Assuming anything has intrinsic value makes your economics go to shit. Sucking down productivity for feel-good reasons reduces actual wealth, which causes a spread of poverty and human suffering.
Fortunately, we're at a stage of economic development where we can finally buff that out for good.
I was talking about a species, not an individual. We have accommodations for disabled people because some people are born with encephalitis or had a head injury, not because one girl with a brain injury showed up once and we realized all women are retarded.
Your sexual systems can be more- or less-influential on your decision system. Some people are heavily sex-driven; some aren't; some are averse; some are confused, and have a biological sex drive along with an aversion and general apathy; some are Al Bundy and are averse to sex with the wife.
I also don't judge their worth as a human being by how attractive I find them, otherwise I'd consider man people, especially men, to be worthless
I did for a while, until I learned how people work. I still don't like how highly-visible men behave in groups in this culture, but I've evaluated people on an individual level forever and eventually learned to generalize the concepts of individuals being deviant from obvious group dynamics. Also, figured out that I'd been mostly going places where I'm prone to encounter horrendous assholes as a rule.
It's a process. I guess you keep growing up until you die, or until you become intolerant of the effort and just turn into a crusty old bastard who hates the world for not fitting into his tiny views. I kind of worry about that last one.
Nope, I'm a working-class American currently employed in computer systems security and systems administration. Economics is a hobby.
You claim the policy I advocate is an ongoing disastrous failure, yet our tech sector has continuously grown faster than lay-offs and faster than immigrant labor has come in. More Americans have been put to work in the tech sector each year than the flat increase in the American population. Unemployment has fallen as low as 4.7% post-recession, although there's another one coming up soon. Middle-income households are immensely more wealthy than they were in the 80s and 90s, and even a decade ago. The upper-class has grown, and the middle-class has shrunk, indicating a transition of middle-class households to upper-class households--although our lower-class has grown as well.
The only people who have lost out are the poor, and that's because of our lackluster poverty-control policies. Our means-tested welfare systems fail to reach many families in need. HUD is a disaster, and TANF benefits have decayed in purchasing power since 1996 due to not being inflation-adjusted. Minimum wage is cost-of-living adjusted and doesn't share prosperity--and besides, doesn't guarantee a minimum weekly wage as Franklin D. Roosevelt had intended, as underemployment is rampant. Social Security's old-age, survivors, and disability insurance pensions are also COLA, and have been under continuous attack for nearly a decade, with the latest being this new budget to hurry along insolvency, coming after attempts to "save" Social Security by denying 5 million Americans disability benefits, raising the retirement age (providing benefits to fewer Americans), or tying COLA to a chained CPI (reducing the benefit).
Our system is built to keep the poor at their fixed level of poverty, not to bring them along with America's growth and prosperity. While middle-income households spend smaller proportions of their income on food, clothing, and other essentials, the bottom quintile continue to spend a solid 16% on food--although the great many things manufactured in China have eased the pressure, and their spending on clothing and various household supplies has diminished greatly. We have not built a system to support the poorest among us as Americans, but rather as an inconvenience.
The last thing we need is medieval economic policies to make the situation even worse. We need a restructuring of our welfare policies to ensure that Americans get their fair share, that the poorest are supported and included in our economic growth, and that our public aid systems actually cover the vast span of the needy instead of failing to reach the great majority of those in poverty.
Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, and we shouldn't hold people to arbitrary and artificial standards of beauty or health.
If we're evaluating physical attractiveness and beauty, then it's based in biological systems developed to maximize species survival.
The human brain has a bunch of odd facilities. There's a prototype and a template system, whereas you can identify a type of thing (computer) or a specific thing (Laptop). The fusiform gyrus supplies face and body recognition, which is why emoticons or cars look like faces.
The fusiform gyrus also supplies an identification of... well, bodies. A woman's body has a narrower waist than hips, and the waist becomes slightly-narrower when the hormonal condition changes during ovulation. That means catching sight of a narrow-waist woman with a broad bottom from behind immediately rings a bell in your brain that says "you can knock that up right now!!!" Time to propagate the species.
Humans are highly-social and build relationships and attractions on social traits as well as physical; but we do notice physical traits, and we have some hard-coded prototypes that suggest "human" versus "attractive human". The one we mostly talk about is symmetry: if your face and body aren't visibly left-right symmetrical, you're fugly.
So Hollywood wants one thing: for people to watch movies and keep the money machine rolling. People are prone to come watch the closest thing to soft porn they can get. Load up the film with beefy, oiled-up, near-naked men and hot swimsuit models and you'll sell a lot more popcorn and Reeses Pieces--and movie tickets.
This is why folks are generally attracted to larger women than the sickly, underfed models Ralph Lauren pushes, and so everyone thinks Filippa Hamilton is hot; yet you get a huge amount of vocal complaints when you tell people that Roseanne Barr is equally as attractive because no she's not. You get deviations, broader tolerances (because some people haven't been honed down by a culture pushing for slimmer waists the same way Apple pushes for slimmer phones), and other variations in population; and yet most people like a certain prototype. Even Italian women aren't generally round, but just... weighty... despite the cultural stereotype that Italians think you're too skinny if you're only a meter wide at the hips.
all they see is money and big donation. They don't give two-fucks about what's best for the nation.
"Rebuilding the nation's manufacturing base" won't create more jobs than it destroys, nor will it bring America wealth. It will only bring slower economic growth and an increase in poverty among the working-class American. Thing is, nobody understands economics on that level--it takes a couple pages of analysis to work out the net impact for moving manufacture, and who really has time to spend an hour or two working out every little detail of everything they encounter?--so it's easy to sell an isolated system with access to an infinite external resource as a model of reality.
LibreOffice hemmorages on simple spread sheets and keeps locking up for several seconds to do auto-save. Google Sheets can't handle sheet-specific named ranges (it can, but won't create them, then dies when you try to mess with named ranges if there are sheet-specific named ranges).
Anxiety and stress tolerance can be improved in general. Humans are capable of learning new mental behaviors, and have similar capacities across population due to having the same facilities.
I'm not sure how to interpret Schmitt's comment. It seems obvious that a difference in general population doesn't conclude a difference in a specific individual; and, as I've said, such individuals can alter those particulars by intent.
The basic premise here is that women are, in general, more-emotional and more-reactionary than men, as a downstream effect of anxiety and stress response. There are, however, many men with anger management issues and other impulse-control problems. Many such men have had to learn to moderate themselves, to suppress their emotional responses, and thus to control their lives. That facility is no different in capacity in women.
Further, people develop those facilities naturally when needed, in general. People placed through traumatic stress generally have better-developed, more-mature defense mechanisms. That suggests that a woman determined to follow an unorthodox interest would have an advantage in developing those facilities so as to cope with the stress generated. Likewise, reducing the threshold of effort required to attend a task--"motivation"--improves success, and so the interest in developing skill and fitting to a particular interest would reduce the effort applied if said woman intentionally took to improving any anxiety and stress-response behaviors.
So, regardless of Damore's intent, I don't believe what he suggested about women necessarily means women are ultimately inferior to men. It would be incorrect to suggest women carry a general lower intellectual capacity, as well. The most you could reasonably conclude is that women tend to direct their intellectual capacity differently, which means a woman with an interest in any particular subject--legal, project management, computer programming, engineering, the like--can develop that interest into a competent career skill on par with general human intelligence just as well as a man, albeit such an interest may be less-common.
As a specific example: many women develop into project managers. They tend to be fantastic bureaucrats and powerful leaders, although more men are interested in the field. Many notable project managers are women--such as the late Rita Mulcahy, one of the leading authorities on project management, whose training material is still maintained by her own institute and considered of the highest standard by those studying the field. The strain only breaks the ones who aren't trying.
This is all sort of implied by the assertion that diversity is anything more than a human rights issue sacrificing efficiency for equality. If we're taken to the ideal that a diverse workplace is better, then we must assume different people are equally-capable, and may bring different approaches to problems. That is, in fact, exactly how it works: bringing people of different cultural backgrounds, life experiences, and other such things together avoids a lockstep group-think and generates more varied solutions to problems, which we can then evaluate and select between. This is a well-understood concept among students of organizational problem-solving.
The bigger problem--which everyone ignores--is that our education system doesn't work to maximize human intellect. We teach kids facts and figures, but not the skilled use of the mind. The smart kids are the ones who stumble on it by mistake, and they usually don't notice the difference because they don't work out how other people think--only that what they think is wrong.
Having different interest and different modes of thinking doesn't imply a decreased mental capacity. People aren't smart; they're simply obsessive, and so invest very little energy in those things for which they carry a great deal of interest. My basic understanding is that Damore pointed this out in some impolitic manner, or that people are just reactionary to a fault.
Take this for example:
most of us would want them to build a system with agents that are compassionate. How will that happen if all of it is run by men who live like we are all on an island like the Lord of the Flies?
It shouldn't take very long for someone to interpret this as a statement that men are testosterone-driven gits with no compassion, rather than that the specific men in question are testosterone-driven gits and that other men aren't. People are patently-bad at reflecting long on what has been said, and patently-good at forcing it into a shape that fits their ideals and gives them reason to attack something they don't like.
Your mannerism also shows a lack of emotional suppression--a difficult trait to develop. Men are bad at this but somehow get a pass, causing a great deal of trouble in our world as a result; women are also bad at this, but are noticed more for making quick emotional leaps and running with them. This puts you at a disadvantage in finding civilized conversation: people will ignore any valid points and instead point to your behavior--and we're particularly-good at finding ways to amplify others's emotional behavior, so you'll be under attack by way of aggravating your emotions so as to make your behavior ridiculous and undermine your credibility.
I would suggest a brief study of George Valliant's categorization of defense mechanisms. You will find most people in general are immature; and also that the "mature" category of defense mechanisms are, in general, powerful tools to shield yourself from attack. Armed with this (and perhaps a study of written and verbal communication), you become quite difficult to attack in debate and discourse; such stability draws respect. Mind you, defense mechanisms are built through pain--even recognizing a personal weakness hurts, a lot--which is one of the reasons suppression is so damned useful.
Mind you, I have a slight advantage: I don't have the same social need as everyone else. I've been badgered and tormented throughout my childhood, but I didn't have the necessary facilities to care all that much, aside from the momentary irritation. Your situation is understandable and relatable, but... not one I can really share, aside from the obvious recognition that you've spent your life surrounded by assholes. Perhaps they suffer from some kind of anti-social personality disorder and require social validation by the infliction of torment; or a simple inferiority complex, requiring reinforcement of their social status with those around them; or maybe they're just attracted to you and have no idea how to handle that. People are strange.
Good luck. You sound like someone who needs power; hopefully the above helps you attend that need. Never underestimate the value of possessing a better response-inhibition system than the people trying to attack you.
Sorry, but it doesn't work like that. If you don't speak up for yourself, others will decide to speak up for you; and then people will attribute that to you, and you'll have to deal with the fall-out.
If people are making an issue of something you don't think is an issue, and they're doing it on your behalf, the best thing for you to do is step in and drag the conversation back to reality. People will want to pull things far-left, other people will want to pull things far-right, and the correct place--optimal or objective, depending on whether we're debating a solution or examining the state of a problem--is somewhere left-leaning, right-leaning, or nearly dead-center. If the problem they're debating is purportedly your problem, you should probably step in before they take this problem they've invent it and burden you with it.
If globalization were such a great policy why has US median income stagnated for almost 20 years?
20 years ago, I could get the kind of high-speed Internet I have at my house for $58,000/month.
20 years ago, many of the standard and low-level economy-package features in cars--luxury features, safety features, power windows, power seats, nice stereos--were high-end luxury items that cost quite a lot.
20 years ago, it was technically-possible to make computers quite fast and with much storage; such computers were of much lower specification than the ones used today, and cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
20 years ago, people in middle-income households spent a larger proportion of their income on food and clothing, and yet they ate more food at home instead of dining out so frequently as they do today.
20 years ago, the home energy bill was a larger proportion of the middle-income for a house of the same space.
20 years ago, cell phone service had limited minutes, and cost nearly a hundred dollars a month. Data transfer was measured by-the-megabyte--if you had it at all. The phones had few features, yet cost hundreds of dollars. People asked why a cell phone cost $400.
20 years ago, the middle-income gave a standard-of-living that's laughable by today's standards. Your quaint little third-world country of 1995 was a world of few luxuries, little income, and much expense--and you thought you were well-off because you had a telephone that could go three rooms away without a cord! The neatest thing was the $80 device that answered phone calls for you and recorded them without requiring a cassette tape, allowing you to instantly skip messages, erase messages in the middle, and do all kinds of other magical things.
Anti-lock brakes had been optional up until 2004 in Europe; in 2013, the United States made anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control mandatory for all newly-sold passenger cars. Back in the 90s, these things cost hundreds of dollars to add onto a base-model car. Even with all these fancy upgrades, people pay the same proportion of their income for a car, and just end up with much-better cars than they would have bought 20 years ago.
The US median income has become capable of purchasing more and more every year. That means it's been increasing, not stagnate. Of course I understand nobody told you that, so you just repeat what you've heard over and over.
America in the past was mainly agricultural, and then technology changed and agriculture became cheap. We export a lot of that, and import some.
The economic situation which made local manufacture a good idea has changed. This isn't causally tied to a police state, either.
As for widespread poverty, let's take some facts about pants manufacture. The import of men and boys's cotton trousers and shorts amounts to around 178,000 total jobs before they're dropped off at a U.S. port. That's 0.11% of the population; the other 90% (consumers under ~$140k income). In short: the effect on price of moving the jobs here is massive; the positive effect on employment and the spending power of these employees is minimal.
So what happens?
if we manufactured pants in America instead of importing them from China and paid the factory workers minimum-wage, then minimum-wage workers across the country would spend 3 hours working instead of 1.8 hours to buy a pair of pants, while people making the median $28/hr income would expend 0.8 hours instead of 0.5 hours. In other words: work longer to buy the same thing. As you raise the factory-worker wage, the factory workers become more-capable of buying pants (0.11% of employed population), but the remainder of the working-class have to expend even more time to purchase said pants (89.89% of employed population). Of course the rich just buy expensive Italian imports or whatever $1,500 American-made, custom-tailored suits they buy now.
But wait, there's more!
Because this labor-time is exchanged to these workers, it's not exchanged to any other worker, whereas formerly it bought other things. That means a reduction of those jobs. So we're talking about moving from McDonalds to the factory, right?
... not quite.
Each truck carries the same amount of pants--or hamburger patties, or shoes, or stupid fidget spinners. If we spend more money for the same pair of pants--or, more precisely, more labor-hours's wage on the same pants--then less of something must ship, be that fewer pants, fewer burgers, or fewer Gameboys. That means fewer truck-driver hours, and fewer trucker jobs.
Likewise, your local FedEx guy carries only so much on his truck, or else your local retail cashier makes only 980 item-scans per hour. Fewer items delivered (by ship-to-home or by retail) means fewer of these workers.
Overall, you might break even with a sub-minimum wage; by the time you hit minimum wage plus social insurances (which are taken as payroll taxes), management overhead, and the cost of equipment maintenance, you're already net-losing jobs. The jobs you keep by-the-numbers are themselves stripped from other industries (hence the net loss: you create 8,000 and lose 10,000, obviously those 8,000 were taken from other industries), and represent a disruption to someone else's life by job loss, but whatever.
So I ask you: why the fuck would anyone advocate raising the amount of time the great, vast masses of Americans need to work to afford the same goods, thus requiring either 60-hour work weeks or a lower standard-of-living and a greater spread of poverty while reducing the total available jobs, only to place some minuscule number of Americans into a specific type of job which will not enrich them so much as the jobs available now? Why do we want America to face greater unemployment and deeper poverty? Why do we want to lower the standards of the middle-class, and kick many of the poor below survival levels?
If what you're doing isn't causing a problem for anyone, it should be harder to arrest you for it. You generate more evidence (and more attention searching for evidence) when you're causing actual trouble.
I don't appreciate the right of people to say things I don't like, largely because the things I don't like to hear are--obviously--things I think are objectional. You're obviously a terrible person for being a nazi, because the collection of knowledge I have leads me to believe this is a valid determination of you and your entire message if you're a nazi.
That doesn't mean I should be given the power to stop you from saying things I don't like.
We have exactly one acceptable system of mob rule, and that's government. When enough people have yelled loudly enough, the government changes the rules through a bureaucratic process involving campaigning, election, public scrutiny, open publication of new laws as they form, disclosure of who supported those laws and who suggested what parts, and so forth. It's hard to get new laws passed; and if you do something a lot of people don't like, you get thrown out, and now you're not allowed to make laws anymore.
If we changed the rules every time some small, loud group of millions of people in a country of hundreds of millions of people started shouting loudly that something must be done, we'd be back to lynching. Last time we had that, it was mostly white people lynching black people for being inconvenient or, frequently, just because the world would supposedly be better with fewer blacks; this is not a part of our history I'd like to repeat. Mind you, now we'll essentially lynch you for lynching someone; and that took decades of public outcry and political campaigning for human rights to set to law, and then more decades to get enforced--the court actually didn't enforce anti-lynching laws until 30 years after they'd passed.
So okay, we have assholes over here. I'm not comfortable with a group of corporations taking it upon themselves to make these assholes unpersons by their own decree, on a whim, to play up to a temporary media spectacle and gain the favor of the public. Each of them decides unilaterally to further restrict the span of a person's freedoms, rather than arguing to consensus on the degree to which a person's freedoms might or might not be restricted overall and by what stated rules.
If the entire market decides to not do business with you, you starve for lack of capacity to draw income or--even with a state welfare--to purchase food from grocers who refuse to conduct business with you. The destruction of a person's freedom, his livelihood, and his life is no trivial thing, and should not be at the whims of the public attention, but rather at the public at-large via the representation of democracy and the bureaucracy of government to fulfill that duty of representation.
This is becoming a popular debate today. Even the recent trial-by-media of James Damore has drawn a fair bout of criticism, largely technical in nature by those who feel he was suggesting a fair perspective on the nature, value, and limits of diversity rather than a simple attack on women; yet there remains a large undertone that a person should be given the right of due process and just consideration, rather than a lynch-mob responding without a careful weighing of facts and a corporate sacrifice to appease the howling masses.
I wonder if this will become an important political topic in some future term, after the common man becomes an effective politician who has to cover his identity and watch what he posts to Twitter for fear of setting off a media attack and corporate blacklisting against himself.
It's because nobody noticed our original legal framework was set up to make sure you can get away with your crimes.
If you go out raping and murdering, people are going to notice. It's going to leave evidence, it's going to draw attention, it's going to put you at risk. People care, people start trying to identify who is doing all this raping and murdering, and your strange movements and behaviors start creating patterns which we can see (and which upset people).
Let me remind you the Unabomber was caught because his manifesto included the phrase "right-wing logicians" a lot. More-subtle things have given people away.
If you're selling heroin and meth, you're damaging people around you. In a competitive black market, you're causing disruption. Trouble, noise, and attention tends to flow your way. If you're smoking pot in your basement on the weekends... nobody cares. People might care in general, and think that those sort should be rounded up and locked away from civilized society; but you're not causing a problem, you're not drawing attention, and nobody's looking your way.
It's actually more-damaging for society if the police roll in and arrest you, because now we have to deal with you. You cost us money, you tie up our justice system, and generally things are now complicated. That doesn't even begin to touch on people who are innocent of a crime framed by circumstantial evidence.
We're often told people are guilty of a myriad of crimes, and we just need to build a case. Our constitution tried to build a framework to make that case really hard to build unless you did something actually important.
Being more-likely to be shot if you're X than Y isn't impacted by how much of the total population are X or Y. If the two values aren't equal, something is different.
Being more-likely to be X or Y if you're shot is impacted by how much of the population is X or Y. If it's not proportional to population, something's different in those too situations.
That doesn't suggest what the difference may be. Likewise, there are other interesting comparisons: are you more-likely to be accused or convicted of a crime under one set of circumstances than another, given similar circumstances otherwise? E.g. if you're black, white, rich, poor, living in Detroit, living in San Francisco, or whatever, and a certain set of circumstances occur which lead you to be a suspect in a crime, do those circumstances also lead to conviction equally as-often? (We can't ask if you're found guilty of the crime more-frequently when you're not guilty because the courts determine that, and so the answer is of course not to the best of our knowledge.)
The fiddly bits in your life won't make your life fall apart. Failed romantic goals, failed career goals, failure in school, failure to pay your mortgage, and severe medical issues will make your life fall apart.
Old people are way past school, family, and career building; they have an income source (retirement fund, pension), medical issues, and any remaining bills (rent, and possibly the tail end of a mortgage). Those things are stable thanks to social security and medicare. When they cease to be stable, your life is now threatened--people don't like that.
Rebuilding America's manufacturing base would result in Americans at all levels (especially the poor) being poorer and America's job market shrinking in total. Why is this considered a good thing?
It's too late for the Republicans. Have you seen the new budget? Everyone is pissed off. Social Security's 2016 report says the Trust is insolvent by 2034 (last page); the new 2018 budget reduces tax funding flowing into Social Security. The AARP, anyone who follows NASI, and even many of our current-generation are quite unhappy about this, and... well, there goes your voter sentiment.
America's aging population and you fucked around with retirement. I get a pass on that because I'm making it more-stable to ensure people get what we promised; you cut benefits, reduce funding, and jeopardize the entire system, you only get roasted. Old people don't have a lot of shit to deal with anymore; you touch their last source of survival, they don't forget for a long time. Medicare and social security will be your downfall if you intend to cut benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, a low UID! That guy's got to have some money!
Can I interest you in saving social security from insolvency today?
(It's too early, I'm bored, and my brain needs a break from trying to learn2politics)
Assuming anything has intrinsic value makes your economics go to shit. Sucking down productivity for feel-good reasons reduces actual wealth, which causes a spread of poverty and human suffering.
Fortunately, we're at a stage of economic development where we can finally buff that out for good.
I was talking about a species, not an individual. We have accommodations for disabled people because some people are born with encephalitis or had a head injury, not because one girl with a brain injury showed up once and we realized all women are retarded.
Your sexual systems can be more- or less-influential on your decision system. Some people are heavily sex-driven; some aren't; some are averse; some are confused, and have a biological sex drive along with an aversion and general apathy; some are Al Bundy and are averse to sex with the wife.
I also don't judge their worth as a human being by how attractive I find them, otherwise I'd consider man people, especially men, to be worthless
I did for a while, until I learned how people work. I still don't like how highly-visible men behave in groups in this culture, but I've evaluated people on an individual level forever and eventually learned to generalize the concepts of individuals being deviant from obvious group dynamics. Also, figured out that I'd been mostly going places where I'm prone to encounter horrendous assholes as a rule.
It's a process. I guess you keep growing up until you die, or until you become intolerant of the effort and just turn into a crusty old bastard who hates the world for not fitting into his tiny views. I kind of worry about that last one.
Nope, I'm a working-class American currently employed in computer systems security and systems administration. Economics is a hobby.
You claim the policy I advocate is an ongoing disastrous failure, yet our tech sector has continuously grown faster than lay-offs and faster than immigrant labor has come in. More Americans have been put to work in the tech sector each year than the flat increase in the American population. Unemployment has fallen as low as 4.7% post-recession, although there's another one coming up soon. Middle-income households are immensely more wealthy than they were in the 80s and 90s, and even a decade ago. The upper-class has grown, and the middle-class has shrunk, indicating a transition of middle-class households to upper-class households--although our lower-class has grown as well.
The only people who have lost out are the poor, and that's because of our lackluster poverty-control policies. Our means-tested welfare systems fail to reach many families in need. HUD is a disaster, and TANF benefits have decayed in purchasing power since 1996 due to not being inflation-adjusted. Minimum wage is cost-of-living adjusted and doesn't share prosperity--and besides, doesn't guarantee a minimum weekly wage as Franklin D. Roosevelt had intended, as underemployment is rampant. Social Security's old-age, survivors, and disability insurance pensions are also COLA, and have been under continuous attack for nearly a decade, with the latest being this new budget to hurry along insolvency, coming after attempts to "save" Social Security by denying 5 million Americans disability benefits, raising the retirement age (providing benefits to fewer Americans), or tying COLA to a chained CPI (reducing the benefit).
Our system is built to keep the poor at their fixed level of poverty, not to bring them along with America's growth and prosperity. While middle-income households spend smaller proportions of their income on food, clothing, and other essentials, the bottom quintile continue to spend a solid 16% on food--although the great many things manufactured in China have eased the pressure, and their spending on clothing and various household supplies has diminished greatly. We have not built a system to support the poorest among us as Americans, but rather as an inconvenience.
The last thing we need is medieval economic policies to make the situation even worse. We need a restructuring of our welfare policies to ensure that Americans get their fair share, that the poorest are supported and included in our economic growth, and that our public aid systems actually cover the vast span of the needy instead of failing to reach the great majority of those in poverty.
Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, and we shouldn't hold people to arbitrary and artificial standards of beauty or health.
If we're evaluating physical attractiveness and beauty, then it's based in biological systems developed to maximize species survival.
The human brain has a bunch of odd facilities. There's a prototype and a template system, whereas you can identify a type of thing (computer) or a specific thing (Laptop). The fusiform gyrus supplies face and body recognition, which is why emoticons or cars look like faces.
The fusiform gyrus also supplies an identification of... well, bodies. A woman's body has a narrower waist than hips, and the waist becomes slightly-narrower when the hormonal condition changes during ovulation. That means catching sight of a narrow-waist woman with a broad bottom from behind immediately rings a bell in your brain that says "you can knock that up right now!!!" Time to propagate the species.
Humans are highly-social and build relationships and attractions on social traits as well as physical; but we do notice physical traits, and we have some hard-coded prototypes that suggest "human" versus "attractive human". The one we mostly talk about is symmetry: if your face and body aren't visibly left-right symmetrical, you're fugly.
So Hollywood wants one thing: for people to watch movies and keep the money machine rolling. People are prone to come watch the closest thing to soft porn they can get. Load up the film with beefy, oiled-up, near-naked men and hot swimsuit models and you'll sell a lot more popcorn and Reeses Pieces--and movie tickets.
This is why folks are generally attracted to larger women than the sickly, underfed models Ralph Lauren pushes, and so everyone thinks Filippa Hamilton is hot; yet you get a huge amount of vocal complaints when you tell people that Roseanne Barr is equally as attractive because no she's not. You get deviations, broader tolerances (because some people haven't been honed down by a culture pushing for slimmer waists the same way Apple pushes for slimmer phones), and other variations in population; and yet most people like a certain prototype. Even Italian women aren't generally round, but just ... weighty... despite the cultural stereotype that Italians think you're too skinny if you're only a meter wide at the hips.
Why are there conservatives and liberals? Why can't we have a reality-based community like HN?
all they see is money and big donation. They don't give two-fucks about what's best for the nation.
"Rebuilding the nation's manufacturing base" won't create more jobs than it destroys, nor will it bring America wealth. It will only bring slower economic growth and an increase in poverty among the working-class American. Thing is, nobody understands economics on that level--it takes a couple pages of analysis to work out the net impact for moving manufacture, and who really has time to spend an hour or two working out every little detail of everything they encounter?--so it's easy to sell an isolated system with access to an infinite external resource as a model of reality.
I'm still waiting for the editor to allow creation of new styles in Google Docs.
LibreOffice hemmorages on simple spread sheets and keeps locking up for several seconds to do auto-save. Google Sheets can't handle sheet-specific named ranges (it can, but won't create them, then dies when you try to mess with named ranges if there are sheet-specific named ranges).
I seriously am considering buying Excel.
Anxiety and stress tolerance can be improved in general. Humans are capable of learning new mental behaviors, and have similar capacities across population due to having the same facilities.
I'm not sure how to interpret Schmitt's comment. It seems obvious that a difference in general population doesn't conclude a difference in a specific individual; and, as I've said, such individuals can alter those particulars by intent.
The basic premise here is that women are, in general, more-emotional and more-reactionary than men, as a downstream effect of anxiety and stress response. There are, however, many men with anger management issues and other impulse-control problems. Many such men have had to learn to moderate themselves, to suppress their emotional responses, and thus to control their lives. That facility is no different in capacity in women.
Further, people develop those facilities naturally when needed, in general. People placed through traumatic stress generally have better-developed, more-mature defense mechanisms. That suggests that a woman determined to follow an unorthodox interest would have an advantage in developing those facilities so as to cope with the stress generated. Likewise, reducing the threshold of effort required to attend a task--"motivation"--improves success, and so the interest in developing skill and fitting to a particular interest would reduce the effort applied if said woman intentionally took to improving any anxiety and stress-response behaviors.
So, regardless of Damore's intent, I don't believe what he suggested about women necessarily means women are ultimately inferior to men. It would be incorrect to suggest women carry a general lower intellectual capacity, as well. The most you could reasonably conclude is that women tend to direct their intellectual capacity differently, which means a woman with an interest in any particular subject--legal, project management, computer programming, engineering, the like--can develop that interest into a competent career skill on par with general human intelligence just as well as a man, albeit such an interest may be less-common.
As a specific example: many women develop into project managers. They tend to be fantastic bureaucrats and powerful leaders, although more men are interested in the field. Many notable project managers are women--such as the late Rita Mulcahy, one of the leading authorities on project management, whose training material is still maintained by her own institute and considered of the highest standard by those studying the field. The strain only breaks the ones who aren't trying.
This is all sort of implied by the assertion that diversity is anything more than a human rights issue sacrificing efficiency for equality. If we're taken to the ideal that a diverse workplace is better, then we must assume different people are equally-capable, and may bring different approaches to problems. That is, in fact, exactly how it works: bringing people of different cultural backgrounds, life experiences, and other such things together avoids a lockstep group-think and generates more varied solutions to problems, which we can then evaluate and select between. This is a well-understood concept among students of organizational problem-solving.
The bigger problem--which everyone ignores--is that our education system doesn't work to maximize human intellect. We teach kids facts and figures, but not the skilled use of the mind. The smart kids are the ones who stumble on it by mistake, and they usually don't notice the difference because they don't work out how other people think--only that what they think is wrong.
Having different interest and different modes of thinking doesn't imply a decreased mental capacity. People aren't smart; they're simply obsessive, and so invest very little energy in those things for which they carry a great deal of interest. My basic understanding is that Damore pointed this out in some impolitic manner, or that people are just reactionary to a fault.
Take this for example:
most of us would want them to build a system with agents that are compassionate. How will that happen if all of it is run by men who live like we are all on an island like the Lord of the Flies?
It shouldn't take very long for someone to interpret this as a statement that men are testosterone-driven gits with no compassion, rather than that the specific men in question are testosterone-driven gits and that other men aren't. People are patently-bad at reflecting long on what has been said, and patently-good at forcing it into a shape that fits their ideals and gives them reason to attack something they don't like.
Your mannerism also shows a lack of emotional suppression--a difficult trait to develop. Men are bad at this but somehow get a pass, causing a great deal of trouble in our world as a result; women are also bad at this, but are noticed more for making quick emotional leaps and running with them. This puts you at a disadvantage in finding civilized conversation: people will ignore any valid points and instead point to your behavior--and we're particularly-good at finding ways to amplify others's emotional behavior, so you'll be under attack by way of aggravating your emotions so as to make your behavior ridiculous and undermine your credibility.
I would suggest a brief study of George Valliant's categorization of defense mechanisms. You will find most people in general are immature; and also that the "mature" category of defense mechanisms are, in general, powerful tools to shield yourself from attack. Armed with this (and perhaps a study of written and verbal communication), you become quite difficult to attack in debate and discourse; such stability draws respect. Mind you, defense mechanisms are built through pain--even recognizing a personal weakness hurts, a lot--which is one of the reasons suppression is so damned useful.
Mind you, I have a slight advantage: I don't have the same social need as everyone else. I've been badgered and tormented throughout my childhood, but I didn't have the necessary facilities to care all that much, aside from the momentary irritation. Your situation is understandable and relatable, but ... not one I can really share, aside from the obvious recognition that you've spent your life surrounded by assholes. Perhaps they suffer from some kind of anti-social personality disorder and require social validation by the infliction of torment; or a simple inferiority complex, requiring reinforcement of their social status with those around them; or maybe they're just attracted to you and have no idea how to handle that. People are strange.
Good luck. You sound like someone who needs power; hopefully the above helps you attend that need. Never underestimate the value of possessing a better response-inhibition system than the people trying to attack you.
Sorry, but it doesn't work like that. If you don't speak up for yourself, others will decide to speak up for you; and then people will attribute that to you, and you'll have to deal with the fall-out.
If people are making an issue of something you don't think is an issue, and they're doing it on your behalf, the best thing for you to do is step in and drag the conversation back to reality. People will want to pull things far-left, other people will want to pull things far-right, and the correct place--optimal or objective, depending on whether we're debating a solution or examining the state of a problem--is somewhere left-leaning, right-leaning, or nearly dead-center. If the problem they're debating is purportedly your problem, you should probably step in before they take this problem they've invent it and burden you with it.
If globalization were such a great policy why has US median income stagnated for almost 20 years?
20 years ago, I could get the kind of high-speed Internet I have at my house for $58,000/month.
20 years ago, many of the standard and low-level economy-package features in cars--luxury features, safety features, power windows, power seats, nice stereos--were high-end luxury items that cost quite a lot.
20 years ago, it was technically-possible to make computers quite fast and with much storage; such computers were of much lower specification than the ones used today, and cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
20 years ago, people in middle-income households spent a larger proportion of their income on food and clothing, and yet they ate more food at home instead of dining out so frequently as they do today.
20 years ago, the home energy bill was a larger proportion of the middle-income for a house of the same space.
20 years ago, cell phone service had limited minutes, and cost nearly a hundred dollars a month. Data transfer was measured by-the-megabyte--if you had it at all. The phones had few features, yet cost hundreds of dollars. People asked why a cell phone cost $400.
20 years ago, the middle-income gave a standard-of-living that's laughable by today's standards. Your quaint little third-world country of 1995 was a world of few luxuries, little income, and much expense--and you thought you were well-off because you had a telephone that could go three rooms away without a cord! The neatest thing was the $80 device that answered phone calls for you and recorded them without requiring a cassette tape, allowing you to instantly skip messages, erase messages in the middle, and do all kinds of other magical things.
Anti-lock brakes had been optional up until 2004 in Europe; in 2013, the United States made anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control mandatory for all newly-sold passenger cars. Back in the 90s, these things cost hundreds of dollars to add onto a base-model car. Even with all these fancy upgrades, people pay the same proportion of their income for a car, and just end up with much-better cars than they would have bought 20 years ago.
The US median income has become capable of purchasing more and more every year. That means it's been increasing, not stagnate. Of course I understand nobody told you that, so you just repeat what you've heard over and over.
America in the past was mainly agricultural, and then technology changed and agriculture became cheap. We export a lot of that, and import some.
The economic situation which made local manufacture a good idea has changed. This isn't causally tied to a police state, either.
As for widespread poverty, let's take some facts about pants manufacture. The import of men and boys's cotton trousers and shorts amounts to around 178,000 total jobs before they're dropped off at a U.S. port. That's 0.11% of the population; the other 90% (consumers under ~$140k income). In short: the effect on price of moving the jobs here is massive; the positive effect on employment and the spending power of these employees is minimal.
So what happens?
if we manufactured pants in America instead of importing them from China and paid the factory workers minimum-wage, then minimum-wage workers across the country would spend 3 hours working instead of 1.8 hours to buy a pair of pants, while people making the median $28/hr income would expend 0.8 hours instead of 0.5 hours. In other words: work longer to buy the same thing. As you raise the factory-worker wage, the factory workers become more-capable of buying pants (0.11% of employed population), but the remainder of the working-class have to expend even more time to purchase said pants (89.89% of employed population). Of course the rich just buy expensive Italian imports or whatever $1,500 American-made, custom-tailored suits they buy now.
But wait, there's more!
Because this labor-time is exchanged to these workers, it's not exchanged to any other worker, whereas formerly it bought other things. That means a reduction of those jobs. So we're talking about moving from McDonalds to the factory, right?
Each truck carries the same amount of pants--or hamburger patties, or shoes, or stupid fidget spinners. If we spend more money for the same pair of pants--or, more precisely, more labor-hours's wage on the same pants--then less of something must ship, be that fewer pants, fewer burgers, or fewer Gameboys. That means fewer truck-driver hours, and fewer trucker jobs.
Likewise, your local FedEx guy carries only so much on his truck, or else your local retail cashier makes only 980 item-scans per hour. Fewer items delivered (by ship-to-home or by retail) means fewer of these workers.
Overall, you might break even with a sub-minimum wage; by the time you hit minimum wage plus social insurances (which are taken as payroll taxes), management overhead, and the cost of equipment maintenance, you're already net-losing jobs. The jobs you keep by-the-numbers are themselves stripped from other industries (hence the net loss: you create 8,000 and lose 10,000, obviously those 8,000 were taken from other industries), and represent a disruption to someone else's life by job loss, but whatever.
So I ask you: why the fuck would anyone advocate raising the amount of time the great, vast masses of Americans need to work to afford the same goods, thus requiring either 60-hour work weeks or a lower standard-of-living and a greater spread of poverty while reducing the total available jobs, only to place some minuscule number of Americans into a specific type of job which will not enrich them so much as the jobs available now? Why do we want America to face greater unemployment and deeper poverty? Why do we want to lower the standards of the middle-class, and kick many of the poor below survival levels?
If what you're doing isn't causing a problem for anyone, it should be harder to arrest you for it. You generate more evidence (and more attention searching for evidence) when you're causing actual trouble.
pretty much yeah.
I don't appreciate the right of people to say things I don't like, largely because the things I don't like to hear are--obviously--things I think are objectional. You're obviously a terrible person for being a nazi, because the collection of knowledge I have leads me to believe this is a valid determination of you and your entire message if you're a nazi.
That doesn't mean I should be given the power to stop you from saying things I don't like.
We have exactly one acceptable system of mob rule, and that's government. When enough people have yelled loudly enough, the government changes the rules through a bureaucratic process involving campaigning, election, public scrutiny, open publication of new laws as they form, disclosure of who supported those laws and who suggested what parts, and so forth. It's hard to get new laws passed; and if you do something a lot of people don't like, you get thrown out, and now you're not allowed to make laws anymore.
If we changed the rules every time some small, loud group of millions of people in a country of hundreds of millions of people started shouting loudly that something must be done, we'd be back to lynching. Last time we had that, it was mostly white people lynching black people for being inconvenient or, frequently, just because the world would supposedly be better with fewer blacks; this is not a part of our history I'd like to repeat. Mind you, now we'll essentially lynch you for lynching someone; and that took decades of public outcry and political campaigning for human rights to set to law, and then more decades to get enforced--the court actually didn't enforce anti-lynching laws until 30 years after they'd passed.
So okay, we have assholes over here. I'm not comfortable with a group of corporations taking it upon themselves to make these assholes unpersons by their own decree, on a whim, to play up to a temporary media spectacle and gain the favor of the public. Each of them decides unilaterally to further restrict the span of a person's freedoms, rather than arguing to consensus on the degree to which a person's freedoms might or might not be restricted overall and by what stated rules.
If the entire market decides to not do business with you, you starve for lack of capacity to draw income or--even with a state welfare--to purchase food from grocers who refuse to conduct business with you. The destruction of a person's freedom, his livelihood, and his life is no trivial thing, and should not be at the whims of the public attention, but rather at the public at-large via the representation of democracy and the bureaucracy of government to fulfill that duty of representation.
This is becoming a popular debate today. Even the recent trial-by-media of James Damore has drawn a fair bout of criticism, largely technical in nature by those who feel he was suggesting a fair perspective on the nature, value, and limits of diversity rather than a simple attack on women; yet there remains a large undertone that a person should be given the right of due process and just consideration, rather than a lynch-mob responding without a careful weighing of facts and a corporate sacrifice to appease the howling masses.
I wonder if this will become an important political topic in some future term, after the common man becomes an effective politician who has to cover his identity and watch what he posts to Twitter for fear of setting off a media attack and corporate blacklisting against himself.
That's not an answer.
It's because nobody noticed our original legal framework was set up to make sure you can get away with your crimes.
If you go out raping and murdering, people are going to notice. It's going to leave evidence, it's going to draw attention, it's going to put you at risk. People care, people start trying to identify who is doing all this raping and murdering, and your strange movements and behaviors start creating patterns which we can see (and which upset people).
Let me remind you the Unabomber was caught because his manifesto included the phrase "right-wing logicians" a lot. More-subtle things have given people away.
If you're selling heroin and meth, you're damaging people around you. In a competitive black market, you're causing disruption. Trouble, noise, and attention tends to flow your way. If you're smoking pot in your basement on the weekends... nobody cares. People might care in general, and think that those sort should be rounded up and locked away from civilized society; but you're not causing a problem, you're not drawing attention, and nobody's looking your way.
It's actually more-damaging for society if the police roll in and arrest you, because now we have to deal with you. You cost us money, you tie up our justice system, and generally things are now complicated. That doesn't even begin to touch on people who are innocent of a crime framed by circumstantial evidence.
We're often told people are guilty of a myriad of crimes, and we just need to build a case. Our constitution tried to build a framework to make that case really hard to build unless you did something actually important.
Being more-likely to be shot if you're X than Y isn't impacted by how much of the total population are X or Y. If the two values aren't equal, something is different.
Being more-likely to be X or Y if you're shot is impacted by how much of the population is X or Y. If it's not proportional to population, something's different in those too situations.
That doesn't suggest what the difference may be. Likewise, there are other interesting comparisons: are you more-likely to be accused or convicted of a crime under one set of circumstances than another, given similar circumstances otherwise? E.g. if you're black, white, rich, poor, living in Detroit, living in San Francisco, or whatever, and a certain set of circumstances occur which lead you to be a suspect in a crime, do those circumstances also lead to conviction equally as-often? (We can't ask if you're found guilty of the crime more-frequently when you're not guilty because the courts determine that, and so the answer is of course not to the best of our knowledge.)
The fiddly bits in your life won't make your life fall apart. Failed romantic goals, failed career goals, failure in school, failure to pay your mortgage, and severe medical issues will make your life fall apart.
Old people are way past school, family, and career building; they have an income source (retirement fund, pension), medical issues, and any remaining bills (rent, and possibly the tail end of a mortgage). Those things are stable thanks to social security and medicare. When they cease to be stable, your life is now threatened--people don't like that.
ZeroHedge is a raving conspiracy site. You get the same ridicule as citing Mercola.
Rebuilding America's manufacturing base would result in Americans at all levels (especially the poor) being poorer and America's job market shrinking in total. Why is this considered a good thing?
You forgot the #PizzaGate hashtag.
It's too late for the Republicans. Have you seen the new budget? Everyone is pissed off. Social Security's 2016 report says the Trust is insolvent by 2034 (last page); the new 2018 budget reduces tax funding flowing into Social Security. The AARP, anyone who follows NASI, and even many of our current-generation are quite unhappy about this, and ... well, there goes your voter sentiment.
America's aging population and you fucked around with retirement. I get a pass on that because I'm making it more-stable to ensure people get what we promised; you cut benefits, reduce funding, and jeopardize the entire system, you only get roasted. Old people don't have a lot of shit to deal with anymore; you touch their last source of survival, they don't forget for a long time. Medicare and social security will be your downfall if you intend to cut benefits.
No evidence, just "you're stupid if you can't see it."