The problem with 4e is it dropped everything else. The fixes to combat make it much more accessible to a new generation, and that's great, but a D&D session shouldn't play like an MMO. You need just as much richness in the setting, in open-ended exploration, in diplomacy, in absurdly over-engineered traps, and so on. 4E got some pieces very right, but it's too tightly wound IMO - too much focus on combat, and especially on well-balanced combats. It's a poor system to accommodate cleverness and tactical elements not captured by player abilities.
4E adventures tend to be a set of very-well-balanced encounters all very level appropriate for a party, but that loses much of the charm of D&D. 4E is poorly suited mechanically for "crazy plans that just might work" to take on foes far out of the party's level range (unless they're scripted into the module). E.g., the party wants to kills a group of foes far more powerful than they, so they gather intelligence by diplomacy, intrigue, and seduction, discover a good time and place for an ambush, arrange to blow up a cliff face to drop an avalanche on the foes as they walk past on a marrow path, then attack before the dust settles. Pre-4E, it's fairly natural for a good DM to figure out how that all works and run a fun session around it in a way the players find fair. In 4E you have so little to work with for any of that, unless it was part of the script.
Old school RP is a tiny corner of the gaming world, and really well served by rules-light RPG systems, I think. Risus is great IMO for anything where you don't need "tactical simulation rules" (hmm, TSR, someone should make a game company....), or one of the many Emo Goffpire games. I just see the broken-rules problems in RP-land that plague the tactical world.
Here's the problem: it's boring to be in an encounter where you have nothing to contribute. And bored players make problems for games, one way or another. With social encounters, most players can enjoy what's going on even if they're just arguing about what the charismatic rogue should say, but it's different in tactical combat, where too great an imbalance in ability to contribute can ruin the game.
becomes an arms race between players to find the most powerful, game breaking combos. Spreadsheets, forums, and research on things that can be abused. It leaves the non min/maxers in the dust,...
You can roleplay the smartest/strongest guy around, or you can abuse the rule system to become the strongest/smartest guy around. When your level 5 character has godly powers to influence the game through some clever min/maxing, it really ruins the experience for others.
All I can say is: that just isn't true of every game system. It's horribly, horribly true of 3.5, which is the fundamental problem with 3.5. If careful min/maxing gives you a 20% combat advantage over a naive build, likely at the cost of non-combat stuff, that's not going to be a problem. Heck, it could be 50% more powerful without hurting the game if the DM is willing to shape encounters a bit (not ideal, but workable). But 3.5 is so bad that some classes simply can't contribute except in carefully contrived encounters, while others (with expert play) won't have any challenge without equal contrivances. Heck, 3.5 has infinite HP builds, infinite damage builds, and so on, though that stuff is less worrying as its so blatant.
On a side note, there were enough base classes in 3.5 that you could almost make whatever character you wanted by dipping into them a la carte. See my rogue/scout/ranger/fighter.
I always liked that part, though I'd say it's a bit of a 3.5 flaw that you have to do that awkward dance to realize what's likely a pretty clear and sensible character concept (just not one of the D&D archetypes).
as anyone who's ever wanted to save a Netflix movie for offline viewing on a flight
They offer that service separately, and I use it all the time: DVDs - but for most people that's a corner case. The problem most people have with Netflix (myself included) is the tiny amount of streaming content in the first place. Even with the DRM they can barely get any content owners contracted. The studios just have recto-cranial inversion over streaming in the first place - the DRM is just a distraction from the real issue.
In both cases - content owners and big ISPs, you've got abuse of government-granted monopolies. The real issue is our alleged democracy selling monopolies in the first place!
Hastings, Netflix, and 99.999999% of all streaming customers give approximately 0 fucks about DRM. They pay Netflix, they see the content, there's simply no problem. And they're right. Technology makes life better by working. If it "just works", then it's fine. This ISP-throttling-Netflix BS, OTOH, is punishing customers until Netflix caves. That's not fine.
They used Akamai for several years for the majority of their streaming traffic, but then they outgrew Akamai. Netflix is, what, 1/3 of all internet traffic now? They are the biggest CDN.
Min/maxing is half the fun of the game, unless it leaves the PCs woefully unbalanced between one another. What you want is a system where min/maxing produces reasonable character concepts, and reasonable character concepts produce well-optimized characters. That was the huge flaw in 3.5 - it was impossible for the new player to figure out what worked mechanically and what didn't. When I play an RPG, I want to play a hero, dammit. I can play the flawed loser in real life, thank you very much.. But I shouldn't have to know or care that if my idea of a hero is a martial monk that I'll bee all but useless in any encounter, while if it's a pure caster that I'll have an "I win" button if I do it right.
That's the problem. Not the idea that if I'm going to be a wizard, I'm going to be the smartest guy around, or if I'm going to hit people in the face with my axe, then I'm going to be the biggest, toughest guy around. Those are totally viable character ideas, especially your first time playing before you've grown bored of the shallow archetypes. And yet, that's min-maxing. Bah, min-maxing is fine. It's a broken system where in order to be an non-cliche character you have to be disadvantaged mechanically, because the game is build on archetype enforcement, that's the problem.
OK, it's worse still if you buy what you thought was an RPG and it turns out to just be miniatures combat rules. 4E got combat right, but the game had little else. At least in 3.5 with a veteran DM guiding new players to make effective characters, or any previous D&D version, there was a deep game there that only occasionally focused on combat.
Sure, in simple code. But when you have crap like a list of labmdas that take a map and return a vector, or somesuch, because what you're doing is just like that, full type descriptions really help.
But that's rare, and I'd agree with you most of the time.
You can definitely over-do auto typing to the point where a human can't figure out the types involved, but that's just a team coding standards thing. For sure, auto is better than any type spec that doesn't fit on a single line in the editor. Obviously class v struct is a historical relic, but I like it. I use class and struct for different things - all members private in the former, vs all public in the latter. I also like the convention that struct is the right keyword to declare an interface, since C++ has no 'interface' keyword.
If you don't use obscure features of C++ just for fun, you won't have that problem. Most of the obscure features in C++ exist to solve a very specific sort of problem. If your job is to solve that problem, you already understand what the relevant C++ feature does - to you it's not obscure, it's quite handy and much cleaner to have in the language than to write an test yourself.
No one needs to master all the obscure crap, because there's no single software product than needs it all - but all of it is needed by someone, somewhere.
And if you're being deliberately obscure, well, others have mentioned the C obfuscation contest. No language is maintainable without at least some basic effort to reject needlessly obfuscated code through code reviews.
Well, you'd just need a chuckugly type declaration for it. The new ability to use auto in declaring the parameters to the lambda expression itself - that's one I don't see how you'd do without auto, as it's effectively templating in a place where you can't syntactically declare the template.
So in the real world, you have to understand nearly all of it in order to be able to maintain other people's code or to work as a team.
If you don't have coding standards and a firm code review process to enforce them, you have already lost.
C++ has a lot of cruft to allow you to cleanly solve problems that 99% of coders will never encounter. I'd say that these days, if your not in some dark corner where you need at least 1 bizarre C++ feature, you should probably use a higher level language.
As an example of what I mean - C++ lets you overload the 'new' operator. Why would you ever want to do that? There no reason to learn how that feature works until and unless you need it. But if you need to do "slab allocation" or otherwise change the memory allocation pattern away from "just malloc", suddenly overloading 'new' is an amazingly useful and clean way to do this. In C you have to replace malloc with some other call (or #define malloc notmalloc) and police it everywhere in your codebase, which gets ugly when you have 20 different objects each allocated from its own slab, and gets horrifically ugly when you discover that you need to do this a couple years into a project. In C++ you just overload 'new' on a class-by-class basis.
C++ has many features like that - stuff that you'd almost never have any use for, but is wonderful when you find yourself in that dark corner. You just need to guard against that guy who just wants to play with some C++ cruft when it's not needed, just because it looks neat.
The fundamental problem with a basic income is that it only works if it's not enough to live on comfortably, just enough to subsist, and that's an impossible system to maintain in a democracy. Entitlements will always be raised by vote until that's all the government can afford to do any more, and a bit above that. We're already there. Parts of Europe have been there long enough, have gone so far over the edge, that only constant donations from neighboring governments (mostly Germany) kept them going through the downturn.
I don't understand what jobs you think will be going away that pay $50k today? If anyone makes that in a job that can be replaced by a robot, I have no sympathy, but I don't see it (other than the few lingering manufacturing jobs, but manufacturing by humans has been going away for decades and is already a small and dwindling % today).
I don't believe in the singularity. The idea that a few rich people would own factories just building stuff for one another is dystopian fantasy - rich people deliberately making themselves poor by refusing to sell to others. Makes no sense at all. Robotic manufacturing just displaces the few people left in America with manufacturing jobs, making things significantly cheaper for everyone. I can see robots displacing unskilled labor next - fast food workers and maids and so on - which is a bigger pool than manufacturing workers, but IMO most people in those jobs are perfectly capable of skilled work, and in fact are usually still students or recent immigrants, already on a path that will lead to skilled jobs if our educational system doesn't fail them.
Watching all the construction projects happening around me, they're already seriously benefitting from (non-robotic) automation, to the point where the only thing really labor intensive is concrete pours (laying out all the rebar, mailing together the forms, smoothing the concrete as its poured), and that still is far less labor than 50 years ago. And yet there's help-wanted signs up at most of the construction projects around me. Modern construction equipment is amazingly productive, but you still need someone to operate it. Modern wood-framed construction is just nailing up prefab walls and other parts, but you still need people to measure and inspect, plus plumbers and electricians and the occasional welder. All of that stuff is skilled labor, none of it will be replaced by robots in the next 20-30 years, and there's a demand for labor for all of it.
Anything involving diagnosing and repairing problems with buildings/vehicles/equipment needs skilled people, not going to be replaced by robots any time soon, and has labor shortages today. We've had a big push away from blue collar jobs and into college by the educational system that hasn't served us well. Manufacturing is dead, blue collar work (work that pays pretty well, though it can be seasonal) is not.
Plus now we'll see growth in skilled services jobs IMO.
Sure, the old jobs don't come back. TYhe new jobs tend to be crappier than the old jobs due to employers taking advantage of desperation (a form of rent seeking)
People flocked from the farms tot he factories during the industrial revolution in the US because those jobs were better. Exactly the same was true in China much more recently. Early manufacturing jobs paid very much better than anything else around. Sure, they were very exploitive by today's standards, but so was everything else at the time. It was only as time went on that workers wanted more (generally it was more about working conditions than pay early on).
Training programs and strong unemployment benefits that actually support the displaced workers while they learn a new skill would be one aproach, but it would need careful controls so it didn't take part in pushing workers into crappier jobs.
Sure, in fact I have a hard time imagining how it could lead to crappier jobs, unless we brought back indentured servitude (aka, non-compete agreements). When you have no skill, you're completely replaceable so your employer has all the power. When you have a skill, well, ever try to get a plumber in a hurry? You know who has the power there.
The basic income is probably the strongest approach. By taking poverty off of the table once and for all, the workforce gains sufficient bargaining power
Complete disregard for human nature. The basic income produces Chavs, not skilled workers. The experiment's been repeated many times: people who don't have to work don't work, and produce a culture of "work is for suckers" that's quite difficult to escape. I spent many years living in what passes in America for poor areas, and the patterns that kept people in poverty were clear once you started to know your neighbors - either a firm belief that "work is for suckers," or a hard worker coupled directly to a leech (and somehow it was also the woman busting ass and the man laying around all day). Causation is just my opinion, but the patterns were self-evident.
Giving people money for not working is a social death trap. Giving people education to become skilled workers also gives them lots of power. (Seriously - try telling a plumber the kind of shit that developers get told about what tools to use or whatnot, and see how far you get! Skilled blue collar workers are less replaceable than skilled white collar workers - though of course we should provide education leading to either sort of job to all.)
give them good reason to believe they can transition painlessly to new and better jobs In fact, they might voluntarily sign up to lose their old jobs.
No argument there.
Keep in mind in your calculations that the union victory on the 8 hour day and 40 hour week had a lot to do with getting people employed as well
Have you never been poor or worked shit jobs? There is no 40 hour work week - you work 30 hours at each of two jobs, and have to add a second fucking commute to your already-long day because some goddamned do-gooder thought there was a 40-hour work week!
OTOH, if we have a social change, a change of common expectations of people, that 30 hours was a good work week (or 40-50 hours in your 20s, but 25-30 once you master your trade), that would be great for everyone I think.
I have 2 speakers. It's the right setup. Center channel is clear, since they have good stereo imaging and each "object" in the front stage sounds like it comes from right where the mixer put it - you don't need more than 2 speakers when your listening positions are close together. (Well, unless it's a badly mixed movie and you can't hear voices over the noise, in which case being able to boost the center channel would actually help a lot).
As far as the rear? I bothered with rear speakers for years - what a waste. Nothing but noise there. The novelty of hearing a chopper fly over gets old fast. My living room is cluttered enough without that crap.
Ahh, I get it now. You're frightened. Well, I prefer that humanity continues to do science, with the inevitable minor risks that entails. If the overwhelming agreement of experts in the field it that "it's safe", I'm going to go with that, and be content with the risk that they're all wrong, because the alternative is worse.
There's a quite important principle in science, generalized from the Copernican principle, that theories that require a lot of "fine tuning" of constants in order to work are bad. The big problem with the anthropic principle is that it's too often used as an excuse to ignore the glaring weaknesses in some areas of science. We shouldn't be comfortable with such things (and for the most part, of course, scientists aren't). It's not that the anthropic principle is some overt fallacy, but it really makes me cringe to see once-respected figures like Tipler taking it seriously. It bothers me a lot less to see a religious figure suggest similar ideas - at least that guy is sticking to his principles.
Historically, the jobs have never come back. It's gonna steam engine when it's steam-engine time. There was fighting for better wages in the new industries, not the old ones! And the new industries started off paying vastly more than any other opportunities of their day.
What people are trying to fight for today is Luddite-ism: trying to stop the progress of technology. That never works. Trying to hold on to jobs that can be done cheaper by robots? Losing battle. Trying to change your jobs which currently pays less than a robot would cost to force your employer to pay more than a robot would cost? Short sighted at best.
If you have a job that automation could do, it's best to face reality, and learn a skill. That's what we as a society need to do better as well, of course! Fuck protecting outdated business models, or demanding more pay for unskilled work, that's just abuse of power. We need to provide a clear and affordable path for unskilled workers to become skilled workers (without gaining crushing debt in the process). The university system is entirely unfit for this purpose, of course, I'm mostly talking about trade schools.
There's a real shortage in almost every skilled trade, and a real oversupply of unskilled workers. Doesn't that sound like a solvable problem?
Robot make stuff that basically for free to the person who owns the robit. (Well, plus cost of materials, shipping, handling, accounting, etc. Which are also robotized, but which still cost.) So the production cost has decreased substantially. But who is earning the money to buy that stuff? Only the guy that owns the robots or delivers the merchandise...but robot truck drivers are on the horizon, and robot warehouses are already here.
Again - why are these robots making this stuff (assuming you scenario is still pre-Skynet)? Either half the people lose their jobs and all these factories go under, or at least sit idle, or people still have jobs. It's not like the rich are going to be buying that much more stuff - nicer stuff sure, but heck that probably means less robot-made stuff in wealthy households.
There are almost no agricultural jobs now, and life kept getting better. There are no almost no manufacturing jobs now, and life kept getting better. Soon there will be almost no unskilled jobs at all, and few low-skill jobs. Life will keep getting better. No one doing demanding manual labor all day? That's a better life. No one scrubbing toilets all day? That's a better life.
The simple answer is: we will be doing skilled labor, or we will fail as a nation due to our inability to educate our workforce. I believe almost everyone is smart enough and motivated enough to do the work, and demand for skilled services will spike as "things" become non-scarce. Yes, our educational system was optimized for producing unthinking factory workers, and is doing a terrible job of turning out people with a mindset useful for modern work, but it's not like change isn't underway, and it's not hopelessly bad today (except perhaps in the doomed cities).
There's already a serious shortage of everything from welders to OB/Gyns, (with the exception of lawyers, which there was a horrible glut of, and I suspect anything "CSI" related is facing a similar oversupply right now, but that's fads for you). Most people will never have the talent to be an entertainer or engineer, but for work that doesn't scale so well the bar is lower. Everything blue collar has serious shortages, and the skilled service-based stuff is growing faster than that labor supply.
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The problem with 4e is it dropped everything else. The fixes to combat make it much more accessible to a new generation, and that's great, but a D&D session shouldn't play like an MMO. You need just as much richness in the setting, in open-ended exploration, in diplomacy, in absurdly over-engineered traps, and so on. 4E got some pieces very right, but it's too tightly wound IMO - too much focus on combat, and especially on well-balanced combats. It's a poor system to accommodate cleverness and tactical elements not captured by player abilities.
4E adventures tend to be a set of very-well-balanced encounters all very level appropriate for a party, but that loses much of the charm of D&D. 4E is poorly suited mechanically for "crazy plans that just might work" to take on foes far out of the party's level range (unless they're scripted into the module). E.g., the party wants to kills a group of foes far more powerful than they, so they gather intelligence by diplomacy, intrigue, and seduction, discover a good time and place for an ambush, arrange to blow up a cliff face to drop an avalanche on the foes as they walk past on a marrow path, then attack before the dust settles. Pre-4E, it's fairly natural for a good DM to figure out how that all works and run a fun session around it in a way the players find fair. In 4E you have so little to work with for any of that, unless it was part of the script.
I just don't see the broken-rules problems in RP-land ...
Old school RP is a tiny corner of the gaming world, and really well served by rules-light RPG systems, I think. Risus is great IMO for anything where you don't need "tactical simulation rules" (hmm, TSR, someone should make a game company ....), or one of the many Emo Goffpire games. I just see the broken-rules problems in RP-land that plague the tactical world.
Here's the problem: it's boring to be in an encounter where you have nothing to contribute. And bored players make problems for games, one way or another. With social encounters, most players can enjoy what's going on even if they're just arguing about what the charismatic rogue should say, but it's different in tactical combat, where too great an imbalance in ability to contribute can ruin the game.
becomes an arms race between players to find the most powerful, game breaking combos. Spreadsheets, forums, and research on things that can be abused. It leaves the non min/maxers in the dust, ...
You can roleplay the smartest/strongest guy around, or you can abuse the rule system to become the strongest/smartest guy around. When your level 5 character has godly powers to influence the game through some clever min/maxing, it really ruins the experience for others.
All I can say is: that just isn't true of every game system. It's horribly, horribly true of 3.5, which is the fundamental problem with 3.5. If careful min/maxing gives you a 20% combat advantage over a naive build, likely at the cost of non-combat stuff, that's not going to be a problem. Heck, it could be 50% more powerful without hurting the game if the DM is willing to shape encounters a bit (not ideal, but workable). But 3.5 is so bad that some classes simply can't contribute except in carefully contrived encounters, while others (with expert play) won't have any challenge without equal contrivances. Heck, 3.5 has infinite HP builds, infinite damage builds, and so on, though that stuff is less worrying as its so blatant.
On a side note, there were enough base classes in 3.5 that you could almost make whatever character you wanted by dipping into them a la carte. See my rogue/scout/ranger/fighter.
I always liked that part, though I'd say it's a bit of a 3.5 flaw that you have to do that awkward dance to realize what's likely a pretty clear and sensible character concept (just not one of the D&D archetypes).
Cool - I haven't used VS for C++ since they grew up and added C99 support - I really should try it out.
as anyone who's ever wanted to save a Netflix movie for offline viewing on a flight
They offer that service separately, and I use it all the time: DVDs - but for most people that's a corner case. The problem most people have with Netflix (myself included) is the tiny amount of streaming content in the first place. Even with the DRM they can barely get any content owners contracted. The studios just have recto-cranial inversion over streaming in the first place - the DRM is just a distraction from the real issue.
In both cases - content owners and big ISPs, you've got abuse of government-granted monopolies. The real issue is our alleged democracy selling monopolies in the first place!
Hastings, Netflix, and 99.999999% of all streaming customers give approximately 0 fucks about DRM. They pay Netflix, they see the content, there's simply no problem. And they're right. Technology makes life better by working. If it "just works", then it's fine. This ISP-throttling-Netflix BS, OTOH, is punishing customers until Netflix caves. That's not fine.
They used Akamai for several years for the majority of their streaming traffic, but then they outgrew Akamai. Netflix is, what, 1/3 of all internet traffic now? They are the biggest CDN.
Min/maxing is half the fun of the game, unless it leaves the PCs woefully unbalanced between one another. What you want is a system where min/maxing produces reasonable character concepts, and reasonable character concepts produce well-optimized characters. That was the huge flaw in 3.5 - it was impossible for the new player to figure out what worked mechanically and what didn't. When I play an RPG, I want to play a hero, dammit. I can play the flawed loser in real life, thank you very much.. But I shouldn't have to know or care that if my idea of a hero is a martial monk that I'll bee all but useless in any encounter, while if it's a pure caster that I'll have an "I win" button if I do it right.
That's the problem. Not the idea that if I'm going to be a wizard, I'm going to be the smartest guy around, or if I'm going to hit people in the face with my axe, then I'm going to be the biggest, toughest guy around. Those are totally viable character ideas, especially your first time playing before you've grown bored of the shallow archetypes. And yet, that's min-maxing. Bah, min-maxing is fine. It's a broken system where in order to be an non-cliche character you have to be disadvantaged mechanically, because the game is build on archetype enforcement, that's the problem.
OK, it's worse still if you buy what you thought was an RPG and it turns out to just be miniatures combat rules. 4E got combat right, but the game had little else. At least in 3.5 with a veteran DM guiding new players to make effective characters, or any previous D&D version, there was a deep game there that only occasionally focused on combat.
Sure, in simple code. But when you have crap like a list of labmdas that take a map and return a vector, or somesuch, because what you're doing is just like that, full type descriptions really help.
But that's rare, and I'd agree with you most of the time.
Processes are only as good as the people who implement them
Naturally. Your code is as good as the code review process, which is to say, as good as your people and how much they care.
You can definitely over-do auto typing to the point where a human can't figure out the types involved, but that's just a team coding standards thing. For sure, auto is better than any type spec that doesn't fit on a single line in the editor. Obviously class v struct is a historical relic, but I like it. I use class and struct for different things - all members private in the former, vs all public in the latter. I also like the convention that struct is the right keyword to declare an interface, since C++ has no 'interface' keyword.
If you don't use obscure features of C++ just for fun, you won't have that problem. Most of the obscure features in C++ exist to solve a very specific sort of problem. If your job is to solve that problem, you already understand what the relevant C++ feature does - to you it's not obscure, it's quite handy and much cleaner to have in the language than to write an test yourself.
No one needs to master all the obscure crap, because there's no single software product than needs it all - but all of it is needed by someone, somewhere.
And if you're being deliberately obscure, well, others have mentioned the C obfuscation contest. No language is maintainable without at least some basic effort to reject needlessly obfuscated code through code reviews.
Well, you'd just need a chuckugly type declaration for it. The new ability to use auto in declaring the parameters to the lambda expression itself - that's one I don't see how you'd do without auto, as it's effectively templating in a place where you can't syntactically declare the template.
So in the real world, you have to understand nearly all of it in order to be able to maintain other people's code or to work as a team.
If you don't have coding standards and a firm code review process to enforce them, you have already lost.
C++ has a lot of cruft to allow you to cleanly solve problems that 99% of coders will never encounter. I'd say that these days, if your not in some dark corner where you need at least 1 bizarre C++ feature, you should probably use a higher level language.
As an example of what I mean - C++ lets you overload the 'new' operator. Why would you ever want to do that? There no reason to learn how that feature works until and unless you need it. But if you need to do "slab allocation" or otherwise change the memory allocation pattern away from "just malloc", suddenly overloading 'new' is an amazingly useful and clean way to do this. In C you have to replace malloc with some other call (or #define malloc notmalloc) and police it everywhere in your codebase, which gets ugly when you have 20 different objects each allocated from its own slab, and gets horrifically ugly when you discover that you need to do this a couple years into a project. In C++ you just overload 'new' on a class-by-class basis.
C++ has many features like that - stuff that you'd almost never have any use for, but is wonderful when you find yourself in that dark corner. You just need to guard against that guy who just wants to play with some C++ cruft when it's not needed, just because it looks neat.
It hasn't happened in over 200 years of democracy, what makes you think it will happen now?
Our government spends more money mailing checks to people than its revenue.
The fundamental problem with a basic income is that it only works if it's not enough to live on comfortably, just enough to subsist, and that's an impossible system to maintain in a democracy. Entitlements will always be raised by vote until that's all the government can afford to do any more, and a bit above that. We're already there. Parts of Europe have been there long enough, have gone so far over the edge, that only constant donations from neighboring governments (mostly Germany) kept them going through the downturn.
I don't understand what jobs you think will be going away that pay $50k today? If anyone makes that in a job that can be replaced by a robot, I have no sympathy, but I don't see it (other than the few lingering manufacturing jobs, but manufacturing by humans has been going away for decades and is already a small and dwindling % today).
I don't believe in the singularity. The idea that a few rich people would own factories just building stuff for one another is dystopian fantasy - rich people deliberately making themselves poor by refusing to sell to others. Makes no sense at all. Robotic manufacturing just displaces the few people left in America with manufacturing jobs, making things significantly cheaper for everyone. I can see robots displacing unskilled labor next - fast food workers and maids and so on - which is a bigger pool than manufacturing workers, but IMO most people in those jobs are perfectly capable of skilled work, and in fact are usually still students or recent immigrants, already on a path that will lead to skilled jobs if our educational system doesn't fail them.
Watching all the construction projects happening around me, they're already seriously benefitting from (non-robotic) automation, to the point where the only thing really labor intensive is concrete pours (laying out all the rebar, mailing together the forms, smoothing the concrete as its poured), and that still is far less labor than 50 years ago. And yet there's help-wanted signs up at most of the construction projects around me. Modern construction equipment is amazingly productive, but you still need someone to operate it. Modern wood-framed construction is just nailing up prefab walls and other parts, but you still need people to measure and inspect, plus plumbers and electricians and the occasional welder. All of that stuff is skilled labor, none of it will be replaced by robots in the next 20-30 years, and there's a demand for labor for all of it.
Anything involving diagnosing and repairing problems with buildings/vehicles/equipment needs skilled people, not going to be replaced by robots any time soon, and has labor shortages today. We've had a big push away from blue collar jobs and into college by the educational system that hasn't served us well. Manufacturing is dead, blue collar work (work that pays pretty well, though it can be seasonal) is not.
Plus now we'll see growth in skilled services jobs IMO.
Sure, the old jobs don't come back. TYhe new jobs tend to be crappier than the old jobs due to employers taking advantage of desperation (a form of rent seeking)
People flocked from the farms tot he factories during the industrial revolution in the US because those jobs were better. Exactly the same was true in China much more recently. Early manufacturing jobs paid very much better than anything else around. Sure, they were very exploitive by today's standards, but so was everything else at the time. It was only as time went on that workers wanted more (generally it was more about working conditions than pay early on).
Training programs and strong unemployment benefits that actually support the displaced workers while they learn a new skill would be one aproach, but it would need careful controls so it didn't take part in pushing workers into crappier jobs.
Sure, in fact I have a hard time imagining how it could lead to crappier jobs, unless we brought back indentured servitude (aka, non-compete agreements). When you have no skill, you're completely replaceable so your employer has all the power. When you have a skill, well, ever try to get a plumber in a hurry? You know who has the power there.
The basic income is probably the strongest approach. By taking poverty off of the table once and for all, the workforce gains sufficient bargaining power
Complete disregard for human nature. The basic income produces Chavs, not skilled workers. The experiment's been repeated many times: people who don't have to work don't work, and produce a culture of "work is for suckers" that's quite difficult to escape. I spent many years living in what passes in America for poor areas, and the patterns that kept people in poverty were clear once you started to know your neighbors - either a firm belief that "work is for suckers," or a hard worker coupled directly to a leech (and somehow it was also the woman busting ass and the man laying around all day). Causation is just my opinion, but the patterns were self-evident.
Giving people money for not working is a social death trap. Giving people education to become skilled workers also gives them lots of power. (Seriously - try telling a plumber the kind of shit that developers get told about what tools to use or whatnot, and see how far you get! Skilled blue collar workers are less replaceable than skilled white collar workers - though of course we should provide education leading to either sort of job to all.)
give them good reason to believe they can transition painlessly to new and better jobs In fact, they might voluntarily sign up to lose their old jobs.
No argument there.
Keep in mind in your calculations that the union victory on the 8 hour day and 40 hour week had a lot to do with getting people employed as well
Have you never been poor or worked shit jobs? There is no 40 hour work week - you work 30 hours at each of two jobs, and have to add a second fucking commute to your already-long day because some goddamned do-gooder thought there was a 40-hour work week!
OTOH, if we have a social change, a change of common expectations of people, that 30 hours was a good work week (or 40-50 hours in your 20s, but 25-30 once you master your trade), that would be great for everyone I think.
I have 2 speakers. It's the right setup. Center channel is clear, since they have good stereo imaging and each "object" in the front stage sounds like it comes from right where the mixer put it - you don't need more than 2 speakers when your listening positions are close together. (Well, unless it's a badly mixed movie and you can't hear voices over the noise, in which case being able to boost the center channel would actually help a lot).
As far as the rear? I bothered with rear speakers for years - what a waste. Nothing but noise there. The novelty of hearing a chopper fly over gets old fast. My living room is cluttered enough without that crap.
Wow, there's no part of this that I can tell whether it's a joke or not, except from context. Well, except the goat.
Ahh, I get it now. You're frightened. Well, I prefer that humanity continues to do science, with the inevitable minor risks that entails. If the overwhelming agreement of experts in the field it that "it's safe", I'm going to go with that, and be content with the risk that they're all wrong, because the alternative is worse.
There's a quite important principle in science, generalized from the Copernican principle, that theories that require a lot of "fine tuning" of constants in order to work are bad. The big problem with the anthropic principle is that it's too often used as an excuse to ignore the glaring weaknesses in some areas of science. We shouldn't be comfortable with such things (and for the most part, of course, scientists aren't). It's not that the anthropic principle is some overt fallacy, but it really makes me cringe to see once-respected figures like Tipler taking it seriously. It bothers me a lot less to see a religious figure suggest similar ideas - at least that guy is sticking to his principles.
Historically, the jobs have never come back. It's gonna steam engine when it's steam-engine time. There was fighting for better wages in the new industries, not the old ones! And the new industries started off paying vastly more than any other opportunities of their day.
What people are trying to fight for today is Luddite-ism: trying to stop the progress of technology. That never works. Trying to hold on to jobs that can be done cheaper by robots? Losing battle. Trying to change your jobs which currently pays less than a robot would cost to force your employer to pay more than a robot would cost? Short sighted at best.
If you have a job that automation could do, it's best to face reality, and learn a skill. That's what we as a society need to do better as well, of course! Fuck protecting outdated business models, or demanding more pay for unskilled work, that's just abuse of power. We need to provide a clear and affordable path for unskilled workers to become skilled workers (without gaining crushing debt in the process). The university system is entirely unfit for this purpose, of course, I'm mostly talking about trade schools.
There's a real shortage in almost every skilled trade, and a real oversupply of unskilled workers. Doesn't that sound like a solvable problem?
Robot make stuff that basically for free to the person who owns the robit. (Well, plus cost of materials, shipping, handling, accounting, etc. Which are also robotized, but which still cost.) So the production cost has decreased substantially. But who is earning the money to buy that stuff? Only the guy that owns the robots or delivers the merchandise...but robot truck drivers are on the horizon, and robot warehouses are already here.
Again - why are these robots making this stuff (assuming you scenario is still pre-Skynet)? Either half the people lose their jobs and all these factories go under, or at least sit idle, or people still have jobs. It's not like the rich are going to be buying that much more stuff - nicer stuff sure, but heck that probably means less robot-made stuff in wealthy households.
There are almost no agricultural jobs now, and life kept getting better. There are no almost no manufacturing jobs now, and life kept getting better. Soon there will be almost no unskilled jobs at all, and few low-skill jobs. Life will keep getting better. No one doing demanding manual labor all day? That's a better life. No one scrubbing toilets all day? That's a better life.
The simple answer is: we will be doing skilled labor, or we will fail as a nation due to our inability to educate our workforce. I believe almost everyone is smart enough and motivated enough to do the work, and demand for skilled services will spike as "things" become non-scarce. Yes, our educational system was optimized for producing unthinking factory workers, and is doing a terrible job of turning out people with a mindset useful for modern work, but it's not like change isn't underway, and it's not hopelessly bad today (except perhaps in the doomed cities).
There's already a serious shortage of everything from welders to OB/Gyns, (with the exception of lawyers, which there was a horrible glut of, and I suspect anything "CSI" related is facing a similar oversupply right now, but that's fads for you). Most people will never have the talent to be an entertainer or engineer, but for work that doesn't scale so well the bar is lower. Everything blue collar has serious shortages, and the skilled service-based stuff is growing faster than that labor supply.