By that logic every president worth his salt should be impeached. The "great" presidents were the ones that creatively interpreted or outright broke the law - it is history that place the violations as great advances or horrible steps backwards.
On the contrary, offshoring has been part of the steady erosion of the middle class, and it doesn't receive enough attention. During the post-war boom, it was common to graduate high school and make $20 an hour at a unionized manufacturing job. Good luck doing that today; many struggle to make that much with a college degree.
Ahhh the romanticism of the post-war boom. The facts don't support the idea that the American family was better off in 1950 than it was today, nor does it support that manufacturing has lost it's place in the US economy
First went the unions, then went the manufacturing, and now the white collar jobs are leaving, and all so the top 1% can see their annual 15% increase in income. Smashing, yea capitalism.
No, all so consumers can buy a $20 HD-DVD player. Companies wouldn't take the significant risk of outsourcing unless there was competitive pressure to reduce prices.
In the same way right-to-work laws free workers from having to pay a thousand dollars a year in union dues AND making another five dollars an hour with twice as much vacation time. It's a penny wise, pound stupid decision, because the vast majority of all cost reductions are not passed down to the consumer, they just go straight into the executives' pockets.
It's a double-edge sword. Maybe the union worker gets extra benefits, but they get locked into a system that often promotes longevity over meritocracy. I'm still not sure where you get the idea that the majority of cost reductions are not passed down. Costs for necessities have decreased, the price for manufactured goods has decreased, and the share of worker income spent in these areas has decreased.
But you said "Stay-at-home parents, for example, are unemployed under that thought process," which are workers not actively looking for work. That number is captured in the labor participation rate. The 5.5% unemployment rate is the number of people in the civilian workforce actively looking for work but are not employed. If you want to extend it by including those who want a job but aren't searching the unemployment rate is 9% though the majority of those workers aren't looking because of reasons other than being discouraged.
I've been countered with that argument before. It's based on the number of people of working age who are not working. Stay-at-home parents, for example, are unemployed under that thought process.
By your definition we're really examining the non-working % of the population which would be: (# looking but can't find work + # not looking for work) = (unemployment rate*labor participation rate)+(1-labor participation rate)
based on Apr 2008 numbers (5.5%*65.8%)+(1-65.8%) = 37.8% working age population not employed Given your definition the labor participation rate is the key driver when examining the total population. The problem with using that number is the demographic breakdown doesn't necessarily reflect the true nature of what generally is considered the core workforce. It includes non-adults(16-18) who are dependents, and retirees(60+) who no longer need to work. Yes the unemployment rate does miss the part of the population that has left the labor pool because they couldn't find a job, but that is a small percentage of workers compared to those who choose to not work for other reasons.
Just to play devil's advocate... There are plenty of countries that can do just about everything we can, for slave wages. Why not just outsource all of our jobs?
Because in many cases it doesn't make business sense. Almost half the time outsourcing fails. And with oil prices rising the ROI for labor cost is becoming negative. For the most part, outsourcing is the worker's boogeyman, something that is blown out of proportion.
would certainly be more profitable for the wealthy
Outsourcing is also beneficial for anybody who is a consumer. A successful "buy American" campaign would curb outsourcing, of course those things never work because outsourcing benefits more people than it hurts. Outsourcing (and automation) may negatively impact employment in a specific industry, but the cost reduction for goods and services results in a net benefit for the economy overall.
Whats the point of employing people? What is our responsibility to our communities?
Jobs don't exist to employ people, they exist to meet the needs of people. Would you like somebody coming up to your door and demand you pay them to landscape your yard? What is the responsibility of the consumer? It is they who hold the ultimate power over corporations. For some reason they are willing to pay $600 for a $10 purse because of a name, why wouldn't they pay extra for a product made domestically.
I think the key problem was once the adventure game genre dried up, Lucas arts couldn't reinvent themselves and ended up with just the Star Wars franchise to exploit.
he's laying off experienced, skilled american labor who have demonstrated their loyalty for god knows how many years of work to replace them with offshore labor.
Just to play devil's advocate, how many of those employees would have decided to leave and work for a foreign company if they thought they'd get paid more.
I just don't see it. Only one person can save the galaxy. I don't want to have to compete with thousands of people to be that person.
Didn't you watch the movies? Thousands of people helped save the galaxy, in fact the primary "hero" of the OT didn't even play a major role in the final battle, he was busy having father-son bonding time.
Yes models are good for a rough starting point, but you get a much higher level of confidence by actual experimentation. A weather model won't be able to take into account whether your house is next to a mountain and is shaded in the afternoon, or that it blocks the prevailing wind. Any model has to make assumptions which leads to inaccuracy.
I also have a personal argument for the laptops; the quality of my public education, at least for me, was shoddy at best. Teachers at my schools were horrible at what they did; I'd say about 5% of my graduating class from high school were even taught calculus and approximately 75% of all students could barely do algebra I.
From my limited experience, technology only magnifies a person's characteristics. Somebody who wants to learn will be able to learn more, workaholics will work more, goof-offs will just find new ways to be distracted. Do you think the kids who don't care about math in the classroom will suddenly be motivated to learn online? More likely they will use the computer to actively pursue their own interests and hobbies.
but imagine what the kid learns when they play King's Quest (and other adventure games with the verbal command prompt)
Forget cranking numbers or solving equations. Engineers (and most people who work in technical or scientific areas) need logic and abstractions, both of which you can learn while doing abstract mathematics.
You can learn the same in a philosophy, science, programming, or a number of academic classes.
People who fail their Calculus I course will not be able to set up the equation nor will they have any idea which equation they actually have to set up.
There's a big difference between setting up a calc equation and going through the motions of solving it. Most classtime was spent teaching techniques on solving equations (that was pretty much my entire diffEQ course), rather than the much simpler process to set them up.
How are we to advance beyond the 'calculator' stage if we don't know how they do they math?
You make the assumption that we should only teach math 1 way, no matter what the student's requirements. Most people in this world can survive without a deep understanding of how math works, they need to understand the proper method of applying it.
How is my 17 year old daughter going to know that the answer the calculator gives is correct? Does she just assume? Do you remember the math bugs in Excel? In the early Pentium processors?
Calculators are tools, and should be treated as such. Do you do a measurement capability analysis of your car's speedometer, or measure a 2x4 to ensure it is within tolerance? The much beloved slide rule had inherent errors in accuracy, but it was still indispensible for engineering applications. Calculating algorithms are researched, published, and peer reviewed, that is how you can have some assumption on the accuracy of calculators. That said, IEEE or ISO should have standards on how calculator accuracy (if they already don't) just like most other tools used in engineering.
Yeah, less time consuming and more accurate to use a calculator... right... so that's why I have to tell other students to be suspicious of what the calc or computer tells them... because oftentimes their dumb selves enter the numbers in wrong, 'so of course an apple weighs 2.3 tonnes.' I fear the day that my life may one day depend on the things that they design.
In this case students don't need to understand the underlying math theory, they need to understand how to use their tools correctly. The same mistake could happen if they were doing the calculation by hand, and infact would be more likely to occur. More important than doing the math is applying logic. Understand initial assumptions, set up the equation(s), and question the number if it is outside of the expected. There's a reason more and more work is done using computer simulations, computing power is cheap so you can "brute force" answers much faster than trying to come up with an elegant solution. As I mentioned in another post one of the key things my vector calc teacher stressed was getting the equations setup correctly, because engineers will more often use computers to solve problems than wasting time to do things by hand.
You didn't mention what type of engineer you are. Computer/software/hardware, perhaps? Then yes, I'd agree that programming logic, vector operations, and the like are probably a valuable intellectual commodity. But I know many engineers who work day in and day out designing things, and this takes more than a simplistic knowledge of how to perform statistical computations.
I work as a process engineer (ChemE, Mat Sci background) - and rarely have needed to use anything beyond statistical computations. The real world is far too complex to boil down to a few equations and still retain the accuracy needed. Calculus can help you understand research papers and fundamental models of what's going on, but actually making something has far too many variables to solve on paper.
A good statistically valid experiment will get you much more accurate results than all the modeling in the world. It's the difference between a weather simulator and going outside.
Namely, avoid negative numbers showing up in the bank account. Or how about interest? I know I'd love to get my politicians to understand that paying the debt off now means paying less years down the road. But, such is life.
It'd be nice if most engineers understood economics and history. Negative numbers are not bad, only negative numbers you can't justify are bad.
Slashdotters are an anomaly because our careers and interests require us to do maths all the time. If the future historians are allowed to slack off on their trig tests, so what? They weren't going to be engineers anyway.
In my experience even most engineers don't do math beyond simple algebra and maybe trig. The most useful math for any engineer is statistics, which gives you a way to quantify the gap between theory and reality, because reality is just too damn complicated.
Calculus is useful to read research papers, but it's real world application is limited. As my vector calc teacher put it, "half of your grade will be based on setting up the equation right, because once you get out of this classroom you'll just put the equation into a computer and it will come up with a faster and more accurate answer."
Awesome! Can you please post instructions for how to do this using drugs instead of files?
You could take the house swap approach, set up a website so that travellers leave drugs in their home country for others to pick up in exchange for the ability to pick up drugs when they travel to another country. This could be setup much faster than waiting for IEEE to pass the 1337a standard.
They said they can't put their servers in Sweden, but US/UK etc is fine? What is the differance?
Perhaps the difference is who they primarily serve? If most requests come from the US or UK, then placing servers within the country reduces Googles exposure to surveillance because the transmissions are domestic not international.
Thus, humanity will achieve a transcendent (meaning, free from the burdens of material existence) state of being.
It is this point that requires a "leap of faith." By it's nature the singularity does not conform to historical inference. It is specifically defined as the point in time where such logic breaks down. As such, the results could be "nerdvana" or the "nerpocolypse," there is no way of knowing.
However, since it won't be bound by the very slow (if moving at all) process of evolution, it will be able to evolve itself (by adding to itself or building more advanced beings that we couldn't do ourselves), and then the cycle continues but at a very fast pace.
That is the fundamental flaw I see in the theory. We are extrapoliting the rate of change in computers and AI now out to much more complex systems. As you point out, AIs will at some point need to interact with the natural world and deal with limited resources, actively search for input, hardware degradation and competition which will suffocate the exponential growth seen now.
I already am a god compared to someone living 200 years ago.
To quote Khan from Star Trek - "In fact I am surprised how little improvement there has been in human evolution. Oh there has been technical advancement, but, how little man himself has changed." We are still driven and controlled by the same basic instincts and suffer from the same failings as 200 years ago. Humans pretty much look like the people living 20,000 years ago, and function the same way - eat and have babies
When the birth, reproduce, die cycle is broken - whether through genetics, technology, or both, we will become "gods." Because at that point the fundamental trappings and desires inherent in human design will be overcome and we will be forced to rethink everything about our being.
Lol, there will be no massive changes in the world when ordinary desktop computers are capable of processing on the order of ten septillion operations per second...
Have a little imagination... Solitaire with an awesome AI & 3D Graphics!
On the other hand, if we develop beings with an artificial intelligence equal to the smartest scientists, they could potentially develop a second generation that would be improved.
The scientists could just get laid, have kids and accomplish the same thing:)
Slashdot Mirror
By that logic every president worth his salt should be impeached.
The "great" presidents were the ones that creatively interpreted or outright broke the law - it is history that place the violations as great advances or horrible steps backwards.
No, all so consumers can buy a $20 HD-DVD player. Companies wouldn't take the significant risk of outsourcing unless there was competitive pressure to reduce prices.
It's a double-edge sword. Maybe the union worker gets extra benefits, but they get locked into a system that often promotes longevity over meritocracy.
I'm still not sure where you get the idea that the majority of cost reductions are not passed down. Costs for necessities have decreased, the price for manufactured goods has decreased, and the share of worker income spent in these areas has decreased.
But you said "Stay-at-home parents, for example, are unemployed under that thought process," which are workers not actively looking for work. That number is captured in the labor participation rate.
The 5.5% unemployment rate is the number of people in the civilian workforce actively looking for work but are not employed.
If you want to extend it by including those who want a job but aren't searching the unemployment rate is 9% though the majority of those workers aren't looking because of reasons other than being discouraged.
(# looking but can't find work + # not looking for work) =
(unemployment rate*labor participation rate)+(1-labor participation rate)
based on Apr 2008 numbers
(5.5%*65.8%)+(1-65.8%) = 37.8% working age population not employed
Given your definition the labor participation rate is the key driver when examining the total population. The problem with using that number is the demographic breakdown doesn't necessarily reflect the true nature of what generally is considered the core workforce. It includes non-adults(16-18) who are dependents, and retirees(60+) who no longer need to work.
Yes the unemployment rate does miss the part of the population that has left the labor pool because they couldn't find a job, but that is a small percentage of workers compared to those who choose to not work for other reasons.
What assumptions are made for that 11%?
Outsourcing is also beneficial for anybody who is a consumer. A successful "buy American" campaign would curb outsourcing, of course those things never work because outsourcing benefits more people than it hurts. Outsourcing (and automation) may negatively impact employment in a specific industry, but the cost reduction for goods and services results in a net benefit for the economy overall.
Jobs don't exist to employ people, they exist to meet the needs of people. Would you like somebody coming up to your door and demand you pay them to landscape your yard?
What is the responsibility of the consumer? It is they who hold the ultimate power over corporations. For some reason they are willing to pay $600 for a $10 purse because of a name, why wouldn't they pay extra for a product made domestically.
I think the key problem was once the adventure game genre dried up, Lucas arts couldn't reinvent themselves and ended up with just the Star Wars franchise to exploit.
A few years later: http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeID=0fd921112e08096673a1100050fb4df1
Yup Vader is still a whiney little bitch
Yes models are good for a rough starting point, but you get a much higher level of confidence by actual experimentation. A weather model won't be able to take into account whether your house is next to a mountain and is shaded in the afternoon, or that it blocks the prevailing wind.
Any model has to make assumptions which leads to inaccuracy.
They will learn no matter how hard they try, they cannot get ye flask
There's a big difference between setting up a calc equation and going through the motions of solving it. Most classtime was spent teaching techniques on solving equations (that was pretty much my entire diffEQ course), rather than the much simpler process to set them up.
Calculating algorithms are researched, published, and peer reviewed, that is how you can have some assumption on the accuracy of calculators. That said, IEEE or ISO should have standards on how calculator accuracy (if they already don't) just like most other tools used in engineering.
More important than doing the math is applying logic. Understand initial assumptions, set up the equation(s), and question the number if it is outside of the expected. There's a reason more and more work is done using computer simulations, computing power is cheap so you can "brute force" answers much faster than trying to come up with an elegant solution. As I mentioned in another post one of the key things my vector calc teacher stressed was getting the equations setup correctly, because engineers will more often use computers to solve problems than wasting time to do things by hand.
A good statistically valid experiment will get you much more accurate results than all the modeling in the world. It's the difference between a weather simulator and going outside.
Calculus is useful to read research papers, but it's real world application is limited. As my vector calc teacher put it, "half of your grade will be based on setting up the equation right, because once you get out of this classroom you'll just put the equation into a computer and it will come up with a faster and more accurate answer."
This could be setup much faster than waiting for IEEE to pass the 1337a standard.
By it's nature the singularity does not conform to historical inference. It is specifically defined as the point in time where such logic breaks down. As such, the results could be "nerdvana" or the "nerpocolypse," there is no way of knowing.
We are still driven and controlled by the same basic instincts and suffer from the same failings as 200 years ago. Humans pretty much look like the people living 20,000 years ago, and function the same way - eat and have babies
When the birth, reproduce, die cycle is broken - whether through genetics, technology, or both, we will become "gods." Because at that point the fundamental trappings and desires inherent in human design will be overcome and we will be forced to rethink everything about our being.