A woman said she lost her power in Hurricane Florence but was still fired for not showing up for a shift at the restaurant where she worked.
Views: 33
Also only in the USA
Monthly Archives: September 2018
Only in the USA
What to fear from automation
The pundits talk a lot about the threat of automation. But they don’t look at historical examples and so they mis-estimate the consequences.
Farm work
In the late 1800s, inventors started building what we now know as “farm machinery”. Between then and the 1940s, the fraction of people employed on farms plummeted, to the point that less than 2% of the population now does farm work.
The former farm workers didn’t become unemployed, but rather moved to cities to work in offices and factories. The time when workers couldn’t move to the cities — the 1930s — the progress of farm automation stalled: the pay of farm workers decreased to essentially subsistence, but they remained generally employed, and farmers didn’t buy any additional machinery to replace them with.
Factory work
The invention of the modern factory around 1900 was a remarkable change. Not only was a lot of work automated, what remained was radically “de-skilled”. What used to take a number of trained artisans now could be done with a building full of unskilled laborers. In many cases, they didn’t even need to know English.
This may not have been good for the employment of artisans, but it was really good for the employment of unskilled laborers, to the point that the U.S. imported them by the millions.
(Note this is an example where automation improved the job prospects of low-skilled workers.)
Household work
During the first half of the 1900s, household work was automated dramatically. The result was that domestic servants essentially vanished as an employment category, and that a tremendous fraction of the lives of adult women was freed.
The result was not mass idleness of adult women, but a huge movement of them into the job market. This made possible, or was, the modern feminist movement.
The observed pattern is that large-scale automation of an area of work doesn’t cause mass unemployment. Automation will often push down wages in a sector, but if there isn’t alternative employment for those workers, the result will be not unemployment, but that their wages go down to the point that automation isn’t profitable.
On the other hand, automation is always good for the customers, as they get the goods for less. From the point of view of the populace as a whole, it’s like a universal basic income — they can suddenly get additional stuff for no extra money.
Automation isn’t a threat to society, but it is a threat to those whose jobs are being automated.
Views: 62
Partisanship is intense enough that Americans are shifting their identities to match
Researchers are starting to see Americans are remarkably flexible regarding their religion and even their sexuality, and on the whole, Americans shift these supposedly fixed parts of their “identity” to match their politics:
There was more inconsistency among answers to these types of questions than I would have expected. For example, about a quarter of people who identified themselves as born-again Christian in at least one of the three interviews either had not described themselves that way in a previous interview or stopped describing themselves that way in a later interview. Nearly half of respondents who identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual at some point during the three interviews did not identify themselves that way in all three (meaning that some people stopped identifying as LGB, while others started to after not having done so at first).
Views: 83
Game of the week
Ulf Andersson is famous for this type of slow squeeze where his opponent’s position gets slowly and imperceptibly worse before cracking under the pressure.
Views: 108
Poem of the day
Jolly Good Ale and Old
by William Stevenson (1530-1575)
I cannot eat but little meat,
My stomach is not good;
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.
Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I nothing am a-cold;
I stuff my skin so full within
Of jolly good ale and old.
Back and side go bare, go bare,
Both foot and hand go cold;
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.
I love no roast but a nut-brown toast,
And a crab laid in the fire;
A little bread shall do me stead;
Much bread I not desire.
No frost nor snow, no wind, I trow,
Can hurt me if it would,
I am so wrapped and throughly lapped
Of jolly good ale and old.
Back and side go bare, go bare,
Both foot and hand go cold;
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.
And Tib, my wife, that as her life
Loveth well good ale to seek,
Full oft drinks she till ye may see
The tears run down her cheek.
Then doth she troll to me the bowl,
Even as a maltworm should,
And saith, “Sweetheart, I took my part
Of this jolly good ale and old.”
Back and side go bare, go bare,
Both foot and hand go cold;
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.
Now let them drink till they nod and wink,
Even as good fellows should do;
They shall not miss to have the bliss
Good ale doth bring men to.
And all poor souls that have scoured bowls
Or have them lustily trolled—
God save the lives of them and their wives,
Whether they be young or old.
Back and side go bare, go bare,
Both foot and hand go cold;
But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.
Views: 33
What happens when two abominations are permitted to mate and spawn
Views: 52
Poem of the day
Kirschblüte bei der Nacht
by Brockes Barthold Heinrich (1680-1747)
Ich sahe mit betrachtendem Gemüte
Jüngst einen Kirschbaum, welcher blühte,
In kühler Nacht beim Mondenschein;
Ich glaubt, es könne nichts von größrer Weiße sein.
Es schien, ob wär ein Schnee gefallen.
Ein jeder, auch der kleinste Ast
Trug gleichsam eine schwere Last
Von zierlich weißen, runden Ballen.
Es ist kein Schwan so weiß, da nämlich jedes Blatt,
–Indem daselbst des Mondes sanftes Licht
Selbst durch die zarten Blätter bricht–
Sogar den Schatten weiß und sonder Schwärze hat.
Unmöglich, dacht ich, kann auf Erden
Was Weißers angetroffen werden.
Indem ich nun bald hin, bald her
Im Schatten dieses Baumes gehe,
Sah ich von ungefähr
Durch alle Blumen in die Höhe
Und ward noch einen weißern Schein,
Der tausendmal so weiß, der tausendmal so klar,
Fast halb darob erstaunt, gewahr.
Der Blüte Schnee schien schwarz zu sein
Bei diesem weißen Glanz. Es fiel mir ins Gesicht
Von einem hellen Stern ein weißes Licht,
Das mir recht in die Seele strahlte.
Wie sehr ich mich am Irdischen ergetze,
Dacht ich, hat Gott dennoch weit größre Schätze.
Die größte Schönheit dieser Erden
Kann mit der himmlischen doch nicht verglichen werden.
Views: 30
Poem of the day
To Autumn
by John Keats (1795-1821)
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometime like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn:
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Views: 28
Poem of the day
Hendecasyllabics
by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)
In the month of the long decline of roses
I, beholding the summer dead before me,
Set my face to the sea and journeyed silent,
Gazing eagerly where above the sea-mark
Flame as fierce as the fervid eyes of lions
Half divided the eyelids of the sunset;
Till I heard as it were a noise of waters
Moving tremulous under feet of angels
Multitudinous, out of all the heavens;
Knew the fluttering wind, the fluttered foliage,
Shaken fitfully, full of sound and shadow;
And saw, trodden upon by noiseless angels,
Long mysterious reaches fed with moonlight,
Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel,
Blown about by the lips of winds I knew not,
Winds not born in the north nor any quarter,
Winds not warm with the south nor any sunshine;
Heard between them a voice of exultation,
“Lo, the summer is dead, the sun is faded,
Even like as a leaf the year is withered,
All the fruits of the day from all her branches
Gathered, neither is any left to gather.
All the flowers are dead, the tender blossoms,
All are taken away; the season wasted,
Like an ember among the fallen ashes.
Now with light of the winter days, with moonlight,
Light of snow, and the bitter light of hoarfrost,
We bring flowers that fade not after autumn,
Pale white chaplets and crowns of latter seasons,
Fair false leaves (but the summer leaves were falser),
Woven under the eyes of stars and planets
When low light was upon the windy reaches
Where the flower of foam was blown, a lily
Dropt among the sonorous fruitless furrows
And green fields of the sea that make no pasture:
Since the winter begins, the weeping winter,
All whose flowers are tears, and round his temples
Iron blossom of frost is bound for ever.”
Views: 35