"Hate speech" is legal in the US, but banned on Twitter. "Openly conservative" is legal in the US, but banned on Twitter. But, hey, continue enjoying your left-wing echo chamber if it pleases you - it's both your right and Twitter's.
My own suggestion is that the self-driving car have to pass the same driving test as any licensed driver. Cheap and easy. Sure, software can fail in all sorts of subtle ways, but so can people.
Also, your sig is one of my favorite Christmas songs.
Seems likely that Uber's lawyers have read the law carefully, and having someone in the driver's seat ready to take over counts as "operating", just as with cruise control.
They aren't a taxi service, any more than towncars or shuttle buses are. They are a hired car service - that's the category that covers all this sort of thing. Taxis are the specific kind of hired car you can hail on the street (that is, it can advertise and take business without a dispatcher or some other pre-existing relationship).
thought anarchism is 'right wing' (e.g. those who want less regulation)..
Every historical anarchist group was an extremist fringe of a left-wing political movement. Does carriage-bombing Wall Street sound the left or right to you? Fortunately this time around, the Occupy X movement lacked such extremists.
The reasonable thing would be for the autonomous car to pass the same driving test other drivers have to pass to get a permit. Cheap and easy, so of course California will never do it that way.
You do realize that "basic libertarian crap" is to want to pay for only those things (which are about 10% of the budget), plus the really important one you left off: national defense. Don't confuse anarchists with libertarians.
Also, don't make the same error Hobbes did: "no government" and "unlimited government" are not the only choices - in fact, those are the only 2 choices we can be sure are bad. America was founded on the notion of "government, but limited". Arguments that the government should do X because "anarchy is bad" are sophistry.
Instead, we should always ask "how can we achieve this public good with the least possible government involvement?" Clearly the government has some role to play in regulating self-driving cars, but what's the minimalist solution that achieves satisfactory public safety?
You own the sky up to a certain height. You can't avoid trespass by jumping. How high, vs the very low ceiling for drone operation, will vary by location. The straightforward solution for Amazon is to fly mostly along roads.
You should know by now those aren't a safe investment. Ever since the CEO of S&P was outed because his analysts dared to suggest there was some risk in treasuries, all the analysts got the hint and you won't hear a word about the risk until the sovereign default. Still better than junk bonds, of course, but the non-zero risk just isn't priced in.
Just so you know: it's not Google paying great, it's IBM paying crap - though at the "competent individual contributor" level, maybe the algorithm does well by people - I don't have the data to argue otherwise. If you're happy, clearly they're paying enough.
It sounds like you were unlucky enough to hit some particularly bad interviewers.
Maybe so - they certainly seemed like very senior people, so maybe it wasn't their main concern. They did all seem stressed out and worn out though.
I could just as easily say that because the last 99 times I flipped a coin it came up heads that I can expect the 100th time to also come up heads
You damn well should expect it to come up heads. The odds are overwhelming that it's not a fair coin. Feynman may have used that exact example when discussing how experiment trumps hypothesis.
That's not a law. A law is provable.
A law is a theory that can be expressed tersely. Theories don't grow up to become laws. Nothing is science is "provable" in the sense of mathematics: science isn't in the business of proof. It's in the business of predictive models, based on observation. The fundamental assumptions of science, which can be summarized as "induction works" simply cannot be proven - which turns out not to matter very much.
Always before when jobs were destroyed, the replacement jobs were already known.
Not true at all. No one saw that the automation of shoes and furniture (and the gradual automation of agriculture) would lead to a vast industry manufacturing cars. When the stuff that dominates your budget becomes instead cheap, people start buying stuff en mass that only rich people had before, or that no one could afford before.
That's the pattern you're not seeing.
What new jobs are being created right now? You keep suggesting existing professions and low-paying ones at that.
Existing jobs expanding are what it's possible to suggest - anyone who can predict the wholly new markets stands to become quite wealthy and successful. (How many saw Facebook coming? Expanding free time was obvious, but the actual product?) But we can talk about goods and mostly services that only the rich are willing to pay for today that most people will be able to afford as everything else get cheap. And that's the key: automation makes existing stuff cheap.
BTW, there's no reason to think new skilled blue-collar work will pay any worse than being a plumber - and if you think a plumber is cheap, you've never needed one in a hurry.
the wealthier ones shop at Wal-Mart
Say what now?
Nobody keeps servants any more
Not true at all - we call those people the upper class. They aren't very visible in America, but they're here. Maid services have enabled the middle class to avoid cleaning their own toilets, without needing a live-in maid, and will only become more common as automation makes other stuff cheaper. But that's at the bottom as far as skill needed, my point is that "services that professionals can afford to hire" will move up the skill ladder, creating many more such jobs.
It's common knowledge. Google sells ads - it's really their only successful business. There's enough common infrastructure that the marginal cost of operating something like gmail is small compared to the ad revenue. YouTube is the exception, because the bandwidth costs are relatively high - http://www.wsj.com/articles/vi...
Android is a bit of an odd duck, and profits were total guesswork outside of Google until the court case: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
bout the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination
Google pays by algorithm, rather than market (for base comp). For the kids, they pay great, but Google has a hard time hiring older guys unless they can be brought into very senior positions in Google - the algorithm doesn't pay enough otherwise. They aren't the only company with this problem, but they might be the largest. It's an example of a system that both fair and discriminatory.
interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc.
When I interviewed there all that was in the background - maybe it wouldn't have been if I wasn't sharp? What they really seemed to be looking for was "would I design a cloud-scale system in the same way the existing old guys do". Everyone was nice and all, but it was about the worst interview experience I've had - very much "guess what I'm thinking" and not "explain how your design deals with X, Y, and Z, and is there a reason you don't like W". The design-focused interviews were the least interactive interviews I've had. At no point did I feel like I was having a design discussion. The experience (together with the fact the old guys all looked really stressed out and worn down) was enough to make me walk away.
The other red flag in the interview was a complete unconcern with designing systems to be easy to operate - deploy, patch, troubleshoot at 4am when the pager goes off. I guess I impressed in that area, since some Google team that focuses on that reached out to me the next week, but the guys interviewing me clearly weren't interested in that part of system design.
new jobs will appear" isn't one of the basic laws of the Universe
All we have to go on in any kind of reasoning about the universe is what we can observe. Every time in the past it seemed like all the jobs would vanish, and for the most pert they did, to be replaced by new jobs. It's happened over and over since the 1600s, and we understand why it happens - the old stuff gets cheap and people want more, different stuff. It may not be general relativity, but it's pretty solid.
iven capable enough automation, virtually any job can be automated, even hair styling
Sure, but people, for the most part, want some human interaction. That's not likely to change in the area of beauty salons and spas. The advice is half the experience.
And that's IMO the core of the new jobs - if everything is cheap and easy to get, what will make you look trendy, fashionable, etc.? A group to belong to, followed by social status, are next on Maslow's hierarchy of needs one the basics are trivial to provide for, and jobs in those areas will only grow. This is quite fundamental to human nature, as best we can study it.
Handyman? We like in a world where literally "Ending is better than Mending" and have been increasingly so for decades now. It costs more to repair than to replace.
Who mounts the new flat-screen on the wall? Who replaces that failing ceiling fan? Most the 20-somthings I know can't even change a tire these days; don't even own basic tools. And the Boomers, who were quite handy, are getting to the point where they need help.
I hope for the best, but we have no assurance we'll get it, so it's prudent to consider the worst and what we might do to avoid it.
Starting with yourself and your family, I hope. Abstract political discussions are easy, but you can directly affect those close to you.
Funny, I thought that was the primary job duty of the CEO: to pick the pockets of investors. A CEO is primarily a salesman, and what good is an honest salesman?
Speculative gambling is not a retirement plan. "Look at all the money I make day-trading" is right up there with "I have the perfect system to beat Vegas".
No individual human being should be allowed to accrue wealth beyond a reasonable limit indexed to inflation - say $10 million.
You've never worked under a bad CEO? Never seen your job vanish because there was an idiot at the top? We want people who are good at that job (i.e., not idiots) to keep doing it as long as they can.
Money != Happiness, although it can buy a little temporary pleasure.
They say that money can't buy love in this world but it'll get you a big long limousine and a sixteen year old girl and a half-pound of cocaine on a hot September night and that may not be love, but it's all right
The amount of money you get beyond roughly 75 000 Euros per year has near to no influence on your happiness.
Presumptuous of you to speak for others.
What you're talking about is the "utility curve" - the increased happiness that increased money brings is not linear. It's often more than 1:1 when you're broke, and much less than 1:1 when you have a lot. But different people have different curves.
When you apply mathematics to investment decisions, you have to allow for the individual's utility curve before you can really plan anything (and many people don't know, of course). x^-2? x^-3? log(x)?
And obviously the more dependents you have, the more you need with any curve.
5% after-tax return is more htan most people manage while drawing down an account. 5% is easy when you putting money in, because dollar-cost averaging makes volatility your friend, so you can make higher returns by accepting higher volatility. That totally doesn't work when you're removing money each month - you need to be in stable income investments (which is 2-3% now, basically inflation) or actually be good at juggling stocks and bonds and guessing where the economy is going.
Also, right now if your over 60 but not yet getting Medicre, health insurance will run you $12-15k, and that's just barebones insurance. $18k is a more realistic budget for those years (and everything will change when Trump changes Obamacare, so it's hard to budget at all).
It's one thing living on $25 when you're 24, but it's not happening when you're 64.
Ah, but my premise is "instead of universal basic income, let's have universal basic robots". I expect small-scale manufacturing to follow the arc of laser printers in any case.
Nor are a lot of us suited for the limited set of jobs that are expected to remain
Very few people farm or manufacture (though there are over a million skilled manufacturing jobs that can't be filled right now, for lack of skilled applicants). But there's always new work to be done - work that needs to be done a little bit differently each time, from handyman work to beauty salons. Plus all the yet-to-be-invented jobs customizing what the robots spit out for social status. Not software dev jobs, but jobs requiring a bit of creativity.
Unskilled jobs will vanish, but almost everyone can be good at something, given the chance.
In many countries, McDs is a reasonable low-end sit-down restaurant, like the crap-on-the-walls restaurants in the US. I doubt they'll overcome their reputation to become that here, though Wendy's is trying - trying at least to move up to Five Guys and In-and-Out status.
When I was young these were good places to eat, before the food cost optimization went crazy. Who knows, they could be again.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hate speech" is legal in the US, but banned on Twitter. "Openly conservative" is legal in the US, but banned on Twitter. But, hey, continue enjoying your left-wing echo chamber if it pleases you - it's both your right and Twitter's.
My own suggestion is that the self-driving car have to pass the same driving test as any licensed driver. Cheap and easy. Sure, software can fail in all sorts of subtle ways, but so can people.
Also, your sig is one of my favorite Christmas songs.
You sound like a millennial. Lots of people in older generations enjoy cars and driving. And what a boring world it would be if we were all the same.
Seems likely that Uber's lawyers have read the law carefully, and having someone in the driver's seat ready to take over counts as "operating", just as with cruise control.
They aren't a taxi service, any more than towncars or shuttle buses are. They are a hired car service - that's the category that covers all this sort of thing. Taxis are the specific kind of hired car you can hail on the street (that is, it can advertise and take business without a dispatcher or some other pre-existing relationship).
thought anarchism is 'right wing' (e.g. those who want less regulation)..
Every historical anarchist group was an extremist fringe of a left-wing political movement. Does carriage-bombing Wall Street sound the left or right to you? Fortunately this time around, the Occupy X movement lacked such extremists.
The reasonable thing would be for the autonomous car to pass the same driving test other drivers have to pass to get a permit. Cheap and easy, so of course California will never do it that way.
You do realize that "basic libertarian crap" is to want to pay for only those things (which are about 10% of the budget), plus the really important one you left off: national defense. Don't confuse anarchists with libertarians.
Also, don't make the same error Hobbes did: "no government" and "unlimited government" are not the only choices - in fact, those are the only 2 choices we can be sure are bad. America was founded on the notion of "government, but limited". Arguments that the government should do X because "anarchy is bad" are sophistry.
Instead, we should always ask "how can we achieve this public good with the least possible government involvement?" Clearly the government has some role to play in regulating self-driving cars, but what's the minimalist solution that achieves satisfactory public safety?
You own the sky up to a certain height. You can't avoid trespass by jumping. How high, vs the very low ceiling for drone operation, will vary by location. The straightforward solution for Amazon is to fly mostly along roads.
You should know by now those aren't a safe investment. Ever since the CEO of S&P was outed because his analysts dared to suggest there was some risk in treasuries, all the analysts got the hint and you won't hear a word about the risk until the sovereign default. Still better than junk bonds, of course, but the non-zero risk just isn't priced in.
Just so you know: it's not Google paying great, it's IBM paying crap - though at the "competent individual contributor" level, maybe the algorithm does well by people - I don't have the data to argue otherwise. If you're happy, clearly they're paying enough.
It sounds like you were unlucky enough to hit some particularly bad interviewers.
Maybe so - they certainly seemed like very senior people, so maybe it wasn't their main concern. They did all seem stressed out and worn out though.
I could just as easily say that because the last 99 times I flipped a coin it came up heads that I can expect the 100th time to also come up heads
You damn well should expect it to come up heads. The odds are overwhelming that it's not a fair coin. Feynman may have used that exact example when discussing how experiment trumps hypothesis.
That's not a law. A law is provable.
A law is a theory that can be expressed tersely. Theories don't grow up to become laws. Nothing is science is "provable" in the sense of mathematics: science isn't in the business of proof. It's in the business of predictive models, based on observation. The fundamental assumptions of science, which can be summarized as "induction works" simply cannot be proven - which turns out not to matter very much.
Always before when jobs were destroyed, the replacement jobs were already known.
Not true at all. No one saw that the automation of shoes and furniture (and the gradual automation of agriculture) would lead to a vast industry manufacturing cars. When the stuff that dominates your budget becomes instead cheap, people start buying stuff en mass that only rich people had before, or that no one could afford before.
That's the pattern you're not seeing.
What new jobs are being created right now? You keep suggesting existing professions and low-paying ones at that.
Existing jobs expanding are what it's possible to suggest - anyone who can predict the wholly new markets stands to become quite wealthy and successful. (How many saw Facebook coming? Expanding free time was obvious, but the actual product?) But we can talk about goods and mostly services that only the rich are willing to pay for today that most people will be able to afford as everything else get cheap. And that's the key: automation makes existing stuff cheap.
BTW, there's no reason to think new skilled blue-collar work will pay any worse than being a plumber - and if you think a plumber is cheap, you've never needed one in a hurry.
the wealthier ones shop at Wal-Mart
Say what now?
Nobody keeps servants any more
Not true at all - we call those people the upper class. They aren't very visible in America, but they're here. Maid services have enabled the middle class to avoid cleaning their own toilets, without needing a live-in maid, and will only become more common as automation makes other stuff cheaper. But that's at the bottom as far as skill needed, my point is that "services that professionals can afford to hire" will move up the skill ladder, creating many more such jobs.
It's common knowledge. Google sells ads - it's really their only successful business. There's enough common infrastructure that the marginal cost of operating something like gmail is small compared to the ad revenue. YouTube is the exception, because the bandwidth costs are relatively high - http://www.wsj.com/articles/vi...
Android is a bit of an odd duck, and profits were total guesswork outside of Google until the court case: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
bout the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination
Google pays by algorithm, rather than market (for base comp). For the kids, they pay great, but Google has a hard time hiring older guys unless they can be brought into very senior positions in Google - the algorithm doesn't pay enough otherwise. They aren't the only company with this problem, but they might be the largest. It's an example of a system that both fair and discriminatory.
interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc.
When I interviewed there all that was in the background - maybe it wouldn't have been if I wasn't sharp? What they really seemed to be looking for was "would I design a cloud-scale system in the same way the existing old guys do". Everyone was nice and all, but it was about the worst interview experience I've had - very much "guess what I'm thinking" and not "explain how your design deals with X, Y, and Z, and is there a reason you don't like W". The design-focused interviews were the least interactive interviews I've had. At no point did I feel like I was having a design discussion. The experience (together with the fact the old guys all looked really stressed out and worn down) was enough to make me walk away.
The other red flag in the interview was a complete unconcern with designing systems to be easy to operate - deploy, patch, troubleshoot at 4am when the pager goes off. I guess I impressed in that area, since some Google team that focuses on that reached out to me the next week, but the guys interviewing me clearly weren't interested in that part of system design.
Congrats on winning that BTW - IMO it's the only impressive programming competition. Definite bragging rights.
new jobs will appear" isn't one of the basic laws of the Universe
All we have to go on in any kind of reasoning about the universe is what we can observe. Every time in the past it seemed like all the jobs would vanish, and for the most pert they did, to be replaced by new jobs. It's happened over and over since the 1600s, and we understand why it happens - the old stuff gets cheap and people want more, different stuff. It may not be general relativity, but it's pretty solid.
iven capable enough automation, virtually any job can be automated, even hair styling
Sure, but people, for the most part, want some human interaction. That's not likely to change in the area of beauty salons and spas. The advice is half the experience.
And that's IMO the core of the new jobs - if everything is cheap and easy to get, what will make you look trendy, fashionable, etc.? A group to belong to, followed by social status, are next on Maslow's hierarchy of needs one the basics are trivial to provide for, and jobs in those areas will only grow. This is quite fundamental to human nature, as best we can study it.
Handyman? We like in a world where literally "Ending is better than Mending" and have been increasingly so for decades now. It costs more to repair than to replace.
Who mounts the new flat-screen on the wall? Who replaces that failing ceiling fan? Most the 20-somthings I know can't even change a tire these days; don't even own basic tools. And the Boomers, who were quite handy, are getting to the point where they need help.
I hope for the best, but we have no assurance we'll get it, so it's prudent to consider the worst and what we might do to avoid it.
Starting with yourself and your family, I hope. Abstract political discussions are easy, but you can directly affect those close to you.
Funny, I thought that was the primary job duty of the CEO: to pick the pockets of investors. A CEO is primarily a salesman, and what good is an honest salesman?
Speculative gambling is not a retirement plan. "Look at all the money I make day-trading" is right up there with "I have the perfect system to beat Vegas".
You know that Slashdot signs your name for you, at the top of your post, right?
No individual human being should be allowed to accrue wealth beyond a reasonable limit indexed to inflation - say $10 million.
You've never worked under a bad CEO? Never seen your job vanish because there was an idiot at the top? We want people who are good at that job (i.e., not idiots) to keep doing it as long as they can.
Money != Happiness, although it can buy a little temporary pleasure.
They say that money
can't buy love in this world
but it'll get you a big long limousine
and a sixteen year old girl
and a half-pound of cocaine
on a hot September night
and that may not be love,
but it's all right
- Randy Newman, It's Money That I Love
The amount of money you get beyond roughly 75 000 Euros per year has near to no influence on your happiness.
Presumptuous of you to speak for others.
What you're talking about is the "utility curve" - the increased happiness that increased money brings is not linear. It's often more than 1:1 when you're broke, and much less than 1:1 when you have a lot. But different people have different curves.
When you apply mathematics to investment decisions, you have to allow for the individual's utility curve before you can really plan anything (and many people don't know, of course). x^-2? x^-3? log(x)?
And obviously the more dependents you have, the more you need with any curve.
5% after-tax return is more htan most people manage while drawing down an account. 5% is easy when you putting money in, because dollar-cost averaging makes volatility your friend, so you can make higher returns by accepting higher volatility. That totally doesn't work when you're removing money each month - you need to be in stable income investments (which is 2-3% now, basically inflation) or actually be good at juggling stocks and bonds and guessing where the economy is going.
Also, right now if your over 60 but not yet getting Medicre, health insurance will run you $12-15k, and that's just barebones insurance. $18k is a more realistic budget for those years (and everything will change when Trump changes Obamacare, so it's hard to budget at all).
It's one thing living on $25 when you're 24, but it's not happening when you're 64.
Ah, but my premise is "instead of universal basic income, let's have universal basic robots". I expect small-scale manufacturing to follow the arc of laser printers in any case.
Nor are a lot of us suited for the limited set of jobs that are expected to remain
Very few people farm or manufacture (though there are over a million skilled manufacturing jobs that can't be filled right now, for lack of skilled applicants). But there's always new work to be done - work that needs to be done a little bit differently each time, from handyman work to beauty salons. Plus all the yet-to-be-invented jobs customizing what the robots spit out for social status. Not software dev jobs, but jobs requiring a bit of creativity.
Unskilled jobs will vanish, but almost everyone can be good at something, given the chance.
In many countries, McDs is a reasonable low-end sit-down restaurant, like the crap-on-the-walls restaurants in the US. I doubt they'll overcome their reputation to become that here, though Wendy's is trying - trying at least to move up to Five Guys and In-and-Out status.
When I was young these were good places to eat, before the food cost optimization went crazy. Who knows, they could be again.