... I don't care if they get him on phony charges of tax evasion or something. Or 15-life for jaywalking.

Somehow I doubt that The Sharia States of America would care much about free speech. Or any of the other hot causes that their allies here claim to care about. They'd be too busy executing accused gays and anyone who's neighbor said they had a negative thought about Mohamed.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

See, that's the part you are missing. CA has a "nice climate" because not much water falls from the sky.

It's called a "trade off". Life is full of them.

Yep. We used to have a nifty word called "aptitude".

If opportunity were to be magically made really equal, then the only remaining differences in outcome would be due to aptitude.

We know for sure that aptitude for various tasks is not spread equally among individuals - that's why we have things like the Scholastic Aptitude Test, for Pete's sake.

Is aptitude for all tasks spread equally among groups? Genders? Racial groups? We don't know, and we sure aren't going to be allowed to study it. But if it isn't, then there will always be differences in outcome, unless you create Procrustean regulations that force an entirely artificial outcome, artificially benefiting some groups and penalizing others.

For those who don't want to follow the link:

Utter nonsense. You wouldn't support forcing someone to bake an "I love Hitler, I hate Jews" cake for a neo-Nazi rally. But you support forcing someone to bake a cake for your favored event. Because you, of course, are self-evidently right.

You're all about the force, as long as it is forcing them to do what you want. That makes you the tolerant one?

Mmm. So I assume that includes people who seek out some obscure pizza restaurant, ask them if they hypothetically would cater an event they abhor, and then unleash a carp storm on them for not joining the latest groupthink?

And I assume it includes those who would fine others for not baking celebratory cakes for events they consider wrong?

I wonder if it would have helped if he'd had a friend. The 501st has a rule "never troop alone", which they came up with after observing that under identical circumstances many people will think one stormtrooper is a little scary but two (or more) stormtroopers are awesome.

We've confirmed conclusively that no changes were made to the project or data

other than the parts we changed.

Since Google has started disabling the old version of Maps i have seen people suggest Yahoo Maps as a good choice to move to for those who thing the new Google Maps is too slow and painful. That probably wouldn't add enough new users for them to justify keeping it, but it's still a little sad for anyone who just recently decided that Yahoo was the right place to move to for maps.

(I didn't go that route myself because i dislike having the entire browser window covered with the map, so i'm thinking of moving to Bing instead.)

Hooray! After all, this just becomes more and more important, as conversion gets easier and easier and more at our fingertips and even voice ... oh.

"you bark commands"

I'm pretty sure you don't.

I don't want to say "woof" to my phone, and i'm pretty sure even if i did Hound wouldn't know what to do with the command, since i can't actually speak dog and i'm guessing that Hound doesn't either.

Funny that you said my examples from the industrial revolution were irrelevant, but when i then named (somewhat theoretical) examples from the information revolution you suddenly _really_ want to talk about the smithing thing.

More importantly, you're changing the goalposts. Your original claim was:

"I could go on... the fears of everyone losing their jobs to robots are ill founded. They're actually going to save us from having to do jobs we hate. Name a job a computer does that you'd actually want to do? There aren't any."

I disagreed with that last point, and i think i've proven it rather well. Many jobs have been eliminated, mostly by the industrial revolution so far but some by the information revolution, and even more are going to be eliminated despite the fact that there are people would like to do them, at least as they originally existed.

At no point did i argue that those jobs _shouldn't_ have been replaced, so your arguments above are invalid.

Yes, i'm moderately lucky as a programmer, but i'm not completely safe, and i have plenty of friends and acquaintances in jobs that are even more at risk.

People are going to lose jobs that they like or that they at least can tolerate. Some of them are going to get stuck with jobs they don't like as much, and some of them are going to be unable to find new employment at all. Your dismissal of their circumstances, saying "nobody wanted to do those jobs anyway" is either arrogant or ignorant, but in either case it's certainly cruel. People want a job they enjoy more than they want a job they don't, and they want a job they don't enjoy more than they want to be homeless and starving.

You say people should do the things they enjoy as a hobby. That's a great theory. However people ought to have work they find meaningful as well. A hobby shouldn't have to be a way to de-stress from a job you hate. And having hobbies is difficult if you're working multiple minimum-wage jobs just to support yourself and possibly a family as well, or if you're literally starving because you can't get a job.

"As our society gets richer, we'll have even more wealth so you can have your hobby."

If you're saying there should be a guaranteed minimum income or some other system to allow everyone to enjoy the prosperity that automation creates, i agree with you 100%. But that's not what's happening. We are becoming (on average) individually more productive, but we're neither getting to work less hours for the same pay nor getting paid fairly for the increased production. Instead we work the same (or more) hours while most of the benefits go to those who are already rich.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

I don't _know_ what jobs are being taken away that people would want to do because they haven't been taken away yet. My argument was based on the fact that people said the same kind of thing about jobs eliminated by mechanical automation, that they were crappy jobs that people wouldn't want to do, and i don't think it's entirely unreasonable to think that the path of automating mental labor may by similar to the path of automating physical labor.

However if you want me to guess. Lawyers. The lower levels are already starting to get hit by automation and it's only going to get worse. Librarians, especially research librarians. Booksellers. Medical billers. Web developers. In fact there's probably a lot of very basic programming/IT work that could be more automated than it currently is. I could do some research and find some more examples, but i think that's enough to prove the point.

In none of those cases do i expect the entire job market to disappear (certainly not immediately at least) but more and more there will be a few experts at the head of a bunch of automation that's happening behind the scene. In fact in most of those cases that process has been going on for awhile, but the growth in the amount of work that needs to be done has, to some degree, kept pace with the increased productivity that automation has allowed. But as the rate at which automation is developed increases that equation could easily change, in which case people with mediocre skills will find themselves squeezed out as competition for the remaining jobs increases.

I work as a programmer, and i'm a pretty mediocre one. However i do like my job, and for the moment it's okay to be average. There's enough work in the industry that even average people are needed. Yes it would be awesome if i were smart enough to become a star programmer who could have his pick of the really cool jobs, but intelligence and skill operates on a bell curve, and the reality is that most of us are going to be clustered around the middle. It would be great to be John Carmack, but i'm okay with being Code Monkey #37.

The stuff i do isn't particularly easy to automate, at least not yet, but if a bunch of the simpler stuff gets automated there will be more programmers competing for the the remaining jobs, and it's possible that i will get pushed out by people more skilled than me. If you wish you can argue that if can't compete i don't deserve the job, but you can't say that i don't _want_ to do the job.

I think it's fair to presume that there are a lot of average lawyers and librarians and web developers and people in other at-risk occupations who feel the same way.

Given the last sentence i'm about 80% certain that this post is satirical in nature, and if so, well done!

Speaking abstractly, i know a lot of people in the SCA, so i could probably name a dozen of them if i spent some time thinking about it. Smithing comes to mind immediately as a job that a lot of people would like to do if they could actually make a reasonable living at it. There are a few people who actually do make a living at it, but it requires a lot of skill (and thus a lot of time to learn) and there's not a huge demand for it. I also know a lot of people who knit or spin or weave as a hobby. Those all used to be valid jobs, but making a living off of any of those skills these days is now _very_ difficult.

As someone mentioned above all these jobs went through a similar pattern. Originally they were highly skilled jobs and people who could do them well were highly regarded. Then mechanization (and later computerization) made these jobs easier until any line worker could carry them out. And then the need for a line worker was eliminated in 99.99% of the cases. Sure, towards the end of that process no one wanted to be the person who welded bolt #128 to component A7, or the person who ran the mechanical loom, both of whom worked 8+ hours days doing repetitive tasks for a minimum wage (or an even more minimal wage before the idea of a minimum was created.) However that just means that being a cog in a process that's already been mostly mechanized isn't an enviable position. It doesn't mean that people didn't like doing the original job before it started getting replaced by machines.

(So just to double-check my assumption: Farmer/gardener, smith, carpenter, bowyer, fletcher, knitter, spinner, weaver, paper-maker, illuminater, glass blower, tanner, potter, and that's more than a dozen so i'll stop now. Admittedly there are a lot of people who still farm and/or garden, but the ones who try to do it professionally are under huge pressure from mechanization and computerization, and the number has declined precipitously from where it used to be.)