My perspective is an overwhelming avalanche of indifference and reluctance to engage, followed by a much smaller avalanche of people trying to help, with the bad actors and true assholes (not just unpleasant, but actually screwing up peoples' lives) coming out as a distant third in volume, outnumbered, as I said before 10:1 by people actually helping other people with their actions.
But, then, I observe my life - not the mass media, and I don't live next door to guerilla revolutionaries, violent religious fanatics, or foreclosure lawyers.
Half a century of interacting with people, all up and down the income and political power scale - mostly in the USA for the income and power diversity, but also across the "commoners" of Europe.
Well, you're making your declaration based on ignoring their behavior, then. You can't just listen to words. Actions are more relevant.
Some behavior I have seen firsthand:
Recent ex speaker of the US House of Representatives facilitating contacts between tech startups and successful businessmen looking to invest, taking hours out of his personal time.
"Bank" president administering hundreds of millions of his family wealth through philanthropy, with the primary challenge being that they can't give it away fast enough to meet the target of 20% distribution every 5 years.
Hard at the other end of the spectrum, I gave a crackhead a lift in my pickup truck with a heavy table he had just bought at a yard sale - matter of 2 minutes for me, but would have been an epic struggle in the sun for him without me. Having nothing else of value to offer me, he offers to hook me up with his dealer. Similarly, I'm sick as a dog Thanksgiving morning in the cold rain but getting gas for a trip to the family dinner, dealer (maybe the same one?) spots me from across the street showing signs of needing a fix (it's just the flu, but I get shaky hands and pasty face), crosses a busy street to come offer me some of what he thinks I need.
I'm not going to make a solid case for 50 years of behavioral psychology observation in a quick message board post, but the common thread here is that people have things that other people need, and they don't just make the connections for personal profit, they also do it to help people even at cost to themselves.
There are of course opposite examples, that neighborhood with the crackhead and the dealer also had a little crime problem, bad stuff happened, but on the whole it was about 1 in 1000 who were the bad actors - they made the news. Hundreds just tried to keep to themselves and mostly follow Budda's first principle of do no harm to your fellow travelers. And, for every criminal I've encountered, there are at least 10 people out there actively trying to do good. Europe also presented a really good face of people helping people, even clueless tourists who barely speak the language. And, then you've got the top end of the scale, all the jerks in power, whether the local school board or national legislature and top level political appointees - power does corrupt, and lots of these guys make the news with their epic self-centeredness, but I still believe that the jerks are outnumbered by people with good intentions - maybe more like 1:2 at the top levels instead of 1:10 at the bottom.
I was wondering about this part... so they run this scrubber and get this giant mountain of baking soda out, and still most of the CO2 escapes to the atmosphere. They'd save more CO2 with a "lights out when you leave the room" campaign in the schools.
I believe (and this is really an act of faith, nothing else can be applied with any more accuracy or certainty when predicting the future that far out) that the majority of the 0.01% want what's best for the "little people"
On what basis?
Half a century of interacting with people, all up and down the income and political power scale - mostly in the USA for the income and power diversity, but also across the "commoners" of Europe.
That's why it's faith, a big extrapolation from this tiny viewpoint that the people of Russia, China, India, etc. will more or less follow the same levels of compassion and indifference as my experience has shown (and even my experience is mostly an extrapolation from far less than 0.1% of the population).
If they all went to work every day worrying about how unfair their position in life is relative to the purchasers of their planes, they'd be miserable to the point of suicide.
This isn't about what it's like for the people with good jobs you know today. It's about what it's going to be like for almost everyone soon. It's called perspective, and you're missing it now.
I believe (and this is really an act of faith, nothing else can be applied with any more accuracy or certainty when predicting the future that far out) that the majority of the 0.01% want what's best for the "little people" - sure, some of them are megalomaniacs, psychopaths, and even treat their personal staff poorly, but, the bulk of them are basically good at heart, like the rest of us. Well, if 98% of "normal" people are good at heart, maybe only 80% of the upper crust are equally good toward their "fellow man," power does corrupt after all. The acts of philanthropy and charity are rare (much less than 80%), but misanthropy and "James Bond Draxian" ill will toward the masses are much rarer, and it's not fear of prosecution that keeps those people in line.
So, based on that belief, I don't think that the little people are going to be given a life of leisure with machines growing and delivering their food, building and furnishing their homes and maintaining the infrastructure of the world while they just do whatever they wish (including procreate to a world population of 100B)... that seems, unlikely - however possible it might be technologically within 100 years. However, I also do not think that society will be allowed to collapse to 80% unemployment and 50% incarceration due to vagrancy and homelessness. The people with the power will try (maybe not particularly successfully all the time) to keep something that evolves not too far from the status quo. They won't give up control of the assets that matter to them, whether that is real-estate, control of commerce, or what have you, and with those tools they will keep life as comfortable for themselves as they can, which includes in some small way keeping the rest of us better than miserable and desperate.
Or, you know, Moonraker could have been prophetic... that's also a possible future, I'm betting it's an unlikely one, but in the end I don't have any significant input to influence the outcome for or against such a future.
I worked in software/electrical engineering for 10 years, then took a look at maybe getting my PE license in electrical - it's a whole different mindset in the PE world, one that software would benefit from, but will take decades to adapt. The people who should be PEs in software are too valuable to industry right now to be bothered with such things. Industry would really be serving itself if they pushed for a PE type of licensing to be instituted, but "learn Java in 21 days" software schools don't even come close to preparing their students for the rigor of a PE licensing process.
On the flip side, a PE software specialization test would be necessarily ludicrous, as are the electrical and mechanical tests today.
Sorry to "take it down a notch" on you, but I had just read a "rebuttal" from some genius cherry picking his sources and linking to everything that sees things his way and reducing complex multi-dimensional issues to a simple binary table that backs up his world view... it means little or nothing.
The fact that I'm calling out Mazda is a reflection of the fact that I actually read Mazda press releases (I own two of them, one since new in 1991).
Mazda makes good engines, but they are, at the end of the day, just another auto manufacturer - the pressures of business mean that, even though they knew about the advantages of tuned length tubular headers back in the 1960s, for whatever reasons (economics I would assume) they chose not to equip any of their production cars with them until just recently. Do you claim that Mazdas have been shipping from the factory with tuned length exhaust headers since the 1960s?
If you think I'm knocking Mazda, you read me wrong, they're in front of the pack, with Wankel and lots of other engine innovations. What I'm knocking is the entire industry that seems to take multiple decades to implement solidly demonstrated improvements in efficiency, presumably because that little improvement in efficiency isn't going to help sales as much as the little increase in sales price will hurt, even when the improvement is a net big win in TCO. If you want to run to root causes, I'm knocking our implementation of free market economics.
They called them "feature phones" - basically too dumb to run a full web browser, but could do photos, videos, e-mails, etc. They mostly lost out because they were too fragmented for a robust "apps" market to develop for them. That, and the fact that everybody could afford smart phones, so why sell them something cheaper?
Meanwhile, Kaby-Lake is consuming Intel's silicon density gains with 4K DRM decoding... it's an essential feature that consumers will miss if it's not implemented in hardware, it's all kinds of IP protected, and it's god-awful expensive in terms of real-estate, just what the world needs, eh?
Back in the days of the Motorola Razer (ultra-thin/light phone, cutting edge....), they made another phone called the 810-something, we had two of them in the family. Basically, it was the Razer with a real battery - lasted over a week on a charge. I would so-love to carry a Nexus 5x that's 3mm thicker with the extra volume filled with high efficiency LiPo.
The basic improvement in efficiency since the 1972-3 gas crisis is electronic engine management - computer controlled EFI. In the early days they slapped it on poorly refined systems (simple cast exhaust manifolds, simple lowest cost of production intake geometries, etc.) What Mazda said recently (somewhere in the 2010-2014 timeframe, web reference not forthcoming from this source), is that they're making their "new" engines cleaner and greener by applying "advanced technologies" which are basically all the old hot-rodding tricks that have been around forever - but weren't applied by manufacturers because they increased cost of production by a percentage point or two.
Basically, these concepts have been available to engine designers for decades, but only today are they reaching the market because only today are they being forced to by emissions and efficiency regulations.
I'm going to go ahead and call asshole here - not everything published in the last 5 years is readily findable with a Google search, not even if it was published on the Web in an AP press release. Not every statement made on/. needs linked reference of proof. Further, if you Google search long and hard enough, you can often come up with contradictory "evidence" for many things - essentially backing up whatever you want.
You may notice that the total federal tux burden doesn't hasn't actually changed that much since 1979 - they just move things around, without changing the total. Rates for the lowest-income quintile have consistently gone down over the last 25 years, from 8% to 1.5%.
A summary by president for your convenience: Obama: No significant change (but huge debt which will require future taxes) GW Bush: average tax rate reduced from 21% to 17.3% Clinton: No change GHW Bush: No significant change Reagan: Reduced from 22% to 21%
Two presidents have had tax changes of more that half of a percent, GW Bush and Ronald Reagan. Both reduced taxes.
Taxes for who? Bush's "base" - sure, their taxes went down. Capital Gains taxes, sure they got reduced by Regan. Workers in the Flint auto making factories, not so much.
I wonder why, in the spirit of your post, you haven't offshored your own job to a dozen workers in India, China, or the Ukraine? You're costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars and dozens of jobs...
I've done the remote work thing myself - it's a great gig when you can get it. The dozens of workers in India, China and the Ukraine just don't have what it takes to do what I do - starting with communicating clearly with people who need things done.
I read a recent Mazda press release about how they "ecofying" their new engines making them more efficient and cleaner: 4 into 1 scavenging exhausts, variable geometry intakes (the modern version of a 4 barrel carb), hemispherical piston heads... I forget what all they listed, but every single thing was stuff that was known, and practiced in the 1960s by anybody who cared. Basically, they're saying that they're not turning out bottom-dollar cast iron turds anymore, they're starting to do the things that have been known to benefit performance (aka efficiency) for 50+ years.
Current ford v8's already do not pass most of the emissions standards, but are legal to sell because Ford as a manufacturer has certain limit they can go on various areas, so they still have a small number of them. Going forward the new limits specifically say how much soot and other various chemicals are allowed, and the v8's can not pass. The only thing I can think of is if they did something similar to the diesel engines where they have a particulate filter that gets burned out on a regular basis, but I don't see that make sense for cars.
The situation was essentially the same in 1978, and a combination of advancing technology and refinements of the requirements led to the resurgence of the muscle car in the late 1990s.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, no. Trump or the GOP aren't going to be raising anyone's taxes or levying any import fees. Makes for a cute story though.
Ford only considered Mexico for the plant because of NAFTA and the tax structures under NAFTA. With Trump loudly boasting that he's restructuring NAFTA, that restructuring will (hopefully) result in more favorable tax structures for Ford locating the plant in Flint (as it should be, IMO.)
However, do not delude yourself or anyone else that GOP == "no new taxes", just because W chanted it like an idiot throughout his election cycle most assuredly does not make it true. Look at the historical record, in practice the GOP raises taxes just as much and sometimes more than the other side.
Slashdot Mirror
My perspective is an overwhelming avalanche of indifference and reluctance to engage, followed by a much smaller avalanche of people trying to help, with the bad actors and true assholes (not just unpleasant, but actually screwing up peoples' lives) coming out as a distant third in volume, outnumbered, as I said before 10:1 by people actually helping other people with their actions.
But, then, I observe my life - not the mass media, and I don't live next door to guerilla revolutionaries, violent religious fanatics, or foreclosure lawyers.
Half a century of interacting with people, all up and down the income and political power scale - mostly in the USA for the income and power diversity, but also across the "commoners" of Europe.
Well, you're making your declaration based on ignoring their behavior, then. You can't just listen to words. Actions are more relevant.
Some behavior I have seen firsthand:
Recent ex speaker of the US House of Representatives facilitating contacts between tech startups and successful businessmen looking to invest, taking hours out of his personal time.
"Bank" president administering hundreds of millions of his family wealth through philanthropy, with the primary challenge being that they can't give it away fast enough to meet the target of 20% distribution every 5 years.
Hard at the other end of the spectrum, I gave a crackhead a lift in my pickup truck with a heavy table he had just bought at a yard sale - matter of 2 minutes for me, but would have been an epic struggle in the sun for him without me. Having nothing else of value to offer me, he offers to hook me up with his dealer. Similarly, I'm sick as a dog Thanksgiving morning in the cold rain but getting gas for a trip to the family dinner, dealer (maybe the same one?) spots me from across the street showing signs of needing a fix (it's just the flu, but I get shaky hands and pasty face), crosses a busy street to come offer me some of what he thinks I need.
I'm not going to make a solid case for 50 years of behavioral psychology observation in a quick message board post, but the common thread here is that people have things that other people need, and they don't just make the connections for personal profit, they also do it to help people even at cost to themselves.
There are of course opposite examples, that neighborhood with the crackhead and the dealer also had a little crime problem, bad stuff happened, but on the whole it was about 1 in 1000 who were the bad actors - they made the news. Hundreds just tried to keep to themselves and mostly follow Budda's first principle of do no harm to your fellow travelers. And, for every criminal I've encountered, there are at least 10 people out there actively trying to do good. Europe also presented a really good face of people helping people, even clueless tourists who barely speak the language. And, then you've got the top end of the scale, all the jerks in power, whether the local school board or national legislature and top level political appointees - power does corrupt, and lots of these guys make the news with their epic self-centeredness, but I still believe that the jerks are outnumbered by people with good intentions - maybe more like 1:2 at the top levels instead of 1:10 at the bottom.
I was wondering about this part... so they run this scrubber and get this giant mountain of baking soda out, and still most of the CO2 escapes to the atmosphere. They'd save more CO2 with a "lights out when you leave the room" campaign in the schools.
Carbonic acid? What's the pH of sea water treated with baking soda?
Don't clean up the Ganges, you'll destroy its magical healing properties.
I believe (and this is really an act of faith, nothing else can be applied with any more accuracy or certainty when predicting the future that far out) that the majority of the 0.01% want what's best for the "little people"
On what basis?
Half a century of interacting with people, all up and down the income and political power scale - mostly in the USA for the income and power diversity, but also across the "commoners" of Europe.
That's why it's faith, a big extrapolation from this tiny viewpoint that the people of Russia, China, India, etc. will more or less follow the same levels of compassion and indifference as my experience has shown (and even my experience is mostly an extrapolation from far less than 0.1% of the population).
If they all went to work every day worrying about how unfair their position in life is relative to the purchasers of their planes, they'd be miserable to the point of suicide.
This isn't about what it's like for the people with good jobs you know today. It's about what it's going to be like for almost everyone soon. It's called perspective, and you're missing it now.
I believe (and this is really an act of faith, nothing else can be applied with any more accuracy or certainty when predicting the future that far out) that the majority of the 0.01% want what's best for the "little people" - sure, some of them are megalomaniacs, psychopaths, and even treat their personal staff poorly, but, the bulk of them are basically good at heart, like the rest of us. Well, if 98% of "normal" people are good at heart, maybe only 80% of the upper crust are equally good toward their "fellow man," power does corrupt after all. The acts of philanthropy and charity are rare (much less than 80%), but misanthropy and "James Bond Draxian" ill will toward the masses are much rarer, and it's not fear of prosecution that keeps those people in line.
So, based on that belief, I don't think that the little people are going to be given a life of leisure with machines growing and delivering their food, building and furnishing their homes and maintaining the infrastructure of the world while they just do whatever they wish (including procreate to a world population of 100B)... that seems, unlikely - however possible it might be technologically within 100 years. However, I also do not think that society will be allowed to collapse to 80% unemployment and 50% incarceration due to vagrancy and homelessness. The people with the power will try (maybe not particularly successfully all the time) to keep something that evolves not too far from the status quo. They won't give up control of the assets that matter to them, whether that is real-estate, control of commerce, or what have you, and with those tools they will keep life as comfortable for themselves as they can, which includes in some small way keeping the rest of us better than miserable and desperate.
Or, you know, Moonraker could have been prophetic... that's also a possible future, I'm betting it's an unlikely one, but in the end I don't have any significant input to influence the outcome for or against such a future.
I worked in software/electrical engineering for 10 years, then took a look at maybe getting my PE license in electrical - it's a whole different mindset in the PE world, one that software would benefit from, but will take decades to adapt. The people who should be PEs in software are too valuable to industry right now to be bothered with such things. Industry would really be serving itself if they pushed for a PE type of licensing to be instituted, but "learn Java in 21 days" software schools don't even come close to preparing their students for the rigor of a PE licensing process.
On the flip side, a PE software specialization test would be necessarily ludicrous, as are the electrical and mechanical tests today.
200,000 patient records sounds like they might be important to somebody...
Are we sure that this wasn't a master stroke by SCO to establish some case law in favor of all the things they appeared to be attempting to tear down?
He won 51 games straight before his 52nd rival, Chen Yaoye, went offline, forcing the game to be recorded as a tie.
So the only way to win is not to play.
No. The only way to not lose is to quit before you are beaten.
Resistance is futile, winning is not an option.
Sorry to "take it down a notch" on you, but I had just read a "rebuttal" from some genius cherry picking his sources and linking to everything that sees things his way and reducing complex multi-dimensional issues to a simple binary table that backs up his world view... it means little or nothing.
The fact that I'm calling out Mazda is a reflection of the fact that I actually read Mazda press releases (I own two of them, one since new in 1991).
Mazda makes good engines, but they are, at the end of the day, just another auto manufacturer - the pressures of business mean that, even though they knew about the advantages of tuned length tubular headers back in the 1960s, for whatever reasons (economics I would assume) they chose not to equip any of their production cars with them until just recently. Do you claim that Mazdas have been shipping from the factory with tuned length exhaust headers since the 1960s?
If you think I'm knocking Mazda, you read me wrong, they're in front of the pack, with Wankel and lots of other engine innovations. What I'm knocking is the entire industry that seems to take multiple decades to implement solidly demonstrated improvements in efficiency, presumably because that little improvement in efficiency isn't going to help sales as much as the little increase in sales price will hurt, even when the improvement is a net big win in TCO. If you want to run to root causes, I'm knocking our implementation of free market economics.
They called them "feature phones" - basically too dumb to run a full web browser, but could do photos, videos, e-mails, etc. They mostly lost out because they were too fragmented for a robust "apps" market to develop for them. That, and the fact that everybody could afford smart phones, so why sell them something cheaper?
Meanwhile, Kaby-Lake is consuming Intel's silicon density gains with 4K DRM decoding... it's an essential feature that consumers will miss if it's not implemented in hardware, it's all kinds of IP protected, and it's god-awful expensive in terms of real-estate, just what the world needs, eh?
No, more like integrating RAM and processor on a single die...
Back in the days of the Motorola Razer (ultra-thin/light phone, cutting edge....), they made another phone called the 810-something, we had two of them in the family. Basically, it was the Razer with a real battery - lasted over a week on a charge. I would so-love to carry a Nexus 5x that's 3mm thicker with the extra volume filled with high efficiency LiPo.
The basic improvement in efficiency since the 1972-3 gas crisis is electronic engine management - computer controlled EFI. In the early days they slapped it on poorly refined systems (simple cast exhaust manifolds, simple lowest cost of production intake geometries, etc.) What Mazda said recently (somewhere in the 2010-2014 timeframe, web reference not forthcoming from this source), is that they're making their "new" engines cleaner and greener by applying "advanced technologies" which are basically all the old hot-rodding tricks that have been around forever - but weren't applied by manufacturers because they increased cost of production by a percentage point or two.
Basically, these concepts have been available to engine designers for decades, but only today are they reaching the market because only today are they being forced to by emissions and efficiency regulations.
I'm going to go ahead and call asshole here - not everything published in the last 5 years is readily findable with a Google search, not even if it was published on the Web in an AP press release. Not every statement made on /. needs linked reference of proof. Further, if you Google search long and hard enough, you can often come up with contradictory "evidence" for many things - essentially backing up whatever you want.
You may notice that the total federal tux burden doesn't hasn't actually changed that much since 1979 - they just move things around, without changing the total. Rates for the lowest-income quintile have consistently gone down over the last 25 years, from 8% to 1.5%.
A summary by president for your convenience:
Obama: No significant change (but huge debt which will require future taxes)
GW Bush: average tax rate reduced from 21% to 17.3%
Clinton: No change
GHW Bush: No significant change
Reagan: Reduced from 22% to 21%
Two presidents have had tax changes of more that half of a percent, GW Bush and Ronald Reagan. Both reduced taxes.
Taxes for who? Bush's "base" - sure, their taxes went down. Capital Gains taxes, sure they got reduced by Regan. Workers in the Flint auto making factories, not so much.
I wonder why, in the spirit of your post, you haven't offshored your own job to a dozen workers in India, China, or the Ukraine? You're costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars and dozens of jobs...
I've done the remote work thing myself - it's a great gig when you can get it. The dozens of workers in India, China and the Ukraine just don't have what it takes to do what I do - starting with communicating clearly with people who need things done.
Um, it wasn't W that changed it this, it was his dad.
Sorry, they all look alike after awhile. I will grant that his dad looked less like an idiot frat-boy, but the family resemblance was very strong.
I read a recent Mazda press release about how they "ecofying" their new engines making them more efficient and cleaner: 4 into 1 scavenging exhausts, variable geometry intakes (the modern version of a 4 barrel carb), hemispherical piston heads... I forget what all they listed, but every single thing was stuff that was known, and practiced in the 1960s by anybody who cared. Basically, they're saying that they're not turning out bottom-dollar cast iron turds anymore, they're starting to do the things that have been known to benefit performance (aka efficiency) for 50+ years.
Current ford v8's already do not pass most of the emissions standards, but are legal to sell because Ford as a manufacturer has certain limit they can go on various areas, so they still have a small number of them. Going forward the new limits specifically say how much soot and other various chemicals are allowed, and the v8's can not pass. The only thing I can think of is if they did something similar to the diesel engines where they have a particulate filter that gets burned out on a regular basis, but I don't see that make sense for cars.
The situation was essentially the same in 1978, and a combination of advancing technology and refinements of the requirements led to the resurgence of the muscle car in the late 1990s.
Afraid of a tax-spanking
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, no. Trump or the GOP aren't going to be raising anyone's taxes or levying any import fees. Makes for a cute story though.
Ford only considered Mexico for the plant because of NAFTA and the tax structures under NAFTA. With Trump loudly boasting that he's restructuring NAFTA, that restructuring will (hopefully) result in more favorable tax structures for Ford locating the plant in Flint (as it should be, IMO.)
However, do not delude yourself or anyone else that GOP == "no new taxes", just because W chanted it like an idiot throughout his election cycle most assuredly does not make it true. Look at the historical record, in practice the GOP raises taxes just as much and sometimes more than the other side.