There are two issues here, and I have been consistent about this. Firstly, while the studies he cites do have some interesting and valid results, he interprets them in a way that isn't justified in order to make his argument. For example, David Schmitt, the author of the "Why Canâ(TM)t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Difference in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures" paper that Damore cites, states that the biological differences account for 10% of the variance, and the other 90% is due to non-biological [wired.com]. Damore greatly over-values the biological component here.
I think you don't really have any understanding of the literature or haven't bothered to read it. If you read the article you cite carefully, the statistic doesn't come from the article mentioned itself, but rather from one of the authors. I don't know where he gets that number, but I'll assume it's not made up. Also, the statement is qualified to refer to a single dimension (only one of the five factors) of personality and may be lacking other information. If you actually bother to read the research paper attributed to that author, it shows that sex-based variation of that trait increases in more egalitarian and prosperous societies.
That may seem odd, but it makes sense when you stop to consider that if you were able to create a perfect and ideal society that treated everyone the same, then the amount of variance in any trait becomes almost entirely genetic factors. It's a bit like giving two plants as much sunlight and water as they want to create an ideal environment. If one grows taller than the other, it's going to come down to biological causes. We also see this result in the tech world where in countries that are less well off such as India there are a greater percentage of women in tech, likely because it pays well. Schmitt doesn't say (or the article excludes) whether this 10% variance for the trait in general, for populations such as western democracies, or groups that do not have high levels of prosperity.
Also, I think you may be trying to conflate the percentage of the variance for that single trait with other ideas. First it would be necessary to determine if neuroticism has any impact on willingness to go into tech fields. I believe that in Damore's memo that he mainly linked neuroticism with a tendency to avoid managerial or authority positions rather than technology in general. Even assuming that it does have some impact and partially explains some of the disparity in the number of women in tech, it is only one of the five factors so it is still necessary to account for the others and their effects.
If you want to claim that the difference doesn't have a large biological explanation, it really becomes necessary to not only propose an alternative hypothesis, but to actually put it to a few tests. First I would ask what the percentage of women in technology should be. If you don't know that, I'm not sure how you can argue that its too low currently. Even a ball park estimate would be fine. I think it then also becomes necessary to explain why technology is somehow different from a large number of other fields, where in some of which women have overtaken men to form a majority. This even includes fields such as veterinary medicine which at one point was a field that was almost exclusively men. Dentistry is an even more extreme example where the gender imbalance is even greater than it is in technology. What makes technology special in that it somehow keeps women out when they have been able to go into other fields and in some cases no make up the strong majority of people in that vocation.
You realize that people have been saying the same thing about you and deliberately trying to misdirect people. In all of the stories related to this, I've seen you or other posters dismiss Damore's memo as nonsense, state that it makes claims that aren't backed up by the research he cited, or claim that the studies are basically pseudoscience, but I think I've only seen one person actually post something that even began citing scientific literature to refute something in Damore's memo.
If there's this 100 years of research on the subject that shows everything that he said was utter nonsense, please start telling us where to find it. Even climate change skeptics around here have a better record of citing something. All you've done is to try to bury your head in the sand and try to convince everyone else that none of this can possibly be true because you don't like the conclusion. I don't really expect anyone here to change your mind because it already seems quite made up, but I'd ask you to actually try to back up some of your assertions.
I think the real problem is that a lot of people who get put into project (or just plain old) management roles lack the aptitude, training, and/or desire to do it well. Some of this is the fault of corporate promotion structures that force good developers into management roles in order to advance up the corporate ladder. This squanders a good developer at the very least and potentially creates a terrible manager, especially if you get someone who doesn't have great people skills and would much rather be coding or working in their old role which they actually enjoyed.
I think another big problem is a tendency for project managers to be treated as bosses rather than a member of the team who's there to help facilitate the development process. I think people would like project managers more if they weren't viewed as task managers setting impossible deadlines for everyone, but instead someone who can figure out when things are expected to be finished and who can help the team remove bottlenecks. Putting someone in the middle management position where they have to try and force impractical schedules on developers is just begging for someone who'll be reviled on all sides and is only there for the pay check.
Project management is like anything else and not some kind of magically solution to all of a team's problems. You can use it responsibly and do it correctly and it's going to be beneficial to development or you can do it poorly and turn it into an impediment that everyone has to try to route around.
The problem is that too many American's let their health go to shit and then demand some kind of pill to fix the problem. High blood pressure is something that can be treated with changes to diet and exercise for the vast majority of people. Using medication should only be reserved for a very limited number of cases or for people who have particular medical conditions that make other approaches impossible.
People like to complain about how awful the American health care system is, but I'd argue that it's easily one of the best in the world. I can't imagine many other systems that could manage to keep alive a group of people as chronically unhealthy as the Americans. That the first thought is that this is being done so that there can be more prescriptions handed out for medication shows just how unhealthy the thinking about health care in America has become. The summary even ends by stating that medication isn't recommended for people who now fall into this new category of high blood pressure, but the first thought is to reach for a pill to fix things.
You know, there's absolutely nothing to stop the colleges from dropping their prices to what students actually pay so that this isn't anywhere near as much of a problem. Of course I wouldn't be surprised if the colleges do this because there's a really fucked up financial incentive for them in pretending that college tuition actually costs $40,000 per year.
I can understand why there's a desire to subsidize graduate education (and I can also understand why plenty of people don't want to have to pay for it as well), but all the same time it's a clearly a mess with all kinds of financial chicanery and shell games going on.
Customers are consumers that buy your product. If I'm selling Android phones, but people are buying from my competitor, they're not customers, but they're still consumers. Consumers represent the pool of potential customers. I think its a more appropriate word choice as I'm speaking broadly. If you think there's some negative connotation attached to consumer, that's on you.
That challenge is likely why Apple's focus at the launch of the HomePod back at WWDC in June was music first and smart features second.
I suppose if you don't already have a sound system, this lets you get something that's probably decent at a lower cost, but if you've already got a set of speakers, what is the purpose of this thing? I despise digital voice assistants anyway and I suspect there are a lot of other posters here that don't like privacy implications and completely disable whatever they've got on their phone, so I can't really see the point of this device. Maybe if they had a crap ton of other smart appliances and you could build an Apple home with this thing serving as the hub, but this just feels to pointless. So that probably just means it will be a smashing success when it does come out.
Even if it is news, does it really matter? Consumers seem to be perfectly fine with an older version of the OS or they don't actually care at all. If consumers don't care, then manufacturers don't have a lot of incentive to spend resources on something that won't improve sales.
It's not as though you're stuck with that option as is the case with iPhones. There are still Android variants that cater to the people who want the latest version and longer support for upgrades. That those devices tend not to sell as well suggests that most consumers don't care or have much higher priorities when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
I think it would be best to summarize it as "People are often wildly intolerant of opposing views over matters they feel strongly about."
None of this has anything to do with liberalism or conservatism. You can find the same kind of disdain among sports fans of opposing teams, especially if they have a historic rivalry and are close competitors.
For some reason though, the more powerful and larger iPad pro costs less than the phone.
I've got a larger and more powerful wall clock that costs much less than a wrist watch. Sometimes the expensive part of something is the miniaturization.
I almost wonder if this is a way to rake in some additional revenue before the company goes belly up for any variety of reasons such as result of some ongoing litigation. If they're only going to be around for another 2 months, $89.95 seems like a hell of a lot better to them than the usual $20. Just enough time for a big round of bonuses for hitting various growth targets before the corpse of the company is picked over by various jackal^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers.
I don't know if I'd want a virus scanner that has the ability to automatically remove files without my explicit permission. Imagine if your virus scanner itself were compromised and told to treat regular files as infections.
There's even more reason to be distrustful of Russian companies after the recent Olympics scandals where the head of the Russian anti-doping organization was told by the state to actually dope and then help to conceal doping for Russian athletes in advance of the Sochi. If Russia can put pressure on people and organizations to do that kind of stuff, there's plenty of reason that they could make Kaspersky operate below board. It's not even that Kaspersky want to do this or are somehow evil, merely that rule of law is quite tenuous in Russia and Putin has enough power that it's not feasible for companies to outright oppose him.
Yes, the U.S. government doesn't try to act much better or actively tries to get away with the same type of crap, but at least the court systems keep them in check to some degree, although I would argue nowhere near enough.
I think people who make this argument really misunderstand what is meant when people say that government cannot make jobs, though I suspect there are plenty of people who make the statement and support it without understanding it either.
From a plain language perspective, it's pretty obvious that government can make jobs. At a minimum any government official is holding a job position that wouldn't exist without the government. Those officials will likely create a lot of other government jobs as part of a bureaucracy in service of those initial jobs, much like a company has administrative assistants, HR departments, and plenty of other staff that don't have anything to do with the core business of the company. Similarly, the FBI, IRS, and other government agencies all need staff. The Department of Homeland Security certainly created a lot of jobs in order to fulfill the purposes it was created for.
But here's the funny thing. Government doesn't create jobs, but neither do companies. Sure a company can employee people for some task just like a government does, but the company can't just create any job at its whim. I could pay a few hundred people to create sculptures of 16th century philosophers fashioned entirely out of their own shit, but I could scarcely afford to for very long. It's consumer demand that ultimately creates jobs, and not any one person's particular whims about what kind of labor should be done. Unless you have customers willing to pay for your products, any job you might create is extremely temporary at best.
The notion that governments can't create jobs isn't about whether or not they can pay people to perform some activity. It's plainly obvious that they can. What is really meant by the phrase is that governments can't hope to direct the economy because they cannot possible imagine what it is that people actually want and value most. The Soviets and many others tried and failed miserably to direct economies no matter how much effort they devoted to central planning. That is also plainly obvious from history.
The difference is that a free market system allows for participants to see the kinds of jobs created that they're willing to pay to maintain rather than have them created by government decree. Furthermore, a government ban on municipal services is against free market principles. Also long as a city municipal internet company does not have any unfair competitive advantages by law, there's no reason why that option shouldn't exist. A free market cannot possibly exist if the government has legislated a monopoly.
If it seems that so many people who are in favor of free markets are against the government getting involved in markets its because a business in a free market is able to fail, freeing up the labor it used for other uses. Government jobs tend not to go away once created, even when most people wouldn't want to buy those services in any form. Look no further than the TSA for an example of where the government is forcing something down consumers throats when you'd be hard pressed to find people who would be willing to voluntarily purchase that kind of service.
Yeah, it's true that Northern states still have mosquitoes. I've even had someone jokingly tell me that the mosquito is even the state bird of Minnesota.
However, not all mosquito species actually carry the diseases that we'd like to prevent, and some of those species that are carriers don't inhabit northern states or aren't as prevalent on the west coast of the country.
Thing is though, people in countries like Denmark are also set for their retirement - total peace of mind. But they didn't have to save and invest ferociously to get there.
Of course they did. It's just that they had no real choice as to whether to do so or not. Do retirement services magically come about freely in Denmark, or do you suppose that its being funded by the massive tax rates that the Danish pay? So what practical difference is there between someone who takes that money that would have otherwise gone to taxes and saves it for retirement and the person who had to pay those higher taxes that would be used to pay for their retirement?
All joking aside, there's more entertainment produced today than any person could hope to consume and the best of the old stuff doesn't go away either so the problem always gets worse. In a world of post-scarcity where no one has want of food, shelter, or simple material goods, exclusive access to entertainment is the only way for society to maintain a hierarchical structure.
If West Virginia or a lot of inner cities are any indication, they'll take up a drug habit. Not everyone works in some hellish job that they only do in order to pay the rent, and there are a lot of people who take satisfaction in their job, even if you might consider that type of work beneath yourself. People want their lives to have meaning and a lot of people find that through their work. People aren't wired for a life filled with nothing but leisure.
Why fund the military though? It's just make work that doesn't actually produce anything of value unless you're involved in some conflict. I suppose you could argue that because the military doesn't actually produce anything of value, that it doesn't distort existing markets too much as long as its not reducing valuable labor supply or consuming a large number of resources itself that might have gone elsewhere. I get that it's a lot easier for out of work people who can't find anything else to be army grunts than rocket scientists or something like that and that the military can provide some job training as they need cooks and mechanics.
However, if you're going to take a huge pile of money to fund the military even more, why not just directly give it to the people without having them do the busy work of marching around, drilling with weapons, etc. that adds little to no value in most cases. The outcome is essentially the same and the people now have some free time to do something with their lives. Some won't take advantage of that and just waste the opportunity, but they probably weren't going to turn their life around in the military either.
Human labor will always be valuable. The problem is that we're reaching a point where a great number of humans will be incapable of doing anything of value, or at least to the extent that they can support themselves. As much as it may sound fine to simply provide everything for such people, and while it may even be financially possible to do so due to increased productivity, most people tend to go a bit squirrelly when they feel they have no purpose in life. Not everyone is cut out to be a sculptor or painter either, so the kind of post-scarcity world that idealists envision where people can spend all of their time on artistic pursuits wouldn't pan out any better either.
I expect at some point someone is going to go down the Gattaca road and that humanity as a whole will find a way to stay ahead of the curve.
If $5 million dollars could fix the problem, Hollywood could have cleaned up their act decades ago. This just reeks of throwing money at some organization that claims to specialize in training, etc. as a PR move.
I don't think we need another adaptation of Lord of the Rings, but I think it would be fucking awesome to get a series that focuses around the Silmarillion. There's enough there to make several seasons worth of a show and you can easily use all of other Tolkien's works set in Middle Earth if the series is popular enough. By the time you get through all of that, perhaps move on to the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, but when there's so much other wonderful material from the man out there, why retread the same ground, especially when the Peter Jackson movies were quite good for the time and still hold up rather well.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two issues here, and I have been consistent about this. Firstly, while the studies he cites do have some interesting and valid results, he interprets them in a way that isn't justified in order to make his argument. For example, David Schmitt, the author of the "Why Canâ(TM)t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Difference in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures" paper that Damore cites, states that the biological differences account for 10% of the variance, and the other 90% is due to non-biological [wired.com]. Damore greatly over-values the biological component here.
I think you don't really have any understanding of the literature or haven't bothered to read it. If you read the article you cite carefully, the statistic doesn't come from the article mentioned itself, but rather from one of the authors. I don't know where he gets that number, but I'll assume it's not made up. Also, the statement is qualified to refer to a single dimension (only one of the five factors) of personality and may be lacking other information. If you actually bother to read the research paper attributed to that author, it shows that sex-based variation of that trait increases in more egalitarian and prosperous societies.
That may seem odd, but it makes sense when you stop to consider that if you were able to create a perfect and ideal society that treated everyone the same, then the amount of variance in any trait becomes almost entirely genetic factors. It's a bit like giving two plants as much sunlight and water as they want to create an ideal environment. If one grows taller than the other, it's going to come down to biological causes. We also see this result in the tech world where in countries that are less well off such as India there are a greater percentage of women in tech, likely because it pays well. Schmitt doesn't say (or the article excludes) whether this 10% variance for the trait in general, for populations such as western democracies, or groups that do not have high levels of prosperity.
Also, I think you may be trying to conflate the percentage of the variance for that single trait with other ideas. First it would be necessary to determine if neuroticism has any impact on willingness to go into tech fields. I believe that in Damore's memo that he mainly linked neuroticism with a tendency to avoid managerial or authority positions rather than technology in general. Even assuming that it does have some impact and partially explains some of the disparity in the number of women in tech, it is only one of the five factors so it is still necessary to account for the others and their effects.
If you want to claim that the difference doesn't have a large biological explanation, it really becomes necessary to not only propose an alternative hypothesis, but to actually put it to a few tests. First I would ask what the percentage of women in technology should be. If you don't know that, I'm not sure how you can argue that its too low currently. Even a ball park estimate would be fine. I think it then also becomes necessary to explain why technology is somehow different from a large number of other fields, where in some of which women have overtaken men to form a majority. This even includes fields such as veterinary medicine which at one point was a field that was almost exclusively men. Dentistry is an even more extreme example where the gender imbalance is even greater than it is in technology. What makes technology special in that it somehow keeps women out when they have been able to go into other fields and in some cases no make up the strong majority of people in that vocation.
You realize that people have been saying the same thing about you and deliberately trying to misdirect people. In all of the stories related to this, I've seen you or other posters dismiss Damore's memo as nonsense, state that it makes claims that aren't backed up by the research he cited, or claim that the studies are basically pseudoscience, but I think I've only seen one person actually post something that even began citing scientific literature to refute something in Damore's memo.
If there's this 100 years of research on the subject that shows everything that he said was utter nonsense, please start telling us where to find it. Even climate change skeptics around here have a better record of citing something. All you've done is to try to bury your head in the sand and try to convince everyone else that none of this can possibly be true because you don't like the conclusion. I don't really expect anyone here to change your mind because it already seems quite made up, but I'd ask you to actually try to back up some of your assertions.
I think the real problem is that a lot of people who get put into project (or just plain old) management roles lack the aptitude, training, and/or desire to do it well. Some of this is the fault of corporate promotion structures that force good developers into management roles in order to advance up the corporate ladder. This squanders a good developer at the very least and potentially creates a terrible manager, especially if you get someone who doesn't have great people skills and would much rather be coding or working in their old role which they actually enjoyed.
I think another big problem is a tendency for project managers to be treated as bosses rather than a member of the team who's there to help facilitate the development process. I think people would like project managers more if they weren't viewed as task managers setting impossible deadlines for everyone, but instead someone who can figure out when things are expected to be finished and who can help the team remove bottlenecks. Putting someone in the middle management position where they have to try and force impractical schedules on developers is just begging for someone who'll be reviled on all sides and is only there for the pay check.
Project management is like anything else and not some kind of magically solution to all of a team's problems. You can use it responsibly and do it correctly and it's going to be beneficial to development or you can do it poorly and turn it into an impediment that everyone has to try to route around.
The problem is that too many American's let their health go to shit and then demand some kind of pill to fix the problem. High blood pressure is something that can be treated with changes to diet and exercise for the vast majority of people. Using medication should only be reserved for a very limited number of cases or for people who have particular medical conditions that make other approaches impossible.
People like to complain about how awful the American health care system is, but I'd argue that it's easily one of the best in the world. I can't imagine many other systems that could manage to keep alive a group of people as chronically unhealthy as the Americans. That the first thought is that this is being done so that there can be more prescriptions handed out for medication shows just how unhealthy the thinking about health care in America has become. The summary even ends by stating that medication isn't recommended for people who now fall into this new category of high blood pressure, but the first thought is to reach for a pill to fix things.
You know, there's absolutely nothing to stop the colleges from dropping their prices to what students actually pay so that this isn't anywhere near as much of a problem. Of course I wouldn't be surprised if the colleges do this because there's a really fucked up financial incentive for them in pretending that college tuition actually costs $40,000 per year.
I can understand why there's a desire to subsidize graduate education (and I can also understand why plenty of people don't want to have to pay for it as well), but all the same time it's a clearly a mess with all kinds of financial chicanery and shell games going on.
Customers are consumers that buy your product. If I'm selling Android phones, but people are buying from my competitor, they're not customers, but they're still consumers. Consumers represent the pool of potential customers. I think its a more appropriate word choice as I'm speaking broadly. If you think there's some negative connotation attached to consumer, that's on you.
That challenge is likely why Apple's focus at the launch of the HomePod back at WWDC in June was music first and smart features second.
I suppose if you don't already have a sound system, this lets you get something that's probably decent at a lower cost, but if you've already got a set of speakers, what is the purpose of this thing? I despise digital voice assistants anyway and I suspect there are a lot of other posters here that don't like privacy implications and completely disable whatever they've got on their phone, so I can't really see the point of this device. Maybe if they had a crap ton of other smart appliances and you could build an Apple home with this thing serving as the hub, but this just feels to pointless. So that probably just means it will be a smashing success when it does come out.
Even if it is news, does it really matter? Consumers seem to be perfectly fine with an older version of the OS or they don't actually care at all. If consumers don't care, then manufacturers don't have a lot of incentive to spend resources on something that won't improve sales.
It's not as though you're stuck with that option as is the case with iPhones. There are still Android variants that cater to the people who want the latest version and longer support for upgrades. That those devices tend not to sell as well suggests that most consumers don't care or have much higher priorities when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
I think it would be best to summarize it as "People are often wildly intolerant of opposing views over matters they feel strongly about."
None of this has anything to do with liberalism or conservatism. You can find the same kind of disdain among sports fans of opposing teams, especially if they have a historic rivalry and are close competitors.
For some reason though, the more powerful and larger iPad pro costs less than the phone.
I've got a larger and more powerful wall clock that costs much less than a wrist watch. Sometimes the expensive part of something is the miniaturization.
If you can't tell if the post was being serious or not, I think the problem is with you, not the post.
I almost wonder if this is a way to rake in some additional revenue before the company goes belly up for any variety of reasons such as result of some ongoing litigation. If they're only going to be around for another 2 months, $89.95 seems like a hell of a lot better to them than the usual $20. Just enough time for a big round of bonuses for hitting various growth targets before the corpse of the company is picked over by various jackal^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers.
I don't know if I'd want a virus scanner that has the ability to automatically remove files without my explicit permission. Imagine if your virus scanner itself were compromised and told to treat regular files as infections.
There's even more reason to be distrustful of Russian companies after the recent Olympics scandals where the head of the Russian anti-doping organization was told by the state to actually dope and then help to conceal doping for Russian athletes in advance of the Sochi. If Russia can put pressure on people and organizations to do that kind of stuff, there's plenty of reason that they could make Kaspersky operate below board. It's not even that Kaspersky want to do this or are somehow evil, merely that rule of law is quite tenuous in Russia and Putin has enough power that it's not feasible for companies to outright oppose him.
Yes, the U.S. government doesn't try to act much better or actively tries to get away with the same type of crap, but at least the court systems keep them in check to some degree, although I would argue nowhere near enough.
I think people who make this argument really misunderstand what is meant when people say that government cannot make jobs, though I suspect there are plenty of people who make the statement and support it without understanding it either.
From a plain language perspective, it's pretty obvious that government can make jobs. At a minimum any government official is holding a job position that wouldn't exist without the government. Those officials will likely create a lot of other government jobs as part of a bureaucracy in service of those initial jobs, much like a company has administrative assistants, HR departments, and plenty of other staff that don't have anything to do with the core business of the company. Similarly, the FBI, IRS, and other government agencies all need staff. The Department of Homeland Security certainly created a lot of jobs in order to fulfill the purposes it was created for.
But here's the funny thing. Government doesn't create jobs, but neither do companies. Sure a company can employee people for some task just like a government does, but the company can't just create any job at its whim. I could pay a few hundred people to create sculptures of 16th century philosophers fashioned entirely out of their own shit, but I could scarcely afford to for very long. It's consumer demand that ultimately creates jobs, and not any one person's particular whims about what kind of labor should be done. Unless you have customers willing to pay for your products, any job you might create is extremely temporary at best.
The notion that governments can't create jobs isn't about whether or not they can pay people to perform some activity. It's plainly obvious that they can. What is really meant by the phrase is that governments can't hope to direct the economy because they cannot possible imagine what it is that people actually want and value most. The Soviets and many others tried and failed miserably to direct economies no matter how much effort they devoted to central planning. That is also plainly obvious from history.
The difference is that a free market system allows for participants to see the kinds of jobs created that they're willing to pay to maintain rather than have them created by government decree. Furthermore, a government ban on municipal services is against free market principles. Also long as a city municipal internet company does not have any unfair competitive advantages by law, there's no reason why that option shouldn't exist. A free market cannot possibly exist if the government has legislated a monopoly.
If it seems that so many people who are in favor of free markets are against the government getting involved in markets its because a business in a free market is able to fail, freeing up the labor it used for other uses. Government jobs tend not to go away once created, even when most people wouldn't want to buy those services in any form. Look no further than the TSA for an example of where the government is forcing something down consumers throats when you'd be hard pressed to find people who would be willing to voluntarily purchase that kind of service.
Yeah, it's true that Northern states still have mosquitoes. I've even had someone jokingly tell me that the mosquito is even the state bird of Minnesota.
However, not all mosquito species actually carry the diseases that we'd like to prevent, and some of those species that are carriers don't inhabit northern states or aren't as prevalent on the west coast of the country.
Yeah, but I think Apple gave Xerox a bunch of stock options in exchange for that.
Wait, what are we talking about again?
Thing is though, people in countries like Denmark are also set for their retirement - total peace of mind. But they didn't have to save and invest ferociously to get there.
Of course they did. It's just that they had no real choice as to whether to do so or not. Do retirement services magically come about freely in Denmark, or do you suppose that its being funded by the massive tax rates that the Danish pay? So what practical difference is there between someone who takes that money that would have otherwise gone to taxes and saves it for retirement and the person who had to pay those higher taxes that would be used to pay for their retirement?
or Kanye West's movie Cruel Summer.
Wait, we're supposed to feel bad about this?
All joking aside, there's more entertainment produced today than any person could hope to consume and the best of the old stuff doesn't go away either so the problem always gets worse. In a world of post-scarcity where no one has want of food, shelter, or simple material goods, exclusive access to entertainment is the only way for society to maintain a hierarchical structure.
If West Virginia or a lot of inner cities are any indication, they'll take up a drug habit. Not everyone works in some hellish job that they only do in order to pay the rent, and there are a lot of people who take satisfaction in their job, even if you might consider that type of work beneath yourself. People want their lives to have meaning and a lot of people find that through their work. People aren't wired for a life filled with nothing but leisure.
Why fund the military though? It's just make work that doesn't actually produce anything of value unless you're involved in some conflict. I suppose you could argue that because the military doesn't actually produce anything of value, that it doesn't distort existing markets too much as long as its not reducing valuable labor supply or consuming a large number of resources itself that might have gone elsewhere. I get that it's a lot easier for out of work people who can't find anything else to be army grunts than rocket scientists or something like that and that the military can provide some job training as they need cooks and mechanics.
However, if you're going to take a huge pile of money to fund the military even more, why not just directly give it to the people without having them do the busy work of marching around, drilling with weapons, etc. that adds little to no value in most cases. The outcome is essentially the same and the people now have some free time to do something with their lives. Some won't take advantage of that and just waste the opportunity, but they probably weren't going to turn their life around in the military either.
It's not xkcd, but it seems obligatory.
Human labor will always be valuable. The problem is that we're reaching a point where a great number of humans will be incapable of doing anything of value, or at least to the extent that they can support themselves. As much as it may sound fine to simply provide everything for such people, and while it may even be financially possible to do so due to increased productivity, most people tend to go a bit squirrelly when they feel they have no purpose in life. Not everyone is cut out to be a sculptor or painter either, so the kind of post-scarcity world that idealists envision where people can spend all of their time on artistic pursuits wouldn't pan out any better either.
I expect at some point someone is going to go down the Gattaca road and that humanity as a whole will find a way to stay ahead of the curve.
If $5 million dollars could fix the problem, Hollywood could have cleaned up their act decades ago. This just reeks of throwing money at some organization that claims to specialize in training, etc. as a PR move.
I don't think we need another adaptation of Lord of the Rings, but I think it would be fucking awesome to get a series that focuses around the Silmarillion. There's enough there to make several seasons worth of a show and you can easily use all of other Tolkien's works set in Middle Earth if the series is popular enough. By the time you get through all of that, perhaps move on to the Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, but when there's so much other wonderful material from the man out there, why retread the same ground, especially when the Peter Jackson movies were quite good for the time and still hold up rather well.