It doesn't have to work in Africa. China can raise their own elephants. There are elephants in Yunnan, and a few millennia ago, they used to migrate as far north as the Yellow River Valley. The only problem is that Asiatic elephants have small tusks. But maybe they could import African elephants to Yunnan. The climate is not that different.
Even better would be to clone mammoths, and raise them in Siberia. The have enormous tusks, and there is plenty of unused tundra where they can graze. Also, mammoths have different DNA, so the tusks could be verified as non-elephant to prevent trafficking of poached ivory.
There's near zero competition with any time-sensitive medical procedures. I don't see why organ donation would be any different.
If there was $100k on the table, I am sure plenty of people would shop around for a better place to die.
Or, if the hospital doesn't give them a good deal, the family can just refuse and let the body rot. The hospital can harvest a heart for about $5k, and then turn around and sell it for over $100k.
It would then be attached by the hospital that created the availability in the first place, as compensation for the medical expenses.
The result would be... no remuneration to the family of the deceased.
This would only be true if there was zero competition, and the donor's family had no other choice but to accept whatever price the monopsony buyer offered.
Countries that do it this way have practically zero organ shortage
Can you provide a citation for this? I am unaware of any countries that allow donors to be compensated. Most, including America, allow the buying and selling of organs, and hospitals make a lot of money doing that, but it is currently illegal for any of that money to go to a donor or a deceased donor's family.
One healthy young male with a head injury is a source of several potentially life-saving organs.
Indeed. We not only get the organs, but the mean intelligence of humanity goes up every time an idiot is removed from the gene pool. We need to repeal helmet laws.
hmm, never thought that manufacturing being a thing in Shanghai area
There is not much manufacturing in Shanghai proper, since everything is so expensive there. But there is quite a big of high end stuff made across the river in Pudong, which most people still consider to be part of Shanghai. In fact, the tallest buildings in the area, and "Shanghai" landmarks like Dongfangmingzhu are actually in Pudong. As you head east toward the airport, Pudong has a lot of low rise sprawl that reminds me of Silicon Valley.
Today, much more manufacturing, especially more labor intensive stuff, is made in Shenzhen or inland cities.
It is still very very very cheap. Probably it is not in the realm of being so cheap as to be called ridiculously cheap anymore.
Sure, it is still cheap. But staffing is a much bigger problem than in the good ole' days. I remember back in 1999, working in a recruiting booth at the Shanghai train station. We would hire farm girls as they exited the trains, with everything they owned strapped to their backs in a big canvas bag. They had nothing to hope for in the countryside but a dead end life of stoop labor in the rice paddies during the day while caring for a nasty mother-in-law at night. So they would head for the big city lights for a better life. We would arrive in the morning, and leave by noon with a van full of recruits. Back then, my Mandarin was really bad, but the company wanted a laowai at the booth just to get more attention, and that seemed to work pretty well.
Terrible advice. The American medical system is bloated and inefficient. It is ripe for automation.There are AI systems nearing approval that can do radiology (X-Ray) analysis better than humans. A nurse with a flowchart can diagnose better than a doctor without one, and a flowchart can be automated. Much medical work is routine and repetitive.
stay out of tech.
More terrible advice. Programming will be the LAST job to be automated, because once that is automated you can use it bootstrap the automation of everything else.
Interesting that the outsourced "cheap labor" is now on the receiving end of being outsourced to robots.
The labor isn't so cheap anymore. When my company started outsourcing to China in 1998, we could hire assembly line workers for $3/day. Today, it costs ten times that and it takes much longer to staff up. There are still locations with lots of cheap labor, like Vietnam and Bangladesh, but supply chains are weak in Vietnam and non-existent in Bangladesh. You can sew blue jeans there, but assembling electronics is not going to work so well.
Places like Shenzhen and Pudong have the widest and deepest supply chains in the world. If you are running out of 0.5mm screws, you can just send a guy on a bicycle over the screw factory, and he will be back in an hour. If is better to bring the robots to where the parts are than to try to move all the parts to where the labor is.
That means if you're holding your breath for Apple to release something that isn't preconfigured in the future
User upgradable phones would make no sense for Apple. By only offering only preconfigured devices, their customers will buy higher priced models to make sure they don't run out of resources before their next upgrade. So instead of getting a 16GB model, and upgrading later if they need it, they buy the 64GB model just to be sure. Since Apple charges far more than the market price for that extra storage, they make a juicy profit.
You seem to miss the fact that climate change researchers and the IPCC are downplaying their predictions and concerns since decades to "not sound alarmist".
The first IPCC report did not downplay anything. Subsequent reports may have, possibly in an attempt to re-establish some credibility. But scientists should not be be downplaying, exaggerating, or anything else to hide or twist the facts. They should be seeking and reporting the unbiased truth.
Climate researchers massaged data with buggy code, then deleted the original data.
Much more worrying was the reaction of the scientific community to the exposure of the undisclosed data and fudged reports. Instead of criticizing their behaviour, they almost universally rallied around them and defended their actions, just like they had earlier defended the wild exaggerations in the first IPCC report. Science needs more integrity and less groupthink.
Apparently some climatologists are convinced that exaggeration and alarmism are justified to push the public into action. But by eroding their own credibility, they are having the opposite effect. Climate Change is an important issue, and needs to be taken seriously by everyone.
especially if two bunk beds means two sets of bunk beds rather than 1 set of two beds, bunked.
I meant 2 sets of bunk beds, equivalent to 4 twin beds. Plus a freestanding crib. It didn't seem crowded to me. It just seemed normal. I remember going to a friend's house when I was about 8, and I found out he had his own room. I couldn't imagine the horror of waking up in the middle of the night and being totally alone in the dark.
Companies can avoid Trump's wrath by spreading out the downsizing. They can fire a few dozen this week, and a few dozen next week, rather than a thousand all at once. They just need to keep it below the radar.
A better long-term solution is to hire fewer Americans in the first place. That way you don't suffer a political backlash if it doesn't work out.
who says its warm? a lot of poor folks cant afford to run the heat or air.
TFA is about Silicon Valley. I live there. The weather is mild, and I rarely turn on the heat. It just doesn't get that cold. My house, like many in the Bay Area, doesn't even have AC.
It is in that you are without your own home, and are subject to being out on the street on a moments notice.
But don't you think that "being out on the street" is a significant change of status from sleeping a warm bed? Don't you think we should have a term for that? If we are going to use "homeless" to refer to anyone that might potentially someday be on the street, then we need another term for the people that actually are on the street. I suggest we call them "The people of the street", or maybe "Unhomed", or "The housing challenged".
How did you benefit from not being on the losing side in WWII or WWI or the Civil War or The War of Independence.
Well, I used to live in Tennessee, so I was on the losing side of the Civil War. As for the others, none of them were preceded by high military spending. Yet we won anyway.
It seems to me that high military spending makes starting wars easy, since you already have the soldiers and weapons ready, so we do it more often, almost always with negative consequences. I don't see how I benefit from that.
Perhaps you will enjoy being a Muslim after the next WW, Sunni or Shia?
How did our meddling in Iraq make that outcome less likely?
These families are NOT homeless. They are living with a lot of people per room. When I was a kid, I slept in a room with two bunk beds and a crib. It was me and four siblings. Was I "homeless"?
I live in San Jose, and the house next to mine has 16 Filipinos living in 4 bedrooms. You may consider that crowded, but they seem happy. They have a BBQ every weekend. They laugh and sing. The kids are always smiling, and are doing well in school. I know because they are my kid's classmates. They don't have any of the problems that actual homeless people have. Sleeping in a bunk bed is a hundred times better than sleeping on a sidewalk, and equating the two is absurd.
And how long did you have to live in that car before finding a job and saving up money for first months rent plus deposit?
Here are two tricks: 1. Rather than move to some random location, move to someplace where anyone will a pulse can get a job. There are plenty of cities with unemployment below 3%, and every shop has a "help wanted" sign. 2. Get a car that is comfortable to sleep in. I recommend either a van or a pickup with a camper top. I have a minivan, and it can comfortably sleep two people with no problem.
I wonder how I've been able to do it half a dozen times with little more than the cost of gas..
Yup. I have lived in seven states and three countries. The trick is to simplify your life, and get rid of junk you don't need, especially big bulky stuff like furniture. Buy it second hand and sell it on Craigslist before your next move.
Slashdot Mirror
70% of Chinese polled did not know that ivory came from dead elephants.
Does it have to? Why not cut the tusks off live elephants? That would remove the incentive to poach them.
I cannot see it working well in Africa.
It doesn't have to work in Africa. China can raise their own elephants. There are elephants in Yunnan, and a few millennia ago, they used to migrate as far north as the Yellow River Valley. The only problem is that Asiatic elephants have small tusks. But maybe they could import African elephants to Yunnan. The climate is not that different.
Even better would be to clone mammoths, and raise them in Siberia. The have enormous tusks, and there is plenty of unused tundra where they can graze. Also, mammoths have different DNA, so the tusks could be verified as non-elephant to prevent trafficking of poached ivory.
Commercialize ivory. Make it a private market. Have companies make money selling ivory.
A better solution would be to use genetic engineering to create fake ivory in factories, and use that to flood the market and push down prices.
There's near zero competition with any time-sensitive medical procedures. I don't see why organ donation would be any different.
If there was $100k on the table, I am sure plenty of people would shop around for a better place to die.
Or, if the hospital doesn't give them a good deal, the family can just refuse and let the body rot. The hospital can harvest a heart for about $5k, and then turn around and sell it for over $100k.
It would then be attached by the hospital that created the availability in the first place, as compensation for the medical expenses.
The result would be ... no remuneration to the family of the deceased.
This would only be true if there was zero competition, and the donor's family had no other choice but to accept whatever price the monopsony buyer offered.
Countries that do it this way have practically zero organ shortage
Can you provide a citation for this? I am unaware of any countries that allow donors to be compensated. Most, including America, allow the buying and selling of organs, and hospitals make a lot of money doing that, but it is currently illegal for any of that money to go to a donor or a deceased donor's family.
One healthy young male with a head injury is a source of several potentially life-saving organs.
Indeed. We not only get the organs, but the mean intelligence of humanity goes up every time an idiot is removed from the gene pool. We need to repeal helmet laws.
hmm, never thought that manufacturing being a thing in Shanghai area
There is not much manufacturing in Shanghai proper, since everything is so expensive there. But there is quite a big of high end stuff made across the river in Pudong, which most people still consider to be part of Shanghai. In fact, the tallest buildings in the area, and "Shanghai" landmarks like Dongfangmingzhu are actually in Pudong. As you head east toward the airport, Pudong has a lot of low rise sprawl that reminds me of Silicon Valley.
Today, much more manufacturing, especially more labor intensive stuff, is made in Shenzhen or inland cities.
It is still very very very cheap. Probably it is not in the realm of being so cheap as to be called ridiculously cheap anymore.
Sure, it is still cheap. But staffing is a much bigger problem than in the good ole' days. I remember back in 1999, working in a recruiting booth at the Shanghai train station. We would hire farm girls as they exited the trains, with everything they owned strapped to their backs in a big canvas bag. They had nothing to hope for in the countryside but a dead end life of stoop labor in the rice paddies during the day while caring for a nasty mother-in-law at night. So they would head for the big city lights for a better life. We would arrive in the morning, and leave by noon with a van full of recruits. Back then, my Mandarin was really bad, but the company wanted a laowai at the booth just to get more attention, and that seemed to work pretty well.
Kids - go into Medical.
Terrible advice. The American medical system is bloated and inefficient. It is ripe for automation.There are AI systems nearing approval that can do radiology (X-Ray) analysis better than humans. A nurse with a flowchart can diagnose better than a doctor without one, and a flowchart can be automated. Much medical work is routine and repetitive.
stay out of tech.
More terrible advice. Programming will be the LAST job to be automated, because once that is automated you can use it bootstrap the automation of everything else.
Interesting that the outsourced "cheap labor" is now on the receiving end of being outsourced to robots.
The labor isn't so cheap anymore. When my company started outsourcing to China in 1998, we could hire assembly line workers for $3/day. Today, it costs ten times that and it takes much longer to staff up. There are still locations with lots of cheap labor, like Vietnam and Bangladesh, but supply chains are weak in Vietnam and non-existent in Bangladesh. You can sew blue jeans there, but assembling electronics is not going to work so well.
Places like Shenzhen and Pudong have the widest and deepest supply chains in the world. If you are running out of 0.5mm screws, you can just send a guy on a bicycle over the screw factory, and he will be back in an hour. If is better to bring the robots to where the parts are than to try to move all the parts to where the labor is.
That means if you're holding your breath for Apple to release something that isn't preconfigured in the future
User upgradable phones would make no sense for Apple. By only offering only preconfigured devices, their customers will buy higher priced models to make sure they don't run out of resources before their next upgrade. So instead of getting a 16GB model, and upgrading later if they need it, they buy the 64GB model just to be sure. Since Apple charges far more than the market price for that extra storage, they make a juicy profit.
You seem to miss the fact that climate change researchers and the IPCC are downplaying their predictions and concerns since decades to "not sound alarmist".
The first IPCC report did not downplay anything. Subsequent reports may have, possibly in an attempt to re-establish some credibility. But scientists should not be be downplaying, exaggerating, or anything else to hide or twist the facts. They should be seeking and reporting the unbiased truth.
Climate researchers massaged data with buggy code, then deleted the original data.
Much more worrying was the reaction of the scientific community to the exposure of the undisclosed data and fudged reports. Instead of criticizing their behaviour, they almost universally rallied around them and defended their actions, just like they had earlier defended the wild exaggerations in the first IPCC report. Science needs more integrity and less groupthink.
Apparently some climatologists are convinced that exaggeration and alarmism are justified to push the public into action. But by eroding their own credibility, they are having the opposite effect. Climate Change is an important issue, and needs to be taken seriously by everyone.
Well, I think its pretty cool, but I also think they shouldn't be able to patent an idea they can't yet build.
They shouldn't be able to patent ideas at all, only specific implementations.
A new propeller design that can be used on a drone: Patentable.
Using that drone to deliver Chinese food: Not patentable.
especially if two bunk beds means two sets of bunk beds rather than 1 set of two beds, bunked.
I meant 2 sets of bunk beds, equivalent to 4 twin beds. Plus a freestanding crib. It didn't seem crowded to me. It just seemed normal. I remember going to a friend's house when I was about 8, and I found out he had his own room. I couldn't imagine the horror of waking up in the middle of the night and being totally alone in the dark.
Would you work for Uber? Could you maintain your standard of living that way?
The majority of Uber drivers do it part time to earn extra money, and not as their main source of income.
Companies can avoid Trump's wrath by spreading out the downsizing. They can fire a few dozen this week, and a few dozen next week, rather than a thousand all at once. They just need to keep it below the radar.
A better long-term solution is to hire fewer Americans in the first place. That way you don't suffer a political backlash if it doesn't work out.
ah but you forget that republicans don't think youre poor if you have a tv or refrigerator.
My grandmother told me that the boundary is paper towels. She believed that once you can afford to buy paper towels, then you are no longer poor.
who says its warm?
a lot of poor folks cant afford to run the heat or air.
TFA is about Silicon Valley. I live there. The weather is mild, and I rarely turn on the heat. It just doesn't get that cold. My house, like many in the Bay Area, doesn't even have AC.
It is in that you are without your own home, and are subject to being out on the street on a moments notice.
But don't you think that "being out on the street" is a significant change of status from sleeping a warm bed? Don't you think we should have a term for that? If we are going to use "homeless" to refer to anyone that might potentially someday be on the street, then we need another term for the people that actually are on the street. I suggest we call them "The people of the street", or maybe "Unhomed", or "The housing challenged".
Any other suggestions?
How did you benefit from not being on the losing side in WWII or WWI or the Civil War or The War of Independence.
Well, I used to live in Tennessee, so I was on the losing side of the Civil War. As for the others, none of them were preceded by high military spending. Yet we won anyway.
It seems to me that high military spending makes starting wars easy, since you already have the soldiers and weapons ready, so we do it more often, almost always with negative consequences. I don't see how I benefit from that.
Perhaps you will enjoy being a Muslim after the next WW, Sunni or Shia?
How did our meddling in Iraq make that outcome less likely?
... end up homeless like these families.
These families are NOT homeless. They are living with a lot of people per room. When I was a kid, I slept in a room with two bunk beds and a crib. It was me and four siblings. Was I "homeless"?
I live in San Jose, and the house next to mine has 16 Filipinos living in 4 bedrooms. You may consider that crowded, but they seem happy. They have a BBQ every weekend. They laugh and sing. The kids are always smiling, and are doing well in school. I know because they are my kid's classmates. They don't have any of the problems that actual homeless people have. Sleeping in a bunk bed is a hundred times better than sleeping on a sidewalk, and equating the two is absurd.
And how long did you have to live in that car before finding a job and saving up money for first months rent plus deposit?
Here are two tricks:
1. Rather than move to some random location, move to someplace where anyone will a pulse can get a job. There are plenty of cities with unemployment below 3%, and every shop has a "help wanted" sign.
2. Get a car that is comfortable to sleep in. I recommend either a van or a pickup with a camper top. I have a minivan, and it can comfortably sleep two people with no problem.
I wonder how I've been able to do it half a dozen times with little more than the cost of gas..
Yup. I have lived in seven states and three countries. The trick is to simplify your life, and get rid of junk you don't need, especially big bulky stuff like furniture. Buy it second hand and sell it on Craigslist before your next move.