To those who believe that the distributed intelligence of the internet (the users at its ends) is insufficient to manage itself, I'd say that the evidence is to the contrary. It is not the government that has provided us with ways of dealing with spam, of effective encryption and VoIP. It is smart individuals and groups that move much faster than governments.
And if the users, who are not in fact users as the grandparent termed them, but actually comprise the internet itself, were insufficient to manage themselves, then there is an alternative to taking the control away and centralizing it, and that would be to increase the education level of these "users."
More than any other systems, democracies and anarchies, require intelligent and educated people. Right now the internet is an anarchy and long may it remain so.
That's an interesting point of view and I think there's some truth to it.
On the subject of three, it's interesting to consider that technologically the people do currently have control. The internet is a co-operative effort and to subvert it, the Powers That Be, need to subvert either people's control over their individual PCs (such as with Trusted Computing) or the connection (such as increasingly vicious legislation on the ISPs, making them responsible for their customer's actions).
First off, yes, shockingly, Free_Meson, I have been to school. But aside from that you at least made an argument which is more than your predecessor did, so it's nice that someone took the time to defend their views rather than just screeching "anti-capitalist" at me.
But as I'm typing this so late after the story was current, I'm probably addressing this reply only to you so I'll be fairly brief.
You are entirely right that there is some benefit from Government spending on the military-industrial complex in terms of employment, but as a means of wealth distribution it's not very efficient. I'd just rather taxes were lowered in the first place. You should also consider whether the same effect could be achieved by ploughing the public money into a different industry and of course it could, so this is not an advantage that military spending has over any other form of spending. It's just an advantage of spending in general, so perhaps we could find something better to spend the money on.
If states and localities thought that education needed more money and were willing to cut back in other areas, they would do so. Because they haven't cut back in other areas more, it's a sound assumption that additional money put into the system would result in negligible changes in school funding.
I can't follow your reasoning here. You seem to assume infallible judgement on the part of the state government, that they are automatically willing or able to make budget cuts elsewhere to fund education and that additional money is irrelevant to the quality of education. Where is the proof that you insisted was so necessary to an argument at the start of your post?
You later use several strawman arguments about additional money being no good if kids aren't willing to learn and that there is more to the education debate than money. Both may be true, but neither shows that additional money wouldn't boost a school's effectiveness.
Just for reference, I would use extra money to hire additional teachers and decrease class sizes. I know from experience that this would have a positive effect.
I'll leave it that now. If you read this, it would be nice if you reply just so that I know you have done so.
I wasn't aware of that actually so I apologise for my mistake. The only sanctions I was aware of were those imposed under Clinton in response to the nuclear tests India carried out. They lasted about a year before the US realized that Europe was cashing in on the opportunity. [I mention this for anyone else who might be reading, not you bluFox].
What provoked the 1970's sanctions?
The basis of what I said was that the US and Russia led the field in rocketry and satellite development and I'm sure that the examples were of use to the Indian engineers and scientists. But I do stand corrected, don't worry. I don't even have the excuse of being American.
Kerala looks beautiful by the way. I may visit when I get the chance.
When I was a kid, some mates and I refilmed the entire orginal trilogy in about two hours. It was tricky as I was both Vader
and Skywalker and we only had one Storm Trooper so we kept stopping and starting the camcorder so that this one Storm Trooper could run in and get shot repeatedly. It also led to the immortal line, "That's not a moon, that's a football."
All of this utterly irrelevant however, unless any of my mates are reading. For me, the issue is not the legality or not, but the actual effects of the performance. First - does this harm the film company? Well, it's unlikely that people will go to see the theatre company's version instead of the original and I don't see how else it would harm their profits. And I doubt that it will be grossly defamatory to the people involved with Star Wars.
So why should anyone have the right to stop them? Yes they are profiting through it, the article says $10 a head. But it doe
sn't cost Lucas anything. It's money out of nothing and it's creative. Everything new evolves from something that came befor
e. To put a lock on anything that grows out of your work is to kill the whole line of it's artistic descendants.
The internet would have come anyway, it was internet time. Universities in Britain were developing networks between themselves that would have been another internet seed. Business would also have come up with the same as corporate networks grew ever larger.
Of course it's all silly because we can kill anybody we want any time we want. We are finally living out our John Wayne destiny.
Yep. There's the sound a nail's head being well and truly hit. Modern developed countries are like egg-shells armed with hammers. Everyone can dish it out and no-one can take it. Long range nuclear weapons have rendered existing armies useless for anything other than population control. In a way, that makes them nastier as fighting a war can concievably be an act of defence or liberation, but population control is inherantly about restricting freedom.
Of course, not everyone has long-range nuclear weapons, but if N. Korea is almost there, then I think that's an indication that anyone who's anyone will soon be so armed.
Re-read my post. Nothing in there is anti- (or pro-) capitalism. For what it's worth, I tend towards a capitalist view of things, but Capitalism is an economic system. It is not a trademark of the Pentagon.
I also take great delight in informing you that the horrible capitalist industries do not generate 80% of the world's food. You'll find that most societies (even communists) have a tendancy to grow food regardless of their economic model. I can't think why that is.
Now to your actual point (such as it is):
And your proof is...nonexistant.
Nope, I just assumed that it was obvious that if your government didn't spend about 400 billion dollars a year on the military, then that money could be spent on something else. Assuming that they ploughed even some of that budget into education rather than explosives, then we can conclude the american public would be better off. That's logic. The only justification is if you really think the US needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than everyone else on its armed forces to ensure it's citizen's safety. I think it is equally clear that it doesn't.
And finally,
Time for you to put on the big kid pants and stop complaining.
Well, in terms of percantage-GDP, we spend less than most developed nations.
Not disagreeing with everything you say, but for the above... that's a unviable justification. Military strength is not determined as a percentage of GDP, but as an absolute. Once you have topped the military power of another nation by a secure margin (which we'll take the relative budgets as an indicator of) there is no point in continuing, regardless of the relative percentages.
The US spends way too much on its armed forces and the population suffers at the expense of the military-industrial lobby.
I also think it would have a significant and positive effect on the rest of the world if the US scaled back it's military forces. After all, many nations follow their example. This will be especially true of space based weapons. The US has an unprecedented chance to try and stop mankind's wars spreading into space which they are walking away from. "If we don't do it, someone else will."
So India has found a more cost effective way of educating the population. Not only is this bloody fantastic, I also like the way that India is able to profit from the educational progress of other countries to leap ahead of them. All the technological innovation that took place in Europe and America - satellite technology, rocketry, etc., has been picked up and used without all the preliminary development having to be repeated.
I hope Europe and America can do the same a few more years down the line to leap forward on the backs of Indian technology developed with their new low-cost education system.
Of course, international patent agreements pushed by the US may prevent that.;)
Re:The logistics of building the Death Star
on
Star Wars Minutiae
·
· Score: 1
and the control center would not need centience either as it would just blindly follow the building plan.
You're suggesting that the formal designs were finalised before development began? Not on any project I've ever worked on, mate.
Unfortunately the US is stuck keeping troops in Iraq, otherwise, the power vaccuum would most likely lead to civil war and there'd be thousands of deaths a week.
I'm not entirely disagreeing, but this idea has been passed around repeatedly yet I've never found much actual analysis to lead to this conclusion. While Iraq is certainly unstable, and I believe that it is becoming more unstable the longer the US administration blocks and dismantles existing organizational structures and puts in place it's own that depend on the US support for their existence, Iraq is not uncivilized. There are many educated people there and there are still [very] strong communities. Consider that the Iraqi people will predominantly do what their clerical leaders will tell them, and that the clerical leaders fall into a handfull of close knit groups - well you would have some power struggling between the groups but it wouldn't be the every man for himself scenario that the West seems to envisage.
Within weeks of Saddam's fall, democratic elections had been held in many areas and people had organized tens of thousands of volunteers to take care of issues such as refuse collections and hospital meals. Now the elections weren't quite up to my standards of democracy - one man from each household was given a vote - but they did appear to be fair.
And then the US administration began imposing their own people through the agency of RTI - a corporation hired for the task. Emerging organizational structures - even democratic ones, were hamstrung or squashed because they were not 'legitimate,' (Paul Bremmer's words). RTI also piss me off because their a corporation with a.org . But I suppose that's just me.
So I'll stress again that pulling out would create a power struggle, but I don't think the assumption that it's only the US army preventing total social breakdown is even close to supported. The US strategy is to remain long enough to cement the power structures that it wants, so that any attempted usurption of them can only take place through uprisings and violence. Specific examples are such things as US supported politicians, business contracts and management and - importantly - the details of various agreements about oil and military forces. The 'breaking' of these agreements [regardless of what 'government' made them] would provide pretext for further punishment of Iraq.
A section of the novel Tik-Tok by John Sladek makes the point more dramatically than I could.
All around me in the car, I hear people setting down their champagne glasses. Someone asked, "What about their clothes and personal belongings?"
"They have none," I said. "They own nothing and they still owe us plenty. Out of common decency we usually give them a pair of p.j.s and bus fare home. If they have a home."
A few people with bandaged heads were wandering in the street, giggling at the traffic. An interrupted appendectomy held himself together and crawled down the steps assisited by a woman draggin her leg traction and leaning on an old brrom as a makeshift crutch. A geriatric case and an amputee were brought out in wheelchairs down the stairs and over to the curb, where they were dumped, while the cameras flashed.
"Oh the press love this," I said bitterly. "They revel in scenes like these, examples of what's wrong with American medicine. But American medicine has always had the same problems, fifty years ago people were bitching about the high costs, the inequity. I'll tell you one thing, though. When other medical groups see our balance sheet at the end of the year, they'll all be doing this. This is the future gang."
A little queue of incubators appeared at the head of the stairs. Nurses were working efficiently, wrapping the kids in blankets and putting them in little cardboard bassinets, to be set out in a row on the sidewalk. An eye patient, hustled down the steps, nearly stepped in one of the bassinets; someone in the limousine made a retching noise. There more such sounds when an amputee was carried out on a stretcher, dumped in the gutter and a bag containing what may have been his leg thrown after him.
When it was all over, I poured more champagne and ordered Nobby to drive on. "Well, gang. Any ideas?"
An account executive cleared his throat. "I see you do have an image problem Mr. Tok, and I'm very glad to see you face up to it like this, facing up is half the battle."
"Good. What's the other half.?"
"Hmm," he stalled. "Hmmm, I like what you said about this being the future. I think we might build on that very concept: Some day, all medical care will be like Clockman care' and um, um--"
"Exclusivity," added the other account executive, the one who had retched. "We can always point out that we throw out deadbeats because we're exclusive, like a good club."
"Um, I could go with that too, though it's a different handle. We could angle it too towards either valuable social contribution or high personal survival value--"
"Sure, sure, I guess the point is, Mr. Tok, there is a menu of options for us here, all excellent. No problem, sir, no problem at all."
The question is, how long will this book remain satire?
Hold on, I'm confused. What does all this debate about who Kerry did or didn't shoot in Vietnam have to do with his stated policies on the economy, international affairs, etc.
I mean that's what the election is about, isn't it? Ermmm, isn't it?
Well, this is hardly news to us on/., but I'm guessing for a lot of people, this is still something from a spy movie. I believe that the only thing that's really stopping this sort of thing being widespread is a lack of imagination on the part of the general public. It certainly isn't cost or difficulty.
I think if more people realise it and understand that working 20 or so hours can be enough, the world will be a happier place
And the beauty of that is if everyone does it, we may reach a new equilibrium where you don't get left behind for working 'only' 20 hours a week.
We have tractors, we have trains, we have telephones and printing presses. It's about time mankind realized it isn't still growing grain all day long to survive the winter. The only busy industries these days should be education, sports and space colonization.;)
Do your bit for humanity, I say - don't let your staff work too hard!
Weird, isn't it? The US economy is staggering in world terms. We hear that all the time. Yet, for the people within the US, their purchasing power isn't wildly different. There are other factors, such as the massive availablity of land, that change things such as the size of your typical house, but broadly speaking, the average US citizen isn't much better off than a european counterpart. And judging by the other posts in this thread, he works a bit harder for it too.
It's ridiculous to say the money isn't there. We have modern farming equipment, manufacturing, transport. So why aren't we all just sitting back and enjoying the rewards of a few centuries of technological development?
I think one difference is formed by what the typical citizens of a country are doing. We all compete with each other. The US citizen may be vastly richer than an eastern european, an indian or a chinese, but he lives in a land where everybody else is too. It's not possible to ease off and do a twenty-hour week because you'd get left behind. Our equilibrium is set at 37+ hours.
But that's not to say that there couldn't be another euqilibrium lower down if everyone typically worked 20 hours a week. A parallel situation would be how there used to be only one breadwinner in a household (typically the husband) and now there are two. Living costs go up and it's now much harder for there to just be a single breadwinner. We've adopted a different equilibrium, just like we've failed to adopt a different equilibrium as technology has progressed.
I think this has led to a reduction in the amount of work that 'needs' to be done. Assuming technology continues to progress and civilization doesn't slide back again, then this situation can only get more pronounced. Energy required to hold onto a job will continue to increase and benefits to the employee will continue to shrink as the 'owners' have less and less need to for them and the balance of power shifts further.
This is an aside to your post really. I don't have so much experience of working in the States, but anecdotal evidence I've picked up from Americans over here suggests that during our predominantly fewer working hours, the Europeans are more energetic in their work (read: slack less). This seems to tie into the original article nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen.
To those who believe that the distributed intelligence of the internet (the users at its ends) is insufficient to manage itself, I'd say that the evidence is to the contrary. It is not the government that has provided us with ways of dealing with spam, of effective encryption and VoIP. It is smart individuals and groups that move much faster than governments.
And if the users, who are not in fact users as the grandparent termed them, but actually comprise the internet itself, were insufficient to manage themselves, then there is an alternative to taking the control away and centralizing it, and that would be to increase the education level of these "users."
More than any other systems, democracies and anarchies, require intelligent and educated people. Right now the internet is an anarchy and long may it remain so.
That's an interesting point of view and I think there's some truth to it.
On the subject of three, it's interesting to consider that technologically the people do currently have control. The internet is a co-operative effort and to subvert it, the Powers That Be, need to subvert either people's control over their individual PCs (such as with Trusted Computing) or the connection (such as increasingly vicious legislation on the ISPs, making them responsible for their customer's actions).
We've been seeing movement on both these fronts.
First off, yes, shockingly, Free_Meson, I have been to school. But aside from that you at least made an argument which is more than your predecessor did, so it's nice that someone took the time to defend their views rather than just screeching "anti-capitalist" at me.
But as I'm typing this so late after the story was current, I'm probably addressing this reply only to you so I'll be fairly brief.
You are entirely right that there is some benefit from Government spending on the military-industrial complex in terms of employment, but as a means of wealth distribution it's not very efficient. I'd just rather taxes were lowered in the first place. You should also consider whether the same effect could be achieved by ploughing the public money into a different industry and of course it could, so this is not an advantage that military spending has over any other form of spending. It's just an advantage of spending in general, so perhaps we could find something better to spend the money on.
I can't follow your reasoning here. You seem to assume infallible judgement on the part of the state government, that they are automatically willing or able to make budget cuts elsewhere to fund education and that additional money is irrelevant to the quality of education. Where is the proof that you insisted was so necessary to an argument at the start of your post?
You later use several strawman arguments about additional money being no good if kids aren't willing to learn and that there is more to the education debate than money. Both may be true, but neither shows that additional money wouldn't boost a school's effectiveness.
Just for reference, I would use extra money to hire additional teachers and decrease class sizes. I know from experience that this would have a positive effect.
I'll leave it that now. If you read this, it would be nice if you reply just so that I know you have done so.
-H.
don't worry about what others are parodying around with your movies.
No no no, Lucas owns copyright on parodies too. And the parodies in question are called "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones."
Inside joke. Not funny in the slightest.
:P
Well, the line in the movie was "That's not a moon, that's a battlestation." So it's not that inside.
But I said it was irrelevant.
Err.. I think we did that already..
Everything goes in circles. And everyone adds a little something each time knowledge changes hands.
Except for patent lawyers.
I wasn't aware of that actually so I apologise for my mistake. The only sanctions I was aware of were those imposed under Clinton in response to the nuclear tests India carried out. They lasted about a year before the US realized that Europe was cashing in on the opportunity. [I mention this for anyone else who might be reading, not you bluFox].
What provoked the 1970's sanctions?
The basis of what I said was that the US and Russia led the field in rocketry and satellite development and I'm sure that the examples were of use to the Indian engineers and scientists. But I do stand corrected, don't worry. I don't even have the excuse of being American.
Kerala looks beautiful by the way. I may visit when I get the chance.
When I was a kid, some mates and I refilmed the entire orginal trilogy in about two hours. It was tricky as I was both Vader and Skywalker and we only had one Storm Trooper so we kept stopping and starting the camcorder so that this one Storm Trooper could run in and get shot repeatedly. It also led to the immortal line, "That's not a moon, that's a football."
All of this utterly irrelevant however, unless any of my mates are reading. For me, the issue is not the legality or not, but the actual effects of the performance. First - does this harm the film company? Well, it's unlikely that people will go to see the theatre company's version instead of the original and I don't see how else it would harm their profits. And I doubt that it will be grossly defamatory to the people involved with Star Wars.
So why should anyone have the right to stop them? Yes they are profiting through it, the article says $10 a head. But it doe sn't cost Lucas anything. It's money out of nothing and it's creative. Everything new evolves from something that came befor e. To put a lock on anything that grows out of your work is to kill the whole line of it's artistic descendants.
The internet would have come anyway, it was internet time. Universities in Britain were developing networks between themselves that would have been another internet seed. Business would also have come up with the same as corporate networks grew ever larger.
Of course it's all silly because we can kill anybody we want any time we want. We are finally living out our John Wayne destiny.
Yep. There's the sound a nail's head being well and truly hit. Modern developed countries are like egg-shells armed with hammers. Everyone can dish it out and no-one can take it. Long range nuclear weapons have rendered existing armies useless for anything other than population control. In a way, that makes them nastier as fighting a war can concievably be an act of defence or liberation, but population control is inherantly about restricting freedom.
Of course, not everyone has long-range nuclear weapons, but if N. Korea is almost there, then I think that's an indication that anyone who's anyone will soon be so armed.
The problem with public education in America is not a lack of funding, it's a lack of accountability.
What do you mean by this? What would you do to introduce accountability?
You are a muppet.
Re-read my post. Nothing in there is anti- (or pro-) capitalism. For what it's worth, I tend towards a capitalist view of things, but Capitalism is an economic system. It is not a trademark of the Pentagon.
I also take great delight in informing you that the horrible capitalist industries do not generate 80% of the world's food. You'll find that most societies (even communists) have a tendancy to grow food regardless of their economic model. I can't think why that is.
Now to your actual point (such as it is):
And your proof is...nonexistant.
Nope, I just assumed that it was obvious that if your government didn't spend about 400 billion dollars a year on the military, then that money could be spent on something else. Assuming that they ploughed even some of that budget into education rather than explosives, then we can conclude the american public would be better off. That's logic. The only justification is if you really think the US needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than everyone else on its armed forces to ensure it's citizen's safety. I think it is equally clear that it doesn't.
And finally,
Time for you to put on the big kid pants and stop complaining.
Nyah nyah!
Well, in terms of percantage-GDP, we spend less than most developed nations.
Not disagreeing with everything you say, but for the above... that's a unviable justification. Military strength is not determined as a percentage of GDP, but as an absolute. Once you have topped the military power of another nation by a secure margin (which we'll take the relative budgets as an indicator of) there is no point in continuing, regardless of the relative percentages.
The US spends way too much on its armed forces and the population suffers at the expense of the military-industrial lobby.
I also think it would have a significant and positive effect on the rest of the world if the US scaled back it's military forces. After all, many nations follow their example. This will be especially true of space based weapons. The US has an unprecedented chance to try and stop mankind's wars spreading into space which they are walking away from. "If we don't do it, someone else will."
So India has found a more cost effective way of educating the population. Not only is this bloody fantastic, I also like the way that India is able to profit from the educational progress of other countries to leap ahead of them. All the technological innovation that took place in Europe and America - satellite technology, rocketry, etc., has been picked up and used without all the preliminary development having to be repeated.
I hope Europe and America can do the same a few more years down the line to leap forward on the backs of Indian technology developed with their new low-cost education system.
Of course, international patent agreements pushed by the US may prevent that.
and the control center would not need centience either as it would just blindly follow the building plan.
You're suggesting that the formal designs were finalised before development began? Not on any project I've ever worked on, mate.
Unfortunately the US is stuck keeping troops in Iraq, otherwise, the power vaccuum would most likely lead to civil war and there'd be thousands of deaths a week.
.org . But I suppose that's just me.
I'm not entirely disagreeing, but this idea has been passed around repeatedly yet I've never found much actual analysis to lead to this conclusion. While Iraq is certainly unstable, and I believe that it is becoming more unstable the longer the US administration blocks and dismantles existing organizational structures and puts in place it's own that depend on the US support for their existence, Iraq is not uncivilized. There are many educated people there and there are still [very] strong communities. Consider that the Iraqi people will predominantly do what their clerical leaders will tell them, and that the clerical leaders fall into a handfull of close knit groups - well you would have some power struggling between the groups but it wouldn't be the every man for himself scenario that the West seems to envisage.
Within weeks of Saddam's fall, democratic elections had been held in many areas and people had organized tens of thousands of volunteers to take care of issues such as refuse collections and hospital meals. Now the elections weren't quite up to my standards of democracy - one man from each household was given a vote - but they did appear to be fair.
And then the US administration began imposing their own people through the agency of RTI - a corporation hired for the task. Emerging organizational structures - even democratic ones, were hamstrung or squashed because they were not 'legitimate,' (Paul Bremmer's words). RTI also piss me off because their a corporation with a
So I'll stress again that pulling out would create a power struggle, but I don't think the assumption that it's only the US army preventing total social breakdown is even close to supported. The US strategy is to remain long enough to cement the power structures that it wants, so that any attempted usurption of them can only take place through uprisings and violence. Specific examples are such things as US supported politicians, business contracts and management and - importantly - the details of various agreements about oil and military forces. The 'breaking' of these agreements [regardless of what 'government' made them] would provide pretext for further punishment of Iraq.
Oh the shame of it. Missed an escape character for my '<'
Never mind my karma, there goes my self-respect...
Here's a sub-120 character version: *Ahem*
Here's a "He who fights monsters should take care, lest he himself become a monster." - Nietzche. *Ahem*
The question is, how long will this book remain satire?
Hold on, I'm confused. What does all this debate about who Kerry did or didn't shoot in Vietnam have to do with his stated policies on the economy, international affairs, etc.
I mean that's what the election is about, isn't it? Ermmm, isn't it?
Well, this is hardly news to us on
No doubt that'll change over the next year.
I think if more people realise it and understand that working 20 or so hours can be enough, the world will be a happier place
And the beauty of that is if everyone does it, we may reach a new equilibrium where you don't get left behind for working 'only' 20 hours a week.
We have tractors, we have trains, we have telephones and printing presses. It's about time mankind realized it isn't still growing grain all day long to survive the winter. The only busy industries these days should be education, sports and space colonization.
Do your bit for humanity, I say - don't let your staff work too hard!
-Harmony.
And you still have to shop at Wal*Mart.
Weird, isn't it? The US economy is staggering in world terms. We hear that all the time. Yet, for the people within the US, their purchasing power isn't wildly different. There are other factors, such as the massive availablity of land, that change things such as the size of your typical house, but broadly speaking, the average US citizen isn't much better off than a european counterpart. And judging by the other posts in this thread, he works a bit harder for it too.
It's ridiculous to say the money isn't there. We have modern farming equipment, manufacturing, transport. So why aren't we all just sitting back and enjoying the rewards of a few centuries of technological development?
I think one difference is formed by what the typical citizens of a country are doing. We all compete with each other. The US citizen may be vastly richer than an eastern european, an indian or a chinese, but he lives in a land where everybody else is too. It's not possible to ease off and do a twenty-hour week because you'd get left behind. Our equilibrium is set at 37+ hours.
But that's not to say that there couldn't be another euqilibrium lower down if everyone typically worked 20 hours a week. A parallel situation would be how there used to be only one breadwinner in a household (typically the husband) and now there are two. Living costs go up and it's now much harder for there to just be a single breadwinner. We've adopted a different equilibrium, just like we've failed to adopt a different equilibrium as technology has progressed.
I think this has led to a reduction in the amount of work that 'needs' to be done. Assuming technology continues to progress and civilization doesn't slide back again, then this situation can only get more pronounced. Energy required to hold onto a job will continue to increase and benefits to the employee will continue to shrink as the 'owners' have less and less need to for them and the balance of power shifts further.
This is an aside to your post really. I don't have so much experience of working in the States, but anecdotal evidence I've picked up from Americans over here suggests that during our predominantly fewer working hours, the Europeans are more energetic in their work (read: slack less). This seems to tie into the original article nicely.