That seems to be the right way to fight these things, if those that have been abused as children are against this law, then this law isn't to protect the children, but to simply push it under the rug.
India is already getting too expensive. The Philippines is the hot place now, but wages are rising quickly there also. Companies could start to look to Africa, but the corruption and lack of a government in many of the countries makes that a tough move.
What will happen is as wages rise more and more work will simply be automated. Factories will be built where they most geographically make sense (close to components, raw materials, customers, etc...)
Expect to see mini silicon valleys of manufacturing pop up much like what happened in Detroit with automakers and part suppliers during the hey day.
Also, saying they aren't coming back is ignoring that they never really left. US manufacturing is still growing strong, and the main reason long term for more new factories to not be built in the US will have to do with the EPA more than labor wages.
Speaking of 'necessity as the mother of invention' were there any research on how to increase birth rate? I remember something about Russia increasing it's birth rate, but I don't remember how.
I'd say he was probably going for more uniqueness factor. Lack of care of capitalization, shows just that - lack of care and possible desire to break the norms.
You would be right if his goal was to impress someone but I doubt that was intention of his blog.
I'd like slightly disagree. I do think more people needs to be analytical but without empathy and morality all hacker qualities would be rendered meaningless and pointless.
As a hacker without empathic skills I could pick any goal and ruthlessly implement it:
Goal: Need more organ donors
1. People are unwilling to donate organs
2. Force all prisoners on death row to give away they organs for staying in death row accommodation
3. Kill them in ways that doesn't hurt the organs (they might suffer some inconvenience)
4. Harvest organs
As Charlie Chaplin in Great Dictator said:
"More than machinery we need humanity, more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness, without these qualities life would be violent and all would be lost."
I don't think "empathy" and "morality" are fundamentally required; rather, they are convenient heuristics for interacting with other humans. As long as you are rational, then acting without empathy or morals would still result in similar behavior (depending on how "smart" and well-informed you are, I guess).
A rational agent seeks to maximize utility. It turns out that murdering people for their organs does not maximize utility! At the very least, society is cleverly structured in a way that the probable utility of murdering somebody for their organs is relatively low.
Basically, my point is that your argument is a straw man. The issue isn't too much logic but rather than you (the agent killing everybody in the example) did not use enough of it. For some reason, all the "arguments" about the inferiority of logic always assume the logical person is extremely short-sighted or ill-informed.
You can call it a heuristic or a guideline, but I consider them essential. Perfectly rational agents without empathy can commits massive acts of evil trying to achieve their goal. Or as the proverb says "Road to hell is paved with good intentions".
And I don't think short-sightedness or ill-informing was ever an integral part with arguing about how empathy is essential to human live. IIRC there was an example of perfectly informed and rational computer of super human intelligence who was told to calculate a particularly difficult equation, to which he promptly restructured all matter on earth, including people into a giant super-computer.
Societal structure is not a constant. In China, for example, the government willingly admitted that 2/3 of organ donations came from executed prisoners (2009), as proposed by the original argument. A purely rational Chinese person probably wouldn't consider criticising this policy to be a means of maximising his utility, and it's not even easy to make an argument that abolition of that specific practice in isolation would maximise society's utility.
I doubt it. If evolution really needed death then why does an immortal jelly-fish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula) exist? Granted their final life stage is a polyp which creates a new young medusa, but there theoretically could be a specimen that is 7 millions years old. Either way they wouldn't need to change for number of generations.
I'd like to see him explaining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
or how Gary Kasparov was beaten (well tied at first) by a computer. I mean did Gary got really dumber in span of a year or so?
I think the reason people somewhat erroneously try to 'robotize' people is the fact that they want consistency even if the quality is poorer.
I'd say plethora is wrong at least in US. Ridiculous retroactive copyright extensions would be my main gripe (though I doubt Grooveshark has any works that are about to become public domain). Or creative accounting that makes artist indebted even if their song is sold in millions.
Also I have a suspicion that most people use Grooveshark as a form of radio in such way that it doesn't really feed on artists main source of profit (CDs and concerts).
However don't take this out of context I still dislike lack of any mechanisms for artist reimbursement.
