If "labor" is confined to activities that generate high joules of output per unit time from human muscle, it's true that the owners "do none of the labor".
By this definition, programmers also do very little labor compared to, for example, that done by an uneducated construction laborer w/no special training, skills, or experience. Perhaps, therefore, the former should get paid less than the latter?
The owners risk their capital, sometimes losing money, to build stadiums (yes, I know, they usually get a lot of help from local governments whose voters foolishly pay a portion because, of course, a city without an NFL team has to be ashamed of itself for being small and weak -- but these tax dollars are voted by local folks and have relatively little impact on Federal budget). They hire/fire coaches and general managers and they generally manage the business. The most successful are the Steve Jobs' or Larry Ellison's of the football world. This is not "labor" by the "joules of output" measure -- but it's far more important. Successful NFL teams exist and do well decade after decade because of these "non laborers" - the "labor" comes and goes (and, BTW, is well compensated if they are great players) and only contribute to a team for a few years usually.
recorded cases serious enough to require a trip to the hospital
I don't know the source of this nor do I have any reason to doubt it.
However, perhaps the definition of "require" has changed due to social and media attention to food allergies and what's being recorded is "trips" not "required trips" (the latter of which would seem medically hard to determine reliably without stringent national standards which remain the same over the decades)?
If a child has a mild allergy to a particular food, my sense is that it's more likely today than 20 years ago that a parent, teacher, child care provider etc. will take the kid to the ER/call 911 instead of waiting to see if the condition resolves on its own. If that's the case and many of these mild cases "self resolve", they wouldn't show up in stats from 20 years ago but might now.
If the child begins to instinctively reject the offending food (humans, and perhaps other animals, actually seem to be pretty good at that -- perhaps to an excess, but then that probably is good for the species survival except where there is very little variety of food available), then the problem may not recur often. If, in fact, continued exposure at low levels actually sometimes causes an allergy to go away, a child from 20 years ago might actually be able to eat that food w/o a reaction after a few mild reactions and never have been "reported" as allergic due to one, potentially unnecessary, trip to the ER under the "new" rules of engagement.
Gee, kids today. Remember the old days when the following was confusing? i=-10; Was it assigning i to be -10 or was it decrementing i by 10? (Actually, I don't remember after all these years).
If the scope is extended to program and project management, every director and exec on the product or development side must read Fumbling the Future (a.k.a. "how to screw up a wet dream" or "how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory").
Apple would do just fine. An "American iPad" would cost $1200 and would only be sold in America (or, perhaps because of its high price and resulting low demand, not sold in America at all). A "global" iPad (assembled in China with components made in many other (mostly) Asian countries) would be sold elsewhere in the world and be successful as it would be competitively priced.
Apple, realizing that the global market is the important one to them would probably would have off-shored all iPad engineering (and, as a nice side benefit, save paying American construction workers to build their new spaceship and save paying taxes to Cupertino and California).
If we extend this to all the "things we didn't really need" in the past 40 years, the state of the art computer in the US would be a 286 with 8 MB RAM while the rest of the world would be running almost the computers they are now. This would not be very likely to have resulted in America having more engineering jobs than it does now.
One significant disadvantage of eBooks over dead tree books is the fleeting nature of them arising from the imposition of DRM.
I learned a lot from books I picked up from bookshelves in my home when I was a child just by browsing. There were classics which no one had read in twenty years, there were engineering text books that my father had kept (presumably he had opened some of them in the prior twenty years since he got his degree!), there were reference works -- a potpourri. I could pick up a book that was way over my head and that no one would ever have bought for me (or even thought to) even if it was 99 cents and just skim it and pick up a little something about some random topic. Two or three years later, I might run across the book again and skim or read it again and get much more from it. I recall reading Huck Finn at least three times before I was an adult and getting a completely different story each time (the first time it was an interesting tale, the second time it was making some very important points, and the third time it was a masterful work which showed how a point can be made without actually belaboring the point).
While it's true that some of the fiction works I'm talking about are now available on the internet due to them being so old, that's not true of newer works which are likely to be locked up virtually forever due to modern copyright law.
With DRMed eBooks, the odds of yourself or your kids being able to browse your collection in twenty years seems much lower than with hard copy books due to device changes, companies going out of business, changes in the law, etc.
Of course, eBooks can be great for that bestselling novel that probably will never become a classic and whose primary purpose is to keep you amused on a trip. If it had been a dead tree book, you would probably just leave in the airport when you finished with it so the DRM isn't a big deal and the advantages of eBooks probably far outweigh the disadvantages in this case.
I didn't suggest hyperinflation. However, losing AAA rating will probably add 10 to 50 basis points to treasuries from the analysts' projections I've read. This will trickle through other loans to some extent (such as car and home loans).
It's possible that US rating will be lowered below AAA independent of interest rates and even if come Tuesday the debt ceiling has been raised. Rumors are that S&P is likely to lower it unless $4T is cut from the current projected debt over the next 10 years and NO bill being considered comes close to that. That, of course, may trigger realistic interest rates with yet higher borrowing costs.
I won't be at all surprised if the rumor turns out to be true.
Actually, true engineers would weigh the cost of reducing the amount of waste spewed by 20 tons against the benefits accrued from having 20 less tons of waste being spewed.
One of the most important components of engineering is cost/benefit analysis which is used to inform design decisions.
[...] because of how poor the education system has become in the US (largely thanks to the no child left behind movement), the majority of people don't understand the extreme importance of every amendment contained within the Bill Of Rights[...]
Although I agree that the public education system in the United States has generally done a horrible job of teaching the US Constitution, this started long before NCLB became effective slightly less than ten years ago. Therefore, I have a hard time seeing that a continued decline (to the extent it may have become worse) in this dimension is attributable "largely" to NCLB.
Of course, the mentality you refer to was anticipated by Franklin when he wrote"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
While it's likely that SS will "be around" when a professional who is now 23 years old retires in 45 years (2056), it's likely that benefits will be reduced and/or benefits will be means tested and/or contributions will have increased substantially. So, it's fair to be skeptical about the benefit of SS to a young professional today.
Social Security expenditures exceeded the program’s non-interest income in 2010 for the first time since 1983. The $49 billion deficit last year (excluding interest income) and $46 billion projected deficit in 2011 are in large part due to the weakened economy and to downward income adjustments that correct for excess payroll tax revenue credited to the trust funds in earlier years. This deficit is expected to shrink to about $20 billion for years 2012-2014 as the economy strengthens. After 2014, cash deficits are expected to grow rapidly as the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers. Through 2022, the annual cash deficits will be made up by redeeming trust fund assets from the General Fund of the Treasury. Because these redemptions will be less than interest earnings, trust fund balances will continue to grow. After 2022, trust fund assets will be redeemed in amounts that exceed interest earnings until trust fund reserves are exhausted in 2036, one year earlier than was projected last year. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to pay only about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2085.
To be fair, the current SS tax is already highly progressive. The first dollar paid in each year returns, roughly, six times the retirement benefit of the last dollar paid in each year just before hitting the cap. As well, benefits are indirectly means tested today by partially taxing SS benefits as income IFF other sources of income exceed a threshold.
Therefore, making SS taxation more progressive (such as by removing the salary cap and/or taxing all income including investment income etc) and/or stronger means testing (possibly including asset tests such as those used by medicaid and other programs) has a precedent. However, going too far down this path risks SS becoming viewed as a "welfare program" making it vulnerable to major "reforms" (i.e., cuts).
Be careful with life expectancy numbers because infant and childhood mortality (and what counts as "infant mortality" -- but that's another topic) weigh very heavily into this but have little relevance to SS.
A more relevant number for SS purposes is "Life expectancy at retirement age" (as folks who die younger than this don't get SS retirement benefits) and these numbers have not changed as much as overall life expectancy.
However, none of these act as formal collective bargaining units which doom, by contract, young high skilled practitioners to lose their jobs or earn a lower salary than their less productive coworkers who happen to have been around the company longer.
The "professional organizations" you mention are really more like guilds exploiting regulatory capture. They have two primary (and conveniently intertwined) goals. First is to ensure some level of competency in the trade so the entire body of members is respected by the general customer class. Second, to limit the number of practitioners in the field to avoid excessive supply driving incomes down. Of course, they will tout the first goal loudly and deny that the second goal ever entered their mind.
Do we also pay for listing the octane quantity on the sides of gas stations? Do we also pay for the calorie labels on the sides of food? The reporting of fuel economy of cars before you buy them?
Yes - but the cost is hidden in the price you pay for the product and is probably quite minimal.
I had heard about the UK health care system of course but have never experienced it first hand.
I was there quite some years ago on a business trip and talking to what must have been a middle class (based on her position - albeit, maybe she had wealth from other sources than her own job) employee of the company hosting us. She mentioned she was going to be out of the office for a couple weeks due to a non-emergency but medically necessary surgery (I think I know what the procedure was and it would have been "routine" in any decent US hospital but fairly invasive so that would probably increase the risk of complications). In response I made some comment about "Well, at least you folks don't have to pay anything directly for such care". She gave me a look of horror as she stammered and explained that of course she wasn't going to use the public health care system (I think she said she maintained private insurance of some sort). She made it quite clear that anyone who could afford to and cared about quality of care would avoid the government system for anything but very simple low risk things.
Question for UK residents... Is it still, or was it ever, common for middle class folks to pay extra to avoid the government health care system?
Perhaps in an art school somewhere -- at least maybe that's what my spell checker thought when it offered me that as first choice and I foolishly hit enter.
And would this also apply to Bernie Madoff's possessions?
I don't see a difference. Both should be sold with the proceeds going to the victims or to the government to help defray the cost of keeping them in prison for the rest of their lives.
Obviously if a museum wanted them, they could bid on them.
Unfortunately, pretty much every school I've visited requires that you do 'N' credits of something you don't love
Unfortunately, pretty much every job requires that you spend X% of your time doing something you don't love.
I'm sure there's an exceptionally narrow job and an exceptionally narrow person somewhere that loves EVERY aspect of that job -- but I think this is rare.
I would be unlikely to even phone screen a younger person who didn't have a collage degree for a job that normally required one if they dropped out just because they didn't like every class. First, I would wonder if this person would be able to be able to cope with the 5% of the job they "had no interest in" or (worse) "didn't love". It also suggests this person may have a certain intolerant and immature reaction to "authority" OR is just extremely inflexible (the latter would bother me more than the former). I'd also be concerned that the person didn't exhibit much creativity in finding a way to meet the degree requirements in a way that reduced the pain to tolerable levels (perhaps by having picked a school that, like most, gives some flexibility in how you meet most of your out-of-major requirements OR by making use of the social network to figure out which classes were "interesting" or "easy passes" or "easy A's" and meeting the requirements with those).
Slashdot Mirror
If "labor" is confined to activities that generate high joules of output per unit time from human muscle, it's true that the owners "do none of the labor".
By this definition, programmers also do very little labor compared to, for example, that done by an uneducated construction laborer w/no special training, skills, or experience. Perhaps, therefore, the former should get paid less than the latter?
The owners risk their capital, sometimes losing money, to build stadiums (yes, I know, they usually get a lot of help from local governments whose voters foolishly pay a portion because, of course, a city without an NFL team has to be ashamed of itself for being small and weak -- but these tax dollars are voted by local folks and have relatively little impact on Federal budget). They hire/fire coaches and general managers and they generally manage the business. The most successful are the Steve Jobs' or Larry Ellison's of the football world. This is not "labor" by the "joules of output" measure -- but it's far more important. Successful NFL teams exist and do well decade after decade because of these "non laborers" - the "labor" comes and goes (and, BTW, is well compensated if they are great players) and only contribute to a team for a few years usually.
I don't know the source of this nor do I have any reason to doubt it.
However, perhaps the definition of "require" has changed due to social and media attention to food allergies and what's being recorded is "trips" not "required trips" (the latter of which would seem medically hard to determine reliably without stringent national standards which remain the same over the decades)?
If a child has a mild allergy to a particular food, my sense is that it's more likely today than 20 years ago that a parent, teacher, child care provider etc. will take the kid to the ER/call 911 instead of waiting to see if the condition resolves on its own. If that's the case and many of these mild cases "self resolve", they wouldn't show up in stats from 20 years ago but might now.
If the child begins to instinctively reject the offending food (humans, and perhaps other animals, actually seem to be pretty good at that -- perhaps to an excess, but then that probably is good for the species survival except where there is very little variety of food available), then the problem may not recur often. If, in fact, continued exposure at low levels actually sometimes causes an allergy to go away, a child from 20 years ago might actually be able to eat that food w/o a reaction after a few mild reactions and never have been "reported" as allergic due to one, potentially unnecessary, trip to the ER under the "new" rules of engagement.
It must be nice to have an OC-48 coming into your basement to drive those three drives to a "heavy load" condition via bit torrent.
Gee, kids today. Remember the old days when the following was confusing?
i=-10;
Was it assigning i to be -10 or was it decrementing i by 10? (Actually, I don't remember after all these years).
At the risk of being modded off-topic...
If the scope is extended to program and project management, every director and exec on the product or development side must read Fumbling the Future (a.k.a. "how to screw up a wet dream" or "how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory").
Apple would do just fine. An "American iPad" would cost $1200 and would only be sold in America (or, perhaps because of its high price and resulting low demand, not sold in America at all). A "global" iPad (assembled in China with components made in many other (mostly) Asian countries) would be sold elsewhere in the world and be successful as it would be competitively priced.
Apple, realizing that the global market is the important one to them would probably would have off-shored all iPad engineering (and, as a nice side benefit, save paying American construction workers to build their new spaceship and save paying taxes to Cupertino and California).
If we extend this to all the "things we didn't really need" in the past 40 years, the state of the art computer in the US would be a 286 with 8 MB RAM while the rest of the world would be running almost the computers they are now. This would not be very likely to have resulted in America having more engineering jobs than it does now.
At least Indiana finally adheres to DST in every county. Before that, it was really confusing!
One significant disadvantage of eBooks over dead tree books is the fleeting nature of them arising from the imposition of DRM.
I learned a lot from books I picked up from bookshelves in my home when I was a child just by browsing. There were classics which no one had read in twenty years, there were engineering text books that my father had kept (presumably he had opened some of them in the prior twenty years since he got his degree!), there were reference works -- a potpourri. I could pick up a book that was way over my head and that no one would ever have bought for me (or even thought to) even if it was 99 cents and just skim it and pick up a little something about some random topic. Two or three years later, I might run across the book again and skim or read it again and get much more from it. I recall reading Huck Finn at least three times before I was an adult and getting a completely different story each time (the first time it was an interesting tale, the second time it was making some very important points, and the third time it was a masterful work which showed how a point can be made without actually belaboring the point).
While it's true that some of the fiction works I'm talking about are now available on the internet due to them being so old, that's not true of newer works which are likely to be locked up virtually forever due to modern copyright law.
With DRMed eBooks, the odds of yourself or your kids being able to browse your collection in twenty years seems much lower than with hard copy books due to device changes, companies going out of business, changes in the law, etc.
Of course, eBooks can be great for that bestselling novel that probably will never become a classic and whose primary purpose is to keep you amused on a trip. If it had been a dead tree book, you would probably just leave in the airport when you finished with it so the DRM isn't a big deal and the advantages of eBooks probably far outweigh the disadvantages in this case.
I didn't suggest hyperinflation. However, losing AAA rating will probably add 10 to 50 basis points to treasuries from the analysts' projections I've read. This will trickle through other loans to some extent (such as car and home loans).
It's possible that US rating will be lowered below AAA independent of interest rates and even if come Tuesday the debt ceiling has been raised. Rumors are that S&P is likely to lower it unless $4T is cut from the current projected debt over the next 10 years and NO bill being considered comes close to that. That, of course, may trigger realistic interest rates with yet higher borrowing costs.
I won't be at all surprised if the rumor turns out to be true.
Actually, true engineers would weigh the cost of reducing the amount of waste spewed by 20 tons against the benefits accrued from having 20 less tons of waste being spewed.
One of the most important components of engineering is cost/benefit analysis which is used to inform design decisions.
And it would make stalkers' lives so much easier! Please, won't someone think of the stalkers.
Although I agree that the public education system in the United States has generally done a horrible job of teaching the US Constitution, this started long before NCLB became effective slightly less than ten years ago. Therefore, I have a hard time seeing that a continued decline (to the extent it may have become worse) in this dimension is attributable "largely" to NCLB.
Of course, the mentality you refer to was anticipated by Franklin when he wrote "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
And only China and India are big enough to bail it out. There will, of course, be some conditions but I'm sure we can get used to those.
For information about the state of the program, we could go to the source, THE 2010 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE FEDERAL OLD-AGE AND SURVIVORS INSURANCE AND FEDERAL DISABILITY INSURANCE TRUST FUNDS (pdf) or A SUMMARY OF THE 2011 ANNUAL REPORTS, the latter of which contains the money quote [emphasis added]:
To be fair, the current SS tax is already highly progressive. The first dollar paid in each year returns, roughly, six times the retirement benefit of the last dollar paid in each year just before hitting the cap. As well, benefits are indirectly means tested today by partially taxing SS benefits as income IFF other sources of income exceed a threshold.
Therefore, making SS taxation more progressive (such as by removing the salary cap and/or taxing all income including investment income etc) and/or stronger means testing (possibly including asset tests such as those used by medicaid and other programs) has a precedent. However, going too far down this path risks SS becoming viewed as a "welfare program" making it vulnerable to major "reforms" (i.e., cuts).
Be careful with life expectancy numbers because infant and childhood mortality (and what counts as "infant mortality" -- but that's another topic) weigh very heavily into this but have little relevance to SS.
A more relevant number for SS purposes is "Life expectancy at retirement age" (as folks who die younger than this don't get SS retirement benefits) and these numbers have not changed as much as overall life expectancy.
However, none of these act as formal collective bargaining units which doom, by contract, young high skilled practitioners to lose their jobs or earn a lower salary than their less productive coworkers who happen to have been around the company longer.
The "professional organizations" you mention are really more like guilds exploiting regulatory capture. They have two primary (and conveniently intertwined) goals. First is to ensure some level of competency in the trade so the entire body of members is respected by the general customer class. Second, to limit the number of practitioners in the field to avoid excessive supply driving incomes down. Of course, they will tout the first goal loudly and deny that the second goal ever entered their mind.
Yes - but the cost is hidden in the price you pay for the product and is probably quite minimal.
Ah, but only if the FBI had noticed the accelerometer nestled among the components that should have been on the mainboard before moving the rack.
I had heard about the UK health care system of course but have never experienced it first hand.
I was there quite some years ago on a business trip and talking to what must have been a middle class (based on her position - albeit, maybe she had wealth from other sources than her own job) employee of the company hosting us. She mentioned she was going to be out of the office for a couple weeks due to a non-emergency but medically necessary surgery (I think I know what the procedure was and it would have been "routine" in any decent US hospital but fairly invasive so that would probably increase the risk of complications). In response I made some comment about "Well, at least you folks don't have to pay anything directly for such care". She gave me a look of horror as she stammered and explained that of course she wasn't going to use the public health care system (I think she said she maintained private insurance of some sort). She made it quite clear that anyone who could afford to and cared about quality of care would avoid the government system for anything but very simple low risk things.
Question for UK residents... Is it still, or was it ever, common for middle class folks to pay extra to avoid the government health care system?
Stereotype and over generalize much?
It seems rather ridiculous, but for balance one should also read the publisher's explanation of this page here.
Perhaps in an art school somewhere -- at least maybe that's what my spell checker thought when it offered me that as first choice and I foolishly hit enter.
And would this also apply to Bernie Madoff's possessions?
I don't see a difference. Both should be sold with the proceeds going to the victims or to the government to help defray the cost of keeping them in prison for the rest of their lives.
Obviously if a museum wanted them, they could bid on them.
Unfortunately, pretty much every school I've visited requires that you do 'N' credits of something you don't love
Unfortunately, pretty much every job requires that you spend X% of your time doing something you don't love.
I'm sure there's an exceptionally narrow job and an exceptionally narrow person somewhere that loves EVERY aspect of that job -- but I think this is rare.
I would be unlikely to even phone screen a younger person who didn't have a collage degree for a job that normally required one if they dropped out just because they didn't like every class. First, I would wonder if this person would be able to be able to cope with the 5% of the job they "had no interest in" or (worse) "didn't love". It also suggests this person may have a certain intolerant and immature reaction to "authority" OR is just extremely inflexible (the latter would bother me more than the former). I'd also be concerned that the person didn't exhibit much creativity in finding a way to meet the degree requirements in a way that reduced the pain to tolerable levels (perhaps by having picked a school that, like most, gives some flexibility in how you meet most of your out-of-major requirements OR by making use of the social network to figure out which classes were "interesting" or "easy passes" or "easy A's" and meeting the requirements with those).