Because, due to the union, they end up with more money even after paying the dues than they would have otherwise.
This is the argument that people try to make all the time but I don't buy it. Unions are designed to negotiate on your behalf. What if I don't want a union to negotiate on my behalf? What if I think I can negotiate a better deal? If I'm an above average employee there is no reason to think that I couldn't negotiate a better deal than a union that is having to negotiate the same deal for everyone which includes both above average and below average employees. Sure unions are fairer for the underdog but to make the claim that everyone should be forced to pay union dues against their will because they somehow all benefit is a lie. There are definitely employees that could negotiate a better deal on their own and they shouldn't be forced to pay union dues especially if they disagree with the union or are morally opposed to it.
The Obama administration sued Boeing for moving jobs from Seattle to South Carolina. So yes, some people believe that moving jobs from higher costs areas to lower cost areas, even within America, is wrong.
The problem is that if you don't allow existing companies to hire employees in lower cost areas then they will eventually go out of business when their new competitors open shop in the lower cost area and offers a cheaper product.
Most private citizens want their legal proceedings private. After all, we've already seen what "a matter of public record" leads to: mugshot websites, voter harassment, and your collected information available to the highest bidder.
I think this is talking about more than just court records. This is talking about all the companies that make you waive your rights and instead are forced to use arbitration of their choosing. The easy solution for court records is to put them as a paper copy in a building and don't allow cameras. This would at least make them somewhat private for the average citizen. The easy solution for arbitration is to not allow it unless both parties agree. And I mean actually agree at the time of disagreement not some boilerplate agreement that is signed or clicked at the beginning in order to get service. For the most part, a person shouldn't be allowed to sign away their rights to sue in court. In certain situations like horseback riding, parachuting, etc... you assume certain risks when you do the activity but that's not the same as signing away your rights to sue if for instance they forget to pack a parachute in your bag.
except almost everyone has multiple fingers.... "two faced lying bastard" is just a description, not a physical property
Exactly, so it must not be merging all the faces into a single face profile because if it was then my brother's name would be just as likely to show up for my dad or my other brother as it would for his kids (50% dna regardless) but that is not what is happening. They know that my brother's kids are being tagged as him so his name shows up as a suggestion on pictures of his kids but not of pictures of his brothers or parents.
But my immediate thought is "what would it take to poison the data". IE, if you can tag your friends, and you have a large enough group of 'em, could you repeatedly tag similar photos (of say, yourself) with different names enough to "muddy the print" ?
Yes, it's already muddy. It suggests my friend's name when their kids appear in the picture as well as when their face appears in the picture so it obviously is able to associate multiple faces with a single person. I'm assuming it works similar to fingerprint scanners where multiple fingers are all recognized as a single person.
Yes, barring an absolute revolution in battery storage densities, we're not going to approach the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels even with sustained incremental advances.
That revolution may happen at some point in the future, but we may need to have a much better handle on physics to do it.
We already know how to store energy at the same density as hydrocarbons. They are called hydrocarbons. The most straightforward solution for a greatly improved battery might be to figure out how to create hydrocarbons on the fly. Likely won't help small portable devices but a plane is large enough that if you could generate hydrocarbons with 500 pounds worth of equipment, it would be worth it. The real problem is not the "battery" but rather that solar just doesn't create that much energy per square foot per hour compared to how much is being consumed. It's comparable to why we have lungs vs gills. We just burn energy too fast. Even if a solar 747 could create all it's own fuel, it would have to be idle for weeks just to make one flight.
Likewise, solar planes will likely not replace a 747, but they may replace balloons and satellites (which are extremely expensive).
Just because something isn't a perfect replacement for an existing piece of technology, doesn't make the development pointless.
Also, a solar plane would not need to be able to fly at night or around the world to be useful. A solar plane that could take off and land in fair weather without using fuel would still be useful. It would still likely need a small battery for emergency landing but not for 8+ hours of flying at night.
Why must the answer *always* be to further tax the consumers?
I would be all about *changing* taxes from sales/income to consumption taxes. But it has to change not just add another tax. Taxing energy usage per person over a certain level would encourage conservation. I think it makes more sense to tax fuel, alcohol, electricity than it does to tax labor. This also has the advantage of being automatically progressive because the people with the bigger houses, private jets, etc... are the ones that would pay more taxes. These are the people who are actually consuming our world versus someone like Warren Buffet who lives relatively frugally. Even someone who buys a million dollar painting is not consuming resources but rather just giving that money to the next person. Taxes should primarily be focused on acts where resources are being actively destroyed. We probably need a certain level of tax-free resources per person so it doesn't disproportionally affect the poor as almost 100% of their income is spent on resources that are destroyed but after a certain level, taxing the consumption of resources seems like the fairest way of taxing people.
I too have thought about limiting maximum number of hours worked but the problem is that many people in the lower income brackets already have to work two sometimes even three jobs to make ends meet. The lower hours will not change unemployment unless the individual has a salary style income that still gets overtime benefits. Hourly employees would just end up having to find more jobs.
Very few of those low income people that are working 2-3 jobs are working full-time jobs and even fewer are likely getting overtime. Capping the week at 40 hours would probably help most of them. If we are going to continue on the employer sponsored healthcare, something else that would help them would be to have healthcare benefits paid out proportional to hours worked. Make it so that every employer has to put $2/hour into a health savings account for employees to buy health insurance regardless of whether they are working 40 hours, 39 hours, 29 hours, or 15 hours per week. That way, someone working multiple part-time jobs could pool the money from their multiple health savings accounts to buy health insurance.
What *I* would like to know is how they protected the cameras. Because the drag and heating effects of a ~3800 mph slipstream are going to be noticeable.
Not sure about the heating effect but did you notice the temperature gauge? It bottomed out at -453F. Less than 7 degrees above absolute zero. I would be highly suspect of the gopro being able to handle that low of temperature. I can't imagine the battery, the electronics, or even the plastic being able to survive that.
Once there are no jobs, because everything is being done by robots and/or artificial intelligence, all of these companies who have no employees will have no one to sell their products to because no one will have any money to buy them.
Nonsense. We are just moving back to the way it used to be where one family had a plantation and had 20 servants and 300 slaves. Even if we're lucky and the computers are the slaves, the servants still make 1/40 what the plantation owners make. That's the service industry that we're moving to where the lucky few have great paying jobs and the rest are barely surviving. There are plenty of places like this around the world, here in the USA we are used to the difference between the rich and the poor generally being less than 1 order of magnitude ($8/hour to $80/hour) but more and more of the wealth is starting to go to the people outside of this range.
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation
No there isn't. Unemployment is at 5%, with is basically full employment. Workforce participation isn't back to where it was in 2007, but basically nearly everyone that wants a job can find one. The problem is that the jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant.
If automation was happening on a massive scale, productivity would be soaring. But productivity is stagnant and barely rising at all. Many manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the 1970s and 1980s, but that process has mostly run its course, and service jobs, which dominate today's economy, are proving much harder to automate.
Someday, robots may steal all our jobs, but there is very little evidence of that happening today.
You're arguing a technicality. Yes, there are jobs still available, but as you admit, they are low paying crap jobs. There are whole industries that revolve around taking advantage of cheap human labor and even those are starting to be automated. Just because we can give everyone a job doesn't mean the original good jobs didn't disappear. It's like a nursing home that replaced all it's doctors and nurses with robots and then hired minimum wage "companions" to sit and talk to the elderly. Yes, technically they still employ the same amount of people but the real jobs are gone. That's what a lot of these service jobs are. It's actually worse than that. Many of the service jobs *could* be automated, these people are just cogs in a machine but it's cheaper to pay someone minimum wage than it is to buy and maintain an expensive robot.
There is an alternative to GBI, and that's public works - the government makes sure that if there are 200 million people that there are 200 million public works jobs available. They could range from childcare to visual arts and engineering. Anything at all that requires a person rather than a machine. Then people have to apply for the positions. This would inspire a little bit of competition and could help satisfy the notion of 'work ethic' that some people have (and seem to want to enforce on other people). The obvious drawback is that it would mean a massivly centralised and centrally controlled government, but hey if a superior AI is contoling everything that might be a good thing.
I agree that public works is a good alternative to GBI. It also help people feel like they are contributing. There are plenty of jobs that could be invented from making trails, to picking up trash, to tutoring. Even something as simple as paying people to volunteer at the 501c3 of their choice. Another option though (or maybe in combination) would be to start reducing the work week in sync with the job loss. If the maximum work week was 40 hours and the government mandated 39 this should in theory lower unemployment by approximately 2.5% when companies hire to replace all that lost work. Many people currently work more that 40 so just setting it at 40 should help the unemployment number. Another less drastic option would be to increase overtime pay to 2 times instead of 1.5 times. 1.5 times is probably about break even for a company compared to hiring a new employee. Moving it to 2 times and it would be cheaper for a company to hire extra employees at 30 hours per week so that during crunch time they can go up to 40. Basically, our automation and efficiency has been going up for years but the hours worked per person has either stayed the same or even gone up. It's a wonder our unemployment is as low as it is. It's probably time to start redistributing that efficiency across the board by increasing people's leisure time.
is not designed to be a full fledged computer, treating it as such is stupid.
Though I will freely admit that many third party apps suck (and are often trying to solve problems that are not suited to the watch).
I agree. It's designed to be a companion to you phone just like the original smart phones were designed to be a companion to your computer. That being said, if I was going to create a watch as a companion, i would make it operate as a second display to the smartphone. Bluetooth has plenty of range to reach the phone in your pocket so why not let the phone do all the heavy lifting. You could use something similar to VNC and when you click on an app on the watch, it runs the program on your phone and you view it on the watch. You could even have apps on the phone that used both displays at once. This way the only thing the watch is responsible for is running the display not executing the app.
I know you're joking. But alcohol actually did contribute a good deal to modern civilization. Beer and wine allowed man to not be perpetually sick, and occasionally dying, from waterborne illness. Rum made routine long-duration ocean voyages possible; leading to trans-oceanic trade and colonization and, eventually, to the British Empire.
You can not survive drinking just alcohol. Sure, alcohol doesn't have the waterborne illness but you would dehydrate in days if all you drank was beer and rum. So no, alcohol didn't allow for long duration ocean voyages or keep people from being perpetually sick.
I understand them liking the iPhone, but it was nowhere near the first viable pocket computer. Not even the first good one.
The iphone was really about being in the right place at the right time. Same with the ipad. What caused the iphone and ipad to take off was they finally reached the feature set, price point, and critical mass to take off. Back in the late 90s I dreamed about having a "webpad". There were several companies that tried to do it but the prices were too high and the technology just wasn't there yet. You could say that apple finally "got it right" but I think it was more that things like bluetooth, wifi, high res screens, processor power, etc.. finally existed and at the right price to make it work. This could be said about many other inventions like the PC, the automobile, the internet, or drones. It takes a certain combination of technology and price points to get something to take off.
So I guess the time has finally come that the US might admit their two-party political system isn't such a great democracy after all?
Although it wouldn't directly affect the presidential race, I think we should move to having members of the house elected at large. Physical districts don't make any sense in today's world where you can drive across a state in a couple hours. It would be much better if the top X candidates of each state became the house of representatives. This would allow someone to run as a libertarian, a representative of chicago, a representative of rural america, but it would also allow people to run as a representative of old people, hispanics, blacks, etc... Basically, in a state with 12 representatives, any group that could get more than 1/12 of the votes for their representative would get a voice. It would be much better than the gerrymandering system we have today where 49% of most districts are unrepresented.
Regardless of how self serving or fraudulent you may think she is, the odds of Hilary accidentally plunging the whole planet into world War three due to ineptitude seems significantly lower than with Trump.
Yep, Clinton is the status quo. If she gets elected then things will likely be exactly the same 4 years from now as it is now. The problem with this is that the majority of the population is not happy with the status quo which is why Trump, Cruz, and Sanders have been getting so many votes. I know many die-hard democrats that voted for Sanders in the primaries but if Sanders doesn't get the nomination they plan to vote for Trump. People want change and Trump/Sanders are campaigning on change. Clinton is campaigning on keeping things the same and I'm not sure that's a winning strategy in this election year. Trump is a loose cannon and unpredictable but he is promising to shake things up and to create new jobs both things that appeal to a large part of the population on both sides of the aisle.
Exactly. It's kindof scary that the most likely next president is hated by 75+% of the population. At least with Sanders or Kasich, the other side of the aisle tolerates them. I'm a republican/libertarian and disagree with most of what Sanders believes but I still think that he is a decent human being. I can't say the same about Hillary or Trump. If it was Kasich vs Hillary, I would vote for Kasich, if it was Trump vs Sanders, I would vote for Sanders, but Hillary vs Trump and I have no idea who to vote. We're either going to have one of the highest turnouts or lowest turnouts in voting history and most people are going to be voting *against* a candidate instead of for a candidate.
I like to use this particular case when talking about commercial piracy. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/20.... In this case, the Army bought software for $4.5 million for 5 servers and ~2,000 workstations but the Army installed it on 100 + servers and 11,000 workstations. The company sued the U.S. government for $180 million and the government settled for $50 million. So the U.S. government willfully and egregiously violated the terms of the contract, you're saying it's not ethical for a company or an individual to try and take the offending client to the bank for egregious violations - that they deserve mercy or something and surely they'll never do it again?
If you assume that the cost was for the servers then: 100/5=20*4.5m=100million 50 millions is a perfectly reasonable settlement if not a little on the low side.
In this case, he was paid 4200 euros for a 3 year contract. Let's say that an indefinite contract is 99 years, that would be 4200*33=138600 euros. Let's assume that the lawyer gets half so let's double the settlement. That's 277200 euros or approximately $318k. Even if you go for gross violation and triple the amount, you're still under the $1 million mark.
So, yes, $2 million seems unreasonable for an extra 2 years. An extra 2 years should be closer to the 4200 that was originally contracted.
I'm frightened that they'll turn comatose/brain-dead people into locked-in people. I consider the latter a fate worse than death.
I was thinking something similar. What exactly happens if they get this person 10% functioning again? Is euthanasia legal for someone previously declared dead or are they now forced to keep this half alive person alive? What if they regain their brain but not their memory (see the book Worthing Saga). Is this a desirable outcome where you have an adult with the brain of an infant that now has to relearn everything? Even if it's 100% and they can eventually return to normal intelligence, you now have 10+ years of learning to walk, read, write, and all the other things we learn in childhood. I'm not even sure that is a desirable outcome.
It must be wonderful being the child of the obscenely wealth. I like Obama and his daughter's are very nice but the whole thing about the gap year just stinks of the privilege that most just do not have.
I got burned out and was running low on money in college so I took a "gap year" by taking a coop with Hewlett Packard. That was the only way I could take a break and still hold onto my financial aid and scholarships. It worked out well for me as I was able to come back with money in the bank and the motivation to finish the rest of my school. I also had a standing offer of employment after I graduated from HP although I didn't end up taking it. Although I would have likely needed some type of job, I would have loved to have taken a proper gap right out of HS but unfortunately most scholarships and loans don't really support that. On the other hand, a gap YEAR really isn't necessary as it's pretty easy for college students to take the summer off and if you can't fix your burnout in 3 months then likely you have bigger problems.
Is it legal to sell whatever is in theses tanks as x-octane gasoline in precise quantities? Isn't this asking for rampant fraud?
Are regulations really necessary? Ebay, uber, etc... have solved this pretty well. If someone doesn't give you a full tank or gives you defective fuel then you rank them as a bad seller and the market fixes itself. More importantly, there are laws against fraud, false advertising, etc... Even without regulating them specifically if someone starts shorting a customer or selling them something other than what they purchased then you catch them in the act and send them to jail.
When a car stops in the middle of a difficult situation because the AI is confused they will make that situation even worse... humans need to take over quickly and keep traffic moving if possible.
As long as most traffic is still human driving is an exercise in risk mitigation, not a problem with clear stop/go decisions.
That's like a pilot stopping and deciding to defer to the passengers on the plane. If the AI isn't up to the task then it's not a self-driving car. Almost all dangerous situations are high speed situation. Even with human drivers switching drivers at high speed is a hard thing to do. The best thing to do is stop and then switch drivers and once you're stopped the difference between a 10 second switch, a 60 second switch, or even a 10 minute switch is minimal.
However, they aren't going to be taking a tanker truck into a random parking lot, they are going to take a light truck. Yes you could devise some regulations around such a fuel carrier, but I don't think that's what these startups are currently doing.
Tow trucks have been doing this for years and they use standard 5 gallon cans. The only difference I see is that we're now talking 20+ gallons at a time versus 5-10 gallons. Even then, there is a lawn mowing service that frequents the gas station near my house and has a row of five gallon cans on the back of his truck. He easily has 35+ gallons. Many semi trucks have 4 tanks that each hold more than 100 gallons each and they also sell tanks for pickups for farmers to take gas home. Basically, all this is already being done in multiple forms. Some like the farmer taking 500 gallons back to his farm might be a gray area but others like th semi truck with 500 gallons of gas in his 4 tanks is definitely already legal. Semis obviously can't go into certain areas because of their weight but the tanks themselve should be 100% legal. As far as I know there are no restrictions on the size of a vehicle's gas tanks. There possibly are but if so it would definitely have to be in the 200+ gallon range to accommodate large trucks.
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Because, due to the union, they end up with more money even after paying the dues than they would have otherwise.
This is the argument that people try to make all the time but I don't buy it. Unions are designed to negotiate on your behalf. What if I don't want a union to negotiate on my behalf? What if I think I can negotiate a better deal? If I'm an above average employee there is no reason to think that I couldn't negotiate a better deal than a union that is having to negotiate the same deal for everyone which includes both above average and below average employees. Sure unions are fairer for the underdog but to make the claim that everyone should be forced to pay union dues against their will because they somehow all benefit is a lie. There are definitely employees that could negotiate a better deal on their own and they shouldn't be forced to pay union dues especially if they disagree with the union or are morally opposed to it.
The Obama administration sued Boeing for moving jobs from Seattle to South Carolina. So yes, some people believe that moving jobs from higher costs areas to lower cost areas, even within America, is wrong.
The problem is that if you don't allow existing companies to hire employees in lower cost areas then they will eventually go out of business when their new competitors open shop in the lower cost area and offers a cheaper product.
Most private citizens want their legal proceedings private. After all, we've already seen what "a matter of public record" leads to: mugshot websites, voter harassment, and your collected information available to the highest bidder.
I think this is talking about more than just court records. This is talking about all the companies that make you waive your rights and instead are forced to use arbitration of their choosing. The easy solution for court records is to put them as a paper copy in a building and don't allow cameras. This would at least make them somewhat private for the average citizen. The easy solution for arbitration is to not allow it unless both parties agree. And I mean actually agree at the time of disagreement not some boilerplate agreement that is signed or clicked at the beginning in order to get service. For the most part, a person shouldn't be allowed to sign away their rights to sue in court. In certain situations like horseback riding, parachuting, etc... you assume certain risks when you do the activity but that's not the same as signing away your rights to sue if for instance they forget to pack a parachute in your bag.
except almost everyone has multiple fingers.... "two faced lying bastard" is just a description, not a physical property
Exactly, so it must not be merging all the faces into a single face profile because if it was then my brother's name would be just as likely to show up for my dad or my other brother as it would for his kids (50% dna regardless) but that is not what is happening. They know that my brother's kids are being tagged as him so his name shows up as a suggestion on pictures of his kids but not of pictures of his brothers or parents.
But my immediate thought is "what would it take to poison the data". IE, if you can tag your friends, and you have a large enough group of 'em, could you repeatedly tag similar photos (of say, yourself) with different names enough to "muddy the print" ?
Yes, it's already muddy. It suggests my friend's name when their kids appear in the picture as well as when their face appears in the picture so it obviously is able to associate multiple faces with a single person. I'm assuming it works similar to fingerprint scanners where multiple fingers are all recognized as a single person.
Yes, barring an absolute revolution in battery storage densities, we're not going to approach the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels even with sustained incremental advances.
That revolution may happen at some point in the future, but we may need to have a much better handle on physics to do it.
We already know how to store energy at the same density as hydrocarbons. They are called hydrocarbons. The most straightforward solution for a greatly improved battery might be to figure out how to create hydrocarbons on the fly. Likely won't help small portable devices but a plane is large enough that if you could generate hydrocarbons with 500 pounds worth of equipment, it would be worth it. The real problem is not the "battery" but rather that solar just doesn't create that much energy per square foot per hour compared to how much is being consumed. It's comparable to why we have lungs vs gills. We just burn energy too fast. Even if a solar 747 could create all it's own fuel, it would have to be idle for weeks just to make one flight.
Likewise, solar planes will likely not replace a 747, but they may replace balloons and satellites (which are extremely expensive).
Just because something isn't a perfect replacement for an existing piece of technology, doesn't make the development pointless.
Also, a solar plane would not need to be able to fly at night or around the world to be useful. A solar plane that could take off and land in fair weather without using fuel would still be useful. It would still likely need a small battery for emergency landing but not for 8+ hours of flying at night.
Why must the answer *always* be to further tax the consumers?
I would be all about *changing* taxes from sales/income to consumption taxes. But it has to change not just add another tax. Taxing energy usage per person over a certain level would encourage conservation. I think it makes more sense to tax fuel, alcohol, electricity than it does to tax labor. This also has the advantage of being automatically progressive because the people with the bigger houses, private jets, etc... are the ones that would pay more taxes. These are the people who are actually consuming our world versus someone like Warren Buffet who lives relatively frugally. Even someone who buys a million dollar painting is not consuming resources but rather just giving that money to the next person. Taxes should primarily be focused on acts where resources are being actively destroyed. We probably need a certain level of tax-free resources per person so it doesn't disproportionally affect the poor as almost 100% of their income is spent on resources that are destroyed but after a certain level, taxing the consumption of resources seems like the fairest way of taxing people.
I too have thought about limiting maximum number of hours worked but the problem is that many people in the lower income brackets already have to work two sometimes even three jobs to make ends meet. The lower hours will not change unemployment unless the individual has a salary style income that still gets overtime benefits. Hourly employees would just end up having to find more jobs.
Very few of those low income people that are working 2-3 jobs are working full-time jobs and even fewer are likely getting overtime. Capping the week at 40 hours would probably help most of them. If we are going to continue on the employer sponsored healthcare, something else that would help them would be to have healthcare benefits paid out proportional to hours worked. Make it so that every employer has to put $2/hour into a health savings account for employees to buy health insurance regardless of whether they are working 40 hours, 39 hours, 29 hours, or 15 hours per week. That way, someone working multiple part-time jobs could pool the money from their multiple health savings accounts to buy health insurance.
What *I* would like to know is how they protected the cameras. Because the drag and heating effects of a ~3800 mph slipstream are going to be noticeable.
Not sure about the heating effect but did you notice the temperature gauge? It bottomed out at -453F. Less than 7 degrees above absolute zero. I would be highly suspect of the gopro being able to handle that low of temperature. I can't imagine the battery, the electronics, or even the plastic being able to survive that.
But everyone is missing the bigger problem.
Once there are no jobs, because everything is being done by robots and/or artificial intelligence, all of these companies who have no employees will have no one to sell their products to because no one will have any money to buy them.
Nonsense. We are just moving back to the way it used to be where one family had a plantation and had 20 servants and 300 slaves. Even if we're lucky and the computers are the slaves, the servants still make 1/40 what the plantation owners make. That's the service industry that we're moving to where the lucky few have great paying jobs and the rest are barely surviving. There are plenty of places like this around the world, here in the USA we are used to the difference between the rich and the poor generally being less than 1 order of magnitude ($8/hour to $80/hour) but more and more of the wealth is starting to go to the people outside of this range.
There is a very obvious problem of mass unemployment and automation
No there isn't. Unemployment is at 5%, with is basically full employment. Workforce participation isn't back to where it was in 2007, but basically nearly everyone that wants a job can find one. The problem is that the jobs being offered are not very good, and wages are stagnant.
If automation was happening on a massive scale, productivity would be soaring. But productivity is stagnant and barely rising at all. Many manufacturing jobs were lost to automation in the 1970s and 1980s, but that process has mostly run its course, and service jobs, which dominate today's economy, are proving much harder to automate.
Someday, robots may steal all our jobs, but there is very little evidence of that happening today.
You're arguing a technicality. Yes, there are jobs still available, but as you admit, they are low paying crap jobs. There are whole industries that revolve around taking advantage of cheap human labor and even those are starting to be automated. Just because we can give everyone a job doesn't mean the original good jobs didn't disappear. It's like a nursing home that replaced all it's doctors and nurses with robots and then hired minimum wage "companions" to sit and talk to the elderly. Yes, technically they still employ the same amount of people but the real jobs are gone. That's what a lot of these service jobs are. It's actually worse than that. Many of the service jobs *could* be automated, these people are just cogs in a machine but it's cheaper to pay someone minimum wage than it is to buy and maintain an expensive robot.
There is an alternative to GBI, and that's public works - the government makes sure that if there are 200 million people that there are 200 million public works jobs available. They could range from childcare to visual arts and engineering. Anything at all that requires a person rather than a machine. Then people have to apply for the positions. This would inspire a little bit of competition and could help satisfy the notion of 'work ethic' that some people have (and seem to want to enforce on other people). The obvious drawback is that it would mean a massivly centralised and centrally controlled government, but hey if a superior AI is contoling everything that might be a good thing.
I agree that public works is a good alternative to GBI. It also help people feel like they are contributing. There are plenty of jobs that could be invented from making trails, to picking up trash, to tutoring. Even something as simple as paying people to volunteer at the 501c3 of their choice. Another option though (or maybe in combination) would be to start reducing the work week in sync with the job loss. If the maximum work week was 40 hours and the government mandated 39 this should in theory lower unemployment by approximately 2.5% when companies hire to replace all that lost work. Many people currently work more that 40 so just setting it at 40 should help the unemployment number. Another less drastic option would be to increase overtime pay to 2 times instead of 1.5 times. 1.5 times is probably about break even for a company compared to hiring a new employee. Moving it to 2 times and it would be cheaper for a company to hire extra employees at 30 hours per week so that during crunch time they can go up to 40. Basically, our automation and efficiency has been going up for years but the hours worked per person has either stayed the same or even gone up. It's a wonder our unemployment is as low as it is. It's probably time to start redistributing that efficiency across the board by increasing people's leisure time.
is not designed to be a full fledged computer, treating it as such is stupid.
Though I will freely admit that many third party apps suck (and are often trying to solve problems that are not suited to the watch).
I agree. It's designed to be a companion to you phone just like the original smart phones were designed to be a companion to your computer.
That being said, if I was going to create a watch as a companion, i would make it operate as a second display to the smartphone. Bluetooth has plenty of range to reach the phone in your pocket so why not let the phone do all the heavy lifting. You could use something similar to VNC and when you click on an app on the watch, it runs the program on your phone and you view it on the watch. You could even have apps on the phone that used both displays at once. This way the only thing the watch is responsible for is running the display not executing the app.
I know you're joking. But alcohol actually did contribute a good deal to modern civilization. Beer and wine allowed man to not be perpetually sick, and occasionally dying, from waterborne illness. Rum made routine long-duration ocean voyages possible; leading to trans-oceanic trade and colonization and, eventually, to the British Empire.
You can not survive drinking just alcohol. Sure, alcohol doesn't have the waterborne illness but you would dehydrate in days if all you drank was beer and rum. So no, alcohol didn't allow for long duration ocean voyages or keep people from being perpetually sick.
I understand them liking the iPhone, but it was nowhere near the first viable pocket computer. Not even the first good one.
The iphone was really about being in the right place at the right time. Same with the ipad. What caused the iphone and ipad to take off was they finally reached the feature set, price point, and critical mass to take off. Back in the late 90s I dreamed about having a "webpad". There were several companies that tried to do it but the prices were too high and the technology just wasn't there yet. You could say that apple finally "got it right" but I think it was more that things like bluetooth, wifi, high res screens, processor power, etc.. finally existed and at the right price to make it work. This could be said about many other inventions like the PC, the automobile, the internet, or drones. It takes a certain combination of technology and price points to get something to take off.
So I guess the time has finally come that the US might admit their two-party political system isn't such a great democracy after all?
Although it wouldn't directly affect the presidential race, I think we should move to having members of the house elected at large. Physical districts don't make any sense in today's world where you can drive across a state in a couple hours. It would be much better if the top X candidates of each state became the house of representatives. This would allow someone to run as a libertarian, a representative of chicago, a representative of rural america, but it would also allow people to run as a representative of old people, hispanics, blacks, etc... Basically, in a state with 12 representatives, any group that could get more than 1/12 of the votes for their representative would get a voice. It would be much better than the gerrymandering system we have today where 49% of most districts are unrepresented.
Regardless of how self serving or fraudulent you may think she is, the odds of Hilary accidentally plunging the whole planet into world War three due to ineptitude seems significantly lower than with Trump.
Yep, Clinton is the status quo. If she gets elected then things will likely be exactly the same 4 years from now as it is now. The problem with this is that the majority of the population is not happy with the status quo which is why Trump, Cruz, and Sanders have been getting so many votes. I know many die-hard democrats that voted for Sanders in the primaries but if Sanders doesn't get the nomination they plan to vote for Trump. People want change and Trump/Sanders are campaigning on change. Clinton is campaigning on keeping things the same and I'm not sure that's a winning strategy in this election year. Trump is a loose cannon and unpredictable but he is promising to shake things up and to create new jobs both things that appeal to a large part of the population on both sides of the aisle.
Exactly. It's kindof scary that the most likely next president is hated by 75+% of the population. At least with Sanders or Kasich, the other side of the aisle tolerates them. I'm a republican/libertarian and disagree with most of what Sanders believes but I still think that he is a decent human being. I can't say the same about Hillary or Trump. If it was Kasich vs Hillary, I would vote for Kasich, if it was Trump vs Sanders, I would vote for Sanders, but Hillary vs Trump and I have no idea who to vote. We're either going to have one of the highest turnouts or lowest turnouts in voting history and most people are going to be voting *against* a candidate instead of for a candidate.
I like to use this particular case when talking about commercial piracy. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/20.... In this case, the Army bought software for $4.5 million for 5 servers and ~2,000 workstations but the Army installed it on 100 + servers and 11,000 workstations. The company sued the U.S. government for $180 million and the government settled for $50 million. So the U.S. government willfully and egregiously violated the terms of the contract, you're saying it's not ethical for a company or an individual to try and take the offending client to the bank for egregious violations - that they deserve mercy or something and surely they'll never do it again?
If you assume that the cost was for the servers then: 100/5=20*4.5m=100million
50 millions is a perfectly reasonable settlement if not a little on the low side.
In this case, he was paid 4200 euros for a 3 year contract. Let's say that an indefinite contract is 99 years, that would be 4200*33=138600 euros.
Let's assume that the lawyer gets half so let's double the settlement. That's 277200 euros or approximately $318k. Even if you go for gross violation
and triple the amount, you're still under the $1 million mark.
So, yes, $2 million seems unreasonable for an extra 2 years. An extra 2 years should be closer to the 4200 that was originally contracted.
I'm frightened that they'll turn comatose/brain-dead people into locked-in people. I consider the latter a fate worse than death.
I was thinking something similar. What exactly happens if they get this person 10% functioning again? Is euthanasia legal for someone previously declared dead or are they now forced to keep this half alive person alive? What if they regain their brain but not their memory (see the book Worthing Saga). Is this a desirable outcome where you have an adult with the brain of an infant that now has to relearn everything? Even if it's 100% and they can eventually return to normal intelligence, you now have 10+ years of learning to walk, read, write, and all the other things we learn in childhood. I'm not even sure that is a desirable outcome.
It must be wonderful being the child of the obscenely wealth. I like Obama and his daughter's are very nice but the whole thing about the gap year just stinks of the privilege that most just do not have.
I got burned out and was running low on money in college so I took a "gap year" by taking a coop with Hewlett Packard. That was the only way I could take a break and still hold onto my financial aid and scholarships. It worked out well for me as I was able to come back with money in the bank and the motivation to finish the rest of my school. I also had a standing offer of employment after I graduated from HP although I didn't end up taking it. Although I would have likely needed some type of job, I would have loved to have taken a proper gap right out of HS but unfortunately most scholarships and loans don't really support that. On the other hand, a gap YEAR really isn't necessary as it's pretty easy for college students to take the summer off and if you can't fix your burnout in 3 months then likely you have bigger problems.
Is it legal to sell whatever is in theses tanks as x-octane gasoline in precise quantities? Isn't this asking for rampant fraud?
Are regulations really necessary? Ebay, uber, etc... have solved this pretty well. If someone doesn't give you a full tank or gives you defective fuel then you rank them as a bad seller and the market fixes itself. More importantly, there are laws against fraud, false advertising, etc... Even without regulating them specifically if someone starts shorting a customer or selling them something other than what they purchased then you catch them in the act and send them to jail.
When a car stops in the middle of a difficult situation because the AI is confused they will make that situation even worse ... humans need to take over quickly and keep traffic moving if possible.
As long as most traffic is still human driving is an exercise in risk mitigation, not a problem with clear stop/go decisions.
That's like a pilot stopping and deciding to defer to the passengers on the plane. If the AI isn't up to the task then it's not a self-driving car. Almost all dangerous situations are high speed situation. Even with human drivers switching drivers at high speed is a hard thing to do. The best thing to do is stop and then switch drivers and once you're stopped the difference between a 10 second switch, a 60 second switch, or even a 10 minute switch is minimal.
However, they aren't going to be taking a tanker truck into a random parking lot, they are going to take a light truck. Yes you could devise some regulations around such a fuel carrier, but I don't think that's what these startups are currently doing.
Tow trucks have been doing this for years and they use standard 5 gallon cans. The only difference I see is that we're now talking 20+ gallons at a time versus 5-10 gallons. Even then, there is a lawn mowing service that frequents the gas station near my house and has a row of five gallon cans on the back of his truck. He easily has 35+ gallons. Many semi trucks have 4 tanks that each hold more than 100 gallons each and they also sell tanks for pickups for farmers to take gas home. Basically, all this is already being done in multiple forms. Some like the farmer taking 500 gallons back to his farm might be a gray area but others like th semi truck with 500 gallons of gas in his 4 tanks is definitely already legal. Semis obviously can't go into certain areas because of their weight but the tanks themselve should be 100% legal. As far as I know there are no restrictions on the size of a vehicle's gas tanks. There possibly are but if so it would definitely have to be in the 200+ gallon range to accommodate large trucks.