That picked my attention, the flow of any medium river is gigantic when compared with human drinking. So:
According to wikipedia, average flow at London is 65.8 m^3/s. This means 5.685.120 m^3/day, or 5.685.120.000 liter/day.
Give that everyone upriver uses not the 2 litre/day the physician recommend but that they sweat heavily so they use up to 4 l/day.
So, 5685120000 / 4 means that, just to be able to drink all of it once, you need 1.421.280.000 people upriver. More than the population of China. If you assume the human use is the usual 2 l/day, you need half the world population upriver. If it has to pass through 7 people... well, you get the idea.
That wasn't to difficult to check, I often wonder why people just repeat these legends without doing the most simple fact checking.
This right here. I'm willing to do the same (accept a lower paycheck) if that means staying employed.
This does not mean "but if we accept lower wages then more people will be employed" (Verizon has increased profits). It means "I will be hired and someone else will be fired". What then means that someone else will appear offering to work for less than you.
But you know what? The cost of goods would also come down because no one can afford them. Technically, this would be deflation.
Are you sure? Deflation means that any investment needs a better ROI to be profitable.
If I use X $ to buy steel and pay workers to make a car for selling, with inflation I expect that the sooner I begin to do that, the less capital I will need. Also, if I know that today a car like the one I am going to do sells for X + Y, I can expect that when my car hits the market it may be sold by X + Y + Z. And the buyer of the car will know that if he delays buying the car, he will end paying more so he has no incentive in delaying that.
With deflation, I know that if I delay buying and paying the raw materials and labour, it will be cheaper. Also, if I know that today a car like the one I am going to do sells for X + Y, I can expect that when my car hits the market it may be sold by X + Y - Z. If Z is greater than Y, then I am losing money. And the buyer of the car will know that if he delays buying the car, he will end paying less so he will also delay the purchase to the maximum, making Z greater.
So, what is the response to deflation? Do not invest, do not purchase, do not produce. Just keep your money in your wallet as it produces more than if you put it to work.
Also, you seem to assume that prices will be elastic (they will react quickly to falling demand with falling prices). Mind you, some prices are not so elastic so it may take a long time before their price gets down. Asuming that the companies producing them do not decide just to cut supply and close production lines.
At some point, all fiat monetary were bound to have their weaknesses exposed. If you ask me politics only accelerated the inevitable to come.
As opposed to? Gold Standard (another kind of fiat money, with the disavantage that it is not flexible and forces deflation)? Barter?
How can someone argue with that? Obviously you are right.
The company can afford that (they got increased profits), so it is just that they do not want. Maybe you like it when you get a deal and later the other side wants to change it in its own favour, only because they are more powerful than you. Perhaps you would not fight back at that, and you would just meekly say "Yes sir, thanks for not abusing me more (by the moment)". I mean, for many people, it looks like what the real world is for them.
That does not change the fact that now you know why this fight is about. Unfortunately, it seems some people want to stay misinformed so they just can "opine" out of his prejudices. Sorry for spoiling that for you.
Don't forget to write in the resume that you are willing to work for as little as anybody else they can find! Ask them to cut your rate if they get cheapest workers!
Here are the details: The company was paying the healthcare and now they want to cut it out from salaries.
For example, you get contracted with an offer that says that you will be paid X in cash and another Y in health care insurance (paid directly by the company).
Now the company says that you have to accept receiving X-Y because "you are not contributing to your health care premium" (thats false, you were earning it before even if it didn't go through your paycheck).
It is not that a person uses a wrong logic and then ends "logically" killing tens of people.
It works the other way around... a person that wants to kill lots of people finds a way of twisting the logic to justify their acts. Most of the less educated people of this class will just need to convince themselves with simple reasonaments ("I deserve more respect"/"They are making fun of me"/Whatever). More educated people will be able to forge more comprehensive looking constructs, complex enough to fill in a manifesto.
The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that intelligence is just another tool for our purposes, not a way of guiding them. Note that I am not talking only about criminals but everyone there, criminals get singled out because:
they get lots more of attention than, say, a sadistic boss or a sleazy coworker or a cheating husband/wife.
as their purposes are far more uncommon than those which I mentioned above, their logic is more "strange" to the common people.
From a purely legal viewpoint, until there is a sentence he is "alleged perpetrator".
Note that (in this case) it is probably just a formality (he won't be released under bond or whatever). But it is good to use the distinction so we can remember it in other, less clear cases that arise. It will be also useful in those cases where the press shows the public lots of circunstancial evidence with just the "right" spin while forgetting of the allegations of the defense.
With weapons, the issue is not energy invested vs energy produced, but cost vs energy deliverable.
Probably 1000 tons of TNT are cheaper than a nuclear bomb. But you can punt 3 or 4 nuclear bombs in an ICBM that would not be capable of launching a payload of 3000 or 4000 tons, or perhaps the same amount of destructive power in submarines would amout to tripling its size.
As I am from another country, YMMV, but what I see here is while there is pressure in the middle and lower level to cut costs, at higher level the game is a little different.
Let's say you have to build another hospital in the public network and (given that the specs are still open), the IT department asks for a place where they can put their CPD (thus being able to provide services currently outsourced at no low price). So they specify that they need so many square meters, must be able to bear a given weight of the servers, and so on.
When the hospital is built, the IT department checks and in effect the room is there, but it has not been built to bear the load. There is a meeting with the higher-ups of public government and the architect, and the only solution offered is to strengthen an area that happens to be above some columns so that a small area is able to meet the specs.
What do you think that would happen:
The political leadership would assume there has been a mistake (by the builder) and fault of oversight (by themselves). Even at the risk that the press could know about the mistake and make it public, and ignoring that they are hard pressed so that the hospital can be inaugurated before the upcoming elections, they stand by the IT department and force the builder to act responsibly and provide a valid solution, or
They tell the IT staff to "shut up" and keep spending (wasting) thousands of € monthly for the hosting of their servers.
Of course, this example is just a product of my imagination and has nothing to do with the recently build hospital in the region where I live.
Yeah, but "restoring" your program in an indefinite state may have worse consequencies than just freezing. Imagine that your compression algorithm has an infinite loop in certains conditions and, when the data has been "successfully" processed, it is written to your file...
And, in addition, I somehow doubt that even in Peru or Thailand it is the poor who are buying fishing ships able to travel several thousand kilometers and stay fishing for months while being supplied by factory ships that process the fish, searching for banks of fish. The poor stay in the territorial waters, usually return home at the end of the day and catch what they can within its reach.
But it is not the poors who are catching the fish.
Fishing in the high seas requires an important technology (fishing vessels, factory vessels and so on). According to Wikipedia, People's Republic of China (excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan), Peru, Japan, the United States, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, India, Thailand, Norway and Iceland are responsible for half of the commercial fishing of the world. You may point out (with reserves) Peru, Indonesia or Thailand, but the rest of countries are not doing it because they need the food so their people does not starve.
After the question of who is an ignorant has been pretty much voted in the previous responses to your posts, here comes my 0.02€.
It looks like you do not understand that fishing is a completely different way of getting food than, say, agriculture.
In agriculture, you use a resource (terrain, sun, water, fertilizers) to directly produce a result. With (maybe) the exception of fertilizers, all of the other resources are guaranteed to be the same year after year (with some variances). So, if you get 100 tons this years, you may expect between 50 or 150 tons next year, and the following one, and so on. There is the occasional drought or flood, but as not all the world suffers drought or flood at the same time, global production numbers do not vary that much. You cannot overproduce(*) because you are limited to your resources.
With cattle, you can overproduce by killing for meat more animals that those that born. But then, if you are doing things bad you'll realize that every time you have less stock and will foresee what is going to happen so usually (out of dire necessity) you won't do that.
In fishing, the product grows "alone" and is not yours until you catch it. So, you can overproduce (kill more fish that it borns) and in fact overproducing does not affect you immediately (because it is not "your fish" that you are saving for later, but "everyone's fish"). If you want an analogy, think of what would happen to the fields around the cities if we closed farms and decided to go back to hunting/gathering.... do you think anything would survive?
So, before saying something akin to "if we do not catch all the fish available we are gonna die of hunger", please, please, think that fishing can easily be the less sustainable way of getting food.
I doubt this means that bitcoin is more prevalent that linux in/.
Probably it means that/. is one of the few places where bitcoins appear many times, while linux appears in a lot more of places. So, in the eyes of Google, "bitcoin" would be more particular to slashdot than "linux", but I am almost sure that linux appears more.
It we were talking about the Alcoa (or Sony) CEO, then yes. The basis of their bussiness and power would be unrelated to the issues at hands, so they may face a public onslaught and continue to have influence.
OTOH, Murdoch influence is due the ability of his newspapers and media to influence people. If they are not well received by the public, then his influence will suffer a lot.
Seems there's a lot of dogma in the thinking of how the Internet should be managed. For instance, we could make another Internet. Instantly double the number of IPv4 addresses, since every address could be used twice. We could find some bit somewhere that we can use to distinguish them, allowing communication between the 2 Internets. Does such a proposition sound like heresy?
It sounds a lot more like fantasy / magic than like heresy. As in "assign the same IP to two NICs and hope that the packets reach the right host".
Smaller airports --> bigger accountability. In some cases the bags were always in public sight while they were checked / sent to the plane.
Even when the baggage was not in sight, the traffic was so little that I imagine that there could be no more than two - three people looking baggage. It makes workers a lot harder to say "But I did not see nothing" if someone complains.
I do not know if it was because we were obviously foreigners, but I did not feel that the checks were very thorough. It looked like they were looking more for smuggled goods than for bombs, which makes it easier to check (you can hide a bomb almost anywhere, if you are smuggling goods probably you'll have to get your luggage full of it in order to make a profit).
Also, as Opportunist says, probably having a stable work in an office in an airport is a way better prospect than most of the population there has, while here it is just a minimal wage work.
And finally, low traffic allowed for some measures that would not be practical in other airports. When leaving Katmandu airport a security officer checked that the code in our bags matched the label we had in our tickets. Think how much would it cost doing the same in, say, Heathrow or JFK.
Slashdot Mirror
That picked my attention, the flow of any medium river is gigantic when compared with human drinking. So:
According to wikipedia, average flow at London is 65.8 m^3/s. This means 5.685.120 m^3/day, or 5.685.120.000 liter/day.
Give that everyone upriver uses not the 2 litre/day the physician recommend but that they sweat heavily so they use up to 4 l/day.
So, 5685120000 / 4 means that, just to be able to drink all of it once, you need 1.421.280.000 people upriver. More than the population of China. If you assume the human use is the usual 2 l/day, you need half the world population upriver. If it has to pass through 7 people... well, you get the idea.
That wasn't to difficult to check, I often wonder why people just repeat these legends without doing the most simple fact checking.
This does not mean "but if we accept lower wages then more people will be employed" (Verizon has increased profits). It means "I will be hired and someone else will be fired". What then means that someone else will appear offering to work for less than you.
Are you sure? Deflation means that any investment needs a better ROI to be profitable.
If I use X $ to buy steel and pay workers to make a car for selling, with inflation I expect that the sooner I begin to do that, the less capital I will need. Also, if I know that today a car like the one I am going to do sells for X + Y, I can expect that when my car hits the market it may be sold by X + Y + Z. And the buyer of the car will know that if he delays buying the car, he will end paying more so he has no incentive in delaying that.
With deflation, I know that if I delay buying and paying the raw materials and labour, it will be cheaper. Also, if I know that today a car like the one I am going to do sells for X + Y, I can expect that when my car hits the market it may be sold by X + Y - Z. If Z is greater than Y, then I am losing money. And the buyer of the car will know that if he delays buying the car, he will end paying less so he will also delay the purchase to the maximum, making Z greater.
So, what is the response to deflation? Do not invest, do not purchase, do not produce. Just keep your money in your wallet as it produces more than if you put it to work.
Also, you seem to assume that prices will be elastic (they will react quickly to falling demand with falling prices). Mind you, some prices are not so elastic so it may take a long time before their price gets down. Asuming that the companies producing them do not decide just to cut supply and close production lines.
As opposed to? Gold Standard (another kind of fiat money, with the disavantage that it is not flexible and forces deflation)? Barter?
How can someone argue with that? Obviously you are right.
The company can afford that (they got increased profits), so it is just that they do not want. Maybe you like it when you get a deal and later the other side wants to change it in its own favour, only because they are more powerful than you. Perhaps you would not fight back at that, and you would just meekly say "Yes sir, thanks for not abusing me more (by the moment)". I mean, for many people, it looks like what the real world is for them.
That does not change the fact that now you know why this fight is about. Unfortunately, it seems some people want to stay misinformed so they just can "opine" out of his prejudices. Sorry for spoiling that for you.
Don't forget to write in the resume that you are willing to work for as little as anybody else they can find! Ask them to cut your rate if they get cheapest workers!
Here are the details: The company was paying the healthcare and now they want to cut it out from salaries.
For example, you get contracted with an offer that says that you will be paid X in cash and another Y in health care insurance (paid directly by the company).
Now the company says that you have to accept receiving X-Y because "you are not contributing to your health care premium" (thats false, you were earning it before even if it didn't go through your paycheck).
Typical example of corporate newspeak.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence?
It is not that a person uses a wrong logic and then ends "logically" killing tens of people.
It works the other way around... a person that wants to kill lots of people finds a way of twisting the logic to justify their acts. Most of the less educated people of this class will just need to convince themselves with simple reasonaments ("I deserve more respect"/"They are making fun of me"/Whatever). More educated people will be able to forge more comprehensive looking constructs, complex enough to fill in a manifesto.
The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that intelligence is just another tool for our purposes, not a way of guiding them. Note that I am not talking only about criminals but everyone there, criminals get singled out because:
From a purely legal viewpoint, until there is a sentence he is "alleged perpetrator".
Note that (in this case) it is probably just a formality (he won't be released under bond or whatever). But it is good to use the distinction so we can remember it in other, less clear cases that arise. It will be also useful in those cases where the press shows the public lots of circunstancial evidence with just the "right" spin while forgetting of the allegations of the defense.
With weapons, the issue is not energy invested vs energy produced, but cost vs energy deliverable.
Probably 1000 tons of TNT are cheaper than a nuclear bomb. But you can punt 3 or 4 nuclear bombs in an ICBM that would not be capable of launching a payload of 3000 or 4000 tons, or perhaps the same amount of destructive power in submarines would amout to tripling its size.
So, it is not only a function of cost.
In essence, your post is somewhat like: since there are other workers who had lost their jobs, they have to accept everything the company offers them.
Could you send my the e-mail of your boss/customers? I think he/them might be interested in knowing your POV...
The poor are getting stomped because it is SOOO EASY to make them believe that their enemies are other poor with just slightly better benefits...
As I am from another country, YMMV, but what I see here is while there is pressure in the middle and lower level to cut costs, at higher level the game is a little different.
Let's say you have to build another hospital in the public network and (given that the specs are still open), the IT department asks for a place where they can put their CPD (thus being able to provide services currently outsourced at no low price). So they specify that they need so many square meters, must be able to bear a given weight of the servers, and so on.
When the hospital is built, the IT department checks and in effect the room is there, but it has not been built to bear the load. There is a meeting with the higher-ups of public government and the architect, and the only solution offered is to strengthen an area that happens to be above some columns so that a small area is able to meet the specs.
What do you think that would happen:
Of course, this example is just a product of my imagination and has nothing to do with the recently build hospital in the region where I live.
Congratulations! You have inspired me a new sig. As a token of gratitude, I'll use it first here!
Yeah, but "restoring" your program in an indefinite state may have worse consequencies than just freezing. Imagine that your compression algorithm has an infinite loop in certains conditions and, when the data has been "successfully" processed, it is written to your file...
And, in addition, I somehow doubt that even in Peru or Thailand it is the poor who are buying fishing ships able to travel several thousand kilometers and stay fishing for months while being supplied by factory ships that process the fish, searching for banks of fish. The poor stay in the territorial waters, usually return home at the end of the day and catch what they can within its reach.
But it is not the poors who are catching the fish.
Fishing in the high seas requires an important technology (fishing vessels, factory vessels and so on). According to Wikipedia, People's Republic of China (excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan), Peru, Japan, the United States, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, India, Thailand, Norway and Iceland are responsible for half of the commercial fishing of the world. You may point out (with reserves) Peru, Indonesia or Thailand, but the rest of countries are not doing it because they need the food so their people does not starve.
You are forgetting about opposition party leader... Vladimir Putin.
After the question of who is an ignorant has been pretty much voted in the previous responses to your posts, here comes my 0.02€.
It looks like you do not understand that fishing is a completely different way of getting food than, say, agriculture.
In agriculture, you use a resource (terrain, sun, water, fertilizers) to directly produce a result. With (maybe) the exception of fertilizers, all of the other resources are guaranteed to be the same year after year (with some variances). So, if you get 100 tons this years, you may expect between 50 or 150 tons next year, and the following one, and so on. There is the occasional drought or flood, but as not all the world suffers drought or flood at the same time, global production numbers do not vary that much. You cannot overproduce(*) because you are limited to your resources.
With cattle, you can overproduce by killing for meat more animals that those that born. But then, if you are doing things bad you'll realize that every time you have less stock and will foresee what is going to happen so usually (out of dire necessity) you won't do that.
In fishing, the product grows "alone" and is not yours until you catch it. So, you can overproduce (kill more fish that it borns) and in fact overproducing does not affect you immediately (because it is not "your fish" that you are saving for later, but "everyone's fish"). If you want an analogy, think of what would happen to the fields around the cities if we closed farms and decided to go back to hunting/gathering.... do you think anything would survive?
So, before saying something akin to "if we do not catch all the fish available we are gonna die of hunger", please, please, think that fishing can easily be the less sustainable way of getting food.
Oh please, don't be so negative.
Probably when there is no more salmon left and no more money can be made of fishing salmon, they will let her speak freely!
It is just a matter of let time go by...
I doubt this means that bitcoin is more prevalent that linux in /.
Probably it means that /. is one of the few places where bitcoins appear many times, while linux appears in a lot more of places. So, in the eyes of Google, "bitcoin" would be more particular to slashdot than "linux", but I am almost sure that linux appears more.
It we were talking about the Alcoa (or Sony) CEO, then yes. The basis of their bussiness and power would be unrelated to the issues at hands, so they may face a public onslaught and continue to have influence.
OTOH, Murdoch influence is due the ability of his newspapers and media to influence people. If they are not well received by the public, then his influence will suffer a lot.
It sounds a lot more like fantasy / magic than like heresy. As in "assign the same IP to two NICs and hope that the packets reach the right host".
I am betting on porn... I always bet on porn.
Very insightful comment... obviously you are at the top of the evolutionary process.
To improve yourself even more (if that is possible), here is a link for you. Reductio ad absurdum (or maybe you prefer this link).
After being in Nepal, that's what I think: