Actually, the trend I notice is CLOSED FACTORIES. And very little factory building going on. So while yes, we are replacing blue collar folks with robots- we're also losing huge specific industries to "low tech" specialties like TV manufacturing, VCR manufacturing, DVD manufacturing, computer manufacturing, textiles (no clothing is made in the United States anymore large scale at all), kitchen gadgets, etc. What we're keeping are things like cars- which are subject to 50% government tarriffs.
We as a nation often stand aghast when cultures are destroyed in the name of profit in other lands.
Since when? I've got ancestors in at least one of those cultures (Native American) and I've yet to see Americans renounce profit for mere culture as a whole. Small parts, yes, but not as a whole.
His real worry- nobody who remembers how to program using his methods and flowcharting method is employed anymore because outsourcing hits the most experienced people first.
The problem, as I see it, is that the company is highly unlikely to actually compensate you for being more efficient. More likely is they'll say "If you can outsource that much of your duties, why don't we just outsource all of your duties?".
While I applaud your honesty, is this lifestyle really one that should be expected, given the state of the world?
NO, it isn't. My big mistake was not being homeless (that is, buying rather than renting when I could afford it, and not getting thrown out on my ass when I lost my job for 26 months due to outsourcing. We don't have a maid, we don't have other luxuries- the kid is enough. During my time unemployed, I did a lot to reduce my expenditures, which helps now. But the fact of the matter is, I'm working for 66% of what I was earning when I got into the mortgage on the house and am now working 50 miles away with a 1.5 hour each way commute just to service my debt from my 26 months of unemployment and the mortgage and of course the car to get me to work. There is NO money left over- and we're at minimum lifestyle for our area (we've even had the gas cut off and heat the house with wood- luckily we've got my parent's farm close by, free wood). You're fucked if you ever WERE a US consumer, and tried to live the American Dream (family and home ownership).
Due to this experience- my recommendation to any young college student is get neutered now- sterilization because you'll never be allowed to afford a family. DO NOT BUY A HOUSE regardless of how rich you think you are in any job- because 2 months down the line you might find your job outsourced. Live as simply and cheaply as possible. You can have a significant other and a house after retirement, if your social security is still available.
That's still only 4 cobalt warheads- IIRC the average ICBM can carry 6, add some extra BDB (Big Dumb Boosters) to get it into the proper orbit- and it isn't impossible at all to place 300 megatons of TNT on target.
GASOLINE is. OIL is not. Oil has been hit with 300% inflation since the 1970s. We may have minimal gasoline policy- but we've got maximum gasoline subsidies.
One more to add to that:
5) $1/mile/container tax on shiping figured at the incoming port, to pay for all that new scanning equipment to make sure terrorists don't ship nuclear bombs into our cities.
This will restore the manufacturing jobs because it's basically a tarriff on EVERYTHING coming across the border at 1.2 million shipping containers a day.
Anyone making a statement like this is a kook... gas/oil has never been cheaper when adjusted for inflation
Hmm, let's test that statement. In 1974, oil was considered high at $20/barrel. It's now $60/barrel and on it's way up. 300% inflation over 30 years. 10% inflation per year is what you are claiming?
Thanks to outsourcing, I'm now living hand to mouth WITH my college degree. In fact, I'm about $200/month less than I need to maintain my lifestyle. I can't just buy a plane ticket and move to Asia.
Given the number of hacker-level jobs that WILL be disappearing, would be to write Distributed Redundant Denial Of Service Attack Bots that specifically target Indian Router IP Addresses. The weak point in the chain of Business Process Outsourcing is that it requires 24/7 broadband connections across continents- if those communications can be disrupted without harming American backbones, then there's a half a chance that Indian productivity will fall- giving us a better chance of implementing Yourdon's solution of higher productivity.
Constant or gradual? Seems to me that there's more than one way to do this. Use your first nuke to blow a crater into the asteroid. Use successive nukes at the bottom of the crater to shape the radiation itself- after all, even gamma and alpha particles have some mass, if very slight.
But given your total, that's 15,239,192 Joules, give or take a bit, needed. From the conversion factors at http://www.ieer.org/clssroom/unitconv.html that's only.00362837541924 tons of TNT. In other words, one Tsar Bomba at 50 tons of TNT would yeild 13780 times as much energy as needed, or given your 50% conversion factor, 6890 km/s to the asteroid. Given that the earth is ONLY ~13,000 km wide, all you need to do is hit this less than a week before collision with just such a nuke- in such a way that sends it out of the plane of the eliptic, preferably.
Best bet isn't to break it up- best bet is to leave it whole and detonate EARLY enough to get that very small change in vector that is needed to change the probability back to 1/300...or better yet one in infinity. Of course the problem with that is apparently you just put it off for another 24 years until you have to do it again....
Ok, thanks- it was already slashdotted by the time I saw it. But that's OK- saw this in real life (or at least, a cheap Chinese knock-off of it with a bit more functionality) with hard drive and multiple-format card reader for $99 at CompUSA over the weekend. I already have a multi-format reader for my PDA, so I wasn't terribly interested.
How do people tell which problems are mathematical and which problems are non-mathematical?
An easy way is to take a concept from mathematics itself. The definition of a function. For any n-dimentional function, there should be n-1 solutions for any given input. Non-mathematical problems have MULTIPLE right answers- they are ambiguous not only in the original question, but also in the solution.
Why is that you want to take hammers out of the hands of lay people?
That's reading an intent into my words that is beyond what I am saying. Even as ambiguous as I've been, the closest you can come to this is that I've said that lay people have some interests that are outside of mathematics- and due to free will and individual choice, no one form of any logic system will ever do for all mankind in all instances.
If you can't use a hammer to take the lugnuts off of your car to change a tire, do you then declare the hammer useless?
In that situation- yes! But implicit in that declaration is that there are some problems the hammer is usefull for- but they are far more rare than first thought. Same with mathematics- the problems that fit the definition of a function are far more uncommon than first thought. Thus the inability of mathematics to actually model reality to any and all degrees of precision- because reality is far more complex than mathematics; switching to infinities and imaginary numbers only serves to make the model less like reality and more like something the human brain can figure out.
More that they fired Bergman and got somebody who had actually *watched* the other series and read the books....though T'Pau as a terrorist was a real twist.
The United States is not currently a free society and hasn't been since the Civil War.
If you included a statement that made it clear to 95+% of the readers what constituted "a free society" meant by your definition, then I would have had no problem.
The Blockquote above was in my very first message- and should have given a hint that I was using a pre-Civil-War ideological definition. The Homestead Act, the original 13th Ammendment before it was struck down, the concept of moving West to avoid the encroaching hyper-federalism and new nobility; all of these are a part and parcel of having a truly "Free" society where a man may earn whatever he can work for- and where a man will not have his labor taken advantage of by the lazy good for nothing investor class. Where a small, nearly unknown Christian Sect could settle a desert and create a theocracy known as Utah- and still eventually become a state. Now that is FREEDOM- the modern anemic version that most people believe in is about as related to it as the institution of slavery in the South was.
I stand by what I said when I said that your statement was obvious. When most people say ""The United States is the land of freedom", they are saying something different. When people make statements like that, thats a totally different statement - more just ideological sloganry. They are not attempting to assert that the truth value of the statement "The USA has absolutely all forms of freedom using Marxist Hacker 42's definitons" is true. Or do you seriously think that people would put their hand up and claim that "The USA has all forms of absolute pure freedom, defined as absolute freedom to do anything and everything they please, as well as having all physical and emotional needs continuously satisfied" is pure truth? (If you take exception to my exact wording, feel free to correct me.)
When I hear new immigrants talking about freedom in the United States- that's EXACTLY the sort of freedom they're talking about. NO other country holds out even the HOPE of this level of freedom- all limit the ability for people to achieve their physical and emotional needs. The United States does too to some extent- but the mythical version of the United States being sold worldwide to potential immigrants is the land where the streets are paved in gold, you can still get land for free to grow your food on, and the government won't arrest you for saying or doing the wrong thing. It's the MYTHICAL version that I hear about the United States being the land of Freedom- and while it's partially true, it ain't entirely true, which was the point of my original message.
If you want to verify my hypothesis, do a phone poll and ask one group "Is the USA the land of freedom" and ask the other group the full question. If you are correct, then an equal percentage of people will say yes to both sentences. If I'm correct, a significantly less percentage of people will agree with the second.
And the outcome of that poll will differ greatly depending on the country you take it in. Take in in Mexico- and you'll get people saying yes to both sentences. Take it in Europe, and up until about 3 years ago you'd still find a majority saying yes to both sentences. Take it in India or China- you'll still find people saying yes to both. Worldwide, the myth of the United States is MUCH more powerfull than you seem to think.
My beef is your unwillingness to be clear and truthful in your statements, and then use people replies (which are based on different premises and definitions than your own, and thus have different meanings when you read them) to claim that others are brainwashed and ignorant when their messages are interpreted by your own unique perspective.
The different meanings ARE the brainwashing- and my version (that the United States is NOT as free as the myth of the United States makes it out to be) is different. So once again, I don't see the problem.
There is nothing wrong with having a unique perspective (perspective defined as premises and definitions), nor am I saying that any perspective is better or worse, but it is simply a good thing to make them clear when one's perspective may be the source of confusion. To go further and deliberately invite confusion based on different perspectives is very distasteful and anti-intellectual.
I have no illusions about the intellectual capacity of others- I assume they have none at all. Who would bother to read something that is "obvious"? But who is it obvious to? I still say that to the majority of people who have never been to the United States, the restricted definition of freedom that is so common in the United States is unknown- and thus, the lie is in when we CLAIM to be the land of freedom to others, suckering in millions of people every year to come here and work for low wages and slowly starve to death.
If you included a statement that made it clear to 95+% of the readers what constituted "a free society" meant by your definition, then I would have had no problem.
I'm just using the same idea of "freedom" that is sold worldwide as in what we have promised to the people of Iraq. I don't see any problem with using that definition.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was one when they try to "reimagine" Galactica 1980 in about 3 years...Vipers and Puddle Jumpers vs Wraith Darts and Type 3 Cylons (assuming of course, that the order of invention was original cylons, super-sleek military cylons, automated ships, then humanoids), that would be oool....
Next up: 21 Jump Street goes undercover on Law and Order
That MIGHT actually make sense- since all of the characters on 21 Jump Street (which was about 20-something cops going undercover in high schools in the late 1980s) are in their mid-40s by now...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the trend I notice is CLOSED FACTORIES. And very little factory building going on. So while yes, we are replacing blue collar folks with robots- we're also losing huge specific industries to "low tech" specialties like TV manufacturing, VCR manufacturing, DVD manufacturing, computer manufacturing, textiles (no clothing is made in the United States anymore large scale at all), kitchen gadgets, etc. What we're keeping are things like cars- which are subject to 50% government tarriffs.
We as a nation often stand aghast when cultures are destroyed in the name of profit in other lands.
Since when? I've got ancestors in at least one of those cultures (Native American) and I've yet to see Americans renounce profit for mere culture as a whole. Small parts, yes, but not as a whole.
His real worry- nobody who remembers how to program using his methods and flowcharting method is employed anymore because outsourcing hits the most experienced people first.
The problem, as I see it, is that the company is highly unlikely to actually compensate you for being more efficient. More likely is they'll say "If you can outsource that much of your duties, why don't we just outsource all of your duties?".
While I applaud your honesty, is this lifestyle really one that should be expected, given the state of the world?
NO, it isn't. My big mistake was not being homeless (that is, buying rather than renting when I could afford it, and not getting thrown out on my ass when I lost my job for 26 months due to outsourcing. We don't have a maid, we don't have other luxuries- the kid is enough. During my time unemployed, I did a lot to reduce my expenditures, which helps now. But the fact of the matter is, I'm working for 66% of what I was earning when I got into the mortgage on the house and am now working 50 miles away with a 1.5 hour each way commute just to service my debt from my 26 months of unemployment and the mortgage and of course the car to get me to work. There is NO money left over- and we're at minimum lifestyle for our area (we've even had the gas cut off and heat the house with wood- luckily we've got my parent's farm close by, free wood). You're fucked if you ever WERE a US consumer, and tried to live the American Dream (family and home ownership).
Due to this experience- my recommendation to any young college student is get neutered now- sterilization because you'll never be allowed to afford a family. DO NOT BUY A HOUSE regardless of how rich you think you are in any job- because 2 months down the line you might find your job outsourced. Live as simply and cheaply as possible. You can have a significant other and a house after retirement, if your social security is still available.
That's still only 4 cobalt warheads- IIRC the average ICBM can carry 6, add some extra BDB (Big Dumb Boosters) to get it into the proper orbit- and it isn't impossible at all to place 300 megatons of TNT on target.
GASOLINE is. OIL is not. Oil has been hit with 300% inflation since the 1970s. We may have minimal gasoline policy- but we've got maximum gasoline subsidies.
One more to add to that:
5) $1/mile/container tax on shiping figured at the incoming port, to pay for all that new scanning equipment to make sure terrorists don't ship nuclear bombs into our cities.
This will restore the manufacturing jobs because it's basically a tarriff on EVERYTHING coming across the border at 1.2 million shipping containers a day.
Anyone making a statement like this is a kook... gas/oil has never been cheaper when adjusted for inflation
Hmm, let's test that statement. In 1974, oil was considered high at $20/barrel. It's now $60/barrel and on it's way up. 300% inflation over 30 years. 10% inflation per year is what you are claiming?
You do realize that the only reason Toyota and BMW have plants in America is because of excessive tarriffs on automobile importing, right?
Management might get downsized, but I can't conceive of it being outsourced.
Personally, I can- because as near as I can tell, management isn't worth the money investors are paying for it, it's just a big con game.
Thanks to outsourcing, I'm now living hand to mouth WITH my college degree. In fact, I'm about $200/month less than I need to maintain my lifestyle. I can't just buy a plane ticket and move to Asia.
Given the number of hacker-level jobs that WILL be disappearing, would be to write Distributed Redundant Denial Of Service Attack Bots that specifically target Indian Router IP Addresses. The weak point in the chain of Business Process Outsourcing is that it requires 24/7 broadband connections across continents- if those communications can be disrupted without harming American backbones, then there's a half a chance that Indian productivity will fall- giving us a better chance of implementing Yourdon's solution of higher productivity.
Constant or gradual? Seems to me that there's more than one way to do this. Use your first nuke to blow a crater into the asteroid. Use successive nukes at the bottom of the crater to shape the radiation itself- after all, even gamma and alpha particles have some mass, if very slight.
.00362837541924 tons of TNT. In other words, one Tsar Bomba at 50 tons of TNT would yeild 13780 times as much energy as needed, or given your 50% conversion factor, 6890 km/s to the asteroid. Given that the earth is ONLY ~13,000 km wide, all you need to do is hit this less than a week before collision with just such a nuke- in such a way that sends it out of the plane of the eliptic, preferably.
But given your total, that's 15,239,192 Joules, give or take a bit, needed. From the conversion factors at http://www.ieer.org/clssroom/unitconv.html that's only
Best bet isn't to break it up- best bet is to leave it whole and detonate EARLY enough to get that very small change in vector that is needed to change the probability back to 1/300...or better yet one in infinity. Of course the problem with that is apparently you just put it off for another 24 years until you have to do it again....
Ok, thanks- it was already slashdotted by the time I saw it. But that's OK- saw this in real life (or at least, a cheap Chinese knock-off of it with a bit more functionality) with hard drive and multiple-format card reader for $99 at CompUSA over the weekend. I already have a multi-format reader for my PDA, so I wasn't terribly interested.
How do people tell which problems are mathematical and which problems are non-mathematical?
An easy way is to take a concept from mathematics itself. The definition of a function. For any n-dimentional function, there should be n-1 solutions for any given input. Non-mathematical problems have MULTIPLE right answers- they are ambiguous not only in the original question, but also in the solution.
Why is that you want to take hammers out of the hands of lay people?
That's reading an intent into my words that is beyond what I am saying. Even as ambiguous as I've been, the closest you can come to this is that I've said that lay people have some interests that are outside of mathematics- and due to free will and individual choice, no one form of any logic system will ever do for all mankind in all instances.
If you can't use a hammer to take the lugnuts off of your car to change a tire, do you then declare the hammer useless?
In that situation- yes! But implicit in that declaration is that there are some problems the hammer is usefull for- but they are far more rare than first thought. Same with mathematics- the problems that fit the definition of a function are far more uncommon than first thought. Thus the inability of mathematics to actually model reality to any and all degrees of precision- because reality is far more complex than mathematics; switching to infinities and imaginary numbers only serves to make the model less like reality and more like something the human brain can figure out.
Welcome to Bangladeshi Software Outsourcers. May we take your order for Open Source Windows XP?
Nah, just Battlestar Galactica, the Gender-bender series (with the female Starbuck).
More that they fired Bergman and got somebody who had actually *watched* the other series and read the books....though T'Pau as a terrorist was a real twist.
Because I tried and the first 50 responses I got were going the other direction. But a large number of the correct product showed up at http://www.provantage.com/buy-66pc2tv_-pc-tv-video -converter-shopping.htm
If you included a statement that made it clear to 95+% of the readers what constituted "a free society" meant by your definition, then I would have had no problem.
The Blockquote above was in my very first message- and should have given a hint that I was using a pre-Civil-War ideological definition. The Homestead Act, the original 13th Ammendment before it was struck down, the concept of moving West to avoid the encroaching hyper-federalism and new nobility; all of these are a part and parcel of having a truly "Free" society where a man may earn whatever he can work for- and where a man will not have his labor taken advantage of by the lazy good for nothing investor class. Where a small, nearly unknown Christian Sect could settle a desert and create a theocracy known as Utah- and still eventually become a state. Now that is FREEDOM- the modern anemic version that most people believe in is about as related to it as the institution of slavery in the South was.
I stand by what I said when I said that your statement was obvious. When most people say ""The United States is the land of freedom", they are saying something different. When people make statements like that, thats a totally different statement - more just ideological sloganry. They are not attempting to assert that the truth value of the statement "The USA has absolutely all forms of freedom using Marxist Hacker 42's definitons" is true. Or do you seriously think that people would put their hand up and claim that "The USA has all forms of absolute pure freedom, defined as absolute freedom to do anything and everything they please, as well as having all physical and emotional needs continuously satisfied" is pure truth? (If you take exception to my exact wording, feel free to correct me.)
When I hear new immigrants talking about freedom in the United States- that's EXACTLY the sort of freedom they're talking about. NO other country holds out even the HOPE of this level of freedom- all limit the ability for people to achieve their physical and emotional needs. The United States does too to some extent- but the mythical version of the United States being sold worldwide to potential immigrants is the land where the streets are paved in gold, you can still get land for free to grow your food on, and the government won't arrest you for saying or doing the wrong thing. It's the MYTHICAL version that I hear about the United States being the land of Freedom- and while it's partially true, it ain't entirely true, which was the point of my original message.
If you want to verify my hypothesis, do a phone poll and ask one group "Is the USA the land of freedom" and ask the other group the full question. If you are correct, then an equal percentage of people will say yes to both sentences. If I'm correct, a significantly less percentage of people will agree with the second.
And the outcome of that poll will differ greatly depending on the country you take it in. Take in in Mexico- and you'll get people saying yes to both sentences. Take it in Europe, and up until about 3 years ago you'd still find a majority saying yes to both sentences. Take it in India or China- you'll still find people saying yes to both. Worldwide, the myth of the United States is MUCH more powerfull than you seem to think.
My beef is your unwillingness to be clear and truthful in your statements, and then use people replies (which are based on different premises and definitions than your own, and thus have different meanings when you read them) to claim that others are brainwashed and ignorant when their messages are interpreted by your own unique perspective.
The different meanings ARE the brainwashing- and my version (that the United States is NOT as free as the myth of the United States makes it out to be) is different. So once again, I don't see the problem.
There is nothing wrong with having a unique perspective (perspective defined as premises and definitions), nor am I saying that any perspective is better or worse, but it is simply a good thing to make them clear when one's perspective may be the source of confusion. To go further and deliberately invite confusion based on different perspectives is very distasteful and anti-intellectual.
I have no illusions about the intellectual capacity of others- I assume they have none at all. Who would bother to read something that is "obvious"? But who is it obvious to? I still say that to the majority of people who have never been to the United States, the restricted definition of freedom that is so common in the United States is unknown- and thus, the lie is in when we CLAIM to be the land of freedom to others, suckering in millions of people every year to come here and work for low wages and slowly starve to death.
If you included a statement that made it clear to 95+% of the readers what constituted "a free society" meant by your definition, then I would have had no problem.
I'm just using the same idea of "freedom" that is sold worldwide as in what we have promised to the people of Iraq. I don't see any problem with using that definition.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was one when they try to "reimagine" Galactica 1980 in about 3 years...Vipers and Puddle Jumpers vs Wraith Darts and Type 3 Cylons (assuming of course, that the order of invention was original cylons, super-sleek military cylons, automated ships, then humanoids), that would be oool....
Next up: 21 Jump Street goes undercover on Law and Order
That MIGHT actually make sense- since all of the characters on 21 Jump Street (which was about 20-something cops going undercover in high schools in the late 1980s) are in their mid-40s by now...