He is a robot left over from the creation of time it's self.

If you are not running with adblock on your browsers you deserve to have this crap happen to you. ALL websites need to be treated as hostile (Slashdot included) and you need to run browser extensions that disable and protect you from this crud. Adblock, redirect protectors, privacy reclaimers, etc...

And if you are a good computer person you install all this stuff on every computer you touch.

No it would not have. You clearly have NO idea how much capital is required nor how much infrastructure is needed to build an auto company and the supply chain that goes with it. Furthermore you seem to be forgetting that in 2008 there was ZERO capital available. Nobody could get capital from the banks because there was no liquidity to be had. Your notion that a bunch of startups could even begin to fill the void left by a suddenly missing GM is laughable. Even if we could have magically waived a wand and provided the capital the engineering would take years. It takes many years to even build a very small auto company like Tesla.

GM isn't just an assembly line. It is the keystone in an entire supply chain. GM goes under and so does virtually every Tier 1 supplier as well as Ford and Chrysler. Even the CEO of Toyota admitted publicly that GM being liquidated would have hurt Toyota badly because they depend on many of the same suppliers. My company would have been out of business entirely and we are a Tier 3 supplier to GM. And we would have been just one of thousands of firms that would have collapsed. Even Tesla would likely have collapsed because the supply chain would have imploded. Tesla depends on many of the same suppliers who would now be bankrupt.

Probably me, because I would immediately go scorched earth before your first "and" (I happen to believe in the concept of "Total War", and probably get along well with William Tecumseh Sherman). Realize, however, that your argument started with what I'd call an intolerable provocation to war.

I can: it equips them to make a rational choice based on *the information available to them at the time of the choice*. Such a choice based on a lack of critical pieces of information necessary to their understanding of the consequences of the decision is only *situationally rational*, and perhaps not long term rational or correct.

There is an ideal time to teach children that has a real biological basis, yes.

There are also kids *graduating* high school in the U.S. who are lacking in basic skills such as the ability to communicate effectively, or even read above a 3rd grade level.

If we don't take advantage of the window between when they apply critical thinking skills to arrive at such conclusions as "Why learn this crap? I'm never going to use it!" and the earlier point at which they still almost unquestionably integrate information which they conveyed by a teacher because the teacher is an authority figure, we will *continue* to graduate effectively broken human beings unable to effectively function in a society where ditch-digging is largely done by machinery.

We will be continuing to create an perpetual underclass whose only means of survival are either criminal activity, or "the dole", assuming it's available in their area.

"Critical thinking is a way of deciding whether a claim is true, partially true, or false. Critical thinking is a process that leads to skills that can be learned, mastered and used. Critical thinking is a tool by which one can come about reasoned conclusions based on a reasoned process. This process incorporates passion and creativity, but guides it with discipline, practicality and common sense."

The problem with "teaching critical thinking", then, is that you teach them to decide validity for themselves, but you do NOT teach them to always come to the correct conclusion when the process is complete. If it were about coming to "correct conclusions", rather than "conclusions which appear on the surface to be correct based on the available information", everyone who applied the critical thinking process would always arrive at exactly the same conclusions.

Therefore, you want to maximize "the available information", and turning on the write protect bit on someone's mind before they understand, for example, that "being able to calculate random garbage in your head quickly" is *very* important to knowing whether you have enough money in your pocket to buy the things you have in your shopping basket when you get to the checkout, or whether you're going to look like an ass while you make everyone behind you in line wait while you decide which things to put back to fit your available cash.

I think you really need to look up the term "Cultural Relativism"; not everyone wants to live in an apartment with cable TV, within walking distance of a Walmart, a McDonald's, and a Pizza Hut. Other cultures value other things, and they keep their cultural integrity, often by operating on a different axiomatic basis that has to necessarily exclude some information, but which does not preclude critical thinking within their (different, not necessarily limited) scope.

There are cultures which achieve what they believe to be very fulfilling lives in that way, and tend to have vastly lower suicide rates than our supposedly "superior" culture has; your statement is tantamount to another term you should look up: "Cultural Imperialism".

From the summary..., I figured it was a bunch of ASIMO robots programmed to trundle around the warehouses screaming in the voice of Sgt. R. Lee Ermey's voice "MOVE IT! Move it, MAGGOTS! Work FASTER!"...

I think you missed the part where I said that some critical thinking skills are formed on their own; and people should definitely have critical thinking skills; I've been persuaded by another poster that it should be a mandatory grade 12 (High School Senior) course, rather than waiting for the first year of college.

It's counter productive to impair the ability to teach children rote information by teaching them to doubt the source before attempting to teach them the rote information. For non-rote information classes, that's the likely places that self-derived critical thinking skills will develop on their own.

Also see my other post about certain religious sects - I give the example of Amish/Mennonite communities) where doubting your teacher in school becomes the same as doubting your parents and doubting your religious authority. Instilling a high probability of acting on such doubts, which is an opportunity given at 14-16 years of age in those communities, is effectively cultural genocide.

While you may be saying "Good! I'm a rational humanist, and they should be too! I want everyone to be like me!", those cultures embody skill sets that we, as a society, may decide we need some day, in the same way that some - myself included - have argued that kids should be taught to do math without calculators because one EMP, and they won't be able to add anything on their own past "ten fingers" any more.

That's a reasonable point. People are mandatorily required to attend primary education through grade 12 in the U.S. (with the exception of some "grade 8 then done" Amish/Mennonite communities), and teaching it before they go out into the world is a good idea. It may actually be counter-productive to the continued existence of those communities, so the stop should not be adjusted downward in those instances - throwing doubt about informations sources right before they go on Rumspringa would likely steal many children from their culture and homogonize them into the mainstream.

Teaching critical thinking early is a bad idea.

There is a place and time for shoveling as much information into a child's head as it can possibly hold without exploding. This is when we teach multiplication tables, drill grammar into their thick skulls, teach them basic math up through algebra, spelling, penmanship, history, and so on.

As soon as you teach critical thinking skills, it's like setting the write protect bit: it enables them to make a value judgement on the validity of the information they are being given by the teachers (and other adults), and as soon as you have that, you begin to build distrust of information sources - even ones with good information to impart.

Generally some critical thinking skills form on their own; creative writing, physics, chemistry, debate, and other classes tend to foster their development, regardless of whether or not you are done shoveling the basic stuff into their heads. As soon as that bit is set, you might as well give up trying to program them, you've lost: they're teenagers.

Logic classes belong in the first quarter/semester of your first year of college, and not before.

Yes, though I disagree with your assertion that factory automation is cheap - it demonstrably is not. All you have to do is look at farming. 100 years ago farming employed the majority of the population. Now it employes less than 2% and much of that is due to automation, particularly devices like tractors, irrigation systems and similar technology. However the economy and the farming sector have both grown tremendously.

Number of jobs per widget is an irrelevant measure unless it is related to profitability, particularly if we are only considering the company making the widget and not the rest of the supply chain. It's called productivity and it is a Good Thing. Remember companies don't exist in a vacuum. They have to compete and without productivity gains they will quickly go out of business. The average productivity of a worker in the US is much higher than in China but since China has 5X as many people that is a necessity.

The US manufacturing sector has increased in production sixfold since 1940 while absolute employment totals have declined slightly. As a percent of the workforce the number fell from about 25% to around 10% over the same period but the population grew so total manufacturing employment was closer to constant. Like farming, automation in manufacturing is reducing the percent of the workforce employed in the sector but that doesn't mean the sector is shrinking. Manufacturing has grown hugely and amounts for about $3+ Trillion annually in the US economy. The reason it is shrinking as a percentage is primarily because other (service) sectors are growing even faster.

First off, your example is too simplistic to be reflective of the real world. Fewer employees in a more profitable larger company is not a bad thing and in the real world a big increase in productivity is also usually accompanied by a big increase in overall company growth, including employment. Furthermore more profits means more opportunities for investment and job creation. You also are not considering the supply chain effects. If a company is selling a lot more of widget that generally means that there are a lot of upstream and downstream jobs created to supply and consume and distribute that product. The jobs created might not be in the company that makes the product. Instead it might be with the distributor or retailer that sells it or the warehouse that stocks it or the materials supplier that provides the raw materials for it.

Refuse? No. Cannot. They cannot raise wages that high even if they wanted to. While it is probably true that those companies could raise their workers wages some, they cannot raise them by more than a little bit unless everyone else is forced to do so as well. They are able to offer low prices in large part by keeping a lid on labor costs. Basically all their direct competitors do exactly the same thing. If they raise wages they have to raise prices and someone else gets the business. Go ahead and do the math. If those companies raise their minimum wages to $15 then ALL of their profits and then some will disappear faster than you can say "shareholder lawsuit".

Everyone knows the Time Lords are one of the first races of the galaxy.