I didn't realize that there were even that many people. It's almost literally a ghost town on weekends.

Honestly, living in the US, I'd be content with just the occasional break from the partisan lunacy, even if only the moment of silence.

Wow, are you still on about this?

I can think of a few reasons why robots may be more efficient.

  - The Biggie(tm): the time the human spends traveling in racks is wasted time that's paid by the hour. Robots aren't paid by the hour, so even if the robots are half the speed of a human, you can simply deploy five times as many robots, and now you aren't paying people for travel time between pick faces AND you're moving more product with fewer man-hours.
  - Racks don't need to be human-length, allowing more storage in less space.
  - Product is lighter than a person, so moving it consumes less fuel. Fuel costs are a very serious expense in a warehouse.
  - Robots can zip around gathering well-organized product faster than a human can think of where to move next. And even if the robot knows exactly where to take the human, it wouldn't be able to accelerate very fast without additional harnesses/restraints for the human.
  - Easier to segregate high-value product. If the robots are bringing you just the SKU you need then nobody except the facility manager has a reason to be wandering around the iPad locker, which means fewer iPads growing legs. Missing product will be noticed very quickly if there's any kind of auditing.
  - Lower inventory error rate, because a robot will never accidentally pick from the wrong location. Your cycle counts and physical inventories are suddenly looking much cleaner, especially on high-volume products.

With all of that said, "no human jobs are being taken" is complete, utter BS. Where do you think those up-to-40% savings are coming from? Yes, storage space, fuel, rent/property taxes, and shrinkage (depending on your security) are all major expenses, but by far the biggest cost in any warehouse operation is labor. The travel time between locations is time that's no longer going into the pockets of workers.

Reading the comments I eventually got enough context to track down the Wikipedia entry, which says: "drag racing tires perform better at higher temperatures, and a burnout is the quickest way to raise tire temperature immediately prior to a race. They also clean the tire of any debris and lay down a layer of rubber by the starting line for better traction."

So... is this just for drag racing? Or is there some other point to this?

Change minds? Nah. But it's fun. Because the paranoid delusion is there whether you feed it or not, and no amount of pandering to them is ever going to make it go away.

This is decidedly not what Gandhi would do, nor MLK. But neither of their opponents were as ravingly delusional as the Oppressed American Christian, who can be neither reasoned with nor shamed. That which cannot be defeated must be borne, which we'll do with laughter, until the declining numbers that power the ferocity of their paranoia make them politically irrelevant. That, and the intermittent sanity of the courts to protect us from the far more real oppression that they want to impose, are the only ways we can cope.

You're nitpicking a semantic strawman of your own creation. The GP only said that the constitution does not allow the state to favor one religion over another. He did not cite the First Amendment as the sole origin of this from the moment it was ratified on, and you yourself acknowledge that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates it against the states.

So, there was no reason to imply the GP had never read the First Amendment, because there's nothing he said that referenced it nor that was incorrect about the current state of the law.

It's a nice story to tell yourself if you're disenchanted with modern Western culture and the still extant religions that founded it, but anyone with a deeper understanding of history and even of other modern cultures can tell you that isn't true at all.

Major polytheistic religions have more gods, but they don't work like your D&D game might make you think. You don't just pick one god and venerate that one at the expense of the others. No, you are expected to venerate all the gods in the proper mixture and at the proper time, and emphasizing one god above the others is a sign of eccentricity at best or disrespect to the gods you neglect at worst.

Plus, humans are humans, and the pressure to conform to the group is built into us at a evolutionary biology level. We're pack animals, and rules to conform identify who is "one of us" and who is "one of them" to compete with.

Do you think the Romans didn't have pressure to conform? Imperial China or the Mongols? Japan, back then and now? Do you not know anyone who is Hindu or read about some of the cultural clashes in India? Polytheism is no panacea.

Generally, no. Objectivity is largely a function of temperament and deliberate effort rather than intelligence. Studies show that the more intelligent you are, the less objective you are. It seems that smart people are so used to being "right," that they are largely unprepared for the possibility that they are wrong. They also have an amazing ability rationalize and defend incorrect positions.

Worse, the more "informed" you are, the less impact facts have on you. Uninformed voters are more easily swayed with information challenging their beliefs, but people who know and have strong opinions on a subject are likely to become more entrenched in a position when confronted with facts that prove it wrong.

Objectivity takes training and deliberate practice. Being smart doesn't make you less susceptible to cognitive biases -- it just makes you much quicker at applying them, at least until you learn to recognize them and fight them.

True. Though he could also have just substituted "people", which would have fit the grammar without the additional connotation of smug condescension, and the irony of repeating a mantra while pretending to be an independent thinker.

As you say, it's well used, and I do know exactly what it means: that somebody is about to tell me how much better he is than everybody else, with very little justification. In that sense, he was being helpful. And in exactly that sense I was trying to be helpful by pointing out that he might get his intended message (the one about whatever it is we're talking about, rather than the one about his self-superiority) across better if he didn't start out with name-calling that doesn't even have the benefit of originality.

I enjoy imagining you spluttering as you're writing this, gradually realizing that you've got nothing to contribute and finally remembering the caps lock button. Thanks for making my day.

Calling it a "law" is an exaggeration for comic effect. But it gets that name because it's common enough to be a recognized trope, indeed overused: you can make a headline more exciting by hinting that a development is more important or that a trend is more pervasive than it actually is. Stories that are important in and of themselves generally have statements rather than questions in the headline.

Invoking Betteridge's Law may well itself be an over-used trope, but if it is it's only because there's so very, very much call for it. News aggregators like Slashdot serve as concentrators, seeking out the most exciting stories. Ideally, the editors would serve as filters as well, recognizing exaggerated headlines and either ignoring them or putting them back into proper context. Instead, it's usually left to a poster to do that, generally after a lot of excited and/or outraged posting based on the headline. (Because the posters who just read the headline will always get there before people who bothered to RTFA.)

And you're going to demonstrate your independence by reiterating a weak pun that's well worn enough to have both a Wikipedia entry (which notes its "shrill and excessive use") and an XKCD already in place?

But it's worth noting that the converse is not true: not all unreasonable people make progress. Unreasonable people would ideally consider whether they're actually achieving something, or just being assholes.

Unfortunately, by definition that's something an unreasonable person cannot do. So the world ends up sorting through self-congratulatory dipsticks, hoping to find the smallish fraction who actually merit congratulations.

Seems to me that there ought to be a corollary to Betteridge's law of headlines (A headline with a question mark can be answered by "no") for headlines with the word "may".

"Scientific advance X may achieve Y" can be read as "Will scientific advance X achieve Y?". To which the answer is "no", followed by "That's how researchers attempt to get more funding for X, a small advance of interest to those in the field but not exactly flying cars, by pretending it might lead to Y, which it almost certainly won't."