds reports that instead of wondering just how much exercise people really need in order to gain health and fitness, a group of scientists in Canada are turning that issue on its head and asking, how little exercise do we need to maintain fitness"
How is that 'turning the issue on its head'? It seems to me more like a very minor rephrasing of the question which ultimately makes no difference at all.
The OP states: "Microsoft claims an "independent" report proves it has the best spam protection in the industry"
Actually, Microsoft doesn't claim that (though it badly wants you to *infer* that).There's a small but subtle difference. What Microsoft claims is that "no one else has better spam protection than us". This is actually a fairly common little trick.
What's the difference? Simple enough. For the claim "Company A has the best X" to be true, Company A's X must be the best. For the claim "No other company's X is better than Company A's" to be true, either Company A's X must be the best - *or it must be equal to any number of other company's Xs*. An equal showing is okay for the second statement; it's not for the first.
This kind of claim is particularly common in cleaning products - you often hear 'no-one else's cleans cleaner than ours!' or some variation on it. It's a statement that's clearly encouraging you to infer that the advertiser's product is actually *better* than the competition's, but it's not actually saying that, and that may well not be the case. I suspect the truth in fields like domestic cleaning is that every product is pretty much equally good, and some smart advertiser hit on this line as a good way to try and promote your brand-name cleaner so it sounds like it's better than the budget alternative, when it isn't.
As the linked article makes clear, this is precisely the dodge Microsoft is using here: the survey found Hotmail and Gmail were in a statistical tie. It did not find that Hotmail was better than Gmail.
'Somehow'? It's pretty clear how, and it's the classic recipe from 1930s Germany onwards: the left is electorally split, the right is not. Left votes are split between Liberal (even though they got just about no *seats* they still pulled at least 20% of the *votes* in most places), NDP, and to a lesser extent Green. Right votes are not split, the Cons are the only game in town. So the 45% of right-leaning voters beat the 55% of left-leaning voters, if the left-leaning voters split their votes 30/25, 35/20 or even 40/15.
Given the amount of people who are regularly busted for KP clearly based on tracking of their internet usage, I'd say it's not in fact true that "anyone but the most technically illiterate criminal will use an anonymizer and encryption". It seems that, in dull practical reality, an awful lot of people look at very illegal things without taking any kind of precautions at all.
I'm not saying I disagree with you, just that that particular point probably isn't a very valid one.
Maybe you could stop being a self-obsessed idiot and cut your grandmother some slack. She's not sending you Christmas cards to spite your right-on tree-hugging ideals or because she's trying to convert you to Christianity. She's sending Christmas cards because that's what a lot of people do for the people they love. Ever considered that to her, *not* sending you a Christmas card might be as bad a breach of protocol to her as getting a paper bill or whatever is to you?
Nokia's Chinese factories may be worse than Apple's, but at least - up until this week, anyway - it still has (had) factories elsewhere in the world, including places with much better labor laws. Quite a lot of N9s were manufactured in Finland.
Note: good-looking and charismatic are, mostly, both qualities you can cultivate, not god-given attributes you must bemoan your lack of.
One thing in particular: go to any mid-range restaurant and look around at the straight dating couples. There's quite a lot who follow the same, depressing pattern: woman in a clearly carefully-selected and maintained outfit, good hair, nice shoes, decent perfume, matched accessories etc, guy in cargo pants two sizes too large, unironed $20 shirt and sneakers, with 5 o' clock shadow.
For Pete's sake, if you're going to go on a date, make a freaking effort. Buy a good suit, that fits, and wear it. If you're not going to do that, at least get some decent pants and a shirt that fits. And iron it. Shave. Get your hair cut more than once a year (and pay more than $10 for it). You know that stereotype that men look at appearance and women look at character? I wouldn't rely on it if I were you. If women go for good-looking, charismatic guys then maybe you could take a shot at being good-looking and charismatic, rather than wondering why no-one seems to see your wonderful personality past your mysteriously-stained sweatpants...
It was rarely noted at the time, but Anne Nicolas was the head engineer (her job title changed a few times, but she was always in overall charge of all the engineers actually working on the distribution and hence arguably 'in charge' of the distro itself) at Mandriva for quite a while.
The guy's on the right side, and all, but he argues pretty weakly, notably by refusing to acknowledge and hence challenge the ideology underpinning the other side of the debate; he just paints it as nothing but terrible ideas and leaves it at that.
Also, he seems to believe he invented wifi, or something. "I was the guy who created the idea of unlicensed spectrum" - well, no, no, you weren't. *All* spectrum is innately unlicensed. The person who came up with the idea of the government asserting control over it and selling the 'rights' to use it off at exorbitant prices can be fairly said to have 'invented' something. Suggesting 'hey, maybe we could not do that' really isn't 'creating' anything.
The big one there is 'cancer', which you sneaked casually into your list. In the end, cancer is just decay: we glorify it by defining it as a disease (actually, hundreds of the bloody things) with treatments and giant research budgets and so forth, but it seems to me that many, perhaps most, cancers are really just...stuff stopping working because it's old. Decay. Entropy. And hence very difficult, perhaps impossible, to 'cure'.
Maybe we'll figure out a way to workaround it. But I suspect the idea of 'curing cancer' will prove to be essentially impossible.
You could point out that neither SOPA nor PIPA has actually passed, and yet the takedown of megaupload is still happening. Which rather seems to suggest that current copyright legislation is more than adequate to the purpose.
His snark was not about the boasting, but the vocabulary. Strictly interpreted, 'massively renowned' is close to being nonsense; it doesn't really mean anything, although if you relax a bit it's clear enough what the author intended.
The stock phrase the author was probably aiming for is 'widely renowned'. 'Widely' can reasonably be attached to 'renowned' as it indicates the geographical scope of the renown - people all over the place are aware of Dr. Bjork. If you think about it, attaching 'massively' doesn't really work in the same way.
"It's not like it takes that long to ship product back and forth."
It kind of does, because flying industrial quantities isn't remotely economical. Almost all bulk shipping between North America and Asia happens by container ship, and those are still pretty slow. I think U.S. -> China is like a couple of weeks.
"No the only solution is to embrace it. Let the US consumers keep buying Chinese until the people there get a clue and overthrow their government."
I'm sorry, you rather seem to have missed a step in your argument there. How exactly is 'US consumers keep buying Chinese' going to lead to the overthrow of the government?
'The option without free trade'? That's interesting, cos self-directed industrial development occurred without free trade in the U.K., in Europe, in the U.S., in Japan, in the U.S.S.R...in fact, everywhere it's ever damn well *happened*. Japan is a particularly interesting comparison case for China.
There are _multiple_ 'options without free trade', for a country. There is the option whereby the rulers continue to extract large taxes from an inefficient economy for their personal enjoyment, sure. That one happens a lot. But then there's also the option whereby vaguely enlightened people wind up in charge and build up the economy, damn well with the help of large tariff barriers, you'd better believe it.
Slashdot Mirror
But hey, if he has nothing to hide, he should have nothing to fear, right?
Oh, and before anyone objects, yes, it'd be perfectly possible to mechanize / automatize retail and food service. This has already happened, to some degree - you can buy all sorts of things from dispensing machines, and there are highly-automated restaurants around. But people will still pay for the 'privilege' of being served or sold to by another person; both for the intangibles of a human interaction and simply for the status of being seen to be served by another person. Even when a machine can perform a task as well as, or better than, a human, more efficiently and at a much lower cost, you will find humans who will pay a large amount extra simply for the knowledge that that task was performed by another human. That's another trend that never seems to die.
Right, and also, 'creative' jobs were just an example. We've invented other jobs for the 'unskilled' - Wal-Mart greeter, for instance. Food service is a wonderfully flexible industry in terms of being able to scale with the supply of workers - most people still don't eat out anywhere near three times a day every day, but the richer the overall economy becomes, the more people trend that way, hence the more crappy low-wage food service jobs get created. There are various other similar fields which can always suck up a few more minimum wage staff - retail is another huge one.
Note, some responders seem to be assuming I'm a mega capitalism cheerleader saying that this is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. I'm not saying that, necessarily. I'm just saying that it seems to be what happens, in general, in most human societies: we don't ever say 'well, hey, this particular standard of living seems great, so let's aim broadly to have everyone hit that standard of living, and as time goes on, we'll each have to perform less and less work for all of us to hit that standard of living'. Which, after all, wouldn't be such a terrible outcome. Instead, we seem to keep inventing new luxuries and frivolities to allow us to continue to have a big rich/poor disparity, lots of 'work' for both the rich and the poor to do, and lots of truly ridiculous things for the rich to spend all their money on.
the regulations on 'made in' are fairly lax. 'made in mexico' just means the components were slapped into the case in mexico (in some extreme cases, it may just mean the assembled monitor was stuck into a box in mexico). many of the components were still likely made in China.
this is a big part of the problem, of course; it's very very difficult to figure out where much of the manufacture involved in any given product was done, with current labelling regulations in most countries.
it's not a question of 'let them'. if we don't buy the stuff they produce, that's a reasonable position; it's not through our agency that their labor is exploited. if we're buying the end products, though, we can hardly act as if we're in some kind of external observation position. it is _for us_ that the labor is being exploited. americans would not stand for american workers being treated the way chinese workers are, ditto canadians, brits, etc. why should it be okay for us to accept chinese workers being treated that way in order to produce the goods we consume?
the fact that some economies went through a certain system of development does not somehow make it inevitable that all economies must go through the same system of development. as other commenters have said, that's just an easy sop to conscience.
I've replied to it before on slashdot, but no, that's a fallacy.
There isn't some magic limited quality of labor that needs to be done, and once we replace all of that with robots, there'll be no work left for people to do any more. That fallacy has existed for hundreds of years. It never quite seems to happen, yet people persist with the belief.
Couple hundred years ago, it was cotton weaving - see, hundreds of thousands of people used to work weaving cotton, then machines got invented that could perform the job much more efficiently. Surely this would result in there not being enough work for all those people! oh no!
Well, in a very short timeframe that can happen, but over the long run it just doesn't work out that way. Why? We just keep inventing more work to do. There's no objective definition of 'work'. It's whatever you can get paid to do. Back in the age of manual cotton weaving, for instance, almost no-one made a living in the 'creative industries', which barely existed. Nowadays, tens of thousands of people make a good wage producing utterly unnecessary and frivolous TV shows. The key point is _there's a direct link between the two things_. Automate things that at present take hundreds of thousands of humans to do, and those hundreds of thousands of humans won't - over the long run - starve to death. We'll invent new stuff for them to do. That 'stuff' is frequently frivolous and entirely unnecessary - like television, or advertising, or professional sports, or pet grooming, or personal shopping...the reason all those ridiculous 'jobs' exist is _precisely_ because we've got so good at making the really essential tasks - farming, construction, health care, clothes manufacture, resource extraction, power generation etc - happen very efficiently that, once all of the above tasks are done for everyone in a reasonably developed country, there's still a *massive* potential labor surplus. Via the magic of the free market economy, instead of rationing all the essential labor and the results of that labor out equally so everyone works 5 hours a week and we all live a comfortable life by the standards of 1850, we instead invented a bewildering array of utterly unnecessary 'work' so most people can continue to 'work' 40 hours a week, and be rewarded with the opportunity to buy a crystal-encrufted cellphone, buy a shirt for their dog, and watch 2.5 Men on an HDTV. Ain't humanity great?
This process can continue more or less indefinitely if we want it to. I see no particular limit to human ingenuity in inventing ridiculous new spheres of activity.
"Now Gretchen Reynolds reports that instead of wondering just how much exercise people really need in order to gain health and fitness, a group of scientists in Canada are turning that issue on its head and asking, how little exercise do we need to maintain fitness"
How is that 'turning the issue on its head'? It seems to me more like a very minor rephrasing of the question which ultimately makes no difference at all.
The OP states: "Microsoft claims an "independent" report proves it has the best spam protection in the industry"
Actually, Microsoft doesn't claim that (though it badly wants you to *infer* that).There's a small but subtle difference. What Microsoft claims is that "no one else has better spam protection than us". This is actually a fairly common little trick.
What's the difference? Simple enough. For the claim "Company A has the best X" to be true, Company A's X must be the best. For the claim "No other company's X is better than Company A's" to be true, either Company A's X must be the best - *or it must be equal to any number of other company's Xs*. An equal showing is okay for the second statement; it's not for the first.
This kind of claim is particularly common in cleaning products - you often hear 'no-one else's cleans cleaner than ours!' or some variation on it. It's a statement that's clearly encouraging you to infer that the advertiser's product is actually *better* than the competition's, but it's not actually saying that, and that may well not be the case. I suspect the truth in fields like domestic cleaning is that every product is pretty much equally good, and some smart advertiser hit on this line as a good way to try and promote your brand-name cleaner so it sounds like it's better than the budget alternative, when it isn't.
As the linked article makes clear, this is precisely the dodge Microsoft is using here: the survey found Hotmail and Gmail were in a statistical tie. It did not find that Hotmail was better than Gmail.
'Somehow'? It's pretty clear how, and it's the classic recipe from 1930s Germany onwards: the left is electorally split, the right is not. Left votes are split between Liberal (even though they got just about no *seats* they still pulled at least 20% of the *votes* in most places), NDP, and to a lesser extent Green. Right votes are not split, the Cons are the only game in town. So the 45% of right-leaning voters beat the 55% of left-leaning voters, if the left-leaning voters split their votes 30/25, 35/20 or even 40/15.
Given the amount of people who are regularly busted for KP clearly based on tracking of their internet usage, I'd say it's not in fact true that "anyone but the most technically illiterate criminal will use an anonymizer and encryption". It seems that, in dull practical reality, an awful lot of people look at very illegal things without taking any kind of precautions at all.
I'm not saying I disagree with you, just that that particular point probably isn't a very valid one.
Given your political affiliation, the chance that you'd come up 'clean' in terms of compliance with existing copyright law seems highly unlikely...
Maybe you could stop being a self-obsessed idiot and cut your grandmother some slack. She's not sending you Christmas cards to spite your right-on tree-hugging ideals or because she's trying to convert you to Christianity. She's sending Christmas cards because that's what a lot of people do for the people they love. Ever considered that to her, *not* sending you a Christmas card might be as bad a breach of protocol to her as getting a paper bill or whatever is to you?
Nokia's Chinese factories may be worse than Apple's, but at least - up until this week, anyway - it still has (had) factories elsewhere in the world, including places with much better labor laws. Quite a lot of N9s were manufactured in Finland.
"There's no reason to not keep an annually updated paper copy in the plane"
except that one of the claimed benefits is a saving in fuel due to the reduced weight of the ipad...
Note: good-looking and charismatic are, mostly, both qualities you can cultivate, not god-given attributes you must bemoan your lack of.
One thing in particular: go to any mid-range restaurant and look around at the straight dating couples. There's quite a lot who follow the same, depressing pattern: woman in a clearly carefully-selected and maintained outfit, good hair, nice shoes, decent perfume, matched accessories etc, guy in cargo pants two sizes too large, unironed $20 shirt and sneakers, with 5 o' clock shadow.
For Pete's sake, if you're going to go on a date, make a freaking effort. Buy a good suit, that fits, and wear it. If you're not going to do that, at least get some decent pants and a shirt that fits. And iron it. Shave. Get your hair cut more than once a year (and pay more than $10 for it). You know that stereotype that men look at appearance and women look at character? I wouldn't rely on it if I were you. If women go for good-looking, charismatic guys then maybe you could take a shot at being good-looking and charismatic, rather than wondering why no-one seems to see your wonderful personality past your mysteriously-stained sweatpants...
Fortunately, being FPL doesn't involve a whole lot of 30 mile forced marches with heavy backpacks.
It was rarely noted at the time, but Anne Nicolas was the head engineer (her job title changed a few times, but she was always in overall charge of all the engineers actually working on the distribution and hence arguably 'in charge' of the distro itself) at Mandriva for quite a while.
The guy's on the right side, and all, but he argues pretty weakly, notably by refusing to acknowledge and hence challenge the ideology underpinning the other side of the debate; he just paints it as nothing but terrible ideas and leaves it at that.
Also, he seems to believe he invented wifi, or something. "I was the guy who created the idea of unlicensed spectrum" - well, no, no, you weren't. *All* spectrum is innately unlicensed. The person who came up with the idea of the government asserting control over it and selling the 'rights' to use it off at exorbitant prices can be fairly said to have 'invented' something. Suggesting 'hey, maybe we could not do that' really isn't 'creating' anything.
Not particularly impressed by this, overall.
The big one there is 'cancer', which you sneaked casually into your list. In the end, cancer is just decay: we glorify it by defining it as a disease (actually, hundreds of the bloody things) with treatments and giant research budgets and so forth, but it seems to me that many, perhaps most, cancers are really just...stuff stopping working because it's old. Decay. Entropy. And hence very difficult, perhaps impossible, to 'cure'.
Maybe we'll figure out a way to workaround it. But I suspect the idea of 'curing cancer' will prove to be essentially impossible.
You could point out that neither SOPA nor PIPA has actually passed, and yet the takedown of megaupload is still happening. Which rather seems to suggest that current copyright legislation is more than adequate to the purpose.
His snark was not about the boasting, but the vocabulary. Strictly interpreted, 'massively renowned' is close to being nonsense; it doesn't really mean anything, although if you relax a bit it's clear enough what the author intended.
The stock phrase the author was probably aiming for is 'widely renowned'. 'Widely' can reasonably be attached to 'renowned' as it indicates the geographical scope of the renown - people all over the place are aware of Dr. Bjork. If you think about it, attaching 'massively' doesn't really work in the same way.
"It's not like it takes that long to ship product back and forth."
It kind of does, because flying industrial quantities isn't remotely economical. Almost all bulk shipping between North America and Asia happens by container ship, and those are still pretty slow. I think U.S. -> China is like a couple of weeks.
"No the only solution is to embrace it. Let the US consumers keep buying Chinese until the people there get a clue and overthrow their government."
I'm sorry, you rather seem to have missed a step in your argument there. How exactly is 'US consumers keep buying Chinese' going to lead to the overthrow of the government?
'The option without free trade'? That's interesting, cos self-directed industrial development occurred without free trade in the U.K., in Europe, in the U.S., in Japan, in the U.S.S.R...in fact, everywhere it's ever damn well *happened*. Japan is a particularly interesting comparison case for China.
There are _multiple_ 'options without free trade', for a country. There is the option whereby the rulers continue to extract large taxes from an inefficient economy for their personal enjoyment, sure. That one happens a lot. But then there's also the option whereby vaguely enlightened people wind up in charge and build up the economy, damn well with the help of large tariff barriers, you'd better believe it.