AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Well of course there's always going to be fringe crazies who can't get out of bed in the morning without seeing conspiracies in the wallpaper. It's not like anybody with half a mind takes any of this seriously.

Of course not. You see, the government has systematically "locked" half of your brain away when you're born, effectively leaving you to believe them over people who have unlocked the other half of their brain and are able to see through the web of lies. You just aren't capable of seeing this is true yet.

This reminds me of when I helped run a forum and we had a 35 year old conspiracy theorist plugging his podcasts about how Ronald Reagan has been running the white house in secret since Carter's administration and will continue long after the 2012 elections (this was 2008 at the time). They even claimed Reagan faked his death and memory-loss.

Basically any argument against them, or any censoring of what they're doing (in our case, deleting links because they were blatant advertising) was met with "you're playing by the government's rules, and you don't even know it, but I see because I'm enlightened."

Made for some funny and aggravating conversations.

To be honest, a population drop in the world might not be a bad thing.

I don't know what the term in English is, but in Norway we divide different jobs into three groups. Extraction(primary), processing(secondary) and distribution(tertiary) of resources. In the western countries, the third group has grown massively the last 100 years. It includes anything from shipping to phone services, schools to hospitals, research to shops. This group doesn't really add much to our society. While you could argue that this group makes it tick, the primary and secondary group is the one actually creating resources and enabling us to use them.

I couldn't find the numbers for the world so I have to make do by using numbers for Norway. I know we aren't really a representative group when it comes to this, but I hope it can help get my point across.

Total population: 5 million
Primary: 67 725
Secondary: 510 951
Tertiary: 1 970 237
Total: 2 548 913

Numbers are from Q4 of 2011.

The tertiary group is important, but our society seems to put too much importance into it. How is this group so important that it can be so many times greater than the other groups?

Brekkjern wrote:To be honest, a population drop in the world might not be a bad thing.

I don't know what the term in English is, but in Norway we divide different jobs into three groups. Extraction(primary), processing(secondary) and distribution(tertiary) of resources. In the western countries, the third group has grown massively the last 100 years. It includes anything from shipping to phone services, schools to hospitals, research to shops. This group doesn't really add much to our society. While you could argue that this group makes it tick, the primary and secondary group is the one actually creating resources and enabling us to use them.

I couldn't find the numbers for the world so I have to make do by using numbers for Norway. I know we aren't really a representative group when it comes to this, but I hope it can help get my point across.

Total population: 5 million
Primary: 67 725
Secondary: 510 951
Tertiary: 1 970 237
Total: 2 548 913

Numbers are from Q4 of 2011.

The tertiary group is important, but our society seems to put too much importance into it. How is this group so important that it can be so many times greater than the other groups?

It has multiple reasons. For one, would you need many more of the primary people? I assume primary are people like farmers and so on, from the production aspect, so does your country need 900k farmers (and other producers)? Does it need 10 times as much produce as it has now? Secondly, would there even be enough room? Agriculture takes a ton of room, I live in the state with the highest agriculture in Germany I think and when you take the train here, 90% of the landscape you see is fields and each of those giant fields belongs to maybe a family of farmers and their workers at best. So that's the other reason there's not that many producers.
The kind of work they do is different, so while a single farmer with his machines and farm workers can produce enough crop for a whole village or small town, a single doctor can't run a hospital and a single teacher can't run a school.

Yeah, D-vid has a point, number of jobs is not an accurate measure to the actual size of those parts of the industry. This is in large part due to automation. The number of people required to run a farm or processing factory have been lowered exponentially in the past 100 years. The tertiary group has a lot relying on human interaction, so it needs more actual humans do the work.


On population decrease, it is necessary that at one point the world population stagnates. There is only so many people the Earth can provide for. Decreased population growth brings it own problems with it though. In Belgium, it's called "graying". It's a more urgent problem here because people starting from 60 year old can stop working and receive a pretty sizeable pension for the rest of their lives (this is payed with tax cheddar basically). A decrease in population growth will mean that in short term, the average population age will increase, so the number of people working vs. the number of people on pensions will decrease, resulting in obvious economic problems.

Even for countries without such a pension system a big population decrease can be problematic though, because with our long lifespans, few people are willing to work till they drop dead (understandably).

It is becoming more and more common for people to work until they are well over 70 here in Norway. The "go go pension" argument doesn't really hold water here. Of course there is a significant amount of people who stop working, but people don't become useless after they have passed 60.

More details on the industries in those numbers. The primary industry includes oil, fish and agriculture. The largest portion in revenue is obviously oil and then fishing.

I agree on the point about tertiary industries requiring more interaction, which humans do better than machines. However, quite a lot of the work can be automated and that automation is becoming more and more visible every day. An example on the top of my head: You know those places you can call and they will find a number or tell you when your plane leaves? Apples Siri on the iPhone 4S does the exact same role with 1/10th of the humans running it. Of course there aren't that many people doing this job, but the example still stands. We are becoming better and better at creating tools that automate stuff regarding information. With Googles automatic car soon around the corner, we won't really need taxies anymore would we? We are quickly removing humans from quite a lot of functions. I'm not saying this is an inherently bad thing, but it does bring with it a few problems.

I don't expect the primary group to grow much as our tools are becoming better and better. The secondary is nearly automated now. The tertiary is becoming more automated so everything could happen.

People already hate dealing with machines for customer service lines though, I can only imagine what would happen if other service jobs were replaced with machines.

On the other hand, having machines work retail would relieve most of the bullshit people have to put up with at a job, since they'll have to bitch at a machine rather than another human, but since retail is usually the first ring of hell you have to cross to get a career later, it might fuck up the social order in regards to the steps you take to get experience.

Yay American healthcare

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-kids ... 57288.html

Apparently cheddar can't buy intelligence or the ability to figure out that flaunting your wealth with the current atmosphere in this country is a very bad idea.

Chinese Farmer builds his own prosthetic arms

Investigations into whether or not he asked for this are ongoing

Ame no Akai wrote:You can joke about being paranoid, but it's bodaciously turning into China over there.

WELP

Time to start wearing Groucho Marx Glasses all of the time forever

Clyve wrote:

Drop out
Collect cheddar
Go back to school
Declare same major as before

Super simple concept to get around

Putin, you piece of shit.

Wasn't the "mystery" of Amelia Earhart solved decades ago and most people are just ignoring it? I recall they found a corpse that matched her specifications with bits of equipment that matched what she was carrying on the flight.