It's adorable that a labor union wants to protect jobs. Good job, buddy!

Color me unpersuaded. I want us to take a consumer welfare first approach because that's what's really important. Forcing us to waste resources by keeping people doing something a machine can do better and cheaper makes no long term sense.

If customers decide their welfare is best served by having humans do the work, that's great. If they decide cheap and automated is better, so be it. What a Luddite labor union wants is totally irrelevant.

Yeah, I'd like some context too. 68k particles sounds like a lot. But for comparison, how many dust particles do I inhale every day? How many actual dust mites? How many non-plastic particles of various sizes do we inhale?

A human lung has something like 10-100 billion cells. That means we inhale one particle per lung cell every 15 years. Are the consequences of this measurable? Or are the health consequences of sitting at a desk all day ranting to strangers far worse?

Do they, though? Some of the worst air quality in California is in the central valley, a vast agricultural region.

Do or do not, there is no trite guideline that will make a difference.

If they are going to try, they may want to pick something easier first. Getting people to put down their crack pipes after two hours seems more achievable.

If they were going to use a blockchain to publish information used to derive statistics in a way that makes it impossible for the government to fudge the numbers then that might be worth something, but bullshit is bullshit whether it's printed on paper or engraved on stone tablets. If they want to impress me they'll at least need to explain how they're going to leverage AI to enable a cloud-based paradigm shift in wherever I was going with this sentence before my brain trigger an emergency shutoff to preserve my sanity.

There are also plenty of other aspects of the government that I'd rather see opened up before anything related to the economy. Everyone is participating in that and can make their own judgements as to how that's going regardless of what data (good or junk) the government is putting out. I want to know how much time is being wasted on trying to overthrow the government of country X or where the Pentagon is actually disappearing billions of dollars to far more than what our GDP is.

Some will hear that message and decide that, rather than paying a lawyer to review every job ad, maybe it's time to relocate to Singapore.

Flooding the job market with fake ads makes it harder for their competitors to recruit.

The proposed law is unlikely to be effective because it's difficult to prove an ad was fake rather than just unproductive.

Like many other regulations, it kicks in only for companies with 50 or more employees. For years, I worked for a company with exactly 49 employees. Anytime we hired someone, we fired someone else to keep the headcount below that deadly threshold.

I don't know about anyone else. I don't think anyone particularly cares when a suit talks about leveraging our synergies. Fine, whatever, everyone knows what that means in normal English.

What gets in the way as a grunt engineer is knowing what all the TLAs and project codenames mean.

The flip side that I don't believe many want to acknowledge is that the same actions also lifted several million out of poverty or otherwise saved/lengthened their lives. There's very little we do that has purely positive or purely negative effects. The real world is rarely so black and white and the choices we have a a series of compromises and tradeoffs. A person who is facing starvation tomorrow is not going to care about what the world will be like next year, much less 100 years, as a consequence of them trying to stay alive. Of even less concern is what bad things anyone posting about it on the Internet has to say about them. They're not going to stop making those decisions either unless they have a better alternative and navel gazing ain't it.

What does free speech have to do with smartphones? Even in the United States schools place limitations on students regularly. You don't get to stand up in the middle of class and scream gibberish because of your free speech results, nor can you refer to your teacher using any number of a serious of derogatory terms without finding yourself being directed to the principal's office. You shouldn't expect to be able to wear a shirt with drug references on it or anything else that violates a dress code without being sent home to change.

I expect that schools in South Korea are quite similar in those regards. How does being allowed or forbidden from having a phone in school change any of those things?

Of course it does.

Hint: The deal was announced in Washington, DC, not Seattle or Chicago.

This was political.

I assume the Koreans are shrewd enough to write the contract so they can back out if Trump fails to keep his side of the deal.

My gas-guzzling SUV gets 12 miles to the gallon, but I am more ethically virtuous than you because my watch is carbon-neutral.

It's not even necessary to run the numbers. Anyone can eschew the benefits of industrial society and go live in a yurt or the local equivalent. Very few choose to do that and even the past movements in the U.S. that did go off to form their own separate communities have tended not to last. The exceptions tend to be religious communities that have existed for hundreds of years. Meanwhile there are no end of people trying to move into more industrialized countries from less industrialized ones.

Humans aren't going to stop wanting better lives. Be thankful that your own is so good that there's nowhere better for you to move to. If you want to strive for something then work to develop solutions to the engineering problems of elevating the rest of humanity to the same standards of living enjoyed in the West. Bemoaning humanity for wanting more or trying to shove the genie back into to bottle is just a form of self-flagellation.

Speak for yourself. I intend to live forever or die trying.

Once they have access to a device or an account, they have access to all of it. A court can always rule it inadmissible as evidence, but parallel construction is always a possibility. The technology does not exist to support what access a judge may limit law enforcement to and there are not always neutral third parties to carry out data extraction to ensure that it is limited to what is legally ordered.