Two interesting serious stories about the world we live in.....if you have time, read #1 and also #5......you need to be aware of these things folks.....
1/ Work, jobs and the economy are at the front of everyone's minds, but keeping people employed in first world countries is affected by macro forces - the obvious example is the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to Asia and other low wage countries. Electronic communication and computers [email, Blackberries] have revolutionised office work, eliminating countless white collar jobs [remember secretaries?].
Guess what's next? Robots.
Industrial robots have quietly advanced in efficiency and got much cheaper, and factories around the world are investing heavily in the machines, eliminating skilled work for humans along the way.
This is scary stuff folks - the world is changing......
One comment on this - this revolution makes corporations richer by cutting their costs [payroll] and improving the quality of their products, as robots don't make mistakes. But does society as a whole benefit by having superprofitable corporations and no skilled work for it's people? It would be tolerable if the corporations paid their fair share of taxes, but giant companies lobby for loopholes and end up paying less than Mitt Romney....
For what the oligarchs really think of their workers, read the last line of this excerpt....
DRACHTEN, the Netherlands — At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.......
At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.
One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.
All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.
Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.
Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/
2/ The Democratic Party needs some real people for the Convention in North Carolina, and John Oliver does his best to find that person......one is a Marine who's life was saved in Iraq by a gay Medic......perfect for the event......
Most amusing.....5 minutes........
3/ Charles Blow, a columnist in the Times, is pissed - he exoricates the Romney campaign for it's lies, shady tactics and obvious corruption.......bought and sold by billionaires.....
Shady money, voter suppression, shifting positions, murky details and widespread apathy.
If there is a road map for a Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan win in November, that’s it. Distasteful all.
As The New York Times reportedthis week, Paul Ryan made the trip on Tuesday to kiss the ring of Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner who has pledged to spend as much as $100 million to defeat President Obama. No reporters were allowed in, of course.
As The Times’s editorial page pointed out on Friday:
“Last year, his company, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, announced that it was under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — specifically, that it bribed Chinese officials for help in expanding its casino empire in Macau. Later, the F.B.I. became involved, and even Chinese regulators looked askance at the company’s conduct, fining it $1.6 million for violating foreign exchange rules,The Times reported on Monday.”
There was a saying I heard growing up in Louisiana: “Bad money doesn’t spend right.”
On Wednesday, a judge in Pennsylvania who is a Republican refused to block a ridiculously restrictive, Republican-backed voter identification law from going into effect in the state, which is a critical swing state. Surprise, surprise.
And to add insult to injury, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Friday: “On the same day a judge cleared the way for the state’s new voter identification law to take effect, the Corbett administration abandoned plans to allow voters to apply online for absentee ballots for the November election and to register online to vote.”
Corbett is Tom Corbett, the Republican governor of the state.
In June, State Representative Mike Turzai, a Republican and the Pennsylvania House majority leader, ripped the veneer off the purpose of the voter changes in the state when he declared, “voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done.”
Angry yet? Well wait, there’s more.
4/ If you watched the amazing closing ceremonies of the Olympics you may have been upset [as I was] NBC showed a comedy show instead of the final acts......The Who, Ray Davies of the Kinks, and The Muse.......
For anyone who wonders what you missed this is what I found.....about 90 seconds of each.......apparently The Who did three songs.....
Click on the smaller pictures underneath.......
5/ Some of you may remember the excellent article by Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone on climate change I sent around a few weeks ago....he has done a follow-up on the ice melt in Greenland, which is much worse than expected.......
You may not want to read this stuff folks, but if you want to know what's coming you need to....otherwise you will be as clueless as Fox viewers......
he Arctic Ice Crisis
Pools of water form as ice melts atop Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland.
AP Photo/Brennan Linsley
August 16, 2012 10:10 AM ET
There's no place on Earth that's changing faster – and no place where that change matters more – than Greenland. Late last month, NASA reported that ice all across the vast glacial interior of the world's largest island was melting – a "freak event" that hadn't occurred for at least 150 years. The alarming discovery briefly focused the media's attention on a place that rarely makes headlines. RAPID ICE MELT BAFFLES SCIENTISTS, The Wall Street Journal declared.
In fact, scientists weren't baffled at all – a paper published just weeks before had predicted that an abrupt, islandwide melt was imminent. The rapid loss of ice is only the latest in a chain of events that have upended conventional understanding of how the Earth's "cryosphere" – its frozen places – behave. Taken together, the events offer new insight into how fast the world's seas are likely to rise as a result of global warming – and hence, the fate of major cities like New York and Miami and Mumbai.
Jason Box, a scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center, has probably spent more time in Greenland than any American of his generation. He began his yearly treks to the island in the 1990s as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, helping his professor install a series of automated weather stations; last month he was sleeping on a sailboat near the mouth of a huge glacier and traveling onto the ice by helicopter to install yet more sensors. The shift he and his team have measured over the course of the past two decades is startling. "When I took my first course in glaciology," Box says, "conventional thought had the reaction time of the ice sheets to heating on the order of 10,000 years." The ice sheet, scientists believed, was a mostly inert ice cube frozen fast at its bed; if the glaciers melted because of global warming, the process would be, well, glacial.
But in a series of scientific epiphanies beginning in 2002, researchers using GPS have found that melting on the ice's surface can cause large sections of the ice sheet to break free of its moorings in hours, not millennia. In 2006, scientists discovered that ice was suddenly pouring into the ocean at twice the rate previously measured, spurred by a pulse of warm ocean temperatures that undercut the glaciers from below. In two separate instances, Box correctly predicted which sections of a glacier would soon break off – sections, in each case, that were many times larger than the island of Manhattan.
But Box's most crucial contribution to ice science – and the scariest part of his new findings – involves his measurement of Greenland's reflectivity, or "albedo."
http://www.rollingstone.com/Here is the article from three weeks ago - I took a deep breath and reread it, and it makes me really sad for the next generations.......severe weather is going to affect us Boomers quite a bit, but our kids and grandchildren will be in a different, tougher world........
Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
Three simple numbers that add up to global catastrophe - and that make clear who the real enemy is
If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.
http://www.rollingstone.com/
6/ The President has a new attack ad out, focusing on beer......
Beer? Huh? One minute........
7/ And continuing the climate change stories, air conditioner usage is rocketing up in India, China and other third world countries with a growing middle class.....the new status symbol in these hot countries is A/C......and guess what's really bad for CO2 - air conditioning.
It's a spiral - each unit uses coolants which are bad for CO2 emissions, but also requires more electricity which is mostly coal fired plants.....and it's getting hotter, so there's more usage.
THE blackouts that left hundreds of millions of Indians sweltering in the dark last month underscored the status of air-conditioning as one of the world’s most vexing environmental quandaries.
Fact 1: Nearly all of the world’s booming cities are in the tropics and will be home to an estimated one billion new consumers by 2025. As temperatures rise, they — and we — will use more air-conditioning.
Fact 2: Air-conditioners draw copious electricity, and deliver a double whammy in terms of climate change, since both the electricity they use and the coolants they contain result in planet-warming emissions.
Fact 3: Scientific studies increasingly show that health and productivity rise significantly if indoor temperature is cooled in hot weather. So cooling is not just about comfort.
Sum up these facts and it’s hard to escape: Today’s humans probably need air-conditioning if they want to thrive and prosper. Yet if all those new city dwellers use air-conditioning the way Americans do, life could be one stuttering series of massive blackouts, accompanied by disastrous planet-warming emissions.
We can’t live with air-conditioning, but we can’t live without it.
8/ Jon Stewart as reporter is better than any of the mainstream corporate media - here he sums up the Pennsylvania Voter iD law for the travesty it is......excellent, and with a bonus - it's funny too......5 minutes......
On Thursday night's "Daily Show," Jon Stewart had a bone to pick with the Pennsylvania lawmakers who are passing restrictive voter ID laws in the state just in time for election season. The problem isn't so much that the law requires voters to provide photo identification, it's that it specifically targets the elderly, the young and minorities -- all groups that tend to vote Democrat. In fact, it impacts the ability of at least 9% of the Pennsylvania electorate to have their voices heard on election day.
"But that's the price you pay to prevent something that doesn't happen," Stewart joked.
Between House Republican Majority Leader Mike Turazi claiming the law would "allow Governor Romney to win the state," and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court purporting that the new laws could be applied in a "non-partisan" manner, there was a lot of "WTF?" to go around.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
9/ A university professor from UCF was frustrated enough to write an open letter to his students, reminding them of why they are at college and how to behave in his classroom.......most interesting.....
Dr. Charles Negy, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida, had to email an extra, elementary lesson to his students -- one so basic and of such societal value that it was posted on Reddit.
Striking a tone somewhere between ivory tower and a mother's lecture, Negy challenged his students to step outside the context of their own cultures for a frank discussion on religious bigotry, a talk apparently interrupted by several students expressing bigoted views, in Negy's opinion.
"We're adults. We're at a university," he concludes. Read the letter below to how he arrived at this point.
Hello, Cross-Cultural students, I am writing to express my views on how some of you have conducted yourself in this university course you are taking with me. It is not uncommon for some-to-many American students, who typically, are first-generation college students, to not fully understand, and maybe not even appreciate the purpose of a university. Some students erroneously believe a university is just an extension of high school, where students are spoon-fed “soft” topics and dilemmas to confront, regurgitate the “right” answers on exams (right answers as deemed by the instructor or a textbook), and then move on to the next course.Not only is this not the purpose of a university (although it may feel like it is in some of your other courses), it clearly is not the purpose of my upper-division course on Cross-Cultural Psychology. The purpose of a university, and my course in particular, is to struggle intellectually with some of life's most difficult topics that may not have one right answer, and try to come to some conclusion about what may be “the better answer” (It typically is not the case that all views are equally valid; some views are more defensible than others). Another purpose of a university, and my course in particular, is to engage in open discussion in order to critically examine beliefs, behaviors, and customs.
10/ Yeay - Bill Maher's back, and here is his New Rules segment from Friday's show - not his best, but we'll take what we can get.....6 minutes.......
11/ Regular readers of DDD know I'm a sucker for sci-fi movies, and this one has a lot of buzz - "Looper", with Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and directed by Rian Johnson. The cast is raving about it.......could just be publicity, but who knows......
The premise is - time travel in the future is outlawed, but the criminal mobs send anyone they want "gone" back to now, where a "looper" kills them without trace. The kicker is they send back the looper from 30 years in the future, so he has to kill his older self......sounds confusing, but the trailer is very cool......
12/ Saturday Paul Ryan spoke at the Villages, dragging out his mother and promising not to touch her Medicare......the always reliable crowd of Republican old faithfuls cheered on cue......
But there's a dark side to the Villages - everything including the politics is controlled by the billionaire owner Gary Morse who is spending lavishly to defeat the President.....
Excellent story from the Tampa Bay Tribune on this empire of right wingers.....
THE VILLAGES — It's happy hour on a steamy summer evening and the band is playing covers of Jimmy Buffett, Pat Benatar and Aerosmith.
Couples sway to the music. Others shuffle in an uneven line dance.
As the sun goes down at the Villages, a 55-and-up retirement community, a crowd slathered in sunscreen ambles about, tossing back vodka and gin-and-tonics (easy on the tonic).
"Most everyone worked 40 to 45 years to get here," says Mike Mittal, a 69-year-old retired corporate pilot from Cincinnati who moved to town four years ago. "And they just want to have fun now."
Their playground is a 5-square-mile area about 90 miles northeast of Tampa Bay that once was rolling cow pasture and ripe watermelon fields. Disneyland for Adults or the Bubble is what residents call it now. The grandkids call it Seniors Gone Wild.
This new twist on retirement living promises robust sales for years to come, but the most important feature about the Villages transcends Florida real estate.
Drawing retirees from the Northeast and Midwest, this planned community is one of the most critical — and dependable — voting blocs in the nation. The development's 61,000 registered voters reside in a battleground region Republicans need to dominate if they are to defeat President Barack Obama in November.
Twice as many Republicans as Democrats live here. Independents tilt rightward, too. With a turnout averaging 80 percent, it has become a fixed stop on the campaign trail for Mitt Romney, who has visited twice in the past year.
One man is credited with molding this constituency.
The creator of the Villages, H. Gary Morse, inherited his father's development business and turned it into one of the most lucrative residential projects in the United States, ushering him into the ranks of the world's richest. Morse and his family have contributed $1.8 million to the cause of removing Obama from the White House.
His biggest contribution, however, will be the Villages vote on Election Day. Now 75, Morse controls just about every facet of life here. And that includes politics, say Democrats like Joseph Flynn, a 69-year-old retired insurance executive from Connecticut.
"You don't know you're being controlled, but you really are," Flynn said. "And Morse is the one who controls you. He wants that control . . . to influence what he can, including the next president."
• • •
Morse seems to be everywhere in the Villages — and nowhere.
He not only sold the project's 40,000 homes, but he owns the mortgage company that financed many of them. He owns part of the bank, too. And the hospital, the water and sewer utility, the TV and radio stations, newspaper, monthly magazine, country clubs and commercial center that has lured a T.G.I. Friday's, Panera Bread Bakery Cafe, Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, and IZOD.
"There isn't anything that makes money here that he doesn't get a piece of," said Flynn.
Yet like dozens of other residents and merchants interviewed, Flynn said he has never met or even seen the man.
13/ Jimmy Kimmel has a regular segment called "The Week in Unnecessary Censorship".....quite amusing, one minute.....the one with Michelle Obama looks completely natural.....
14/ For those of you with the excellent taste to be addicted to "The Good Wife", the most intelligent drama on the air, this is an interview with Christine Baranski who plays Diane in the series.......
In the third season of CBS’s The Good Wife, Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart found herself on the defense, fending off attacks from the equity partners after the suspension of her partner, Will (Josh Charles), a grand jury investigation, uppity clients, and vengeful adversaries.
15/ Time for car envy.....this is a review of the totally revamped Porsche Boxster.......slaver, drool.....Mary!
PORSCHE doesn’t like to be rushed. But while it took the company’s lab-coated obsessives 16 years to fully redesign the Boxster, the two-seat convertible has steadily evolved into one of the world’s best sports cars.
Flaunting retro-Spyder curves, the Boxster made a splash for 1997 as a more affordable midengine counterpart to Porsche’s revered 911. It’s hard to imagine now, with Porsche cranking out respectable production volumes and sizable profits with the Cayenne S.U.V. and Panamera sedan, but before the Boxster the company had devolved into a one-trick pony, troubled by quality issues and inefficiency. The 911, with only about 15,000 annual sales worldwide, wasn’t enough to keep Porsche afloat.
After dropping plans for a high-price sedan, Porsche bet the farm on the Boxster. But to have any chance at making money on a $40,000 sports car, Porsche had to hire former Toyota engineers — again, almost unfathomable — to tear down, revamp and modernize the entire company.
The efficiency expert James P. Womack wrote in Autoweek magazine, “Porsche wouldn’t be around if they hadn’t stared into the abyss and eaten a lot of crow.” He added, “To make any money on the car, the old Porsche would have had to sell it for $80,000.”
Or, 16 years later, for $88,720 — the sticker price of my 2013 Porsche Boxster S test car, larded like a veal chop with $27,000 in options. (At Porsche, the more things change... .) And that was for a model with a 6-speed manual transmission; adding the brilliant PDK 7-speed automated gearbox would have kicked the price to $91,920.
So much for the “affordable” Porsche. But despite some price inflation, the new Boxster starts at a more reasonable level: the base version is $50,450 and the powerful Boxster S starts at $61,850.
Todays video - the classic Monty Python sketch - Dead Parrot.......John Cleese in amazing form......
Todays ladies joke
I had lunch with 2 of my unmarried friends.
One is engaged, one is a mistress, and I have been married for 20+ years.
We were chatting about our relationships and decided to amaze our men by greeting them at the door wearing a black bra, stiletto heels and a mask over our eyes. We agreed to meet in a few days to exchange notes.
Here's how it all went.
My engaged friend:The other night when my boyfriend came over he found me with a black leather bodice, tall stilettos and a mask.
He saw me and said, 'You are the woman of my dreams.
I love you.' Then we made passionate love all night long.
The mistress:
Me too! The other night I met my lover at his office and I was wearing a raincoat, under it only the black bra, heels and
Mask over my eyes. When I opened the raincoat he didn't say a word, but he started to tremble and we had wild sex all night.
Then I had to share my story:
When my husband came home I was wearing the black bra,
Black stockings, stilettos and a mask over my eyes.
When he came in the door and saw me he said,
"What's for dinner, Zorro?"
Todays golf joke
THER WAS A DISCUSSION IN THE CLUBHOUSE WHO WAS THE BETTER GOLFER, JOHN OR BILL. TO SETTLE THE ARGUMENT A MATCH WAS ARRANGED TO COMMENCE AT 10AM OVER 4 DAYS.
THE FIRST MORNING THEY BOTH SHOWED UP ON TIME AND T'D OFF; JOHN WAS LEFT HANDED AND BILL RIGHT HANDED.
THE SECOND MORNING A STRANGE PHENOMENON OCCRRED; THEY BOTH SHOWED UP ON TIME, BUT JOHN WHO IS LEFT HANDED T'D OFF RIGHT HANDED;
CURIOUSLY BILL ASKED WHY,
JOHN REPLIED, I AM A BIT SUPERSTITIOUS; WHEN I WAKE UP IN THE MORNINGS WHICHEVER SIDE MY WIFE IS LAYING ON THAT IS THE WAY I TEE OFF; IF SHE IS LAYING ON HER RIGHT SIDE I TEE OFF RIGHT HAND, IF SHE IS LAYING ON THE LEFT SIDE I TEE OFF LEFT HAND;
BILL ASKED WHAT IF SHE IS LAYING FACE UP?
JOHN REPLIED, THAT'S THE MORNING I'LL BE TWENTY MINUTES LATE!!
Todays family joke
And a short joke for the guys
The wife left a note on the fridge "It's not working, I can't take it anymore!! Gone to stay with my Mother."
I opened the fridge, the light came on and the beer was cold.........
What the hell is she talking about?
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