The research found in the article link shows young people are far less likely to be religious than old people. Around half as likely in fact. So it is likely many of the gains we have seen in the last decade has just been from older generations dying off. So regardless of how open minded you are, you will be off his "hit list" in due time. You will be replaced by someone from a younger generation who far less likely to be religious. And in 20 years the next young generation will hopefully be far less religious than today's millennials.

As an atheist myself, I am perfectly happy with people considering themselves agnostic since by my definition they are basically the same thing. Virtually every atheist is agnostic, and vice versa. Atheism is just a lack of religious conviction, which is something all agnostics share or else they would be worshiping their deity of choice. People who have no affiliation are not necessarily atheist or agnostic, but they do at least help create an environment where lack of religious belief is not looked down upon.

While your second statement is obviously true, that does not help validate your first statement. Every limitation can be overcome, even being a religious scientist. I equate it as being similar to a professional basketball player who is under 6' tall. It is absolutely possible but it does impact your play.

Neil Degrasse Tyson has a great lecture which goes over how religious thought has impacted some of the greatest minds in history. He also writes about the concept in an article titled "The Perimeter Of Ignorance." As I understood his point, there have been times when great scientific scholars have stopped their pursuit of knowledge because they were content with the "God did it" explanation.

Newton stopped investigating the movement of planets once his current mathematical knowledge was put to the task of understanding how planets affect each others' orbits. This was the man who invented Calculus and wrote the Principia, but even he was guilty of not pushing forward the boundaries of science because he was content with the "God did it" answer. If not for his religious beliefs, perhaps he would have added inventing perturbation theory to his list of accolades and could have introduced it a century before Laplace did.

I am not arrogant enough to think I could keep religious beliefs from impacting my ability to investigate the world rationally if even geniuses like Newton couldn't.

The most troubling causational link he highlights is how the Islamic world lost its place as a center of scientific progress when a radical version of Islam took hold in the 12th century. Over the centuries that followed, the Islamic world went from being the place Algebra was invented to having 0.6% of Nobel laureates in Physics/Chemistry/Medicine with 23% of the world's population.

My favorite concept from his lecture is the danger of Revelation Replacing Investigation. It is at the core of why scientific thought and religious thought are at opposing sides, even though they can both exist within the same human being.

Unfortunately Slashdot doesn't have an "Obvious But Still Important To Say" option, so Insightful will have to do.

In this case though I would agree that Informative is a better mod, since his statement isn't that insightful it is just correcting the previous post when he stated climate change deniers are skeptical. While they may be skeptical in the "skeptical science is the best way to gain knowledge" sense, they are not the good kind of skeptical that actually help the debate on what to do above climate change.

This thread was already mixing individual income ($89k average tech-pro salary) and median income ($51k median HH income) so I was merely following the convention. I agree that we shouldn't be looking at HH income at all though, and should focus on average college grads making $51k and average tech-pro workers making $89k. These stats are slightly different since one is median and one is the mean, but I doubt there are many 1%-ers skewing the tech-pro salaries.

We are already ignoring the population that lack college degrees since the $51k/yr figure only includes college grads. And while many people have fairly useless college degrees, many IT workers not qualified for much more than tier-2 help desk support.

IT salaries should probably be fairly mediocre compared to STEM fields as a whole. It is on the very low end of necessary training / skills except in some very specialized sub-fields where workers do average six digit salaries.

IT workers need to stop using salaries in the 90's as evidence that IT salaries have stagnated. Pay in the 90's was bloated, and there was a massive correction after the bubble burst.

The S&P 500 finally reached its 2000 peak in April 2015. Considering the tech sector was a major contributor to the stock market crashing in 2000, it makes sense that IT wages would not be much higher than they were 20 years ago.

Also, most IT sector workers have their salaries stagnate at around $100k per year because they have trouble transitioning their career into a senior level / management role. If you don't have more responsibilities than you did 10 years ago, you shouldn't make more money other than cost of living raises.

Median male salary with a Bachelor's degree is $50,916 according to your own source. That is still much less than the average IT worker.

IT workers typically do not make what a person with a Professional degree makes, because the amount of education and certifications is not similar at all. A professional degree is essential a doctorate. That is not universally true, but the vast majority of professional degrees are doctorates. They are also almost universally licensed as a requirement to practice in their field. That is not the same thing as an A+/CCNA/MSCE/etc certification.

Comparing average IT workers with doctors and lawyers is disingenuous. There are many highly skilled IT workers who do have a similar level of education and training as professional degree holders, and they tend to make similar salaries as professional degree holders. The vast majority of IT workers fall into the same level of education as average Bachelor degree holders.

Don't people tend to stay at their job longer during a poor economy? As long as they aren't laid off that is (and the above study looked at employed people).

I would expect that employees would do far more job hopping from 1992 - 2000 than they would have in 2004 - 2008. The late 90's was one of the best economies in history (if not the best) so job mobility was probably very high.

I'm more interested in the odds of working at the same employer at least 20 years when starting there in 1965 as compared to 1995. Averages can be very misleading (like when using average salary instead of median salary).

Also, the above statistics don't seem to mention changing careers, just changing employers. That is a very different thing.

Wish I had mod points, this is the perfect response.

The trades cannot be off-shored, but they can be flooded by ex-employees of jobs that were off-shored.

There simply is not such thing as a safe good paying job. If you want above average income, you need ongoing above average effort in managing your career. For anyone under the age of 40 that usually means many career pivots before retirement. Very few industries will stagnate for 40 years in a row in order to provide someone a clear and easy career path.

Requiring a physical presence may stop a particular job from being off-shored, but it does not stop it from being affected by off-shoring. As the jobs that can be off-shored leave, those former employees start competing for the jobs that cannot be off-shored. So any IT related job that needs to stay local now has many more applicants, thus driving down wages.

There is at least one high paying software developer job for every highly skilled software developer. That is why no one knows a highly skilled developer who they would kill to have on their team who is unemployed.

Even in the Midwest you will hit a six digit salary by your early 30's. There is a ceiling of about $150k that very few even qualified developers will ever cross (again based on the Midwest) simply because there aren't enough Director / VP / CTO jobs to go around. But very few professions have max salaries that even reach six digits, so I really don't see what software developers have to complain about.

Developers often compare themselves to lawyers, doctors, or investment bankers, but they don't realize there is an army of public defendants, general practitioners, and unsuccessful traders who make no more than your average software developer. The ones making $300k+ per year are likely not much more numerous than the software entrepreneurs making similar money. And the lawyers, doctors, etc. making that much money are often essentially small business owners, not simple salaried employees.

It is pretty obvious to me that our country's productivity and economy in general will improve if we improve CS based education. But that is simply because increasing education in general will help our economy. There are very few ways a country can actually invest in its economy in the long term. Improving education. increasing funding of both private and public research, and improving infrastructure are the only ways that come to mind.

So while improving CS education is a great idea, I see no reason why it needs to be singled out.

That won't help, as the wealthy live in a type of walled garden where their kids would all go to the same schools even if they were public schools. I live in a school district with arguably the 4th best high school in my state, private schools included (#1-3 are private). This is accomplished by making sure the average price of a home in my school district is about $600k in a county where the average home price is closer to $200k. We effectively have a private school that is paid for with public tax money.

Let's not pretend this is the only problem with lowering the global population. Let's also not pretend that any time a problem is not easily solved we should just give up on trying to solve it.

It will be very hard to limit population growth, but without some major breakthroughs in science we may not have any choice. Most likely the people on the short end of the stick will be the ones with the least wealth, just like everything else in life.

One problem with looking into the future is most people only think of one thing changing at a time. For instance many people though that as buildings became taller, restaurants and other services would need to be built in sky scrapers to provide basic services. They didn't think of potential inventions (such as elevators) that would simply make it easy to travel back and forth between 40 stories. Many of the tasks you describe feel very similar to this issue.

Robots will not use the same dishes and utensils that humans use to make food. For instance it isn't like you use a robotic arm to physically flip burgers on a pan, you create a conveyor belt that cooks on both sides at the same time. The machines built to replace humans will not only take into consideration the most efficient way to cook food, but also the most efficient ways to either self-clean or be cleanable by another machine.

If only there was a major e-commerce retailer that has already been working on using fleets of robots to make loading / unloading products easier. I'm sure this technology will never proliferate to other industries. [/sarcasm>]

Even if you couldn't accomplish this with digital signs / posters / etc, these tasks are done infrequently enough that a small group of human employees could probably service dozens if not hundreds of stores.

1) Kiosks taking orders. If Walmart self-checkout lines are any indicator, one human operator with six kiosks could probably replace six cashiers.
2) Machines cooking the food. Plenty of machines already help cook food now, but once again I could forsee machines that reduce three line cooks with one line cook and more machinery.
3) Machines packaging the food. Again you will likely need some human intervention, but this also removes a few staff members.
4) Lower number of employees also means a lower number of shift supervisors.

I could easily see a McDonalds crew being cut by half or even 75% with only today's level of technology. The only thing stopping it is the robots are still more expensive than humans. More engineers would certainly have jobs, but probably around the rate of 1 more engineering job per 10-20 crew member jobs lost.