It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again.
It does make sense. Without welfare, they'll be more likely start criminal activities to support themselves. In the end, these have a higher cost to society than welfare.
Also you have the idiocy of "we only need the perfect candidate for the job" and idiocy of thinking we could centrally plan not only the current economy but the future economy.
Put in a sports analogy, so Americans can understand, you don't need a quarterback this season so you euthanize (gladiatorial combat?) all the quarterback applicants to reduce the surplus population. Then your QB breaks his arm. Whoops. Shoulda kept them around instead of killing them off, a "Redundant Array of Expensive Quarterbacks" or whatever.
The other part is technological / cultural / social / military science changes. Maybe the bum under the overpass will be greatly desired as a musician in 30 years in some unpredictable fad. Maybe the bum under the bridge would make great cannon fodder in the resource war against Canada. Who knows?
This assumes the "greater economy" is decoupled from carbon. I would suggest the economy is nearly totally dependent on fossil fuels. The usual suspect benefit from a giant new bureaucracy, the usual victims (us) will merely suffer more.
If you have one giant bureaucracy controlling extracting fossil fuels, another controlling the refining process, another controlling punitive sales taxes, you don't really need to implement yet another giant bureaucracy to tax the exhaust pipe output... just punch up the numbers on the existing taxation groups.
Its all about screwing over the middle class, more government jobs, big businesses using regulation to crush smaller businesses. Its just a bunch of crooks trying to set up a new protection racket, basically.
Do you really want to go back to a feudal system (nobles opinions count more)?... Do you really want to go back to an oligarchy (ruling party members opinions count more)?
Same thing, and yes, we already have, and yes it sucks.
The worst part is the intense marketing / PR / forced indoctrination that it is otherwise, in order to prevent the population from rebelling.
In the modern days? State of the art is so diverse and impenetrable to the common man that they know nothing.... In this perspective, we know more on average than the Greeks did absolutely, but quite a bit less relatively.
Maybe short summary is better trained, poorly educated.
Don't forget cultural and economic pressures to be an idiot, in ancient Greece those pressures were the opposite, to not act like an idiot.
In ancient Greece, people aspired to be educated, to learn how to think. In modern America, people would literally die rather than think. Its not a fair comparison.
The problem with democracy is that it assumes everyone's opinions on every subject are equal.
A much more important and obviously missing prerequisite would be everyone's opinions on every subject are RATIONAL. Have to crawl before you can walk...
They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science.
Agree with the majority of what you wrote, although that one line is horribly wrong.
Hang out with a geologist, like my former roommate, and even if you don't talk geology all the time, simply having to think about the topic will educate you.
The entire science / history of geology seems to be nothing more than carefully supported / researched / analyzed scientific study of environmental catastrophe. I'm sure there is some weird corner of geology focusing solely on the flight patterns of unicorns flying over rainbows, but 99.9% of geology is catastrophe related. The sea level rising a couple feet sounds really scary in a perfect knowledge vacuum. Compared to past, present, and future geological events, frankly I'm VERY unimpressed by a minor sea level fluctuation like that. Doesn't mean it won't be bad for the fools who didn't plan for it, but it does mean its (unfortunately) pocket change compared to expected geologic evolution.
Environmental catastrophe always has, and always will, occur. The politically correct environmentalist position is if we go Pol Pot on our population (with the poorly hidden message that we'll be going Pol Pot on the "politically nonenvironmentalist" population, or at least not our ethnic / cultural group) and destroy our economy down to the level of Somalia or Afghanistan, then it'll be "better". Nope, its still gonna suck, its just if we torture ourselves and destroy civilization before hand, we can make it worse and increase the total suffering of humanity, if we try really hard to implement hard core environmentalist agenda.
Part of it is what used to pass for environmentalism has become common sense. Don't dump industrial waste into your drinking water is common sense, not "modern environmentalism". All thats left of environmentalism is the watermelon types, green on outside, red on inside.
I seriously hope not. SSL adds latency to the connection and is completely useless for a huge number of websites. Why would I need SSL to access a e.g. recipes page which doesn't even have a login page?
You want to cook a non-Halal recipe in a Halal nation where improper religious observation will get you killed? Really simple example would be looking up mixed-drinks cocktails in Saudi Arabia...
space probes: a stream of bits is present in a computer file... easy to fake, so they assume every knows they're fakes.
moon landings: Supposedly astronauts and rocks came back... hard to fake, therefore they have to preach to us to reveal to us the gospel of the faked moon landings.
You can't price-fix without at least two parties. Anyone know who the co-conspirator(s) are?
According to the charge, Hitachi-LG Data Storage executed the scheme through interstate communications, including an email sent by one of its employees to co-conspirators in San Jose, Calif., and the Republic of Korea, that contained first round bidding results and non-public, competitively sensitive information relating to the April 2009 event.
So, how many places in San Jose make optical drives? RoK is kind of vague, San Jose not so.
Whoops almost forgot the most important reason, fired during a mass layoff means 100% approved for unemployment compensation, fired outside a legally declared mass layoff means the boss can fight the benefits. There's a huge financial motivation to do this because the UE bill is based on previous layoff records...
decided to cut staff and for the next several months followed a policy of two people got laid off every friday.... the 2 out on Friday policy was murder on morale.
Been there done that.
Talk to legal. Each state has a different law about "mass firings" and "mass layoffs".
In some states there can be fines if not reported, severe negative publicity if reported, line entered on business creditworthiness report.
It is admittedly a really stupid 19th-20th century law assuming all employees are on the assembly line, so layoffs can only be done by line shift, which is completely unrealistic in the 21st century, unless you live in China I guess.
He was only threatening to fire people actively intentionally breaking some fairly simple rules. I LOLed when I read it. All I have to do, is not talk on my phone when I'm supposedly working, not violate the dress code, not violate security rules. I would not exactly break out in a cold sweat of terror.
Now a Real toxic A hole, much worse than this guy, would threaten randomly, based on totally random arbitrary "attitude" or if female how hot she was.
Being the hacker mentality the first thing I though of was how to crack his system, entering multiple times, framing others by writing their name, etc.
That sounds a little like how military boot camp works. The recruits bond together against the drill sergeants.
Something tells me you haven't been thru basic, or you had a really bad individual experience with someone in the chain of command being completely bonkers (which does happen).
They try to get the recruits to bond with each other (... get your mind out of the gutter). All about cooperation, working together, etc.
Respect them, yes. Actively plot against them, heck no. IF as a group, you were squared away, frankly they were pretty cool people.
How would you answer some terrible interview questions that we programmers are subjected on every interview:
So, Mr Shatner, I see you only have 45 years of experience as a Star Trek Actor/Federation Starship Captain, since 1966, but our ideal candidate would have more than 50 years experience in that role. I was wondering if you were expecting to grow into the position, or perhaps open to the thought of a lower salary? We've already looked into outsourcing to India, where we've received numerous resumes promising 50, 60, even 75 years of experience in that specific field.
I thought this was some kind of "Google+ in the Enterprise" story for a few seconds.
In my experience, a G+ circle of hell is where some dude in the "Ham Radio" circle insists on a fox news headline post every thirty minutes, or religious crusader clutters up my "Linux" circle with daily bible quotes. Ugh.
Hmmm maybe the best/. car analogy I can make is the guy who invented the idea of a turbocharger is gonna win the prize, not the guy who plugged numbers into predetermined equations and made this specific individual turbo.
A more scientific analogy is the guy who donates his stellar light magnitude measurements to the AAVSO is not gonna win the prize, even if an astrophysicist analyzes the donor's data and writes a very important variable star paper that depended on those measurements.
Some of the most important historical physics experiments were negative result or "failure". Michealson-Morley aether / speed of light interferometer which stubbornly refused to show light goes faster pointed ahead of earths orbit as compared to pointed behind earths orbit. The noise level in that giant microwave horn antenna is too blasted high to be useful for communications when pointed at the sky, celestial noise, WTF is it? I'm trying to think of some more good examples... Trying to detect high intensity infrared light (vs UV) using old fashioned photocathodes...
would they ever give the protein folding gamers a Nobel prize? Probably not - but they did make a significant contribution to science.
As far as I know they have not awarded a hard science prize merely for being donors. Otherwise I'm sure over the past century or two the humble lab rat would have earned a prize by now.
Also engineering achievements, at least solely with respect to being an engineering achievement, never win a prize.
For example, the politicians who paid for CERN have never won a prize (at least not for donating CERN funds). The engineers who design particle detectors never win a prize (design as in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, not design as in basic concept of operation). However the '92 physics prize was awarded to the inventor of the multiwire proportional chamber (a gross simplification is its kinda like a 3-d geiger counter instead of being a 0-d scalar detector, sorta)
this eReader not having touch and also using an onscreen keyboard which has to be navigated using nudges on the "controller" is just so brain-dead as a concept... people will NOT be impressed by it at all...
so... you've not owned an ereader appliance yet. I had a "rocket ebook" reader more than a decade ago, and a jetbook, and used the kindle app on my ipod touch (I've tried other ipod touch reader apps), etc.
You'll wear out the "down" button. You occasionally need the "up" button to navigate thru the menu of books. You'll press the "escape/menu/library/enter" button roughly each time you switch books. Thats about it, for keyboard use. You really only need three buttons, although a fourth for power is nice.
The massive fail is amazon sold at least some books directly on the kindle, as in go to the search bar, type in a name or whatever, and buy it all from the kindle. I would assume with onscreen keyboard, those sales, however low they might be, will drop to zero. Apparently amazon thinks the cost of all the keyboards worldwide exceeds the expected worldwide profits from sales on the device itself. They could be right.
Summary cut off right where it got interesting, announcing 320 mile range. The Tesla is of course useless because a 320 mile range means I can only drive for 10 continuous hours without a brake in 32 MPH stop and go traffic and I love having a five hour commute each direction. In fact, everyone knows that not only does the average american watch TV 8 hours per day, they also commute 10 hours per day.
Slashdot Mirror
It does make sense. Without welfare, they'll be more likely start criminal activities to support themselves. In the end, these have a higher cost to society than welfare.
Also you have the idiocy of "we only need the perfect candidate for the job" and idiocy of thinking we could centrally plan not only the current economy but the future economy.
Put in a sports analogy, so Americans can understand, you don't need a quarterback this season so you euthanize (gladiatorial combat?) all the quarterback applicants to reduce the surplus population. Then your QB breaks his arm. Whoops. Shoulda kept them around instead of killing them off, a "Redundant Array of Expensive Quarterbacks" or whatever.
The other part is technological / cultural / social / military science changes. Maybe the bum under the overpass will be greatly desired as a musician in 30 years in some unpredictable fad. Maybe the bum under the bridge would make great cannon fodder in the resource war against Canada. Who knows?
This assumes the "greater economy" is decoupled from carbon. I would suggest the economy is nearly totally dependent on fossil fuels. The usual suspect benefit from a giant new bureaucracy, the usual victims (us) will merely suffer more.
If you have one giant bureaucracy controlling extracting fossil fuels, another controlling the refining process, another controlling punitive sales taxes, you don't really need to implement yet another giant bureaucracy to tax the exhaust pipe output... just punch up the numbers on the existing taxation groups.
Its all about screwing over the middle class, more government jobs, big businesses using regulation to crush smaller businesses. Its just a bunch of crooks trying to set up a new protection racket, basically.
Do you really want to go back to a feudal system (nobles opinions count more)? ... Do you really want to go back to an oligarchy (ruling party members opinions count more)?
Same thing, and yes, we already have, and yes it sucks.
The worst part is the intense marketing / PR / forced indoctrination that it is otherwise, in order to prevent the population from rebelling.
In the modern days? State of the art is so diverse and impenetrable to the common man that they know nothing. ... In this perspective, we know more on average than the Greeks did absolutely, but quite a bit less relatively.
Maybe short summary is better trained, poorly educated.
Don't forget cultural and economic pressures to be an idiot, in ancient Greece those pressures were the opposite, to not act like an idiot.
In ancient Greece, people aspired to be educated, to learn how to think. In modern America, people would literally die rather than think. Its not a fair comparison.
The problem with democracy is that it assumes everyone's opinions on every subject are equal.
A much more important and obviously missing prerequisite would be everyone's opinions on every subject are RATIONAL. Have to crawl before you can walk...
They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science.
Agree with the majority of what you wrote, although that one line is horribly wrong.
Hang out with a geologist, like my former roommate, and even if you don't talk geology all the time, simply having to think about the topic will educate you.
The entire science / history of geology seems to be nothing more than carefully supported / researched / analyzed scientific study of environmental catastrophe. I'm sure there is some weird corner of geology focusing solely on the flight patterns of unicorns flying over rainbows, but 99.9% of geology is catastrophe related. The sea level rising a couple feet sounds really scary in a perfect knowledge vacuum. Compared to past, present, and future geological events, frankly I'm VERY unimpressed by a minor sea level fluctuation like that. Doesn't mean it won't be bad for the fools who didn't plan for it, but it does mean its (unfortunately) pocket change compared to expected geologic evolution.
Environmental catastrophe always has, and always will, occur. The politically correct environmentalist position is if we go Pol Pot on our population (with the poorly hidden message that we'll be going Pol Pot on the "politically nonenvironmentalist" population, or at least not our ethnic / cultural group) and destroy our economy down to the level of Somalia or Afghanistan, then it'll be "better". Nope, its still gonna suck, its just if we torture ourselves and destroy civilization before hand, we can make it worse and increase the total suffering of humanity, if we try really hard to implement hard core environmentalist agenda.
Part of it is what used to pass for environmentalism has become common sense. Don't dump industrial waste into your drinking water is common sense, not "modern environmentalism". All thats left of environmentalism is the watermelon types, green on outside, red on inside.
I seriously hope not. SSL adds latency to the connection and is completely useless for a huge number of websites. Why would I need SSL to access a e.g. recipes page which doesn't even have a login page?
You want to cook a non-Halal recipe in a Halal nation where improper religious observation will get you killed? Really simple example would be looking up mixed-drinks cocktails in Saudi Arabia...
They don't have to. The article is obviously talking about spatial resolution.
Which is EXACTLY why its a perfectly irrelevant, meaningless comparison.
My orange is 5 inches in diameter as compared to my watermelon at 8 inches, therefore that is a tiny apple.
space probes: a stream of bits is present in a computer file... easy to fake, so they assume every knows they're fakes.
moon landings: Supposedly astronauts and rocks came back ... hard to fake, therefore they have to preach to us to reveal to us the gospel of the faked moon landings.
spying on your coworkers
Secret shoppers are never coworkers... that would kind of defeat the point?
You can't price-fix without at least two parties. Anyone know who the co-conspirator(s) are?
According to the charge, Hitachi-LG Data Storage executed the scheme through interstate communications, including an email sent by one of its employees to co-conspirators in San Jose, Calif., and the Republic of Korea, that contained first round bidding results and non-public, competitively sensitive information relating to the April 2009 event.
So, how many places in San Jose make optical drives? RoK is kind of vague, San Jose not so.
Whoops almost forgot the most important reason, fired during a mass layoff means 100% approved for unemployment compensation, fired outside a legally declared mass layoff means the boss can fight the benefits. There's a huge financial motivation to do this because the UE bill is based on previous layoff records...
decided to cut staff and for the next several months followed a policy of two people got laid off every friday.... the 2 out on Friday policy was murder on morale.
Been there done that.
Talk to legal. Each state has a different law about "mass firings" and "mass layoffs".
In some states there can be fines if not reported, severe negative publicity if reported, line entered on business creditworthiness report.
It is admittedly a really stupid 19th-20th century law assuming all employees are on the assembly line, so layoffs can only be done by line shift, which is completely unrealistic in the 21st century, unless you live in China I guess.
Wow. What an asshole.
He was only threatening to fire people actively intentionally breaking some fairly simple rules. I LOLed when I read it. All I have to do, is not talk on my phone when I'm supposedly working, not violate the dress code, not violate security rules. I would not exactly break out in a cold sweat of terror.
Now a Real toxic A hole, much worse than this guy, would threaten randomly, based on totally random arbitrary "attitude" or if female how hot she was.
Being the hacker mentality the first thing I though of was how to crack his system, entering multiple times, framing others by writing their name, etc.
That sounds a little like how military boot camp works. The recruits bond together against the drill sergeants.
Something tells me you haven't been thru basic, or you had a really bad individual experience with someone in the chain of command being completely bonkers (which does happen).
They try to get the recruits to bond with each other (... get your mind out of the gutter). All about cooperation, working together, etc.
Respect them, yes. Actively plot against them, heck no. IF as a group, you were squared away, frankly they were pretty cool people.
How would you answer some terrible interview questions that we programmers are subjected on every interview:
So, Mr Shatner, I see you only have 45 years of experience as a Star Trek Actor/Federation Starship Captain, since 1966, but our ideal candidate would have more than 50 years experience in that role. I was wondering if you were expecting to grow into the position, or perhaps open to the thought of a lower salary? We've already looked into outsourcing to India, where we've received numerous resumes promising 50, 60, even 75 years of experience in that specific field.
tour of the nine circles of IT hell
I thought this was some kind of "Google+ in the Enterprise" story for a few seconds.
In my experience, a G+ circle of hell is where some dude in the "Ham Radio" circle insists on a fox news headline post every thirty minutes, or religious crusader clutters up my "Linux" circle with daily bible quotes. Ugh.
Transparent flexible LCD screens would be nice. No more indium metal...
it will have a resolving power far greater than Hubble,
Didn't know they operate in the same frequency band.
Hmmm maybe the best /. car analogy I can make is the guy who invented the idea of a turbocharger is gonna win the prize, not the guy who plugged numbers into predetermined equations and made this specific individual turbo.
A more scientific analogy is the guy who donates his stellar light magnitude measurements to the AAVSO is not gonna win the prize, even if an astrophysicist analyzes the donor's data and writes a very important variable star paper that depended on those measurements.
I am not sure what good it is at all.
Some of the most important historical physics experiments were negative result or "failure". Michealson-Morley aether / speed of light interferometer which stubbornly refused to show light goes faster pointed ahead of earths orbit as compared to pointed behind earths orbit. The noise level in that giant microwave horn antenna is too blasted high to be useful for communications when pointed at the sky, celestial noise, WTF is it? I'm trying to think of some more good examples... Trying to detect high intensity infrared light (vs UV) using old fashioned photocathodes...
would they ever give the protein folding gamers a Nobel prize? Probably not - but they did make a significant contribution to science.
As far as I know they have not awarded a hard science prize merely for being donors. Otherwise I'm sure over the past century or two the humble lab rat would have earned a prize by now.
Also engineering achievements, at least solely with respect to being an engineering achievement, never win a prize.
For example, the politicians who paid for CERN have never won a prize (at least not for donating CERN funds). The engineers who design particle detectors never win a prize (design as in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, not design as in basic concept of operation). However the '92 physics prize was awarded to the inventor of the multiwire proportional chamber (a gross simplification is its kinda like a 3-d geiger counter instead of being a 0-d scalar detector, sorta)
this eReader not having touch and also using an onscreen keyboard which has to be navigated using nudges on the "controller" is just so brain-dead as a concept... people will NOT be impressed by it at all...
so... you've not owned an ereader appliance yet. I had a "rocket ebook" reader more than a decade ago, and a jetbook, and used the kindle app on my ipod touch (I've tried other ipod touch reader apps), etc.
You'll wear out the "down" button. You occasionally need the "up" button to navigate thru the menu of books. You'll press the "escape/menu/library/enter" button roughly each time you switch books. Thats about it, for keyboard use. You really only need three buttons, although a fourth for power is nice.
The massive fail is amazon sold at least some books directly on the kindle, as in go to the search bar, type in a name or whatever, and buy it all from the kindle. I would assume with onscreen keyboard, those sales, however low they might be, will drop to zero. Apparently amazon thinks the cost of all the keyboards worldwide exceeds the expected worldwide profits from sales on the device itself. They could be right.
A cattle catcher?
I don't drive thru walmart parking lots, thank you
Summary cut off right where it got interesting, announcing 320 mile range. The Tesla is of course useless because a 320 mile range means I can only drive for 10 continuous hours without a brake in 32 MPH stop and go traffic and I love having a five hour commute each direction. In fact, everyone knows that not only does the average american watch TV 8 hours per day, they also commute 10 hours per day.