Technology is just a tool it is a hard heart that kills.
This is true for rifles and true for any other technology. As for guns - there are countries where a junta owns it all as much as it does in US of A and yet the murder rate is significantly lower. There are countries where average income is much lower than in US of A and where societal tensions are handled mostly without use of violence and growth in prison industry. Shall I continue?
Still the fact is the same in US as it is in Germany: globalization, progress in logistics, technology but also mrket saturation leads to situation where wages and salaries stagnate and eventually fall. This does not have to be a bad thing in itself as long people have something meaningful to do (not poverty but luck of stimuli is a significant factor for massive drug abuse it seems) and have hope for the future. Every generation had an existential challenge to resolve except maybe the one that is going into pension now. It would be odd if a good ride went on forever.
Where I live they clean up, cloth up and bury the dead. Sometimes we go for a celebration with family and close friends. Burial house gets its share of money anyway. You can save on quality of coffin and some such. You still need a burial house to bury or otherwise process the remains. There is usually a place where some speeches are done and/or people can say g'd riddance to the dead - they can skip that too and save on it, while streaming burning of remains (direct from furnace for additional fee). From this perspective I do not see why would anybody in the industry worry about this - if at all, this is an opportunity for additional fees (e.g. camera in the furnace etc).
I can hardly believe that sometimes too, but sometimes people have real concerns and do their job as well as they can. Maybe there are places where this is different and mostly driven by profit (Murica comes to mind) but I suspect, that this is a general human thing, so there are plenty of folks everywhere, that can combine profit drive with honesty, hard work and respect for others. This hardly applies to international companies and I would be hard pressed to name a corporation that does that (not at the levels above production floor).
The exact predictions of course do not exist because, with current level of knowledge, they cannot be done. It has been said however, that number of extreme conditions will increase and it did although possibly not in US. It is of course appropriate politically to talk about single aspect of huge and complex thing and pick an exceptional area as US surely is and then claim - 'lies and bad science' as the GP did. Arguing with this lot is pointless. Not because we know all about how weather patterns change and why, but because the nut cases do - there is a huge number of them out there claiming, that burning fossil fuels at steadily increasing pace and cutting the forests of the world does not make any difference at all because they 'know' weather does not change or if it does, it is some external force, we cannot control, thus nothing can be done and we shall not even think if we have something to do with it and/or more importantly, if we can do anything about it.
It is not bakshish that is stopping doctors from prescribing generic in this case. It is rather the law on what is to be prescribed - generics if the same branded drug exists. If you stop production of old drug on which patent expired and started production and marketing of a new slightly different under different brand then this rule does not apply, generic makers lose out market share and new brand which is only slightly different from older one (as you suggest) can make bigger profits again. BTW: the issue as per linked articles is not with lack of profits (they made more than a billion on this drug alone last year) but production facilities (or so they say). If they cannot produce the shit then they should release the old patent - sell it to generic maker or make it free for what I care. That is not what they want - they aim at market share to maximize profit. This would be OK in anything else or rather it would go unnoticed but in medicine costs are so high and demand is forced by suffering of patients, that this makes courts decide so. In other words court does not think company should be in business of riding IP laws but in making and selling medicine.
This is a sidetrack but still important one I think. The way free market was alleged to function is to provide cheapest goods for the customers and biggest profits for the businesses. That is inherent conflict that no market can resolve as big profit is there only for limited time and product becomes cheap over time. Companies ride the patent war to increase profit knowing very well that patients are forced to take medications by their suffering. Come to think of it unholy aliance of IP rigihst and privatized healthcare is worse than racket schemes mafias of different origins have run trough cities of the world since ?
First of all the 'no profit' argument that is used here is a wrong - the company still makes a profit in this particular medicine and decision to stop production was made only to stop generic makers from being able to continue from the point the patent expires. This said one can imagine that (possibly oversimplified) analysis of options available to company and society (and its arm called state) gives: either produce the drug till patent expires or if you cannot then you declare bankruptcy and pass over to for instance: generic producers (which as per actions and motivations of the company were just waiting for it anyway).
So all the bollocks about what the owners have to do is pointless. They are not obliged to do anything under normal conditions. Possibly a court can force them to do things like it does to us all to follow the laws, pay taxes, serve in the army if need be etc. But I think we are far from that point as the drug still brings money.
I still think that US is exceptional. All other nations use torture in a way that is less effective and not done according to scientific standard. I see millions of US taxpayers money spent effectively for a change. Looking at the opponents of the greatest nation (that would be almost everybody else except maybe UK but who knows what future brings) we can see that their torture chambers are just fun places made up for power trips of their sponsors unless of course they are rented by US authorities because standard scientific methods of extended interrogation do not suffice to satisfy the needs of said authorities.
What was the reason US republic was grounded again? Was it oppression and no justice of corrupted regimes of old continent or just taxes? I guess it was just taxes.
Considering that ex is wearing one I should be able to agree but I have a problem with this because so many people wear them these days. I consider most of humanity slightly more intelligent than a earthworm but general standard of stupidity are much lower than mine so only some tatooed people are in fact of substandard intelligence. In general I was thought at home and confirmed that myself in life - judging people on basis of their clothing is bound to yield wrong results and people relying on such attributes are usually bad or stupid persons themselves.
Well there can be an argument for homeopathy and it can go as follows. For most of the patients coming to practitioners the best option is actually wait and see and treat only if body does not cope with common cold on its own going into complications. prescribing antibiotics makes no health sense if you have common cold but it does make financial sense for a doctor - the legal costs from malpractice charges fall away. If so one can argue it would be better to prescribe homeopathic stuff instead of antibiotics. Granted it is annoying being forced to listen to blabbering of people about how good homeopathic stuff is but it is sometimes good to have something that 'helps'/- being a parent is not always easy....
If they grow up they buy a gun or get elected or some other terrible thing happens. Better shoot them straight or in case your religion or ethics prevent you from doing that: hope for your preferred deity or force of nature to take care of the problem, preferably within our lifetime.
I thought that is the purpose (i.e. feeding trolls) of this site anyway? I mean intelligent trolling session are difficult to come by. There were good trolling waves here 10ya but not even that is the same as in 'ol good days. The youth of today cannot even troll properly anymore - something that may be associated with the shortened attention spans etc.
As for the reasons why you may think foreigners are more skilled than locals there is this explanation that fits best into your use case: if you look at immigrants in context of their source society you will see, that they are either over- or undereducated. The ones in the middle usually have more to lose and less to gain from immigrating. Low skilled have very little to lose and very skilled usually migrate because they have better options in other countries and not only financially. In other words, if you were looking you would have found locals of the same skill level as immigrants are but immigrants asking for a job in IT are usually filtered by the migration effort that is huge and has to pay off so mostly well skilled take that risk. This is a simplification of real process but as long as people do not try to flee natural disaster of Pol Pot proportions they usually form the diamond shape when put on mass/skill diagram.
As for lowering of numbers of skilled workers there are many reasons I would think. USA was once major magnet because the rest of the world was so underdeveloped. This has changed. Then more restrictive environment means that to get in, you have to do more or get there illegally - such conditions are putting skilled ones off naturally as it increases risk without increasing of pay off. But there are other reasons too. US society is better known to people now and not from better side. If decision to immigrate is based on information and calculation instead of myths and herd instincts, then there is ever less incentive: US society is more and more seen in perspective of great divide between have and havenots, there are riots, militarized police seems to be shooting people at random and people are shooting other people, tensions in society seem to be fixed so people in say Fergusson buy guns instead of trying to address the problems, add to this war on drugs, massive prison population and what is important for people like me who would immigrate with family: basic social safety nets are somewhat lacking. There is also another aspect - US is not seen as a good country anymore or not by majority. Take Germany - conquered by (among others) US military power and turned into ashes in a process yet people loved US after a while. This has stopped and now they are more critical but there are plenty of places in the world where people see US as only good to get some goodies AND a great danger to own society too. I do not know how many people use such arguments not to migrate to US but I would imagine the number became significant of late.
Plus today there are more jobs which you can do from home. You can do some of those jobs from home - income may be lower but risk is lower too.
As for your/. argument - I think you exaggerate hugely the influence this site has on anything. I know maybe 2 or 3 guys who know/. If this site had any influence on general population anywhere we would see libertarian economic policy at least in US, energy needs covered by 4th generation of nuclear reactors and NSA and religion banned from the system their proponents sent to re-education camps in Syberia. maybe even some good examples could have been found of such geek based society but we would not know because this is not happening.
Selling is a good thing and various regimes of this planet engage in selling military toys to different (sometimes clearly very unpleasant) regimes. Yet in case of Ukraine there is a problem with selling because that involves paying for goods and services which Ukraine has difficulty with.
the statements about dead of the lander are slightly exaggerated. It may still wake up. What was the last time when your project delivered all you started it for, did it on time and possibly (as we do not know it yet) did not reach goals on ambition level? I would like project that I work on be as good as this one. But than I have the biggest evil in the whole universe to fight against: bean counters.
I suppose the poor guy may have made a mistake but the nazimfems and their serfs that go after him and his shirt should be sent to uranium mine for their stupidity and lack of spirit and understanding for other humans, especially if those are equipped with rape toolkit formerly known as penis.
If you dislike government making decisions then there is a problem with 'we' that you use as in "we have to do something". If you want to have a general application of some rules then usually you need to have to talk to gov. Unless the matter can be resolved by talking to one controlling body that is not government. Do we have such? So if your statement (about 90% of issues being fucked up by a gov) than there is a much bigger problem in your country and that is not net neutrality or few angry and uninformed people talking nonsense.
Other than that it is a very thoughtful post, thank you.
Is that so? So why the biggest democracy in the world India has higher poverty levels than the most populous country in the world which is not very democratic? One can take your sentence of course and say that for it to work you would have to have functioning government and during process of building one there is no way to have democracy but I think the old fart that allegedly said this thing was maybe drunk but surely did not mean all that much.
I suppose by "single click problem you mean "a problem that is solved by single click" or a problem that is caused in single click directly followed by 'oh shit" realization? Privacy, encryption, authentication and authorization are all quite difficult already without bad terminology being used.
we all made a conscious decision on that? I must have missed that somehow. Privacy is not dead. There is always something that can be done to ensure good enough level of privacy that also allows good enough chances to catch criminals. The current violations of privacy are not used to do even that but serve the powers that be. And that needs to change.
The really interesting part is this: if all that in the study is true then one can imagine a device that determines your voting preferences automatically. I can even imagine making similar scans early in the childhood (as soon as that is technically possible - I would imagine early teens is already good enough). Make an implant or something not easilly removable and you do not even have to go trough all the trouble of visiting polling station anymore. Optimizing it further I can imagine that your preference can be noted in a voting register (together with some other preferences deduced from the scans) and use them whenever an election or some other silly routine is started. When technology is advanced enough we can even put some people (rated dangerous or not very useful for society) on the way trough the chimney with a single and simple database query although that may require some amendments to currently existing laws in some jurisdictions.
Slashdot Mirror
Technology is just a tool it is a hard heart that kills.
This is true for rifles and true for any other technology. As for guns - there are countries where a junta owns it all as much as it does in US of A and yet the murder rate is significantly lower. There are countries where average income is much lower than in US of A and where societal tensions are handled mostly without use of violence and growth in prison industry. Shall I continue?
Still the fact is the same in US as it is in Germany: globalization, progress in logistics, technology but also mrket saturation leads to situation where wages and salaries stagnate and eventually fall. This does not have to be a bad thing in itself as long people have something meaningful to do (not poverty but luck of stimuli is a significant factor for massive drug abuse it seems) and have hope for the future. Every generation had an existential challenge to resolve except maybe the one that is going into pension now. It would be odd if a good ride went on forever.
embalming?
Where I live they clean up, cloth up and bury the dead. Sometimes we go for a celebration with family and close friends. Burial house gets its share of money anyway. You can save on quality of coffin and some such. You still need a burial house to bury or otherwise process the remains. There is usually a place where some speeches are done and/or people can say g'd riddance to the dead - they can skip that too and save on it, while streaming burning of remains (direct from furnace for additional fee). From this perspective I do not see why would anybody in the industry worry about this - if at all, this is an opportunity for additional fees (e.g. camera in the furnace etc).
I can hardly believe that sometimes too, but sometimes people have real concerns and do their job as well as they can. Maybe there are places where this is different and mostly driven by profit (Murica comes to mind) but I suspect, that this is a general human thing, so there are plenty of folks everywhere, that can combine profit drive with honesty, hard work and respect for others. This hardly applies to international companies and I would be hard pressed to name a corporation that does that (not at the levels above production floor).
The exact predictions of course do not exist because, with current level of knowledge, they cannot be done. It has been said however, that number of extreme conditions will increase and it did although possibly not in US. It is of course appropriate politically to talk about single aspect of huge and complex thing and pick an exceptional area as US surely is and then claim - 'lies and bad science' as the GP did.
Arguing with this lot is pointless. Not because we know all about how weather patterns change and why, but because the nut cases do - there is a huge number of them out there claiming, that burning fossil fuels at steadily increasing pace and cutting the forests of the world does not make any difference at all because they 'know' weather does not change or if it does, it is some external force, we cannot control, thus nothing can be done and we shall not even think if we have something to do with it and/or more importantly, if we can do anything about it.
It is not bakshish that is stopping doctors from prescribing generic in this case. It is rather the law on what is to be prescribed - generics if the same branded drug exists. If you stop production of old drug on which patent expired and started production and marketing of a new slightly different under different brand then this rule does not apply, generic makers lose out market share and new brand which is only slightly different from older one (as you suggest) can make bigger profits again. BTW: the issue as per linked articles is not with lack of profits (they made more than a billion on this drug alone last year) but production facilities (or so they say). If they cannot produce the shit then they should release the old patent - sell it to generic maker or make it free for what I care. That is not what they want - they aim at market share to maximize profit. This would be OK in anything else or rather it would go unnoticed but in medicine costs are so high and demand is forced by suffering of patients, that this makes courts decide so. In other words court does not think company should be in business of riding IP laws but in making and selling medicine.
This is a sidetrack but still important one I think. The way free market was alleged to function is to provide cheapest goods for the customers and biggest profits for the businesses. That is inherent conflict that no market can resolve as big profit is there only for limited time and product becomes cheap over time. Companies ride the patent war to increase profit knowing very well that patients are forced to take medications by their suffering. Come to think of it unholy aliance of IP rigihst and privatized healthcare is worse than racket schemes mafias of different origins have run trough cities of the world since ?
First of all the 'no profit' argument that is used here is a wrong - the company still makes a profit in this particular medicine and decision to stop production was made only to stop generic makers from being able to continue from the point the patent expires.
This said one can imagine that (possibly oversimplified) analysis of options available to company and society (and its arm called state) gives: either produce the drug till patent expires or if you cannot then you declare bankruptcy and pass over to for instance: generic producers (which as per actions and motivations of the company were just waiting for it anyway).
So all the bollocks about what the owners have to do is pointless. They are not obliged to do anything under normal conditions. Possibly a court can force them to do things like it does to us all to follow the laws, pay taxes, serve in the army if need be etc. But I think we are far from that point as the drug still brings money.
I still think that US is exceptional. All other nations use torture in a way that is less effective and not done according to scientific standard. I see millions of US taxpayers money spent effectively for a change. Looking at the opponents of the greatest nation (that would be almost everybody else except maybe UK but who knows what future brings) we can see that their torture chambers are just fun places made up for power trips of their sponsors unless of course they are rented by US authorities because standard scientific methods of extended interrogation do not suffice to satisfy the needs of said authorities.
What was the reason US republic was grounded again? Was it oppression and no justice of corrupted regimes of old continent or just taxes? I guess it was just taxes.
Considering that ex is wearing one I should be able to agree but I have a problem with this because so many people wear them these days. I consider most of humanity slightly more intelligent than a earthworm but general standard of stupidity are much lower than mine so only some tatooed people are in fact of substandard intelligence. In general I was thought at home and confirmed that myself in life - judging people on basis of their clothing is bound to yield wrong results and people relying on such attributes are usually bad or stupid persons themselves.
Well there can be an argument for homeopathy and it can go as follows. For most of the patients coming to practitioners the best option is actually wait and see and treat only if body does not cope with common cold on its own going into complications. prescribing antibiotics makes no health sense if you have common cold but it does make financial sense for a doctor - the legal costs from malpractice charges fall away. If so one can argue it would be better to prescribe homeopathic stuff instead of antibiotics. Granted it is annoying being forced to listen to blabbering of people about how good homeopathic stuff is but it is sometimes good to have something that 'helps' /- being a parent is not always easy....
you have already a capable prison industry so you can employ some and put the rest inside. Problem solved.
If they grow up they buy a gun or get elected or some other terrible thing happens. Better shoot them straight or in case your religion or ethics prevent you from doing that: hope for your preferred deity or force of nature to take care of the problem, preferably within our lifetime.
I thought that is the purpose (i.e. feeding trolls) of this site anyway? I mean intelligent trolling session are difficult to come by. There were good trolling waves here 10ya but not even that is the same as in 'ol good days. The youth of today cannot even troll properly anymore - something that may be associated with the shortened attention spans etc.
As for lowering of numbers of skilled workers there are many reasons I would think. USA was once major magnet because the rest of the world was so underdeveloped. This has changed. Then more restrictive environment means that to get in, you have to do more or get there illegally - such conditions are putting skilled ones off naturally as it increases risk without increasing of pay off. But there are other reasons too. US society is better known to people now and not from better side. If decision to immigrate is based on information and calculation instead of myths and herd instincts, then there is ever less incentive: US society is more and more seen in perspective of great divide between have and havenots, there are riots, militarized police seems to be shooting people at random and people are shooting other people, tensions in society seem to be fixed so people in say Fergusson buy guns instead of trying to address the problems, add to this war on drugs, massive prison population and what is important for people like me who would immigrate with family: basic social safety nets are somewhat lacking. There is also another aspect - US is not seen as a good country anymore or not by majority. Take Germany - conquered by (among others) US military power and turned into ashes in a process yet people loved US after a while. This has stopped and now they are more critical but there are plenty of places in the world where people see US as only good to get some goodies AND a great danger to own society too. I do not know how many people use such arguments not to migrate to US but I would imagine the number became significant of late.
Plus today there are more jobs which you can do from home. You can do some of those jobs from home - income may be lower but risk is lower too.
As for your /. argument - I think you exaggerate hugely the influence this site has on anything. I know maybe 2 or 3 guys who know /.
If this site had any influence on general population anywhere we would see libertarian economic policy at least in US, energy needs covered by 4th generation of nuclear reactors and NSA and religion banned from the system their proponents sent to re-education camps in Syberia. maybe even some good examples could have been found of such geek based society but we would not know because this is not happening.
Selling is a good thing and various regimes of this planet engage in selling military toys to different (sometimes clearly very unpleasant) regimes. Yet in case of Ukraine there is a problem with selling because that involves paying for goods and services which Ukraine has difficulty with.
that was a princes last time and she was mine - I feel sooooo betrayed!
the statements about dead of the lander are slightly exaggerated. It may still wake up. What was the last time when your project delivered all you started it for, did it on time and possibly (as we do not know it yet) did not reach goals on ambition level? I would like project that I work on be as good as this one. But than I have the biggest evil in the whole universe to fight against: bean counters.
I suppose the poor guy may have made a mistake but the nazimfems and their serfs that go after him and his shirt should be sent to uranium mine for their stupidity and lack of spirit and understanding for other humans, especially if those are equipped with rape toolkit formerly known as penis.
That was maybe well intentioned but naive and written in a context of a large continent emptied nicely of local populations by germs and steel tools.
it works like fighting evil regimes by clicking on 'likes' button of fb and alikes does.
Other than that it is a very thoughtful post, thank you.
Is that so? So why the biggest democracy in the world India has higher poverty levels than the most populous country in the world which is not very democratic? One can take your sentence of course and say that for it to work you would have to have functioning government and during process of building one there is no way to have democracy but I think the old fart that allegedly said this thing was maybe drunk but surely did not mean all that much.
You should maybe read this before talking nonsense.
I suppose by "single click problem you mean "a problem that is solved by single click" or a problem that is caused in single click directly followed by 'oh shit" realization? Privacy, encryption, authentication and authorization are all quite difficult already without bad terminology being used.
we all made a conscious decision on that? I must have missed that somehow. Privacy is not dead. There is always something that can be done to ensure good enough level of privacy that also allows good enough chances to catch criminals. The current violations of privacy are not used to do even that but serve the powers that be. And that needs to change.
to have design flaws one would need design process in the first place. for number of years already I mostly see coding without design.
The really interesting part is this: if all that in the study is true then one can imagine a device that determines your voting preferences automatically. I can even imagine making similar scans early in the childhood (as soon as that is technically possible - I would imagine early teens is already good enough). Make an implant or something not easilly removable and you do not even have to go trough all the trouble of visiting polling station anymore. Optimizing it further I can imagine that your preference can be noted in a voting register (together with some other preferences deduced from the scans) and use them whenever an election or some other silly routine is started. When technology is advanced enough we can even put some people (rated dangerous or not very useful for society) on the way trough the chimney with a single and simple database query although that may require some amendments to currently existing laws in some jurisdictions.