Republicans don't win the Southern vote, they do, however, appeal to rural constituencies, and the south has more rural areas than the north.
Here are some statistics, from a University of South Carolina webpage, on the rural/urban breakdown in a bunch of Southern states. Hint: none of the Southern states shown ( SC, NC, GA, TN) are more that 40% rural population (and less than 60% urban). The only overwhelmingly "rural" state is Vermont --- the place that elects self-identified Independent/Socialist candidates. While the "Red South" has a bigger rural proportion than some "strong blue" areas, the simplistic narrative that "Republicans win the vote by supporting Rural folks over Urban" is itself a propaganda piece.
The Republican narrative involves constructing an image of a "real" America, folksy and rural and hard-working and self-sufficient [insert picture of white family holding hunting rifles here], versus the "urban welfare moochers" [insert picture of black people, despite the vast majority of welfare recipients being white]. White city folk, with confederate flags on the pickup truck they drive two blocks to the grocery store, are convinced to identify with the "real America," and vote Republican (so those lazy dark-skinned "urban" people don't take all their hard-earned wages). Ignore the fact that rural America receives much more Federal money per capita (few farms would be self-supporting without big Federal ag. subsidies, infrastructure subsidies, etc.), and "Red" states as a whole receive a net influx of benefits paid for by "Blue" state taxes. Appealing to long-standing racial resentment keeps the white South --- including its majority urban population --- voting Republican, to make sure the "urban" people don't get "handouts".
The election strategy used in 1968 continued to shape and inform the party into the present era. Republicans *still* win the Southern vote, based on appeals to racist fear-mongering and appeasing the Religious Right voting block. Have you ever been in the South, and seen the electoral strategies and messages being sent to fire up the "base" of white males with confederate flags on their cars? I agree that the Democratic party hasn't been particularly great for minority communities the last many years --- but they get away with it because the Republicans are proud to advertise that they'd make things even worse for minorities, so the Democrats have a solid lock on the "lesser of two evils" vote. The Democrats aren't "my team," and when not voting strategically to prevent an even worse far-right nutter from gaining office, I vote for candidates with better than the Democrat's "just be glad we're not Republicans!" platform.
Since you want nothing to do with the products of union scum, please hand in your healthcare, pension plan, sick leave, vacation time, lunch break, compensation for crippling workplace injuries, 40-hour work week, right to work in a properly ventilated and lighted building (that won't kill everyone inside in the event of a fire), and any workplace protections against frequent loss of life and limb. Don't worry, you'll still get an extra three hours off on Sundays, to attend the mandatory chapel service and hear how God wants you to be a proper obedient worker. As a reward for your hard work, there'll be pie in the sky when you die!
At one point during the 2012 election cycle, I recall Mitt Romney took a lot of flak when, asked what kind of annual salary he considered 'middle class', he answered 200-250k. I figured someone should point out that Mitt was adhering to astute Marxian class analysis, in which 'middle class' was a technical term which didn't mean "median income" (at ~4x lower than Mitt named), but rather the specific class that buffers between the working masses (proletariat) and top investors (capital). 'Capital' has enough wealth to get richer purely off of investment of their wealth. The 'middle class' are the highly-paid managerial class, working directly under Capital: not quite rich enough not to need a regular "job," but plenty comfortably paid (rarely risking actual material need that the proletariat would encounter). Because of their position, they would tend to view Capitalism through quite rose-tinted glasses; assuming everyone who works reasonably hard could enjoy a comfortable life like themselves. They are happy to enforce Capitals' wishes against the lower working class.
It appears that you've reached this "middle class". You are happy with the status quo; you don't know the existential fear of living one paycheck away from seeing your family on the street. The system "works" for you --- you can buy a house, send the kids to college, pursue a hobby. Only your own ambition and effort stand between you and even higher pay. Thus this "middle class" sees little need for unions, if not outright opposing them.
Best of luck with your career path --- but, if you suddenly get laid off, your job given to a younger/cheaper worker, your once secure career prospects vanish into years of unemployment as your savings dwindle --- remember, that to the Capital class above you, you are no less disposable than the proletariat, and will be happily discarded whenever it benefits their bank accounts. That's why unionization (and solidarity with the less-close-to-CTO-position working class) might be worth the "extra effort" beyond blithely rolling along with the status quo.
Well, if the Republicans of 1915 were running in current races, that would be a different matter. Heck, even the Republican party that supported Reagan-era top marginal tax rates (higher top tax rates than now) would provide a nice alternative slightly to the left of Obama. But the Republicans (and Democrats) of 2012 have little to do with groups of the same name from decades ago. With the exception of Byrd, most of the notorious anti-civil-rights Democrats (like the long-lived Strom Thurmond) eventually switched party affiliations, and ended their careers as Republican candidates. The "Southern Strategy" era, where the Republican party intentionally courted the racist vote to turn the once-solidly-blue South into the solid "red" area today was remarkably successful, and cemented the modern Republican party as undisputed champions of neo-Confederate racists and the Religious "women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" Right.
So, if you're blind to the last several decades of history, you might accidentally vote for the Republican party assuming that they were progressives in civil and gender rights. However, assuming you haven't Rip-Van-Winkled the last couple decades away in slumber, it's pretty obvious where the party currently stands.
Given the steady decline in union membership in the US, correlated with a corresponding decline in real wages and increase in underemployment and unemployment, I'd say that actual facts on the ground don't support claims that unionization causes unemployment and homelessness. Now, perhaps nicer areas with higher wages (supporting better chances at busking for handouts and improved homeless shelter infrastructure) may attract the homeless to less-already-miserable cities, but overall unionization is quite well correlated with positive economic indicators for the masses (and its decrease in this country correlated with, and likely providing causation for, overall economic decline for all but the top few).
And when you have an utterly political system that aims to grow itself in complete denial of business realities
It's a risk you face, against the certainty of an utterly corporatized system that grows itself in complete denial of human realities. And sometimes, when all goes well, brief flashes of democracy and solidarity break out to improve the lives of all. We have yet to find the perfect arrangement for human society, but shall not (I hope) give up the struggle on that account.
It's not true that our politicians aren't for wealth redistribution. In fact, they're pretty evenly divided between wanting slow upward wealth redistribution, or very rapid upward wealth redistribution.
Hey, it would at least be an important lessons to the techno-libertarian types that their utopian ideals are full of fail (or, maybe prove me wrong on that assumption --- more power to them if so). I'm personally much more left-anarchist, so I think there are much better organizing principles (focusing on equality and solidarity, rather than self-interested "meritocratic" infighting); however, my point is that it's their workplace, and their union --- so they've got the freedom and responsibility to build better systems where they think other models (bureaucratic business unions) stink. While management is gearing up to ship their jobs to China, they really can't do much worse (and have the possibility of doing much better) by taking control into their own hands.
You didn't read my post very closely, did you? Like the part where I said "until you reach a near-unity portion of the population being sampled," which is exactly the special case you're complaining about? Please go back to your second-grade reading comprehension class (and it was the poster above, not me, who was in the intro maths course).
Yes, it's a lot like government. The more the rank-and-file members work to take democratic control of the union, instead of turning it over to government/business management types, the more democratic it'll be. Because many nominally democratic governments suck at representing their people, do you think humanity should just give up and turn everything over to authoritarian dictators (the default structure for corporations)? Or, should we instead strive for more and better representative forms, at the national, state, local, and workplace level? In the past, unions have done an awful lot to actually help the people they represent (sane working hours, workplace conditions that won't literally kill you, blue-collar wages that buy your family a house and put the kids through college, rising wages and standards of living tracking productivity increases, etc.), as have democracies benefited their citizens. Eternal vigilance is a small price to pay to avoid eternal servitude.
Without the unions, I doubt there'd be many fewer useless 1%'ers --- but there'd be a lot fewer productive middle-class workers, to the enrichment of a few 1%-of-1%'ers. You want a more meritocratic or even egalitarian wealth distribution? Then make that a priority of the union you form with your co-workers (you don't have to use anyone else' model).
The statistical power of a sample has pretty much zilch dependence on the population size being sampled (until you reach a near-unity portion of the population being sampled); 162 of 9.5 Million provides no less hypothesis-testing power than 162 of 1000 (assuming sampling is properly uniform; a caveat here is that the researcher has a sample of 162 voluntary-survey-responders). While it might have been nice to include statistical error bars on the percentages in the summary, the "in 9.5 Million" is irrelevant to the robustness of conclusions drawn from a sample of 162.
You know a neat thing about unions? They're made of the people in them. You want a meritocratic, agile, decentralized Union that represents a Hacker/techno-utopian ethos, with blackjack and hookers and bitcoin micropayments? Then make that union! What benefit does the union provide? Well, what would you want with a bigger voice in how your workplace runs? Higher wages? Better hours? Better security against being laid off or bullied by retarded managers? More freedom for side-project work? Advanced training/education? More input into higher-level project planning? Name what you want and claim it.
If Bollywood suddenly started churning out quality American-style movies at (say) 1/10th the price, do you really believe studios wouldn't tell unions to go fuck themselves and start hiring Indians?
Meanwhile, every single unionized American actor/writer/technician would never again set foot in said studios. Whichever few studios stayed American would overnight become the only folks lined up to release a whole season of movies with all the big-name American acting stars. In the grand scheme of things, labor costs are a pretty small factor in what makes a movie profitable --- no matter how well produced a film is, it's not going to gross $XYZ,000,000 on the opening weekend without $MEGA_STAR and $MEGA_STARLET's faces on the movie poster. It's all about solidarity: studios may be able to replace a lot of workers with ultra-cheap labor, but so long as enough of the more "irreplaceable" workers stay loyal to the unions that helped their own early careers, losing all the top American talent overnight would be suicide for Hollywood executive.
Same for the tech industry. Lots of people can be replaced; if they wait long enough, they all will be. But right now, if tech workers said "No, we're not going to train our overseas replacements. No, we're not going to deploy and configure the infrastructure that non-Union shops need in this country. No, you won't be any on-site tech support. Screw with us, and we walk out without leaving you the passwords to your own systems. We hear UnionFriendlyCo is hiring, and would love to have all the people who designed your proprietary systems," they'd have Corporate America on their knees begging. And with solidarity: leverage the critical jobs that can't go away (local infrastructure, etc.) to assure all jobs are protected.
Then join the class (or make your own), instead of resenting it. It's a lot easier to join the union class than to join the billionaire class, and a lot more pleasant than joining the homeless unemployed class.
And most union hotel maids get paid less than programmers (and actors) do, too --- but better than their non-union counterparts (unless there is a high enough concentration of union shops in an area to force everyone else to compete on higher wages/benefits, instead of lower). Unionize, and you're better off than not --- not only in wages, but, perhaps more importantly, in not being treated as disposable and subject to whimsical brutalization by management.
SAG rates set the lowest you can go; it's all uphill from there. A lot of developers earn more --- so do a lot of actors. A lot of developers will also be earning a lot less (or have no job at all) if they let the race-to-the-bottom in wages Walmartize their industry sector.
Right, because there's no demand for programmers that speak American English natively, or for folks to make American-specific games, American-specific websites, provide software for American unionized companies, so unions are hopeless. It's not like scads of top technology companies all tend to cluster in tight geographic regions, as though there was some benefit to being in particular American locations. Nope, if all the American programmers walked off the job right now on strike, no one in the tech industry would even notice.
Oh, wait, none of the preceding is true --- if American programmers got their act together and pooled resources to fight back against the Zuckerbergs of the world, they could bring the entire US IT industry to a grinding halt, and get basically whatever concessions they asked for.
Now, this might not always be true in the future, so if you don't want to wait until you're really powerless (already entirely replaced by a crew in India), then you'd better start organizing *now* while you've still got a chance.
Actors, gaffers, electricians, focus pullers, you name it. Do you think the typical Hollywood studio exec pays the folks who man the lights a living wage out of the goodness of his generous heart? Hell, no; they're greedy bastards just like the folks who run every other industry into a race-for-the-bottom cash-grab. Thanks to unions (a large variety of unions supporting each other in solidarity, so the actors don't say "screw cameramen, pay them less and us more"), the whole working class gets enough money to support their families and live with dignity (even in an expensive part of the country). And behold: having the "burden" of all those unions doesn't seem to make Hollywood a terribly unprofitable place, or prevent top talent from earning megabucks, or drive away the industry to some labor-hating hellhole of an anti-union town.
Want "Hollywood" money? How about programmers banding together and insisting on the protections that stop Hollywood management from moving every aspect of production to the cheapest outsourced labor: Unions. Writers, actors, makeup, costume, camera --- they've all got unions, so their jobs aren't competing with $9/hour H1-B labor.
Ahh, the "I can't explain it because you're just a big stupid-head!" response. Always classy, that one.
Always classy, sometimes true. You're acting like someone who asks a mathematician to explain Green's Theorem, but gets confused when concepts like "addition" and "fractions" appear in the explanation. Sigh; I'll give one more try to address some points using your choice of terms.
Your big sticking point seems to be that, as soon as you need something other than "co-moving endpoints" to demonstrate a paradox, you'll rip a new asshole in the fabric of spacetime and new-physics monkeys will fly out (allowing for exotic possibilities like FTL). Yes, the examples I was giving above on how to construct a paradox did rely on the possibility of boosting the endpoints so they "see" a different reference frame. However, this doesn't require coming anywhere close to the boundaries of "unknown physics," where strong gravitational effects may over-rule the laws of known physics. While accelerating an object to 0.999*c in the lab frame is an "engineering" challenge (note, we do a whole lot more all the time with atomic nuclei, so this would be no problem if your "device" was a quantum-entangled electron), you're nowhere near the point of worrying about general relativistic effects (much less the point of forming black holes where known physics details get iffy). And if your "FTL theory" produces paradoxes while operating well within the realm of known physics (regardless of what "engineering challenges" are required), then it's not compatible with or derivable from known physics (doesn't mean its wrong, but the burden is on you to demonstrate why your whole new hyper-relativistic grand unified superphysics isn't a load of crap).
If you have a pair of FTL-communicator endpoints which, when co-moving along with your own reference frame, can send a message 2 LY away in 1 year, then you can also boost the speed of the endpoint pair relative to your frame so that when a "2 LY in +1 year" message is sent in the endpoint pair's reference frame, in your reference frame the message was sent 2 LY in -1 years (shows up at the receiver a year before being sent). The precise Lorentz boost required to do this is left as an exercise to the reader (if you can't handle this, you're **way** too far out of your depth). Now, chain two of these systems together in a loop: your first message shows up at the remote lab a year ago, who relays a message back that arrives in the sending lab 2 years ago, saying "success! no need to run your experiment 2 years from now!".
The problem is that this pattern isn't limited to one sector of the economy; it's everywhere.
Perhaps in isolation you could say "favor capital over labor in the hi-tech sector to drive down wages to make it cheaper for everyone else --- it's worth paying management $1M more, if they can cut wages by $2M." The problem is, at the same time, it's "favor capital over labor to drive down wages in manufacturing"; "favor capital over labor to drive down wages in retail"; "favor capital over labor to drive down wages in service industries"; etc. --- at the end of the day, the "everyone else" you're trying to "help" can't afford even the cheaper services, because they've lost their own wages and/or jobs. The only people who benefit are the tiny capital/management class, who "earn" their wages for taking money away from everyone else. Unless you look at the system as a whole --- where it's obvious that slashing wages for the majority of people doesn't help the majority of people --- you'll be fooled into your addled style of thinking.
If I could tell you how quantum computing worked exactly, I'd be too busy preparing my Nobel Prize acceptance speech to comment on Slashdot. But roughly, just because there are some things you can't do according to the laws Quantum Mechanics (like precisely measure both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time --- the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle puts certain hard limits on exactly how much / what kind of information you can extract from a quantum system), doesn't mean that there aren't also interesting things that you can do. Quantum computing requires setting up systems where the final "answer" can be read out in a measured state, instead of being "hidden" in some fundamentally unobservable quantity. Likewise for "quantum communication" schemes where you encode transmitted information in quantum properties that you *can* directly control/measure (though you can devise clever schemes where, if the recipient doesn't know exactly which things to measure, they'll accidentally measure the wrong thing and irrecoverably destroy the real information, making it difficult for an impostor to eavesdrop).
This is a fundamental problem that I can't solve: to an uneducated reader, a sufficiently slick troll might be indistinguishable from a genuine expert. As I said, I can't solve this --- but you can on your end, by working to not be an uneducated reader. At this point, I'd recommend that you pick up a basic undergraduate introductory text on special relativity, and get a firm grip on the most elementary principles (which will likely start with events/points and invariant intervals). Your problem is that you've confused how science works with how science fiction works: you're trying to "explain" basic concepts by piling on layers of ever-more complex terminology, which is just gobbledygook that you don't fundamentally understand at all. Having taken graduate-level courses in relativistic physics from top researchers in the field, I can assure you that the word "ansible" does not appear anywhere in the concepts needed to answer your questions --- it's a Sci-Fi plot device, not a component of Einstein's theory of relativity. So no, I'm not going to attempt further explanation (since it won't help any if you're already assuming I'm a troll and too uneducated to tell otherwise for yourself), and hell no I won't use the word "ansible" to explain physics, because tossing around Sci-Fi jargon is the opposite of helpful in explaining real basic science concepts (no matter how fun it may be as a plot device).
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Republicans don't win the Southern vote, they do, however, appeal to rural constituencies, and the south has more rural areas than the north.
Here are some statistics, from a University of South Carolina webpage, on the rural/urban breakdown in a bunch of Southern states. Hint: none of the Southern states shown ( SC, NC, GA, TN) are more that 40% rural population (and less than 60% urban). The only overwhelmingly "rural" state is Vermont --- the place that elects self-identified Independent/Socialist candidates. While the "Red South" has a bigger rural proportion than some "strong blue" areas, the simplistic narrative that "Republicans win the vote by supporting Rural folks over Urban" is itself a propaganda piece.
The Republican narrative involves constructing an image of a "real" America, folksy and rural and hard-working and self-sufficient [insert picture of white family holding hunting rifles here], versus the "urban welfare moochers" [insert picture of black people, despite the vast majority of welfare recipients being white]. White city folk, with confederate flags on the pickup truck they drive two blocks to the grocery store, are convinced to identify with the "real America," and vote Republican (so those lazy dark-skinned "urban" people don't take all their hard-earned wages). Ignore the fact that rural America receives much more Federal money per capita (few farms would be self-supporting without big Federal ag. subsidies, infrastructure subsidies, etc.), and "Red" states as a whole receive a net influx of benefits paid for by "Blue" state taxes. Appealing to long-standing racial resentment keeps the white South --- including its majority urban population --- voting Republican, to make sure the "urban" people don't get "handouts".
The election strategy used in 1968 continued to shape and inform the party into the present era. Republicans *still* win the Southern vote, based on appeals to racist fear-mongering and appeasing the Religious Right voting block. Have you ever been in the South, and seen the electoral strategies and messages being sent to fire up the "base" of white males with confederate flags on their cars? I agree that the Democratic party hasn't been particularly great for minority communities the last many years --- but they get away with it because the Republicans are proud to advertise that they'd make things even worse for minorities, so the Democrats have a solid lock on the "lesser of two evils" vote. The Democrats aren't "my team," and when not voting strategically to prevent an even worse far-right nutter from gaining office, I vote for candidates with better than the Democrat's "just be glad we're not Republicans!" platform.
Since you want nothing to do with the products of union scum, please hand in your healthcare, pension plan, sick leave, vacation time, lunch break, compensation for crippling workplace injuries, 40-hour work week, right to work in a properly ventilated and lighted building (that won't kill everyone inside in the event of a fire), and any workplace protections against frequent loss of life and limb. Don't worry, you'll still get an extra three hours off on Sundays, to attend the mandatory chapel service and hear how God wants you to be a proper obedient worker. As a reward for your hard work, there'll be pie in the sky when you die!
At one point during the 2012 election cycle, I recall Mitt Romney took a lot of flak when, asked what kind of annual salary he considered 'middle class', he answered 200-250k. I figured someone should point out that Mitt was adhering to astute Marxian class analysis, in which 'middle class' was a technical term which didn't mean "median income" (at ~4x lower than Mitt named), but rather the specific class that buffers between the working masses (proletariat) and top investors (capital). 'Capital' has enough wealth to get richer purely off of investment of their wealth. The 'middle class' are the highly-paid managerial class, working directly under Capital: not quite rich enough not to need a regular "job," but plenty comfortably paid (rarely risking actual material need that the proletariat would encounter). Because of their position, they would tend to view Capitalism through quite rose-tinted glasses; assuming everyone who works reasonably hard could enjoy a comfortable life like themselves. They are happy to enforce Capitals' wishes against the lower working class.
It appears that you've reached this "middle class". You are happy with the status quo; you don't know the existential fear of living one paycheck away from seeing your family on the street. The system "works" for you --- you can buy a house, send the kids to college, pursue a hobby. Only your own ambition and effort stand between you and even higher pay. Thus this "middle class" sees little need for unions, if not outright opposing them.
Best of luck with your career path --- but, if you suddenly get laid off, your job given to a younger/cheaper worker, your once secure career prospects vanish into years of unemployment as your savings dwindle --- remember, that to the Capital class above you, you are no less disposable than the proletariat, and will be happily discarded whenever it benefits their bank accounts. That's why unionization (and solidarity with the less-close-to-CTO-position working class) might be worth the "extra effort" beyond blithely rolling along with the status quo.
Well, if the Republicans of 1915 were running in current races, that would be a different matter. Heck, even the Republican party that supported Reagan-era top marginal tax rates (higher top tax rates than now) would provide a nice alternative slightly to the left of Obama. But the Republicans (and Democrats) of 2012 have little to do with groups of the same name from decades ago. With the exception of Byrd, most of the notorious anti-civil-rights Democrats (like the long-lived Strom Thurmond) eventually switched party affiliations, and ended their careers as Republican candidates. The "Southern Strategy" era, where the Republican party intentionally courted the racist vote to turn the once-solidly-blue South into the solid "red" area today was remarkably successful, and cemented the modern Republican party as undisputed champions of neo-Confederate racists and the Religious "women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" Right.
So, if you're blind to the last several decades of history, you might accidentally vote for the Republican party assuming that they were progressives in civil and gender rights. However, assuming you haven't Rip-Van-Winkled the last couple decades away in slumber, it's pretty obvious where the party currently stands.
Given the steady decline in union membership in the US, correlated with a corresponding decline in real wages and increase in underemployment and unemployment, I'd say that actual facts on the ground don't support claims that unionization causes unemployment and homelessness. Now, perhaps nicer areas with higher wages (supporting better chances at busking for handouts and improved homeless shelter infrastructure) may attract the homeless to less-already-miserable cities, but overall unionization is quite well correlated with positive economic indicators for the masses (and its decrease in this country correlated with, and likely providing causation for, overall economic decline for all but the top few).
And when you have an utterly political system that aims to grow itself in complete denial of business realities
It's a risk you face, against the certainty of an utterly corporatized system that grows itself in complete denial of human realities. And sometimes, when all goes well, brief flashes of democracy and solidarity break out to improve the lives of all. We have yet to find the perfect arrangement for human society, but shall not (I hope) give up the struggle on that account.
It's not true that our politicians aren't for wealth redistribution. In fact, they're pretty evenly divided between wanting slow upward wealth redistribution, or very rapid upward wealth redistribution.
Hey, it would at least be an important lessons to the techno-libertarian types that their utopian ideals are full of fail (or, maybe prove me wrong on that assumption --- more power to them if so). I'm personally much more left-anarchist, so I think there are much better organizing principles (focusing on equality and solidarity, rather than self-interested "meritocratic" infighting); however, my point is that it's their workplace, and their union --- so they've got the freedom and responsibility to build better systems where they think other models (bureaucratic business unions) stink. While management is gearing up to ship their jobs to China, they really can't do much worse (and have the possibility of doing much better) by taking control into their own hands.
You didn't read my post very closely, did you? Like the part where I said "until you reach a near-unity portion of the population being sampled," which is exactly the special case you're complaining about? Please go back to your second-grade reading comprehension class (and it was the poster above, not me, who was in the intro maths course).
Yes, it's a lot like government. The more the rank-and-file members work to take democratic control of the union, instead of turning it over to government/business management types, the more democratic it'll be. Because many nominally democratic governments suck at representing their people, do you think humanity should just give up and turn everything over to authoritarian dictators (the default structure for corporations)? Or, should we instead strive for more and better representative forms, at the national, state, local, and workplace level? In the past, unions have done an awful lot to actually help the people they represent (sane working hours, workplace conditions that won't literally kill you, blue-collar wages that buy your family a house and put the kids through college, rising wages and standards of living tracking productivity increases, etc.), as have democracies benefited their citizens. Eternal vigilance is a small price to pay to avoid eternal servitude.
Without the unions, I doubt there'd be many fewer useless 1%'ers --- but there'd be a lot fewer productive middle-class workers, to the enrichment of a few 1%-of-1%'ers. You want a more meritocratic or even egalitarian wealth distribution? Then make that a priority of the union you form with your co-workers (you don't have to use anyone else' model).
The statistical power of a sample has pretty much zilch dependence on the population size being sampled (until you reach a near-unity portion of the population being sampled); 162 of 9.5 Million provides no less hypothesis-testing power than 162 of 1000 (assuming sampling is properly uniform; a caveat here is that the researcher has a sample of 162 voluntary-survey-responders). While it might have been nice to include statistical error bars on the percentages in the summary, the "in 9.5 Million" is irrelevant to the robustness of conclusions drawn from a sample of 162.
You know a neat thing about unions? They're made of the people in them. You want a meritocratic, agile, decentralized Union that represents a Hacker/techno-utopian ethos, with blackjack and hookers and bitcoin micropayments? Then make that union! What benefit does the union provide? Well, what would you want with a bigger voice in how your workplace runs? Higher wages? Better hours? Better security against being laid off or bullied by retarded managers? More freedom for side-project work? Advanced training/education? More input into higher-level project planning? Name what you want and claim it.
If Bollywood suddenly started churning out quality American-style movies at (say) 1/10th the price, do you really believe studios wouldn't tell unions to go fuck themselves and start hiring Indians?
Meanwhile, every single unionized American actor/writer/technician would never again set foot in said studios. Whichever few studios stayed American would overnight become the only folks lined up to release a whole season of movies with all the big-name American acting stars. In the grand scheme of things, labor costs are a pretty small factor in what makes a movie profitable --- no matter how well produced a film is, it's not going to gross $XYZ,000,000 on the opening weekend without $MEGA_STAR and $MEGA_STARLET's faces on the movie poster. It's all about solidarity: studios may be able to replace a lot of workers with ultra-cheap labor, but so long as enough of the more "irreplaceable" workers stay loyal to the unions that helped their own early careers, losing all the top American talent overnight would be suicide for Hollywood executive.
Same for the tech industry. Lots of people can be replaced; if they wait long enough, they all will be. But right now, if tech workers said "No, we're not going to train our overseas replacements. No, we're not going to deploy and configure the infrastructure that non-Union shops need in this country. No, you won't be any on-site tech support. Screw with us, and we walk out without leaving you the passwords to your own systems. We hear UnionFriendlyCo is hiring, and would love to have all the people who designed your proprietary systems," they'd have Corporate America on their knees begging. And with solidarity: leverage the critical jobs that can't go away (local infrastructure, etc.) to assure all jobs are protected.
Then join the class (or make your own), instead of resenting it. It's a lot easier to join the union class than to join the billionaire class, and a lot more pleasant than joining the homeless unemployed class.
And most union hotel maids get paid less than programmers (and actors) do, too --- but better than their non-union counterparts (unless there is a high enough concentration of union shops in an area to force everyone else to compete on higher wages/benefits, instead of lower). Unionize, and you're better off than not --- not only in wages, but, perhaps more importantly, in not being treated as disposable and subject to whimsical brutalization by management.
SAG rates set the lowest you can go; it's all uphill from there. A lot of developers earn more --- so do a lot of actors. A lot of developers will also be earning a lot less (or have no job at all) if they let the race-to-the-bottom in wages Walmartize their industry sector.
Right, because there's no demand for programmers that speak American English natively, or for folks to make American-specific games, American-specific websites, provide software for American unionized companies, so unions are hopeless. It's not like scads of top technology companies all tend to cluster in tight geographic regions, as though there was some benefit to being in particular American locations. Nope, if all the American programmers walked off the job right now on strike, no one in the tech industry would even notice.
Oh, wait, none of the preceding is true --- if American programmers got their act together and pooled resources to fight back against the Zuckerbergs of the world, they could bring the entire US IT industry to a grinding halt, and get basically whatever concessions they asked for.
Now, this might not always be true in the future, so if you don't want to wait until you're really powerless (already entirely replaced by a crew in India), then you'd better start organizing *now* while you've still got a chance.
Actors, gaffers, electricians, focus pullers, you name it. Do you think the typical Hollywood studio exec pays the folks who man the lights a living wage out of the goodness of his generous heart? Hell, no; they're greedy bastards just like the folks who run every other industry into a race-for-the-bottom cash-grab. Thanks to unions (a large variety of unions supporting each other in solidarity, so the actors don't say "screw cameramen, pay them less and us more"), the whole working class gets enough money to support their families and live with dignity (even in an expensive part of the country). And behold: having the "burden" of all those unions doesn't seem to make Hollywood a terribly unprofitable place, or prevent top talent from earning megabucks, or drive away the industry to some labor-hating hellhole of an anti-union town.
Want "Hollywood" money? How about programmers banding together and insisting on the protections that stop Hollywood management from moving every aspect of production to the cheapest outsourced labor: Unions. Writers, actors, makeup, costume, camera --- they've all got unions, so their jobs aren't competing with $9/hour H1-B labor.
Ahh, the "I can't explain it because you're just a big stupid-head!" response. Always classy, that one.
Always classy, sometimes true. You're acting like someone who asks a mathematician to explain Green's Theorem, but gets confused when concepts like "addition" and "fractions" appear in the explanation. Sigh; I'll give one more try to address some points using your choice of terms.
Your big sticking point seems to be that, as soon as you need something other than "co-moving endpoints" to demonstrate a paradox, you'll rip a new asshole in the fabric of spacetime and new-physics monkeys will fly out (allowing for exotic possibilities like FTL). Yes, the examples I was giving above on how to construct a paradox did rely on the possibility of boosting the endpoints so they "see" a different reference frame. However, this doesn't require coming anywhere close to the boundaries of "unknown physics," where strong gravitational effects may over-rule the laws of known physics. While accelerating an object to 0.999*c in the lab frame is an "engineering" challenge (note, we do a whole lot more all the time with atomic nuclei, so this would be no problem if your "device" was a quantum-entangled electron), you're nowhere near the point of worrying about general relativistic effects (much less the point of forming black holes where known physics details get iffy). And if your "FTL theory" produces paradoxes while operating well within the realm of known physics (regardless of what "engineering challenges" are required), then it's not compatible with or derivable from known physics (doesn't mean its wrong, but the burden is on you to demonstrate why your whole new hyper-relativistic grand unified superphysics isn't a load of crap).
If you have a pair of FTL-communicator endpoints which, when co-moving along with your own reference frame, can send a message 2 LY away in 1 year, then you can also boost the speed of the endpoint pair relative to your frame so that when a "2 LY in +1 year" message is sent in the endpoint pair's reference frame, in your reference frame the message was sent 2 LY in -1 years (shows up at the receiver a year before being sent). The precise Lorentz boost required to do this is left as an exercise to the reader (if you can't handle this, you're **way** too far out of your depth). Now, chain two of these systems together in a loop: your first message shows up at the remote lab a year ago, who relays a message back that arrives in the sending lab 2 years ago, saying "success! no need to run your experiment 2 years from now!".
The problem is that this pattern isn't limited to one sector of the economy; it's everywhere.
Perhaps in isolation you could say "favor capital over labor in the hi-tech sector to drive down wages to make it cheaper for everyone else --- it's worth paying management $1M more, if they can cut wages by $2M." The problem is, at the same time, it's "favor capital over labor to drive down wages in manufacturing"; "favor capital over labor to drive down wages in retail"; "favor capital over labor to drive down wages in service industries"; etc. --- at the end of the day, the "everyone else" you're trying to "help" can't afford even the cheaper services, because they've lost their own wages and/or jobs. The only people who benefit are the tiny capital/management class, who "earn" their wages for taking money away from everyone else. Unless you look at the system as a whole --- where it's obvious that slashing wages for the majority of people doesn't help the majority of people --- you'll be fooled into your addled style of thinking.
If I could tell you how quantum computing worked exactly, I'd be too busy preparing my Nobel Prize acceptance speech to comment on Slashdot. But roughly, just because there are some things you can't do according to the laws Quantum Mechanics (like precisely measure both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time --- the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle puts certain hard limits on exactly how much / what kind of information you can extract from a quantum system), doesn't mean that there aren't also interesting things that you can do. Quantum computing requires setting up systems where the final "answer" can be read out in a measured state, instead of being "hidden" in some fundamentally unobservable quantity. Likewise for "quantum communication" schemes where you encode transmitted information in quantum properties that you *can* directly control/measure (though you can devise clever schemes where, if the recipient doesn't know exactly which things to measure, they'll accidentally measure the wrong thing and irrecoverably destroy the real information, making it difficult for an impostor to eavesdrop).
This is a fundamental problem that I can't solve: to an uneducated reader, a sufficiently slick troll might be indistinguishable from a genuine expert. As I said, I can't solve this --- but you can on your end, by working to not be an uneducated reader. At this point, I'd recommend that you pick up a basic undergraduate introductory text on special relativity, and get a firm grip on the most elementary principles (which will likely start with events/points and invariant intervals). Your problem is that you've confused how science works with how science fiction works: you're trying to "explain" basic concepts by piling on layers of ever-more complex terminology, which is just gobbledygook that you don't fundamentally understand at all. Having taken graduate-level courses in relativistic physics from top researchers in the field, I can assure you that the word "ansible" does not appear anywhere in the concepts needed to answer your questions --- it's a Sci-Fi plot device, not a component of Einstein's theory of relativity. So no, I'm not going to attempt further explanation (since it won't help any if you're already assuming I'm a troll and too uneducated to tell otherwise for yourself), and hell no I won't use the word "ansible" to explain physics, because tossing around Sci-Fi jargon is the opposite of helpful in explaining real basic science concepts (no matter how fun it may be as a plot device).