Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
Why not? There are so many laws on file now that we're all criminals to some extent without knowing it. The majority of people in prison are the ones who got caught and couldn't afford a lawyer.
The sad fact about prison is that the people who really deserve to be there (the socio-paths etc) tend to influence the non-socio paths into socio-paths so when they get out of prison they already have contacts on the outside to go commit crime.
Also because of the way background checks work, its very hard for a first time offender to ever be re-integrated back into society so they usually either resort to crime or become a ward of the state.
But it's not because I'm a tightwad: I just hate the taste of alcohol.
Question... Do you avoid certain foods as well because you don't like the taste?
This is more of a curiosity question because I know someone similar attitude but they eat very unhealthy because they simply hate the taste of vegetables and fruit and simply eat carbs and fried food all the time.
They also don't drink that much because they don't like the taste.
I'm more concerned about they're dietary habits than the drinking, but I was curious if being "picky" also had issues with diet as well.
So if you reduce awareness to a set of physical propositions, you lose the experience of "what it is like." and "what is it like to be me" - That's the other side of the coin, the subjective side. The best we can come up as far as how this is possible - physically or spiritually - is at most a hypothesis and at worst a religious assumption, even if we believe in materialism. If we want to be truly scientific we should begin to view this fundamental question as fundamentally undecidable.
You're digging to deep into the problem.
You don't need to actually build consciousness, you just need to build a computer that can perform the same intelligent tasks as a human can.
Even if it really doesn't have philosophical questions...
I don't think he's wrong about how powerful machines will be in 2050 I think he may be wrong about whether those machines can simulate a mind well enough because I really wonder if the complexity of a mind is actually a superpolynomial problem due to the hyper connected-ness of a mind and its environment.
The thing is... The human brain isn't some magical infinite processing machine. Its made of atoms and is ruled by the laws of physics.
The question is whether or not if we will achieve computational power high enough to simulate the human brain.
Personally, I think we think too highly of ourselves so most estimations could be over done.
The people at Blue Brain have had some major breakthroughs in the modeling part of the brain and they are legit as it gets.
And their estimates are its going to be 10 years before they can model the brain....
Exponential growth in technology ergo artificial brains isn't optimism, it's a (specific) leap of faith.
I'm blowing mod points here, but the people at Blue Brain believe they can do it in 10 years and they are the ones actually building it and reverse engineering brains.
Of course they might be a bit over optimistic, but unlike Kurzweil, they are doing the actual brain modeling and research so I would think they'd have an idea of what they are getting into.
and what's wrong with that? it needs to be a pain in the ass, that's the whole point.
Wouldn't it be easier if the US government gave DARPA and the car industry $1 billion dollars to invent driverless cars?
Then not only the drunk driving would be eliminated but also accidents related to lack of sleep, texting, cell phones, or otherwise people who are too senile to drive.
If you've got enough money, you can get any laws you want passed. Whenever some pro-consumer anti-large corporation law gets suggested, it gets shot down before you know it - anyone up for some Net Neutrality?
Question.
Doesn't the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) have deeper pockets than the RIAA?
From my understanding Apple profits alone has made more money than the entire music industry did in CD sales last year.
Perhaps I'm a dissenting voice here, but I actually do listen to broadcast radio, and I would love it if my android-based smart phone had an FM tuner in it. There are times when I don't have the music I want to listen to on the device, and I would tune in to either CBC 2 (classical music channel) or the local indy/alternative station.
Doesn't android have internet radio? I know I have CastCatcher for iPhone if I wanted to listen to a local radio station who broadcasts over the net.
Exactly. I, for one, am sick and tired of the 'blame everybody but the self' mentality that pervades society.
To be fair... They are really on to something more profound.
You are limited by your genetics... Or at least being human. You know... Being programmed to want sex, eat, sleep, feel sensations or emotions that get in the way.
You are programmed with 300 million years of evolution which most people are not aware of (much less actually fight).
And you are sometimes limited by the language and ideas that you were taught with.
I mean... Would you blame someone who grew up in the 1400's in believing in witches?
I already used this once tonight but I'll use the concept again.
If you had a yummy fish and you threw it at a bear, and the bear ate it... Would you get mad at the bear for not using self control?
Of course not (well most of us), its what bears do. Now going along with this though...
Humans are also like bears. We are both animals so somethings that we do, we can't help because thats what we've been raised to do, or taught, or just through instinct.
Or lack thereof...
Now I'm not saying that free will doesn't exist and that everyone is blameless, but rather if we looked at human behavior problems as you would an animal or as an evolutionary, then things get a lot clearer...
The PADDs similar tablets in general, not just Apples iPad.
I dunno. Star Trek is very inline with Slashdot. I was suprised no one noticed the similarities sooner here.
I was watching reruns STNG with my dad a few months ago and I saw Picard hand what basically looked like an iPad to riker and I joked "Hey, I bet this is where got the idea haha."
The device is pretty much the same size and shape and considering every console in STNG is touch based...
Maybe. But then you'll end up with scholars of lessen value then. *Specially* at the face of the new economics can any country allow for worse knowledge workers? I don't think so.
True, but corporations are looking at dollar signs on the quarterly report. They can't quantify knowledge. I've seen entire departments laid off where they spends on the upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars to train the department and still came to conclusion it was cheaper to fire them all and retrain people overseas.
Because businesses have a mission of enriching their investors. Universities have a mission of turning students into educated persons capable of disciplined thought.
Why would you conclude that the tools that a business uses to hold meetings -- "the practical alternative to work", as one wag described them -- would be at all useful to a university?
Because the end result of a degree usually ends up working in a non-academic environment. Don't call me jaded but its obvious many schools are diploma mills simply for their students to get a peice of paper to get that job, while the businesses complain that they are getting graduates who didn't learn anything of practical value.
Personally, if businesses would just require something else than degrees from universities for people to get entry level jobs, then the masses can go do something else other than cause the price of enrichment to go through the roof.
Because of the artificial demand for degrees, many people just go to college for that piece of paper. Again, maybe I'm sad an jaded, but I've seen plenty of philosophy and art majors in our ranks bitter and broken because their education that got them into so much debt really has not practical application for their lives now.
Personally, I'd like go back to college to learn things that have no bearing on my career, simply to learn more things, but the world is getting a bit hard up in this economy.
I know a good deal of you put academia on a pedestal, but the truth is businesses need people trained to work and deal with interaction in a corporate environment rather than an academic one.
Though... I don't really like the corporate world as much as I can throw it due to its hostile nature.
Perhaps schools can start teaching kids how to deal with backstabbers and neopotism.
But there's no substitute for actually going to a class in person... with other learners and a teacher in front of you... for much of your formal education.
Could you not acheive the same with a conference call and a powerpoint presentation or video conference?
Sure there is face time and easier reading of the class, but when I went to school I was in classes with 300 kids in it so I really doubt they saw my face back on the 20th row.
In the corporate world, flying to meetings was the first thing cut during the downturn.
We ended up tons of conference calls and shared desktops for the meetings and technology classes.
So I am asking... If it works for a major corporation, then why doesn't it work for universities.
Would save on costs of logistics like dorm rooms etc.
Besides in the real world, you are more likely to deal with people over the phone and email than you are in person. You'll be given a Blackberry and expected to work 24/7 too. Haha. But I digress.
Again... Businesses have decided face time and presence is no longer important. Don't see why universities won't follow suite.
While I used to often boast about having learned at least as much on the net as I did in class, the net is no substitution for a formal education. There is value to the structure of coursework, to the demands of learning material and being tested on it, and to requirement to learn to think and apply logic. There is also value in the advise and teaching of professors, as well as the social and academic interaction you have with other students.
Question, baring engineering and science labs, what can a university do that a person using voip and the net cannot?
I'm asking this because my last job laid everyone off for a company that employs people to work from home.
And a lot of the jobs being offered out there now are work from home voip setups.
Offices have been one of the major things to go in the economic downturn. Face time was seen as a luxury so most businesses decided to cut the over head (also they turned everyone into contractors, but I digress).
Class rooms and labs are nice tools for learning, but the fact of the new economics, that people will settle for less if it costs less.
If an on-line university degree is just valid as a brick and mortar but cost less... Well... Its only logical they will become more popular.
Don't blame me. I used to have an office to myself a long time ago.
You give up certain rights when you travel to a foreign country
Rights are inherent and not given or allowed by any government. Nor are laws enumerations on these rights.
I thought that was the whole point of the Magna Carta and the American Revolution.
But if you want to be pragmatic about it, it is in the moral and political best interest of any nation who does respect those rights to put pressure on countries that do not.
Or is it ok to be nice with people who allow repression and torture in their countries?
It doesn't matter if it is their law in that country or not, if you are an individual or a corporation that plays nice with those rules, it means you support those policies. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about that.
Oh the more I re-read your post the more I realized how people who don't even pay attention to the stock market modded you up.
Even Enron and Worldcom didn't tank overnight.
Yes, but you are completely wrong in that they hid their problems from the world to the end. They were rated AAA by Moody's the day they announced bankruptcy. An investor can't protect themselves from companies that cook their books.
Fortunately that is illegal and rare.
An automatic buy order is stupid for the exact same reason. You might set yourself up to snap up a bargain if and when it ever happens, but the problem is, if the stock suddenly drops due to a pending bankruptcy or some other equally devastating reason, you'll get your stock purchase, making some other desperate seller very happy, and never be able to recover the cost.
But didn't you say companies don't go bankrupt overnight?
Obviously putting a limit buy order on say IBM or Coca-Cola is logical because they are not going bankrupt anytime soon.
You should pay attention to see if they have competent management, put out quality products, and keep their production in line. If on a daily basis, you notice the stock starting to slip, find out why.
Hrm.... Recently I saw a well profitable small electronics company loose 75% share value in a week. The only reason I could find out was a google search that found that this company was being targeted by short squeezes on forums.
I could have panicked and sold though, but I decided not to look at the share price for a while and its back up to where it was before the squeeze.
Sometimes share prices are being manipulated. You just have to know when.,
Oh and note... There is some incongruity between the casualty and force ratio simply because, Americans tended to capture large amounts of German soldiers while on the Eastern front, they tended to fight the Russians until there was no option left.
Of course, towards the end of the war, many German units walked across the eastern front to the eastern to surrendered to the Americans.
You really need to understand the context of why though.
The sad thing is, if you're under the age of 30, the vast majority of Americans can't relate to WWII in the least. You ask the average American on the street and they don't know the difference between WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, or the Gulf War.
And what's even sader is that the American's who do know about WWII know nothing about the eastern front.
Let's put it this way...
US forces only suffered about 500,000 dead during WWII and only faced a fraction of the German forces in Africa, France, and Germany.
Germany had 75% of its forces on the eastern front and had lost about 2 million soldiers there which is about 90% of its wartime casualties.
Russia... Well it lost 10 million soldiers there.
Not to say the US helped... Its just that most Americans don't understand the scale and the importance of the WWII Eastern front in history.
As soon as you enter Congress, you are no longer allowed to belong to any party. You become one single whole group, with no allegiances to anything but your own personal beliefs, your voters back home, and the Law.
If that works, extend it to the Member State Parliaments too.
Its not political parties... Its the first past the post system which gives you a coke or pepsi choice.
Not suprisingly... Thomas Jefferson had come up with a system that sort of took on this issue but sadly never really caught on in the states:
Used in Israel and other places... Say what you will about Israel treatment of occupied territory, its one of the few nations that actually had a new political party kick out the old in a very short timespam.
You know, before I went to university, I thought the exact same thing. What's in it for me? I'm a smart guy, have a high IQ, know a lot. I'm generally smarter than many people who've graduated university. So why do employers insist on a post-secondary degree or diploma to hire for certain positions?
I think the point he was trying to make, is that if employers require it for employment, then an adverse portion of the population goes not for learning, but simply to have a piece of paper to get a job.
The negative effect of this is of course insanely high tuition and schools just churning out diploma mills.
This of course defeats the whole purpose of the spirit of higher education. Personally, I'd love to go back to college just to learn things that have no bearing on my career to further my own development as a human, but because of the high costs I don't think that will ever happen.
I remember I once talked to a Swedish or Norwegian woman in a hotel lobby bar at a convention a few years back (can't remember which one... I think it was Norway) and was shocked to find out that college over there is basically free over there. I didn't realize other nations didn't make you take out life crushing loans to get college.
Of course, it can also mean a factory shuts down, and moves production to a country with fewer human rights protections, promoting slavery, but really who minds the little details.
Is the argument here is that rather than increasing wages at home, we should put pressure on making them raise them overseas?
Slashdot Mirror
Last I heard, that would give each evil do-er a comfortable middle class existence.
Why not? There are so many laws on file now that we're all criminals to some extent without knowing it. The majority of people in prison are the ones who got caught and couldn't afford a lawyer.
The sad fact about prison is that the people who really deserve to be there (the socio-paths etc) tend to influence the non-socio paths into socio-paths so when they get out of prison they already have contacts on the outside to go commit crime.
Also because of the way background checks work, its very hard for a first time offender to ever be re-integrated back into society so they usually either resort to crime or become a ward of the state.
But it's not because I'm a tightwad: I just hate the taste of alcohol.
Question... Do you avoid certain foods as well because you don't like the taste?
This is more of a curiosity question because I know someone similar attitude but they eat very unhealthy because they simply hate the taste of vegetables and fruit and simply eat carbs and fried food all the time.
They also don't drink that much because they don't like the taste.
I'm more concerned about they're dietary habits than the drinking, but I was curious if being "picky" also had issues with diet as well.
We don't have more than a rudimentary understanding of how the brain works, or even what Consciousness [wikipedia.org] is.
Correct. However, we have no proof that consciousness or free will exists. That is not the point of artificial intelligence.
They are aiming for getting a machine to perform tasks that requires human intelligence.
There is not way we can prove it or other real humans have are consciousness or not.
So if you reduce awareness to a set of physical propositions, you lose the experience of "what it is like." and "what is it like to be me" - That's the other side of the coin, the subjective side. The best we can come up as far as how this is possible - physically or spiritually - is at most a hypothesis and at worst a religious assumption, even if we believe in materialism. If we want to be truly scientific we should begin to view this fundamental question as fundamentally undecidable.
You're digging to deep into the problem.
You don't need to actually build consciousness, you just need to build a computer that can perform the same intelligent tasks as a human can.
Even if it really doesn't have philosophical questions...
I don't think he's wrong about how powerful machines will be in 2050 I think he may be wrong about whether those machines can simulate a mind well enough because I really wonder if the complexity of a mind is actually a superpolynomial problem due to the hyper connected-ness of a mind and its environment.
The thing is... The human brain isn't some magical infinite processing machine. Its made of atoms and is ruled by the laws of physics.
The question is whether or not if we will achieve computational power high enough to simulate the human brain.
Personally, I think we think too highly of ourselves so most estimations could be over done.
The people at Blue Brain have had some major breakthroughs in the modeling part of the brain and they are legit as it gets.
And their estimates are its going to be 10 years before they can model the brain....
Exponential growth in technology ergo artificial brains isn't optimism, it's a (specific) leap of faith.
I'm blowing mod points here, but the people at Blue Brain believe they can do it in 10 years and they are the ones actually building it and reverse engineering brains.
Of course they might be a bit over optimistic, but unlike Kurzweil, they are doing the actual brain modeling and research so I would think they'd have an idea of what they are getting into.
and what's wrong with that? it needs to be a pain in the ass, that's the whole point.
Wouldn't it be easier if the US government gave DARPA and the car industry $1 billion dollars to invent driverless cars?
Then not only the drunk driving would be eliminated but also accidents related to lack of sleep, texting, cell phones, or otherwise people who are too senile to drive.
If you've got enough money, you can get any laws you want passed. Whenever some pro-consumer anti-large corporation law gets suggested, it gets shot down before you know it - anyone up for some Net Neutrality?
Question.
Doesn't the CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) have deeper pockets than the RIAA?
From my understanding Apple profits alone has made more money than the entire music industry did in CD sales last year.
Perhaps I'm a dissenting voice here, but I actually do listen to broadcast radio, and I would love it if my android-based smart phone had an FM tuner in it. There are times when I don't have the music I want to listen to on the device, and I would tune in to either CBC 2 (classical music channel) or the local indy/alternative station.
Doesn't android have internet radio? I know I have CastCatcher for iPhone if I wanted to listen to a local radio station who broadcasts over the net.
Exactly. I, for one, am sick and tired of the 'blame everybody but the self' mentality that pervades society.
To be fair... They are really on to something more profound.
You are limited by your genetics... Or at least being human. You know... Being programmed to want sex, eat, sleep, feel sensations or emotions that get in the way.
You are programmed with 300 million years of evolution which most people are not aware of (much less actually fight).
And you are sometimes limited by the language and ideas that you were taught with.
I mean... Would you blame someone who grew up in the 1400's in believing in witches?
I already used this once tonight but I'll use the concept again.
If you had a yummy fish and you threw it at a bear, and the bear ate it... Would you get mad at the bear for not using self control?
Of course not (well most of us), its what bears do. Now going along with this though...
Humans are also like bears. We are both animals so somethings that we do, we can't help because thats what we've been raised to do, or taught, or just through instinct.
Or lack thereof...
Now I'm not saying that free will doesn't exist and that everyone is blameless, but rather if we looked at human behavior problems as you would an animal or as an evolutionary, then things get a lot clearer...
Because you know how to fix it.
The reality: a 20 year old's shame cost a company millions.
No. The person too lazy to label the button cost the company millions of dollars.
Its like throwing a fish at a bear and not expecting him to eat it.
Oh and don't just label it "Do not press!" that will just entice someone.
"Emergency Shutdown" would have sufficed.
The PADDs similar tablets in general, not just Apples iPad.
I dunno. Star Trek is very inline with Slashdot. I was suprised no one noticed the similarities sooner here.
I was watching reruns STNG with my dad a few months ago and I saw Picard hand what basically looked like an iPad to riker and I joked "Hey, I bet this is where got the idea haha."
The device is pretty much the same size and shape and considering every console in STNG is touch based...
Well... Here you go:
http://www.milliamp.com/blog/1485/ipad-got-nuthin-on-picard/
Maybe. But then you'll end up with scholars of lessen value then. *Specially* at the face of the new economics can any country allow for worse knowledge workers? I don't think so.
True, but corporations are looking at dollar signs on the quarterly report. They can't quantify knowledge. I've seen entire departments laid off where they spends on the upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars to train the department and still came to conclusion it was cheaper to fire them all and retrain people overseas.
Because businesses have a mission of enriching their investors. Universities have a mission of turning students into educated persons capable of disciplined thought.
Why would you conclude that the tools that a business uses to hold meetings -- "the practical alternative to work", as one wag described them -- would be at all useful to a university?
Because the end result of a degree usually ends up working in a non-academic environment. Don't call me jaded but its obvious many schools are diploma mills simply for their students to get a peice of paper to get that job, while the businesses complain that they are getting graduates who didn't learn anything of practical value.
Personally, if businesses would just require something else than degrees from universities for people to get entry level jobs, then the masses can go do something else other than cause the price of enrichment to go through the roof.
Because of the artificial demand for degrees, many people just go to college for that piece of paper. Again, maybe I'm sad an jaded, but I've seen plenty of philosophy and art majors in our ranks bitter and broken because their education that got them into so much debt really has not practical application for their lives now.
Personally, I'd like go back to college to learn things that have no bearing on my career, simply to learn more things, but the world is getting a bit hard up in this economy.
I know a good deal of you put academia on a pedestal, but the truth is businesses need people trained to work and deal with interaction in a corporate environment rather than an academic one.
Though... I don't really like the corporate world as much as I can throw it due to its hostile nature.
Perhaps schools can start teaching kids how to deal with backstabbers and neopotism.
But there's no substitute for actually going to a class in person... with other learners and a teacher in front of you... for much of your formal education.
Could you not acheive the same with a conference call and a powerpoint presentation or video conference?
Sure there is face time and easier reading of the class, but when I went to school I was in classes with 300 kids in it so I really doubt they saw my face back on the 20th row.
In the corporate world, flying to meetings was the first thing cut during the downturn.
We ended up tons of conference calls and shared desktops for the meetings and technology classes.
So I am asking... If it works for a major corporation, then why doesn't it work for universities.
Would save on costs of logistics like dorm rooms etc.
Besides in the real world, you are more likely to deal with people over the phone and email than you are in person. You'll be given a Blackberry and expected to work 24/7 too. Haha. But I digress.
Again... Businesses have decided face time and presence is no longer important. Don't see why universities won't follow suite.
While I used to often boast about having learned at least as much on the net as I did in class, the net is no substitution for a formal education. There is value to the structure of coursework, to the demands of learning material and being tested on it, and to requirement to learn to think and apply logic. There is also value in the advise and teaching of professors, as well as the social and academic interaction you have with other students.
Question, baring engineering and science labs, what can a university do that a person using voip and the net cannot?
I'm asking this because my last job laid everyone off for a company that employs people to work from home.
And a lot of the jobs being offered out there now are work from home voip setups.
Offices have been one of the major things to go in the economic downturn. Face time was seen as a luxury so most businesses decided to cut the over head (also they turned everyone into contractors, but I digress).
Class rooms and labs are nice tools for learning, but the fact of the new economics, that people will settle for less if it costs less.
If an on-line university degree is just valid as a brick and mortar but cost less... Well... Its only logical they will become more popular.
Don't blame me. I used to have an office to myself a long time ago.
You give up certain rights when you travel to a foreign country
Rights are inherent and not given or allowed by any government. Nor are laws enumerations on these rights.
I thought that was the whole point of the Magna Carta and the American Revolution.
But if you want to be pragmatic about it, it is in the moral and political best interest of any nation who does respect those rights to put pressure on countries that do not.
Or is it ok to be nice with people who allow repression and torture in their countries?
It doesn't matter if it is their law in that country or not, if you are an individual or a corporation that plays nice with those rules, it means you support those policies. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about that.
Oh the more I re-read your post the more I realized how people who don't even pay attention to the stock market modded you up.
Even Enron and Worldcom didn't tank overnight.
Yes, but you are completely wrong in that they hid their problems from the world to the end. They were rated AAA by Moody's the day they announced bankruptcy. An investor can't protect themselves from companies that cook their books.
Fortunately that is illegal and rare.
An automatic buy order is stupid for the exact same reason. You might set yourself up to snap up a bargain if and when it ever happens, but the problem is, if the stock suddenly drops due to a pending bankruptcy or some other equally devastating reason, you'll get your stock purchase, making some other desperate seller very happy, and never be able to recover the cost.
But didn't you say companies don't go bankrupt overnight?
Obviously putting a limit buy order on say IBM or Coca-Cola is logical because they are not going bankrupt anytime soon.
You should pay attention to see if they have competent management, put out quality products, and keep their production in line. If on a daily basis, you notice the stock starting to slip, find out why.
Hrm.... Recently I saw a well profitable small electronics company loose 75% share value in a week. The only reason I could find out was a google search that found that this company was being targeted by short squeezes on forums.
I could have panicked and sold though, but I decided not to look at the share price for a while and its back up to where it was before the squeeze.
Sometimes share prices are being manipulated. You just have to know when.,
Oh and note... There is some incongruity between the casualty and force ratio simply because, Americans tended to capture large amounts of German soldiers while on the Eastern front, they tended to fight the Russians until there was no option left.
Of course, towards the end of the war, many German units walked across the eastern front to the eastern to surrendered to the Americans.
You really need to understand the context of why though.
The sad thing is, if you're under the age of 30, the vast majority of Americans can't relate to WWII in the least. You ask the average American on the street and they don't know the difference between WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, or the Gulf War.
And what's even sader is that the American's who do know about WWII know nothing about the eastern front.
Let's put it this way...
US forces only suffered about 500,000 dead during WWII and only faced a fraction of the German forces in Africa, France, and Germany.
Germany had 75% of its forces on the eastern front and had lost about 2 million soldiers there which is about 90% of its wartime casualties.
Russia... Well it lost 10 million soldiers there.
Not to say the US helped... Its just that most Americans don't understand the scale and the importance of the WWII Eastern front in history.
Especially say those pictures from Leningrad.
As soon as you enter Congress, you are no longer allowed to belong to any party. You become one single whole group, with no allegiances to anything but your own personal beliefs, your voters back home, and the Law.
If that works, extend it to the Member State Parliaments too.
Its not political parties... Its the first past the post system which gives you a coke or pepsi choice.
Not suprisingly... Thomas Jefferson had come up with a system that sort of took on this issue but sadly never really caught on in the states:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson's_method
Of course I think the best solution is the:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
Used in Israel and other places... Say what you will about Israel treatment of occupied territory, its one of the few nations that actually had a new political party kick out the old in a very short timespam.
You know, before I went to university, I thought the exact same thing. What's in it for me? I'm a smart guy, have a high IQ, know a lot. I'm generally smarter than many people who've graduated university. So why do employers insist on a post-secondary degree or diploma to hire for certain positions?
I think the point he was trying to make, is that if employers require it for employment, then an adverse portion of the population goes not for learning, but simply to have a piece of paper to get a job.
The negative effect of this is of course insanely high tuition and schools just churning out diploma mills.
This of course defeats the whole purpose of the spirit of higher education. Personally, I'd love to go back to college just to learn things that have no bearing on my career to further my own development as a human, but because of the high costs I don't think that will ever happen.
I remember I once talked to a Swedish or Norwegian woman in a hotel lobby bar at a convention a few years back (can't remember which one... I think it was Norway) and was shocked to find out that college over there is basically free over there. I didn't realize other nations didn't make you take out life crushing loans to get college.
If it is true that the tech extorted a laptop, then it becomes a criminal case. People can go to jail.
While the US has an extradition treaty with India, it is highly unlikely they would do anything over there as would require major FBI pressure.
Of course, it can also mean a factory shuts down, and moves production to a country with fewer human rights protections, promoting slavery, but really who minds the little details.
Is the argument here is that rather than increasing wages at home, we should put pressure on making them raise them overseas?