Military spending also boosts the economy. Admittedly, it doesn't do anything for easing the burden on hospitals.
As for weapons, most of what is being fired are AK-47s and RPGs, which are Soviet and Eastern Bloc licensed weapons. Yeah, we provided some of them indirectly but, they'd get the weapons no matter who gave them to them. The world is absolutely awash in small arms. If you were talking about more sophisticated weaponry, I might agree.
Note that in Iran-Contra, we armed Iran with TOW missiles and some anti-aircraft Hawk missiles. As far as I can tell, the terrorists, ISIS, Taliban or whoever are not using TOW missiles and certainly not antiaircraft missile batteries. Iran-Contra is a total non-factor here.
As for the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government, it is pure speculation that it would have made the area more stable. Clearly it led to a bad result, but there was a reason that Mosaddegh was considered dangerous to US interests. It is not entirely clear that Iran would not have been a problem no matter who was in charge. We spent quite a bit of effort working to ensure that the Soviets did not gain access to Iran and the Soviets were always there causing what trouble they could.
So in terms of that goal, we actually succeeded, even the religious government which hates us was still not friends with he Soviet Union and did not become Communist. Obviously, we did pay for that in the long term by creating a new, albeit somewhat less immediate enemy.
We shouldn't stop teaching Calc, we just shouldn't require it for people who will never use it and never need to use it.
It has value, but the level of difficulty is such that the value it has for the general population is overshadowed entirely by the fact that it causes a high rate of failure.
We're not talking about dropping the quality of the US population's educational readiness for jobs. I've worked in computing for almost 20 years and never so much had to use or even code a differential. I know there are jobs in CS where that happens all day, every day, but the point is that even in more technical roles, it's not used.
If your goal is to produce a better citizen, I could agree that a good basic stats course is probably more useful than Calc will ever be. Things at the size and scope of the modern USA tend to be best described by statistics.
I for one, think that is a shitty idea. Unless you like being in a police station.
Your goal is to attract the attention of the police, to make them less likely to use tactics like this. That could work, but you'd need thousands of people doing it. One or two of you might create a ruckus, but you'll end up in jail in the meantime. I think a petition would probably be just as annoying and ineffective, but without the "being investigated by the cops" part.
Quite the opposite. He's stating that the people themselves are asking for it. Only it's like the wish the man made with the genie for his family to never be poor again. They were turned into golden statues; they will never feel the misery of poverty again.
However, the problem is what we want the government to do, which is to take care of us and make everything okay. And to do that, the government keeps assuming more responsibilities and demanding more power to do it with. That makes the government larger and more invasive. Eventually, it becomes its own constituency. What happens when someone wants to cut your sweet retirement benefits that no one else in the country gets? You oppose any change to the government. What happens when some reformer wants to cut government jobs down to something more efficient? That gets opposed as well. What happens when encryption makes it a little harder to do your job? Get rid of it!
Unless the government is kept in check, it will run out of control, eventually leading to its own demise from its sheer weight. But before it implodes, it becomes worse and worse every year for everyone else. I'm not actually sure there's anything that can be done about it at this point. We might as well vote ourselves health care and other free things and wait for the end.
The American Revolution did not start from the expectation of violence. There had been tensions growing ever since the end of the French and Indian War where a number of colonists tried to work with the mother country to obtain peaceful redress which was not forthcoming.
There is no question that the American Revolution was a cousin to the French Revolution which then became one of the models for Communist revolution, but again, it is a matter of scale and goals.
Communism's goal was violent revolution from the get-go. And it wanted to export that revolution to the world. The colonies in America just wanted to be able to govern themselves from a local government and assure certain rights. I don't think there is a direct comparison unless you insist that just because it was called a Revolution that it was equivalent to what the communists wanted. I don't think you can really make that case.
But don't get me wrong, I don't buy into the completely sainted depiction of the American Revolution either. That it ended up being a war, instead of being negotiated, was a failure. That it produced a reasonably decent product was that the idea of Revolution didn't take over and completely rip the country apart meant that worked out about as well as can be expected. In fact, I think the greatest thing about the American Revolution was not that it happened, but that the people like Washington and the rest, put down their swords at the end of it and didn't try and build a new regime based on brute force and personality. We could easily have ended up being led by a dictator or king, instead, we managed to weather that storm and that result is probably more important than the Revolution itself ever was.
I'm sorry, but while there are definitely unforeseen consequences in some of those events, we didn't "invent" communism as a threat. Communism did that all by themselves. Communism from the beginning was a theory that expected the export of revolution, and violent revolution at that. It was right and proper to fight it head on. While workers were certainly being exploited by owners, there are still other ways than exporting violence.
Now, if you were to suggest that it is possible that fighting monsters makes it easier to make a monster out of yourself, I would not disagree. However, let's not lose ourselves in the blame game and mistake cause for effect. There are things you fight against because they are wrong, but there is also a battle within to ensure that you don't become just as bad. There are two different things.
Losing the second battle doesn't mean the first was wrong to fight. If someone was to attack my wife, I would be 100% right to get that person away from her, and put him in a position that he could not hurt her again by knocking him on his ass.
However, if I was then to go burn his house down and torture and then kill his family because I was so consumed by rage that I wanted to end his entire genetic line, then I've gone too far.
In the second "part" of the scenario one could certainly suggest to me that I have done worse to this person than he ever did to me, but don't tell me that I had no right to end the initial threat that he posed. The question instead is one of self-control and perspective.
Should we have done everything possible to end Communism, including supporting dictators? I don't think so. Should we have opposed Communism directly and without compromise for the evils in that system? Absolutely yes. We made the right decision, we just failed to avoid entering the mud with the pigs.
Yes, but no other country in the Americas goes by "America". You either say it is from the Americas (which is probably what they meant) or you say North or South America.
You could say that calling it the "United States" is also wrong, because Mexico is actually officially, the "United States of Mexico". The fact is that, no one from Mexico or the US really cares.
Referring to the US as "America" is pretty much accepted by everyone, including the other people living on the American continents. They don't really care if the US has used the shorthand.
And I should also note that the USA is the oldest existing independent country in the Americas, so the short hand made even more sense at the beginning.
I don't think the US intelligence or law enforcement community is going to win this one. They may try, but there's too many ways around this.
Unfortunately, it won't prevent them from trying, which could be a problem, but its going to go the way of the RSA "weaponized" encryption.
Ultimately, when faced with perfect or even really, really good encryption, your only real choice is to change tactics. It doesn't matter how good their encryption is, if you have a spy on the other end or you're able to survail the message after it was decrypted. We need more and better human intelligence, and we need people thinking out of the box. No law or regulation is going to stop criminals from using something that is outlawed, especially if those items are freely and legally available anywhere else.
To some degree I am talking about that, and I mention shareholder value, but there are other things CEOs do which can move forward a company without specifically discussing shareholder value too. For instance, the luncheons can be charity events, where a CEO tends to be sent to participate or officiate.
CEOs can be very in-the-trenches sorts of people, but when you're in charge of a holding company with not only many units, but many different types of companies, your responsibilities can vary a lot from direct management of a specific organization.
And actually, shareholder value has always been Number One, the short term focus is what is new about that. Previously, stock prices were not so independent from the way companies were run, because the focus used to be on long term investment. If you bought a stock, you didn't buy a fly-by-night, and you looked at how well the businesses were doing, not how you could create news which allowed short term manipulation of stock price.
Alas, either way, I don't think the short term trader focus is going back in the bottle either. Too much money is being made that way.
True, although not finding it would be true of both stories. If it made escape velocity, it is now in orbit around the Sun somewhere and probably not all that easy to locate without a good track.
I think you can only mark areas as dangerous. I don't think there is a way to say that an area is safe.
At least in the US, you can mark where cops are, but you don't see bubbles that say: "No cops here, I swear. Drive really fast here!" by user 'TotallyNotACop1656"
I don't think it is a matter of punishment here or even being allowed to live without the crime impacting his future. The problem is that such people end up being released from jail and becoming homeless and unemployable.
Now, there are some really, really dangerous people out there. And those people should not be in the community, because they will threaten children again. So the answer there is for people like that to never leave some form of custody.
But if you're actually releasing these people, and expect rehabilitation, presumably you're assuming that they can be rehabilitated. And you're not going to be rehabilitated if you can't hold down jobs or find a place to live. If anything, it makes you more likely to end up back in jail.
Let's be honest, there's a difference between some guy who had consensual sex with a 16-17 year old and some guy who molests pre-pubescent children. The former should be treated like any other criminal and the other needs to stay locked away for everyone's safety. These half-measures hurt everyone involved.
Well, if you look at it another way, this universe *was* always destined to produce life. It was generated by whatever process determines the parameters with the parameters that would produce life.
Obviously, the concept of "destiny" here as a romantic notion is not really applicable, but if you mean it in the sense that there was no other option than it would appear with these parameters, I think you could make a case for it.
I just think the concept of the multiverse is just another rabbit-hole. If the universes are constantly being created and destroyed in various ways, that's no more than a cosmological mobius strip. And while something bound to the strip is bound to never meet the end of it in one dimension, the strip itself is an object in a higher dimensional space. An infinity in one set of dimensions can be a bounded object in another.
Yes, the Population III stars which were basically all hydrogen with a little helium and lithium and occurred nearest the Big Bang would have had to have run through their lifespans to have produced significant amounts of heavier elements and then distributed them. The Population II stars were also "metal-poor" (in this case "metal" meaning any element above helium).
Of course, you want "metals" not only to form life itself, but to form the actual planets and objects that life could appear on. While I imagine there might have been at least some planets in Pop II stars, you're going to want to look first at Population I stars for planets and life.
You pretty much need galaxies to form to get life as we know it. One star exploding off by itself somewhere will never have the opportunity for its remains to form another star, and it seems like you need at least three populations of stars to really do it. To get the material back together again, you need something where that material is kept in orbit and not able to fly away into an increasingly expanding void.
That's a little unfair to a corpse who has been dead for 50 years. After all, Disney left the world with the US on top, and H1-B visas not even a glimmer in anyone's eye.
Oh, and they cremated him.
(Or someone already staked him and he burned to ashes. In which case, you don't want to dig him up again lest he re-form and haunt the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.)
Thing is, you don't qualify for being that type of CEO unless you've done quite a few the jobs underneath. That person used to be one of those VPs, and possibly a director or even a minion. There are some that get into those roles because of Daddy, but that is not the rule at that level.
You may be on the golf course, or at a charity luncheon. But the reason you are there is because you know how to run a company, you know when to intervene and when to not. And you know that that luncheon is part of your work, as well. If you are needed to give a speech at some conference, you need to be there and ready. The analysts are watching you, your company's stock price or product line sometimes hanging on your words. You better nail it or you company takes a dive. Steve Jobs understood that, and that is why his talks were legendary for both their insane preparation and his ability to get things done with them. Jobs was nothing at all without his engineers, but where would Apple be today without him?
Now, at my much more humble level, the people on my team complete their assigned tasks, I don't care if they sit around on the web or go home early. I give them plenty to do, but I don't pay them less when they complete work quickly and correctly and are not constantly typing away. I value them for their skills and knowledge because I know for a fact that I need people with those skills and experience to do the job. Trust me, I have been "gifted" people who don't have those skills, and until they are up to speed, they're worse than useless, they're a drag on the team because we have to fix their mistakes while training them. I can't just grab someone who wants to do the job, even someone who is a hard worker. Raw work is needed, but it is *not decisive*.
I'm not saying a CEO is worth 100 times what I am worth as a human, but they do have experience and job responsibilities that they worked at. You can't just jam a janitor, or even a Sr. Manager in the CEO job. There are a small number of people who can do the job, and they have real work to do.
I think the real problem with corporations and the economy in general is that we need to change the goals of the system. Efficiency and demand still need to have a place, but we must find a way to temper it with social value, and I don't think that will actually come from laws or regulations imposed on people who don't believe in them. I think it comes from a society and a cultural commitment to do these things.
If you have a culture where getting the most points (i.e. dollars) or things is not the highest goal, you will find that it ceases to become an issue. I think America suffers from a consumerist and materialistic bent which has destroyed the balance. There are billionaires out there who will probably do nothing with the bulk of their money other than give it to charity or bequeath it to someone else. So it is clear they don't need to make that money, they need a new attitude. I don't think we can get it back with a law, I think we have to get it back and then the laws won't be needed most of the time, because people will do the right things of their own accord. The real question is how we do that.
Without assembly line workers Apple has nothing to sell.
And the day that there aren't assembly line worker candidates lined up around the block to take those jobs, they will be paid more.
Remember, those "slave labor" workers in China are coming to the city from the countryside to make more money than they did before. They may have terrible working conditions, but they are actually getting value from that pay, as minuscule as it seems to us.
The key development will be how we transition from having to work for our bread, to receiving it from a fully or mostly automated economy. It could become a dystopia in many ways. People without work can be a problem, because bored people are a very bad thing unless you've managed the transition so they can occupy themselves with something that keeps their attention and makes them feel like they're having a full life. They don't have to get everything, but humans have had jobs, hunted or tilled the soil for two million years or so now, there is no existence a human has ever had where they don't work for something.
Bored people can be very dangerous to themselves and each other. We've seen from badly run welfare projects that you can't just hand someone a check that they can live on and expect that life to be a good one, or that it will provide a positive culture. You need more than just being able to meet minimum needs or minimal comfort levels.
That's another reason I support people continuing to work, but on more and more interesting things. And I support programs that put people in space, under the sea and eventually on other worlds. We don't need the humans there for the science, although it wouldn't hurt, but what humanity needs is the challenge of doing things and individual humans need to be part of that.
I do hope we can automate production AND manage the transition well. As it stands, the automation is coming, so we'd best start thinking about the transition, even if it is a century or two in the future.
You're reducing it without seeing the value to the city. Yes, in theory, the billionaires *could* afford to build it, but the cities need football more than they need to make someone else pay for it. Having a football team is huge for a city. A new stadium project is a revitialization project for a whole part of a city which has a high probability of approval by voters, and interest from other investors.
It is also important to remember that team owners weren't initially all billionaires. They became that way eventually. Until that happened, the cities or regions would have been more able to pay for infrastructure.
So what you're seeing is the owners approaching and even overtaking the cities in terms of means, but the model was set long before the current situation existed.
Seriously though. It means that they may need *someone* doing your job, but if there is a line of a thousand people waiting for your job, you make only what the least expensive person in that line is going to ask for to be selected over you to get paid.
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Military spending also boosts the economy. Admittedly, it doesn't do anything for easing the burden on hospitals.
As for weapons, most of what is being fired are AK-47s and RPGs, which are Soviet and Eastern Bloc licensed weapons. Yeah, we provided some of them indirectly but, they'd get the weapons no matter who gave them to them. The world is absolutely awash in small arms. If you were talking about more sophisticated weaponry, I might agree.
Note that in Iran-Contra, we armed Iran with TOW missiles and some anti-aircraft Hawk missiles. As far as I can tell, the terrorists, ISIS, Taliban or whoever are not using TOW missiles and certainly not antiaircraft missile batteries. Iran-Contra is a total non-factor here.
As for the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government, it is pure speculation that it would have made the area more stable. Clearly it led to a bad result, but there was a reason that Mosaddegh was considered dangerous to US interests. It is not entirely clear that Iran would not have been a problem no matter who was in charge. We spent quite a bit of effort working to ensure that the Soviets did not gain access to Iran and the Soviets were always there causing what trouble they could.
So in terms of that goal, we actually succeeded, even the religious government which hates us was still not friends with he Soviet Union and did not become Communist. Obviously, we did pay for that in the long term by creating a new, albeit somewhat less immediate enemy.
I think you're about 30 years too late for that. They were importing doctors from India when I was a kid.
It may not make it easier, but the value might be higher for the work put into it.
We shouldn't stop teaching Calc, we just shouldn't require it for people who will never use it and never need to use it.
It has value, but the level of difficulty is such that the value it has for the general population is overshadowed entirely by the fact that it causes a high rate of failure.
We're not talking about dropping the quality of the US population's educational readiness for jobs. I've worked in computing for almost 20 years and never so much had to use or even code a differential. I know there are jobs in CS where that happens all day, every day, but the point is that even in more technical roles, it's not used.
If your goal is to produce a better citizen, I could agree that a good basic stats course is probably more useful than Calc will ever be. Things at the size and scope of the modern USA tend to be best described by statistics.
I for one, think that is a shitty idea. Unless you like being in a police station.
Your goal is to attract the attention of the police, to make them less likely to use tactics like this. That could work, but you'd need thousands of people doing it. One or two of you might create a ruckus, but you'll end up in jail in the meantime. I think a petition would probably be just as annoying and ineffective, but without the "being investigated by the cops" part.
Quite the opposite. He's stating that the people themselves are asking for it. Only it's like the wish the man made with the genie for his family to never be poor again. They were turned into golden statues; they will never feel the misery of poverty again.
However, the problem is what we want the government to do, which is to take care of us and make everything okay. And to do that, the government keeps assuming more responsibilities and demanding more power to do it with. That makes the government larger and more invasive. Eventually, it becomes its own constituency. What happens when someone wants to cut your sweet retirement benefits that no one else in the country gets? You oppose any change to the government. What happens when some reformer wants to cut government jobs down to something more efficient? That gets opposed as well. What happens when encryption makes it a little harder to do your job? Get rid of it!
Unless the government is kept in check, it will run out of control, eventually leading to its own demise from its sheer weight. But before it implodes, it becomes worse and worse every year for everyone else. I'm not actually sure there's anything that can be done about it at this point. We might as well vote ourselves health care and other free things and wait for the end.
The American Revolution did not start from the expectation of violence. There had been tensions growing ever since the end of the French and Indian War where a number of colonists tried to work with the mother country to obtain peaceful redress which was not forthcoming.
There is no question that the American Revolution was a cousin to the French Revolution which then became one of the models for Communist revolution, but again, it is a matter of scale and goals.
Communism's goal was violent revolution from the get-go. And it wanted to export that revolution to the world. The colonies in America just wanted to be able to govern themselves from a local government and assure certain rights. I don't think there is a direct comparison unless you insist that just because it was called a Revolution that it was equivalent to what the communists wanted. I don't think you can really make that case.
But don't get me wrong, I don't buy into the completely sainted depiction of the American Revolution either. That it ended up being a war, instead of being negotiated, was a failure. That it produced a reasonably decent product was that the idea of Revolution didn't take over and completely rip the country apart meant that worked out about as well as can be expected. In fact, I think the greatest thing about the American Revolution was not that it happened, but that the people like Washington and the rest, put down their swords at the end of it and didn't try and build a new regime based on brute force and personality. We could easily have ended up being led by a dictator or king, instead, we managed to weather that storm and that result is probably more important than the Revolution itself ever was.
I'm sorry, but while there are definitely unforeseen consequences in some of those events, we didn't "invent" communism as a threat. Communism did that all by themselves. Communism from the beginning was a theory that expected the export of revolution, and violent revolution at that. It was right and proper to fight it head on. While workers were certainly being exploited by owners, there are still other ways than exporting violence.
Now, if you were to suggest that it is possible that fighting monsters makes it easier to make a monster out of yourself, I would not disagree. However, let's not lose ourselves in the blame game and mistake cause for effect. There are things you fight against because they are wrong, but there is also a battle within to ensure that you don't become just as bad. There are two different things.
Losing the second battle doesn't mean the first was wrong to fight. If someone was to attack my wife, I would be 100% right to get that person away from her, and put him in a position that he could not hurt her again by knocking him on his ass.
However, if I was then to go burn his house down and torture and then kill his family because I was so consumed by rage that I wanted to end his entire genetic line, then I've gone too far.
In the second "part" of the scenario one could certainly suggest to me that I have done worse to this person than he ever did to me, but don't tell me that I had no right to end the initial threat that he posed. The question instead is one of self-control and perspective.
Should we have done everything possible to end Communism, including supporting dictators? I don't think so. Should we have opposed Communism directly and without compromise for the evils in that system? Absolutely yes. We made the right decision, we just failed to avoid entering the mud with the pigs.
Yes, but no other country in the Americas goes by "America". You either say it is from the Americas (which is probably what they meant) or you say North or South America.
You could say that calling it the "United States" is also wrong, because Mexico is actually officially, the "United States of Mexico". The fact is that, no one from Mexico or the US really cares.
Referring to the US as "America" is pretty much accepted by everyone, including the other people living on the American continents. They don't really care if the US has used the shorthand.
And I should also note that the USA is the oldest existing independent country in the Americas, so the short hand made even more sense at the beginning.
I don't think the US intelligence or law enforcement community is going to win this one. They may try, but there's too many ways around this.
Unfortunately, it won't prevent them from trying, which could be a problem, but its going to go the way of the RSA "weaponized" encryption.
Ultimately, when faced with perfect or even really, really good encryption, your only real choice is to change tactics. It doesn't matter how good their encryption is, if you have a spy on the other end or you're able to survail the message after it was decrypted. We need more and better human intelligence, and we need people thinking out of the box. No law or regulation is going to stop criminals from using something that is outlawed, especially if those items are freely and legally available anywhere else.
I suppose it then matters what the product was before the sticker was slapped on it. Does anyone know who they bought out for this?
To some degree I am talking about that, and I mention shareholder value, but there are other things CEOs do which can move forward a company without specifically discussing shareholder value too. For instance, the luncheons can be charity events, where a CEO tends to be sent to participate or officiate.
CEOs can be very in-the-trenches sorts of people, but when you're in charge of a holding company with not only many units, but many different types of companies, your responsibilities can vary a lot from direct management of a specific organization.
And actually, shareholder value has always been Number One, the short term focus is what is new about that. Previously, stock prices were not so independent from the way companies were run, because the focus used to be on long term investment. If you bought a stock, you didn't buy a fly-by-night, and you looked at how well the businesses were doing, not how you could create news which allowed short term manipulation of stock price.
Alas, either way, I don't think the short term trader focus is going back in the bottle either. Too much money is being made that way.
True, although not finding it would be true of both stories. If it made escape velocity, it is now in orbit around the Sun somewhere and probably not all that easy to locate without a good track.
I think you can only mark areas as dangerous. I don't think there is a way to say that an area is safe.
At least in the US, you can mark where cops are, but you don't see bubbles that say: "No cops here, I swear. Drive really fast here!" by user 'TotallyNotACop1656"
I don't think it is a matter of punishment here or even being allowed to live without the crime impacting his future. The problem is that such people end up being released from jail and becoming homeless and unemployable.
Now, there are some really, really dangerous people out there. And those people should not be in the community, because they will threaten children again. So the answer there is for people like that to never leave some form of custody.
But if you're actually releasing these people, and expect rehabilitation, presumably you're assuming that they can be rehabilitated. And you're not going to be rehabilitated if you can't hold down jobs or find a place to live. If anything, it makes you more likely to end up back in jail.
Let's be honest, there's a difference between some guy who had consensual sex with a 16-17 year old and some guy who molests pre-pubescent children. The former should be treated like any other criminal and the other needs to stay locked away for everyone's safety. These half-measures hurt everyone involved.
His article still needs to be voted up, theoretically. So either an editor did it, or enough people liked it.
So, I don't see why he can't submit his own article. Most promotion is self-promotion anyway.
Well, if you look at it another way, this universe *was* always destined to produce life. It was generated by whatever process determines the parameters with the parameters that would produce life.
Obviously, the concept of "destiny" here as a romantic notion is not really applicable, but if you mean it in the sense that there was no other option than it would appear with these parameters, I think you could make a case for it.
I just think the concept of the multiverse is just another rabbit-hole. If the universes are constantly being created and destroyed in various ways, that's no more than a cosmological mobius strip. And while something bound to the strip is bound to never meet the end of it in one dimension, the strip itself is an object in a higher dimensional space. An infinity in one set of dimensions can be a bounded object in another.
Yes, the Population III stars which were basically all hydrogen with a little helium and lithium and occurred nearest the Big Bang would have had to have run through their lifespans to have produced significant amounts of heavier elements and then distributed them. The Population II stars were also "metal-poor" (in this case "metal" meaning any element above helium).
Of course, you want "metals" not only to form life itself, but to form the actual planets and objects that life could appear on. While I imagine there might have been at least some planets in Pop II stars, you're going to want to look first at Population I stars for planets and life.
You pretty much need galaxies to form to get life as we know it. One star exploding off by itself somewhere will never have the opportunity for its remains to form another star, and it seems like you need at least three populations of stars to really do it. To get the material back together again, you need something where that material is kept in orbit and not able to fly away into an increasingly expanding void.
That's a little unfair to a corpse who has been dead for 50 years. After all, Disney left the world with the US on top, and H1-B visas not even a glimmer in anyone's eye.
Oh, and they cremated him.
(Or someone already staked him and he burned to ashes. In which case, you don't want to dig him up again lest he re-form and haunt the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.)
Thing is, you don't qualify for being that type of CEO unless you've done quite a few the jobs underneath. That person used to be one of those VPs, and possibly a director or even a minion. There are some that get into those roles because of Daddy, but that is not the rule at that level.
You may be on the golf course, or at a charity luncheon. But the reason you are there is because you know how to run a company, you know when to intervene and when to not. And you know that that luncheon is part of your work, as well. If you are needed to give a speech at some conference, you need to be there and ready. The analysts are watching you, your company's stock price or product line sometimes hanging on your words. You better nail it or you company takes a dive. Steve Jobs understood that, and that is why his talks were legendary for both their insane preparation and his ability to get things done with them. Jobs was nothing at all without his engineers, but where would Apple be today without him?
Now, at my much more humble level, the people on my team complete their assigned tasks, I don't care if they sit around on the web or go home early. I give them plenty to do, but I don't pay them less when they complete work quickly and correctly and are not constantly typing away. I value them for their skills and knowledge because I know for a fact that I need people with those skills and experience to do the job. Trust me, I have been "gifted" people who don't have those skills, and until they are up to speed, they're worse than useless, they're a drag on the team because we have to fix their mistakes while training them. I can't just grab someone who wants to do the job, even someone who is a hard worker. Raw work is needed, but it is *not decisive*.
I'm not saying a CEO is worth 100 times what I am worth as a human, but they do have experience and job responsibilities that they worked at. You can't just jam a janitor, or even a Sr. Manager in the CEO job. There are a small number of people who can do the job, and they have real work to do.
I think the real problem with corporations and the economy in general is that we need to change the goals of the system. Efficiency and demand still need to have a place, but we must find a way to temper it with social value, and I don't think that will actually come from laws or regulations imposed on people who don't believe in them. I think it comes from a society and a cultural commitment to do these things.
If you have a culture where getting the most points (i.e. dollars) or things is not the highest goal, you will find that it ceases to become an issue. I think America suffers from a consumerist and materialistic bent which has destroyed the balance. There are billionaires out there who will probably do nothing with the bulk of their money other than give it to charity or bequeath it to someone else. So it is clear they don't need to make that money, they need a new attitude. I don't think we can get it back with a law, I think we have to get it back and then the laws won't be needed most of the time, because people will do the right things of their own accord. The real question is how we do that.
Without assembly line workers Apple has nothing to sell.
And the day that there aren't assembly line worker candidates lined up around the block to take those jobs, they will be paid more.
Remember, those "slave labor" workers in China are coming to the city from the countryside to make more money than they did before. They may have terrible working conditions, but they are actually getting value from that pay, as minuscule as it seems to us.
The key development will be how we transition from having to work for our bread, to receiving it from a fully or mostly automated economy. It could become a dystopia in many ways. People without work can be a problem, because bored people are a very bad thing unless you've managed the transition so they can occupy themselves with something that keeps their attention and makes them feel like they're having a full life. They don't have to get everything, but humans have had jobs, hunted or tilled the soil for two million years or so now, there is no existence a human has ever had where they don't work for something.
Bored people can be very dangerous to themselves and each other. We've seen from badly run welfare projects that you can't just hand someone a check that they can live on and expect that life to be a good one, or that it will provide a positive culture. You need more than just being able to meet minimum needs or minimal comfort levels.
That's another reason I support people continuing to work, but on more and more interesting things. And I support programs that put people in space, under the sea and eventually on other worlds. We don't need the humans there for the science, although it wouldn't hurt, but what humanity needs is the challenge of doing things and individual humans need to be part of that.
I do hope we can automate production AND manage the transition well. As it stands, the automation is coming, so we'd best start thinking about the transition, even if it is a century or two in the future.
You failed to detect sarcasm.
You're reducing it without seeing the value to the city. Yes, in theory, the billionaires *could* afford to build it, but the cities need football more than they need to make someone else pay for it. Having a football team is huge for a city. A new stadium project is a revitialization project for a whole part of a city which has a high probability of approval by voters, and interest from other investors.
It is also important to remember that team owners weren't initially all billionaires. They became that way eventually. Until that happened, the cities or regions would have been more able to pay for infrastructure.
So what you're seeing is the owners approaching and even overtaking the cities in terms of means, but the model was set long before the current situation existed.
Just because you're necessary doesn't mean you're important.
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Seriously though. It means that they may need *someone* doing your job, but if there is a line of a thousand people waiting for your job, you make only what the least expensive person in that line is going to ask for to be selected over you to get paid.