HN user
If this happened as reported, then it's a ridiculous story. As several have said one can easily walk outside and take a call if it's really that urgent. However I find that in these stories there tends to be another side to it that isn't being reported. Either way I'm not really sure why it's on Hacker News, not particularly insightful or interesting.
Agreed. This article, and those like it, essentially support their thesis with a bunch of examples, which doesn't really measure or prove anything.
I can think of a number of circumstantial arguments that would indicate technological progress is growing. For example, that world population is at an all-time high, and therefore most likely more people are working on research than ever before. However this doesn't actually prove anything either.
Yeah...not sure I buy it. I put pretty conservative responses and probably had a footprint smaller than the average middle-class American and still got over 20 slaves. Which doesn't really extrapolate well to the country as a whole.
What does it mean that 20 slaves work for you? Does it mean there are 20 slaves who at some point or another use products that you consume, or does it mean that there are an equivalent of 20 slaves working full-time for you (in terms of man-hours or something)? The former metric is rather meaningless since it's unclear what proportion of the labor of those 20 slaves benefits you. Is 1/1000th of their labor output? 50%? This makes a huge difference. The latter metric is meaningful, in that it would mean that you "employ" around 20 slaves. However the mathematics don't really work out in that case, since 20 slaves per person for hundreds of millions of Americans obviously doesn't make sense.
The way it's written as you point out seems to indicate that they're using the former metric, that is, the number of slaves involved in stuff you use, regardless of what proportion of their labor goes toward your lifestyle.
This is an interesting argument but I'm not sure I completely buy it. For a similar example, the Gizmodo/iPhone 4 fiasco definitely led to increased awareness and pageviews for the site. However subsequently their reputation took a hit and they no longer had a good relationship with Apple which hurt their ability to cover future product releases. I don't have any data to really back this up but I imagine in the long term it reduced readership for the site. Funnyjunk is way less known than Gizmodo (I had never heard of it until this recent story), so maybe the increased traffic will have a positive effect in the long term. However I don't think that's a smart or sustainable way to build an audience for any website.