The problem is not so much that they're in their 40s, it's that when you eliminate a category of jobs you're telling people to move to higher-skilled jobs. You then have the question: if you weren't able to train for this higher-skilled job when you were in your 20s, are you going to be able to train for it now that you're in your 40s? For most people, the answer is 'no'. The only exceptions are people who could have learned to do the job 20 years ago, but couldn't get the training or were discouraged from the field.
I see you haven't read the new edition of the technology journalists dictionary. AI is now listed as a synonym for statistics, computer, and algorithm.
How about we actually enforce the law rather than change it
Because it's difficult to enforce. How much does a 'software engineer' earn? The same job title applies to someone doing security and timing sensitive code for a microcontroller with 16KB of RAM and someone tweaking some PHP on a low-volume web site. The law requires that you pay the average wage for the profession, but if you want to hire people for the former occupation you're able to point to the large volume of people doing the latter to justify the salary. And the only thing that you have to do to justify hiring an H1B is advertise the job and be unable to find an American willing to do it (which is easy if you offer a sufficiently low salary).
. You're simply not going to retrain people in their 40s+.
You might be able to, but you're not going to retrain them on-the-job for completely different sets of skills than the ones that they've used previously and you're absolutely not going to be able to train them for things that they didn't stand a chance of being able to learn when they were in their 20s.
The problem is even reduced productivity past 40 hours is basically free to the employer because they've already met their costs at that point, so your marginal output past 40 hours is now free to them.
Maybe you've already worked more than 40 hours recently, because you've misunderstood what I said: after 40 hours, each hour that you work has a net negative impact on your productivity. i.e. you accomplish less working 45 hours than working 40, because you spend more time fixing the errors that you made than you spend working productively. Your marginal output is negative, so it doesn't matter to your employer that they're not having to pay anything for it. If you work 45 hours, but spend 10 of those fixing mistakes that you made because you weren't concentrating well, then it doesn't matter to your employer if your costs are the same as someone working 40 hours: if they only spend 4 hours fixing mistakes then you're not cheaper.
Luxury hotels don't have those for tenants and they've started nickel and diming you for internet
This is a reaction to expenses policies, particularly from the US government. The per-diem rates for accommodation set by the GSA are very low, but the rates for meals and incidentals are a bit higher than they need to be. If you can get a hotel room $10 cheaper and pay $10/day for the WiFi, then you get to stay somewhere nicer. Even better, the city and state hotel taxes are only applied to the room rate and not to extras in most places in the US.
I tried AirBNB for a trip to Boston a couple of years back. I booked the trip, exchanged a couple of messages with the person hosting me to check that I'd be able to get in if I arrived late (transatlantic flight then a hop up from New York, getting in to Boston around 11pm). Everything was fine. Only apparently Airbnb somehow failed to take the money from my card (I was nowhere near my credit limit, so I don't know why they failed). No problem, of course, they sent me an email asking me to retry or use another card. Well, that's what a sensible company would have done. Instead, they notified the host that I had failed to pay and didn't tell me anything. Two day before I was due to leave on the trip, I contacted the host to double check some details. She informed me that Airbnb had cancelled the booking and that the flat was now unavailable. That late, there was nowhere else available (except a couple of hotel rooms charging $750+/night), and so I ended up having to cancel the trip and pay the fee to the airline for the cancellation.
The hotel lobby doesn't need to undermine Airbnb, they're happily doing that themselves. There's no way that I'd consider trying to use them again.
I'm not sure about nursing (there's a physical component that probably makes the numbers different), but a large study of 'knowledge worker' jobs about a decade ago showed that productivity peaked at 20 hours a week, plateaued until 40, and then dropped off. After about 20 hours, concentration drops off and you work more slowly (and over prolonged periods this becomes your average), and you also start making more mistakes. After 40 hours, you're spending more time fixing the mistakes that you made than you're getting from working longer. If you've ever worked in a programming job, you've probably seen this first hand, where a single typo that takes a few seconds for someone who is not fully focussed to make can end up costing a week of debugging time down the line.
Minimum wage for "tipped employees" in California is $2.71 per hour, so if you're not tipping then you are quite literally robbing your server
Is that actually the case? I'm not sure about California, but several places with similar laws still require that their total income be the normal minimum wage, and if they don't collect enough tips require that the employer pay the difference.
(and kitchen staff)
And yet in New York, it is explicitly illegal to share tips with the kitchen staff, though it is permitted to pool tips between front-of-house staff.
That's sort-of true, though it's closer to a sequel. In The Sentinel, the monolith was a pyramid and it was difficult to access. The short story ended as they found their way in and sent a signal. In 2001, the monolith was a rectangle with 1,4,9 (and so on in higher dimensions, according to 2061) ratio sides and sent the signal as soon as it was discovered. The events analogous to those in The Sentinel happened before the start of the book. The Sentinel didn't have the second monolith around Jupiter / Saturn (the film and book of 2001 disagree on which one it was), didn't involve a space flight to discover it, didn't include an AI computer, and so on.
District 9 was terrible. The premise was lifted directly from Alien Nation and the 'racism is bad' theme was ham fisted and the films assumption that all Nigerians are criminals somewhat detracted from its ability to retain moral authority regarding prejudice.
Nope, read the foreword to the book. Clarke wrote the book at the same time as working on the screenplay. The book was, as I recall, released slightly earlier than the film, but neither was based on the other.
For me, the equivalent would be my Psion Series 3. 256KB of RAM (battery backed, also used for persistent storage) and fitted in a jacket pocket. It came with a BASIC-like language (with good support for structured programming) and I wrote a lot of code for that tiny machine. Modern smartphones still feel pretty limited in comparison.
The first that I owned was an upgraded Amstrad PC clone (PC1640 HD20). Originally with 640KB of RAM and a 20MB hard disk, but with the CPU upgraded to a NEC V30H and the hard disk to 40MB (bigger than FAT-12 could handle!). There were a few really nice features of that computer. One was a a feature that I missed from most later computers: a volume control for the PC internal speaker. The second was a port on the back of the keyboard to plug in an Amstrad (digital) joystick, which let you play any game that let you remap the keys with a joystick. It also had a weird Amstrad mouse that needed special drivers: Windows 3.0 had them and so did a few DOS programs, but not everything. Oh, and it had an EGA monitor. I got it very cheap when my father's company had upgraded.
The first brand new computer I owned was a 166MHz Pentium clone. A big step up in performance from the 12MHz 386 that it replaced!
Why? There are two things that can be improved from the perspective of a textbook author. The first is that your income is contingent on sales, so you're taking a big risk when you write a book. The publisher gives you an advance, but that's just an income free loan and if you read the contract carefully then you'll see that you can be required to pay it back if the book doesn't sell (not happened to me yet, but it could). The second is that the publisher takes the vast majority of the revenue. When they're publishing a physical book, then it makes sense that they'll take a big cut to cover production and distribution costs, but for electronic distribution they're basically doing nothing for the money. If an organisation (e.g. a group of half a dozen universities) knows that it needs enough textbooks to pay up-front to have them open sourced, then life is much better for the author: as long as your work passes their quality standards then you get paid the entire amount up front (on completion, if not on signing). And from the perspective of the students, it's even better: the textbook is paid for already, so it's free to copy. From the perspective of the institution, it's also better because they're free to modify the textbook to add material that's newer or more relevant to their curriculum.
Unfortunately, the training for doctors still focusses far more on memorising a large subset of known conditions and not on effectively using expert systems to refine a diagnosis.
The population density of most populated areas of the United States is very low compared to Europe
As the other poster said, this is simply untrue. The vast majority of the population of the USA lives in cities with a higher population density than the areas that the majority of Europeans live in. The USA also has a load of empty space that almost no one lives in, which skews averages a lot and is constantly used as an excuse for why US infrastructure is so bad. One of the big problems in the US is the zoning concept that seems to try to ensure that places people live, places people work, and places people go for recreation are all far apart.
Sure, if you want to go for the high-end everything. I recently replaced an ageing (12 year old, on its second bulb) projector with a newer one for £200. It's only 720p, but for most of the things I watch the limiting factor is the source quality, not the projector. I project onto a painted white wall, no screen. My sound system is one I bought for about £100 around 15 years ago. It only does 5.1 sound, but the quality is fine and (unlike several cinemas I've been to) correctly adjusted so that I don't get distortions (which break immersion for me faster than anything else) when the sound is loud. Total cost is around £300 (actually, the most expensive part was the comfy reclining sofa, but I haven't included that in the price because we use that a lot even when not watching anything). My local cinema costs around £10/ticket (closer to £12 at peak times, to £9 for matinees), so for two of us that works out at 15 trips to the cinema. Assuming that we didn't eat or drink anything, then it's a little over one trip a year for the cinema to cost more, and by watching at home we get a more comfy seat, the ability to eat and drink whatever we want (try getting good wine or beer in our local cinema!), can pause if we need a bathroom break, can have friends join in for no extra cost, and so on.
If I want the "shared experience" that point 1 discusses, I call my friends and we make a movie night of it. Even if a dozen people come over we have room and we can then share in the experience without having to include people that won't get off the phone.
Even better - they bring the beer. I started doing this back when I was a student. They'd all bring about half the cost of a cinema ticket's worth of food / beer and we'd have a much better time than if we'd gone to the cinema. I've got a better projector since then (I bought my first one jointly with my housemates and within a year it had cost less than the amount that we'd been spending on cinemas). I don't see films right after they come out, but since I stopped watching ads on TV and in the cinema, I've started caring about that a whole lot less.
And for the things that aren't worth watching more than once, a subscription to a DVD rental service will give you as many films as you can watch for less than the price of two cinema tickets a month (closer to the cost of one now).
I didn't mind 10 minutes of trailers, but when it became 15 minutes of ads followed by 15 minutes of trailers, on top of the extortionate ticket price (and extortionate food / drinks price for really bad food / drinks), I gave up on the whole thing. I have a big screen at home - a half decent projector costs about the same over two years as two people going to the cinema once a month, and a decent sound system (now almost 10 years old and still working fine).
The purpose of most of the questions on the current customs form is not that they expect you to admit them, it's that you can be deported for lying on the form and that's much easier to prove than a bunch of things that they might actually want to deport you for.
If you are a bad guy, why would you bring a phone loaded with contacts?
If there's one thing that we've learned from terrorists over the last decade or so, it's that people willing to blow themselves up for some poorly defined objective tend not to be the brightest people in the world. We stop most terrorist attempts precisely because they make stupid mistakes on a regular basis. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, western intelligence services haven't had to deal with a competent adversary.
That would likely backfire. A huge proportion of people in the US have never been outside their country's borders. This is great for the government because they have no basis for comparison other than scare stories from the media, which is largely owned by the same people that own the politicians. Reducing the number of US citizens who see other countries is unlikely to make the US a better neighbour.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is not so much that they're in their 40s, it's that when you eliminate a category of jobs you're telling people to move to higher-skilled jobs. You then have the question: if you weren't able to train for this higher-skilled job when you were in your 20s, are you going to be able to train for it now that you're in your 40s? For most people, the answer is 'no'. The only exceptions are people who could have learned to do the job 20 years ago, but couldn't get the training or were discouraged from the field.
Calling this AI is a little dishonest.
I see you haven't read the new edition of the technology journalists dictionary. AI is now listed as a synonym for statistics, computer, and algorithm.
How about we actually enforce the law rather than change it
Because it's difficult to enforce. How much does a 'software engineer' earn? The same job title applies to someone doing security and timing sensitive code for a microcontroller with 16KB of RAM and someone tweaking some PHP on a low-volume web site. The law requires that you pay the average wage for the profession, but if you want to hire people for the former occupation you're able to point to the large volume of people doing the latter to justify the salary. And the only thing that you have to do to justify hiring an H1B is advertise the job and be unable to find an American willing to do it (which is easy if you offer a sufficiently low salary).
. You're simply not going to retrain people in their 40s+.
You might be able to, but you're not going to retrain them on-the-job for completely different sets of skills than the ones that they've used previously and you're absolutely not going to be able to train them for things that they didn't stand a chance of being able to learn when they were in their 20s.
The problem is even reduced productivity past 40 hours is basically free to the employer because they've already met their costs at that point, so your marginal output past 40 hours is now free to them.
Maybe you've already worked more than 40 hours recently, because you've misunderstood what I said: after 40 hours, each hour that you work has a net negative impact on your productivity. i.e. you accomplish less working 45 hours than working 40, because you spend more time fixing the errors that you made than you spend working productively. Your marginal output is negative, so it doesn't matter to your employer that they're not having to pay anything for it. If you work 45 hours, but spend 10 of those fixing mistakes that you made because you weren't concentrating well, then it doesn't matter to your employer if your costs are the same as someone working 40 hours: if they only spend 4 hours fixing mistakes then you're not cheaper.
I disagree. There may be no single correct answer, but there are lots of wrong answers!
Luxury hotels don't have those for tenants and they've started nickel and diming you for internet
This is a reaction to expenses policies, particularly from the US government. The per-diem rates for accommodation set by the GSA are very low, but the rates for meals and incidentals are a bit higher than they need to be. If you can get a hotel room $10 cheaper and pay $10/day for the WiFi, then you get to stay somewhere nicer. Even better, the city and state hotel taxes are only applied to the room rate and not to extras in most places in the US.
I tried AirBNB for a trip to Boston a couple of years back. I booked the trip, exchanged a couple of messages with the person hosting me to check that I'd be able to get in if I arrived late (transatlantic flight then a hop up from New York, getting in to Boston around 11pm). Everything was fine. Only apparently Airbnb somehow failed to take the money from my card (I was nowhere near my credit limit, so I don't know why they failed). No problem, of course, they sent me an email asking me to retry or use another card. Well, that's what a sensible company would have done. Instead, they notified the host that I had failed to pay and didn't tell me anything. Two day before I was due to leave on the trip, I contacted the host to double check some details. She informed me that Airbnb had cancelled the booking and that the flat was now unavailable. That late, there was nowhere else available (except a couple of hotel rooms charging $750+/night), and so I ended up having to cancel the trip and pay the fee to the airline for the cancellation.
The hotel lobby doesn't need to undermine Airbnb, they're happily doing that themselves. There's no way that I'd consider trying to use them again.
I'm not sure about nursing (there's a physical component that probably makes the numbers different), but a large study of 'knowledge worker' jobs about a decade ago showed that productivity peaked at 20 hours a week, plateaued until 40, and then dropped off. After about 20 hours, concentration drops off and you work more slowly (and over prolonged periods this becomes your average), and you also start making more mistakes. After 40 hours, you're spending more time fixing the mistakes that you made than you're getting from working longer. If you've ever worked in a programming job, you've probably seen this first hand, where a single typo that takes a few seconds for someone who is not fully focussed to make can end up costing a week of debugging time down the line.
Minimum wage for "tipped employees" in California is $2.71 per hour, so if you're not tipping then you are quite literally robbing your server
Is that actually the case? I'm not sure about California, but several places with similar laws still require that their total income be the normal minimum wage, and if they don't collect enough tips require that the employer pay the difference.
(and kitchen staff)
And yet in New York, it is explicitly illegal to share tips with the kitchen staff, though it is permitted to pool tips between front-of-house staff.
That's sort-of true, though it's closer to a sequel. In The Sentinel, the monolith was a pyramid and it was difficult to access. The short story ended as they found their way in and sent a signal. In 2001, the monolith was a rectangle with 1,4,9 (and so on in higher dimensions, according to 2061) ratio sides and sent the signal as soon as it was discovered. The events analogous to those in The Sentinel happened before the start of the book. The Sentinel didn't have the second monolith around Jupiter / Saturn (the film and book of 2001 disagree on which one it was), didn't involve a space flight to discover it, didn't include an AI computer, and so on.
District 9 was terrible. The premise was lifted directly from Alien Nation and the 'racism is bad' theme was ham fisted and the films assumption that all Nigerians are criminals somewhat detracted from its ability to retain moral authority regarding prejudice.
Space Odyssey was based on a book
Nope, read the foreword to the book. Clarke wrote the book at the same time as working on the screenplay. The book was, as I recall, released slightly earlier than the film, but neither was based on the other.
For me, the equivalent would be my Psion Series 3. 256KB of RAM (battery backed, also used for persistent storage) and fitted in a jacket pocket. It came with a BASIC-like language (with good support for structured programming) and I wrote a lot of code for that tiny machine. Modern smartphones still feel pretty limited in comparison.
The first that I owned was an upgraded Amstrad PC clone (PC1640 HD20). Originally with 640KB of RAM and a 20MB hard disk, but with the CPU upgraded to a NEC V30H and the hard disk to 40MB (bigger than FAT-12 could handle!). There were a few really nice features of that computer. One was a a feature that I missed from most later computers: a volume control for the PC internal speaker. The second was a port on the back of the keyboard to plug in an Amstrad (digital) joystick, which let you play any game that let you remap the keys with a joystick. It also had a weird Amstrad mouse that needed special drivers: Windows 3.0 had them and so did a few DOS programs, but not everything. Oh, and it had an EGA monitor. I got it very cheap when my father's company had upgraded.
The first brand new computer I owned was a 166MHz Pentium clone. A big step up in performance from the 12MHz 386 that it replaced!
Why? There are two things that can be improved from the perspective of a textbook author. The first is that your income is contingent on sales, so you're taking a big risk when you write a book. The publisher gives you an advance, but that's just an income free loan and if you read the contract carefully then you'll see that you can be required to pay it back if the book doesn't sell (not happened to me yet, but it could). The second is that the publisher takes the vast majority of the revenue. When they're publishing a physical book, then it makes sense that they'll take a big cut to cover production and distribution costs, but for electronic distribution they're basically doing nothing for the money. If an organisation (e.g. a group of half a dozen universities) knows that it needs enough textbooks to pay up-front to have them open sourced, then life is much better for the author: as long as your work passes their quality standards then you get paid the entire amount up front (on completion, if not on signing). And from the perspective of the students, it's even better: the textbook is paid for already, so it's free to copy. From the perspective of the institution, it's also better because they're free to modify the textbook to add material that's newer or more relevant to their curriculum.
Unfortunately, the training for doctors still focusses far more on memorising a large subset of known conditions and not on effectively using expert systems to refine a diagnosis.
The population density of most populated areas of the United States is very low compared to Europe
As the other poster said, this is simply untrue. The vast majority of the population of the USA lives in cities with a higher population density than the areas that the majority of Europeans live in. The USA also has a load of empty space that almost no one lives in, which skews averages a lot and is constantly used as an excuse for why US infrastructure is so bad. One of the big problems in the US is the zoning concept that seems to try to ensure that places people live, places people work, and places people go for recreation are all far apart.
Sure, if you want to go for the high-end everything. I recently replaced an ageing (12 year old, on its second bulb) projector with a newer one for £200. It's only 720p, but for most of the things I watch the limiting factor is the source quality, not the projector. I project onto a painted white wall, no screen. My sound system is one I bought for about £100 around 15 years ago. It only does 5.1 sound, but the quality is fine and (unlike several cinemas I've been to) correctly adjusted so that I don't get distortions (which break immersion for me faster than anything else) when the sound is loud. Total cost is around £300 (actually, the most expensive part was the comfy reclining sofa, but I haven't included that in the price because we use that a lot even when not watching anything). My local cinema costs around £10/ticket (closer to £12 at peak times, to £9 for matinees), so for two of us that works out at 15 trips to the cinema. Assuming that we didn't eat or drink anything, then it's a little over one trip a year for the cinema to cost more, and by watching at home we get a more comfy seat, the ability to eat and drink whatever we want (try getting good wine or beer in our local cinema!), can pause if we need a bathroom break, can have friends join in for no extra cost, and so on.
If I want the "shared experience" that point 1 discusses, I call my friends and we make a movie night of it. Even if a dozen people come over we have room and we can then share in the experience without having to include people that won't get off the phone.
Even better - they bring the beer. I started doing this back when I was a student. They'd all bring about half the cost of a cinema ticket's worth of food / beer and we'd have a much better time than if we'd gone to the cinema. I've got a better projector since then (I bought my first one jointly with my housemates and within a year it had cost less than the amount that we'd been spending on cinemas). I don't see films right after they come out, but since I stopped watching ads on TV and in the cinema, I've started caring about that a whole lot less.
And for the things that aren't worth watching more than once, a subscription to a DVD rental service will give you as many films as you can watch for less than the price of two cinema tickets a month (closer to the cost of one now).
I didn't mind 10 minutes of trailers, but when it became 15 minutes of ads followed by 15 minutes of trailers, on top of the extortionate ticket price (and extortionate food / drinks price for really bad food / drinks), I gave up on the whole thing. I have a big screen at home - a half decent projector costs about the same over two years as two people going to the cinema once a month, and a decent sound system (now almost 10 years old and still working fine).
The purpose of most of the questions on the current customs form is not that they expect you to admit them, it's that you can be deported for lying on the form and that's much easier to prove than a bunch of things that they might actually want to deport you for.
If you are a bad guy, why would you bring a phone loaded with contacts?
If there's one thing that we've learned from terrorists over the last decade or so, it's that people willing to blow themselves up for some poorly defined objective tend not to be the brightest people in the world. We stop most terrorist attempts precisely because they make stupid mistakes on a regular basis. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, western intelligence services haven't had to deal with a competent adversary.
That would likely backfire. A huge proportion of people in the US have never been outside their country's borders. This is great for the government because they have no basis for comparison other than scare stories from the media, which is largely owned by the same people that own the politicians. Reducing the number of US citizens who see other countries is unlikely to make the US a better neighbour.