Yes, because there's apparently much more demand for them, so more people develop those skills. I'm currently doing.NET/web stuff specifically because I couldn't find work writing C. (And I'm entry-level, so it's not as if experience was a factor -- in fact, I wrote C & Fortran in my research assistant job while at school).
I'm not convinced the sort of person you're talking about would become more useful with a different degree. Do you really want people like that running around with a piece of paper claiming that they're qualified to do programming, for instance?
ST's vision of the future economy (at least from TNG on; TOS wisely avoided touching on it but implied it was a form of Capitalism) is a pipe-dream Utopia.
I'd say only TNG's vision... even DS9 was much more realistic. Of course, even TNG showed plenty of traders and colonists, where one might wonder why they'd do their trading or colonizing if they didn't have to. (For an extreme example, consider Tasha Yar's homeworld.)
It's not that they stopped hating; it's that they found new outsiders to hate. Just as (for example) the French and English can get along when they're united against somebody from the Middle East, Europeans and Middle Easterners would have no problem getting along when they're united against Klingons.
The problem is simple, right out of the first chapter of a high school economics class. "wants" are infinite. Consider our daily lives in today's world. The "working poor" among us live lives right around the "poverty line". Yet they can generally afford motor vehicle transportation (even if it's the bus), to spend most of their time in air conditioned environments (even if it's the workplace at McDonalds), can call anyone on the planet in theory (even if it's from VoIP at a library), and so on. Even the shittiest life is the life of a king a thousand years ago.
There are plenty of people (some of the most prominent of which can be found here and here) who would claim that even poverty-line levels of spending produce a lifestyle that's decidedly not shitty.
water vapor is a far more potent greenhouse gas than methane or CO2
We have a solution to that: it's called "rain."
The problem with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is not the water vapor they produce; it's capturing and storing the hydrogen. Of course, one really easy way to store hydrogen is by chemically combining it with carbon, but if you do that then you might as well react it by combustion instead of (whatever the opposite of electrolysis is called) and then -- oops! -- you're back to the conventional drivetrain you started with.
In other words, the future will be synthetic hydrocarbon fuel made from captured CO2 (or more likely, from coal because humanity is a bunch of shortsighted morons) in regular internal combustion engines.
Your lack of perspective is due to the fact that you can't tell the difference between environmentalists and hippie nutjobs. That's as bad as thinking every Republican is Rush Limbaugh.
In Atlanta, it can get over 100 degrees (with 100% humidity) in the summer. Nothing closes; people go about their business. When that happens in Wisconsin, people die. I think you Wisconsin folks are pussies because you can't deal with the heat!
The last storm the warnings were issued at 3AM, well before most people got up and went to work... The government and school systems had plenty of time to close the school and simply chose not to. Getting out of bed before the ass crack of dawn was apparently too much effort for the officials to prevent "snowpocalypse" and now we get to watch them do their darnedest to not look like idiots a second time for the same reasons.
As an Atlantan and an engineer who used to work in a position where, if I were still there, I'd be among those responsible for managing the emergency, I have to say you're exactly right. I looked at the forecast on the afternoon the day before and knew damn well to stay home that day!
"Involved" doesn't mean "nod and go 'mm-hmm' then do whatever the fuck you were planning to do anyway;" it means "actually make changes to implement the community's desires."
Anyway, since you're allegedly listening, here is a partial list of the problems I have with Beta:
THERE IS NO HYPERLINK TO THE INDIVIDUAL POST NUMBERS ANYMORE!!!!!!!!!! How am I supposed to reference another comment (other than the one I'm directly replying to) without the ability to link to it?
The default comment title when replying is missing.
The "from the... dept" text is missing on the list of stories on the front page (and is in the wrong place on the individual story's page).
The story tags are missing everywhere.
Posts should always have precise timestamps, not this "__ minutes/hours/days/weeks/months/years ago" bullshit.
Why are you wasting my horizontal space?
This unordered list is missing its bullet points (of course, classic fucks that up too...).
The two things that people actually wanted fixed -- Unicode support and maybe more allowed HTML -- are hardly any better with beta than they were before.
What tags on the article? The ones that aren't displayed on the beta site, so I couldn't see them until I switched back to classic?
Apparently, like the article, they were also from the "poof it's gone" department! Not to mention, even the "from the 'poof it's gone' department" text itself is gone too, at least on the front page. It's like Beta is the VAPR of Slashdot!
Look, the problem with fossil fuels isn't that it produces carbon dioxide. Every singly human being produces carbon dioxide when we exhale.
No, the problem is that we use way, way way too much fossil fuels, producing way, way, way too much carbon dioxide.
No, the problem is that fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide from carbon that had been part of the long-term carbon cycle. If we were to replace all fossil fuels with wood (for example) and growing and harvesting of trees were at equilibrium, everything would be perfectly fine because only the short-term carbon cycle would be involved.
(Note: the "perfectly fine" assertion above does not take into account other polluting emissions, like particulates and VOCs.)
For most of December, the central European wholesale price of electricity was negative. Yes, that means people paid other people to take their electricity away. This was a direct result of reliance on wind power. This is _not_ a good thing.
LOL WUT?
I mean, I understand how it could be unprofitable for those who paid to build the turbines, but cheap electricity has got to be good for the economy as a whole.
Yes, the telecom industry is heavily regulated and companies are often granted a monopoly for right-of-way access (on a per-service basis) such that each municipality has exactly one phone service provider and one cable TV provider. For phone service, at least, the companies involved also received millions (or billions?) of dollars of public subsidy in order to build out their network (and millions or billions more to build out "broadband" networks, which they've apparently spent mostly on executive compensation instead).
Exercising my rights as a consumer... in a market consisting of a government-imposed oligopoly. Yeah, sure, that'll work...!
This kind of moronic regurgitation of talking points with no consideration of context or applicability is what gives libertarians a bad name. Either learn to think or fuck off, please.
Look, seriously: this is not a partisan issue, so you can take your divisive rhetoric and fuck off with it.
And for the record, I am not a Democrat and would be perfectly happy if the government decided to interpret the Second Amendment to mean that every citizen was required to own a firearm.
Slashdot Mirror
https://xkcd.com/605/
Also, compare with this (which I seem to be posting a lot today, between this and the "Star Trek Economics" article).
Yes, because there's apparently much more demand for them, so more people develop those skills. I'm currently doing .NET/web stuff specifically because I couldn't find work writing C. (And I'm entry-level, so it's not as if experience was a factor -- in fact, I wrote C & Fortran in my research assistant job while at school).
But do you want to be that kind of person? I certainly don't -- I want to solve new problems, not live out the broken window fallacy.
I'm not convinced the sort of person you're talking about would become more useful with a different degree. Do you really want people like that running around with a piece of paper claiming that they're qualified to do programming, for instance?
You realize what you said reduces to a version of the broken window fallacy, right?
Are you kidding? That problem is even easier to solve than the "final few meters" part!
(Okay, so you need some computer vision algorithms in order to aim at the door, but still...)
I'd say only TNG's vision... even DS9 was much more realistic. Of course, even TNG showed plenty of traders and colonists, where one might wonder why they'd do their trading or colonizing if they didn't have to. (For an extreme example, consider Tasha Yar's homeworld.)
It's not that they stopped hating; it's that they found new outsiders to hate. Just as (for example) the French and English can get along when they're united against somebody from the Middle East, Europeans and Middle Easterners would have no problem getting along when they're united against Klingons.
There are plenty of people (some of the most prominent of which can be found here and here) who would claim that even poverty-line levels of spending produce a lifestyle that's decidedly not shitty.
Why? Luxury cars can parallel-park by themselves already; clearly, the final few meters is the easy part!
Indeed: it is well-known that population growth is logistic, not exponential, yet alarmist idiots keep yelling about it anyway.
We have a solution to that: it's called "rain."
The problem with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is not the water vapor they produce; it's capturing and storing the hydrogen. Of course, one really easy way to store hydrogen is by chemically combining it with carbon, but if you do that then you might as well react it by combustion instead of (whatever the opposite of electrolysis is called) and then -- oops! -- you're back to the conventional drivetrain you started with.
In other words, the future will be synthetic hydrocarbon fuel made from captured CO2 (or more likely, from coal because humanity is a bunch of shortsighted morons) in regular internal combustion engines.
Your lack of perspective is due to the fact that you can't tell the difference between environmentalists and hippie nutjobs. That's as bad as thinking every Republican is Rush Limbaugh.
In Atlanta, it can get over 100 degrees (with 100% humidity) in the summer. Nothing closes; people go about their business. When that happens in Wisconsin, people die. I think you Wisconsin folks are pussies because you can't deal with the heat!
I'm from Atlanta, and once vacationed (in Florida) in a category 2 hurricane.
As an Atlantan and an engineer who used to work in a position where, if I were still there, I'd be among those responsible for managing the emergency, I have to say you're exactly right. I looked at the forecast on the afternoon the day before and knew damn well to stay home that day!
"Freedom" would be if anyone receiving NBC's broadcast signal had the right to retransmit it (over the Internet or otherwise).
"Involved" doesn't mean "nod and go 'mm-hmm' then do whatever the fuck you were planning to do anyway;" it means "actually make changes to implement the community's desires."
Anyway, since you're allegedly listening, here is a partial list of the problems I have with Beta:
What tags on the article? The ones that aren't displayed on the beta site, so I couldn't see them until I switched back to classic?
Apparently, like the article, they were also from the "poof it's gone" department! Not to mention, even the "from the 'poof it's gone' department" text itself is gone too, at least on the front page. It's like Beta is the VAPR of Slashdot!
No, the problem is that fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide from carbon that had been part of the long-term carbon cycle. If we were to replace all fossil fuels with wood (for example) and growing and harvesting of trees were at equilibrium, everything would be perfectly fine because only the short-term carbon cycle would be involved.
(Note: the "perfectly fine" assertion above does not take into account other polluting emissions, like particulates and VOCs.)
LOL WUT?
I mean, I understand how it could be unprofitable for those who paid to build the turbines, but cheap electricity has got to be good for the economy as a whole.
Yes, the telecom industry is heavily regulated and companies are often granted a monopoly for right-of-way access (on a per-service basis) such that each municipality has exactly one phone service provider and one cable TV provider. For phone service, at least, the companies involved also received millions (or billions?) of dollars of public subsidy in order to build out their network (and millions or billions more to build out "broadband" networks, which they've apparently spent mostly on executive compensation instead).
Exercising my rights as a consumer... in a market consisting of a government-imposed oligopoly. Yeah, sure, that'll work...!
This kind of moronic regurgitation of talking points with no consideration of context or applicability is what gives libertarians a bad name. Either learn to think or fuck off, please.
Look, seriously: this is not a partisan issue, so you can take your divisive rhetoric and fuck off with it.
And for the record, I am not a Democrat and would be perfectly happy if the government decided to interpret the Second Amendment to mean that every citizen was required to own a firearm.
That's just FUD. The creation of the NHTSA made it possible, and that came long before Obamacare.