There cannot be perfect equality, but when one aggregates a huge sample, the statistical centers for each gender group should be roughly the same, because with a large enough sample, individual deviations for things like actual hours worked and the strengths and weaknesses for particular work-related skills should even-out.
So if I get you correct, this requires not only making the pay the same, but capping it as well.
I made a lot more than my co-workers of the same job descriptions, but it was because I was a shitload more productive than they were. I would do the work that especially the women would refuse to do. They wouldn't travel, do dirty work, almost impossible to get them to work other than 8-5, or interface with the shakers and movers. nor did they have the experience.
But they wanted to be paid the same as I was. From day one.
This presents quite an issue for everyone concerned. For the women, it was upsetting because they were paid less than me. For the boss, it was a real problem because I was on record that if the people who refused to do the same work I did were paid as much as me, I would adjust my work and output to equal theirs. Which meant that the powers that be would have to hire yet another person specifically to do the things we were all refusing to do. That's the tricky part. A modern company does not simply fire women. I also had them on notice that I knew what I was worth, so I would be seeking work elsewhere immediately.
This whole idea of everyone is paid the same no matter what is fine in a factory or a fast food joint. Eachj job is highly defined - but tell me, what about people who get bonuses and commissions or stock options? How does one make certain that no man is paid more than a woman?
Frankly, this sounds a lot like Communism. After all, why should there be any pay differences at all? Your bread costs the same as mine.
I don't think the web is going away anytime soon. Especially as app stores continue to lose traction. There's probably a better solution out there, but I don't think anyone's thought of it yet.
The Intertoobz is becoming mature. As much fun as it was back in the day - and damn, it sure was fun, those old days are gone.
And the people who are still interested in tinkering with new technology are moving on. This leaves the toobz being the playground of smartphone addicts, Grandma, and The big corporate players.
Mostly the toobz have become boring. I still come here to get interesting conversation, and I'm forced to use Facebook, but the web itself is only marginally interesting. We're moving on.
In my own case, I've returned to an early love - RF. Software defined radio specifically, and weak signal modes. The software is still there of course, but the fun part is designing and building the equipment.
Except there is this funny thing called hundreds of vacant square miles between all the Metropolitan Areas with high populations.
This exactly. I was dealing with some people who were insisting that emergency communications could be solved via mesh networking with F.C.C. Part 15 low power Routers, or if you had an Amateur Radio license, some of the Channels are open to higher powers.
Either way, the things need many individual stations, and since the RF at these frequencies doesn't travel far by design, RF characteristics and power, Those rural and low population areas would have to be literally littered with nodes.
They didn't like it when at best I pointed out that they could at best put up a special mesh in a building or two. Or use the wireless already in the building if it had it. Or even better and faster, run temporary copper.
When these people are all sitting around that big mahogany table, in their fancy suits, do they *really* talk to each other like this, or do they think that guys like me are that stupid?
Not quite like that. That's the marketing department. I'll do a Marketing to Suitspeech translation below.
If someone came up to me on the street talking like this, I'd punch them right in the mouth.
Doood! Anger issues!
"an exciting new opportunity" for vehicle manufacturers to "monetize connectivity to cover service costs and even drive healthy profits while enriching the consumer experience with safely delivered, engaging and relevant offers"...
Okay, translation into suitspeak follows:
This is a disruptive paradigm shifting implementation of a cost center enhancement benefit action item, that will fungibly actualize client-centric, cloud based deliverables. Coupled with seamlessly e-enabling cross platform derivatives, we are foreseeing proactively implemented agents for change, metrics of empowerment, and synergistic monetization.potentialities
Weird part is I could say that at a meeting, and people would applaud.
On another note: fuck that, my car is my private oasis of tranquility (when I'm not yelling at other drivers)...
On that note, my horn died yesterday. I used the last minute of its life alerting another driver they were a moron.
Was he suitably chastened and vowed to abandon his moronic ways?
The insistence of ramming advertisements into our heads through every possible medium merely dilutes them. And in a world where we have to protect ourselves from the ad servers, it will be only a matter of time before some smartasses figure out how to mess with your car. We live in a world where some fellow gets his jollies by Swatting another and getting him killed. There are lots of sociopaths out there.
My issue is what I am going to do when I need another vehicle. My Jeep is a 2014 model, without any of the crap I see on my friends vehicles, (said crap seems to be responsible for a lot of trips t the dealer for service) but it is getting harder to find what I want, which is modern motor enhancements without the unreliable electronica crap they stick in cars these days.
There is a small rider fee, charged to your WeChat Wallet, which covers losses as well as providing a profit that pays for expanding the system to more outlying areas.
So you are saying after you are done using the bike, you get the Shanghai Bill?
Bullcrap. Property crime in America peaked around 1990, and has since fallen dramatically.
The perception of the modern crime wave is based on the reportage of every single little thing across one's nation as if it were happening in one's own city. coupled with an aging population and the nostalgia effect of "the past was better", we have the incorrect impression that society is lawless.
I can generate white noise easily, and it has been doable for a long, long time. Back in the 1970's I used white noise generators. Now I just use a computer software program to get close, and if I need something better, a card would do.
I think these folks trying to demand that they have the sole ability to utilize white noise might think twice about trying to assert that theory, because they will be set upon like wildebeests crossing a crocodile filled river.
It's pretty much a signal with zero mean and statistically uncorrelated finite variance. If these people can prove that he somehow infringed upon any rights they have they will have to prove that their signal isn't white noise, and prove that he used their non-white noise signal.
This is right up there with the time that Harley Davidson tried to copyright the sound their motorcycles make. They lost that case http://articles.latimes.com/20...
Face it. Some of the creative types are such procrastinators they wont do anything unless there is a deadline.
That is exactly how it works. "Give us something we can work on by the end of the week." makes for a lot more creativity than "Meh, whenever"
If no management guidelines are offered, the creative types need to start coming up with restrictions they have to work in themselves, or else they falter
These are great examples of times when the computer messed up the day.
You can't make an informed decision based on that alone (well, you can, but science can't).
For balance, we now need to list every time the computer saved the day and see which method really wins.
Well, I suppose if you are trying to say that I'm wanting to go back to woodburning rockets.
My point is that people have a tendency to believe that a human in the loop equals bad, and that computers will always be accurate.
I'm dealing with that very thiing right now as we write. There is a process that currently involves hand checking a number of databases.
This is being replaced with an automated checking process that is demonstrably less accurate than the hand checked version.
I can demonstrate this easily, but there is a powerful meme at work that says even if hand checking is more accurate, it is less accurate.
But that's how people are - the biggest advantage is that the hand checks are challenged all the time, around 20 percent. but the acceptance rate on the automated version is 100 percent. So whatever, do it and move on to the next project. Fortunately, this is not the sort of thing that causes People to die, but if they are going to launch these things fairly close to populated areas when doing polar orbit launches, they better hope that the always more accurate computer controlled goboom works every time.
Then again, a Rocket that lands in say Jacksonville because the computer won't kill it - I'm certain that everyone will be completely understanding, yes? It was just an outlier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Safety systems were invented for a reason and humans are only ever considered the first line of defence before automatic systems take over. I often like getting asked why I don't perform reliability calculations on emergency stop pushbuttons on critical equipment. The answer typically stops the person asking the question dead in their tracks: "Without doing a calculation I can say the reliability of the pushbutton is approximately 3 orders of magnitude higher than the brain that is tasked with making the decision to push it."
I think the takeaway here - or at least the one that to me would work best, is to have both. An override of the computer in the event it refuses to destroy an obviously errant rocket. Which should actually increase safety, not just eliminate payroll.
You only like it because you don't work in the reliability field. Having a human operator in charge is one of the least reliable ways of doing things.
Then again, there are the famous Airbus incidents where software caused the plane to safely mow through a forest and crash because it knew that the pilot desperately trying to fly it was obviously wrong.
Or the computer glitch that told another Airbus that it was somehow flying nose-up at 30 degrees at cruising speed, and immediately pitched it down at 30 because it then thought it was in level flight. Miraculously they eventually wrested control and managed to land - though safely is a bit strong of a word for that mess.
There was another case where software was added to keep pilots from throttling back right after takeoff. Some did this to lower noise. There was an airstrike on the flight as the plane took off. The engines were running rough, the pilot called for reduced power, but the software insisted on full power for takeoff. Killed the engines and the plane had to land in a local field.
The point is, I don't know that I'd take the position that the human is the least reliable ways of doing things, when the humans tried to do the correct thing, but the computers insisted on their way or the highway.
I'd like to know how they determined that this is failsafe. The presumably unsafe range officers - do you have the numbers of flights that should have been destroyed that were not? The only one I know of was a Chinese launch that took out a nearby town, and I don't even know if that had a human in the loop or was a more reliable computer
TL;DR - Don't be in too big a hurry to declare superior safety. Hubris always attracts Karma
As long as they are talking about making voting more secure, they should add into the bill voter ID requirements
Absolutely, but a particular group always tries to bring that up right before elections. This ends up becoming a dogwhistle to make certain that the faithful get out to vote.
The fix for this is very simple. When you register to vote, you get a photo ID taken, and a card issued. If you are already registered you get one the next time you vote. And in addition to the photo id, it goes into a database that you have the id. If you cannot find your ID, your drivers license wil be cross referenced with aanother form, such as Driver's license, oyu ar eissued a new ID, and you can vote.
Then it is phased in over a couple election cycles.
Then along with the ID, you cannot be denied the ability to vote - indeed keeping a person from voting should be a third degree felony for the polling place manager(s) Give them an incentive for promotion of enfranchisement. Lines with a wait time longer than an hour will be a misdemeanor, and must be addressed by a new group of poll workers and a solution. As well, the Voter should get a confirmation that their vote has been counted.
Any problems with that? Disenfranchisement as a felony will probably be the one most people doen't like. But some groups like issuing felonies, so maybe that's a win win?
Now the interesting thing is that I am holding in my fat little hand, a voting ID card. Seems they already exist. Standing by to hear why my proposal won't work.
But how do you deal with the varying road surfaces? Studs are a little scary on a non-snow or ice covered road.
Mine are road-legal studs, protruding only 1.2mm from the surface of the knobs. On tarmac the rubber will be in contact with the road, making me able to drive and brake almost as normal. I allow for a little longer brake distance. I wouldn't do wheelies on ice or lean down too far, but the grip on ice is more than enough for normal driving. Curves are comparable to riding on gravel. Brake distance increases to about double, so you have to allow for that. Overall I'm impressed with the traction I get, and for the daily commute it's all I need.
Okay. I've had them on autos before..
As for your English, what I have read is impeccable and indistinguishable from an educated American speaker. Certainly much better than any Norwegian I can muster, which is limited to simple phrases like "God morgen",
If meat eating was the sin you declare, the Inuits would have caused a total collapse of the arctic ecosystem long ago, as their diets consist alomost totally of meat.
That logic would work if, at some point in time, there'd been seven billion of them.
?quote>
But keeping my reply in context, I was accused of wanting to kill of humanity because meat.
The Inuit are living in pretty fair balance with their ecosystem, Their meat diet is not causing the ecosystem they live in into collapse. Their eating meat is not immoral or wrong, unless we decide that the very act of eating meat is always wrong, then we have real moral dilemma on our hands.
Think of two linked sliders. As the one for "percentage of meat in diet" moves up, the one for "total sustainable population" moves down.
While artificial meat might tweak that paradigm by a lot, I'll accept the argument at the moment.
Are we making the argument that we must use as economical a way to produce food as possible in order to pack as many people on earth as possible?
That if we live right at the peak of sustainability, that we need to have the most people that the earth can sustain, and it is wise and just and good to at that point figure out how to make food even cheaper and more abundant so we can stuff some more people onto the planet?
I kind of doubt you are making that argument, but that's where the artificial sustainability argument ends up at.
If the kind of food that we have evolved to eat is considered unsustainable to our existence, the problem does not lie in the food source. A quick perusal leads pretty quickly to the conclusion that there are too damn many of us. A sustainable world simply has a lot less homo sapiens sapiens running around it, not changing from a predator to a prey diet so that we can jam more of us onto it..
But that's just for the cold. Snowy days like today in PA really put a cramp in riding.
Get yourself a suitable bike and tyres, and you're good to go:)
I live in Norway. I bought a used Yamaha WR250R, put studded knobbies on it, and started winter riding on it a few weeks back.
This reminded me of ice racing motorcycles. They used to show it on "Wide World of Sports" every winter. And they still have it it seems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?....
I'm assuiming the studs on your tires are not the same as the ice racers. I owuldn't want to lay the bike down doing that stuff!
But how do you deal with the varying road surfaces? Studs are a little scary on a non-snow or ice covered road.
Precisely! Taking cars off the road in exchange for motorcycles is a great thing. Suddenly that 4 lane highway could become a 10 lane bikeway. With better acceleration and braking as well, you can easily increase the highway capacity by a factor of 4 or more. If highway capacity bumped that much - there wouldn't be any rush-hour traffic jams.
I suspect that the practicalities of the matter will take care of the issue as the freeways jam up even more. Bikes will be the cure. As well as the fun, I can cruise a long way on a little gas. My ride is a VTC1100 Spirit, and for all it's size, it gets 50 MPG. Seems if you remove the baffles or just get low restriction pipes, the gas mileage goes way up. I did both. It's a little loud, but when I get someone glaring at me, I know that they know I'm there. I'm about 80K now, and it shows no signs of getting tired - it'll still pull stumps. Hopefully I'll annoy AC some day - that's on my bucket list.
The real issue is that most purported feminists being given air time nowadays aren't feminists per-se, but in fact female supremacists.
And like all extremists they represent a small, but hard to avoid fringe, and like white supremacists are more than capable of inciting race war, and islamic extremists inciting religious war, they're more than capable of inciting gender war.
And they have succeeded. It is a strange thing that government and adademia have not figured out that as you progress along an idelogical path the tendency is always to become a little more extreme. If a country becomes more conservative, even more conservative players pop up. The same with liberals.
The confusion arises when ideologies start to pander to iether extremes. Because the extremes on both sides have a lot more in common than either side would admit. And are never sustainable. Todays version of feminists are as you suggest, female supremacists. Unfortunately, they have a lot of power in the media and even politics and the courts. And apparantly in pop culture and those comic books.
And I concur, most men are not concerned about females being equal. But in a world of #metoo, in a world where there is no such thibng as due process. And where people actually throw away the entiure underpinnings of civilization, and substitute the rule of the mob for law and order, because of the gender of the accuser.
Well, these people are more aligned with the collapse of society than anything else.
I look at supporters of #metoo as teh exact equivalent of people who enjoy lynching African Americans. Because thety are doing to exact same thing. The accusation is enough for whatever destruction is meted out. These are all bigots through and through, and the only difference is that they are bigoted about.
So, what do you suggest? Should we outlaw automation and go back to manual labor as much as possible?
This is happening, and nothing save complete collapse is going to stop it.
But, it is going to be exceptionally interesting times to live in. They employee has been enemy number one for a long time now. A liability to be eliminated. So the concept of using automation to eliminate as many of the enemy amidst us is seen as good.
And if net new jobs are created, this automation is a failure. And the people at the low end are not going to be able to take most of those jobs created anyhow. The person who is working near their peak as a server at McD's is not going to be able to troubleshoot and maintain the robots that took their job.
The takeaway is that there will be. surplus population. There will be millions of people who are simply not worth anything at all in the new economy. They either have to be supported or eliminated, as there will be less tax base to support them, and suporting them will erode the gains made by the ruling class in getting rid of their jobs in the first place.
Will it be slow, or will we see the biggest killing spree ever, as the world adjusts several billions very quickly?
3.5 million Americans are employed as professional truck drivers and will be out of work when self-driving freight trucks hit the roads.
The American labor force is 160 million people, so the truck drivers are about 2%. The economy is currently growing at over 3% per year, so it could easily absorb that many workers even if all the trucks were replaced in one year.
Now Bill - tell me about the fundamental mistake you just made. Here's help. Assuming that the rte of growth remains constant, your math is trying to tell us that out of work truck drivers will take up two percent of that growth. It also assumes that whatever jerbs they take in the new economy will pay the same as their truck driving jerb. Which is unlikely, and takes your assumption down to a 1 percent growth, except maybe even less.
Most likely they will be phased in over a decade.
Meanwhile, self driving cars will create plenty of business opportunities for "on demand" services and "just in time" deliveries. Need a tile saw for a project? Have one delivered to your front door in 15 minutes, use it for a few hours, and then another vehicle picks it up and returns it.
The problem s that if automation creates more jerbs than it eliminates, it has failed at it's purpose. Because it is pecifically designed to eliminate human jerbs.
Regardless - it is happening. There will be some jobs created, and some destroyed. With a goal of eliminating the costs of human workers, the end result will be a lot of surplus population. At that point, there will be a balancing act as the surplus population is eliminated. It might be slow via attrition, or quick by purposeful killing. There will be some tricky adjustment issues as well, such as making certain not to have the human population dip so low that the automation runs out of work to do - the people who are running the show might not want people working for them, but they do want people's money. A restaurant with only one human employed doesn't make much money if there are no customers, no matter how small their payroll. So we stand on the threshold of some exceptionally interesting times.
Skynet was a neural network, it made decisions based on the training data. The training data in the lab led it to believe that every problem could be solved by turning the system off and on again.
That's some hate! I guess you never venture to California, or anywhere overseas! You must have a damn-near aneurysm at every light, seeing all those scooters and motorcycles filter forward and split away...
The weird thing is he doesn't seem to realize that it helps traffic flow. Imagine if every one of those two wheelers stopped "properly", and backed traffic up. But some folks are just cranky old fscks.
Started my bike today in the garage to let it exercise and keep the battery charged. Wife bought me a new helmet for Christmas. First time the roads get safe here, I'm ridin'.
Got a little over 1.3 million miles in the saddle, filtered and split on 6 Continents, never had a problem yet... Seems that about 95% of all riders in the world (being in Europe and Asia) have little to no problem with lane splitting and filtering - given that it's legal pretty much everywhere except 49 of the 50 States and Canada. But hey, let's all stay cooped up in cars, taking even more space, burning even more fuel, and damaging roads even further, rather than doing the responsible thing like getting a vehicle just big enough to serve you - and living in with it.
Take pity on the poor coward. He gets upset when those mean motorcycles pass him on the way to the topless coffee kiosk when he gets as close to a naked woman as he ever will, and then you pass him again on his way back to mom's basement to wank to his memory of her. The topless barista, that is. Or maybe not.
Lane splitting assholes like you are a menace, and I only hope that when you get into your inevitable accident, A) you don't harm any innocent drivers, and B) it is only your brain that ends up smeared along the pavement, so your organs are in decent enough shape to help someone who needs them. Of course, with your penchant for stupidly risky behavior, I imagine your liver, kidneys, spleen, heart, and lungs are probably already wrecked.
You need to say that to the next Biker you pull alongside at a traffic light. I'm certain they will be suitibly impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
There cannot be perfect equality, but when one aggregates a huge sample, the statistical centers for each gender group should be roughly the same, because with a large enough sample, individual deviations for things like actual hours worked and the strengths and weaknesses for particular work-related skills should even-out.
So if I get you correct, this requires not only making the pay the same, but capping it as well.
I made a lot more than my co-workers of the same job descriptions, but it was because I was a shitload more productive than they were. I would do the work that especially the women would refuse to do. They wouldn't travel, do dirty work, almost impossible to get them to work other than 8-5, or interface with the shakers and movers. nor did they have the experience.
But they wanted to be paid the same as I was. From day one.
This presents quite an issue for everyone concerned. For the women, it was upsetting because they were paid less than me. For the boss, it was a real problem because I was on record that if the people who refused to do the same work I did were paid as much as me, I would adjust my work and output to equal theirs. Which meant that the powers that be would have to hire yet another person specifically to do the things we were all refusing to do. That's the tricky part. A modern company does not simply fire women. I also had them on notice that I knew what I was worth, so I would be seeking work elsewhere immediately.
This whole idea of everyone is paid the same no matter what is fine in a factory or a fast food joint. Eachj job is highly defined - but tell me, what about people who get bonuses and commissions or stock options? How does one make certain that no man is paid more than a woman? Frankly, this sounds a lot like Communism. After all, why should there be any pay differences at all? Your bread costs the same as mine.
I don't think the web is going away anytime soon. Especially as app stores continue to lose traction. There's probably a better solution out there, but I don't think anyone's thought of it yet.
The Intertoobz is becoming mature. As much fun as it was back in the day - and damn, it sure was fun, those old days are gone.
And the people who are still interested in tinkering with new technology are moving on. This leaves the toobz being the playground of smartphone addicts, Grandma, and The big corporate players.
Mostly the toobz have become boring. I still come here to get interesting conversation, and I'm forced to use Facebook, but the web itself is only marginally interesting. We're moving on.
In my own case, I've returned to an early love - RF. Software defined radio specifically, and weak signal modes. The software is still there of course, but the fun part is designing and building the equipment.
Except there is this funny thing called hundreds of vacant square miles between all the Metropolitan Areas with high populations.
This exactly. I was dealing with some people who were insisting that emergency communications could be solved via mesh networking with F.C.C. Part 15 low power Routers, or if you had an Amateur Radio license, some of the Channels are open to higher powers.
Either way, the things need many individual stations, and since the RF at these frequencies doesn't travel far by design, RF characteristics and power, Those rural and low population areas would have to be literally littered with nodes.
They didn't like it when at best I pointed out that they could at best put up a special mesh in a building or two. Or use the wireless already in the building if it had it. Or even better and faster, run temporary copper.
When these people are all sitting around that big mahogany table, in their fancy suits, do they *really* talk to each other like this, or do they think that guys like me are that stupid?
Not quite like that. That's the marketing department. I'll do a Marketing to Suitspeech translation below.
If someone came up to me on the street talking like this, I'd punch them right in the mouth.
Doood! Anger issues!
"an exciting new opportunity" for vehicle manufacturers to "monetize connectivity to cover service costs and even drive healthy profits while enriching the consumer experience with safely delivered, engaging and relevant offers"...
Okay, translation into suitspeak follows:
This is a disruptive paradigm shifting implementation of a cost center enhancement benefit action item, that will fungibly actualize client-centric, cloud based deliverables. Coupled with seamlessly e-enabling cross platform derivatives, we are foreseeing proactively implemented agents for change, metrics of empowerment, and synergistic monetization.potentialities Weird part is I could say that at a meeting, and people would applaud.
Username checks out.
On another note: fuck that, my car is my private oasis of tranquility (when I'm not yelling at other drivers) ...
On that note, my horn died yesterday. I used the last minute of its life alerting another driver they were a moron.
Was he suitably chastened and vowed to abandon his moronic ways?
The insistence of ramming advertisements into our heads through every possible medium merely dilutes them. And in a world where we have to protect ourselves from the ad servers, it will be only a matter of time before some smartasses figure out how to mess with your car. We live in a world where some fellow gets his jollies by Swatting another and getting him killed. There are lots of sociopaths out there.
My issue is what I am going to do when I need another vehicle. My Jeep is a 2014 model, without any of the crap I see on my friends vehicles, (said crap seems to be responsible for a lot of trips t the dealer for service) but it is getting harder to find what I want, which is modern motor enhancements without the unreliable electronica crap they stick in cars these days.
There is a small rider fee, charged to your WeChat Wallet, which covers losses as well as providing a profit that pays for expanding the system to more outlying areas.
So you are saying after you are done using the bike, you get the Shanghai Bill?
Bullcrap. Property crime in America peaked around 1990, and has since fallen dramatically.
The perception of the modern crime wave is based on the reportage of every single little thing across one's nation as if it were happening in one's own city. coupled with an aging population and the nostalgia effect of "the past was better", we have the incorrect impression that society is lawless.
I think these folks trying to demand that they have the sole ability to utilize white noise might think twice about trying to assert that theory, because they will be set upon like wildebeests crossing a crocodile filled river.
It's pretty much a signal with zero mean and statistically uncorrelated finite variance. If these people can prove that he somehow infringed upon any rights they have they will have to prove that their signal isn't white noise, and prove that he used their non-white noise signal.
This is right up there with the time that Harley Davidson tried to copyright the sound their motorcycles make. They lost that case http://articles.latimes.com/20...
Face it. Some of the creative types are such procrastinators they wont do anything unless there is a deadline.
That is exactly how it works. "Give us something we can work on by the end of the week." makes for a lot more creativity than "Meh, whenever"
If no management guidelines are offered, the creative types need to start coming up with restrictions they have to work in themselves, or else they falter
These are great examples of times when the computer messed up the day. You can't make an informed decision based on that alone (well, you can, but science can't). For balance, we now need to list every time the computer saved the day and see which method really wins.
Well, I suppose if you are trying to say that I'm wanting to go back to woodburning rockets.
My point is that people have a tendency to believe that a human in the loop equals bad, and that computers will always be accurate.
I'm dealing with that very thiing right now as we write. There is a process that currently involves hand checking a number of databases.
This is being replaced with an automated checking process that is demonstrably less accurate than the hand checked version.
I can demonstrate this easily, but there is a powerful meme at work that says even if hand checking is more accurate, it is less accurate.
But that's how people are - the biggest advantage is that the hand checks are challenged all the time, around 20 percent. but the acceptance rate on the automated version is 100 percent. So whatever, do it and move on to the next project. Fortunately, this is not the sort of thing that causes People to die, but if they are going to launch these things fairly close to populated areas when doing polar orbit launches, they better hope that the always more accurate computer controlled goboom works every time.
Then again, a Rocket that lands in say Jacksonville because the computer won't kill it - I'm certain that everyone will be completely understanding, yes? It was just an outlier. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Safety systems were invented for a reason and humans are only ever considered the first line of defence before automatic systems take over. I often like getting asked why I don't perform reliability calculations on emergency stop pushbuttons on critical equipment. The answer typically stops the person asking the question dead in their tracks: "Without doing a calculation I can say the reliability of the pushbutton is approximately 3 orders of magnitude higher than the brain that is tasked with making the decision to push it."
I think the takeaway here - or at least the one that to me would work best, is to have both. An override of the computer in the event it refuses to destroy an obviously errant rocket. Which should actually increase safety, not just eliminate payroll.
You only like it because you don't work in the reliability field. Having a human operator in charge is one of the least reliable ways of doing things.
Then again, there are the famous Airbus incidents where software caused the plane to safely mow through a forest and crash because it knew that the pilot desperately trying to fly it was obviously wrong.
Or the computer glitch that told another Airbus that it was somehow flying nose-up at 30 degrees at cruising speed, and immediately pitched it down at 30 because it then thought it was in level flight. Miraculously they eventually wrested control and managed to land - though safely is a bit strong of a word for that mess.
There was another case where software was added to keep pilots from throttling back right after takeoff. Some did this to lower noise. There was an airstrike on the flight as the plane took off. The engines were running rough, the pilot called for reduced power, but the software insisted on full power for takeoff. Killed the engines and the plane had to land in a local field.
The point is, I don't know that I'd take the position that the human is the least reliable ways of doing things, when the humans tried to do the correct thing, but the computers insisted on their way or the highway.
I'd like to know how they determined that this is failsafe. The presumably unsafe range officers - do you have the numbers of flights that should have been destroyed that were not? The only one I know of was a Chinese launch that took out a nearby town, and I don't even know if that had a human in the loop or was a more reliable computer
TL;DR - Don't be in too big a hurry to declare superior safety. Hubris always attracts Karma
The person who is working near their peak as a server at McD's is not going to be able to troubleshoot and maintain the robots that took their job.
And even if they could, you aren't going to have one human per robot.
Exactly. The "More jobs are always created!" folks are missing out on the main purpose of all of this. The main purpose is to eliminate jobs.
Some different jobs will be created, but nowhere near enough to replace the jobs lost. That would be the automation paradigm failing.
As long as they are talking about making voting more secure, they should add into the bill voter ID requirements
Absolutely, but a particular group always tries to bring that up right before elections. This ends up becoming a dogwhistle to make certain that the faithful get out to vote.
The fix for this is very simple. When you register to vote, you get a photo ID taken, and a card issued. If you are already registered you get one the next time you vote. And in addition to the photo id, it goes into a database that you have the id. If you cannot find your ID, your drivers license wil be cross referenced with aanother form, such as Driver's license, oyu ar eissued a new ID, and you can vote.
Then it is phased in over a couple election cycles.
Then along with the ID, you cannot be denied the ability to vote - indeed keeping a person from voting should be a third degree felony for the polling place manager(s) Give them an incentive for promotion of enfranchisement. Lines with a wait time longer than an hour will be a misdemeanor, and must be addressed by a new group of poll workers and a solution. As well, the Voter should get a confirmation that their vote has been counted.
Any problems with that? Disenfranchisement as a felony will probably be the one most people doen't like. But some groups like issuing felonies, so maybe that's a win win?
Now the interesting thing is that I am holding in my fat little hand, a voting ID card. Seems they already exist. Standing by to hear why my proposal won't work.
But how do you deal with the varying road surfaces? Studs are a little scary on a non-snow or ice covered road.
Mine are road-legal studs, protruding only 1.2mm from the surface of the knobs. On tarmac the rubber will be in contact with the road, making me able to drive and brake almost as normal. I allow for a little longer brake distance. I wouldn't do wheelies on ice or lean down too far, but the grip on ice is more than enough for normal driving. Curves are comparable to riding on gravel. Brake distance increases to about double, so you have to allow for that. Overall I'm impressed with the traction I get, and for the daily commute it's all I need.
Okay. I've had them on autos before..
As for your English, what I have read is impeccable and indistinguishable from an educated American speaker. Certainly much better than any Norwegian I can muster, which is limited to simple phrases like "God morgen",
That logic would work if, at some point in time, there'd been seven billion of them.
?quote> But keeping my reply in context, I was accused of wanting to kill of humanity because meat.
The Inuit are living in pretty fair balance with their ecosystem, Their meat diet is not causing the ecosystem they live in into collapse. Their eating meat is not immoral or wrong, unless we decide that the very act of eating meat is always wrong, then we have real moral dilemma on our hands.
Think of two linked sliders. As the one for "percentage of meat in diet" moves up, the one for "total sustainable population" moves down.
While artificial meat might tweak that paradigm by a lot, I'll accept the argument at the moment.
Are we making the argument that we must use as economical a way to produce food as possible in order to pack as many people on earth as possible? That if we live right at the peak of sustainability, that we need to have the most people that the earth can sustain, and it is wise and just and good to at that point figure out how to make food even cheaper and more abundant so we can stuff some more people onto the planet?
I kind of doubt you are making that argument, but that's where the artificial sustainability argument ends up at.
If the kind of food that we have evolved to eat is considered unsustainable to our existence, the problem does not lie in the food source. A quick perusal leads pretty quickly to the conclusion that there are too damn many of us. A sustainable world simply has a lot less homo sapiens sapiens running around it, not changing from a predator to a prey diet so that we can jam more of us onto it..
But that's just for the cold. Snowy days like today in PA really put a cramp in riding.
Get yourself a suitable bike and tyres, and you're good to go :)
I live in Norway. I bought a used Yamaha WR250R, put studded knobbies on it, and started winter riding on it a few weeks back.
This reminded me of ice racing motorcycles. They used to show it on "Wide World of Sports" every winter. And they still have it it seems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... .
I'm assuiming the studs on your tires are not the same as the ice racers. I owuldn't want to lay the bike down doing that stuff!
But how do you deal with the varying road surfaces? Studs are a little scary on a non-snow or ice covered road.
Precisely! Taking cars off the road in exchange for motorcycles is a great thing. Suddenly that 4 lane highway could become a 10 lane bikeway. With better acceleration and braking as well, you can easily increase the highway capacity by a factor of 4 or more. If highway capacity bumped that much - there wouldn't be any rush-hour traffic jams.
I suspect that the practicalities of the matter will take care of the issue as the freeways jam up even more. Bikes will be the cure. As well as the fun, I can cruise a long way on a little gas. My ride is a VTC1100 Spirit, and for all it's size, it gets 50 MPG. Seems if you remove the baffles or just get low restriction pipes, the gas mileage goes way up. I did both. It's a little loud, but when I get someone glaring at me, I know that they know I'm there. I'm about 80K now, and it shows no signs of getting tired - it'll still pull stumps. Hopefully I'll annoy AC some day - that's on my bucket list.
The real issue is that most purported feminists being given air time nowadays aren't feminists per-se, but in fact female supremacists.
And like all extremists they represent a small, but hard to avoid fringe, and like white supremacists are more than capable of inciting race war, and islamic extremists inciting religious war, they're more than capable of inciting gender war.
And they have succeeded. It is a strange thing that government and adademia have not figured out that as you progress along an idelogical path the tendency is always to become a little more extreme. If a country becomes more conservative, even more conservative players pop up. The same with liberals.
The confusion arises when ideologies start to pander to iether extremes. Because the extremes on both sides have a lot more in common than either side would admit. And are never sustainable. Todays version of feminists are as you suggest, female supremacists. Unfortunately, they have a lot of power in the media and even politics and the courts. And apparantly in pop culture and those comic books.
And I concur, most men are not concerned about females being equal. But in a world of #metoo, in a world where there is no such thibng as due process. And where people actually throw away the entiure underpinnings of civilization, and substitute the rule of the mob for law and order, because of the gender of the accuser.
Well, these people are more aligned with the collapse of society than anything else.
I look at supporters of #metoo as teh exact equivalent of people who enjoy lynching African Americans. Because thety are doing to exact same thing. The accusation is enough for whatever destruction is meted out. These are all bigots through and through, and the only difference is that they are bigoted about.
"The economy is growing!" Not for them it's not.
So, what do you suggest? Should we outlaw automation and go back to manual labor as much as possible?
This is happening, and nothing save complete collapse is going to stop it.
But, it is going to be exceptionally interesting times to live in. They employee has been enemy number one for a long time now. A liability to be eliminated. So the concept of using automation to eliminate as many of the enemy amidst us is seen as good.
And if net new jobs are created, this automation is a failure. And the people at the low end are not going to be able to take most of those jobs created anyhow. The person who is working near their peak as a server at McD's is not going to be able to troubleshoot and maintain the robots that took their job.
The takeaway is that there will be. surplus population. There will be millions of people who are simply not worth anything at all in the new economy. They either have to be supported or eliminated, as there will be less tax base to support them, and suporting them will erode the gains made by the ruling class in getting rid of their jobs in the first place.
Will it be slow, or will we see the biggest killing spree ever, as the world adjusts several billions very quickly?
3.5 million Americans are employed as professional truck drivers and will be out of work when self-driving freight trucks hit the roads.
The American labor force is 160 million people, so the truck drivers are about 2%. The economy is currently growing at over 3% per year, so it could easily absorb that many workers even if all the trucks were replaced in one year.
Now Bill - tell me about the fundamental mistake you just made. Here's help. Assuming that the rte of growth remains constant, your math is trying to tell us that out of work truck drivers will take up two percent of that growth. It also assumes that whatever jerbs they take in the new economy will pay the same as their truck driving jerb. Which is unlikely, and takes your assumption down to a 1 percent growth, except maybe even less.
Most likely they will be phased in over a decade.
Meanwhile, self driving cars will create plenty of business opportunities for "on demand" services and "just in time" deliveries. Need a tile saw for a project? Have one delivered to your front door in 15 minutes, use it for a few hours, and then another vehicle picks it up and returns it.
The problem s that if automation creates more jerbs than it eliminates, it has failed at it's purpose. Because it is pecifically designed to eliminate human jerbs.
Regardless - it is happening. There will be some jobs created, and some destroyed. With a goal of eliminating the costs of human workers, the end result will be a lot of surplus population. At that point, there will be a balancing act as the surplus population is eliminated. It might be slow via attrition, or quick by purposeful killing. There will be some tricky adjustment issues as well, such as making certain not to have the human population dip so low that the automation runs out of work to do - the people who are running the show might not want people working for them, but they do want people's money. A restaurant with only one human employed doesn't make much money if there are no customers, no matter how small their payroll. So we stand on the threshold of some exceptionally interesting times.
Skynet was a neural network, it made decisions based on the training data. The training data in the lab led it to believe that every problem could be solved by turning the system off and on again.
Sounds like computer tech support.
That's some hate! I guess you never venture to California, or anywhere overseas! You must have a damn-near aneurysm at every light, seeing all those scooters and motorcycles filter forward and split away...
The weird thing is he doesn't seem to realize that it helps traffic flow. Imagine if every one of those two wheelers stopped "properly", and backed traffic up. But some folks are just cranky old fscks.
Started my bike today in the garage to let it exercise and keep the battery charged. Wife bought me a new helmet for Christmas. First time the roads get safe here, I'm ridin'.
Got a little over 1.3 million miles in the saddle, filtered and split on 6 Continents, never had a problem yet... Seems that about 95% of all riders in the world (being in Europe and Asia) have little to no problem with lane splitting and filtering - given that it's legal pretty much everywhere except 49 of the 50 States and Canada. But hey, let's all stay cooped up in cars, taking even more space, burning even more fuel, and damaging roads even further, rather than doing the responsible thing like getting a vehicle just big enough to serve you - and living in with it.
Take pity on the poor coward. He gets upset when those mean motorcycles pass him on the way to the topless coffee kiosk when he gets as close to a naked woman as he ever will, and then you pass him again on his way back to mom's basement to wank to his memory of her. The topless barista, that is. Or maybe not.
Lane splitting assholes like you are a menace, and I only hope that when you get into your inevitable accident, A) you don't harm any innocent drivers, and B) it is only your brain that ends up smeared along the pavement, so your organs are in decent enough shape to help someone who needs them. Of course, with your penchant for stupidly risky behavior, I imagine your liver, kidneys, spleen, heart, and lungs are probably already wrecked.
You need to say that to the next Biker you pull alongside at a traffic light. I'm certain they will be suitibly impressed.