The amount of capital there has increased a lot over the last few decades. That implies fewer workers relative to capital, and higher wages for workers.

but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers.

When there's a scarcity of workers relative to capital, then workers have bargaining power. They can leave a job which pays too little for a job which pays more. It makes sense (ie is more profitable) for companies to pay more, otherwise they cannot attract enough workers to run their equipment. Competition among workers for jobs pushes wages up, when capital is abundant, just as competition between firms for customers lowers prices and pushes wages back down.

Companies in the US and western countries have always paid the lowest they can to their workers. Google has to pay $100k per engineer. If they paid only $50k, then all those engineers would go elsewhere and google would be no more. Labor is scarce in silicon valley, because there's more money than engineers. The relative scarcity of labor is what pushes the price of labor (wages) up everywhere, and is the only reason labor makes more than bare subsistence ($2/day) in any country. In countries where there is no capital (no factories, no investment money, etc), there is no labor scarcity relative to capital, and people actually make bare subsistence wages ($2/day).

Sure it does. At least to those who aren't sure the earth is round.

No it doesn't. I was asking whether the procedure was logically valid, not whether some people think it's valid. The two aren't the same.

You must be an American if you equate liberal with socialist. In Europe, they tend to be the very opposite of each other.

In the USA, the left appropriated the term liberal and started using it to refer to itself in the early 20th century. It stuck. As a result, the word liberal now has almost the opposite meaning in the USA as everywhere else.

For example some liberals are now promoting nuclear energey now that global climate change has proved to be a much bigger issue.

Some liberals do, but others don't. To me, it appears there's a small group of people who are reasonable and who really consider things. I would say that they are mildly liberal on average. Which does not imply that most people who are liberal are reasonable and really consider things.

this is why people don't believe in AGW. Because every time that a proponent of it comes into contact with something that disagrees with their tidy view of the world, the first thing they do is lash out. And in the minds of a rational person, this simply screams "scam."

You don't believe in AGW because someone on slashdot was impolite in a comment? Which proves the whole thing is a scam to any "rational" person?

Try this. People who think the world is flat are fuckfaces. Does that imply that the round-earth idea is a scam?

Of course, I explicity stated that on resume.

EVERYONE states on their resume that all their prior projects were very successful, and that they're excellent employees.

If your employer was going by your resume and had no direct experience with your prior work, then they had no way of knowing what kind of employee you'd be. No one "minded" six month jumps on your resume because you code in ruby on small projects, and it's common among that group of people to jump around all the time, so nobody cared.

Although experience is awesome, new people always come in ready to work, and they always present fresh ideas.

New people do not always come in ready to work, and do not always present fresh ideas. You are conflating personality attributes, with whether someone is new to your company or not.

And, to be totally honest, I'd prefer to hire someone with 1 or 2 years of experience in my industry as compared to someone that had 25 years.

That is a tremendous mistake. Although there are diminishing returns to additional experience, only 1 or 2 years is not enough to be equivalent to someone with more experience. Granted, there is probably little difference between someone with (say) 8 years of experience versus someone with 25. However, 1 or 2 years of experience is not enough for complicated projects.

I would be curious as to why someone with 25 years hasn't taken the initiative to learn something new.

You are conflating experience, with not having taken the initiative to learn something new. You are also conflating lack of experience, with initiative. They are not related.

Many people have been programmers for 25+ years but learn new things all the time. Many people have been programmers for 1 year but are very resistant to learning new things. It's a personality attribute.

If you are not considering people simply based on their length of employment

That's not what the parent poster said.

if you were the hiring manager at my company, you would be the first one out the door.

Over and over again, you're just operating under the influence of incorrect inferences, crude and incorrect stereotypes you've invented, and incorrect generalizations you've reached. You repeatedly conflate things which have nothing to do with each other.

Happily, it will make little difference. Most places use a selection procedure which is equivalent to throwing darts at a board. If you had concluded that "people with green eyes feel special, so they'll bring fresh ideas", you'd probably have similar success to what you have now. That's what most places achieve. It will make no difference.

Now someone just needs how to work out H2O->H2->NH3 using solar and the problem is solved.

Take a look at solid state ammonia synthesis.

Anhydrous ammonia is dangerous. Certainly much more dangerous than you seem to think it is.

Lots of things are dangerous. It's a question of the kinds of safety measures that can be used to prevent injury.

For example, your car has antifreeze made out of methanol. If you consume even a tiny amount of that, it will cause permanent nerve damage and blindness. Your car also contains a large tank of highly flammable gasoline which can explode and light you on fire during an accident (whereas ammonia only combusts under pressure when it's in the cylinder of your engine). Your car also has a pressurized coolant system, and if you open the hood of your engine and unscrew the cap to the coolant system while the engine is hot, the coolant will flash boil and stream up into your face and burn your eyes. Your car also produces carbon monoxide during its normal operation, which will kill you if it leaks into the cabin. However, those things don't happen that often. The coolant cap has a sign on it saying "DO NOT OPEN WHILE ENGINE IS HOT", and the tank of gasoline is reinforced and protected in such a way that it doesn't usually explode during an accident, and the anti-freeze has a childproof cap and a prominent warning, etc.

Ammonia vapors are only dangerous in an enclosed space. You can tell right away if ammonia is leaking into the cabin because ammonia a characteristic pungent odor even at very low concentrations. (Contrast this with carbon monoxide, which your car produces now, and which can kill you and has no odor).

The main danger from ammonia is that it must be stored in mildly pressurized tanks. If you puncture the tank while staring at it, the ammonia can flash boil, stream out into your face, and cause a chemical burn on the surface of your eyes. That is the most significant danger. In order to mitigate this danger, the fuel tank would have to be designed in such a way that people do not have access to it, and it vents downward in case of accident. Also, refueling stations would be different from how they are now.

I don't know offhand how much of a danger ammonia fuel would be in practice, after reasonable precautions are taken. It's a question of what kinds of technological mitigations we can employ to prevent the fuel tank from splitting open and spewing into someone's eyes directly.

That's the astonishing thing about this. I read some of Elliot Rodger's book, and he was obviously an extremely disturbed man, who had a severe case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and also had other psychiatric disorders besides. At various points, he considered lashing out violently against society for the "injustice" he suffered when he did not win the powerball $400m lottery, which he felt he had been certain to win, and was entitled to.

He was crazy. He had a whole team of shrinks working on him, since he was age 8, to no avail. For much of his life he went to psychologists every single day, to no avail. He was crazy.

Yet so many people on the internet will find the moral or political lesson in it. For example: this massacre just goes to show how depraved Hollywood culture is (the editorial at the Washington Post said this). Or, it just demonstrates what's really wrong in American culture (approximately a third of the comments on scribd said this). Or, it just shows how the country has become too conservative, or too liberal. Or, it's a classic example of postmodern leftism run amok ('"ELLIOT RODGERS: PSYCHO SPEWING POSTMODERNIST CRAP"). Or, this is just another example of geek culture, even though Elliot Rodger obviously was not a geek, and spent much of his free time shopping for expensive Armani clothing.

The very silliest of these claims, was the contention that it shows what's wrong with geek culture. Elliot Rodgers was obviously not a geek. Quite the opposite, he had utter contempt for geeks. He considered them as not "alpha" males, and therefore beneath contempt, and he says so repeatedly in his "manifesto". The very first people he killed were his geeky roommates, whom he stabbed to death for precisely that reason. Claiming that Rodgers was inspired by geek culture is the most absurd of the moral lessons being drawn, and is even less serious than claiming he was inspired by postmodern leftism.

But it doesn't matter Elliot Rodgers was obviously not a geek. Even so, his massacre will still serve for Arthur Chu's moral indictment. The massacre can still be used as an indictment of geek culture, despite the obvious lack of any real connection between geek culture and Rodger's acts.

Though with Gig-level fiber, I assume I'd get both....

You wouldn't. Your latency would decrease only slightly. If you get 12mbit down, then you're located only a couple of miles from your DSLAM. You wouldn't reduce your latency by even 1% by having fiber to the home.

I don't think getting gigabit would help latency much. Latency is largely a function of how many routers you're going through and physical distance, neither of which is affected by whether you have fiber to the home. Furthermore, your internet connection to your home is just last mile stuff anyway. The vast majority of the distance your packets travel is over fiber even if you personally are using dialup.

Fiber might help latency slightly, because it would improve the speed of transmission for the final 0.1% of the distance. However, I'd guess the overall difference in ping times would be pretty slight.

But to address your fears, I don't think you'll have to worry about the future of sailing too much. Of course it has to share time with other pastimes, especially if it gets cheaper and hence people can afford having more than just this one pastime (but, frankly, I can't really say that sailing is so much cheaper now than it was a decade ago). I know a fair lot of younger people who enjoy sailing. Yes, you will find few teenagers, but a fair amount of people in their 20s and 30s pick it up, exactly because it is a relaxing, "slow" activity that allows them to get away from hectic and stress.

It's not going away any time soon, and there are definitely some young people who are interested in it. I'm sure sailing will continue to exist as a sport or pastime for a long time.

That said, most people who sail are boomers. Whenever I visit a race, excursion, or yacht club, I notice that 75% or more of the people there are boomers, in general. There are exceptions, but that's the average, I'd guess.

There are some young people interested in it, so it will be around for a long time. However, I'd guess there are only half as many people sailing 40 years from now, relative to the size of the population.

I'm an avid sailor, and the same discussion is being had in the sport of sailing. The sport of sailing is in rapid decline, at least in the US. It's far less popular than it was 30 years ago. Most of the people who do it are baby boomers who will soon retire from it.

There is great consternation within the sport of sailing about what can be done to save it, but really, nothing can be done. The sport is not appropriate for the times.

It's not a matter of cost. Sports like golf, sailing, lawn bowling, and other sports which are in rapid decline can be done affordably. Sailing, for example, is cheaper than ever because more and more used sailboats are dumped on the market every year (fiberglass sailboats almost never wear out).

The pace of life has changed. That is the issue. Young people, who've been reared on dizzyingly fast-paced entertainment such as first-person shooter games, are not thrilled at the idea of racing at five miles per hour (or sometimes less) in a sailboat for four hours. Nor do they find it exciting to play shuffleboard or do golf. By the standards of today, those sports are boring.

Nothing should be done to make golf or sailing more interesting for younger people. It won't help to make golf holes bigger. The only way to make these sports more interesting is to make them drastically faster paced, which will ruin them for the people who enjoy them now. These sports should just accept unpopularity.

The Civil War was related to slavery, but not exactly cause much by it. It was more of the southern states trying to favor "states' rights" over federal power, and the growing opposition against slavery in the north made the more stubborn southern states feel resentful of the federal government taking action.

That's just all wrong, and I don't think any serious historians believe it. Although the south wanted "states' rights", the particular states' right they wanted was the right to be slaveholding. They indicated no other "states' rights" which were important to them in the main historical documents at the time. The debate within the south over whether they should secede, focused almost entirely upon slavery. The main documents in which they explained their reasons for secession (such as the various declarations of Independence of southern states, and Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina) usually mention nothing other than slavery, and always mention slavery as their main concern.

The Emancipation Proclamation in wording freed slaves, but it also discouraged Europeans from assisting the south as they would seem like they were promoting a morally wrong practice.

No. The south indicated very clearly what the issue was for them. There is no reason that the South would conspire against themselves and go along with Lincoln's supposed PR campaign, in order to deny themselves support from Europeans. The crucial thing here is that the historical documents from the South clearly and obviously don't support what you're saying. It's possible to attribute other motives to Lincoln, and to claim he didn't really care about slavery but was using that issue to sound high-minded. You could always attribute his anti-slavery statements and actions to insincerity. However, it was the south which seceded, opened fire on Fort Sumter, and formally started the civil war. They were very frank in their reasons for doing so, and it was always about slavery.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued long after Europeans had decided not to intervene on behalf of the South in the civil war (not that they ever had any serious intention of doing so). As a result, the Emancipation Proclamation cannot have been intended to prevent Europeans from entering the war.

I suspect you have been influenced by the Lost Cause historical revisionist movement, which was a crackpot revisionist movement that arose about 30 years after the civil war had ended, and which sought to re-write history regarding the civil war. It wished to portray the civil war as being due to causes other than slavery (which is entirely wrong) and it portrayed slavery as a benign institution, done for the benefit of slaves (also entirely wrong).

Unfortunately, that group has tremendous influence among the general public, particularly in the American south. It's just ignored by professional historians, who consider it a crackpot group. But it has managed to propagate all kinds of historical falsehoods which are now widespread. It's a crackpot movement, but it's very successful. It's claims are repeated all the time by all sorts of people, even here, on slashdot.

The evidence weighs very heavily against that point of view, and no serious historians believe it.