I feel like I should've known that. Thanks for the correction.

And horses have their own advantages.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
My point still stands. For the most part, bows are obsolete and not used nearly as much as before the spread of firearms over 400 years ago (which btw, can be silenced with a little bit of effort).

Hey now! My aunt rode dressage in 2 olympics. One of my earliest memories was seeing her in the opening ceremonies in 1984.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
She was holding the red balloon. :)

Dressage is defined as "the highest expression of horse training." My aunt dedicated her life to understanding and working with horses. Going to the olympics was an added bonus, awarded to her because she is very good at what she does.

Horses were largely replaced by the internal combustion engine about 100 years ago. Bows were replaced by firearms nearly 400 years ago. Both are archeaic and underappreciated. Honestly, I was surprised someone who enjoys longbow archery has no respect for dressage. Then I read NoNONAlphaCharsHere's reply and see that pretty much everything in your post is bullshit. So now I'm no longer surprised.

It may not happen; the modern Olympics, quite unlike the ancient Olympics, have not always been purely about physical sports. Competitions like poetry and painting were removed in part because the same entrants won year after year—this has not, so far, been an issue for e-sports.

Just start between recessions, not during.

Technically, those are company purchases, not mergers.

a strange co-dependent relationship

Yes, they manufacture products and we manufacture debt. A match made in.....well...

Somebody please provide ONE case of a merger making a bad company better.

Let's try English, shall we? Undernourishment, lack of food, EXTREME HUNGER. Like 14 million households, not getting enough food; like 7 million households, experiencing extreme food insecurity and pain from hunger.

It's hard to quantify starvation. It's hard to quantify malnourishment. It's hard to quantify death. Estimates of 3000+ per year dead in America by starvation stand right next to estimates of almost 50% of deaths under 5 (28,000 deaths under 5 per year in the United States) being caused by malnutrition--that is, we know people were eating, we know the kids were eating, but they weren't eating enough; we can't exactly say they died of ... well, starving to death ... but their bodies did stop functioning simply from stress caused by being hungry all the fucking time, essentially BECAUSE THEY WEREN'T FED ENOUGH. We can't exactly point to this in the muck of complications it causes, which brings other health effects, any one of which can be the killing blow, ultimately caused by chronic hunger but not itself chronic hunger, so not technically death by hunger.

In short: people who die because they don't eat enough may not have technically died of hunger, even though they wouldn't have died if they had adequate food security. In the same way, people who die of heart disease caused by smoking are marked as dying by heart disease, rather than "death by cigarettes".

You can be like this woman and argue that dying of complications caused by and related to chronic hunger aren't the same as starving to death, but you'd be intellectually dishonest and not credible.

Whoops. Someone else was having a 9 mile long minimum wage argument with me; I thought this was a moving goalposts thing. My bad.

Do you remember the Industrial Revolution? Do you remember greater than 70% unemployment, because machines took jobs? Do you remember it lasting 60 years, before we got back to some 5%-15% level of unemployment, like a normal, civil society?

Do you honestly think we're going to just up and move people to new jobs? We'll face major unemployment for decades in a giant paradigm shift. The demand for jobs will vanish until we invent a new way for people to be useful that cannot be equaled by machines. The ones we already have apparently haven't solved unemployment for us yet.

Good to know no credible research shows an oversupply of the STEM market. There's news that STEM graduates have low unemployment, with half of engineers and computer people not working in STEM jobs, and 75% of STEM graduates overall not working in STEM-related jobs. CIS has found 8 million non-working STEM graduates, and thinks there are 50% more STEM graduates than STEM jobs.

You're saying there is infinite demand for engineers. All current research says we have plenty more than we need. You know why I'm not listening? Because I have access to current data that says exactly the opposite of what you're saying, coming out of multiple research sources, and plastered all over the fucking place. In short: you're wrong.

Yes, that's harsh, and unfriendly. But you can take a fucking look and see. My sources linked above are 2013-2014 sources, not 2002 or some stupid shit. It's current. I'm arguing correctly, by credible and recent data. I understand that part of good negotiation is to give people a way to save face, but I'm going to call a lifeline here and say I know more about the job market in this discussion than about how to not make you look stupid for being wrong.

That's what universal college education is: cheap labor, pre-trained workforce, trained on the backs of the individual and the taxpayer, with an oversupplied labor market so wages can be kept low. When your education is no longer adequate, we'll replace you with a new college grad who is up-to-speed, unless you keep yourself up-to-speed using money from your wages we pay you, without costing more than a replacement grad.

Have you not realized that selecting an education career is a risk? It's a big risk: even if it's free, it's years of your life relegated to whatever useless McBurgerJackInTheAss fry runner drive thru job you can get, with the hopeful return of a career. If you pick the wrong career, you will not gain employment by your degree; your upwards mobility is destroyed. We can talk government loans, but I think you understand well the prospect a poor, black kid has with a $120,000 UofT degree and no job.

You think employers don't have control over the primary force of upwards mobility? They don't just choose a motivated hard-worker and build him into a tool; they wait for a flood of self-built tools, pick the cheapest from them, and go with that. The others who invested in this but got passed over can go fuck themselves in the ass with the burger flipper. Employers have no responsibility to their employees in this model: they don't have to provide them with careers; they just have to take them, use them, and throw them out when the newer college grads are cheaper than the cost of retraining old dogs.

Do you really believe employers would be better off with an untrained workforce? Do you think they wouldn't experience severe pain from the vacuum of skilled labor in the market? It'd be like grasping them by the wrists and shoving their hands into the fire, and the state-funded college education system provides the fire brigade to douse them; but we've taken that away, and so they have to pull their own hands out of the fire by building their own workforce. The businesses who fail to do just that will burn and burn until they char and crumble, and they will die screaming as a warning to others.

Those aren't minimum wage jobs.

Also, historically, mechanization, paradigm shifts, and other such major business process changes aren't there to shift labor up the pipe. You're not turning 100 people into 150 people across more services; you're involving 30 people instead of 100 people in the entire process of making a shirt. The point is to pay less in wages by eliminating workers, possibly replacing them with far fewer workers of slightly higher wages (e.g. eliminate 10 $10/hr wokers for 2 $20/hr workers, you pay $40/hr instead of $100/hr for the same result).

There really isn't an infinite demand market for scientists and engineers. Where would we get infinite money?

To speculate on a market, with other people speculating, deciding what limited resource to hedge their future upon, in a mode which will fail if other people select the same limited resource; as opposed to having businesses who understand their own needs develop the work force, hiring entrants and managing their education far more efficiently.

It's a bad plan, but it looks nice because we're physically handing something to individuals. The big businesses are the ones who reap the benefit; we're handing the costs and risks to individuals. Effectively, we're giving individuals shovels and land rights, and telling them we're helping them to mine gold, while the big businesses sit back with piles of cash to buy that gold for cheap off any of the few who find some; this is the alternative to making big businesses expend the resources to find fewer gold mines, prospect themselves, then get heavy machinery and hire miners to dig for gold, even though the businesses have expertise that allows them to more effectively prospect and find gold more often with less time and effort and cost.

You're mistaken. If you said to me, "Two plus Two is Five," a hundred times, and I continued to argue, it wouldn't be because I don't listen; it would be because I'd heard the mathematical arguments before, I'd examined yours and found nothing new, and I'd determined you're wrong.

I'm listening, and you're not saying anything groundbreaking here. It's all things I've heard before, things I've spent thousands of hours analyzing, and things I've determined don't work that way in the real world. You're saying things, I'm telling you what you're saying is nonsense, and you're assuming I'm not listening because I consistently discount your arguments about cats chasing carrots through the sky as if they have no merit.

"Standing" has been dramatically changed in US law. It now allows people to claim they could be potentially harmed, or could be harmed, or could have been harmed, to make a lawsuit.

Metadata is data.

And the Schrodinger's version?

Even Windows could manage the resources of North Korea better than...

Actually, nobody would know the difference:

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