*nod* there are all sorts of measured solutions to the issues. Sadly, well balanced solutions tend to sell very poorly to the the public so we mostly get people ranting about simplified extreme measures.
On the other hand, if there was no limit on visas and such people did not need sponsorship, the advantage of hiring them would also evaporate since they could then compete for wages too.
*nod* those 'indentured servitude' elements are the big issue with H1-B visas. It is not simply that foreign workers are willing to work for less, it is that employers have non-financial sway over their employees, which breaks the balance of the labor market. Why pay someone X dollars who has the ability to go elsewhere when you can pay someone else half that under the threat of kicking them out of the country if they are unsatisfied? Threats are much cheaper than pay and you can not use them nearly as easily on American workers.
Which is an ill omen for where the economy might be heading. Over the last few decades there has been this big mantra that the loss of manufacturing jobs will be offset by tech and service jobs, but the numbers of such jobs being created is far smaller than the middle class jobs being lost and now we are seeing those jobs experiencing a greater and greater wage divide with an increasingly small number making more money and a majority getting closer and closer to lower class.
While protectionism has its own set of problems, the pure market solution is not panning out well either.
While it may be a fact of life, entitlement is only part of the equation. The other is pure economic pragmatism, such patterns can only work so long before you cut off your feet. They tend to make a few people richer in the short term but as more and more companies/industries do it they start finding their customer base evaporating too, at which point earnings get eaten from the bottom up. It is a classic game theory problem, the economy is strongest with well paying jobs kept local, but any single company gets and advantage by getting rid of its well paid jobs while other companies still have them, so companies that have behaviors that are healthy for the overall economy (including themselves) are economically punished.
Statistics aside, one of the big issues is that problems with the police tend to be institutional not just individual. Even when an individual is a good cop (and I suspect most are) they are generally still making life easier for the bad ones. Most good cops, via action or inaction, are enabling the bad ones.
Though if we do want to talk stats, we could dip into risk management. Cops are dangerous, when interacting with one there is a non-zero probability that something bad will happen to you. In weighing interactions this can be offset by potential utility if one needs help, but for general interaction there is little to justify the risk, so the police really are best avoided unless you have a reason to be approaching one. It is a sad situation, but the way things are structured right now there is too much of a chance of something going wrong and too few ways to mitigate the risks... you can not even defend yourself or even have the law as a potential threat to discourage them.
Actually it is relevant. One of the major hopes for autonomous cars is they will be safer than human drivers, and thus even if they are operating within the laws human drivers would still be a safety hazard. If nothing else, the laws are built around human capabilities and limitations, so they do not represent the paragon of safetly, only what humans can reasonably manage.
True, but there are those who love horses as well, yet now most people rarely even see a live horse, let alone own one.
Another point relevant to this piece, a lot people who ride horses for enjoyment do not actually own them. Owners generally do not have the time to exercise their horses every day, so part of stabling is other people ride them on days when the owner can not.
Long term the question will be how disruptive human drivers are in such situations. All it takes is one or two cars behaving oddly to reduce a high speed flow of traffic to one of those 'why is everyone going slow?' jams. That could turn public opinion against allowing drivers on the road real fast.
A few decades ago perhaps, but by today not so much. Examples have been found for where ape aggression vanishes (and maintains across generation) when the social context changes. The 'nature' crowd has slowly been fading since maybe the 70s or 80s and increasingly are 'pop' science.
The place where this breaks down is that the question of how much aggression is genetic vs social, the old nature vs nurture debate. While it can be argued males tend to be larger and stronger, actual aggression seems to be influenced more as a social construct from early age. Aggression in males and females is treated differently in terms of role models and people's feedback, with positive and negative effects being drastically different.
This changes the scope of the issue rather significantly since social norms and parenting are a lot easier to change then genetics.
Are you going to tell a womyn-born-womyn to knock off her sexism, or is your strategy going to be to hold all of us assigned the male gender at birth accountable because you're the One Good Man?
Ahm, "womyn-born-womyn" is a common adversary of third wave feminism and such communities are frequently called out for being sexist.
Right. Because I was assigned the male gender at birth and I happen to play a few games, I'm an evil misogynist.
No, people are perfectly capable of being judged based off their words and actions. The only people I see claiming this 'all men are evil misogynists' are people claiming that feminists are saying that. Outside a few fringe whackjobs left over from radfem, I pretty much never see this coming from the community, even second wave feminists have backed off that stuff over the years.
Either I'm one of those evil gamers who just hate all women and can't get laid, or I'm a pinko communist socialist feminist because I'm trans. And still an evil gamer who hates women because she dates men and is clearly sexually frustrated because she's never gotten in bed with a cisgendered woman!
There are lots of people out there, there are jerks with a variety of opinions and for anything there will be someone out there attacking it. I have no doubt you have heard both, as I have I (I am also trans), but once the rage subsides one can look around to see who is not being horrible and find lots of good people. Creating strawmen does not make the world seem any better.
The person is under the assumption that women simply endure sex in order to get what they want and should (or do) use that power to control people, with 'people' being men of course, since only men can actually do things.
That is something I wish people would keep in mind more often. There is this idea that misogyny is some big explicit evil that people choose to have sexist attitudes and are generally terrible people when, most of the time, it is just a product of not thinking outside one's own perspective or examining gender based assumptions.. leading to people who are generally good people having some sexist attitudes purely through never having really sat down and examining them. Though it could be argued that how one reacts when their problematic attitudes are pointed out can kinda invalidate them being 'good'.
I actually got into an argument with a coworker about that, with him claiming that it matched his experience with female coworkers and students, 'especially attractive ones'. One irony that I did not feel like pointing out is all the claims he was making about 'women' developers and how they skirt work, need constant help, expect others to hand hold, etc etc, were all complaints I have about his work and he is probably about a week from being fired for it.
Of course we can. There seems to be this persistent idea that women can not be misogynistic, but women grow up with and internalize the same social messages men do, meaning they can be just as misogynistic as men. The author being a woman does not actually change what she wrote, and it is the message that people are responding to, not her sex.
Nonsense. It is far from a no-win situation, it is simply not a situation where Mattel is immune to criticism. Though given how much backlash there is against feminism and companies failing to 'think of the menz!', perhaps it really is no-win since the anti-SJW crowd gets bent out of shape pretty much any time some group other than them might have their concerns taken seriously.
Even when they did ask for help it generally was not attributed to their gender. So girls asking for help went into that little confirmation box that girls had trouble and boys asking for help just became people asking for help.
I completely agree that one can have respect and re-examine things, with new one off technologies and perspectives often leading to progress. It is the lack of respect and the push to not even be aware of the past that tends to bother me, or the belief that problems were not solved in the past because of the inferriority of the people involved.
*nods* cloud stuff is a good example. It is something worth revisiting as technologies around it change since the pros and cons will reshuffle and sometimes that changes things. The important part IMHO though is to treat it as a re-evaluation rather then something new, keeping in mind all the good and bad things about it and the lessons learned last time it was popular AND, rather importantly, why it fell out of popularity.
I think this speaks a lot about how companies and the population are increasingly thinking in rather short terms and how little respect the modern tech elite have for those who came before them. There seems to be this attitude that difficult problems are only unsolved because the 'wrong' people have looked at it and flush with arrogance for solving comparatively simple internet related ones they believe that they are smarter and thus will quickly tackle what those 'researchers' and 'old fogies' could not.
And when gratification is not instant, they move on.
I also see this, on a smaller but more insidious scale, in the almost pathological desire to not learn from the past developers have been fetishizing. Too often learning roots or old technologies 'taints' a person with 'old' ideas rather than teaching them lessons others have already learned so that they can move on from there. So many 'new' technologies that when the developers are asked 'ok, this is great, but how do you plan to address the issues that were encountered last time?' they just look at you blankly and claim this is new and innovative, or that you just don't understand.
Slashdot Mirror
They did spend a whole 4 years doing it, and their stock options prove they are smarter than ivory tower academics.
Everything old is new again. Pretty much everything we see in tech is people rediscovering things done decades ago and trying them again.
*nod* there are all sorts of measured solutions to the issues. Sadly, well balanced solutions tend to sell very poorly to the the public so we mostly get people ranting about simplified extreme measures.
On the other hand, if there was no limit on visas and such people did not need sponsorship, the advantage of hiring them would also evaporate since they could then compete for wages too.
*nod* those 'indentured servitude' elements are the big issue with H1-B visas. It is not simply that foreign workers are willing to work for less, it is that employers have non-financial sway over their employees, which breaks the balance of the labor market. Why pay someone X dollars who has the ability to go elsewhere when you can pay someone else half that under the threat of kicking them out of the country if they are unsatisfied? Threats are much cheaper than pay and you can not use them nearly as easily on American workers.
Which is an ill omen for where the economy might be heading. Over the last few decades there has been this big mantra that the loss of manufacturing jobs will be offset by tech and service jobs, but the numbers of such jobs being created is far smaller than the middle class jobs being lost and now we are seeing those jobs experiencing a greater and greater wage divide with an increasingly small number making more money and a majority getting closer and closer to lower class.
While protectionism has its own set of problems, the pure market solution is not panning out well either.
It is sad how many people I see leaving engineering to enter finance... but yeah, the pay and respect tend to be better there.
While it may be a fact of life, entitlement is only part of the equation. The other is pure economic pragmatism, such patterns can only work so long before you cut off your feet. They tend to make a few people richer in the short term but as more and more companies/industries do it they start finding their customer base evaporating too, at which point earnings get eaten from the bottom up. It is a classic game theory problem, the economy is strongest with well paying jobs kept local, but any single company gets and advantage by getting rid of its well paid jobs while other companies still have them, so companies that have behaviors that are healthy for the overall economy (including themselves) are economically punished.
Statistics aside, one of the big issues is that problems with the police tend to be institutional not just individual. Even when an individual is a good cop (and I suspect most are) they are generally still making life easier for the bad ones. Most good cops, via action or inaction, are enabling the bad ones.
Though if we do want to talk stats, we could dip into risk management. Cops are dangerous, when interacting with one there is a non-zero probability that something bad will happen to you. In weighing interactions this can be offset by potential utility if one needs help, but for general interaction there is little to justify the risk, so the police really are best avoided unless you have a reason to be approaching one. It is a sad situation, but the way things are structured right now there is too much of a chance of something going wrong and too few ways to mitigate the risks... you can not even defend yourself or even have the law as a potential threat to discourage them.
Actually it is relevant. One of the major hopes for autonomous cars is they will be safer than human drivers, and thus even if they are operating within the laws human drivers would still be a safety hazard. If nothing else, the laws are built around human capabilities and limitations, so they do not represent the paragon of safetly, only what humans can reasonably manage.
True, but there are those who love horses as well, yet now most people rarely even see a live horse, let alone own one.
Another point relevant to this piece, a lot people who ride horses for enjoyment do not actually own them. Owners generally do not have the time to exercise their horses every day, so part of stabling is other people ride them on days when the owner can not.
Long term the question will be how disruptive human drivers are in such situations. All it takes is one or two cars behaving oddly to reduce a high speed flow of traffic to one of those 'why is everyone going slow?' jams. That could turn public opinion against allowing drivers on the road real fast.
A few decades ago perhaps, but by today not so much. Examples have been found for where ape aggression vanishes (and maintains across generation) when the social context changes. The 'nature' crowd has slowly been fading since maybe the 70s or 80s and increasingly are 'pop' science.
The place where this breaks down is that the question of how much aggression is genetic vs social, the old nature vs nurture debate. While it can be argued males tend to be larger and stronger, actual aggression seems to be influenced more as a social construct from early age. Aggression in males and females is treated differently in terms of role models and people's feedback, with positive and negative effects being drastically different.
This changes the scope of the issue rather significantly since social norms and parenting are a lot easier to change then genetics.
Are you going to tell a womyn-born-womyn to knock off her sexism, or is your strategy going to be to hold all of us assigned the male gender at birth accountable because you're the One Good Man?
Ahm, "womyn-born-womyn" is a common adversary of third wave feminism and such communities are frequently called out for being sexist.
Right. Because I was assigned the male gender at birth and I happen to play a few games, I'm an evil misogynist.
No, people are perfectly capable of being judged based off their words and actions. The only people I see claiming this 'all men are evil misogynists' are people claiming that feminists are saying that. Outside a few fringe whackjobs left over from radfem, I pretty much never see this coming from the community, even second wave feminists have backed off that stuff over the years.
Either I'm one of those evil gamers who just hate all women and can't get laid, or I'm a pinko communist socialist feminist because I'm trans. And still an evil gamer who hates women because she dates men and is clearly sexually frustrated because she's never gotten in bed with a cisgendered woman!
There are lots of people out there, there are jerks with a variety of opinions and for anything there will be someone out there attacking it. I have no doubt you have heard both, as I have I (I am also trans), but once the rage subsides one can look around to see who is not being horrible and find lots of good people. Creating strawmen does not make the world seem any better.
The person is under the assumption that women simply endure sex in order to get what they want and should (or do) use that power to control people, with 'people' being men of course, since only men can actually do things.
That is something I wish people would keep in mind more often. There is this idea that misogyny is some big explicit evil that people choose to have sexist attitudes and are generally terrible people when, most of the time, it is just a product of not thinking outside one's own perspective or examining gender based assumptions.. leading to people who are generally good people having some sexist attitudes purely through never having really sat down and examining them. Though it could be argued that how one reacts when their problematic attitudes are pointed out can kinda invalidate them being 'good'.
I actually got into an argument with a coworker about that, with him claiming that it matched his experience with female coworkers and students, 'especially attractive ones'. One irony that I did not feel like pointing out is all the claims he was making about 'women' developers and how they skirt work, need constant help, expect others to hand hold, etc etc, were all complaints I have about his work and he is probably about a week from being fired for it.
Of course we can. There seems to be this persistent idea that women can not be misogynistic, but women grow up with and internalize the same social messages men do, meaning they can be just as misogynistic as men. The author being a woman does not actually change what she wrote, and it is the message that people are responding to, not her sex.
Nonsense. It is far from a no-win situation, it is simply not a situation where Mattel is immune to criticism. Though given how much backlash there is against feminism and companies failing to 'think of the menz!', perhaps it really is no-win since the anti-SJW crowd gets bent out of shape pretty much any time some group other than them might have their concerns taken seriously.
Even when they did ask for help it generally was not attributed to their gender. So girls asking for help went into that little confirmation box that girls had trouble and boys asking for help just became people asking for help.
I completely agree that one can have respect and re-examine things, with new one off technologies and perspectives often leading to progress. It is the lack of respect and the push to not even be aware of the past that tends to bother me, or the belief that problems were not solved in the past because of the inferriority of the people involved.
*nods* cloud stuff is a good example. It is something worth revisiting as technologies around it change since the pros and cons will reshuffle and sometimes that changes things. The important part IMHO though is to treat it as a re-evaluation rather then something new, keeping in mind all the good and bad things about it and the lessons learned last time it was popular AND, rather importantly, why it fell out of popularity.
I think this speaks a lot about how companies and the population are increasingly thinking in rather short terms and how little respect the modern tech elite have for those who came before them. There seems to be this attitude that difficult problems are only unsolved because the 'wrong' people have looked at it and flush with arrogance for solving comparatively simple internet related ones they believe that they are smarter and thus will quickly tackle what those 'researchers' and 'old fogies' could not.
And when gratification is not instant, they move on.
I also see this, on a smaller but more insidious scale, in the almost pathological desire to not learn from the past developers have been fetishizing. Too often learning roots or old technologies 'taints' a person with 'old' ideas rather than teaching them lessons others have already learned so that they can move on from there. So many 'new' technologies that when the developers are asked 'ok, this is great, but how do you plan to address the issues that were encountered last time?' they just look at you blankly and claim this is new and innovative, or that you just don't understand.
Ok, got a bit off topic there ^_^
It is comments like this that make me wish Slashdot had something about +5.