With a population numbering in the billions, do you think it's possible that the village ran out of usable farmland for generations to endlessly inherit, rather than Junior deciding to strike out into the great big world?
Killing a bunch of young, working-age men drove down the labor pool and made labor more valuable. Also, getting out of a war meant that there was a lot of work to be done. So wages went up.
I had *no* idea what 'miscellaneous services' icon was until a buddy told me that it was a paper coming out of a folder. Who in the hell drew that thing? Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to put in the operating system?
And WTF is that 'change root password' icon, now that I see it? A hallucinating snake?
Health insurance, school, new clothes,etc. Kids aren't cheap. Heating oil is a *major* cost. If you're living in the country, a car is a *requirement*, if you want to have any income at all. That means a car payment, insurance, and maintenance on a car that you're at least putting 50 miles a day on. There are no more good union factory jobs in the country, so mom and dad both have to work to clear $30k ( I was at a news year's party a few years back in the country, where the guy said he was making a great money at the local DHL -- $9/hour. That's $18k a year) DHL has since pulled out of this state, if not the country ). That means two cars, and very little time to manufacture clothing.
Do you know people who live in the country? I do. They subsidies their food budget with deer meat from hunting season. They buy $10 jeans from Wal-mart.
I've lived on quite a bit less than $30k. All of these "I can do it, so can you" work okay for the single guy. You're moving the goalposts in this scenario. What the grandparent talked about was a family of four -- mom, dad, and two kids. $30k won't cut it.
It would be a good time to take a vacation to third world countries where living is dirt cheap. For around 300 usd a month, you will get house, food, clothing and some entertainment too.
Yeah, but you'll also be out of the loop for as long as you're down there. You won't know the 'right moment' to come back up, and you'll miss any opportunities that come up up here.
So your company can go five months without a Senior Admin?
You couldn't hire someone bright, able to learn, background with Linux Administration, but not necessarily experienced in the apps s/he'll be supporting. You needed someone ready to hit the ground running?
Basically you're saying that you need to hire the person who just left. Nobody can get into that position from promotion, education, or similar work experience.
What will your company do when that person leaves? What will you do when people with that specific skill set retire?
MS's revenue stream will increasingly become the annual license fee.
If they can actually keep up with it. They've tried software subscriptions already; it was a failure. They couldn't keep up release cycles for their monolithic software.
I think really only web application providers can do periodic software licensing.
Remember, as we approach the singularity, technology speeds up, or something like that, so if you're unsatisfied with what they can offer now, wait a year or two; you'll be able to get a full PhD in just two week's time.
Businesses always suspected they were wasting a lot of money on advertising. But, it was a black box. Designed, by the admen, to be hard to judge whether it was effective or not.
This is completely untrue. They had very advanced mathematical models of their advertising back in the day, and they correlated it to sales, tracked down to the number of items on a shelf in a given location. It didn't happen as *fast* as it does today, but it did happen.
They knew when and where their ads were being delivered, and they knew when and where sales were made. What you said is sort of like saying 50 years ago, accounting was a black box. Just not factual.
I think what has happened is that people are exposed to more advertising these days, so each ad is more ineffectual. 50 years ago, you weren't getting 10 pages of junk mail, a Sunday paper the size of a cofee-table book, miles of road signs, etc. They still had them, but they were much rarer.
Ads suck? Then why are coke and pepsi the world-wide leaders? They sell the same carbonated sugar water as any other knock-off brand anywhere in the world. Moxie was the main competitor to coke, up until their decided to raid their advertising budget when the price of sugar rose. But, I bet they sold a better tasting product -- they just sold a whole lot less of it.
Then we pay them the same salary as we would anyone else - they're _not_ a cheap source of labor.
HB-1s lower wages. The reason why is simple economics.
You have a number of positions to fill in the US. There is a number of workers in the US who could fill those jobs. Supply and demand determine the wages.
Now take those same number of jobs in the US, and enlarge the labor pool to anybody *in the world* ( remember, 1.15 billion people in India ), and what happens? The number of positions remain the same, but the supply of workers has increased many fold -- so now any worker is worth much less, because there's much more competition amongst workers for those positions. And the supply of US positions is not greatly increased by hiring HB-1 visa holders.
Isn't any wonder that middle-class wages have been stagnant for the past 30 years?
This is the problem of perceiving individual dynamics versus group dynamics. Sure, if everyone is making $70k in a department, and the HB-1 visa guy brought in is making $60, that's illegal.
Instead, say a company is opening a new department, and offering some 10-15% less then the going wage, and the positions are open to citizens and HB-1 visa guys. The natives don't want to accept a 10-15% less competitive salary, but someone trying to get into the US is happy to get it. Remember, there are 1.15 billion people in India. There'd be no problem filling the department with HB-1 guys, because hey! No native citizen really wanted the position. So, it gets filled with HB-1 guys and natives who are willing to settle for less.
Now that you have a department of people who are working for 10-15% less, the average wage has been driven down. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The wikipedia article on mercury poisoning says that "Quicksilver (liquid metallic mercury) is poorly absorbed by ingestion and skin contact. It is hazardous due to its potential to release mercury vapour." Perhaps that's why it's not immediately dangerous to play with the block from a broken thermometer.
So it looks like the real mercury is from mercury vapor and from mercury that's already in the food chain.
I suggest you look up their recommendations for cleaning up a standard incandescent bulb for comparison.
I looked and didn't find anything. Care to provide a link?
As far as land fill problems, putting them in the land fill puts less mercury in the enviroment then using an incandescent bulb. Assuming your power come from coal, and not a clean alternative like nuclear.
The concern here is spot concentration -- what goes into the landfills tends quickly to go into the groundwater. If you've got a coal plant 150 miles away, you're not going to be getting much of it. Here's a link that says mercury in landfills is a bigger problem than mercury in the air.
I don't know why more people are shocked about this, but this goes back to Jan 2002, when Admiral Poindexter was putting together the Information Awareness Office, which ran the Total Information Awareness program. It was going to be a big aggregate database of all electronic data about everyone. Think of it as a big social network with all of your communications, financial records, legal records -- every digital record. The program was supposedly canceled after public outcry. It looks like, in light of recent revelations, the program just went into black ops or whatever you want to call it.
The problem with CFLs is not the mercury spread into the environment during production, is the spot concentrations of mercury 1. in your home, when you break a bulb, and 2. in the landfill, when people toss them out like regular bulbs, not understanding that these are hazardous waste and need to be disposed of in the proper facilities.
When you break a lamp, the state of Maine says "The next time you replace a lamp, consider putting a drop cloth on the floor so that any accidental breakage can be easily cleaned up. If consumers remain concerned regarding safety, they may consider not utilizing fluorescent lamps in situations where they could easily be broken. Consumers may also consider avoiding CFL usage in bedrooms or carpeted areas frequented by infants, small children, or pregnant women. "
Have people and pets leave the room, and don't let anyone walk through the breakage area on their way out.
Open a window and leave the room for 15 minutes or more.
Shut off the central forced-air heating/air conditioning system, if you have one.
Clean-Up Steps for Hard Surfaces
Carefully scoop up glass pieces and powder using stiff paper or
cardboard and place them in a glass jar with metal lid (such as a canning
jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small
glass fragments and powder.
Wipe the area clean with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place towels in the glass jar or plastic bag.
Do not use a vacuum or broom to clean up the broken bulb on hard surfaces.
Clean-up Steps for Carpeting or Rug
Carefully pick up glass fragments and place them in a glass jar with
metal lid (such
as a canning jar) or in a sealed plastic bag.
Use sticky tape, such as duct tape, to pick up any remaining small
glass fragments
and powder.
If vacuuming is needed after all visible materials are removed, vacuum the area where the bulb was broken.
Remove the vacuum bag (or empty and wipe the canister), and put the
bag or vacuum debris in a sealed plastic bag.
Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding and Other Soft Materials
If clothing or bedding materials come in direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from inside the bulb that may stick to the fabric, the clothing or bedding should be thrown away. Do not wash such clothing or bedding because mercury fragments in the clothing may contaminate the machine and/or pollute sewage.
You can, however, wash clothing or other materials that have been exposed to the mercury vapor from a broken CFL, such as the clothing you are wearing when you cleaned up the broken CFL, as long as that clothing has not come into direct contact with the materials from the broken bulb.
If shoes come into direct contact with broken glass or mercury-containing powder from the bulb, wipe them off with damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes. Place the towels or wipes in a glass jar or plastic bag for disposal.
Disposal of Clean-up Materials
Immediately place all clean-up materials outdoors in a trash container or protected area for the next normal trash pickup.
Wash your hands after disposing of the jars or plastic bags containing clean-up materials.
Check with your local or state government about disposal requirements in your specific area. Some states do not allow such trash disposal. Instead, they require that broken and unbroken mercury-containing bulbs
Training and Education are not the answer to the lack of skilled workers.
So how exactly, then, do workers get skills? From job experience? How do workers then get work experience, when they need work experience in the first place to get the work?
Are you really claiming that education does not prepare someone for work? Then how exactly did a person who is doing well in a position actually get to that position?
The main problem is, GM didn't out-compete the light rail system; they bought it out, and made it inconvenient ( by closing down lines ) or impossible ( by completely shutting down lines )to use the railcar system in LA. When they bought the light rail systems, they weren't interested in making money by running light rail; they just wanted only to remove a competitor. This is anti-competitive behavior. This *reduces* competition in the market-place. This was a conspiracy amongst "General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack". All of these interests wanted to sell tires, gasoline, and cars, instead of watching 90% of the people use a light rail system within the city. So you see, the car couldn't compete in the city against light rail, instead they used non-competitive tactics to simply destroy the competition instead. After they destroyed light rail in the cities, they lobbied the government to create the federal highway system. Here, industry hadn't come up with a cheaper, more efficient alternative, which won the day in market competition; they destroyed alternatives so that their more expensive, less efficient system, which also needed government subsidy, was the only one available.
Is it your position that anti-competitive monopolies and government subsidies are fair market-place moves? I believe that the US government is supposed to serve the interests of the people, not pass bills that serve the interests of the corporations that lobby them and, these days, donate to their campaigns. I have a problem when an industry destroys a perfectly working system outside of marketplace competition to promote their interests over the public's.
The other problem I have is that the car companies draw too much subsidy from the government, both in the form of roads and highways, and also in terms of externalized costs -- the pollution that goes into the system and negatively impacts human health. The oil companies get to make money off of gasoline and oil, but don't have to pay for the costs of disposing of the waste -- the taxpayers do. If light rail were still running in the cities, today we would have more oil, less air pollution, fewer tensions in the middle east, less cancers( from benzene and other pollutants ) and other breathing disorders. Also, the power system for electric light rail could be from cleaner sources, and partially, even perhaps completely, from green sources.
Slashdot Mirror
With a population numbering in the billions, do you think it's possible that the village ran out of usable farmland for generations to endlessly inherit, rather than Junior deciding to strike out into the great big world?
Killing a bunch of young, working-age men drove down the labor pool and made labor more valuable. Also, getting out of a war meant that there was a lot of work to be done. So wages went up.
Wow. I'll be darned.
Correlation is not causation. I think it's because guys with Aspie genes are socially inept, and tend to marry and have kids later in life.
The spine was weaker than the glue' chemical bonding to mouse paws? C'mon.
Remember these?
I had *no* idea what 'miscellaneous services' icon was until a buddy told me that it was a paper coming out of a folder. Who in the hell drew that thing? Who in the hell thought it was a good idea to put in the operating system?
And WTF is that 'change root password' icon, now that I see it? A hallucinating snake?
Health insurance, school, new clothes,etc. Kids aren't cheap. Heating oil is a *major* cost. If you're living in the country, a car is a *requirement*, if you want to have any income at all. That means a car payment, insurance, and maintenance on a car that you're at least putting 50 miles a day on. There are no more good union factory jobs in the country, so mom and dad both have to work to clear $30k ( I was at a news year's party a few years back in the country, where the guy said he was making a great money at the local DHL -- $9/hour. That's $18k a year) DHL has since pulled out of this state, if not the country ). That means two cars, and very little time to manufacture clothing.
Do you know people who live in the country? I do. They subsidies their food budget with deer meat from hunting season. They buy $10 jeans from Wal-mart.
I've lived on quite a bit less than $30k. All of these "I can do it, so can you" work okay for the single guy. You're moving the goalposts in this scenario. What the grandparent talked about was a family of four -- mom, dad, and two kids. $30k won't cut it.
You can still keep a resume posted and scan the replies to it once in awhile.
"Hey Boss, I'm interviewing four people for the position today. Three are coming in, and one is calling from an internet cafe in Guatemala."
From your perspective, you get an offer for a position. Do you blow $1200 on a plane ticket to fly home and interview?
You can still keep up with current financial news online.
Would you be looking for the headline "Economy recovered; Americans abroad may now return to jobs", or "Darpo come home, new position waiting" ?
It would be a good time to take a vacation to third world countries where living is dirt cheap. For around 300 usd a month, you will get house, food, clothing and some entertainment too.
Yeah, but you'll also be out of the loop for as long as you're down there. You won't know the 'right moment' to come back up, and you'll miss any opportunities that come up up here.
So your company can go five months without a Senior Admin?
You couldn't hire someone bright, able to learn, background with Linux Administration, but not necessarily experienced in the apps s/he'll be supporting. You needed someone ready to hit the ground running?
Basically you're saying that you need to hire the person who just left. Nobody can get into that position from promotion, education, or similar work experience.
What will your company do when that person leaves? What will you do when people with that specific skill set retire?
MS's revenue stream will increasingly become the annual license fee.
If they can actually keep up with it. They've tried software subscriptions already; it was a failure. They couldn't keep up release cycles for their monolithic software.
I think really only web application providers can do periodic software licensing.
Remember, as we approach the singularity, technology speeds up, or something like that, so if you're unsatisfied with what they can offer now, wait a year or two; you'll be able to get a full PhD in just two week's time.
What if the 'observer' was the Earth?
Businesses always suspected they were wasting a lot of money on advertising. But, it was a black box. Designed, by the admen, to be hard to judge whether it was effective or not.
This is completely untrue. They had very advanced mathematical models of their advertising back in the day, and they correlated it to sales, tracked down to the number of items on a shelf in a given location. It didn't happen as *fast* as it does today, but it did happen.
They knew when and where their ads were being delivered, and they knew when and where sales were made. What you said is sort of like saying 50 years ago, accounting was a black box. Just not factual.
I think what has happened is that people are exposed to more advertising these days, so each ad is more ineffectual. 50 years ago, you weren't getting 10 pages of junk mail, a Sunday paper the size of a cofee-table book, miles of road signs, etc. They still had them, but they were much rarer.
Ads suck? Then why are coke and pepsi the world-wide leaders? They sell the same carbonated sugar water as any other knock-off brand anywhere in the world. Moxie was the main competitor to coke, up until their decided to raid their advertising budget when the price of sugar rose. But, I bet they sold a better tasting product -- they just sold a whole lot less of it.
Then we pay them the same salary as we would anyone else - they're _not_ a cheap source of labor.
HB-1s lower wages. The reason why is simple economics.
You have a number of positions to fill in the US. There is a number of workers in the US who could fill those jobs. Supply and demand determine the wages.
Now take those same number of jobs in the US, and enlarge the labor pool to anybody *in the world* ( remember, 1.15 billion people in India ), and what happens? The number of positions remain the same, but the supply of workers has increased many fold -- so now any worker is worth much less, because there's much more competition amongst workers for those positions. And the supply of US positions is not greatly increased by hiring HB-1 visa holders.
Isn't any wonder that middle-class wages have been stagnant for the past 30 years?
This is the problem of perceiving individual dynamics versus group dynamics. Sure, if everyone is making $70k in a department, and the HB-1 visa guy brought in is making $60, that's illegal.
Instead, say a company is opening a new department, and offering some 10-15% less then the going wage, and the positions are open to citizens and HB-1 visa guys. The natives don't want to accept a 10-15% less competitive salary, but someone trying to get into the US is happy to get it. Remember, there are 1.15 billion people in India. There'd be no problem filling the department with HB-1 guys, because hey! No native citizen really wanted the position. So, it gets filled with HB-1 guys and natives who are willing to settle for less.
Now that you have a department of people who are working for 10-15% less, the average wage has been driven down. Lather, rinse, repeat.
$30,000 in a rural part of Ohio or Western Pennsylvania? Or $30,000 in Austin Texas or Destin Florida?
For a family of four, $30k is still not enough in rural Ohio or Penn. ( If you had a household total of $60k, no problem ).
Can you tell us more?
The wikipedia article on mercury poisoning says that "Quicksilver (liquid metallic mercury) is poorly absorbed by ingestion and skin contact. It is hazardous due to its potential to release mercury vapour." Perhaps that's why it's not immediately dangerous to play with the block from a broken thermometer.
So it looks like the real mercury is from mercury vapor and from mercury that's already in the food chain.
I suggest you look up their recommendations for cleaning up a standard incandescent bulb for comparison.
I looked and didn't find anything. Care to provide a link?
As far as land fill problems, putting them in the land fill puts less mercury in the enviroment then using an incandescent bulb. Assuming your power come from coal, and not a clean alternative like nuclear.
The concern here is spot concentration -- what goes into the landfills tends quickly to go into the groundwater. If you've got a coal plant 150 miles away, you're not going to be getting much of it. Here's a link that says mercury in landfills is a bigger problem than mercury in the air.
I don't know why more people are shocked about this, but this goes back to Jan 2002, when Admiral Poindexter was putting together the Information Awareness Office, which ran the Total Information Awareness program. It was going to be a big aggregate database of all electronic data about everyone. Think of it as a big social network with all of your communications, financial records, legal records -- every digital record. The program was supposedly canceled after public outcry. It looks like, in light of recent revelations, the program just went into black ops or whatever you want to call it.
And what did the original seal of the OIA depict? An All-Seeing Eye, on top of a pyramid, with the wording Scientia est Potentia -- "Knowledge is Power". Are we then to conclude that Total Information Awareness means Absolute Power? ( It looks like its gaze falls directly over the United States )
I voted for Obama, but now I am utterly uninterested in having my medical records digitized.
Is he running for a second term next week!?
When you break a lamp, the state of Maine says "The next time you replace a lamp, consider putting a drop cloth on the floor so that any accidental breakage can be easily cleaned up. If consumers remain concerned regarding safety, they may consider not utilizing fluorescent lamps in situations where they could easily be broken. Consumers may also consider avoiding CFL usage in bedrooms or carpeted areas frequented by infants, small children, or pregnant women. "
Here's what the EPA says to do if a CFL bulb breaks in your home:
Before Clean-up: Air Out the Room
Clean-Up Steps for Hard Surfaces
Clean-up Steps for Carpeting or Rug
Clean-up Steps for Clothing, Bedding and Other Soft Materials
Disposal of Clean-up Materials
Training and Education are not the answer to the lack of skilled workers.
So how exactly, then, do workers get skills? From job experience? How do workers then get work experience, when they need work experience in the first place to get the work?
Are you really claiming that education does not prepare someone for work? Then how exactly did a person who is doing well in a position actually get to that position?
Check out the wikipedia article on GM buying out the streetcars. (It's not referenced up to wikipedia's standard, but it gives you a good overview.)
The main problem is, GM didn't out-compete the light rail system; they bought it out, and made it inconvenient ( by closing down lines ) or impossible ( by completely shutting down lines )to use the railcar system in LA. When they bought the light rail systems, they weren't interested in making money by running light rail; they just wanted only to remove a competitor. This is anti-competitive behavior. This *reduces* competition in the market-place. This was a conspiracy amongst "General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack". All of these interests wanted to sell tires, gasoline, and cars, instead of watching 90% of the people use a light rail system within the city. So you see, the car couldn't compete in the city against light rail, instead they used non-competitive tactics to simply destroy the competition instead. After they destroyed light rail in the cities, they lobbied the government to create the federal highway system. Here, industry hadn't come up with a cheaper, more efficient alternative, which won the day in market competition; they destroyed alternatives so that their more expensive, less efficient system, which also needed government subsidy, was the only one available.
Is it your position that anti-competitive monopolies and government subsidies are fair market-place moves? I believe that the US government is supposed to serve the interests of the people, not pass bills that serve the interests of the corporations that lobby them and, these days, donate to their campaigns. I have a problem when an industry destroys a perfectly working system outside of marketplace competition to promote their interests over the public's.
The other problem I have is that the car companies draw too much subsidy from the government, both in the form of roads and highways, and also in terms of externalized costs -- the pollution that goes into the system and negatively impacts human health. The oil companies get to make money off of gasoline and oil, but don't have to pay for the costs of disposing of the waste -- the taxpayers do. If light rail were still running in the cities, today we would have more oil, less air pollution, fewer tensions in the middle east, less cancers( from benzene and other pollutants ) and other breathing disorders. Also, the power system for electric light rail could be from cleaner sources, and partially, even perhaps completely, from green sources.