Funny how anonymity and Trump go together so nicely. Sort of like secret ballots... Trump is the first presidential candidate willing to say what the silent majority is thinking. That's why he does so poorly in opinion polls, yet seems to do so well in elections: many more people support what the guy says than are willing to admit....
Does this screed pass the "reality test", I know this is a terribly Liberal thing to do - check with actual facts.
Does Trump support show signs of being a majority anywhere based on actual voting (since those polls are skewed and what-not)?
So far Trump has received 39.4% of the total Republican vote and the highest portion of any state that he has received is 49.3%, close, but still shy of majority. Cruz, OTOH has won an actual majority in two states. So, no the majority of Republicans are not voting for him.
But are the votes higher than his polling though, a key contention of the OP?
The current RealClearPolitics poll average has him at 43%, so it seems about the same. If anything perhaps he is under-performing his polls at the voting booth, rather than the reverse.
And of course this is all just among registered Republicans, a minority of the nation as a whole. He does worse in polling nationally, holding a 30% favorability rating, with a 2.1-1 unfavorable/favorable ratio.
Lastly, I find the notion that the angry crowd voting for him have been "silent" these past 7 years, with Tea Party rallies, town hall disruptions, heavy voting for a slate of Tea Party candidates across the board, to be laughable.
I wish them the best of luck, and no doubt they are right about the problems of their management culture.
But this sort of thing is invariable ugly. Like modifying an aircraft in mid-flight. When making the changes you usually get the worst of both worlds, for quite awhile. This can drive an organization to complete failure. Small organizations have better luck at this.
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup have all been fined almost $77 Billion dollars for improprieties in their financial dealings. There have been many high profile Wall Street investors convicted of crimes who have been fined and received jail time.
How many people at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup went to jail or at least received criminal convictions for those $77 Billion dollars for those "improprieties" (otherwise known as "law-breaking", aka "crimes" when ordinary people do them)?
I believe the number is "zero".
Interesting that the "high profile Wall Street investors convicted of crimes who have been fined and received jail time" comes with no counts, estimates, or actual names. Sorry, only people who were so convicted in the last 10 years count. The long-ago S&L scandal was back when breaking the law still carried some personal legal risk on Wall Street, another era entirely.
Only in the financial-sphere can billions of dollars of crimes have no one responsible for committing them. Down on main street if you swipe an iPhone you have committed felony theft.
No it isn't how HFT make money. HFT have the same restrictions about spoofing, they make their money by simply being in a position to react to changes in the market much faster (think Milliseconds) than the rest of the market.
Milliseconds? Where are you? 1995? In a millisecond light travels 186 miles. Those high frequency traders rely on their trading systems being co-located in the same data center as the exchange systems (for which the exchange gets big bucks in rent). Every foot of distance adds a nanosecond to the trading time delay. They could save considerable money siting their trading computers half a mile away, but that would add 2.5 microseconds to the trade add knock them out of the running entirely. Those guys are playing against other high speed traders and the advantage they are seeking is measured in nanoseconds.
Since the exchanges make the rules (legal restrictions are far more lax) they are in the game of authorizing cheating, and collecting a cut of the take.
The classicist joke goes "The Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name.
The joke is, if you don't get it, is that we know absolutely nothing about the originator(s) of those poems, except that they are traditionally credited to someone called "Homer", who has no other historic existence. By definition whoever wrote those poems is "Homer".
After reading the TFA, the claim that the Irish are not really Celtic has the same self-referential quality.
First, the term "Celtic" is not well defined - is means in essence, what we attach it to.
Second, the discovery highlighted in the article is that the ancestors of the Irish lived in Ireland before the assumed arrival of "the Celts" from the European continent, thus they aren't true Celts (since it is assumed that a "Celt" is someone descended genetically from this ancient continental culture, which we call "Celtic").
But third, it points out recent research that the Celtic languages and cultural traits may have actually originated in Ireland and the British Isles, and from there spread to the rest of Europe, to show up in classical account of the Greeks and Romans many centuries later. And it happens that we use "Celtic" to designate speakers of a Celtic language - Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and Breton - and the associated culture.
So the Irish (and Welsh, Scots, Manx, etc.) are not descended from a Celtic invasion of the British Isles, so they aren't really "Celts"; except that they are since increasingly seem to have actually been the true origin of Celtic culture in the first place, and they definitely speak the languages that we describe using the term "Celtic".
From Wikipedia: An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attack on an argument made by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, rather than attacking the argument directly. When used inappropriately, it is a logical fallacy in which a claim or argument is dismissed on the basis of some irrelevant fact or supposition about the author or the person being criticized. Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, for example, when it relates to the credibility of statements of fact...
Pointing out the credibility of the source as a potential cause of concern is in no way fallacious.
Your historical analysis is way off. Here, for instance, is what one writer says about Medieval Europe:
Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the [medieval] peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off. The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too. In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year.
OTOH, it is well established that (from actual observation) surviving hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time. This is partly due to the lack of a compulsion to "make stuff" (maintain a more complex dwelling, clothing, tool requirements, etc.).
Of course not, because feminists don't care about equality.
As a life-long feminist, who also happens to be a man, I can say this is ignorant bullshit. Move along, nothing to see here but self-congratulatory preconceptions.
I've never found a woman coworker to be even half as passionate about technology and computers as I am.
...
So you say.
As a software team lead and project manager with a few decades of experience delivering project I have never found women developers to be inferior to men. Indeed looking back at over my best hires and staff members, women are - if anything - over represented relative to their numbers.
Knowledge of contagion was universal before the germ theory of disease. They just did not know what the mechanism of contagion was, and so conversely how to sterilize (remove) the contamination.
And yes, fabric that comes in contact with small pox infected people absolutely can spread infection. Small pox outbreaks occurred in textile miles in England in the 1950s from contaminated cotton imported from Egypt. Study of variola survival in cotton found that "if cotton can become contaminated with smallpox scabs in temperate climates (20-25C) or is already contaminated when imported at this temperature, the experiments indicate that a few particles of virus may survive for as long as 18 months."
...The focus has shifted from menially making punch cards to writing OOP in a high level language. The actual job changed so dramatically and the skills required to do it increased quite dramatically....
I have been around long enough to have seen this entire transition from punch card/main frame primitive time sharing systems (MVT fixed memory allocation), or alternatively having to program by entering machine code in registers with switches, to modern tools and languages on the super-fast computers of today. And this is complete nonsense.
Believe it or not, programming the early 1970s involved problem solving on the same level as today, with much worse tools. Not exactly the same problems, of course, but it was in no way simpler. Since computers were several orders of magnitude slower with much less memory it was necessary to understand the internal architecture of the system quite well, how data was represented in memory and applications mapped to memory (necessary to interpret core dumps as your primary debugging tool), algorithmic efficiency (otherwise you couldn't get anything useful done), and archaic things like planning efficient use of tape movement.
On the other hand, I have observed the rise of a new class of semi-skilled programmers (that I don't hire, BTW) who, with modern OOP languages and vast class libraries, can only be called "application assemblers", chaining together existing class components within a framework (Struts, Spring, etc.) that means that they don't really have to understand anything about algorithms, OS's, or computer science generally, to set up working systems.
This shows the real value of those OOP languages and libraries, that it is possible for such people to exist and for this to actually work; but to argue that they are doing dramatically more complex work is simply ignorant.
Uh, socialists started WWII. NSDAP, look up the meaning of the word. And then prepare to use the No True Scotsman fallacy, because that's what you do every time.
And, no doubt, you believe that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is a democracy because, you know, look up the meaning of the word "democracy".
There is a secondary problem that people rarely talk about. The intermediate step between humans doing the work and full automation is "almost full automation" where humans are just a cog in the machine. You can see this in mcdonald's, in amazon warehouses, in manufacturing plants, and even in things like amazon turk. These "almost full automation" plants have horrible working conditions as the steps performed by the humans are repetitive, boring, and have to be done at high speed to keep up with the rest of the machine. My guess is that although mercedes-benz might have put humans back into the loop that you still wouldn't want to work at one of those jobs.
This is a good point. It mirrors what happened in the First Industrial Revolution. Those factory jobs were notorious for the brutal conditions of work.
Also mirroring the FIR is the likely generations long gap between putting a large fraction of the population out of work, and the socioeconomic adjustment leading to distribution of the new wealth back to all segments of the population. In the case of the FIR that gap was at least 70 years long, from about 1770 to 1840 (optimists claim it was "only" 60 years, pessimists might extend it to 90 years). In the interval there was massive, desperate poverty for a large segment of the population clearly documented by falling life spans and shrinking adult height. This is masked in any study that only looks at average real wages, since that hides the enormous inequality that exploded during the period.
Free healthcare burdens many a national budget with unsustainable debt but that doesn't stop politicians from promising even more free stuff.
A list of nations that have unsustainable national budget debt that can be traced to directly to health care, please? Because, you wouldn't just be making stuff up, right? (One or two examples won't cut it, if you can find any, since you are claiming this is a common pattern.)
If you just look at the "Management of Companies and Enterprises" category then the average wage amount increases significantly to $210,120 but as you note there is no mention anywhere in the article at all about bonuses and it specifically mentions "wages" so I doubt that this is in any way representative of the actual compensation a CEO gets...
Yep. It is normal for top execs to have 100% performance bonuses, which they invariably get if they are simply competent enough to keep their jobs. You can see this stuff in SEC filings for publicly traded corporations. And even wage + bonuses does not take into account other methods used to enrich the guy at the top: stock options, severance packages, expense accounts, company cars, etc.
Hmm, 1 employee for every 6 students... I think maybe I found the cause of your spiraling university cost problem.
Yes you are right - the size of the administration relative to the student body has doubled in the last couple of decades, without any evidence that I know of that they were "under-administered" before. And the growth of university administrator salaries is part of this "management" bloat.
In both U.S. corporations and at colleges and universities we need a movement back to earlier, more sane, levels of staffing and pay.
On the other hand, CEO's are at much greater risk of being prosecuted for the actions of employees.
Do you have any stats handy on how likely CEOs are to be prosecuted for "actions by employees"?
AFAIK few CEOs have been prosecuted for anything in recent decades, and usually it is for their own direct transgressions. Law-breaking ordered by a CEO is not "actions of employees". And paying civil fines is not "prosecution".
We are. But then there are alternatives - there is oil and there is "oil".
The "peak oil" projection is based on the observations of M. King Hubbert showing a characteristic production curve of most any limited resource under intensive extraction, most particularly (but not exclusively) oil.
It is a near-universal production curve he found for oil wells, oil fields, and oil districts. At every level on the scale of production (which is the sum of all the production curves of its components) the same production curve is seen. So conclusion is that this will scale up to the largest scale also, the entire world.
Which is absolutely true - with some important caveats. The peak curve applies to one specific resource - liquid oil, "conventional oil" as it is called. And the world market did in fact hit the predicted peak of this resource already, around 2010 (the 2008 crash has sort of confused the situation by suppressing oil consumption for some years).
Now about those caveats. The entire world represents a different scenario from any part of it, no matter how large that part. When the world runs out of a resource the price shoots through the roof, something that does not happen on smaller scales. This creates, in a very real sense, a new resource - expensive conventional oil - that did not exist as a resource before (this is how resources are actually measured, reserves at a particular price point). This makes a new larger Hubbert curve that remains to be climbed to its peak, and so on. This flattens the peak into a gently down-sloping plateau, rather than the more precipitous decline that the raw curve suggests. And in addition to expensive conventional oil, new "oils" are created. "Condensate fluids" that formerly were not diverted into the petroleum pipeline, after some reforming, now end up there. New very non-conventional liquid petroleum sources start getting tapped: "fracking" oil, and tar sands particularly. These were not represented in the original conventional oil curve at all.
The situation we are now in is that there is a strong short-to-medium term coupling between price and supply. As the price of "oil" goes up, more wells restart, increasing supply very quickly, while more exploitation of the expensive oils starts up again, increasing supply longer term. This creates a quasi-natural ceiling on oil prices, and consequently a stable supply, for a change.
Though the Saudis control the price of oil, and can shut down frackers almost at will, it depletes their limited resource faster, at a lower price. So there is a limit to how far they can push this.
It's not that the Saudi Oil would be cheap because the infrastructure is already in place. It's because you don't need much infrastructure at all to get it. The cost to get one barrel of crude ready for shipping in Saudi Arabia is about $3. Texan oil from oil wells cost about $16, shale oil and oil from oil sands about $60.
Saudi Arabia thus has complete control about the oil price because they can sell at prices that would bankrupt everyone else and still make a profit. And Saudi Arabia waited long enough for enough companies to invest much money into shale oil and only then lowered the oil price to drive them out of competition when much of the money was burnt, but not much revenue yet generated. Investors for the next future will be very wary to ever invest in alternative oil sources again.
Indeed! Good analysis. I think on this every time I still see those EnergyTomorrow.org spots talking up how we are soon going to be energy independent, (hooray!).
The game was well played by the Saudis. Kudos to them.
Based on the questions I see on surveys, and comparing to the quality of writing displayed here, I totally believe that you used to own a polling company.
... Better to put a liquid salt thorium nuclear reactor... The light weight thorium reactor...
There seems to have developed a nerd cult of the "liquid salt thorium nuclear reactor" which is apparently endowed now with quasi-magical powers, the answer to all possible questions about power sources. The proposed "liquid salt thorium nuclear reactor concept, none of which has every been built, is an idea for large scale fixed power plant designs, and is a very complex system as conceived (involving circulating molten salt fuel, on-line fission product removal systems from the fuel, etc.) that only makes sense - if it is practical at all - as part of a world-wide nuclear power industry. It has absolutely no features of value for a space travel power source.
The notion that such a system could ever be "light weight" is ridiculous - tacking those words on to "thorium reactor" does not make it any sense.
Any real space-flight ready reactor use ceramic highly enriched uranium fuel (negligible hazard until the reactor core turns on for the first time in space), fast neutron operation (moderator is heavy), and as few moving parts as possible. Something more like this.
I am a big wind energy supporter, but this isn't a very meaningful milestone, although it is a sign of the rapid emergence of large scale wind power.
When wind energy production in annual gigawatt hours exceeds nuclear power, that will be something indeed. That will happen of current trends continue, but not until 2030 or so.
Was it an intelligence failure due to a lack of backdoors and/or laws against cryptography? Absolutely not.
Of course he is lying (BTW, that is the job description for spies). The spy agencies want to ban strong crypto because they like "reading everyone's mail" (and looking at everyone's naked pictures as has become apparent in numerous revelations) so they will say anything, make up anything to advance that agenda.
With the advent of digital communications as the life-blood of modern society we must as a society accept that strong, no-backdoor cryptography is a necessity to protect everyone and society itself. It even protects us from cyber-terrorists, and nation-state cyber attackers, a threat that could disrupt much of society - much more than nine men with guns. Rogers and his ilk want us to be less safe for their convenience.
Spies and law enforcement (not the same thing at all) has always had to deal with not having all-seeing, all-knowing eyes and ears. One-time pads cannot be broken, period. In-person communication was always inaccessible before the advent of bugging technology, and still is with suitable precautions. Pre-agreed signals are as opaque as an encrypted digital message. Spy craft has been able to defeat spying as long as spying has existed. Rogers knows this perfectly well.
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Funny how anonymity and Trump go together so nicely. Sort of like secret ballots... Trump is the first presidential candidate willing to say what the silent majority is thinking. That's why he does so poorly in opinion polls, yet seems to do so well in elections: many more people support what the guy says than are willing to admit....
Does this screed pass the "reality test", I know this is a terribly Liberal thing to do - check with actual facts.
Does Trump support show signs of being a majority anywhere based on actual voting (since those polls are skewed and what-not)?
So far Trump has received 39.4% of the total Republican vote and the highest portion of any state that he has received is 49.3%, close, but still shy of majority. Cruz, OTOH has won an actual majority in two states. So, no the majority of Republicans are not voting for him.
But are the votes higher than his polling though, a key contention of the OP?
The current RealClearPolitics poll average has him at 43%, so it seems about the same. If anything perhaps he is under-performing his polls at the voting booth, rather than the reverse.
And of course this is all just among registered Republicans, a minority of the nation as a whole. He does worse in polling nationally, holding a 30% favorability rating, with a 2.1-1 unfavorable/favorable ratio.
Lastly, I find the notion that the angry crowd voting for him have been "silent" these past 7 years, with Tea Party rallies, town hall disruptions, heavy voting for a slate of Tea Party candidates across the board, to be laughable.
Noisy minority - yes. Silent majority - no.
I wish them the best of luck, and no doubt they are right about the problems of their management culture.
But this sort of thing is invariable ugly. Like modifying an aircraft in mid-flight. When making the changes you usually get the worst of both worlds, for quite awhile. This can drive an organization to complete failure. Small organizations have better luck at this.
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup have all been fined almost $77 Billion dollars for improprieties in their financial dealings. There have been many high profile Wall Street investors convicted of crimes who have been fined and received jail time.
How many people at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup went to jail or at least received criminal convictions for those $77 Billion dollars for those "improprieties" (otherwise known as "law-breaking", aka "crimes" when ordinary people do them)?
I believe the number is "zero".
Interesting that the "high profile Wall Street investors convicted of crimes who have been fined and received jail time" comes with no counts, estimates, or actual names. Sorry, only people who were so convicted in the last 10 years count. The long-ago S&L scandal was back when breaking the law still carried some personal legal risk on Wall Street, another era entirely.
Only in the financial-sphere can billions of dollars of crimes have no one responsible for committing them. Down on main street if you swipe an iPhone you have committed felony theft.
No it isn't how HFT make money. HFT have the same restrictions about spoofing, they make their money by simply being in a position to react to changes in the market much faster (think Milliseconds) than the rest of the market.
Milliseconds? Where are you? 1995? In a millisecond light travels 186 miles. Those high frequency traders rely on their trading systems being co-located in the same data center as the exchange systems (for which the exchange gets big bucks in rent). Every foot of distance adds a nanosecond to the trading time delay. They could save considerable money siting their trading computers half a mile away, but that would add 2.5 microseconds to the trade add knock them out of the running entirely. Those guys are playing against other high speed traders and the advantage they are seeking is measured in nanoseconds.
Since the exchanges make the rules (legal restrictions are far more lax) they are in the game of authorizing cheating, and collecting a cut of the take.
No, not about Homer Simpson.
The classicist joke goes "The Iliad" and the "Odyssey" were not written by Homer, but by another man of the same name.
The joke is, if you don't get it, is that we know absolutely nothing about the originator(s) of those poems, except that they are traditionally credited to someone called "Homer", who has no other historic existence. By definition whoever wrote those poems is "Homer".
After reading the TFA, the claim that the Irish are not really Celtic has the same self-referential quality.
First, the term "Celtic" is not well defined - is means in essence, what we attach it to.
Second, the discovery highlighted in the article is that the ancestors of the Irish lived in Ireland before the assumed arrival of "the Celts" from the European continent, thus they aren't true Celts (since it is assumed that a "Celt" is someone descended genetically from this ancient continental culture, which we call "Celtic").
But third, it points out recent research that the Celtic languages and cultural traits may have actually originated in Ireland and the British Isles, and from there spread to the rest of Europe, to show up in classical account of the Greeks and Romans many centuries later. And it happens that we use "Celtic" to designate speakers of a Celtic language - Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and Breton - and the associated culture.
So the Irish (and Welsh, Scots, Manx, etc.) are not descended from a Celtic invasion of the British Isles, so they aren't really "Celts"; except that they are since increasingly seem to have actually been the true origin of Celtic culture in the first place, and they definitely speak the languages that we describe using the term "Celtic".
From Wikipedia: An ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attack on an argument made by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, rather than attacking the argument directly. When used inappropriately, it is a logical fallacy in which a claim or argument is dismissed on the basis of some irrelevant fact or supposition about the author or the person being criticized. Ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, for example, when it relates to the credibility of statements of fact...
Pointing out the credibility of the source as a potential cause of concern is in no way fallacious.
Your historical analysis is way off. Here, for instance, is what one writer says about Medieval Europe:
Plowing and harvesting were backbreaking toil, but the [medieval] peasant enjoyed anywhere from eight weeks to half the year off. The Church, mindful of how to keep a population from rebelling, enforced frequent mandatory holidays. Weddings, wakes and births might mean a week off quaffing ale to celebrate, and when wandering jugglers or sporting events came to town, the peasant expected time off for entertainment. There were labor-free Sundays, and when the plowing and harvesting seasons were over, the peasant got time to rest, too. In fact, economist Juliet Shor found that during periods of particularly high wages, such as 14th-century England, peasants might put in no more than 150 days a year.
Interesting - but a Reuters news story does not a meaningful historical analysis make. Here is a good counterpoint to this (very misleading) thesis.
OTOH, it is well established that (from actual observation) surviving hunter-gatherer societies have more leisure time. This is partly due to the lack of a compulsion to "make stuff" (maintain a more complex dwelling, clothing, tool requirements, etc.).
Of course not, because feminists don't care about equality.
As a life-long feminist, who also happens to be a man, I can say this is ignorant bullshit. Move along, nothing to see here but self-congratulatory preconceptions.
I've never found a woman coworker to be even half as passionate about technology and computers as I am.
...
So you say.
As a software team lead and project manager with a few decades of experience delivering project I have never found women developers to be inferior to men. Indeed looking back at over my best hires and staff members, women are - if anything - over represented relative to their numbers.
Knowledge of contagion was universal before the germ theory of disease. They just did not know what the mechanism of contagion was, and so conversely how to sterilize (remove) the contamination.
And yes, fabric that comes in contact with small pox infected people absolutely can spread infection. Small pox outbreaks occurred in textile miles in England in the 1950s from contaminated cotton imported from Egypt. Study of variola survival in cotton found that "if cotton can become contaminated with smallpox scabs in temperate climates (20-25C) or is already contaminated when imported at this temperature, the experiments indicate that a few particles of virus may survive for as long as 18 months."
...The focus has shifted from menially making punch cards to writing OOP in a high level language. The actual job changed so dramatically and the skills required to do it increased quite dramatically....
I have been around long enough to have seen this entire transition from punch card/main frame primitive time sharing systems (MVT fixed memory allocation), or alternatively having to program by entering machine code in registers with switches, to modern tools and languages on the super-fast computers of today. And this is complete nonsense.
Believe it or not, programming the early 1970s involved problem solving on the same level as today, with much worse tools. Not exactly the same problems, of course, but it was in no way simpler. Since computers were several orders of magnitude slower with much less memory it was necessary to understand the internal architecture of the system quite well, how data was represented in memory and applications mapped to memory (necessary to interpret core dumps as your primary debugging tool), algorithmic efficiency (otherwise you couldn't get anything useful done), and archaic things like planning efficient use of tape movement.
On the other hand, I have observed the rise of a new class of semi-skilled programmers (that I don't hire, BTW) who, with modern OOP languages and vast class libraries, can only be called "application assemblers", chaining together existing class components within a framework (Struts, Spring, etc.) that means that they don't really have to understand anything about algorithms, OS's, or computer science generally, to set up working systems.
This shows the real value of those OOP languages and libraries, that it is possible for such people to exist and for this to actually work; but to argue that they are doing dramatically more complex work is simply ignorant.
Uh, socialists started WWII. NSDAP, look up the meaning of the word. And then prepare to use the No True Scotsman fallacy, because that's what you do every time.
And, no doubt, you believe that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, is a democracy because, you know, look up the meaning of the word "democracy".
There is a secondary problem that people rarely talk about. The intermediate step between humans doing the work and full automation is "almost full automation" where humans are just a cog in the machine. You can see this in mcdonald's, in amazon warehouses, in manufacturing plants, and even in things like amazon turk. These "almost full automation" plants have horrible working conditions as the steps performed by the humans are repetitive, boring, and have to be done at high speed to keep up with the rest of the machine. My guess is that although mercedes-benz might have put humans back into the loop that you still wouldn't want to work at one of those jobs.
This is a good point. It mirrors what happened in the First Industrial Revolution. Those factory jobs were notorious for the brutal conditions of work.
Also mirroring the FIR is the likely generations long gap between putting a large fraction of the population out of work, and the socioeconomic adjustment leading to distribution of the new wealth back to all segments of the population. In the case of the FIR that gap was at least 70 years long, from about 1770 to 1840 (optimists claim it was "only" 60 years, pessimists might extend it to 90 years). In the interval there was massive, desperate poverty for a large segment of the population clearly documented by falling life spans and shrinking adult height. This is masked in any study that only looks at average real wages, since that hides the enormous inequality that exploded during the period.
Also a lot of Libertarian tripe (McArdle I'm looking at you). Don't be credulous about everything you read on Bloombergview.
Free healthcare burdens many a national budget with unsustainable debt but that doesn't stop politicians from promising even more free stuff.
A list of nations that have unsustainable national budget debt that can be traced to directly to health care, please? Because, you wouldn't just be making stuff up, right? (One or two examples won't cut it, if you can find any, since you are claiming this is a common pattern.)
U.S. private debt from healthcares costs can be shown to be a real problem though.
One of your irony posts, I take it.
If you just look at the "Management of Companies and Enterprises" category then the average wage amount increases significantly to $210,120 but as you note there is no mention anywhere in the article at all about bonuses and it specifically mentions "wages" so I doubt that this is in any way representative of the actual compensation a CEO gets...
Yep. It is normal for top execs to have 100% performance bonuses, which they invariably get if they are simply competent enough to keep their jobs. You can see this stuff in SEC filings for publicly traded corporations. And even wage + bonuses does not take into account other methods used to enrich the guy at the top: stock options, severance packages, expense accounts, company cars, etc.
...s/he oversees 5000+ employees, 30,000+ students...
Hmm, 1 employee for every 6 students... I think maybe I found the cause of your spiraling university cost problem.
Yes you are right - the size of the administration relative to the student body has doubled in the last couple of decades, without any evidence that I know of that they were "under-administered" before. And the growth of university administrator salaries is part of this "management" bloat.
In both U.S. corporations and at colleges and universities we need a movement back to earlier, more sane, levels of staffing and pay.
On the other hand, CEO's are at much greater risk of being prosecuted for the actions of employees.
Do you have any stats handy on how likely CEOs are to be prosecuted for "actions by employees"?
AFAIK few CEOs have been prosecuted for anything in recent decades, and usually it is for their own direct transgressions. Law-breaking ordered by a CEO is not "actions of employees". And paying civil fines is not "prosecution".
We are. But then there are alternatives - there is oil and there is "oil".
The "peak oil" projection is based on the observations of M. King Hubbert showing a characteristic production curve of most any limited resource under intensive extraction, most particularly (but not exclusively) oil.
It is a near-universal production curve he found for oil wells, oil fields, and oil districts. At every level on the scale of production (which is the sum of all the production curves of its components) the same production curve is seen. So conclusion is that this will scale up to the largest scale also, the entire world.
Which is absolutely true - with some important caveats. The peak curve applies to one specific resource - liquid oil, "conventional oil" as it is called. And the world market did in fact hit the predicted peak of this resource already, around 2010 (the 2008 crash has sort of confused the situation by suppressing oil consumption for some years).
Now about those caveats. The entire world represents a different scenario from any part of it, no matter how large that part. When the world runs out of a resource the price shoots through the roof, something that does not happen on smaller scales. This creates, in a very real sense, a new resource - expensive conventional oil - that did not exist as a resource before (this is how resources are actually measured, reserves at a particular price point). This makes a new larger Hubbert curve that remains to be climbed to its peak, and so on. This flattens the peak into a gently down-sloping plateau, rather than the more precipitous decline that the raw curve suggests. And in addition to expensive conventional oil, new "oils" are created. "Condensate fluids" that formerly were not diverted into the petroleum pipeline, after some reforming, now end up there. New very non-conventional liquid petroleum sources start getting tapped: "fracking" oil, and tar sands particularly. These were not represented in the original conventional oil curve at all.
The situation we are now in is that there is a strong short-to-medium term coupling between price and supply. As the price of "oil" goes up, more wells restart, increasing supply very quickly, while more exploitation of the expensive oils starts up again, increasing supply longer term. This creates a quasi-natural ceiling on oil prices, and consequently a stable supply, for a change.
Though the Saudis control the price of oil, and can shut down frackers almost at will, it depletes their limited resource faster, at a lower price. So there is a limit to how far they can push this.
It's not that the Saudi Oil would be cheap because the infrastructure is already in place. It's because you don't need much infrastructure at all to get it. The cost to get one barrel of crude ready for shipping in Saudi Arabia is about $3. Texan oil from oil wells cost about $16, shale oil and oil from oil sands about $60.
Saudi Arabia thus has complete control about the oil price because they can sell at prices that would bankrupt everyone else and still make a profit. And Saudi Arabia waited long enough for enough companies to invest much money into shale oil and only then lowered the oil price to drive them out of competition when much of the money was burnt, but not much revenue yet generated. Investors for the next future will be very wary to ever invest in alternative oil sources again.
Indeed! Good analysis. I think on this every time I still see those EnergyTomorrow.org spots talking up how we are soon going to be energy independent, (hooray!).
The game was well played by the Saudis. Kudos to them.
Based on the questions I see on surveys, and comparing to the quality of writing displayed here, I totally believe that you used to own a polling company.
... Better to put a liquid salt thorium nuclear reactor ... The light weight thorium reactor...
There seems to have developed a nerd cult of the "liquid salt thorium nuclear reactor" which is apparently endowed now with quasi-magical powers, the answer to all possible questions about power sources. The proposed "liquid salt thorium nuclear reactor concept, none of which has every been built, is an idea for large scale fixed power plant designs, and is a very complex system as conceived (involving circulating molten salt fuel, on-line fission product removal systems from the fuel, etc.) that only makes sense - if it is practical at all - as part of a world-wide nuclear power industry. It has absolutely no features of value for a space travel power source.
The notion that such a system could ever be "light weight" is ridiculous - tacking those words on to "thorium reactor" does not make it any sense.
Any real space-flight ready reactor use ceramic highly enriched uranium fuel (negligible hazard until the reactor core turns on for the first time in space), fast neutron operation (moderator is heavy), and as few moving parts as possible. Something more like this.
I am a big wind energy supporter, but this isn't a very meaningful milestone, although it is a sign of the rapid emergence of large scale wind power.
When wind energy production in annual gigawatt hours exceeds nuclear power, that will be something indeed. That will happen of current trends continue, but not until 2030 or so.
Was it an intelligence failure due to a lack of backdoors and/or laws against cryptography? Absolutely not.
Of course he is lying (BTW, that is the job description for spies). The spy agencies want to ban strong crypto because they like "reading everyone's mail" (and looking at everyone's naked pictures as has become apparent in numerous revelations) so they will say anything, make up anything to advance that agenda.
With the advent of digital communications as the life-blood of modern society we must as a society accept that strong, no-backdoor cryptography is a necessity to protect everyone and society itself. It even protects us from cyber-terrorists, and nation-state cyber attackers, a threat that could disrupt much of society - much more than nine men with guns. Rogers and his ilk want us to be less safe for their convenience.
Spies and law enforcement (not the same thing at all) has always had to deal with not having all-seeing, all-knowing eyes and ears. One-time pads cannot be broken, period. In-person communication was always inaccessible before the advent of bugging technology, and still is with suitable precautions. Pre-agreed signals are as opaque as an encrypted digital message. Spy craft has been able to defeat spying as long as spying has existed. Rogers knows this perfectly well.