you'll find that most people's opinions are the same: "congress sucks. The president is an idiot. All I really want to do is live my little life the way i want to and be left alone, and to hell with all of them."
I'll agree that's a common opinion. Yet, Congress consistently gets reelected. People want to be left alone until someone else is doing something they don't like. People can think congress is doing a horrible job all they want, but they just keep reelecting them, rewarding failure. Many people don't know their representatives, let alone how they've voted on important issues in the past. When it comes time to vote people will just pick which ever person is on their team (D or R), even if that guy voted for things like SOPA or the Patriot Act or the wars.
If congress critters were subject to recall like their local and state counterparts you'd see a LOT more responsiveness.
Every member of the House must be reelected every 2 years. The reelection rate never drops below 80%. While I would support recall at the federal level, I don't know how much a difference it would make. Most people are simply too apathetic and ignorant about anything that doesn't obviously and directly affect their day to day lives.
Just because they're not in a big city doesn't mean that they don't have problems better handled by SWAT than by general officers.
I'm not arguing the specific case you gave here. But in general, I think the creation of SWAT teams should be a last resort. Let them exist at the state level, to be called in by local police forces.
When there are more SWAT teams they will get more use. And every time a SWAT team is used it's an opportunity for something to go wrong. See for example this map of botched SWAT raids, including numerous examples of SWAT killing innocent bystanders. http://www.cato.org/raidmap/
You have to admit, that while SWAT teams do provide a benefit they also provide a cost. A monetary cost, a freedoms cost, and avoidable death cost. The question is if the cost/benefit is worth it.
I do feel that the whole "police UAVs = 1984" thing is slightly odd, given that all a UAV is in this role is a cheaper police helicopter. Unless your objection is specifically against all cameras between altitudes of 1.6m and 100km, I don't see much difference between the platform being manned or unmanned.
It's the same thing as a GPS tracker on a car vs a full surveillance team. In both cases the problem is that the new tech is much cheaper. Because it is cheaper it will be used much more frequently and by many more agencies. My local police department can't afford their own helicopter, but 10 years from now I wouldn't be surprised if they have a drone.
It boils down to the previous expense made it much less common, and traceable. You probably couldn't use a police helicopter to follow some guy who made your shitlist 24/7, but drones will soon make that sort of thing inevitable. At least when this stuff was less common abuses were also less common; when it was more expensive, accountability was also higher.
Yes, he has. It's part of the training in the use of pepper spray by police forces. He's been sprayed at least once in the face with it.
The person you're responding to wasn't talking about the cop, he was talking about the guy in the story (Andrew Sprung) that made this claim:
There's almost parity. You have a truncheon or gun, I have a camera. You inflict pain, I inflict infamy.
In other words OP thinks this statement isn't true because the pain of pepper spray or a beating is worse than the infamy that can be inflicted with a camera.
Now all that being said, I disagree with the OP, and agree with Andrew Sprung. I have been pepper sprayed, and I can only describe it as, by far, the worst pain of my life. It was years ago, and I still am very apprehensive whenever someone has pepper spray around me. As awful as it was, the pain subsides in a few hours, and the next day there is basically no ill effects. However, the cop in this case (Lt. John Pike) has been publicly identified, and will be receiving weeks and months of harassment. He will also, hopefully, lose his job. He should to go to prison for assault (but won't), but even so, I'd much rather be pepper sprayed once than receive the public scorn he will receive.
Or disallow riders that are not related to the primary bill being passed.
The problem is there is no clear way to define related or not. Similar to regulating drugs falling under "interstate commerce", they will just come up with some convoluted way in which anything is related to anything else.
i am sorry that you where moded down, people seems to believe that if they disagree with some one they should mod you down rather than come up with reasons why they are right and you are wrong
I think the reason he was modded down was he was making comments that were plainly trolling. See this:
personally I'm not stupid enough to push into a wall of riot police cause I know it will end badly for my dumb ass then again when I'm protesting I do it peacefully
He was either purposely trying to troll, or he was commenting on the incident without even watching the videos in the link. I don't think there's any other way to describe the group of students sitting in a public space than peaceful. They certainly weren't pushing into any riot police.
Over prescribing means you piss way antibiotic, and impact the good stuff. Which should be stopped, but it is foolish to say over prescribing is what is driving the evolutionary change.
Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor of molecular biology at the Tufts School of Medicine and one of the world's leading medical authorities on antibiotics, says the cause of the crisis is not in dispute: we are simply using too many antibiotics.
You don't consider Kim Jong Il to be crazy? Just because he hasn't started a war yet (and it's not like he hasn't come close), doesn't make him sane. Perhaps I could agree it does mean he has some grasp of reality, but sanity isn't a totally boolean choice.
You do realize that the first amendment has no qualifiers such as "as long as you never inconvenience anyone", right.
As with most things, it isn't quite that clear cut.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We'll assume that the 14th amendment makes this apply equally to states/municipalities. Now the question is, does making any law whatsoever regulating assembly abridge the right of people to peaceably assemble? I think it must be clear that some laws are ok. As the extreme example, it would not be ok for people to assemble on private property (and I mean actual legitimate private property, not quasi public property, like the parks in question here). Barring people from trespassing on your land, even if they are doing so to protest is ok. This is because trespassing isn't necessary in order to assemble.
Taking this idea further, as long as people have the ability to assemble then laws regulating that assembly are ok. I could see an issue with forcing people to some distant location, as the distance and remote location could be seen as a barrier to assembly. That doesn't seem to be the case here though. While the cities are trying to force people out of specific parks for a limited time they aren't forcing them to go home, or go to any other specific location.
In the specific case of NYC, the city doesn't seem to be really preventing anyone from assembling. Even with respect to this planned carnival, I see no reason this latest action would interfere with it. People can gather Thursday and do all the videotaping of messages they want. However, blocking streets and camping out for months on end isn't a necessary prerequisite to assembly, and I see no reason it should be allowed.
Arresting people without giving them a fair chance to move away, and using force on people that aren't violent are two things I certainly have an issue with. However, I frankly don't think it is unreasonable to clear people out of a public place at least once a week to clean it up. If they fail to allow anyone back into the park then there could again be an issue if there isn't any other suitable place for them to assemble.
You'd be suprised how oblivious the average user is, to what can be found on the Internet.
About 2 years ago, I was taking a low level math class and, one day while in the library, someone from the class came up to me and asked if I could help with some of the homework he was stuck on. It became clear that his problem was he forgot how to deal with fractions, eg, he couldn't add two fractions with different denominators.
I told him he should brush up on his fraction rules. A good idea would be just to google 'fraction review' and read through a few of those, then something like 'fraction review problems' and do a bunch of practice problems. His response was: (slightly amazed) "they have that on the internet?"
Given how often I used the internet as a reference for anything and everything this legitimately boggled my mind.
I like this idea. I'd however propose a delay before the switch could happen. Perhaps require 50% for over 3 months. This would protect against a fickle public changing its mind every other day.
I don't agree with either idea proposed so far, but I'll add this idea. When politicians leave office the people vote on their approval rating. If it's over 50% then they get a lifetime pension. Under 50% and they get nothing.
This would have some problems. Particularly that people would vote based on how well the country is doing as a whole, which individual politicians might have very little influence over.
My personal idea is just to bar anyone from office who has received gift, donations, or items worth over $10,000 over the last 10 years, from either people, corporations or anything else. Get a petition with 100,000 signatures and you get a set amount of funding to promote yourself. All ads have to come from that fund.
The real question I have is, that 2.98M megawatts being pumped out, is that weekly, monthly, yearly, in total or what? And how much of our national energy consumption does that actually take care of?
A watt is a unit of power, which is the rate of energy use. If you want it in energy/time it's 3 trillion joules per second. Wiki tells me that the peak electrical power demand for the US is around 800 GW. Since the geothermal potential is about 3000 GW, we in theory could get all our electricity from geothermal. I think our power usage is something like 40% electrical, 40% transportation, 20% heating. So it could even provide all power, and some exports, and some room for growth. Of course that is after a huge infrastructure investment, and with optimistic estimates.
If 99% of us don't have to work because the machines do it all... how exactly would that be bad?
There's an important distinction here between "don't have to work" and "have to, but can't work". Just because 99% of jobs are replaced doesn't mean that the 99% of people who had those jobs before will now be retired and living their dreams. The alternative could be simply starving, or living on a very modest government provided survival wage. Perhaps even government provided dorms, food, and clothing (more than enough to keep you alive, but not exactly a full life) for anyone that can't provide for themselves. I would say that 99% could easily overthrow 1% if conditions were that bad except for two points. First, the conditions could be improved enough where they still aren't great, but people aren't willing to risk life and limb to fight for better ones. Second, a massive robotic army/police force would certainly discourage any rebellion.
More stuff gets automated, more jobs lost, cost of living goes down because of automation, more jobs created.
I've used the same argument in the past, however, I've been somewhat swayed. Keep in mind, I'm not completely convinced that 99% of people will be out of work and robots will be doing everything. But, I do think there could be a fundamental difference between the oncoming wave of automation and the preceding ones.
The difference is in specialization. Before when new technologies replaced workers they replaced single jobs, and those people could create new jobs for themselves eventually. However, we are close (few decades) to creating humanoid robots that will be capable of doing just about any task a human does that doesn't require great intelligence. Just about every job not requiring a collage degree, from janitor, to factory work, to many service and retail will be automated. That is a huge chunk of jobs, probably over half. Go here and look at the 2008 job percentages. Many of the big categories can be outright replaced by robots. Just about all of them can be somewhat reduced.
Marshall Brain has a few interesting articles about this. He is much more dramatic about it than I am, but still interesting to consider. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
If you don't have anything that someone will pay for you are pretty much screwed. Throughout human history, people were born with the ability to do work that others would pay for. If humanoid robots become common that could cease to be true for the first time. Combined with possible human level AI and only people who own things that are valuable (resources) will have anything that can be sold. Hopefully our society can adjust to this and spread the benefit around. But it will certainly be interesting.
It would seem that machines must create less jobs than they replace, otherwise they wouldn't be economical. Also, since they tend to replace many lower paying jobs with fewer higher paying support ones, the ratio is probably even worse.
Mehaute et. al. conclude in their 1996 overview Water Waves Generated by Underwater Explosion that the surface waves from even a very large offshore undersea explosion would expend most of its energy on the continental shelf, resulting in coastal flooding no worse than that from a bad storm.
khanacademy.org style: you record ONE person, doing a lecture series, and share with everyone. for miniscule incremental cost.
While I agree with your general idea, I feel you are being too optimistic with how far costs could be reduced. To begin, while it is nice that Khan creates his excellent videos for free, a school can't count on them for everything; there are still many subjects he hasn't covered, and even for the ones he has a school should still provide their own lectures. At the least they will have to record their own professors teaching a class and publish that (MIT OCW style). Admittedly this is a one time cost, but it still should be included in the costs.
The next problem is test creation. Since tests are going to be of much more importance in grading it would be crucial that they are made up unique every time. You must pay someone (probably a few someones) who is an expert in a field to create the tests. If the tests can't be given as multiple choice scan trons, then you also need to employ an expert to grade them.
Lastly, there is the problem of hands on experiments. How would one do chemistry online? While I'm sure that somewhere some school has given chemistry classes with no experiments, I don't think that should be the standard. So, you are going to have to provide open access labs where students can come in and do experiments. For a variety of reasons, the students will have to be supervised while in the lab, so that is another person to pay.
Again, I agree with your central point that schools could greatly reduce tuition costs by moving to prerecorded video lectures, I don't think the savings would be that dramatic.
I think the costs go down as the scale goes up. You only need one test for either 20 students or 200,000 students, as long as they are all taking it on the same day. Consider then, if the Federal government went out and got some top professors to give video lectures of all the classes one would expect for the variety of common bachelor degrees. With a couple professors giving the same lectures (never underestimate the value of having the same concept explained by two different people). They then also had those professors create the tests (they could keep them on retainer), and have regional proctoring centers for students to come to to take the tests on test days. Non scantron grading would still require local graders, but that would seem unavoidable. Provide suggested books and suggested homework assignments (for all the old editions as well). Post worked solutions online. The government then allows anyone to enroll in any class they want, perhaps for a modest fee (~$100), with additional lab fees for classes that must perform labs or classes that require non scantron grading. If the student passes the tests they earn the credits for that class. Pass all the classes in a degree and you get that degree. Complete as many degree as you wish, for relatively cheaply.
This is obviously the exact opposite from Ron Paul's idea, but I feel it would work much better. Degrees would become common, and the huge debts would be eliminated. I can't think of anyway grad school could be automated like this though.
I thought that United States currency was legal tender for all debts. Some businesses or governmental agencies say that they will only accept checks, money orders or credit cards as payment, and others will only accept currency notes in denominations of $20 or smaller. Isn't this illegal?
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.
I get the impression Ballmer hasn't even used an Android phone. Exactly what part of the OS is complicated to use? Really, that's just an absurd, out-there statement.
It's a marketing statement, it doesn't need any basis in reality. Ballmer could be in love with android, and use it all the time, that doesn't change the fact that he stands to benefit if other people use the MS product. That means hyping up the perceived positives of your own product while also reinforcing the negative stereotypes of the competition. If you ask regular people why they don't use android, perceived complexity might be near the top of the list. Again, marketing isn't concerned with facts, just with reinforcing what is best for the company.
There's not much theater they can do if a terrorist body packs a bomb.
The beauty of theater is that doesn't have to be effective. It just has to look good and nothing more. I have no doubt they'd come up with something to do.
Slashdot Mirror
you'll find that most people's opinions are the same: "congress sucks. The president is an idiot. All I really want to do is live my little life the way i want to and be left alone, and to hell with all of them."
I'll agree that's a common opinion. Yet, Congress consistently gets reelected. People want to be left alone until someone else is doing something they don't like. People can think congress is doing a horrible job all they want, but they just keep reelecting them, rewarding failure. Many people don't know their representatives, let alone how they've voted on important issues in the past. When it comes time to vote people will just pick which ever person is on their team (D or R), even if that guy voted for things like SOPA or the Patriot Act or the wars.
If congress critters were subject to recall like their local and state counterparts you'd see a LOT more responsiveness.
Every member of the House must be reelected every 2 years. The reelection rate never drops below 80%. While I would support recall at the federal level, I don't know how much a difference it would make. Most people are simply too apathetic and ignorant about anything that doesn't obviously and directly affect their day to day lives.
http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php
Just because they're not in a big city doesn't mean that they don't have problems better handled by SWAT than by general officers.
I'm not arguing the specific case you gave here. But in general, I think the creation of SWAT teams should be a last resort. Let them exist at the state level, to be called in by local police forces.
When there are more SWAT teams they will get more use. And every time a SWAT team is used it's an opportunity for something to go wrong. See for example this map of botched SWAT raids, including numerous examples of SWAT killing innocent bystanders.
http://www.cato.org/raidmap/
You have to admit, that while SWAT teams do provide a benefit they also provide a cost. A monetary cost, a freedoms cost, and avoidable death cost. The question is if the cost/benefit is worth it.
I do feel that the whole "police UAVs = 1984" thing is slightly odd, given that all a UAV is in this role is a cheaper police helicopter. Unless your objection is specifically against all cameras between altitudes of 1.6m and 100km, I don't see much difference between the platform being manned or unmanned.
It's the same thing as a GPS tracker on a car vs a full surveillance team. In both cases the problem is that the new tech is much cheaper. Because it is cheaper it will be used much more frequently and by many more agencies. My local police department can't afford their own helicopter, but 10 years from now I wouldn't be surprised if they have a drone.
It boils down to the previous expense made it much less common, and traceable. You probably couldn't use a police helicopter to follow some guy who made your shitlist 24/7, but drones will soon make that sort of thing inevitable. At least when this stuff was less common abuses were also less common; when it was more expensive, accountability was also higher.
Agreed, to everything you said.
Yes, he has. It's part of the training in the use of pepper spray by police forces. He's been sprayed at least once in the face with it.
The person you're responding to wasn't talking about the cop, he was talking about the guy in the story (Andrew Sprung) that made this claim:
There's almost parity. You have a truncheon or gun, I have a camera. You inflict pain, I inflict infamy.
In other words OP thinks this statement isn't true because the pain of pepper spray or a beating is worse than the infamy that can be inflicted with a camera.
Now all that being said, I disagree with the OP, and agree with Andrew Sprung. I have been pepper sprayed, and I can only describe it as, by far, the worst pain of my life. It was years ago, and I still am very apprehensive whenever someone has pepper spray around me. As awful as it was, the pain subsides in a few hours, and the next day there is basically no ill effects. However, the cop in this case (Lt. John Pike) has been publicly identified, and will be receiving weeks and months of harassment. He will also, hopefully, lose his job. He should to go to prison for assault (but won't), but even so, I'd much rather be pepper sprayed once than receive the public scorn he will receive.
Or disallow riders that are not related to the primary bill being passed.
The problem is there is no clear way to define related or not. Similar to regulating drugs falling under "interstate commerce", they will just come up with some convoluted way in which anything is related to anything else.
i am sorry that you where moded down, people seems to believe that if they disagree with some one they should mod you down rather than come up with reasons why they are right and you are wrong
I think the reason he was modded down was he was making comments that were plainly trolling. See this:
personally I'm not stupid enough to push into a wall of riot police cause I know it will end badly for my dumb ass then again when I'm protesting I do it peacefully
He was either purposely trying to troll, or he was commenting on the incident without even watching the videos in the link. I don't think there's any other way to describe the group of students sitting in a public space than peaceful. They certainly weren't pushing into any riot police.
Over prescribing means you piss way antibiotic, and impact the good stuff. Which should be stopped, but it is foolish to say over prescribing is what is driving the evolutionary change.
See here:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01/03/2018247/How-Norway-Fought-Staph-Infections
And here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-rather/the-antibiotics-crisis_b_807887.html
Dr. Stuart Levy, a professor of molecular biology at the Tufts School of Medicine and one of the world's leading medical authorities on antibiotics, says the cause of the crisis is not in dispute: we are simply using too many antibiotics.
Governments who are unpopular with other governments may have their leaders called lunatics, but can you name one significant leader who truly was?
These guys seem pretty crazy.
You don't consider Kim Jong Il to be crazy? Just because he hasn't started a war yet (and it's not like he hasn't come close), doesn't make him sane. Perhaps I could agree it does mean he has some grasp of reality, but sanity isn't a totally boolean choice.
You do realize that the first amendment has no qualifiers such as "as long as you never inconvenience anyone", right.
As with most things, it isn't quite that clear cut.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We'll assume that the 14th amendment makes this apply equally to states/municipalities. Now the question is, does making any law whatsoever regulating assembly abridge the right of people to peaceably assemble? I think it must be clear that some laws are ok. As the extreme example, it would not be ok for people to assemble on private property (and I mean actual legitimate private property, not quasi public property, like the parks in question here). Barring people from trespassing on your land, even if they are doing so to protest is ok. This is because trespassing isn't necessary in order to assemble.
Taking this idea further, as long as people have the ability to assemble then laws regulating that assembly are ok. I could see an issue with forcing people to some distant location, as the distance and remote location could be seen as a barrier to assembly. That doesn't seem to be the case here though. While the cities are trying to force people out of specific parks for a limited time they aren't forcing them to go home, or go to any other specific location.
In the specific case of NYC, the city doesn't seem to be really preventing anyone from assembling. Even with respect to this planned carnival, I see no reason this latest action would interfere with it. People can gather Thursday and do all the videotaping of messages they want. However, blocking streets and camping out for months on end isn't a necessary prerequisite to assembly, and I see no reason it should be allowed.
Arresting people without giving them a fair chance to move away, and using force on people that aren't violent are two things I certainly have an issue with. However, I frankly don't think it is unreasonable to clear people out of a public place at least once a week to clean it up. If they fail to allow anyone back into the park then there could again be an issue if there isn't any other suitable place for them to assemble.
You'd be suprised how oblivious the average user is, to what can be found on the Internet.
About 2 years ago, I was taking a low level math class and, one day while in the library, someone from the class came up to me and asked if I could help with some of the homework he was stuck on. It became clear that his problem was he forgot how to deal with fractions, eg, he couldn't add two fractions with different denominators.
I told him he should brush up on his fraction rules. A good idea would be just to google 'fraction review' and read through a few of those, then something like 'fraction review problems' and do a bunch of practice problems. His response was: (slightly amazed) "they have that on the internet?"
Given how often I used the internet as a reference for anything and everything this legitimately boggled my mind.
I like this idea. I'd however propose a delay before the switch could happen. Perhaps require 50% for over 3 months. This would protect against a fickle public changing its mind every other day.
I don't agree with either idea proposed so far, but I'll add this idea. When politicians leave office the people vote on their approval rating. If it's over 50% then they get a lifetime pension. Under 50% and they get nothing. This would have some problems. Particularly that people would vote based on how well the country is doing as a whole, which individual politicians might have very little influence over. My personal idea is just to bar anyone from office who has received gift, donations, or items worth over $10,000 over the last 10 years, from either people, corporations or anything else. Get a petition with 100,000 signatures and you get a set amount of funding to promote yourself. All ads have to come from that fund.
This would be like the USA getting most of it's energy from the middle east....oh wait, we do.
While I think the US should move to domestic nuclear power as much as possible, we don't get even close to most of our energy from the middle east.
In 2008, petroleum was the largest source of energy in the US, providing 38% of the energy consumed
In 2008 the US consumed 19.5 million barrels (3,100,000 m3) per day of petroleum products
4.9 million barrels per day are from OPEC.
4.9 / 19.5 = 0.251
0.38 * 0.251 = 0.095
The US gets 9.5% of its energy from OPEC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_in_the_United_States
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbblpd_a.htm
Note this like pegs the imports from the Persian gulf at 18% vs the 25% I calculated. Probably because of OPEC countries that aren't in the Persian gulf.
http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/foreign_oil_dependence.cfm
The real question I have is, that 2.98M megawatts being pumped out, is that weekly, monthly, yearly, in total or what? And how much of our national energy consumption does that actually take care of?
A watt is a unit of power, which is the rate of energy use. If you want it in energy/time it's 3 trillion joules per second. Wiki tells me that the peak electrical power demand for the US is around 800 GW. Since the geothermal potential is about 3000 GW, we in theory could get all our electricity from geothermal. I think our power usage is something like 40% electrical, 40% transportation, 20% heating. So it could even provide all power, and some exports, and some room for growth. Of course that is after a huge infrastructure investment, and with optimistic estimates.
If 99% of us don't have to work because the machines do it all... how exactly would that be bad?
There's an important distinction here between "don't have to work" and "have to, but can't work". Just because 99% of jobs are replaced doesn't mean that the 99% of people who had those jobs before will now be retired and living their dreams. The alternative could be simply starving, or living on a very modest government provided survival wage. Perhaps even government provided dorms, food, and clothing (more than enough to keep you alive, but not exactly a full life) for anyone that can't provide for themselves. I would say that 99% could easily overthrow 1% if conditions were that bad except for two points. First, the conditions could be improved enough where they still aren't great, but people aren't willing to risk life and limb to fight for better ones. Second, a massive robotic army/police force would certainly discourage any rebellion.
More stuff gets automated, more jobs lost, cost of living goes down because of automation, more jobs created.
I've used the same argument in the past, however, I've been somewhat swayed. Keep in mind, I'm not completely convinced that 99% of people will be out of work and robots will be doing everything. But, I do think there could be a fundamental difference between the oncoming wave of automation and the preceding ones.
The difference is in specialization. Before when new technologies replaced workers they replaced single jobs, and those people could create new jobs for themselves eventually. However, we are close (few decades) to creating humanoid robots that will be capable of doing just about any task a human does that doesn't require great intelligence. Just about every job not requiring a collage degree, from janitor, to factory work, to many service and retail will be automated. That is a huge chunk of jobs, probably over half. Go here and look at the 2008 job percentages. Many of the big categories can be outright replaced by robots. Just about all of them can be somewhat reduced.
Marshall Brain has a few interesting articles about this. He is much more dramatic about it than I am, but still interesting to consider. http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
If you don't have anything that someone will pay for you are pretty much screwed. Throughout human history, people were born with the ability to do work that others would pay for. If humanoid robots become common that could cease to be true for the first time. Combined with possible human level AI and only people who own things that are valuable (resources) will have anything that can be sold. Hopefully our society can adjust to this and spread the benefit around. But it will certainly be interesting.
It would seem that machines must create less jobs than they replace, otherwise they wouldn't be economical. Also, since they tend to replace many lower paying jobs with fewer higher paying support ones, the ratio is probably even worse.
Mehaute et. al. conclude in their 1996 overview Water Waves Generated by Underwater Explosion that the surface waves from even a very large offshore undersea explosion would expend most of its energy on the continental shelf, resulting in coastal flooding no worse than that from a bad storm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_explosion
khanacademy.org style: you record ONE person, doing a lecture series, and share with everyone. for miniscule incremental cost.
While I agree with your general idea, I feel you are being too optimistic with how far costs could be reduced. To begin, while it is nice that Khan creates his excellent videos for free, a school can't count on them for everything; there are still many subjects he hasn't covered, and even for the ones he has a school should still provide their own lectures. At the least they will have to record their own professors teaching a class and publish that (MIT OCW style). Admittedly this is a one time cost, but it still should be included in the costs.
The next problem is test creation. Since tests are going to be of much more importance in grading it would be crucial that they are made up unique every time. You must pay someone (probably a few someones) who is an expert in a field to create the tests. If the tests can't be given as multiple choice scan trons, then you also need to employ an expert to grade them.
Lastly, there is the problem of hands on experiments. How would one do chemistry online? While I'm sure that somewhere some school has given chemistry classes with no experiments, I don't think that should be the standard. So, you are going to have to provide open access labs where students can come in and do experiments. For a variety of reasons, the students will have to be supervised while in the lab, so that is another person to pay.
Again, I agree with your central point that schools could greatly reduce tuition costs by moving to prerecorded video lectures, I don't think the savings would be that dramatic.
I think the costs go down as the scale goes up. You only need one test for either 20 students or 200,000 students, as long as they are all taking it on the same day. Consider then, if the Federal government went out and got some top professors to give video lectures of all the classes one would expect for the variety of common bachelor degrees. With a couple professors giving the same lectures (never underestimate the value of having the same concept explained by two different people). They then also had those professors create the tests (they could keep them on retainer), and have regional proctoring centers for students to come to to take the tests on test days. Non scantron grading would still require local graders, but that would seem unavoidable. Provide suggested books and suggested homework assignments (for all the old editions as well). Post worked solutions online. The government then allows anyone to enroll in any class they want, perhaps for a modest fee (~$100), with additional lab fees for classes that must perform labs or classes that require non scantron grading. If the student passes the tests they earn the credits for that class. Pass all the classes in a degree and you get that degree. Complete as many degree as you wish, for relatively cheaply.
This is obviously the exact opposite from Ron Paul's idea, but I feel it would work much better. Degrees would become common, and the huge debts would be eliminated. I can't think of anyway grad school could be automated like this though.
To quote my $20 - "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"
In a technical sense, accepting goods places a burden of debt upon the recipient.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/legal-tender.aspx
I thought that United States currency was legal tender for all debts. Some businesses or governmental agencies say that they will only accept checks, money orders or credit cards as payment, and others will only accept currency notes in denominations of $20 or smaller. Isn't this illegal?
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.
Why does an IOU need names or what it was for?
How would you enforce it if it didn't? What proof is there that I owe you anything if I never signed anything?
I get the impression Ballmer hasn't even used an Android phone. Exactly what part of the OS is complicated to use? Really, that's just an absurd, out-there statement.
It's a marketing statement, it doesn't need any basis in reality. Ballmer could be in love with android, and use it all the time, that doesn't change the fact that he stands to benefit if other people use the MS product. That means hyping up the perceived positives of your own product while also reinforcing the negative stereotypes of the competition. If you ask regular people why they don't use android, perceived complexity might be near the top of the list. Again, marketing isn't concerned with facts, just with reinforcing what is best for the company.
There's not much theater they can do if a terrorist body packs a bomb.
The beauty of theater is that doesn't have to be effective. It just has to look good and nothing more. I have no doubt they'd come up with something to do.