Thank you for the excellent exercise in descrambling unreadable text. I made it 1/4th of the way of your writing and was no longer able to decipher its current context.
When writing a letter, we make use of paragraphs that should be cut to sizes that are not overwhelming in their nature. We do this not just for grammar's sake, but also to allow the text a little room to breath.
We also use paragraphs as a means of moving onto the next thought in the chain.
Can I recommend that in the future, you make more liberal use of white space in your writings. I believe it will allow you to better share your thoughts.
A380 was one of the greatest job making successes in the history of France. The government dumped billions into making a plane that took forever to design and build and build and infrastructure around. I have no idea how many jobs were created or mouths were fed from it, but there have been very few great examples of the success of a capitalistic country extending balancing their deficits internationally while decreasing unemployment so drastically on a dead end project.
The U.S. does this with Boeing, Lockheed and now are experimenting with computer companies like Cisco and HP.
The idea is, to create more wealth and jobs, you buy and fund tons of shit that really has no benefit what-so-ever to anyone. Wealth is created by federal governments sort-of controlling the rates of their national deficits relative to one another, so it's kind of like massive collaborative devaluation of currencies. Then the money produced by the increased deficit is used to fund major projects which may or may not succeed, but generates huge numbers of jobs and wealth redistribution within the economy.
Then ideally to remove some of the money from circulation with the hopes of avoiding major deflation, several 1%ers horde the funds to ensure that the status quo is maintained and the price of bread and milk doesn't inflate too quickly due to devalued currency.
A380 was amazing for the French economy and I'll be surprised if they can find something new to replace it anytime soon. Maybe a major overhaul to the design to make it more attractive to the market?
It's their general inability to almost intentionally misinterpret everything literally and take offense at things that are obviously jokes to anyone who has a sense of sarcasm.:)
It's quite funny that this wasn't even my joke originally, it was made by my brother-in-law (a Finn) while we were out drinking one night. Well at least the part about Finns.... he's never been to Fresno so far as I can tell.
Isn't the solution to that to :
a) Eliminate Fresno... ever since Karate Kid, this has seemed like a good idea
b) Don't go to Helsinki... don't get me wrong... it's a pretty place. But the old saying is "There's no I in team"... and the reason for that is because the Fins used all the I's in their language and there was none left for the rest of the world. No person should ever have to expose themselves to a culture (one famous for exposing themselves to everyone else when running into the snow from saunas) that actually believe entire sentences can be constructed without the use of a single consonant.
You make some very interesting points which got me thinking in those lines.
Also consider that we're not really considering some more important issues which is that in the past, we were very dependent on major hubs because most airline travel was planned and booked by travel agents or humans who would calculate routes. They could search for a direct flight and they could also search for flights through hubs between the origin and destination. But booking multiple corresponding tickets on multiple airlines would result in major delays as well since the airlines didn't really cooperate like that. So one airline wouldn't necessarily hold a flight 5 minutes to compensate of a delayed plane from another airline that had a connection.
These days, due to far more efficient algorithms in calculating the routes, but also in executing the forwarding of the passengers through the routes as well as the buffer management on ingress and egress... as well as the added ability to compensate for things like additional security checks at Heathrow that can take 45 minutes or longer between flights in the same terminal.... we don't need big fat ass planes from hub to hub anymore.
I've been on probably close to 100 flights since the A380 was launched. I don't think I've been on it more than twice. I've been on 787s a few dozen times.
Was the A380 the one which had the window seats with storage on the side which means you can't sleep while leaning against the window?
Made me scroll up to see what article it was I was reading.
Are you REALLY excited and hopeful that Mike Pence... a guy who is the political embodiment of the flat-Earthers and who needs a constitution if you have the evangelical church to guide him... as president?
Trump is horrible... but would you rather have Trump which no sane politician wants to be seen to support or would you rather have Mike Pence who it seems everyone would support if it meant getting rid of Trump?
I'd rather have a fool who has a one track mind of building a wall that we can say no to as opposed to a fool who thinks women who get pregnant when they're raped should be forced to kill themselves because they can't kill off the seed of the rapist who destroyed their lives... who would have the full support of a republican congress.
Please consider trying this nifty new game called chess. It teaches you... if you let it to consider the consequences of your actions. What seems like a great idea at first may not be the best idea if you look a move or two ahead.
I'm not completely sure I agree with you. In sentiment I certainly do. You're right, we should have had 30 years more experience in space now.
But here's a few things.
1) I'm a globalist. Consider that almost every single "Great American Achievement" during my short lifetime of 42 years are credited primarily to immigrants. This isn't to speak poorly of Americans, but there's a general rule of history and that's that greatness almost always comes from people willing to give up absolutely everything and take the greatest risks to achieve it. This generally means leaving everything you know and love to go someplace which may be even openly hostile towards you to make something great. American's do great things abroad, but rarely in America.
The moral of the story in this sense is that we as humans should have accomplished a great deal more in collaboration to reach space. And to a certain extent we really did. We built the space station and people have lived in space for over a year. We have created a lot of technology able to function and operate in space and we're not far from starting to do more than just put people there, we should be able to build habitats where we may produce food and may build things we need too.
We are almost experts on water recycling now. We can scrub air like crazy. In those 30 years, we have learned so incredibly much about space that now companies can take that information and privatize it.
2) The price is dropping fast. My household income is only a few hundred thousand a year and I think I'll be able to take a family trip to space at some point before I die. SpaceX and Blue Horizon are amazing companies who will increase the infrastructure into space. Virgin should eventually have the capacity to transport people to LEO. It's an issue of supply and demand. As soon as we have the means to reach space with lower fuel cost and at a much higher frequency, prices will drop substantially.
3) Space belongs to no one too. Consider there's an awful lot of space. There is more than enough to go around. We will have no problem sharing and if someone wants to claim property rights on a square kilometer on a dusty planet somewhere, I suppose most people won't begrudge them the right to do so. I don't really think ownership will matter beyond small personal items when the space age truly happens.
4) If we did this 30 years sooner, we wouldn't have been ready. To accomplish it, the space craft would have had to be government owned / operated / whatever. They would have been public projects. That means bureaucracy and politics. It also means cutting corners, wasted spending, etc... we spent 30 years learning an incredible lesson. While organizations like NASA can do this stuff, the government can't. Privatizing space changes everything. Right now, there are a small number of players. Someday, there will be more. If an entire country is only able to go to space if the government chooses to launch a rocket, then any space missions which are not specifically government will be of little interest and will be very expensive. The government as a whole has a responsibility to flood the economy with money produced by the deficit and produce massive numbers of jobs, therefore making space cheap was always a bad idea for the government.
Now, multiple companies are launch capable. Soon, more will be capable and some will be human rated. We'll soon move past the thrill of simply getting into space and move onto going somewhere in space.
Let's be honest, Elon Musk is a dreamer and by most standards a mad man. We can't tell whether he should be locked up for mental health, arrested for running his company stocks just short of a ponzi operation, or if we should place him on a pedestal and try and change the laws of the US to allow for a foreign presidential candidate. He sometimes seems like he's learned how to live by reading Iron Man comic books and he models himself after Tony Stark. I'll die laughing if he all of a sudden makes an Iron Man suit.
Currently, Cryptocurrencies are a means of allowing gamblers to gamble. This is highly constructive and productive for the general markets for a few good reasons.
Volatility in trading is a major problem. Classically, gamblers (investors) have creatively attempted to carve out niches that have had devastating impacts on society. For example, the price of grain isn't driven by supply and demand. The price of grain is driven by commodity trading. This means that if the gamblers on the stock markets who actually do not care what the price of grain is for practical reasons can generate enough trading volume to increase volatility of the share for any period of time, then due to trends, the price of grain can either be artificially forced upwards or downwards causing mass disruption in the supply chain or the commodity cost.
Let me explain, people like Warren Buffet, Icann or others of their ilk invest in companies and people who they believe in with the interest of seeing a stable and predictable return based on the performance of the companies they invest in. As such, a company with an investor like Warren Buffet will issue shares and Warren Buffet will take an interest in the company. If the company performs badly, he will along with other investors alter the management structure of the company through actions of the shareholders and the board to improve the performance of the company or change the structure of the company to dissolve it gracefully to give the best return on the investment. What Warren does is theoretically a form of inside trading as he is directly profiting from influencing the performance of the company. But trading regulations are in place to force him to act generally ethically. So for example, he can't short sell the share if he knows the shareholder report will kill the share value. He would instead have to publicly announce his trades in time to prepare the market for his change in interest and generally provide a reason for it.
The majority of traders out there however act on trends.
This means that without any knowledge of the company, they buy and sell shares which weren't issued to them by the company, but instead buy and sell shares which were owned by others through open trading. They are not gambling on the performance of the company. They have no interest in the health of the company. Instead, they are gambling on the value of the share. Often times, their behavior hurts the companies far more than they help. See, a trader will buy and sell based on whether the stock is going up or down. In some cases, dividends can be used to convince the shareholders to take an invested interest in the performance of the company, but generally, the average trader will have no particular interest in the long term aspects of the firm. Many investors buy into a company simply long enough to reap the rewards of the dividend and then dispose of the share shortly after.
I can go on, but in general, trend traders which are basically nothing more than gamblers trying to sell high and buy low based on upwards and downward trends have major negative impacts on the shares. Consider the "Essential Phone" which was just another Android phone. The leaders of the company managed to hype the share so much that the market cap of the company reached a billion dollars long before it ever sold a single device. The people who hyped the share, even if it completely tanks will still manage to walk away with a lot of money on their pockets. Many people will lose their investments but several people, thanks to an amazing stir and incredible management of selling the share will walk away wealthier than ever and start their next venture.
Cryptocurrencies provide a new gamblers hotbed. Thanks to the insane volatility of coins and lack of regulation, buy low sell high is an easy game to play. People excited about upward trends can ride it out several times a week. If they can manage to shift money in and out of the currencies, they can produce amazing returns on investment. These people have
haha I love this. The causality of this exact statement is something I sometimes contemplate while sitting in traffic.
I am no an asshole driver... the kind that pissed off me as a kid because I drive within 10% of speed limit and I don't rush everywhere. I'm extremely considerate and let people in from the sides all the time... at least every other road where I have the right-of-way, if there's someone waiting, I'll slow down to let them in. The people behind me get pissed. I also attempt to never make a driving decision that doesn't mathematically impact more people positively than negatively (within my calculations)
I was an asshole drive back then... I drove "Safely" at 160km/hr every chance I could in a car that probably wasn't even safe at 110km/hr. I cut in and out of traffic. I would drive the 140km from Clearwater, FL to Disney world in under an hour... with traffic.
I realized... I've always been an asshole driver... just a different kind of asshole and I assume that everyone else is too:)
1) Roads are for infrastructure and tracks are for play driving. Your fun time should be done where I don't have to see it. It's like churches and stadiums. The civilized population supports people having these places because it keeps "those people" away from us at least for a few hours a week. When people say they like driving and that's a good excuse to not be forced into a far better world, it means you believe you put your play time in front of what is best for society. Consider that you could probably instead spend all the money you're wasting on cars these days on trips to Dublin to learn to drift on a track for example. You could learn how to drive for real.
2) Driverless won't ruin the prices of cars. Progress will. The car market will rapidly shrink with current and future generations of cars. Cars don't rust anymore and electric cars don't vibrate themselves to an early grave. A brand new electric car today could easily be maintained safely for 30 years for far less than the cost of maintaining a gas car for 12. Tires, the occassional wheel motor replacement, brakes, tires, wipers, a refurbished battery pack, etc... in fact, about 90% of the work could likely be automated.
3) Insurance companies will no longer be part of most peoples lives... at least for automotive. Self-driving cars should be pooled. Normal people would ride share, wealthier people would pay extra for quiet service. But, you will open your phone and basically Uber everything. This should in fact be law in cities, in the countryside (off the highways) there will be diesel and gas cars for decades. Also, since most cars will be owned by companies like Uber (or city...) they will find it more profitable to own their own insurance firms. You'll probably have to pay a fortune or auto insurance. I'm perfectly ok with this.
4) Driving should be cost prohibitive. There is absolutely no possible reason you can present that would justify owning a car in the future... at least in urban or suburban areas. Self-driving car pools and public transportation should handle it. There should be about 1 car per 3-4 families, not 1.7 cars per family. Consider that at least during my life, it's about every 10-15 years, every single car is replaced. Consider the MASSIVE WASTE involved. With the exception of collectors cars (which I feel strongly should be banned from roads) most cars are crushed and recycled. Most modern cars are made of polymers or other materials, many of them extremely difficult to recycle. The fabrics are often synthetic. Leather seats actually require tanning which has never ever ever been something good for the environment. So... simply owning a car should be VERY EXPENSIVE. Should be billionaire's club thing.
5) My household income is quite healthy. I don't know for sure, but I think if my wife worked full time instead of 80%, we'd probably make about $200k, and we're in a city where anything over $100k is comfortable. I look forward to not being able to afford personal transportation. I don't see any benefit to me as an individual owning a vehicle. That said, public transportation will be far more important. Self-driving cars pools will not always be convenient for everyone.
BTW, self-driving tractors and tractor sharing should be a must as well. This way, a single tractor can be used for 10-20 farms instead of 1-2.
I noticed you didn't make a point of how this will impact real people. What percentage of the world feed themselves each day because of cars? 1) Taxi drivers 2) What about truck drivers? 3) What about train conductors? 4) Airline pilots? 5) Delivery drivers?
Driving is the one job any idiot in the world seems to think they are able to do. We're going to replace every one of the jobs above with computers. Keep in mind that no matter how ugly, stupid, smelly, incompetent, etc... you are, you can drive something. You can be the least ambitious person in the world and you'll still be able to eat if you can drive.
If you need an example of how insanely bad of an idea it is to pollute the world with unneeded languages, consider either Hebrew, Gaelic or Nynorsk. They increase the number of languages for no apparent reason.
There are currently 4 languages of significance in the world.
- English (hardly any native speakers but widely proliferated, likely the most spoken and understood language)
- Spanish (possibly the most spoken language by people who only speak on language)
- Mandarin (lots of speakers in many countries, though very difficult to learn due to the dependence on vowel pronunciation)
- Arabic (a very widely used language within a given religion, estimated speakers around the same as Mandarin or Spanish)
For a runner up, French which is widely spoken in Africa and is expected to eventually become the most widely spoken language in the world due to good improving health care in Africa.
Additionally, Hindi is widely spoken and if Punjabi is considered compatible with Hindi and even little more than a common language as a union, it may be the most spoken language after English.
Of course my numbers are based on my understanding and I can link any references. But this has been what I've learned through my research.
At some point in time, English is likely to become the universal language in the world. For an example of its versatility, I just traveled to Qatar and spent a day with 15 people from the Philippines, multiple regions of India and multiple regions within Africa and the middle east. We were all able to communicate naturally because of English.
Fewer languages are better. We should never strive to introduce new languages since even engineered languages will eventually diversify and contain local dialects and colloquialisms. The sooner we reach a single spoken language and attempt to eliminate the smaller languages, the sooner we can call ourselves Earthlings.
Of course, I'm a globalist. I don't believe in patriotism or borders. People are people and borders are not useful for anything other than taxation.
This is pretty true. I've been to many small places in Norway... and once the population hits about two thousand, there seems to be mass transit via buses but not to the way off places. To be fair though, I've seen bus stops outside of most farms I've driven past. There is a pretty complete taxi system in Norway... even in the somewhat tiny places, but they're absolutely stupidly expensive. There is always a taxi when you need one, but most taxi drivers can sit for an hour or more waiting for a fare... and they make sure to charge you appropriately for that.
I haven't, but I've laid bricks, shoveled ditches, built circuit boards, etc... I even held a "Slow/Stop" sign for 10 hours in Florida summer heat at a construction site.
I think it taught me a few important things in life. And I never did those things for more then a few days each. I did learn to respect the people around me. I also learned that what was easy for me wasn't always easy for other people.
As for the driving and delivering packages.... you'd be absolutely shocked how much work that really is.
i don't think it's desperation. It's the classic rule that the people who put the least effort into getting their jobs are the people who will work the hardest for the least amount of compensation.
McDonalds for example hires most of their employees by posting a sign on the door saying "no hiring" at which point you see the people behind the counter and see the standards for what they'll hire are about the same as you are...and you fill out an application and unless $20 background search on you turns up something awful, it's time to start training you. Then they'll work you to death, see you as easily replaceable and for the most part would prefer you don't make it through a trial phase as then you might be difficult to fire.
Consider the classic case of the "job creation economy". People voted for Trump and many other politicians over the promises of jobs. I've never ever taken a job which was created as a political promise and in most cases could not be tracked back to government stimulus. But there are a massive number of jobs which exist to deliver jobs to the people. Most people have classically been against immigrant workers because they believe their jobs are being taken by people flooding in to steel them. But those jobs are generally taken by people who actively apply for them.
Automotive, manufacturing, coal, gas, etc... even building space craft and airplanes at Lockheed and co... are all jobs which were created to advertise to the people in one area or another that all they really need to do is show up and they'll have a job.
Most people of the world do not know how to look for jobs. Many people simply don't realize that the jobs are there if they want them or ask the right way. If you want a job and you have an interest in doing something, more often than not, you can find someone to pay you for it. There's also the issue of wanted advertisements in the newspaper (or wherever else). They are almost always written in a concise fashion which scares away 99% of their qualified candidates. You can't just write "We're willing to pay good money for honest people willing to work hard... call 555-1234". They list educational requirements and all kinds of other crap... when they really just need people. But by making it too professional, people will end up working for $5 an hour while sweating the entire time and risking death on greasy floors while paying for expensive work clothes and shoes because someone else was smart enough to keep it simple and write "Help wanted" on a sign.
Most people want to work. If for no other reason but it allows them to have more to their life than just what is on the couch and on the TV. It provides them with a social experience. They don't however want to look for work.
What is worse is that it's clear that Amazon apparently believed they were paying a company enough money to provide these people a good living and making it worth it to them to work hard. Instead, that company was placing their employees in a scenario nearing indentured servitude. They were even charging the guys for the car rental and the fuel.
Amazon should be held accountable for not performing research into their associate companies. They need to ensure they only work with companies who actually are treating their employees at least reasonably. On the other hand, they can't possibly be expected to run their own delivery companies for every single little village out there. It's better to try and find honest people who are willing to hire and manage good people. This makes it so that everyone benefits. If Amazon managed the drivers themselves, those drivers would just be another number in a database. By using courier companies, there is a good chance the owner of the company will take a personal interest in the welfare of his employees.
I would like to agree with your impassioned argument. And I suppose I could on some level. These people are really impressive in the capabilities and I suppose it's nice to watch people strive to be the best at something or part of the best team.
I of course, don't agree with sports as sports are yet another means of glorifying competition as a good thing. Cooperation is good, so watching a player be part of a team that can work together to accomplish something greater... that is truly a great thing.
Competition is a bad thing. Nothing in history has ever been accomplished with competition as its motivation that could not have been done far better with cooperation at its core. Consider the space race as an example.
We chose to go to the moon. Yep... we went to the moon and we got bored and we stopped. The Americans went to the moon. The Russians just gave up because why bother going to the moon if the Americans already got there. Its was just a waste of time and money. Yet, when Russia and America worked together and everyone else became involved as well, we got the International Space Station which we have been learning from for a long time. We work together towards something much greater in that case.
We're going to Mars... yesterday Boeing said "we're going to get to Mars before SpaceX" which is stupid. Who cares who gets there first as long as once we start going there, we don't just stop like we did with the moon. How about a better headline "SpaceX, Boeing and other space companies and agencies agree to work together to raise funding and make travelling to Mars a reality"
Organized sports advocate almost all that is wrong with humanity though, they do give a little back in the sense you do get to observe greatness. I doubt I'll ever reach greatness, but I work 10-18 hours a day every day and with the exception of a few short breaks due to becoming a father or burning out, I've done so for 25 years. If I'm not working, I learning. If I'm working I'm learning. I would never waste my life with reality TV or sports and watch other people live their lives. I instead embrace my hopes that I could make myself and the people around me a little better each day.
To be fair though, I imagine you and many others want to watch the best at their peaks. If I were to use my life for something like that, I would simply say that watching people at their peak or near it is boring. It's far more exciting to watch a person rise. Then you can see clear progress in their self-improvement every single day.
And of course, I have been blessed to see human excellence in most everything. You can see human excellence at the park while out on a walk where children learn to walk and climb and run. You can see excellence in a book where an author like Eion Colfer can write an entire novel like Airman which is a display of sheer perfection in his employment of the right work every single time. As though the words were born for no other reason than to narrate his story. The story itself was entertaining, but the words he chose were a display of human excellence. You can visit your local town hall and admire the architecture and think "how did someone managed to design a tool or machine to create columns like that". You can of course watch sports while out as well. You can visit a bar with a pianist who may be lude, crude and barely able to hammer the keys, but watch whether he/she has a gift to entertain.
There are so many different forms of human excellence. But watching two teams blatantly display their ambitions to cause the other team to lose. And in many cases through means of violent domination. I consider this to be a display of the worst of humanity. Excellence can only be achieved through cooperation and never through competition unless the competition is focused entirely against yourself at which point in time, it's just measuring your own progress.
Battery life is ok on Intel hardware these days. The question is battery for performance. So, we're not doing much for Atom based laptops anymore. By now Intel has 20 hours nailed with that I'm almost sure.
The question is, if I sit down and start using this machine how slow is it? I use a Surface Book each day and plan to get a Surface Book 2 next month. Yes, it's top end model. I have high expectations from a laptop. Will this laptop be so slow that a Core i3 is fast?
I think you're comparing a PC to a... I have no idea what this is.
Let's make a better comparison. Let's compare this to a Motorola Galaxy... at least from a hardware perspective. How does this stack up? I guess the flash is less, but otherwise is there any actually different from a Samsung telephone? They're still making that huge iPad mini sized telephone right?
Consider this, most code these days for Windows is generally packed in someway or another. Therefore while something like DynamicRIO could probably compil the unpacking code, the code would then be unpacked and would have to be executed. Since DynamicRIO would no longer be running, the unpacked x86 code could no longer run.
To make this work, it is necessary to employ a just-in-time compiler which is exactly the same as code morphing... which the article points out is still classified as executing the instructions. Just in an optimized fashion.
I was thinking... 300k? Are you serious? What actually justifies calling yourself an AI developer?
I haven't really put that much effort into AI and while I've done a lot of coding I imagine probably counts as AI from what I understand about it, to be a real AI developer would require a lot more than just writing code which makes decisions based on statistical analysis and thresholds.
For example, I wrote a signal decoder years ago which couldn't be handled using traditional DSP theory. High pass and low pass filters couldn't work. There was a signal that took a digital signal transmitted over an analog satellite broadcast link and then sampled at 2.7 times the original signal frequency. The phase was erratic, the amplitude was erratic, the white noise was crazy.... even human visual inspection of the signal was extremely difficult. I managed to write code that would progressively reconstruct the data from the signal given surrounding data. As it was reproducing formatted screens of text, I would perform pyramid scans surrounding the character and identify the formatting of the text to guess the approximate phase and amplitude and noise types of the current block to be decoded. As it decoded more text, it learned more and had an increased success rate. Then when phase, amplitude or noise types shifted, it would decrease its certainty regarding the quality of it's learned knowledge and go back to basics.
This I assume was AI, but I have no idea. There was a problem that needed to be solved. It wouldn't work using normal algorithms. So, I made a new algorithm that could solve the problem similar to how I would solve it manually using my eyes and intuition while also compensating for a limited data set by defining a simplistic series of rules that defined something that could considered a thought process.
Now that being said, for code to be AI, I would expect it to be trying to do something more interesting. I saw the research posted by Google where an engineer taught a robotic arm to open a door when it encountered one, showed it how to use a door knob and then let it figure out how to use a different door knob. The same technology could be used for example to say "If you encounter a screw and you encounter a bolt, put the two together and tighten it but not too much". With enough rules like that, it could easily replace humans in most manufacturing roles.
Use the same ideas and build a single type of robot that can lift, fold, manipulate and sew different types of fabrics. This sounds a lot easier than it is. Try as a human to sew two pieces of equal sized cotton together using a machine. Then try slinky silk or nylon. The texture of the fabric on the silk will constantly shift and slip, it's not a stable grid. The dog feed pulls the bottom piece but not necessarily the top. The last piece of fabric you sewed may have left a residue behind that effects whether the presser is sticky during the first bunch of stitches on the new fabric, etc... someone who sews a lot will have subconsciously learned to hold and manipulate fabric just the right way... which they can't really explain. Someone who doesn't will try sewing with silk and just never try again. It's a task that simply can't be solved by traditional robotics because as with humans, the machine driving the robot needs to make a lot of assumptions with incomplete data to achieve the workflow.
So... if there are 300,000 people in the world with the knowledge and studies for things like writing AI that can solve problems like the fabric and sewing problem... I'd be shocked.
Of course there are probably a bunch of people making software to high-frequency trade or play poker online.
I was thinking the same thing. Tarantino films universally lack any form of intelligence.
I recently accidentally watched a Tarantino film. See I generally don't recognize him except as "That guy who is always in some shitty movie" so I didn't think to just turn it off. I spent 2 hours wondering where the plot was... if there was a plot etc... somehow the guy mixes almost French soap opera style drama with completely gratuitous violence and some inanely stupid "didn't you see this coming?" kind of toss in.
I would honestly rather see the whole series die rather than see Tarantino take his "I would have written porn parodies but then I wouldn't get to press up against Travolta" writing and directing butchery to the series.
I've spent years trying to understands the deficit myself. If I understand it correctly, it's a tool which governments attempt to balance between each other to print more money allowing for inflation.
So, for example, if the U.S. were to spend more money it can't afford.. meaning it would have to "borrow from the people" or in reality it's more like printing more money, then in order to avoid devaluing that money relative to the rest of the world, the rest of the world would also have to print approximately the same amount of money (percentage-wise of course). The deficit needs to be carefully balanced to ensure that no country prints too much money, otherwise it would dilute the base too greatly in comparison to others.
The problems with a deficit isn't really the size of the deficit. It's that when introducing so much more money into the system, it has to trickle down through the masses and either it needs to get stuck in the bank accounts of people like Bill Gates who basically removes it from the economy. Or the alternative is it will trickle down to the middle class (not middle income). At that point, to avoid having the deficit have and positive value, it is necessary to coerce the money into the lower classes either through work, taxes, donations, etc... this would allow enough wealth distribution to permit across the board inflation... which means that the poor people would make more and the cost of milk would rise.
The equilibrium will remain, but enough money will be introduced to the economy to allow housing prices to increase thereby increasing the wealth of the middle class and allowing them to help finance their childrens' futures.
This system became important as medicine improved and the middle class could no longer count on inheritance. Because the middle class lives to 80+ years of age, by the time you inherit, you're already 50-55 years old. When you inherit, your kids are already in their late 20s to 30s. Also since mom and dad have lived between 15-30 years on fixed income with almost no increase to social security, whatever they had owned was mortgaged and even the middle class is dieing broke. So inheritance probably is no longer and option anyway. So since wealth isn't being passed generation to generation until reaching the higher end of the upper middle class, wealth to assist later generations has to be produced through the deficit.
I'm pretty sure I've oversimplified and left out many steps. I do believe that the deficit is a very good thing if it can be properly throttled and managed. It is a very bad thing if we can't figure out how to get the wealth produced by the deficit into the hands of the lower classes. If there is more wealth, we need the price of milk to go up... or we'll simply push more people into the lower class.
Ok... so I have displayed I don't know shit about the deficit.
Voters are generally idiots. The proof of it is that most voters choose a team. They vote red or blue, lib or conser, etc... they almost never have a single unique thought and while this is 2017 and we don't actually need NBC, CBS, ABC the NY Times etc... to run for president, the average voter is far too stupid to actually care about what they're voting for. They only care about what team the player is on and whether they'll help kick the other teams ass.
Ok... let's be a little more intelligent than this. I don't say it like this to be rude, I say it like this because I believe we shouldn't take the first answer that comes to mind.
1) There aren't enough "rich people" to cause enough demand to pay these high prices. Also consider that a rich person can call the manufacturer and have a chat and try to get one allocated. I'm not rich and I've done this. In fact, I've gotten the items for free as a thank you for a nice conversation.
2) Upper middle class, I think I'm part of this but am not sure, we don't spend money like that. I've said to my kids "We're not getting this for Christmas unless you're willing to take an IOU until they become available for regular price" or "It's way too expensive and while I love you... I love you enough to say no... even at Christmas. I would pay that much for a gift, but it has to be something I believe you'll get value from. That's not something I believe you'll use enough... or even enjoy enough to justify the cost".
3) The likelihood of spending irresponsibly to provide more for their children than they had generally is a characteristic of the lower classes. The lower you go, the more likely you are to believe that it's really important that your child looks like they have everything. I know this too because I wasn't always upper-middle class. It was never the rich kids who always had all the latest and greatest things in school. It was the lower-middle class. This is because upper-middle would often have a lot of stuff, certainly they did. But they were used to having these things.
Consider that my kid and his friends, all kids growing up in nearly million dollar houses with average household incomes that can comfortably cover that cost. These boys are into Nike and sports etc... my son who wear glasses has never had to worry about what a pair of glasses cost, if he liked them and we thought they looked good, we bought them. Sometimes they were Versace, sometimes Oakley, etc... He has two pairs of Jordans. We bought him one pair because he needed shoes and he had been telling us for a while his dreams are to have a pair of Jordans. So, we bought them for the new school year. His second pair, he paid for himself from his confirmation money. He and his friends all have about the same. The kids from "the other side of the tracks" however have 5-6 different pairs of Jordans. They wear all the latest trends and have nothing but expensive things. They are the kids who always had the hotest toys first. They are also the kids who I've actually heard saying "Oh my god!!! I can't go to school dressed like this. I have to get.... or else I'll be an outcast". The wealthier kids, they shop at H&M... the lower middle shop at the name brand stores.
There's a reason for this. It's prioritization. I didn't think my kid needed two pairs of Jordans. It didn't make sense to have two $200 pairs of shoes. After all, they are just shoes. A man needs a sneakers, dress shoes, sandals and boots. One pair of each, boots are optional. A pair of sneakers should last about 2-3 years and therefore $200 is reasonable for a pair. There is value in owning one good pair of sneakers. And there is the key... is there value?
So... I think what you're seeing instead if opportunists profiting by preying on the weak. I would imagine that the price of the item after scalper inflation is hardly relevant since the people most likely to purchase it will need to place it on credit anyway. People who spend on gifts based on what they can afford would never waste money like that.
I bought a AMD GPU for $200 7 years ago and mined coins for 2 months at about one bitcoin a month.
I now have 3 drives which were once in a RAID holding my bitcoin wallet. I haven't tried getting the coins back yet because :
a) I don't really need the money... though now they're worth enough that I should try to get it just for the sake of responsibility
b) I figure that the bitcoin frenzy is far from over and I'm wondering is the numbnuts driving the prices up will make it hit $50,000.
c) I know I'll be thoroughly disappointed if I go through all the trouble of performing a RAID recovery when I don't even remember what kind of controller I used just to find out that I had done something stupid and just deleted them because the bitcoin market had tanked and they weren't worth the effort at the time.
But at $10,000 I think I'll take the time to at least make images of the drives and experiment with RAID recovery tools. I don't care for gambling, but if I risk $100 on stuff I can use otherwise like a 4 slot USB to SATA dock... I don't think it counts as gambling.
So... Let's assume I spent $200 and a negligible amount on electricity 7 years ago and now I have $20,000...
Since I don't count this as real money... I think I'll ride it out. If gets to the point which it can pay off most of my house, then I'll cash in.
Stocks work exactly the same way as bitcoin does. Once a company issues new shares and sells them, there is absolutely no difference between bitcoin and stocks unless the company with the stocks pay a loyalty fee called a dividend to shareholders. Unless you own a considerable portion of the shares in the company, there is absolutely nothing different between bitcoin and stocks.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone hasn't taken their medication today?
Hmmm..
"Bubba Bill"
"Norks"
"Deep state"
"Troll armies"
I'll take a guess and assume that you're are the member of a political party that takes advantage of people like you?
Thank you for the excellent exercise in descrambling unreadable text. I made it 1/4th of the way of your writing and was no longer able to decipher its current context.
When writing a letter, we make use of paragraphs that should be cut to sizes that are not overwhelming in their nature. We do this not just for grammar's sake, but also to allow the text a little room to breath.
We also use paragraphs as a means of moving onto the next thought in the chain.
Can I recommend that in the future, you make more liberal use of white space in your writings. I believe it will allow you to better share your thoughts.
A380 was one of the greatest job making successes in the history of France. The government dumped billions into making a plane that took forever to design and build and build and infrastructure around. I have no idea how many jobs were created or mouths were fed from it, but there have been very few great examples of the success of a capitalistic country extending balancing their deficits internationally while decreasing unemployment so drastically on a dead end project.
The U.S. does this with Boeing, Lockheed and now are experimenting with computer companies like Cisco and HP.
The idea is, to create more wealth and jobs, you buy and fund tons of shit that really has no benefit what-so-ever to anyone. Wealth is created by federal governments sort-of controlling the rates of their national deficits relative to one another, so it's kind of like massive collaborative devaluation of currencies. Then the money produced by the increased deficit is used to fund major projects which may or may not succeed, but generates huge numbers of jobs and wealth redistribution within the economy.
Then ideally to remove some of the money from circulation with the hopes of avoiding major deflation, several 1%ers horde the funds to ensure that the status quo is maintained and the price of bread and milk doesn't inflate too quickly due to devalued currency.
A380 was amazing for the French economy and I'll be surprised if they can find something new to replace it anytime soon. Maybe a major overhaul to the design to make it more attractive to the market?
It's their general inability to almost intentionally misinterpret everything literally and take offense at things that are obviously jokes to anyone who has a sense of sarcasm. :)
It's quite funny that this wasn't even my joke originally, it was made by my brother-in-law (a Finn) while we were out drinking one night. Well at least the part about Finns.... he's never been to Fresno so far as I can tell.
Isn't the solution to that to :
a) Eliminate Fresno... ever since Karate Kid, this has seemed like a good idea
b) Don't go to Helsinki... don't get me wrong... it's a pretty place. But the old saying is "There's no I in team"... and the reason for that is because the Fins used all the I's in their language and there was none left for the rest of the world. No person should ever have to expose themselves to a culture (one famous for exposing themselves to everyone else when running into the snow from saunas) that actually believe entire sentences can be constructed without the use of a single consonant.
You make some very interesting points which got me thinking in those lines.
Also consider that we're not really considering some more important issues which is that in the past, we were very dependent on major hubs because most airline travel was planned and booked by travel agents or humans who would calculate routes. They could search for a direct flight and they could also search for flights through hubs between the origin and destination. But booking multiple corresponding tickets on multiple airlines would result in major delays as well since the airlines didn't really cooperate like that. So one airline wouldn't necessarily hold a flight 5 minutes to compensate of a delayed plane from another airline that had a connection.
These days, due to far more efficient algorithms in calculating the routes, but also in executing the forwarding of the passengers through the routes as well as the buffer management on ingress and egress... as well as the added ability to compensate for things like additional security checks at Heathrow that can take 45 minutes or longer between flights in the same terminal.... we don't need big fat ass planes from hub to hub anymore.
I've been on probably close to 100 flights since the A380 was launched. I don't think I've been on it more than twice. I've been on 787s a few dozen times.
Was the A380 the one which had the window seats with storage on the side which means you can't sleep while leaning against the window?
Made me scroll up to see what article it was I was reading.
Are you REALLY excited and hopeful that Mike Pence... a guy who is the political embodiment of the flat-Earthers and who needs a constitution if you have the evangelical church to guide him... as president?
Trump is horrible... but would you rather have Trump which no sane politician wants to be seen to support or would you rather have Mike Pence who it seems everyone would support if it meant getting rid of Trump?
I'd rather have a fool who has a one track mind of building a wall that we can say no to as opposed to a fool who thinks women who get pregnant when they're raped should be forced to kill themselves because they can't kill off the seed of the rapist who destroyed their lives... who would have the full support of a republican congress.
Please consider trying this nifty new game called chess. It teaches you... if you let it to consider the consequences of your actions. What seems like a great idea at first may not be the best idea if you look a move or two ahead.
I'm not completely sure I agree with you. In sentiment I certainly do. You're right, we should have had 30 years more experience in space now.
But here's a few things.
1) I'm a globalist. Consider that almost every single "Great American Achievement" during my short lifetime of 42 years are credited primarily to immigrants. This isn't to speak poorly of Americans, but there's a general rule of history and that's that greatness almost always comes from people willing to give up absolutely everything and take the greatest risks to achieve it. This generally means leaving everything you know and love to go someplace which may be even openly hostile towards you to make something great. American's do great things abroad, but rarely in America.
The moral of the story in this sense is that we as humans should have accomplished a great deal more in collaboration to reach space. And to a certain extent we really did. We built the space station and people have lived in space for over a year. We have created a lot of technology able to function and operate in space and we're not far from starting to do more than just put people there, we should be able to build habitats where we may produce food and may build things we need too.
We are almost experts on water recycling now. We can scrub air like crazy. In those 30 years, we have learned so incredibly much about space that now companies can take that information and privatize it.
2) The price is dropping fast. My household income is only a few hundred thousand a year and I think I'll be able to take a family trip to space at some point before I die. SpaceX and Blue Horizon are amazing companies who will increase the infrastructure into space. Virgin should eventually have the capacity to transport people to LEO. It's an issue of supply and demand. As soon as we have the means to reach space with lower fuel cost and at a much higher frequency, prices will drop substantially.
3) Space belongs to no one too. Consider there's an awful lot of space. There is more than enough to go around. We will have no problem sharing and if someone wants to claim property rights on a square kilometer on a dusty planet somewhere, I suppose most people won't begrudge them the right to do so. I don't really think ownership will matter beyond small personal items when the space age truly happens.
4) If we did this 30 years sooner, we wouldn't have been ready. To accomplish it, the space craft would have had to be government owned / operated / whatever. They would have been public projects. That means bureaucracy and politics. It also means cutting corners, wasted spending, etc... we spent 30 years learning an incredible lesson. While organizations like NASA can do this stuff, the government can't. Privatizing space changes everything. Right now, there are a small number of players. Someday, there will be more. If an entire country is only able to go to space if the government chooses to launch a rocket, then any space missions which are not specifically government will be of little interest and will be very expensive. The government as a whole has a responsibility to flood the economy with money produced by the deficit and produce massive numbers of jobs, therefore making space cheap was always a bad idea for the government.
Now, multiple companies are launch capable. Soon, more will be capable and some will be human rated. We'll soon move past the thrill of simply getting into space and move onto going somewhere in space.
Let's be honest, Elon Musk is a dreamer and by most standards a mad man. We can't tell whether he should be locked up for mental health, arrested for running his company stocks just short of a ponzi operation, or if we should place him on a pedestal and try and change the laws of the US to allow for a foreign presidential candidate. He sometimes seems like he's learned how to live by reading Iron Man comic books and he models himself after Tony Stark. I'll die laughing if he all of a sudden makes an Iron Man suit.
Wha
Currently, Cryptocurrencies are a means of allowing gamblers to gamble. This is highly constructive and productive for the general markets for a few good reasons.
Volatility in trading is a major problem. Classically, gamblers (investors) have creatively attempted to carve out niches that have had devastating impacts on society. For example, the price of grain isn't driven by supply and demand. The price of grain is driven by commodity trading. This means that if the gamblers on the stock markets who actually do not care what the price of grain is for practical reasons can generate enough trading volume to increase volatility of the share for any period of time, then due to trends, the price of grain can either be artificially forced upwards or downwards causing mass disruption in the supply chain or the commodity cost.
Let me explain, people like Warren Buffet, Icann or others of their ilk invest in companies and people who they believe in with the interest of seeing a stable and predictable return based on the performance of the companies they invest in. As such, a company with an investor like Warren Buffet will issue shares and Warren Buffet will take an interest in the company. If the company performs badly, he will along with other investors alter the management structure of the company through actions of the shareholders and the board to improve the performance of the company or change the structure of the company to dissolve it gracefully to give the best return on the investment. What Warren does is theoretically a form of inside trading as he is directly profiting from influencing the performance of the company. But trading regulations are in place to force him to act generally ethically. So for example, he can't short sell the share if he knows the shareholder report will kill the share value. He would instead have to publicly announce his trades in time to prepare the market for his change in interest and generally provide a reason for it.
The majority of traders out there however act on trends.
This means that without any knowledge of the company, they buy and sell shares which weren't issued to them by the company, but instead buy and sell shares which were owned by others through open trading. They are not gambling on the performance of the company. They have no interest in the health of the company. Instead, they are gambling on the value of the share. Often times, their behavior hurts the companies far more than they help. See, a trader will buy and sell based on whether the stock is going up or down. In some cases, dividends can be used to convince the shareholders to take an invested interest in the performance of the company, but generally, the average trader will have no particular interest in the long term aspects of the firm. Many investors buy into a company simply long enough to reap the rewards of the dividend and then dispose of the share shortly after.
I can go on, but in general, trend traders which are basically nothing more than gamblers trying to sell high and buy low based on upwards and downward trends have major negative impacts on the shares. Consider the "Essential Phone" which was just another Android phone. The leaders of the company managed to hype the share so much that the market cap of the company reached a billion dollars long before it ever sold a single device. The people who hyped the share, even if it completely tanks will still manage to walk away with a lot of money on their pockets. Many people will lose their investments but several people, thanks to an amazing stir and incredible management of selling the share will walk away wealthier than ever and start their next venture.
Cryptocurrencies provide a new gamblers hotbed. Thanks to the insane volatility of coins and lack of regulation, buy low sell high is an easy game to play. People excited about upward trends can ride it out several times a week. If they can manage to shift money in and out of the currencies, they can produce amazing returns on investment. These people have
haha I love this. The causality of this exact statement is something I sometimes contemplate while sitting in traffic.
:)
I am no an asshole driver... the kind that pissed off me as a kid because I drive within 10% of speed limit and I don't rush everywhere. I'm extremely considerate and let people in from the sides all the time... at least every other road where I have the right-of-way, if there's someone waiting, I'll slow down to let them in. The people behind me get pissed. I also attempt to never make a driving decision that doesn't mathematically impact more people positively than negatively (within my calculations)
I was an asshole drive back then... I drove "Safely" at 160km/hr every chance I could in a car that probably wasn't even safe at 110km/hr. I cut in and out of traffic. I would drive the 140km from Clearwater, FL to Disney world in under an hour... with traffic.
I realized... I've always been an asshole driver... just a different kind of asshole and I assume that everyone else is too
Let me address this
1) Roads are for infrastructure and tracks are for play driving. Your fun time should be done where I don't have to see it. It's like churches and stadiums. The civilized population supports people having these places because it keeps "those people" away from us at least for a few hours a week. When people say they like driving and that's a good excuse to not be forced into a far better world, it means you believe you put your play time in front of what is best for society. Consider that you could probably instead spend all the money you're wasting on cars these days on trips to Dublin to learn to drift on a track for example. You could learn how to drive for real.
2) Driverless won't ruin the prices of cars. Progress will. The car market will rapidly shrink with current and future generations of cars. Cars don't rust anymore and electric cars don't vibrate themselves to an early grave. A brand new electric car today could easily be maintained safely for 30 years for far less than the cost of maintaining a gas car for 12. Tires, the occassional wheel motor replacement, brakes, tires, wipers, a refurbished battery pack, etc... in fact, about 90% of the work could likely be automated.
3) Insurance companies will no longer be part of most peoples lives... at least for automotive. Self-driving cars should be pooled. Normal people would ride share, wealthier people would pay extra for quiet service. But, you will open your phone and basically Uber everything. This should in fact be law in cities, in the countryside (off the highways) there will be diesel and gas cars for decades. Also, since most cars will be owned by companies like Uber (or city...) they will find it more profitable to own their own insurance firms. You'll probably have to pay a fortune or auto insurance. I'm perfectly ok with this.
4) Driving should be cost prohibitive. There is absolutely no possible reason you can present that would justify owning a car in the future... at least in urban or suburban areas. Self-driving car pools and public transportation should handle it. There should be about 1 car per 3-4 families, not 1.7 cars per family. Consider that at least during my life, it's about every 10-15 years, every single car is replaced. Consider the MASSIVE WASTE involved. With the exception of collectors cars (which I feel strongly should be banned from roads) most cars are crushed and recycled. Most modern cars are made of polymers or other materials, many of them extremely difficult to recycle. The fabrics are often synthetic. Leather seats actually require tanning which has never ever ever been something good for the environment. So... simply owning a car should be VERY EXPENSIVE. Should be billionaire's club thing.
5) My household income is quite healthy. I don't know for sure, but I think if my wife worked full time instead of 80%, we'd probably make about $200k, and we're in a city where anything over $100k is comfortable. I look forward to not being able to afford personal transportation. I don't see any benefit to me as an individual owning a vehicle. That said, public transportation will be far more important. Self-driving cars pools will not always be convenient for everyone.
BTW, self-driving tractors and tractor sharing should be a must as well. This way, a single tractor can be used for 10-20 farms instead of 1-2.
I noticed you didn't make a point of how this will impact real people.
What percentage of the world feed themselves each day because of cars?
1) Taxi drivers
2) What about truck drivers?
3) What about train conductors?
4) Airline pilots?
5) Delivery drivers?
Driving is the one job any idiot in the world seems to think they are able to do. We're going to replace every one of the jobs above with computers. Keep in mind that no matter how ugly, stupid, smelly, incompetent, etc... you are, you can drive something. You can be the least ambitious person in the world and you'll still be able to eat if you can drive.
How will this impact
If you need an example of how insanely bad of an idea it is to pollute the world with unneeded languages, consider either Hebrew, Gaelic or Nynorsk. They increase the number of languages for no apparent reason.
There are currently 4 languages of significance in the world.
- English (hardly any native speakers but widely proliferated, likely the most spoken and understood language)
- Spanish (possibly the most spoken language by people who only speak on language)
- Mandarin (lots of speakers in many countries, though very difficult to learn due to the dependence on vowel pronunciation)
- Arabic (a very widely used language within a given religion, estimated speakers around the same as Mandarin or Spanish)
For a runner up, French which is widely spoken in Africa and is expected to eventually become the most widely spoken language in the world due to good improving health care in Africa.
Additionally, Hindi is widely spoken and if Punjabi is considered compatible with Hindi and even little more than a common language as a union, it may be the most spoken language after English.
Of course my numbers are based on my understanding and I can link any references. But this has been what I've learned through my research.
At some point in time, English is likely to become the universal language in the world. For an example of its versatility, I just traveled to Qatar and spent a day with 15 people from the Philippines, multiple regions of India and multiple regions within Africa and the middle east. We were all able to communicate naturally because of English.
Fewer languages are better. We should never strive to introduce new languages since even engineered languages will eventually diversify and contain local dialects and colloquialisms. The sooner we reach a single spoken language and attempt to eliminate the smaller languages, the sooner we can call ourselves Earthlings.
Of course, I'm a globalist. I don't believe in patriotism or borders. People are people and borders are not useful for anything other than taxation.
This is pretty true. I've been to many small places in Norway... and once the population hits about two thousand, there seems to be mass transit via buses but not to the way off places. To be fair though, I've seen bus stops outside of most farms I've driven past. There is a pretty complete taxi system in Norway... even in the somewhat tiny places, but they're absolutely stupidly expensive. There is always a taxi when you need one, but most taxi drivers can sit for an hour or more waiting for a fare... and they make sure to charge you appropriately for that.
You should seriously try it.
I haven't, but I've laid bricks, shoveled ditches, built circuit boards, etc... I even held a "Slow/Stop" sign for 10 hours in Florida summer heat at a construction site.
I think it taught me a few important things in life. And I never did those things for more then a few days each. I did learn to respect the people around me. I also learned that what was easy for me wasn't always easy for other people.
As for the driving and delivering packages.... you'd be absolutely shocked how much work that really is.
i don't think it's desperation. It's the classic rule that the people who put the least effort into getting their jobs are the people who will work the hardest for the least amount of compensation.
McDonalds for example hires most of their employees by posting a sign on the door saying "no hiring" at which point you see the people behind the counter and see the standards for what they'll hire are about the same as you are...and you fill out an application and unless $20 background search on you turns up something awful, it's time to start training you. Then they'll work you to death, see you as easily replaceable and for the most part would prefer you don't make it through a trial phase as then you might be difficult to fire.
Consider the classic case of the "job creation economy". People voted for Trump and many other politicians over the promises of jobs. I've never ever taken a job which was created as a political promise and in most cases could not be tracked back to government stimulus. But there are a massive number of jobs which exist to deliver jobs to the people. Most people have classically been against immigrant workers because they believe their jobs are being taken by people flooding in to steel them. But those jobs are generally taken by people who actively apply for them.
Automotive, manufacturing, coal, gas, etc... even building space craft and airplanes at Lockheed and co... are all jobs which were created to advertise to the people in one area or another that all they really need to do is show up and they'll have a job.
Most people of the world do not know how to look for jobs. Many people simply don't realize that the jobs are there if they want them or ask the right way. If you want a job and you have an interest in doing something, more often than not, you can find someone to pay you for it. There's also the issue of wanted advertisements in the newspaper (or wherever else). They are almost always written in a concise fashion which scares away 99% of their qualified candidates. You can't just write "We're willing to pay good money for honest people willing to work hard... call 555-1234". They list educational requirements and all kinds of other crap... when they really just need people. But by making it too professional, people will end up working for $5 an hour while sweating the entire time and risking death on greasy floors while paying for expensive work clothes and shoes because someone else was smart enough to keep it simple and write "Help wanted" on a sign.
Most people want to work. If for no other reason but it allows them to have more to their life than just what is on the couch and on the TV. It provides them with a social experience. They don't however want to look for work.
What is worse is that it's clear that Amazon apparently believed they were paying a company enough money to provide these people a good living and making it worth it to them to work hard. Instead, that company was placing their employees in a scenario nearing indentured servitude. They were even charging the guys for the car rental and the fuel.
Amazon should be held accountable for not performing research into their associate companies. They need to ensure they only work with companies who actually are treating their employees at least reasonably. On the other hand, they can't possibly be expected to run their own delivery companies for every single little village out there. It's better to try and find honest people who are willing to hire and manage good people. This makes it so that everyone benefits. If Amazon managed the drivers themselves, those drivers would just be another number in a database. By using courier companies, there is a good chance the owner of the company will take a personal interest in the welfare of his employees.
I would like to agree with your impassioned argument. And I suppose I could on some level. These people are really impressive in the capabilities and I suppose it's nice to watch people strive to be the best at something or part of the best team.
I of course, don't agree with sports as sports are yet another means of glorifying competition as a good thing. Cooperation is good, so watching a player be part of a team that can work together to accomplish something greater... that is truly a great thing.
Competition is a bad thing. Nothing in history has ever been accomplished with competition as its motivation that could not have been done far better with cooperation at its core. Consider the space race as an example.
We chose to go to the moon. Yep... we went to the moon and we got bored and we stopped. The Americans went to the moon. The Russians just gave up because why bother going to the moon if the Americans already got there. Its was just a waste of time and money. Yet, when Russia and America worked together and everyone else became involved as well, we got the International Space Station which we have been learning from for a long time. We work together towards something much greater in that case.
We're going to Mars... yesterday Boeing said "we're going to get to Mars before SpaceX" which is stupid. Who cares who gets there first as long as once we start going there, we don't just stop like we did with the moon. How about a better headline "SpaceX, Boeing and other space companies and agencies agree to work together to raise funding and make travelling to Mars a reality"
Organized sports advocate almost all that is wrong with humanity though, they do give a little back in the sense you do get to observe greatness. I doubt I'll ever reach greatness, but I work 10-18 hours a day every day and with the exception of a few short breaks due to becoming a father or burning out, I've done so for 25 years. If I'm not working, I learning. If I'm working I'm learning. I would never waste my life with reality TV or sports and watch other people live their lives. I instead embrace my hopes that I could make myself and the people around me a little better each day.
To be fair though, I imagine you and many others want to watch the best at their peaks. If I were to use my life for something like that, I would simply say that watching people at their peak or near it is boring. It's far more exciting to watch a person rise. Then you can see clear progress in their self-improvement every single day.
And of course, I have been blessed to see human excellence in most everything. You can see human excellence at the park while out on a walk where children learn to walk and climb and run. You can see excellence in a book where an author like Eion Colfer can write an entire novel like Airman which is a display of sheer perfection in his employment of the right work every single time. As though the words were born for no other reason than to narrate his story. The story itself was entertaining, but the words he chose were a display of human excellence. You can visit your local town hall and admire the architecture and think "how did someone managed to design a tool or machine to create columns like that". You can of course watch sports while out as well. You can visit a bar with a pianist who may be lude, crude and barely able to hammer the keys, but watch whether he/she has a gift to entertain.
There are so many different forms of human excellence. But watching two teams blatantly display their ambitions to cause the other team to lose. And in many cases through means of violent domination. I consider this to be a display of the worst of humanity. Excellence can only be achieved through cooperation and never through competition unless the competition is focused entirely against yourself at which point in time, it's just measuring your own progress.
Battery life is ok on Intel hardware these days. The question is battery for performance. So, we're not doing much for Atom based laptops anymore. By now Intel has 20 hours nailed with that I'm almost sure.
The question is, if I sit down and start using this machine how slow is it? I use a Surface Book each day and plan to get a Surface Book 2 next month. Yes, it's top end model. I have high expectations from a laptop. Will this laptop be so slow that a Core i3 is fast?
Apples to turquoise turtlenecks?
... I have no idea what this is.
I think you're comparing a PC to a
Let's make a better comparison. Let's compare this to a Motorola Galaxy... at least from a hardware perspective. How does this stack up? I guess the flash is less, but otherwise is there any actually different from a Samsung telephone? They're still making that huge iPad mini sized telephone right?
Won't work... simple as that.
You're thinking all code is created the same way.
Consider this, most code these days for Windows is generally packed in someway or another. Therefore while something like DynamicRIO could probably compil the unpacking code, the code would then be unpacked and would have to be executed. Since DynamicRIO would no longer be running, the unpacked x86 code could no longer run.
To make this work, it is necessary to employ a just-in-time compiler which is exactly the same as code morphing... which the article points out is still classified as executing the instructions. Just in an optimized fashion.
I was thinking... 300k? Are you serious? What actually justifies calling yourself an AI developer?
I haven't really put that much effort into AI and while I've done a lot of coding I imagine probably counts as AI from what I understand about it, to be a real AI developer would require a lot more than just writing code which makes decisions based on statistical analysis and thresholds.
For example, I wrote a signal decoder years ago which couldn't be handled using traditional DSP theory. High pass and low pass filters couldn't work. There was a signal that took a digital signal transmitted over an analog satellite broadcast link and then sampled at 2.7 times the original signal frequency. The phase was erratic, the amplitude was erratic, the white noise was crazy.... even human visual inspection of the signal was extremely difficult. I managed to write code that would progressively reconstruct the data from the signal given surrounding data. As it was reproducing formatted screens of text, I would perform pyramid scans surrounding the character and identify the formatting of the text to guess the approximate phase and amplitude and noise types of the current block to be decoded. As it decoded more text, it learned more and had an increased success rate. Then when phase, amplitude or noise types shifted, it would decrease its certainty regarding the quality of it's learned knowledge and go back to basics.
This I assume was AI, but I have no idea. There was a problem that needed to be solved. It wouldn't work using normal algorithms. So, I made a new algorithm that could solve the problem similar to how I would solve it manually using my eyes and intuition while also compensating for a limited data set by defining a simplistic series of rules that defined something that could considered a thought process.
Now that being said, for code to be AI, I would expect it to be trying to do something more interesting. I saw the research posted by Google where an engineer taught a robotic arm to open a door when it encountered one, showed it how to use a door knob and then let it figure out how to use a different door knob. The same technology could be used for example to say "If you encounter a screw and you encounter a bolt, put the two together and tighten it but not too much". With enough rules like that, it could easily replace humans in most manufacturing roles.
Use the same ideas and build a single type of robot that can lift, fold, manipulate and sew different types of fabrics. This sounds a lot easier than it is. Try as a human to sew two pieces of equal sized cotton together using a machine. Then try slinky silk or nylon. The texture of the fabric on the silk will constantly shift and slip, it's not a stable grid. The dog feed pulls the bottom piece but not necessarily the top. The last piece of fabric you sewed may have left a residue behind that effects whether the presser is sticky during the first bunch of stitches on the new fabric, etc... someone who sews a lot will have subconsciously learned to hold and manipulate fabric just the right way... which they can't really explain. Someone who doesn't will try sewing with silk and just never try again. It's a task that simply can't be solved by traditional robotics because as with humans, the machine driving the robot needs to make a lot of assumptions with incomplete data to achieve the workflow.
So... if there are 300,000 people in the world with the knowledge and studies for things like writing AI that can solve problems like the fabric and sewing problem... I'd be shocked.
Of course there are probably a bunch of people making software to high-frequency trade or play poker online.
I was thinking the same thing. Tarantino films universally lack any form of intelligence.
I recently accidentally watched a Tarantino film. See I generally don't recognize him except as "That guy who is always in some shitty movie" so I didn't think to just turn it off. I spent 2 hours wondering where the plot was... if there was a plot etc... somehow the guy mixes almost French soap opera style drama with completely gratuitous violence and some inanely stupid "didn't you see this coming?" kind of toss in.
I would honestly rather see the whole series die rather than see Tarantino take his "I would have written porn parodies but then I wouldn't get to press up against Travolta" writing and directing butchery to the series.
I've spent years trying to understands the deficit myself. If I understand it correctly, it's a tool which governments attempt to balance between each other to print more money allowing for inflation.
So, for example, if the U.S. were to spend more money it can't afford.. meaning it would have to "borrow from the people" or in reality it's more like printing more money, then in order to avoid devaluing that money relative to the rest of the world, the rest of the world would also have to print approximately the same amount of money (percentage-wise of course). The deficit needs to be carefully balanced to ensure that no country prints too much money, otherwise it would dilute the base too greatly in comparison to others.
The problems with a deficit isn't really the size of the deficit. It's that when introducing so much more money into the system, it has to trickle down through the masses and either it needs to get stuck in the bank accounts of people like Bill Gates who basically removes it from the economy. Or the alternative is it will trickle down to the middle class (not middle income). At that point, to avoid having the deficit have and positive value, it is necessary to coerce the money into the lower classes either through work, taxes, donations, etc... this would allow enough wealth distribution to permit across the board inflation... which means that the poor people would make more and the cost of milk would rise.
The equilibrium will remain, but enough money will be introduced to the economy to allow housing prices to increase thereby increasing the wealth of the middle class and allowing them to help finance their childrens' futures.
This system became important as medicine improved and the middle class could no longer count on inheritance. Because the middle class lives to 80+ years of age, by the time you inherit, you're already 50-55 years old. When you inherit, your kids are already in their late 20s to 30s. Also since mom and dad have lived between 15-30 years on fixed income with almost no increase to social security, whatever they had owned was mortgaged and even the middle class is dieing broke. So inheritance probably is no longer and option anyway. So since wealth isn't being passed generation to generation until reaching the higher end of the upper middle class, wealth to assist later generations has to be produced through the deficit.
I'm pretty sure I've oversimplified and left out many steps. I do believe that the deficit is a very good thing if it can be properly throttled and managed. It is a very bad thing if we can't figure out how to get the wealth produced by the deficit into the hands of the lower classes. If there is more wealth, we need the price of milk to go up... or we'll simply push more people into the lower class.
Ok... so I have displayed I don't know shit about the deficit.
Voters are generally idiots. The proof of it is that most voters choose a team. They vote red or blue, lib or conser, etc... they almost never have a single unique thought and while this is 2017 and we don't actually need NBC, CBS, ABC the NY Times etc... to run for president, the average voter is far too stupid to actually care about what they're voting for. They only care about what team the player is on and whether they'll help kick the other teams ass.
Ok... let's be a little more intelligent than this. I don't say it like this to be rude, I say it like this because I believe we shouldn't take the first answer that comes to mind.
... or even enjoy enough to justify the cost".
.... or else I'll be an outcast". The wealthier kids, they shop at H&M... the lower middle shop at the name brand stores.
1) There aren't enough "rich people" to cause enough demand to pay these high prices. Also consider that a rich person can call the manufacturer and have a chat and try to get one allocated. I'm not rich and I've done this. In fact, I've gotten the items for free as a thank you for a nice conversation.
2) Upper middle class, I think I'm part of this but am not sure, we don't spend money like that. I've said to my kids "We're not getting this for Christmas unless you're willing to take an IOU until they become available for regular price" or "It's way too expensive and while I love you... I love you enough to say no... even at Christmas. I would pay that much for a gift, but it has to be something I believe you'll get value from. That's not something I believe you'll use enough
3) The likelihood of spending irresponsibly to provide more for their children than they had generally is a characteristic of the lower classes. The lower you go, the more likely you are to believe that it's really important that your child looks like they have everything. I know this too because I wasn't always upper-middle class. It was never the rich kids who always had all the latest and greatest things in school. It was the lower-middle class. This is because upper-middle would often have a lot of stuff, certainly they did. But they were used to having these things.
Consider that my kid and his friends, all kids growing up in nearly million dollar houses with average household incomes that can comfortably cover that cost. These boys are into Nike and sports etc... my son who wear glasses has never had to worry about what a pair of glasses cost, if he liked them and we thought they looked good, we bought them. Sometimes they were Versace, sometimes Oakley, etc... He has two pairs of Jordans. We bought him one pair because he needed shoes and he had been telling us for a while his dreams are to have a pair of Jordans. So, we bought them for the new school year. His second pair, he paid for himself from his confirmation money. He and his friends all have about the same. The kids from "the other side of the tracks" however have 5-6 different pairs of Jordans. They wear all the latest trends and have nothing but expensive things. They are the kids who always had the hotest toys first. They are also the kids who I've actually heard saying "Oh my god!!! I can't go to school dressed like this. I have to get
There's a reason for this. It's prioritization. I didn't think my kid needed two pairs of Jordans. It didn't make sense to have two $200 pairs of shoes. After all, they are just shoes. A man needs a sneakers, dress shoes, sandals and boots. One pair of each, boots are optional. A pair of sneakers should last about 2-3 years and therefore $200 is reasonable for a pair. There is value in owning one good pair of sneakers. And there is the key... is there value?
So... I think what you're seeing instead if opportunists profiting by preying on the weak. I would imagine that the price of the item after scalper inflation is hardly relevant since the people most likely to purchase it will need to place it on credit anyway. People who spend on gifts based on what they can afford would never waste money like that.
I bought a AMD GPU for $200 7 years ago and mined coins for 2 months at about one bitcoin a month.
I now have 3 drives which were once in a RAID holding my bitcoin wallet. I haven't tried getting the coins back yet because :
a) I don't really need the money... though now they're worth enough that I should try to get it just for the sake of responsibility
b) I figure that the bitcoin frenzy is far from over and I'm wondering is the numbnuts driving the prices up will make it hit $50,000.
c) I know I'll be thoroughly disappointed if I go through all the trouble of performing a RAID recovery when I don't even remember what kind of controller I used just to find out that I had done something stupid and just deleted them because the bitcoin market had tanked and they weren't worth the effort at the time.
But at $10,000 I think I'll take the time to at least make images of the drives and experiment with RAID recovery tools. I don't care for gambling, but if I risk $100 on stuff I can use otherwise like a 4 slot USB to SATA dock... I don't think it counts as gambling.
So... Let's assume I spent $200 and a negligible amount on electricity 7 years ago and now I have $20,000...
Since I don't count this as real money... I think I'll ride it out. If gets to the point which it can pay off most of my house, then I'll cash in.
What do you thin the stock market is?
Stocks work exactly the same way as bitcoin does. Once a company issues new shares and sells them, there is absolutely no difference between bitcoin and stocks unless the company with the stocks pay a loyalty fee called a dividend to shareholders. Unless you own a considerable portion of the shares in the company, there is absolutely nothing different between bitcoin and stocks.