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Comment There is math for that (Score 5, Informative) 540

New jobs - due to innovation or due to other reasons - is what macroeconomics call "growth".
Less jobs for the same effect - due to automation or for other reasons - is what they call an increase in "productivity".
Both effects are measured and reported by various sources.

For the last decades growth has been lower thant productivity gains. These measurements include all the effects he is listing.
The projections for the future are worse. Some of these projections take all these effects into account.

Comment Re:But that doesn't explain (Score 1) 256

In the above post "serial monogamy" is included when I talk about "monogamy".

The alternative is to have multiple intimate relationships at the same time.

If you live in a closed group of less than 50 people with next to no contact to anybody else the relationship to anybody in you world must be relatively intense as is interdependence between everybody in the group. There is no real reason why these relationships should not include sex.

Comment Re:But that doesn't explain (Score 1) 256

As for monogomy, research among cultures around the world do show a consistent view that is "mostly" monogamous. Ie, serial monogamy with occasional cheating on the sly. That's universal.

Monogamy is almost universal among agricultural societies where property and patrimony play an important role. It is also crucial in patriarchates without social welfare where women can't support themselves if not married. (However, even in agricultural societes monogamy is relatively new. The old testament still contains many norms regulating polygamous live.)

Monogomy however is the exception for pure hunter gatherer societies today, Humans lived in societies like that for most of their history. Promiscous societies are rare now because hunter gatherer societies are rare.

Modern industrialized welfare stares remove most of the presurres that resulted in the adoption of monogamy. People start realizing this. As a result polyamory and other open lifestyles are on the rise.

Citations:
https://www.facebook.com/sexatdawn
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyamory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-positive_movement

Comment Re:But that doesn't explain (Score 2) 256

Indeed.
Imagine you are living in a small group of foragers that share all their food and take care of the children together and have next to no property. How exactly could mating with only one partner help you raise your child or sustain food supply? It is also hard to imagine how infanticide could be prevented by monogamy in such a context. A better strategy for a female to avoid infanticide would be to regularly mate with most males so that all males might be the father of each child. And actualy that is what is observed in many pure hunter gatherer societies.

Gorilla, Gibbons and other primates only mate to create offspring. They only copulate a few times per pregancy. Chimps, Bonobos and humans however copulated thousands of times per pregnancy. Sex in these species is not only used to create offspring but also for communication and as a tool to form bonds within a group.

Comment Faulty Conclusion (Score 2) 256

They did a statistic among many primate species. But the conclusion that this applies to humans is propably wrong:

The closest relatives of humans - chimps and bonobos - don't live in monogamous pairs.
Humans share genital features and gender relative body size with bonobos and chimps but not with monogamous primates like gibbons.
And pure hunter gatherer societies that exist know don't live monogamous.

It is very likely that monogamy in humans was triggered by agriculture. It really doesn't make much sense for a population living in small communal groups without property.
http://www.sexatdawn.com/

The research presented in the article might be sound for monogamous primates, but that group of animals does not include humans.

Comment Re:That's nice (Score 2) 717

Even when it comes to murder, there are a number of European contries with higher rates.

Yes. Greenland. A country where most people own a firearm. Also Estonia and Lithuania. Poor countries.

All other european countries, even countries who where in civil war a few years ago have murder rates a factor of 2 to 8 lower than the US.
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html
The link you posted ranks the US, one of the richest nations in the world, at place 103 of 180 countries in murder rate. Something you can be proud of!
Virtually all countries at comparable development to US have murder rates much lower than the US.

Comment Re:Not cost competitive (Score 1) 87

My fault, wrong wording. If you go backwards you see a 30% price increase per year which is a 23% cost reduction when you go forward (1/1.3 = ca. 0,77) which equates to a factor of about 10000 over 44 years.
Photovoltaics system costs in 1969 where about 3000$/kwp compared to about 1.4$/kwp in 2013. This is a factor of 2150 (19% improvement per year). Together with shorter module liveteam and higher maintainance cost and much higher installation area you get the 23% improvement.
I currently can't find 1969 data, but here is a plot going back to 1972:
http://www.nzdl.org/gsdl/collect/envl/archives/HASH0123.dir/p17.gif

I currently don't find long term data for coal, but there is a slow increase since 1995. The gap between coal and solar has been rapidly closing.

It is not guaranteed that the same cost can be reached, but we are allready down to a factor of 3, coming from a factor of several thousand. Currently no significant slow down in improvement is apparent. There is no data to support that coal will continue to be less expensive than solar twenty years from now. Denying this is similar to those who in the face of moores law claimed that there never could be interactice 3D computer graphics with bump mapping.

Comment Re:Not cost competitive (Score 1) 87

a)
End customers often pay more than those 10ct due to transportation losses and other overhead. So if you are connected ton the grid and have a minimum power requirement higher than the peak output of this system, the system is profitable.

b)
Coal has seen very little cost improvement over the last decades while solar is co stantly improving at 30% per year since the sixties. It is intermediate steps like this system that are likely to make solar one of the least expensive technologies around.

(BTW: A recent survey revealed that solar installation overhead costs are 3x as high in the US compared to Germany due to less efficient work organization. So if IBMs numbers are for the US there is immediate room for improvement.)

Comment Re:Stay the hell away from the F35 (Score 1) 484

You argument is completely unrelated to mine.
Observe that my argument of analysing demand could well result in the observation that more engineers are needed.
It could also come to the results that there are diminishing returns and that having less engineers will result in almost the same advantage for significantly less money. A demand analysis will show which is the case.

But it seems that you are arguing that more military tech is always better, not matter what.
I suggest that you at once stop producing food and train all these people to be engineers and mechanics to make sure that the taliban don't have better drones than you do.

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