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Comment Yes it does make a difference. (Score 2) 314

When compared with "real sugar", sucrose in other words, it doesn't make much difference. It's 55% fructose instead of 50%.

HFCS 55 - one used in sodas, is 55 parts fructose, 42 parts glucose.
Sucrose - plain sugar, is 50 parts fructose and 50 parts glucose.

Our brains only measure the glucose intake, cause that is the sugar we start burning the moment it hits the bloodstream. We even absorb it directly through the oral cavity - hence oral glucose gel for diabetics.
When we hit optimal glucose the brain tells the body it had enough.

So, if optimal glucose is (some) 100 parts, that means that using sucrose, one would take in 100 parts of fructose and 100 parts of glucose.
To get to the same level of glucose satiety (those same 100 parts) with HFCS 55, one would take in 131 parts of fructose for every 100 parts of glucose.

Then all that fructose, as Al Green puts it, gets taken to the liver.

Comment Re:Is math more societally meaningful? (Score 1) 634

What is the final workplace for those math students?

Around these parts (Bosnia) it tends to be teaching. Which is once again traditionally a female-centric profession.
Half my math teachers in elementary school, high school, at university were female.
I have a cousin (female) who is a math teacher.

On the other hand...
Having started electro-engineering, quitting that for work, taking up CS later...
In both those cases female to male ratio was about... 1 to 15-20.

Comment Re:Yawn... Strawmening and elenchiing now? (Score 1) 285

Yeah, it basically conflates parts of the picking, sorting and packing process into a single job.

Though, it lacks one aspect of the old process, clearly visible there in your video.
Old system allowed for quick and dirty picking during daytime, while sorting, packing and transport could be done as a separate process, 24/7.
That automated picker dictates that all work must be done in daytime if one is aiming for optimum efficiency.

Cause nobody's gonna do any sorting at night in the field with all those insects rushing at the light and all that nectar in the air.

Comment More ignoratio elenchi I see... (Score 1) 285

Yeah, I stopped after the first paragraph

Ah yes... Famous last words of those with no arguments apart from repeating that black is white.
And then you go "If people only ate more blah-blah-blah"... which is AGAIN just ignoratio elenchi.
Babbling about irrelevant points cause you have no leg to stand on.

You came to "people should eat more nuts", in a topic about automated strawberry pickers, over a fallacious argument about wages, which you have related to pizza.
That large thing on the horizon you no longer see? That was the topic. You are out at sea, lost and confused.

And in conclusion all you offer is "Nah-ah. You is wrong. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!!!"

BTW... how can you know if my argument is "fallacial [sic] at best" if you don't read until the end?
Maybe I completely change my mind by the end?

Bah... give my best to the sharks.

Comment Yawn... Strawmening and elenchiing now? (Score 1) 285

First off, strawberries aren't food? Since when? And pizza and Big Macs are?

I already explained above why strawberries are not food but an edible luxury item, AND gave you a HIGHLY comparable example of almonds.
Both need to be farmed, both are actually really expensive to produce, both use up a lot of water and land...

Only difference being that you can scale down the price of strawberries easier by adding cheap labor while more pickers won't make almonds cheaper because a tree is not a vine, and because the cost of picking is practically non-existent for almonds while cost of planting vines is not comparable to a cost of planting and nursing trees.

And the fact that you are refusing to acknowledge the difference between a MEAL like pizza or burger off of which you can live and work just fine, as many do - and a luxury food item which is basically water and a small amount of sugar and fiber...

That makes you either delusional, dishonest or both. And your "argument" is either nonsense or a strawman. Well... it's actually both, but most strawman are.

What's next? Comparing chocolate to bacon? How about cake and water?
They should all do you just fine - as none of those are produced in the same way nor do they have similar nutritional values nor do they cost the same to produce OR purchase.
I KNOW! How about comparing apples and oranges?

Whatever difficulties there are in picking strawberries are irrelevant, as the production of every food substance has it's own set of challenges. Pizza dough has to be used when it's thawed and can't be refrozen. Same with hamburger. Cheese needs to be refrigerated. French fries can only be up to 2 hours old and then need to be pitched. Buns have to be thrown out once they get stale, and so on. None of which are germane to the discussion of wages.

This whole part is just one big ignoratio elenchi, a false analogy and a strawman where you try to present different actions, all with different costs as if they are one and the same.
Hint: IT'S WHAT YOU ALREADY DID IN THE ORIGINAL ARGUMENT.

You do realize that you compared laboring in the fields with "buns have to be thrown out if stale"?
And then you dot your list of nonsense with a non sequitur.
What? Are you going down a list of fallacies, checking off one by one?

YOUR ANALOGY OF FAST FOOD INDUSTRY WITH FIELD LABOR IS FALSE - WHICH DESTROYS THE BASIS OF YOUR WAGE ARGUMENT.

You can't compare fast food that gets produced year round, 9 to 5, in malls and restaurants - to sunrise to sundown labor in the fields, during a very short period when strawberries are ripe.
Nor do you have to plant a pizza and wait for it to grow, water it, keep it safe from pests for months...
Nor can you hire 500 workers to make that pizza faster - you know... the way more pickers pick the pickings pretty post-haste.

if strawberries are so difficult to pick, and so delicate, one would think you'd need skilled labor to do it correctly and efficiently.

Digging a ditch is difficult. Does that require skilled labor?
How about lifting heavy things?

Nice obtuseness though. Really.
Or are you now making fun of people working in the fields?
"If it were so hard to keep your back bended the whole day, there'd be a school for that. Har-har-har! Ow! My carpal tunnel!"

Not a single "point" you make makes any sense, as you are talking out of your ass.
The story is about people moving on to BETTER jobs. Not necessarily better paid jobs. Wage is not a single measure of a job.
Try working in a field for a day and compare that to a similarly or worse paid work done inside.
Try working on a farm and compare that to a similarly or worse paid work in a city.

Also, the story is about a specific crop. Not just any crop. And certainly not about pizza.
And it is about a technological solution for planting and harvesting that crop NOT because that would be cheaper.
There are high initial costs and if you think that maintenance of robotic pickers will come cheap then you haven't been paying attention.
But because there are now better jobs for unskilled workers out there due to which there is a lack of available workforce - that makes machines which cost around 100k a pop seem affordable.

And did you even look at what that picker does? It's turning fieldworkers into assembly line workers.
Sitting and sorting and packing sunrise-to-sunset is a lot easier than hunching down all that time.
BETTER JOBS. Not better paid jobs.

Comment Re:Close but no cigar... (Score 1) 285

Just to make it clear - we ARE just shooting the breeze here.
       

To be clear, we're not talking about a completely equal income, or anything so communistic.

It doesn't have to be.

We eliminate cost of living by paying people's basic needs (food, water, clothing, living quarters, heating, hygiene, health, communication) - those things we pay for instantly become free.
Correct the list anyway you want - things that we end up providing ALL of the people with, will no longer be marketable (as everyone can have them for free) AND if we're employing robots to provide those things that scales up until the cost is no longer existent.

First batch of "free stuff" might carry a cost. Second will be cheaper. Third even more...
Until it disappears somewhere far behind the decimal point - because robots.
And not only free... The fact that we can save both items and money - we won't be able to give them away.

Aaaannd... There goes economy.
If we give EVERYONE free money AND we replace them with robots that are effective enough to provide the raw material or the finished products everyone needs - supply and demand kills the economy.

A fad diet where enough people stop eating bread for a few days would suddenly cause huge stockpiling of wheat.
If we are still using money for that resource, i.e. we still run it like an economy and not a government provided service, market dies at that point.
And brings down with it anything related to it. Stuff like money and government and stuff like that.

Cause we're talking about BILLIONS of people.
We can't have a partial basic income only in some countries and not in others - unless we want to promote inequality while ruining people's lives on both sides of the in-equation.
Cause instead of equality we would create a miserable privileged class, and a slave class. Like what Qatar and Kuwait have done.
And they don't even have a full basic income per se... just a crapload of free stuff and privileges.

Robots aren't going to completely replace skilled human labor, at least not until they can replace us completely

Robots don't have to completely replace humans as long as they replace ENOUGH humans.

If at that point we are still trying to pretend that it's an economy and not a government subsidy - economy dies.
Make it an outright government subsidy... it either ends up as Qatar or as USSR. Neither of which is a good thing.
One doubles (or balloons it up even more) the population of the country by importing personal slaves - other makes everyone stand in bread lines.
Both would destroy a country from inside. Bread lines probably less - it's easier on one's morale to be hungry than to be a slave owner.

Which brings us to the crux of the problem - we can't have both the basic income AND robots making everything at the same time.
It is one or the other.

Both of those at the same time kill economy, money, moral values...

It's just that people who previously were able to work and get by on jobs that did not require particular knowledge or talent are going to be increasingly scarce,

Actually... There might be a surge in people actively looking FOR that kind of work.

We ARE still the same old hunter gatherers.
Our bodies like the outdoors and physical work. Our brains love it when we work with our hands.

Make it no longer an issue of economic status and you might just end up with highly educated garbage collectors, short order cooks, cleaners, gardeners, janitors, couriers...
Heck... You got that now to some extent with people organizing themselves to clean up parks or riverbeds.
And let's not even go into all those hobbies.

We NEED to have stuff to do.
We get sick if just sit around on our asses the whole day. Or we start doing stupid and dangerous things.
Idle hands and all that jazz...

And as we run up that population ladder we'll need even more stuff to do just to keep us from doing stupid things like killing each other.

Comment Close but no cigar... (Score 1) 285

How do you pay for this? For one, change from taxing human labor, i.e. income, and instead tax the new source of production - robots. You could also get rid of all the other social safety net programs, because they're now redundant (and probably less efficient), and get rid of the minimum wage as it's no longer needed. When no one is forced to work to survive, markets can be allowed to freely set the price of labor, however low.

The moment you give people guaranteed basic income and replace them with robots - everything that robots can produce becomes FREE, with price of labor producing those products becoming zero.
Because production scales up and cost goes down with number of robots added. Including the production of more robots.

Nothing changes in areas where you still need humans - other than the price of labor being replaced with price of QUALITY.

Not quality as in "this is a 5 stars product" but quality as in "this product is purple - I like purple".
You can get the price of materials and labor down to zero with enough robots.
There is no such thing as scarcity of LOVE AND DESIRE, nor is there an upper limit to the price we are willing to pay for certain things.

We already got examples of that with artists and performers being paid bajilions of dollars for songs and movies nobody actually likes.
Paul Blarp: Mall Blarp 2 made about $62 million so far. It cost $30 million to make.
It has 4% on Rotten Tomatoes, up from 0% it had last week.

There is no reason for that movie to cost so much OR make so much - other than people simply willing to pay for even a chance of entertainment of the kind of QUALITY they might expect from a Kevin James movie.
There are people out there with DESIRE for that crap.
Countries spending billions on nukes they hope they'll never use are the same thing.
Only instead of paying for an illusion of entertainment they are paying for an illusion of security.

There are some things money can't buy.
But that don't mean we should stop tryin.

Comment Re:You're not willing to pay (Score 1) 285

Strawberries are not pizza or BigMacs.

They grow low on the ground, rot easily, bruise easily, have to be picked and shipped quickly... and are not cheap to produce either, with all that water they suck up, while the rodents just love eating them cause they are sweet.
It is backbreaking work to pick them and it must be done quickly and be gentle about it.

The dirty little secret is that they were NEVER priced fairly - it's just that the cheap labor allowed farmers to shift the costs onto someone else's back. Quite literally.

It is a luxury item. Not food.
Think almonds - only you can't just shake them down nor can you pick them all at once like almonds.
Nor store them. Nor pack them dried. Nor ship them in bags. Nor...

Now think of the price of almonds per kilo... multiply it by all the things you can't do with strawberries but you can with almonds...
And then imagine buying them at that "fair" price. Then imagine how much the farmer would sell at that price.

Comment Re:You're not willing to pay (Score 2) 285

And then what?
Force the "third world" to eat overpriced (for their wallets) strawberries while you don't get yours cause they are still rotting on the vine in the fields?

Strawberries are more perishable than corn.
Also, you can't pick them all at once with a huge, field-leveling machine. Too gentle for that.
Nor can you store them like corn. Nor can you turn them into HFCS or feed livestock with them.
And it is literally a backbreaking job to pick them.

But you need them picked during a very short window, and you need a LOT of them picked fast...
And pretty soon you're either employing armies of people who can still only pick your strawberries while there is light outside - or you got strawberries rotting in the field. After you've spent all that water and fertilizer on them.
And then you have to sort them and rush them to the market before they rot in their little baskets.

So you can sell them cheap and fast - or close up shop and let those armies of pickers go.
And just plant corn instead.

Notice how nobody questions the use of combines to pick corn instead of hiring "third world" do it by hand.
Cause if anyone used people instead of machines to pick the corn it would rot "on the stalk", and the price of food would skyrocket and it would end up hurting the most the very people one would try to "raise from poverty".

Endgame is not to make everyone rich by paying more for simple work. It does not work that way.
That would just be devaluing money until everyone is a millionaire while a loaf of bread costs two million.
Or four. Or five.

The goal is to make expensive things cheap and affordable so that "poor" means "we only have two cars and our TV is too small".
Make pickers into buyers.

If you can't find pickers for a certain price it no longer means that you don't want to pay them a decent wage.
It means you can't AFFORD them at the wages they can now earn doing something else.
They are no longer illiterate half-humans half-slaves willing to do any job just so as not to starve.
They had to fight HARD to get to that point. And there is more road ahead.

Now the goal is to have robots pick so many strawberries, that you need to hire more people for your strawberry processing plant where you make jams, pies, ice creams...
That's how you pay those pickers more - by creating better paying jobs.

Comment Re:There ARE other kinds of values. Movies!=money. (Score 1) 301

That's because the Greek poets, the apostles, and William Shakespeare died more than 70 years ago. For example, translations of the Bible into modern language are still copyrighted.

NOPE.
It's because culture, cultural artifacts and works by there very nature have no expiration date - unlike humans who are limited by their mortality.

You are confusing the rule we came up with to try to harness that natural quality of cultural works in order to monetize them - with the reason for the existence of said rules in the first place.
I.e. You're engaging in circular reasoning where "old works can't belong to one person - because authors died so long ago that copyright ran out".

Which is another way of saying "There is no copyright - because it ran out".
Which is an ignoratio elenchi claim regarding the issue why " works of CULTURE AND ART AND STORYTELLING... can [NOT] ultimately belong to one person or a group of persons".

I.e. That it is THAT very property... attribute... of the works of culture to transcend any physical limitations through which mortal humans might try to limit access to such works in order to monopolize their value - WHY we had do come up with the idea of copyright.
Cause you can't expunge information and ideas from someone's mind.

You can't physically unhear a song or unsee an image or force others to do so if they don't want to pay for experiencing that work of culture.
You can only create a rule that they MUST pay.

I really can't go into other "points" you make there, other than to point out that they are all based on more ignoratio elenchi.
That is, ignoring that I am making points on WHY we have copyright laws instead of the HOW - i.e. particular nature and implementation of such laws.
Sorry.

Comment Re:Habeus Corpus (Score 1) 336

Animals don't have responsibilities, so why should they have rights?

Close.
Animals are incapable of being held responsible.

Much like children or mentally challenged (i.e. retarded) humans who are not in control of their faculties or incapable of understanding or holding on to agreements, rules and contracts, including but not limited to social contracts.

A human child is literally millions of years ahead of a chimp in mental development, but no one with any sense would dream of treating a child as an adult, capable of agreeing to or signing contracts.
Including those that the society one is born into has established for that child centuries and millennia ago.
Do not steal, do not kill, do not attack other people, don't light fires on the carpet...

Accepting those preestablished societal RULES (i.e. responsibilities) is the basis of having RIGHTS - or the society puts you in a cage.
Or, if you are REALLY incapable of following rules, keep hurting others and live in a place which practices a death penalty - society kills you to protect others from you.

And while you CAN explain such abstract concepts as good and bad to children or retarded adults, and have them obey the rules based on those concepts, you can't do that with animals.

You start treating animals like humans, you better plan for mass killing of said animals.
Cause that's where it ends at, very quickly - as they CAN'T FOLLOW HUMAN RULES AND REGULATIONS.
They will continue to break the rules they can't even understand, you will continue to punish them for that, until you either end up killing them or you get them to try to kill you.
At which point someone will HAVE TO kill them.

Comment There ARE other kinds of values. Movies!=money. (Score 2) 301

Seems like all movies that profit off of heinous acts should have to go to repay the victims of their crimes.

In ALL cases, every single one, EVER - victims became victims cause nobody heard or acted upon their cries for help.
Victims are acutely aware of that.

And they are aware of how valuable and invaluable it is to just have someone tell their story to the world.
Even if it is told badly. Like with "Mississippi Burning".
Which beats almost every single movie about Vietnam war - a war that was totally only about Americans and how THEY suffered.

Which again beats every single movie NOT made about Jeju uprising, regarding the mass executions, burning of villages, rape and the following coverup which lasted for some 60 years.
In a friendly, forward thinking, western democracy of South Korea.
Just like the Bodo League massacre and systematic mass execution of hundreds of thousands of "communist sympathizers".
Covered up for over 40 years... and clearly not considered a big deal.
Not big enough to warrant a movie, anyway.

Movies, like books, are primarily works of CULTURE AND ART AND STORYTELLING - and neither of those can ultimately belong to one person or a group of persons any more than the works of Shakespeare or the Bible or the Greek myths do.
Someone can own a block of wood with a Mona Lisa painted on it - but no one can own Mona Lisa no more than anyone can own the letter 'A'.

That's why we have copyright laws.
To assure that those who create/produce that cultural wealth FOR EVERYONE get paid something in exchange for their effort in creating something that is only valuable if everyone has free access to it.
Because you can't stop someone from seeing a movie or hearing a song - not if you ever want to make money out of showing them a movie or playing them a song.
It must be free and available to everyone so you could charge money for it.
Jerry Lewis can't charge people money for "The Day the Clown Cried". Even if he wanted to. Or if they did. And though they do.

Human art is designed to be appreciated and experienced and absorbed by other humans.
If it wasn't so easy for humans to experience that art and culture without paying or even trying (just quiz yourself about a movie you are not at all interested in - like Twilight or 50 Shades of Gray) no regulation would be needed.
Hell... you can chase down a thief and make him either burn up the calories in that apple he stole from you, beat it out of him or make him throw it up.
No amount of force or persuasion can make someone unwatch a movie or unhear a song. Sadly, in many cases.

So we have laws to try to make sure that at least some people pay for what they willingly experience.

BUT... as those laws are about monetary compensation to the creators of that art, we are fed a story that it is "all about the money" and that the movies are "just business".
Which is not true even for the most commercial of all art - pornography.
We can joke that it does not matter as long as there's sex in it - but we can't ignore the fact that there are porn STARS, and then there are "others".

Meaning that even with a movie that is so cheap to produce, both artistically and monetarily, where actor's skills are down to simple physical attributes and looks, and which is produced to satisfy such a base need - people will demand more than just a "recording of two people fucking for money".

And people will favor those who produce more than just a "recording" - thus creating popularity and fame for those performers who do "more than just recording".
That favoritism will not create MORE money though. It will only cut out of the picture those who produce only "recordings".

Even in such an utterly commercial field of film making, the goal is towards more than just money and money earned alone does not equal success nor is it the ultimate and only goal of producing the movie.

Movies are about art and culture and telling stories...
And that is where the victims of massacres and crimes get "compensated" - their story gets told.
Even if told badly, at least it allows them the opportunity to criticize the story told and instead tell their version to the world - who is now primed to listen.

Cause it is not about the money for the victims either. You can't pay someone back for a genocide or rape or dead and murdered relatives.
You CAN tell their story though.

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