May I be controversial and point out that saving lives on an overpopulated planet may in itself not be ethical?
The world is not overpopulated. Certain parts of the world are overpopulated. Other parts of the world are underpopulated. Other parts have sustainable population. I would say that it would be unethical to save lives in an overpopulated area that cannot support it's existing population. Other people would say that is is unethical to let people die in those areas.
The animals which I use on a frequent basis or are used to humanity's benefit on a frequent basis tend to be domesticated, raised for some consumptive use for humanity, and would otherwise quickly die out in the wild.
Being yummy has proven to be a useful trait for many species of fruit, and apparently works well for many species of animal. Sucks for the individual, but great for the species.
Humans are the only species that indiscriminately kills each other over ideology.
Ever met an ant? They will kill an ant from another colony just because of their ideology that they don't think the other colony should be alive. Same with most other pack animals, including primates.
Cherokee trail of tears: forced march from fertile lands to a desert.
Hey now! I live in that desert. Homestead act: move on in! Even though we promissed them the land.
Well, why would they want the land? It's a desert, remember?
I think it is stupid to avoid working on a project just because it MIGHT be used for evil. Sure, the atomic bomb killed lots of people, but atomic energy has also provided clean, safe power for billions of people. You have to look at the net positive or negative effect. Otherwise you are traveling down the road of "if it saves one child."
Outsourcing is outsourcing, whether it's to India, a contract house, the cloud or your own user base.
Many companies outsource internally all the time. For example, once upon a time, you turned in all your expenses to a $30,000 a year office assistant to compile and post the expenses. However, now they have "saved money" by eliminating this position, buying some fancy (and slow and unusable) third party web application, and instead of having someone inexpensive and familiar with expenses and expense policies doing the job day in and day out, we make the $100,000 a year developers and managers task switch to using this third party program. The net effect? One department gets to save $30k a year, while all the other departments probably have a cumulative loss of $100,000 or more.
their taxes on those products surely pay more than the cost of their treatment.
A pack a day smoker in New York pays the highest taxes, about $1,000 a year. Over a lifetime, this can amount to about $50,000. Initial treatment for a first year lung cancer patient is about $26,000 and then about $9,000 per year for every year they survive. This was based on 2002 numbers, so with the rising cost of healthcare, you probably need to multiply those by about 5.
I suspect that the taxes on cigarettes are able to meet the cost of treatment only because most people have other insurance to cover them.
Oddly, while legislation to suppress soda seems to be gaining traction, legislators fall over themselves in an effort to go in the opposite direction regarding children.
It is worth it to me to pay for educating somebody else's child. People are going to have children whether we educate those children or not, so on the whole it is better that those children end up being educated.
A simple four digit password has about a 1 in a 100 million chance of being cracked before the automatic account locking system locks the account. I think I can live with those odds. My work password is 12 digits (and the retarded system at work wants me to change it even though the account hasn't been compromised and I haven't given it to anyone else), by using 12 digits instead of 4, my odds of getting cracked decrease by about the same amount as your odds decrease when you buy week old lottery tickets.
That's not the problem. The problem is that the lists of user logins and corresponding hashed passwords get in the wrong hands, whether it be due to bad design and/or coding, insecure software, or unfaithful servants. When you have that list, you run brute force against it to get the actual passwords.
I suspect that if you have that list, then the individual users logins and passwords are of no use to you. Unless of course you have acquired that list secondhand.
Do you really need to "touch" your new PC or laptop? It's just a generic device nowadays.
Maybe your PC is a generic device, but mine isn't. Having said that, I ordered all the parts for mine from Newegg. But the keyboard and mouse was kept from a previous model. If I need a new keyboard or mouse, it is definitely something I need to touch before buying. I have even had some that I tried out in-store that I later decided were unacceptable and traded them in.
There are literally millions of measurements that prove a heliocentric solar system, quantitatively consistent with Newton's laws, measuring straightforward physical quantities like distance and time.
But, even the heliocentric idea is outdated. After all, every particle in the universe is attracted to every other particle by the four universal forces (and there were only three when I was in college). And still, even upon getting down to that level, planetary motion is very slightly inconsistent with predictions.
Although credited to Cathy Ladman, I swear I heard George Carlin or Robin Williams or somebody describe religion as "Guilt with different holidays". Given that Global Warming has at least one holiday, even if you don't actually get the day off, and it is basically a way for humans to feel guilty about existing, I think it qualifies.
(Hmm, actually, you could make an argument that you should count evolutionary time in generations rather than years, in which case bacteria and virii have us all beat hands down - and there are in fact several species that have genomes far larger than,say, corn, which in turn has a genome notably larger than humans)
Undoubtedly, whoever can create more generations faster is more likely to survive in the long run. It seems likely that as time goes on, we will see fewer and fewer large organisms and eventually it will be a battle of the single celled organisms.
Of course, that is the opposite of what evolutionary theory says, but that certainly makes a certain amount of sense.
I was doing some science outreach stuff at a museum a while back, and a seemingly intelligent looking thirtysomething woman with two children asked me if the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way around.
At least she asked.
But with stuff like that, you can't really fault people. I mean, they probably were told that the Earth revolves around the Sun in school, but seeing as how it makes precious little difference in the ordinary lives of 99.9% of the populace, it is not something that they are going to keep on their shift register.
appealing to the expertise of say richard dawkins about evolution, would be correct while appealing to someone like fred hoyle would not, he is an astronomer
creationists appeal to hoyle all the time, even though he isn't a biologist.
Well, to be fair, if you think evolution is wrong, why would you go to an evolutionary biologist to try to prove your point? I suspect that Dawkins doesn't go to Billy Graham and ask Billy for evidence that Creationism is wrong.
I personally know very little about Dawkins' work in evolutionary biology and only am familiar with his work to try to promote atheism. So I would probably try to find somebody who spent more of their time dealing with evolutionary biology than someone who spent their time trying to prove a negative.
It Slices, It Dices, It's the Universal Theory!
It's just like the Science of economics. It can't predict crap, but it sure is good at explaining why something happened after the fact.
Could very well be. But $100k to $120k, and not in NYC or SF should bring in a decent selection of candidates at the very least. But I'm in one of those rare fields where there very low or near zero unemployment, unfortunately.
And if that is the case, then in fact that is what the H1B program was designed for, and back in the 70s that is what it did. Now it is used to bring in entry and mid-level developers, which we already have in spades, in an attempt to artificially lower the cost of labor and destroy the middle class.
I share your pain. I used to make more than twice what I make right now, but it seems that these days, having an H1B is a requirement. I keep getting contacted by people with Indian sounding names from various consulting firms, and they always want to know about my H1B status, never my citizenship status. Basically, if you are not on an H1B and are not Indian, they don't want to hear from you, because you are going to demand the prevailing wage, and they are there to try to illegally undercut the prevailing wage by using H1B labor.
We're a large company, and in this region, to find someone with the skillsets I'm looking for is nearly impossible, and we're paying top $$.
Sounds like you are not paying top dollar enough or you would find somebody. Or perhaps the needs are too specific. I just hired a guy with lots of technical background in various languages, but no experience in language X to be a programmer for me in language X.
On the other hand, we also recently tried to hire some entry level programmers, and we didn't get very many exciting applicants. But then, the pay range that my company was willing to pay for entry level was below what most entry level programmers would be willing to take. There was one guy that we looked at that I would have paid $50k for, and probably another company would have, but the company only wanted to pay $39k. Unfortunately, that is not on par with entry level programmer wages. The department hiring for that position figured there are no programmers available in our area. In fact, if they offered $50k, I'm sure they would find many qualified applicants (and many more unqualified ones).
The theory is that we have plenty of talent to fill the 20k-90k/yr jobs and don't want to dilute that market for current residents and citizens.
I would argue that the theory is exactly backwards. We should only be allowing people to immigrate who have specialized skills that are not available in the current labor pool in the United States. Thus, those jobs should also be the highest paying jobs. Instead, what we have turned the immigration policy into is a way to bring in people to perform the middle class jobs for which we have many, many existing people with the skill and desire to perform. So instead of filling a specific gap in labor we are just undercutting the cost of an already existing and well-balanced labor pool.
No amount of training is going to bridge the shortage of skilled workers in the USA.
Hiring the existing unemployed skilled workers might bridge the shortage. You won't know if you don't try it.
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May I be controversial and point out that saving lives on an overpopulated planet may in itself not be ethical?
The world is not overpopulated. Certain parts of the world are overpopulated. Other parts of the world are underpopulated. Other parts have sustainable population. I would say that it would be unethical to save lives in an overpopulated area that cannot support it's existing population. Other people would say that is is unethical to let people die in those areas.
The animals which I use on a frequent basis or are used to humanity's benefit on a frequent basis tend to be domesticated, raised for some consumptive use for humanity, and would otherwise quickly die out in the wild.
Being yummy has proven to be a useful trait for many species of fruit, and apparently works well for many species of animal. Sucks for the individual, but great for the species.
You`d run out of person to kill much faster than this.
We're willing to wait a few weeks while you shore up the numbers.
Humans are the only species that indiscriminately kills each other over ideology.
Ever met an ant? They will kill an ant from another colony just because of their ideology that they don't think the other colony should be alive. Same with most other pack animals, including primates.
Cherokee trail of tears: forced march from fertile lands to a desert.
Hey now! I live in that desert.
Homestead act: move on in! Even though we promissed them the land.
Well, why would they want the land? It's a desert, remember?
I think it is stupid to avoid working on a project just because it MIGHT be used for evil. Sure, the atomic bomb killed lots of people, but atomic energy has also provided clean, safe power for billions of people. You have to look at the net positive or negative effect. Otherwise you are traveling down the road of "if it saves one child."
Outsourcing is outsourcing, whether it's to India, a contract house, the cloud or your own user base.
Many companies outsource internally all the time. For example, once upon a time, you turned in all your expenses to a $30,000 a year office assistant to compile and post the expenses. However, now they have "saved money" by eliminating this position, buying some fancy (and slow and unusable) third party web application, and instead of having someone inexpensive and familiar with expenses and expense policies doing the job day in and day out, we make the $100,000 a year developers and managers task switch to using this third party program. The net effect? One department gets to save $30k a year, while all the other departments probably have a cumulative loss of $100,000 or more.
their taxes on those products surely pay more than the cost of their treatment.
A pack a day smoker in New York pays the highest taxes, about $1,000 a year. Over a lifetime, this can amount to about $50,000. Initial treatment for a first year lung cancer patient is about $26,000 and then about $9,000 per year for every year they survive. This was based on 2002 numbers, so with the rising cost of healthcare, you probably need to multiply those by about 5.
I suspect that the taxes on cigarettes are able to meet the cost of treatment only because most people have other insurance to cover them.
Oddly, while legislation to suppress soda seems to be gaining traction, legislators fall over themselves in an effort to go in the opposite direction regarding children.
It is worth it to me to pay for educating somebody else's child. People are going to have children whether we educate those children or not, so on the whole it is better that those children end up being educated.
A simple four digit password has about a 1 in a 100 million chance of being cracked before the automatic account locking system locks the account. I think I can live with those odds. My work password is 12 digits (and the retarded system at work wants me to change it even though the account hasn't been compromised and I haven't given it to anyone else), by using 12 digits instead of 4, my odds of getting cracked decrease by about the same amount as your odds decrease when you buy week old lottery tickets.
That's not the problem. The problem is that the lists of user logins and corresponding hashed passwords get in the wrong hands, whether it be due to bad design and/or coding, insecure software, or unfaithful servants. When you have that list, you run brute force against it to get the actual passwords.
I suspect that if you have that list, then the individual users logins and passwords are of no use to you. Unless of course you have acquired that list secondhand.
Do you really need to "touch" your new PC or laptop? It's just a generic device nowadays.
Maybe your PC is a generic device, but mine isn't. Having said that, I ordered all the parts for mine from Newegg. But the keyboard and mouse was kept from a previous model. If I need a new keyboard or mouse, it is definitely something I need to touch before buying. I have even had some that I tried out in-store that I later decided were unacceptable and traded them in.
There are literally millions of measurements that prove a heliocentric solar system, quantitatively consistent with Newton's laws, measuring straightforward physical quantities like distance and time.
But, even the heliocentric idea is outdated. After all, every particle in the universe is attracted to every other particle by the four universal forces (and there were only three when I was in college). And still, even upon getting down to that level, planetary motion is very slightly inconsistent with predictions.
Although credited to Cathy Ladman, I swear I heard George Carlin or Robin Williams or somebody describe religion as "Guilt with different holidays". Given that Global Warming has at least one holiday, even if you don't actually get the day off, and it is basically a way for humans to feel guilty about existing, I think it qualifies.
(Hmm, actually, you could make an argument that you should count evolutionary time in generations rather than years, in which case bacteria and virii have us all beat hands down - and there are in fact several species that have genomes far larger than,say, corn, which in turn has a genome notably larger than humans)
Undoubtedly, whoever can create more generations faster is more likely to survive in the long run. It seems likely that as time goes on, we will see fewer and fewer large organisms and eventually it will be a battle of the single celled organisms.
Of course, that is the opposite of what evolutionary theory says, but that certainly makes a certain amount of sense.
Go to every other story on the front page and click an advertisement. It's the only way they'll learn.
it so obvious that darwinian evolution *must* happen
Why MUST it happen? Because the alternatives are something that you don't want to hear?
I was doing some science outreach stuff at a museum a while back, and a seemingly intelligent looking thirtysomething woman with two children asked me if the Sun goes around the Earth, or the other way around.
At least she asked.
But with stuff like that, you can't really fault people. I mean, they probably were told that the Earth revolves around the Sun in school, but seeing as how it makes precious little difference in the ordinary lives of 99.9% of the populace, it is not something that they are going to keep on their shift register.
appealing to the expertise of say richard dawkins about evolution, would be correct while appealing to someone like fred hoyle would not, he is an astronomer creationists appeal to hoyle all the time, even though he isn't a biologist.
Well, to be fair, if you think evolution is wrong, why would you go to an evolutionary biologist to try to prove your point? I suspect that Dawkins doesn't go to Billy Graham and ask Billy for evidence that Creationism is wrong.
I personally know very little about Dawkins' work in evolutionary biology and only am familiar with his work to try to promote atheism. So I would probably try to find somebody who spent more of their time dealing with evolutionary biology than someone who spent their time trying to prove a negative.
It Slices, It Dices, It's the Universal Theory! It's just like the Science of economics. It can't predict crap, but it sure is good at explaining why something happened after the fact.
Could very well be. But $100k to $120k, and not in NYC or SF should bring in a decent selection of candidates at the very least. But I'm in one of those rare fields where there very low or near zero unemployment, unfortunately.
And if that is the case, then in fact that is what the H1B program was designed for, and back in the 70s that is what it did. Now it is used to bring in entry and mid-level developers, which we already have in spades, in an attempt to artificially lower the cost of labor and destroy the middle class.
I share your pain. I used to make more than twice what I make right now, but it seems that these days, having an H1B is a requirement. I keep getting contacted by people with Indian sounding names from various consulting firms, and they always want to know about my H1B status, never my citizenship status. Basically, if you are not on an H1B and are not Indian, they don't want to hear from you, because you are going to demand the prevailing wage, and they are there to try to illegally undercut the prevailing wage by using H1B labor.
We're a large company, and in this region, to find someone with the skillsets I'm looking for is nearly impossible, and we're paying top $$.
Sounds like you are not paying top dollar enough or you would find somebody. Or perhaps the needs are too specific. I just hired a guy with lots of technical background in various languages, but no experience in language X to be a programmer for me in language X.
On the other hand, we also recently tried to hire some entry level programmers, and we didn't get very many exciting applicants. But then, the pay range that my company was willing to pay for entry level was below what most entry level programmers would be willing to take. There was one guy that we looked at that I would have paid $50k for, and probably another company would have, but the company only wanted to pay $39k. Unfortunately, that is not on par with entry level programmer wages. The department hiring for that position figured there are no programmers available in our area. In fact, if they offered $50k, I'm sure they would find many qualified applicants (and many more unqualified ones).
The theory is that we have plenty of talent to fill the 20k-90k/yr jobs and don't want to dilute that market for current residents and citizens.
I would argue that the theory is exactly backwards. We should only be allowing people to immigrate who have specialized skills that are not available in the current labor pool in the United States. Thus, those jobs should also be the highest paying jobs. Instead, what we have turned the immigration policy into is a way to bring in people to perform the middle class jobs for which we have many, many existing people with the skill and desire to perform. So instead of filling a specific gap in labor we are just undercutting the cost of an already existing and well-balanced labor pool.
No amount of training is going to bridge the shortage of skilled workers in the USA.
Hiring the existing unemployed skilled workers might bridge the shortage. You won't know if you don't try it.